Interactive Storytime - Season 4
You sit beside your wife, Ashely, on the sofa in your living room. Clad in a towel, which has a witch’s dress expertly forced over the top, any free space which could be imagined to exist in such a garment is packed tight with your inventory of unquestionably precious and inarguably useful items. The secateurs in particular make sitting down rather uncomfortable, but you haven’t come this far just to give in to your body’s natural warning messages about soft-tissue damage. In the back of your mind, you still feel a strong desire to teach the bathroom sink a lesson about splashing you for so many years.
Barely half a day ago you returned home after picking up the case of the ecclesiastical embezzlement, but already, following some top-dollar sleuthing work at the local library, Ashley has turned up some dynamite evidence that’ll blow the case wide open. Meanwhile you nobly threatened an innocent librarian, and were subsequently given a gun by Police Chief Diane Ingrid Shame, apparently a close friend of yours. Your head still spins from the bombshell of an epiphany that Ashley dropped a few seconds ago.
Gertie and Gertie Enterprises, Ashley has deduced, is nothing but a front for flipping dirty money and creating a false trail for the financial conduct authority. But for all their sophisticated accounting and fiscal gymnastics, they failed to consider one thing: the tenacity of a woman with a drainpipe in a scarf, and tyre iron with lightbulbs tied to it.
Back in Greater Washburn, probably shredding his pillows with a pair of forks or teaching a course on mispronouncing bird names, the vicar waits for the results of your investigation, barely suspecting that the task he set is but the tip of the snooker cue, one which is grasped by the gnarled fingers of Big Money Laundering. He thinks that Ellen Gertie was a mere opportunist, and fails to see the true writhing morass of tentacles, crimes and awful décor choices that lurk behind her presumably grotesque face.
You look towards Ashley, recent consumer of a curly-wurly, crafter of Bruce Springsteen the seat-spring man, and champion of your heart.
“Do you think Diane Ingrid Shame glues a new moustache onto her face every day, or leaves it stuck on overnight?” you ask.
“Yes.” Ashley replies, illuminating the shadowy corners of your ignorance with the light of her mental acuity. “But we can discuss that at greater length in a minute. What we are going to do about this evidence, Luce?” she asks, always willing to poll you for a suggestion, despite her inconceivable genius and excellent driving abilities. “Do you want to take it back to the vicar to let him decide what to do about it, head to Gertie and Gertie Enterprises to catch them in the act, or find Ellen Gertie herself for a dramatic confrontation?”
You ponder this in your classically pensive, measured and rational way, feeling the revolver in your towel shift slightly. Its barrel points comfortingly towards your softer organs, the ones most susceptible to being pierced by a metal projectile. The Thresher of Light’s wires are still wrapped tightly around the trigger, giving it a warm hug. As you think you jiggle your legs, pulling the wire tighter as both weapons shift in opposite directions
1. “We should tell the vicar, and maybe steal his curtains.”
2. “We should head to Gertie and Gertie Enterprises with a can of petrol.”
3. “Ellen’s house will feel the fury of a hatchback un-braked.”
4. Check Inventory and Stats to Buy Time
>> "We should head to Gertie and Gertie Enterprises with a can of petrol."
You're a serious investigator now. You engage in professional things like gathering intel on potential leads and equipping yourself with useful items, and you've not eaten stale biscuits from the floor of a train carriage in over a day. With the weight of this extreme competence hanging over you, and the responsibility with which your powers of deduction furnish you, you know that there's only one sensible course of action.
"We should head to Gertie and Gertie Enterprises with a can of petrol.” you say to Ashley, with your fingers steepled at your mouth to show how serious and solemn you are. The long sleeves of your witch's dress dangle decorously, adding gravitas to the imposing figure you so surely cut.
"A can of petrol?" Ashley asks, looking you dead in the eye with an expectant expression. After some internal deliberation you decide that what she's expecting is an answer, rather than a baby or a bus.
"Yep." you simply confirm, always happy to let Ashley know she hasn't misheard something.
"You wouldn't be planning any arson would you, Lucy? I'm not telling you 'no', necessarily; heaven knows that if these Gerties are as malign as we suspect then they'll need a good burning down. But I'd not like for us to set out with arson as our primary intention."
You feel a little hurt that Ashley leapt to the conclusion that you were planning a fire crime. You could have been innocently taking that petrol to refuel the car in an emergency, or to help out a stranded lawnmower, or to start a perfectly legal accelerated conflagration somewhere unrelated to the case.
"She was right to think it though, wasn't she?" Drainpipe Von Staffen calls from the porch, yet again demonstrating a supernatural attunement to your thoughts and feelings. You feel privileged to call such an astute pipe your friend, and to have a wife who knows you so well.
"I... was planning to go in with an 'arson first, questions second' kind of approach, yes." you admit. "Do you think that this investigation requires something stronger? I can look up how to make a bomb instead if you'd rather." you kindly offer, knowing that improvised explosives could also help with some of the more stubborn ant hills in the garden.
"No, that's OK. I've made enough over the years to knock one up on the fly." Ashley dismisses. "Thank you for being honest with me though. We'll put a can of petrol in the boot of the car so that we have it if we need it."
Pleased with this compromise, and with the implication that you can totally justify burning something down in the near future, you leap to your feet.
"Then there's no time to lose! To Gertie and Gertie Enterprises! Via our garage!" you triply exclaim.
1. Head to your garage and loot petrol can
2. Head to neighbour's garage and loot indiscriminately
3. Fetch your backpack of items, check inv and stats
4. Carb load
>> Head to neighbour's garage and loot indiscriminately
Your veins flow with vigour and enthusiasm for the case, and also with blood that doesn't have quite enough sugar in it for you to function properly. They spur you onwards, to head straight for the outdoors; haven of garages worldwide. Stopping only to pull on your unreasonably practical wellingtons, a task that you've whittled down to an efficient five minutes, you dash out to the porch where Drainpipe Von Staffen is waiting.
"Straight to action, I see! How can I help?" it asks. In lieu of an answer, you snatch your friend up into your arms and burst your way through the front door.
From your vantage point in the front garden you can see your garage, the house of all petrol cans, right where you left it next to the house. As tempting as it is to follow through on your own plan to fetch some petrol, you cannot help your own nature; instincts which have formed the foundation of your mind for time immemorial, which is to say about two days, take over once again as you turn to face your neighbour's garage instead.
"Why should we be wasting our own precious petrol, which might be better used to fuel our chainsaw, all for the benefit of an ungrateful client?" you ask Drainpipe.
"Why, there's no good reason for that at all. We're out here saving the world from Gertie, and we're expected to foot the expenses bill for the pleasure! We oughtn't stand for it, friend. It's exploitative!"
"My thoughts exactly. It's high time that Mr and Mrs Goodwill next door paid their fair share of my costs." you declare, vaulting the low wall that separates your driveways. Drainpipe tears up some of their begonias on the other side as it lands; a fitting punishment for the Goodwills' avarice.
A small, wooden side door stands in your path, acting tough and pretending that it can keep you out, but the door hasn't been made that can withstand your sense of entitlement and purpose. Using Drainpipe as a makeshift ram you crash it's crowned head into the aged wooden panel, easily cracking a way through. With a few follow-up kicks the bulk of the door falls away from the frame.
"It was awfully careless of the Goodwills to leave their garage open like this." you say to Drainpipe, your voice full of neighbourly concern. "Anyone could get in. We'd better check that everything's alright."
Inviting yourself in, you climb through the portal of shattered wood and cast an appraising eye around the garage. It's dark inside, probably a deliberate move by the spiteful and devil-may-care Goodwills to make your life even harder, but with some simple straining of the eyes you manage to see what's around.
Just as suspected, the Goodwills are harbouring years worth of selfishly hoarded treasure. Wherever you look you see tools, equipment and sentimental items that could have helped in countless cases. The nerve of these people not to hand them over to you, and their arrogance in leaving only a smashed up door in the way, are baffling to you. In the centre of the garage is a car underneath some kind of tarpaulin cover.
"Looks like nothing has been taken." Drainpipe assesses. "In fact, it's so full that I'm struggling to picture what it would look like if someone had snuck in here to steal things."
"Don't worry, Drainpipe. I'll show you the kind of thing I was worried about, so that you can spot it in future." you kindly offer.
Resting Drainpipe in an observation position beside the door, you do your best impression of a burglar, at no benefit to yourself.
"We've already cased the joint, so now we need to get a storage solution for our illicit gains." you explain. With no time to deliberate, you tear the tarpaulin away from the car as a makeshift sack. It sounds like a wing mirror or two come away in the process, but burglars would never care about that so neither do you.
"Now we grab everything of value that we can see." you continue. It would be quite out of character for you to take things that don't belong to you, of course, but Drainpipe needs this education and you're duty bound to provide it.
It costs you several bumps to the head, knees and elbows, on account of the garage being dangerously dark, but eventually your wild hands manage to fill your tarp bag. With no space left to fill, except the enormous emotional void that your actions imply to exist, you drag a pile of demonstrative loot back through the broken doorway.
"Oh, I almost forgot, there's normally some criminal damage too. Like this." you add, taking a brick from your loot and heave it through the unveiled car's windscreen. It sounds suitably expensive.
"A wonderful lesson, friend!" cries Drainpipe, who sounds as out of breath as you are from all the looting.
You hop back over the wall to take stock of your gains, and Ashley emerges from your own garage with a can of petrol.
Items gained:
Claw hammer
Fox taxidermy
Plastic bag of miscellanous pills
Electric chainsaw
Nails (22)
Oil
Hard hat
Wing mirror
Photo albums
Accordion
£6000 in unmarked notes
Belt sander
>> Stash loot in car, ask Ashley to drive
These questions might reasonably pertain to where the goods came from, why they were misappropriated, and whether or not you intend to return them at any point. Clearly, that line of questioning will do nothing to progress the case, and is therefore a waste of precious time. Having spent the last few days in such unbroken concentration on the case, focusing every shred of your attention on only the most critical investigative tasks, you feel that such distractions cannot be countenanced.
For a moment you consider filling the hard hat with oil and cash as a makeshift flammable device, one which might be returned at speed to the neighbour's garage to put to bed any questions about your goods, but you decide against it. The best thing to do is act natural, get the equipment in the car, and ask Ashley to get you towards your destination.
"Is the car unlocked, Ash?" you ask, your voice a mask of perfect innocence.
"No, not yet. One sec." she replies, fishing around in her inventory for the key. You hope that it is less choked with emergency supplies than yours.
A flashing of indicators informs you of your car's newfound accessibility. Doing no favours for the modest lawn of your front garden, your tarp carves a path towards the street and leaves a muddy trail on the pavement. You shake your head at the deplorable state of street cleaning around here, and resolve to default on your next few council tax payments. You've barely got the boot of the car open when your heart, for the first time ever, sinks a little at the sound of Ashley's voice.
"What do you have there, Luce?" she asks.
"Just a few supplies I thought we might need. There might be some evidence of Gertie and Gertie's wrongdoing in here, so we'd be remiss to leave without it." you reply, thinking on your feet and feeling wily as a fox. You try to look Ashley in the eye, to really sell the cover story, but her own gaze is tracing the line of mud and carnage back to the Goodwills' garage.
"So I see." she says, softly. "It was very kind of the Goodwills to let you borrow those things, especially after their month long hunger strike for awareness of climate change. To think that they managed to keep up their regular volunteering at the hospital, and their litter-picking walks, while having nothing more than room temperature water to sustain them, is absolutely incredible. We really must return that book on impulse control they lent us."
You remember that book vividly. It had an enormously positive impact on your life. In particular, you recall how entertaining it was to watch it spin in the toilet bowl before finally succumbing to the power of the flush, which in turn would make honouring Ashley's desire to return it rather challenging.
"Yes." you say, conveying all relevant information succinctly. "Anyway, shall we get going? You can drive if you like." you continue, heaving the tarpaulin into the vehicle. You hear the unmistakably sound of a bottle of antifreeze splitting beneath the weight of a chainsaw, but pay it no mind as you close the boot lid again.
"Yeah, I can drive." Ashley says, brightly. "I suppose it's for the best that you let steady old me stick behind the wheel; while we might be in a hurry, we wouldn't want to risk an accident with the way you race about." You can't deny that, of the pair of you, Ashley's driving is the most relaxing and controlled. It means you get to spend more time together each journey though, so you've never minded.
In your now practiced way, you once again thread Drainpipe Von Staffen through the window of the rear doors, its own head ready to headbutt any agents of the elderly woman who might be lurking on the streets. Steadfastly refusing to check the road for traffic, you step out to the passenger door and open it wide. An inconsiderate driver mounts the kerb on the opposite side of the street, apparently labouring under the delusion that sounding their hooter and swearing at you will make their violent swerving sufficiently safe for suburban travel.
After her own trip to the boot with the petrol can, Ashley climbs into the driver's seat and starts the engine.
"Here we go again!" she says happily, as she slams the car into first, keeps her eyes well off her mirrors, and wheel spins carefully into motion.
>> Surf on Roof
Houses whip past your window, as you find yourself yet again pressed hard into the passenger seat of your car. It's as if the world outside is as desperate to flee Gertie and Gertie Enterprises as you are to reach it; perhaps the universe can feel the righteous weight of investigative justice that you're wielding and wishes to clear the way.
In the driver's seat, Ashley has made the sage decision to close her eyes and get a little relaxation in before the big confrontation. Cruising as you are at a steady fifty through a school zone, you are once again blown away by her natural drivership and intuitive vehicle control. Other vehicles honk their praise as you tear past, and some even mount the pavement in deference. A few such acolytes slam into front garden walls or lampposts, which you find to be rather reckless of them.
Seeing the good work that Ashley is doing, you conclude that you too have a duty to prepare. But how best would you do that?
You ponder your circumstances as you hear a loud crunch from the undercarriage of the car, and the whole thing lurches upwards. You spare a look out of the window and see that Ashley has expertly ramped up the side of a roundabout, not wasting precious time or wearing down the road surface by going all the way around, instead taking the direct line. What a visionary. It inspires you to think all the more clearly about the events to come.
You're heading into a mystery showdown; two plucky private investigators, and length of Drainpipe, versus a multinational corporation dedicated to evil. What you'll need most of all isn't the element of surprise, or a plan, or to know what you're carrying, or even to know what your abilities are; what you need is adrenaline. The ability to make snap decisions and take spontaneous action will see you through any crisis. But how will you achieve such a heightened state when Ashley's driving makes you feel so safe and calm? No part of your brain could possibly feel excited when you are in such secure hands.
The car leans hard onto two wheels as Ashley makes a u-turn across the dual carriageway, despite the naysaying of a road sign that needlessly prohibits such a good sense manoeuvre.
As your head crashes into the window, you note a pigeon sitting atop a bollard. The glass might well have given you a concussion, but the pigeon has given you a great idea.
"I'll be back in a moment, Ash. Just getting ready." you say.
"Got it!" she replies, apparently a little distracted by the amount of swerving she's been forced into. It seems that some rogue gardener has planted a row of veteran chestnut trees along the roadway.
Opening the door of a moving vehicle under such circumstances would be dangerous, of course, so you safely roll the window down and lean your torso immediately through. Once again, your decision not to wear a seat belt pays off, saving you many seconds of fiddling time. You resolve to cut it off entirely when you get to Gertie and Gertie; Ashley would never crash, and to imply she might by wearing a belt is just insulting.
The wind assails you as you flop from the open window. It pulls at your hair and your witches dress, but the latter is held firmly in place by your towel. Pawing at the roof of the car, facing up to the sky, you find it hard to get purchase on the smooth, painted metal and curse that you are not a sucker-footed gecko.
"Can I lend you a head?" Laughs Drainpipe, poking out of the rear window behind you.
"You're a genius!" you tell your cylindrical companion, grasping the space where its face would be with one hand and levering yourself upwards. It turns out that whoever designed this car made the windows woefully inadequate in terms of size; your towel clad torso barely fits out, and you feel the frame pushing the barrel of the revolver into your ribs again.
With a lot of levering and wiggling, and some rousing near misses, you manage to get your whole body free of the interior. One leg rests on Drainpipe, one on the window frame, and both arms are on the roof. A final Heroic effort springs you onto the thin, aluminium roof of the hatchback, and you feel it bowing reverently beneath your weight.
From prone, to squat, to standing you rise, feeling the air ripping at your skin as the car wobbles beneath you. Ashley is clearly on board with the adrenaline angle, and has increased the violence of her weaving from 'reasonable' to 'thrilling'.
"Great work, Ash!" You shout, as you duck a low bough of chestnut. You are far from stable, lurching whole bodied from front to back in a desperate attempt to keep your feet. Below you the tarmac and pavement whip by, and the car bounces hard every time Ashley is forced to mount and dismount the confusingly positioned kerb.
>> See if you can stamp a sunroof into the car
In recent memory you've utilised several modes of transport, all with great success. In the beginning there were your original shoes, now long lost in the depths of the supermarket. One likely still remains where it fell, among the dairy at the battle of yoghurt slip, while the other is in a gentleman's shepherd's pie. Maybe the pie and the shoe have been eaten already. Maybe the shoe was served as a side dish, or kept as leftovers. The likelihood is that you'll never know.
After your shoes were lost to you, by no fault of your own, you tried the snake method, but that led to you becoming tired and even more covered in gore from your assault on the bakery. Pumpkin feet came and went, there were a couple of stowaway journeys on the train, you've had a number of enjoyable, serene drives with Ashley, but the best way to travel, on balance, has to be your unreasonably practical wellingtons.
Just as you'd expect from a master craftsperson like yourself, the springs you roughly jammed into the soles have held fast, and moving like a kangaroo has become second nature to you. It doesn't even matter that they're both lefts anymore; either the rubber or your ankle have yielded enough to make it work. They really are the best decision you ever made.
Such is the train of thought passing through your mind as you wobble like a blancmange in an earthquake atop your car. What's so nice about your current circumstance, other than the demonstration of great practicality from your wellies, is the fact that you get to enjoy both the warmth of the summer sunshine and the cooling effect of the breeze. It's one of those simple treats that everyone should be allowed to sample. Even Drainpipe Von Staffen, renowned workaholic, is allowing its head to have a taste of the breeze.
Your stomach drops out of all of a sudden as the car crashes through a hedgerow, and you realise what a terribly indefensible action you've taken; Ashley is stuck inside the vehicle with neither sun nor breeze to enjoy. Here you are, selfishly living the high life of car surfing, while she's diligently finding shortcuts to get you to Gertie and Gertie Enterprises on time. It's shameful, really, that she's being denied these pleasures too.
Thankfully, you're a genius engineer at heart. You know there's no problem that can't be fixed with the right tools, and the right tools are already on your feet.
Conventional wisdom, the remit of cowards and thinkers, would dictate that when surfing on a car at around twice the speed limit, standing on one leg is risky. It would demand that both feet are kept in contact at all times, and preferably a hand or two gets involved as well. You know far better than that.
Raising one leg high into the air, you aim the pointy end of your spring at the centre of the roof; prime position for a fashionable, resale value doubling sunroof. The next moment sees your foot slamming down, an almighty bang and crunch of bodywork combining with the metallic scraping of spring on paintwork. Regrettably, you remember too late what happens when you compress a spring.
If Ashley has cried out with any gratitude at your modification attempts then you can't hear it, deafened as you are by the rushing air, and distracted as you are by your stamping leg flying upwards. In a rare flash of introspection, you fear that you may have made the wellingtons too practical for this course of action. The flash is replaced by a blur as your leg's momentum topples you backwards, and your bottom crashes onto the edge of the roof, while Ashley takes a tight corner that only she could see.
Towel slides against dress and dress slides against roof. Somehow, despite your expert calculation, you are at risk of falling from the vehicle.
>> Stab secateurs into roof for purchase
Frightfully embarrassingly, you seem to have found yourself gravitationally inconvenienced. Any normal civilian could be forgiven for winding up in such a position; after all, the disgusting morass of peasants and agents of the elderly woman around you are not equipped with unreasonably practical wellingtons, nor do they command the help of Drainpipe Von Staffen or Ashley. It would be a miracle if any of them could manage to get onto the roof of a calmly driven car at all, let alone try to stamp a hole in it.
For you, however, things are different. A veteran of many high profile cases, including the case of Public Ainsley, Secret Drainpipe, you should know better than to lose your balance or fail to adhere to a roof. As you careen towards the point of no return, which takes bloody ages to get back from, your mind reels that this might be what finally delivers you to calamity on the tarmac. If you can sleep in a church toilet, break into a safe, and indulge in an early morning secateur frenzy, all with half a train carriage's worth of springs in your pockets, then to be brought low by something as banal as roof-walking gone wrong is shameful.
A light switches on in your brain. Secateurs can snatch victory from the jaws of any defeat, much like they snatch buds and twigs from bushes in their own jaws. You recall with perfect clarity how your last pair of secateurs easily punched a hole in the vicar's bible; it can't be any different to jam them into a hatchback's bodywork.
Pursuing this example of perfectly sound logic, you hurriedly rummage through your towel, feeling the fabric of both the drying implement and the dress forced over it pull tight. It's a snug fit at the best of times, and the quantity of treasure & weaponry within the folds does nothing to make navigability any easier. With an alacrity that really spits in the face of modern backpack designers, you manage to get a hold of the secateurs, pull them free, and deliver an almighty downward stab into the roof.
There's a horrifying puncturing sound, like someone rupturing a tin of beans using a colleague's collarbone, but the spike holds fast. You feel your shoulder jerk painfully as your whole bodyweight and all of its momentum are arrested by the gardening tool. You are no longer sliding towards the precipice, but Ashley's slalom below is causing you to pivot like a pendulum, backwards and forwards across the roof. If this goes on for too much longer then you fear that your dress might get ruffled, or you'll pick up a friction burn on your chin.
You wonder to yourself how Ashley has reacted to seeing a blade stab through the roof of the car. Last time anything like that happened it'd been a real nightmare with the insurance company, so presumably it won't be a popular happenstance. Then again, the last time you had a near miss with a moving vehicle, namely the time you cut your way onto the train tracks with a ceremonial dagger, Ashley had been rather displeased, forcing you to promise that you wouldn't do something so dangerous again. As you trail from the car like a kite in a strong wind, holding on by one hand and a half-inch of gardening tool only, you feel the warm sensation of a promise ably kept.
>> Press torso into roof to check inventory and stats
It has been alleged, by many stock photos with text poorly photoshopped on top, that it's how you react in times of trouble that really define you as a person. Will you let animal instinct take over and panic? Will you lash out at those around you? Or will you keep your head, stay calm, and exercise some good old-fashioned sense? Obviously, based on your track record, only the most astute decisions will be made.
As you flail upon the roof, gripping with all your might onto the handles of your secateurs while your legs flap like a distressed flag in a hurricane, you realise that it's been a long time since you really took stock of your possessions. They could have slipped down, or disappeared into, anywhere inside your towel, and you won't want to waste time at Gertie and Gertie Enterprises by performing your own stock take. It occurs to you that a stock take of their inventory would serve as great evidence for your case, but that's not important now. The only thing that matters is checking what you've got, and how you feel.
Determined with your new course of action, you take one hand off the secateurs, aiming to use it to check your towel. However, this only makes it more difficult to check your inventory, on account of the increased impact of turbulence on your already ragdolled body. You let out a disappointed sigh, irritated by your body's treacherous submission to fluid dynamics, and place your hand back on the gardening tool. It feels like it's slicing further through the roof, but that's a future problem for a Lucy who knows what she's about.
Unable to use your hands, you settle for pushing your torso hard into the roof, squirming and shuffling to create a sensory picture of what lurks inside your clothing. You find:
Inventory:
MOT Certificates
Tourist Leaflets
Burned-out Bulbs (4)
£4.56
Road Map
The Thresher of Light
Secateurs (equipped)
Revolver
Rather pleased with your detective skills, especially in being able to delineate leaflets, a map, and an MOT certificate by nothing more than how much of a papercut they feel like they might give you, you reflect on what kind of a person finds themselves in your position.
Stats:
Charisma – 11
Self-confidence – 16
Sass – 13
Erudition – 15
Insolubility – 13
Contrition - 8
Serendipity – 11
Serenity – 9
Verisimilitude -11
Duplicity – 15
What a hero!
>> Roof surf the rest of the journey with renewed confidence
Your brief flash of introspection is a concession to humility that you can't abide for long. Your whole being yearns for action, to make something happen, to make your mark on history as well as several smaller, more tangible marks on the bodywork of your car.
No more will you flap limply behind a pair of secateurs, buffeted by the rushing air and fighting to keep your place. The time has come to rise up, to make good on your previous intentions, and to roof surf like you've never roof surfed before. Such an assertion is completely correct; you've never roof surfed before this day, but you're sure it's an inherent skill that you must possess. Having learned so much about yourself and what's crammed into your towel, nothing could hope to stand in the way of achieving your dreams.
With a herculean effort you drag your body fully back onto the roof, and push up onto your hands and knees. Still gripping the secateurs for support, you get one spring-soled wellington onto the roof, and then the other, bouncing and bobbing with the wild reverberations of a car that's making great headway along a public footpath. As pristine hedgerows whip past on either side, being pruned by the car that's wider than the space between them, you relax your hands and push up to standing, ready to surf all the way to Gertie and Gertie Enterprises.
[Self-confidence check - Success]
The sounds of the world begin to decrease in volume. They fade like any doubts you could possibly have in your plans. Spring, rubber, leg, dress and towel act as one glorious chimera of high-fashion and stolen goods, your knees absorbing the sway of the vehicle while the springs deal with any vertical oscillations. There are a couple of near misses with low-hanging branches and a lady riding a horse, but those distractions cannot hope to penetrate the euphoric focus you've managed to achieve. You are like a professional athlete out at sea, cresting the peak of a mighty water swell, except that you're preparing to probably commit several crimes in the name of justice.
In what seems like no time at all, or possibly a couple of weeks depending on who you ask, you snap out of your travel-fugue state as Ashley performs an emergency stop in the car park of Gertie and Gertie Enterprises. Neatly you're flung forwards, unable to arrest your own momentum, and land back-first on the bonnet with a confident crunch.
You give Ashley a 'We're here, then' thumbs-up.
>> Huddle with the team to agree on the plan
Falling onto the bonnet of the car brings your journey to an abrupt crescendo. With the engine now turned off, you lie in relative silence of a world without rushing air, a roaring engine, or the thumping of your own pulse in your ears. Slowly, the exertion of your chosen method of travel catches up with you, and you become aware of a burning and aching in your arms, back and legs. Thankfully, engine heat rising up from the bonnet is doing some work towards soothing those pains.
"You alright there, Luce? Have a good surf?" Ashley asks, leaning her head out of the driver's side window.
"Yup." you reply, playing it cool. "I started work on that sunroof we didn't talk about as well; we can finish it up once the case is done."
"Great! You really made the most of the journey time. Thank you for always being so considerate, my love."
With a new warmth filling you from the inside, you have a go at moving. Although it's uncomfortable and slightly awkward, you manage to get some lift and slide down the bonnet, onto the tarmac. Your towel pads your landing.
Ahead of you, looming like a monolith of concrete, hatred, doily-enabling, and improper varnishing disciple, probably, is Gertie and Gertie enterprises. It is the fortress of viral insipidity that has set you on a path of righteousness, the bastion of guttural bile that turned a vicar into a bird-confusing, thieves' tool owning marauder of rudeness. It will be your greatest triumph to take them down.
You have a lot of experience with triumphs, as evidenced by your long record of great successes, but your partners might need some encouragement. If they feel like they're involved in the decision making then they'll be able to keep up with your lightning fast changes of heart and rapid-fire reactionary choices.
"We should agree on a plan." you say, rising to your feet. "Let's huddle."
"Good idea. I'll get Drainpipe Von Staffen." agrees Ashley, threading your companion out of the window and round to your central operations room at the front of the car.
"Right, now I suspect you'll be wondering why I've gathered you here, today." you start, as all good meetings should.
"No. I know exactly why we're here." replies Ashley, always on the ball.
"Yes." answers Drainpipe, never one to contradict you.
"Good. This variety of perspectives bodes well, and we shouldn't change it." you assess, pleased at your diverse team composition. You point to the crater you left in the bonnet. "This enormous dent represents Gertie and Gertie Enterprises. These three scratches from someone's hedge can be us, and those holes from the chisel incident last year can be Ellen Gertie and her nefarious agents."
You can tell from the look on Ashley's face, and the look on Drainpipe's space where a face would be if it wasn't a drainpipe, that they're fully immersed in your theatre of the mind.
"We need to initiate a dual-pronged attack. The first prong will be you, Ashley. You'll enter the building first as Sir Chrimmington Colobario, a local greengrocer with a dark past and nothing to lose. You want to engage Gertie and Gertie's services as an intermediary between you and your customers, so that you don't have to touch the disgusting public at any point of manning your market stall. With the front desk distracted, Drainpipe and I will then enter using our patented Public Ainsley, Secret Drainpipe technique."
"You left your newspaper at home in your backpack, electing that you don't need any of the tools you carefully gathered over two long seasons of investigating." Ashley points out, throwing a spanner in the works of your otherwise perfect plan.
"Butts. You're right. What do we have instead..." you ponder. Drainpipe's disguise is still intact, on account of it never taking the thing off. But you are so obviously the famous and powerful towel-witch investigator Lucy that you'll require a real doozy of a costume. "I've got it!" you cry, rushing around to the boot of the car.
Ashley and Drainpipe watch in patient awe as you use your expert crafting skills in real time. By combining the claw hammer, nails, hard hat and fox taxidermy, you create a flawless hat-and-veil system, whereby the taxidermy hangs in front of your face, disguising you completely.
"Behold! Public Mrs Fox, Secret Drainpipe!" you cackle, rationally.
"But where did Lucy go? How did you get here, Mrs Fox?!" Ashley asks in some alarm. The risk of you being taken by one of Ellen Gertie's agents is, of course, weighing on her mind.
"It's still me really, Ash." you say, removing the hat. "But that proves how great this disguise is. We'll head in after you, and start taking the elevator up. Before it leaves we'll call you over 'for a chat' and then bundle you in too. We'll be in that office and rummaging through their stuff in no time."
"It's perfect. No notes." Ashley surmises, before slipping into character flawlessly. "Apples and pears, ten pounds via my associate!" she cries.
You crack your knuckles, pick up Mrs Fox's trademark chainsaw, and start walking behind your wife.
>> Stick with the plan as discussed
The weight of a chainsaw in your hands feels predictably comforting as you watch Ashley saunter, grocer-like, into the main entrance of Gertie and Gertie Enterprises. It's a marvel to watch her keen, insightful mind in action as she chooses to open the door before heading through, saving herself a sore head, a lot of broken glass, and a lot more attention than any of you need.
"Are you ready Drainpipe? We need to be more inconspicuous now than we've ever been before." You warn you companion, who has really been making some quite outlandish moves recently.
"Ready as can be, friend." Replies the pipe, it's accent so thick, consistent and convincing that you feel transported to generic continental Europe with every word. "I shall blend into the shadows as only a Drainpipe can; we lurk at every corner, on every building, silently siphoning away precious rainwater from the gutters of a nation with nary a glance from the public. We are experts at operating in plain sight. We were born for subterfuge and we will die for espionage."
"No need to die today, old buddy. You and 'Mrs Fox' have an important meeting." You say with a wink. Estimating that you've waited long enough for Ashley to strike up a conversation, you begin your own approach of the front doors, Drainpipe in arms.
Following Ashley's lead you open the door before progressing through. Unveiled before you is the wide, high ceilinged, marble edifice of Gertie and Gertie Enterprises, an atrium fit for a national Bank or international laundrette stretching away from you in every direction except down. To your left is the reception desk, where Ashley is standing. Behind it is a middle aged gentleman in a porter's cap and pinstriped overalls. To your right is the gleaming, steel door to the lift, and a plain pine doorway to the stairs. You scan for a third, loo-like doorway but draw a blank. You make a mental note that you might have to go in the corner if it comes to it.
Most impressive is the back wall. Stretching upwards is a single slab of granite, three storeys high and two storeys wide. Onto its face the likeness and titles of Carradan Gertie and Excelsior Jones-Smith-Johnson-Johnstone-Miller-Smith-Jones-O’Daniels-Walker-Smith-Gertie, in a grim tableaux at a local pizzeria. Carradan is shaking hands with a waiter, while Excelsior stuffs a whole pizza into his back pocket and pours salt on another table. Quite why this is the scene, real or fictitious, that they have chosen to immortalise and present to the public is a mystery to you. Thankfully, solving mysteries is your business.
"Wow. This is Ritzy." You utter, softly. Mrs Fox, famed socialite, would never be taken aback by a space so cramped and tacky by comparison to her own home, so subtly is required to keep up the facade.
"That it is, colleague. It's symptomatic of their flagrant disregard for money." Assesses Drainpipe.
"Yes, that's right- THE Sir Chrimmington Colobario, of grocery fame..." You hear Ashley say, nailing down that cover story. It reminds you of the plan, to which you are determined to maintain an uncharacteristic adherence. Tempting as it is to start the chainsaw, and as much as you want to start letting the creative juices flow, you keep yourself on track. This case could make or further make your career; there's no breaking such a strong reputation as yours under any circumstances.
With the confidence of a woman twice your age, wrapped in one fewer towel, wearing a much nicer dress and not lugging an immaculately disguised length of Drainpipe, you stride on a purposeful trajectory towards the lifts.
"...that's right, I need your services as an intermediary. The public are so wretched and filthy; I want nothing to do with them..."
Underfoot the tiles are polished to a mirror shown, and the springs punctured into your wellies clatter and scrape their way noisily across. You try to convince yourself that it's just like the dignified heel-toe clicking of a stiletto, but the conviction just isn't there.
"...so as long as someone can scream about apples and pears, and their relative price per unit weight using a distributed software as a service model then I think we're able to work together regardless..."
Drainpipe slips in your hands. Not enough to be dropped, but plenty to touch the ground with a hollow clang. The receptionist looks over.
"Excuse me?! Sir and Madam? Can I help you?" He calls over.
Thinking quickly, which is an improvement on your general tendency not to think at all, you spin on your heel like a well-to-do vulpine socialite, fixing the receptionist with a 'Well, what is it?' kind of look from the dangling taxidermy.
"Oh! Begging your pardon, Mrs Fox. I didn't recognise you with that long, mysterious member of some kind of charred royalty." The receptionist blusters, rightfully embarrassed, when they are taken in by your disguise and Drainpipe's singed spring crown. "You have a nice day now."
You give the receptionist a thumbs up, and continue your walk to the lift, heart pounding.
"My word, but your disguise making skills are top drawer." Compliments Drainpipe.
At the lift, you press the door open button and the doors immediately slide back. There's no-one else inside.
"Excuse me, Sir Chrimmington Colobario! Could you attend me for a chat?"
You see the receptionist shooing Ashley in your direction. She has a business card in her hand.
"Great work, Ash." You whisper as she reaches you
"You too, team." She replies. "Based on the documents we found, the main office will be on the tenth floor."
Master of disguise: +1 duplicity
Famous Vulpine Socialite: +1 Charisma, +1 Self-confidence, -1 Verisimilitude
>> Press button for 10th floor
No sooner has Ashley relayed the location of the main office than your finger darts out like a harpoon in the hands of a jittery deck-hand. Expertly aimed from years of learning fine motor control, the end of the finger that favours utility over connection makes firm contact with the button for the 10th floor. It lights up under your touch, and a pleasing 'bing' rings out from speakers unseen. Slowly the doors begin to slide closed, as do the clouds of doubt inside your mind.
You look at your finger, still extended and still pressing down the button, and wonder if you can even recognise yourself anymore. Sure, you're wearing the towel that you and Ashley bought when you moved in together, and yes, you've got the permanently bruised collarbone of a regular passenger of your wife, but these actions... Are they really you?
There wasn't even hesitation for thought before you acted; you immediately pressed the correct button sensibly, progressing your investigation in the most efficient way possible. You didn't try to press anything else, chainsaw a hole in the ceiling, ask Ashley a perfectly pertinent question, or even squat. Intolerable as it is, you feel that you could stand it, or brush it off, if you hadn't also stuck with the plan immediately prior. No improvisation, no going off-script, no spontaneous acts of genius; no Lucy, a voice in your head adds.
The fearful hypothetical reality seeps in from the sides of your vision. It feels as if a thick, sticky sludge of banality is leaking from the elevator's control panel and pumping itself into your veins. Is this Ellen Gertie's greatest weapon? Her most despicable plan? Her hail Mary? Has she made her own trail so fraught with opportunities to behave yourself that it strips you of your greatest investigative weapon; your sense of self?
The thought niggles at your mind for the whole elevator ride, which is upwards of twelve seconds and less than fourteen seconds. The doors open, and a well-lit corridor extends away from you. But who is looking down it, you ask yourself.
"You are, Lucy. " Drainpipe replies, in its most devastatingly impressive show of empathy yet. "You didn't allow me to be lost in the train station all those hours ago, and I won't let you be lost here and now. You're Lucy, even when you refuse to obey your wiser instincts to widen the investigation via theft, assault and inanity."
Drainpipe's words send a wave of relief over you. You might be able to doubt yourself, but Drainpipe knows you far too well to do so as well.
Drainpipe Von Saviour: No self-confidence loss
Behaved yourself: -1 Sass
>> Ask Ashley for a piggyback
Drainpipe Von Staffen's words ring in your ears. It's as if they came from your own mouth and reverberated through your jaw. It was right; you're Lucy and you're not going to let the magnitude of this case or the vicissitudes of your attitude change how you approach it.
"Sir Chrimmington?" you start, committing heavily to the watertight aliases you've established, "would you please bear me down these corridors upon your back, as if you were a piggy of the type who might eat the cast-offs from your establishment?" It transpires that Mrs Fox has a shrill yet smoky voice, and over-pronounces all of her vowels. She's always getting hit in the face by the wooden plinth of a taxidermy, which puts her off her stride a bit.
"Wha-? Er, oh, you want a piggyback, love?" Sir Chrimmington replies, giving you Ashley's 'Just checking I heard you right' look.
"Yes, please. I wouldn't like for my high society feet to touch these peasant floors."
"Even though they already did downstairs?" asks the attentive grocer. You think for a moment.
"Yes."
"Alright then! Hop up!"
Using Drainpipe Von Staffen for support, physically now as well as emotionally, and still holding a chainsaw in one hand, you bounce on your springy wellingtons and propel yourself onto the back of the heavily disguised Ashley. She lets out a little grunt of exertion as you and your toolbox of towel-ensconced items land on her back, and you feel the revolver dig reassuringly into your diaphragm, just as Mrs Fox would like it.
"Onwards, my grocer! To our definitely scheduled meeting in the largest, emptiest office of a CEO or similar." you declare, quietly enough not to be overheard through the walls, but with sufficient volume to fool any hidden microphones into believing this was a legitimate piggyback.
Not one who needs to be told twice, Ashley launches into a full sprint, or as much of a sprint as she can with you on her back and a drainpipe dragging along behind her. The venerable Von Staffen catches its head section on the top of the lift door with a bold, regal twang, providing a resonant soundbed for the thumping footsteps of a dashing grocer. To either side of you are closed pine doors with small brass plaques, but you're moving too quickly to read them. It seems that Sir Chrimmington has a destination in their sights, and they're determined to get you there without delay.
Ahead of you loom a pair of finely polished marble double doors. Engraved on the left door is 'Carradan' and on the other is 'Excelsior'. As graffiti goes an engraving is certainly much classier than spray-paint, but doing it to one's own door feels foolish. These CEOs, one real and one fake, will certainly run this shell corporation into the ground unless you stop them. Or once you stop them. You'll accept it either way.
Still heading quickly towards the marble doors you brace yourself on your wife's back, ready for impact.
It's around this time that you discover the quality of modern fake marble. From a distance it had looked terribly convincing, and even up close it was a credible effigy of hard stone. So taken in was Ashley that she really put her whole shoulder into barging the doors open. She also, in a more literal sense, put her whole body and yours into the hollow shell of batten and paper, and loses a good degree of her balance in the process. You both tumble through, feeling thin wood splinter and thinner paper tear as you hit the old, sunken carpet of the CEO's office.
1. Style it out
2. Teach remaining door a lesson using chainsaw
3. Ask Ashley if she's OK
4. Assume you're injured, but loot office anyway
>> Ask Ashley if she's OK
"Are you OK, Ashley?" you ask, from your position of relative control underneath the desk. You're definitely upside down, and your feet are rested on the seat of the chair, but you feel like this better than many of the chainsaw-based alternatives.
"Er..." she thinks out loud. You follow the sound of her voice to see your wife, in disguise as a prominent grocer, lying in a pile of wood and paper. "...what do you mean, Mrs Fox? Have you banged your head a bit and accidentally mispronounced Sir Chrimmington as 'Ashely'?"
Ashley's commitment to the character is exemplary, even after a severe de-dooring incident.
"Apologies, Sir Chrimmington. Are you alright?"
"Yes, I think so, Mrs Fox. Nothing that the sale of a half-dozen kilos of finest Glaswegian oranges couldn't fix, just as long as that sale goes through an intermediary." exposits 'Sir Chrimmington'.
"Great, then let's extract ourselves from this door rubble that someone has carelessly left scattered around the office and find someone with whom to enquire within." you say, images of opening a Gertie's chest so that you can shout a question inside flickering in front of your mind's eye. It's a bit grim.
"I'm also fine, by the way." says Drainpipe. You look over to the sound of Drainpipe's voice, which almost sounds like it comes from exactly your position. It's expertly balanced on a large indoor flowerpot, having disarmed by bifurcation the pot's previous leafy owner. Petals litter the floor around it.
"That's a great relief, mysterious pipe noble." you reply, kicking the desk chair hard away from yourself to create an exfiltration route. You hear the wheels eventually hit the skirting boards at the opposite end of the room, and then the heavy seat-back crack the window into which it pivots.
With severe discomfort from your overstuffed towel, awkwardness from the chainsaw you refuse to release, and obstructed vision from the dangling fox taxidermy, you make your way to your feet. The office in which you find yourself is a real mess of broken doors, shredded plants, broken windows, and scattered grocers. It's just the sort of depravity you should have expected from any relative of Ellen Gertie.
"Oh, Mrs Fox! I wasn't expecting you today." cries a voice from the corner of the room. It doesn't sound like the voice of either a grocer or a drainpipe, which surprises you. You look over to see an elderly woman, not THE Elderly Woman, looking over at you. She's wearing a doily on each shoulder, diamante pumps, and a sensible olive skirt.
"And yet here I am! As cunning and sly as a fox, with just as much interest in rummaging through your bins. Mrs Ellen Gertie, I presume." you answer, in a manner which you firmly believe to be debonair.
"Well... Yes. We've met several times before. Did you really hit your head like your friend, Sir Chrimmington was it, presumed?" replies Ellen Gertie.
The confirmation twists in your stomach. The hag herself, in the flesh, stands before you. She threw the first stone when she threw you through that doorway a moment ago and then thrust Drainpipe Von Staffen into a plant pot.
>> Stay in character and surreptitiously gather intel
Standing before you is Ellen Gertie. Evil incarnate. Suffering made manifest. Hell in a cardigan. She's remarkably tolerant of the damage that some inconsiderate soul did to the door of the office, but shows very little concern for your wellbeing, or that of your companions. That sort of callousness is to be expected from such a monster as her, and is exactly why she needs to be brought to justice. All that nonsense with stealing from a church and being hired by a vicar is sort of relevant too, you concede.
Ashley, still deep undercover, fetches Drainpipe and comes to stand by your side, adopting the one-legged stance that typifies a market stall grocer. Seeing her continued dedication inspires you to follow suit. As far as Ellen Gertie knows, you really are Mrs Fox; you've got a unique and probably time-limited opportunity to pump her for intel before you're rumbled, so you need to make the most of it. Diane Ingrid Shame can unleash a hellstorm upon her once you're done.
"Ah, yes, of course. I don't like to appear over-familiar, though. You know how it is; people like you and I turn heads in the street and break hearts in the canal, so we can't take risks with other people's feelings in a business setting." you say. "Speaking of abject failures of emotional intelligence: are Carradan and Excelsior not around, today?"
Ellen gives you an appraising look.
"I was hoping to speak to them about representation for my grocery business. Take the fetid, filthy public off my pristinely manicured hands." Sir Chrimmington announces, taking some of the heat for your totally accurate and reasonable description of the CEOs.
"Ah. That's a very good choice, Mr..."
"Sir. Sir Chrimmington." you correct her. "A close friend of mine. You can speak as freely in front of him, and my other associate Gutterpipe Del Perdido, as you would in front of me." you add, hoping that she'll reveal some devastatingly incriminating facts.
"Well, it's an honour to meet a knight." says Gertie, who has probably been hunted like a mythical dragon a few times in her squalid and rotten existence. "And to meet a member of hollow royalty."
Drainpipe, masquerading as Gutterpipe, gives the impression it would nod if it could.
"So as we were saying, Mrs Gertie, are Carradan and Excelsior not around today? I was hoping to discuss some important business matters with them; hiding money, laundering funds, embezzlement, theft, tax evasion, corporate espionage, asset stripping, dumping hundreds of tonnes of unused roofing tiles into local ponds, that sort of thing." you tell the old hag, effortlessly fulfilling the role of the socialite and entrepreneur.
"Sounds like a busy afternoon you've got planned." chuckles Ellen Gertie. Her unremarkable teeth are unworthy of any remarks, but they lurk behind lips which cry out for a third-party making-up. Flashbacks of your first encounter with The Elderly Woman come unbidden to your mind, but you strive to hold yourself together. "You know as well as I do that Carradan and Excelsior are both fictitious. I suppose this was just your way of revealing it to Sir Chrimmington?"
The bombshell lands in your lap like a bomb landing in a woman's lap.
"Yes." you say, simply. Ashley lets out a grocerly gasp of surprise. You'd come here to expose Gertie and Gertie Enterprises having a false figurehead alongside the despicable Excelsior, but now you've been left reeling from the revelation that neither of the joint CEOs exists. Ellen Gertie is the puppetmaster at every level.
>> "Do you have any experience with church embezzlement?"
Now that you know Ellen Gertie is the sick, demented ringmaster in this circus of crime and fare-dodging, you realise the true gravity of your situation. She's not just the beneficiary of nepotism and matriarchal dominance of a money laundering operation, but effectively an organised crime boss with absolutely awful taste in office carpeting. Having been up close with it, you can really bear witness to the offensive orange colour she's selected.
You can't allow the chance to question her to slip through your fingers. Mrs Fox's famously cat-like curiosity normally makes you sick as a dog and tired as a work horse, but it's time to commit to it like a highland cow commits to blocking a road.
"Do you have any experience with church embezzlement?" you ask, the most natural question that a prospective client could have when discussing the potential representation of a grocer.
"Church embezzlement?" Ellen repeats, the words slipping easily from her mouth as if it's the most familiar phrase in her arsenal of despair.
"Yes, church embezzlement. You know, like we always do at the rich people clubs in the city." you clarify. "Once we're done eating our gilded parsnips in our rooftop restaurants, we descend to underground canal level - the secret underground canals that only the elite know of, I mean - and then allow the gondolas to bear us to nearby towns. Upon our arrival, rejuvenated by the costly liqueurs that the gondola bartenders foist upon us, we rise back up to the streets where the proletariat shamble along in their pitiful existences. We find their places of worship, where they gather in their tens on a weekly basis, and we infiltrate the power structures for our own amusement. With influence secured, we then make sizable donations using ill-gotten money and then steal it back, effectively laundering it without drawing any suspicion to ourselves."
You can feel the silence from Ashley and Drainpipe behind you. They're either totally taken in by your scarily accurate depiction of the lives of the wealthy, or they're trying to think of their own totally dynamite contributions to the investigation
"I see." Ellen replies after a short silence. The sound of her grating, evil-choked voice leaves you with the impression that the silence wasn't short enough. "It seems like you have an awful lot of experience with the subject already, Mrs Fox."
That dastardly hag! She's trying to turn the whole thing round on you! You thrust your hands into the pockets of your dress, blocking them from any attempt Gertie might make to slip some falsified evidence in.
"No I don't! I've never even heard of a church. Or money laundering. Or vicars." you deny. "Or what happened in that shoe shop that got robbed yesterday."
"It's true; she doesn't. I questioned her thoroughly on the topic earlier today." Drainpipe adds, always having your back.
"I think what Mrs Fox is trying to say, is that I don't really like talking to the public when I sell groceries, so I'd like Gertie and Gertie to take that responsibility off my hands." says Ashley as Sir Chrimmington, steering your interrogation back into the realms of the cover story. Ellen gives her a confused look.
"I was a very strange way of saying that."
"I'm a known poet." you defend, spinning your web of lies to ever greater breadths. "And as a poet, I do need to know what experience you have with stealing back donations from churches."
Ellen looks you in the eye without speaking. Ashley sidles her way towards the desk, with Drainpipe in tow.
"Why?"
>> Distract Ellen Gertie using MOT certificates
The situation is more dire than you could have ever predicted. Despite blending seamlessly into the life of Mrs Fox, and although you have probed so subtly as to render your interrogation imperceptible, even to yourself, Ellen's suspicions are piqued. You worry that if she rumbles you now then she might unleash the full force of her empire upon you, utilising passive aggression, spiteful scheduling of church fetes and probably even knife crime to end your investigation. You have to think quickly.
"Because, my darling Gertie, you see, the thing is..." you start, expertly stalling while you fish around in your towel for anything that might help "... I really need to understand your ecclesiastical and financial crossover events because, er, aha!" You triumphantly yank a bundle of crumpled documents from the confines of your inventory and thrust them towards Gertie's face. "I am very worried about this advisory finding on the tread of my tyres, despite them never so much as brushing a kerb unintentionally!"
Sir Chrimmington nods behind you. She only ever strikes kerbs on purpose.
"And only money that's been stolen from a church, preferably laundered by it, is good enough to settle our automotive invoices." Gutterpipe del Perdido adds, providing vital context.
"Ah, I see. One of the sanctified branches of Halfords, that'll be. I'm always telling the vicar about those holy mechanics and their insistence on wiping up oil stains using the Turin shroud."
You nod. Mrs Fox would be dead set against the destruction of ancient artefacts in the pursuit of routine vehicle care.
"I should be able to embezzle cash from Greater Washburn church; I did so already, just last week. It's been part of a little hobby of mine; putting fake voices of the divine into armchairs, making things look deeply secatuerable in the Chapel, moving the vicar's theives tools into prominent display, and doing the old take-back play on large donations. Gives me stories to tell the grandchildren, you know?" Explains Ellen Gertie. You're almost convinced that you could scour that statement for incriminating evidence if only you had the time. Unfortunately, Ellen's eyes travel to the name and address printed at the top of the MOT certificate.
"What's this... owner's name Ashley Von Staffen?!" Ellen Gertie reads. In hindsight, you begin to wonder if handing your nemesis personally identifying information that runs counter to your disguise was the best use of time and resources. "You're not Mrs Fox, Sir Chrimmington and Gutterpipe del Perdido at all! You're Ashley and Lucy, famous private investigators! And you've reunited Ashley with her long lost brother! I should have recognised Drainpipe Von Staffen from the off; no other pipe wears a crown so naturally!"
You're not a paranoid or insecure person, but you begin to think that Ellen suspects you're not Mrs Fox.
>> Squat
Reluctantly, and despite the masterclass in subterfuge you've just led, you accept that Ellen Gertie has seen through the veil. She must surely be a sorceress, mage, witch or shaman of extreme power to be able to find the truth like that; perhaps, in another life, you could have been crime fighting partners. You yourself are also a witch, you remember, so having a second magic user in your private investigations, especially one who is such a powerful soothsayer, would render you utterly unstoppable. But that was not to be. You are opposed like night and day, like hammer and cake, like Gertie and morality.
With confrontation at hand and having already secured a full confession from the haggard old puddle of swamp water and hatred, you prepare to take the only logical next step.
Your thigh muscles go completely limp. You stick your bum out, feeling it pull the towel and all contents taut. Your ankles become soft and bouncy and your calves relax as your torso plummets downwards, and your dress-clad-towel-clad rump makes contact with the carpet. Ashley gasps with reverential wonder; this is surely the most powerful and divine squat of your life and times to date. You have become Mrs Fox the Crab King, finally uniting the old foes of crustacean and mammal into a singular combatant who rules both ocean and high society with an iron claw.
"The jig is up, Gertie! You're under arrest for doing all those crimes you just admitted to, plus also for making me dunk buttery crumpets in tea four times. It was horrid!"
"They'd soak up all the tea and become delicious! Do it again!" she cries back, revealing how truly delusional and cruel she has allowed herself to become. She's gone too far.
>> Bonus action: Arrest Ellen Gertie
"By the power vested in me, on the authority of Diane Ingrid Shame, I'm doing an arrest of you. You're really arrested right now. You're so under arrest that all you can see is a silhouette of arrest flying high above you, making inferences on its species by wing shape, the way it flaps or glides, and how high it goes!" you bellow, layering metaphor upon metaphor until you've formed a single, groaning tower of ramshackle improvised dialogue. You start your chainsaw and then draw your gun. With a weapon in each hand you feel ready to make good on your promise of not letting her go freely.
Ellen lunges for the telephone, presumably intending to call up some goons from the rest of the office, but Ashley is too quick for her, ripping the cord from the wall in a single mighty tug; that grocer's strength has come into its own yet again. Wheeling around, Gertie whips two razor-edged doilies from her handbag and slings them your way, carving the air like angry wasp discs. You barely manage to dodge the first doily. It cuts cleanly through the dangling fox taxidermy and sends Mrs Fox's head tumbling to the ground. The second bladed wheel of place-marking is deflected by the angrily whirring teeth of your chainsaw. Gertie merely smirks at you.
"That vicar will never get his money back! He can't even tell the difference between a chicken and an eagle!" she snarls, accurately, dealing a firm psychological blow to your resolve. But although she's quite right that he's an avian delinquent, and by all rights you should be shunning him rather than helping such a person, he is still your client. If nothing else, you've proved to yourself over the last few days that you're a consummate professional, so you have to see this case through. You convey this message to Ellen by stabbing forwards with the chain blade. Unfortunately, your squat renders motion rather slow and difficult. She leaps to one side, leaving your attack to harmlessly carve her desk in twain, but doesn't anticipate the flying kick from Ashley, sending the ashen-eyed, sewage-hearted monster backwards into the western wall of the office.
Leaving the chainsaw safely running, you let go of the handle and grab Drainpipe instead. Ashley forms up alongside you, adopting a squat of her own, and you both place your hands on what would begrudgingly be called a midriff if one were to anthropomorphise a drainpipe.
"Hey, Gertie?" you call out. She looks you in the eye, defiantly. "C'est ne pas un pipe!"
Her face becomes a mask of decay and despair at your devastating one liner, moments before you and Ashley reprise your patented 'Hers and Hers Battering Drainpipe' technique, the most powerful arrest in your arsenal. Crab-sprinting sideways, as best a squat allows, you charge at full force. You and your wife slam Drainpipe's crowned end hard into the chitinous carapace of Ellen Gertie, forcing her through the paper wall and into what appears to be a lavatory. Overbalancing backwards, the waste of a good cardigan falls bottom first into the toilet bowl, the seat of which has been left up, criminally. With a satisfying thunk, and the pained moan of two buttocks made wet from toilet water, the fight is over. Your arrest is done. You've finally defeated Ellen Gertie.
To celebrate, you discharge five rounds from the revolver, into the sink, lights, hand dryer, floor, and Ellen Gertie's desk. The chainsaw roars approvingly, and Ashley high fives you.
A few minutes later, once you've pulled the toilet seat over Ellen's torso and arms like a safety bar on a roller coaster, you plug her phone back in and call Diane Ingrid Shame for backup.
"Not willing to go down without a fight, Ellen Gertie went down without a fight." you tell Diane Ingrid Shame, humbly.
"It's exactly the sort of contradiction you'd expect from someone of her moral decrepitude." she answers. "I'll be there in a few minutes. Good work, Lucy."
You hang up and think about it. Yes, you did do a good job, didn't you?
>> Forgo epilogue for a description of a bin
Absence. A void, constrained. A gap which expects something, but finds itself with nothing, always wanting.
Or does it?
This cavity can be filled. This cavity is round; not quite cylindrical, thanks to the gentle outward taper from base to aperture, but not a cone by virtue of the flat, inverted peak.
The absence that this cavity represents is, ultimately, a positive thing. It's a place where unwanted, unclean, wasted things go to hide. Temporary though it might be, the waste lingers there for a few hours, days, weeks, before being taken away. The absence tells of the successful purging of that which did not need to be where it was, and of a readiness to accept more. It's a friendly, supportive cavity, sometimes with a lid to hide the waste from those who might not wish to see it, that helps to keep everything clean outside, and everything unclean within.
The bin is a great friend to all who seek to segregate things which need to be kept from things which need not to be kept. Things which, under no circumstances, should be allowed to remain in the cupboards, on the worktops, hanging in wardrobes, or mixed into a pesto pasta meal. Without the noble bin there would be chaos and carnage in the kitchen and beyond. Empty loo rolls would flood the staircase, bread bags would choke the oven and receipts, perhaps for a curly wurly or packet of batteries, would clog the drain until no washing up could be completed again. The whole house would be ruined, or turned into a fountain of filth that spills onto the street and smothers the world.
Gratitude be unto the bins, and in particular a single black bin, which lurks outside a house and keeps its lid firmly on its head. A bin which contains bags more often than not; bags which contain nappies more often than not. The smell is confined, the leaks are contained, and the noses and carpets are thereby left unoffended by anything which might otherwise, if the world were not so gentle, kind or filled with bins, have blighted them.
Bins are good. Cherish your bins.
Thank you for playing.
Barely half a day ago you returned home after picking up the case of the ecclesiastical embezzlement, but already, following some top-dollar sleuthing work at the local library, Ashley has turned up some dynamite evidence that’ll blow the case wide open. Meanwhile you nobly threatened an innocent librarian, and were subsequently given a gun by Police Chief Diane Ingrid Shame, apparently a close friend of yours. Your head still spins from the bombshell of an epiphany that Ashley dropped a few seconds ago.
Gertie and Gertie Enterprises, Ashley has deduced, is nothing but a front for flipping dirty money and creating a false trail for the financial conduct authority. But for all their sophisticated accounting and fiscal gymnastics, they failed to consider one thing: the tenacity of a woman with a drainpipe in a scarf, and tyre iron with lightbulbs tied to it.
Back in Greater Washburn, probably shredding his pillows with a pair of forks or teaching a course on mispronouncing bird names, the vicar waits for the results of your investigation, barely suspecting that the task he set is but the tip of the snooker cue, one which is grasped by the gnarled fingers of Big Money Laundering. He thinks that Ellen Gertie was a mere opportunist, and fails to see the true writhing morass of tentacles, crimes and awful décor choices that lurk behind her presumably grotesque face.
You look towards Ashley, recent consumer of a curly-wurly, crafter of Bruce Springsteen the seat-spring man, and champion of your heart.
“Do you think Diane Ingrid Shame glues a new moustache onto her face every day, or leaves it stuck on overnight?” you ask.
“Yes.” Ashley replies, illuminating the shadowy corners of your ignorance with the light of her mental acuity. “But we can discuss that at greater length in a minute. What we are going to do about this evidence, Luce?” she asks, always willing to poll you for a suggestion, despite her inconceivable genius and excellent driving abilities. “Do you want to take it back to the vicar to let him decide what to do about it, head to Gertie and Gertie Enterprises to catch them in the act, or find Ellen Gertie herself for a dramatic confrontation?”
You ponder this in your classically pensive, measured and rational way, feeling the revolver in your towel shift slightly. Its barrel points comfortingly towards your softer organs, the ones most susceptible to being pierced by a metal projectile. The Thresher of Light’s wires are still wrapped tightly around the trigger, giving it a warm hug. As you think you jiggle your legs, pulling the wire tighter as both weapons shift in opposite directions
1. “We should tell the vicar, and maybe steal his curtains.”
2. “We should head to Gertie and Gertie Enterprises with a can of petrol.”
3. “Ellen’s house will feel the fury of a hatchback un-braked.”
4. Check Inventory and Stats to Buy Time
>> "We should head to Gertie and Gertie Enterprises with a can of petrol."
You're a serious investigator now. You engage in professional things like gathering intel on potential leads and equipping yourself with useful items, and you've not eaten stale biscuits from the floor of a train carriage in over a day. With the weight of this extreme competence hanging over you, and the responsibility with which your powers of deduction furnish you, you know that there's only one sensible course of action.
"We should head to Gertie and Gertie Enterprises with a can of petrol.” you say to Ashley, with your fingers steepled at your mouth to show how serious and solemn you are. The long sleeves of your witch's dress dangle decorously, adding gravitas to the imposing figure you so surely cut.
"A can of petrol?" Ashley asks, looking you dead in the eye with an expectant expression. After some internal deliberation you decide that what she's expecting is an answer, rather than a baby or a bus.
"Yep." you simply confirm, always happy to let Ashley know she hasn't misheard something.
"You wouldn't be planning any arson would you, Lucy? I'm not telling you 'no', necessarily; heaven knows that if these Gerties are as malign as we suspect then they'll need a good burning down. But I'd not like for us to set out with arson as our primary intention."
You feel a little hurt that Ashley leapt to the conclusion that you were planning a fire crime. You could have been innocently taking that petrol to refuel the car in an emergency, or to help out a stranded lawnmower, or to start a perfectly legal accelerated conflagration somewhere unrelated to the case.
"She was right to think it though, wasn't she?" Drainpipe Von Staffen calls from the porch, yet again demonstrating a supernatural attunement to your thoughts and feelings. You feel privileged to call such an astute pipe your friend, and to have a wife who knows you so well.
"I... was planning to go in with an 'arson first, questions second' kind of approach, yes." you admit. "Do you think that this investigation requires something stronger? I can look up how to make a bomb instead if you'd rather." you kindly offer, knowing that improvised explosives could also help with some of the more stubborn ant hills in the garden.
"No, that's OK. I've made enough over the years to knock one up on the fly." Ashley dismisses. "Thank you for being honest with me though. We'll put a can of petrol in the boot of the car so that we have it if we need it."
Pleased with this compromise, and with the implication that you can totally justify burning something down in the near future, you leap to your feet.
"Then there's no time to lose! To Gertie and Gertie Enterprises! Via our garage!" you triply exclaim.
1. Head to your garage and loot petrol can
2. Head to neighbour's garage and loot indiscriminately
3. Fetch your backpack of items, check inv and stats
4. Carb load
>> Head to neighbour's garage and loot indiscriminately
Your veins flow with vigour and enthusiasm for the case, and also with blood that doesn't have quite enough sugar in it for you to function properly. They spur you onwards, to head straight for the outdoors; haven of garages worldwide. Stopping only to pull on your unreasonably practical wellingtons, a task that you've whittled down to an efficient five minutes, you dash out to the porch where Drainpipe Von Staffen is waiting.
"Straight to action, I see! How can I help?" it asks. In lieu of an answer, you snatch your friend up into your arms and burst your way through the front door.
From your vantage point in the front garden you can see your garage, the house of all petrol cans, right where you left it next to the house. As tempting as it is to follow through on your own plan to fetch some petrol, you cannot help your own nature; instincts which have formed the foundation of your mind for time immemorial, which is to say about two days, take over once again as you turn to face your neighbour's garage instead.
"Why should we be wasting our own precious petrol, which might be better used to fuel our chainsaw, all for the benefit of an ungrateful client?" you ask Drainpipe.
"Why, there's no good reason for that at all. We're out here saving the world from Gertie, and we're expected to foot the expenses bill for the pleasure! We oughtn't stand for it, friend. It's exploitative!"
"My thoughts exactly. It's high time that Mr and Mrs Goodwill next door paid their fair share of my costs." you declare, vaulting the low wall that separates your driveways. Drainpipe tears up some of their begonias on the other side as it lands; a fitting punishment for the Goodwills' avarice.
A small, wooden side door stands in your path, acting tough and pretending that it can keep you out, but the door hasn't been made that can withstand your sense of entitlement and purpose. Using Drainpipe as a makeshift ram you crash it's crowned head into the aged wooden panel, easily cracking a way through. With a few follow-up kicks the bulk of the door falls away from the frame.
"It was awfully careless of the Goodwills to leave their garage open like this." you say to Drainpipe, your voice full of neighbourly concern. "Anyone could get in. We'd better check that everything's alright."
Inviting yourself in, you climb through the portal of shattered wood and cast an appraising eye around the garage. It's dark inside, probably a deliberate move by the spiteful and devil-may-care Goodwills to make your life even harder, but with some simple straining of the eyes you manage to see what's around.
Just as suspected, the Goodwills are harbouring years worth of selfishly hoarded treasure. Wherever you look you see tools, equipment and sentimental items that could have helped in countless cases. The nerve of these people not to hand them over to you, and their arrogance in leaving only a smashed up door in the way, are baffling to you. In the centre of the garage is a car underneath some kind of tarpaulin cover.
"Looks like nothing has been taken." Drainpipe assesses. "In fact, it's so full that I'm struggling to picture what it would look like if someone had snuck in here to steal things."
"Don't worry, Drainpipe. I'll show you the kind of thing I was worried about, so that you can spot it in future." you kindly offer.
Resting Drainpipe in an observation position beside the door, you do your best impression of a burglar, at no benefit to yourself.
"We've already cased the joint, so now we need to get a storage solution for our illicit gains." you explain. With no time to deliberate, you tear the tarpaulin away from the car as a makeshift sack. It sounds like a wing mirror or two come away in the process, but burglars would never care about that so neither do you.
"Now we grab everything of value that we can see." you continue. It would be quite out of character for you to take things that don't belong to you, of course, but Drainpipe needs this education and you're duty bound to provide it.
It costs you several bumps to the head, knees and elbows, on account of the garage being dangerously dark, but eventually your wild hands manage to fill your tarp bag. With no space left to fill, except the enormous emotional void that your actions imply to exist, you drag a pile of demonstrative loot back through the broken doorway.
"Oh, I almost forgot, there's normally some criminal damage too. Like this." you add, taking a brick from your loot and heave it through the unveiled car's windscreen. It sounds suitably expensive.
"A wonderful lesson, friend!" cries Drainpipe, who sounds as out of breath as you are from all the looting.
You hop back over the wall to take stock of your gains, and Ashley emerges from your own garage with a can of petrol.
Items gained:
Claw hammer
Fox taxidermy
Plastic bag of miscellanous pills
Electric chainsaw
Nails (22)
Oil
Hard hat
Wing mirror
Photo albums
Accordion
£6000 in unmarked notes
Belt sander
- Stash loot in car, offer to drive
- Fill hard hat with oil and cash
- Warn Ashley about garage burglaries
- Stash loot in car, ask Ashley to drive
>> Stash loot in car, ask Ashley to drive
These questions might reasonably pertain to where the goods came from, why they were misappropriated, and whether or not you intend to return them at any point. Clearly, that line of questioning will do nothing to progress the case, and is therefore a waste of precious time. Having spent the last few days in such unbroken concentration on the case, focusing every shred of your attention on only the most critical investigative tasks, you feel that such distractions cannot be countenanced.
For a moment you consider filling the hard hat with oil and cash as a makeshift flammable device, one which might be returned at speed to the neighbour's garage to put to bed any questions about your goods, but you decide against it. The best thing to do is act natural, get the equipment in the car, and ask Ashley to get you towards your destination.
"Is the car unlocked, Ash?" you ask, your voice a mask of perfect innocence.
"No, not yet. One sec." she replies, fishing around in her inventory for the key. You hope that it is less choked with emergency supplies than yours.
A flashing of indicators informs you of your car's newfound accessibility. Doing no favours for the modest lawn of your front garden, your tarp carves a path towards the street and leaves a muddy trail on the pavement. You shake your head at the deplorable state of street cleaning around here, and resolve to default on your next few council tax payments. You've barely got the boot of the car open when your heart, for the first time ever, sinks a little at the sound of Ashley's voice.
"What do you have there, Luce?" she asks.
"Just a few supplies I thought we might need. There might be some evidence of Gertie and Gertie's wrongdoing in here, so we'd be remiss to leave without it." you reply, thinking on your feet and feeling wily as a fox. You try to look Ashley in the eye, to really sell the cover story, but her own gaze is tracing the line of mud and carnage back to the Goodwills' garage.
"So I see." she says, softly. "It was very kind of the Goodwills to let you borrow those things, especially after their month long hunger strike for awareness of climate change. To think that they managed to keep up their regular volunteering at the hospital, and their litter-picking walks, while having nothing more than room temperature water to sustain them, is absolutely incredible. We really must return that book on impulse control they lent us."
You remember that book vividly. It had an enormously positive impact on your life. In particular, you recall how entertaining it was to watch it spin in the toilet bowl before finally succumbing to the power of the flush, which in turn would make honouring Ashley's desire to return it rather challenging.
"Yes." you say, conveying all relevant information succinctly. "Anyway, shall we get going? You can drive if you like." you continue, heaving the tarpaulin into the vehicle. You hear the unmistakably sound of a bottle of antifreeze splitting beneath the weight of a chainsaw, but pay it no mind as you close the boot lid again.
"Yeah, I can drive." Ashley says, brightly. "I suppose it's for the best that you let steady old me stick behind the wheel; while we might be in a hurry, we wouldn't want to risk an accident with the way you race about." You can't deny that, of the pair of you, Ashley's driving is the most relaxing and controlled. It means you get to spend more time together each journey though, so you've never minded.
In your now practiced way, you once again thread Drainpipe Von Staffen through the window of the rear doors, its own head ready to headbutt any agents of the elderly woman who might be lurking on the streets. Steadfastly refusing to check the road for traffic, you step out to the passenger door and open it wide. An inconsiderate driver mounts the kerb on the opposite side of the street, apparently labouring under the delusion that sounding their hooter and swearing at you will make their violent swerving sufficiently safe for suburban travel.
After her own trip to the boot with the petrol can, Ashley climbs into the driver's seat and starts the engine.
"Here we go again!" she says happily, as she slams the car into first, keeps her eyes well off her mirrors, and wheel spins carefully into motion.
- Attempt boarding manoeuvre on another car
- Remove car radio to reduce weight
- Start rousing game of 'sudden handbrake'
- Surf on roof
>> Surf on Roof
Houses whip past your window, as you find yourself yet again pressed hard into the passenger seat of your car. It's as if the world outside is as desperate to flee Gertie and Gertie Enterprises as you are to reach it; perhaps the universe can feel the righteous weight of investigative justice that you're wielding and wishes to clear the way.
In the driver's seat, Ashley has made the sage decision to close her eyes and get a little relaxation in before the big confrontation. Cruising as you are at a steady fifty through a school zone, you are once again blown away by her natural drivership and intuitive vehicle control. Other vehicles honk their praise as you tear past, and some even mount the pavement in deference. A few such acolytes slam into front garden walls or lampposts, which you find to be rather reckless of them.
Seeing the good work that Ashley is doing, you conclude that you too have a duty to prepare. But how best would you do that?
You ponder your circumstances as you hear a loud crunch from the undercarriage of the car, and the whole thing lurches upwards. You spare a look out of the window and see that Ashley has expertly ramped up the side of a roundabout, not wasting precious time or wearing down the road surface by going all the way around, instead taking the direct line. What a visionary. It inspires you to think all the more clearly about the events to come.
You're heading into a mystery showdown; two plucky private investigators, and length of Drainpipe, versus a multinational corporation dedicated to evil. What you'll need most of all isn't the element of surprise, or a plan, or to know what you're carrying, or even to know what your abilities are; what you need is adrenaline. The ability to make snap decisions and take spontaneous action will see you through any crisis. But how will you achieve such a heightened state when Ashley's driving makes you feel so safe and calm? No part of your brain could possibly feel excited when you are in such secure hands.
The car leans hard onto two wheels as Ashley makes a u-turn across the dual carriageway, despite the naysaying of a road sign that needlessly prohibits such a good sense manoeuvre.
As your head crashes into the window, you note a pigeon sitting atop a bollard. The glass might well have given you a concussion, but the pigeon has given you a great idea.
"I'll be back in a moment, Ash. Just getting ready." you say.
"Got it!" she replies, apparently a little distracted by the amount of swerving she's been forced into. It seems that some rogue gardener has planted a row of veteran chestnut trees along the roadway.
Opening the door of a moving vehicle under such circumstances would be dangerous, of course, so you safely roll the window down and lean your torso immediately through. Once again, your decision not to wear a seat belt pays off, saving you many seconds of fiddling time. You resolve to cut it off entirely when you get to Gertie and Gertie; Ashley would never crash, and to imply she might by wearing a belt is just insulting.
The wind assails you as you flop from the open window. It pulls at your hair and your witches dress, but the latter is held firmly in place by your towel. Pawing at the roof of the car, facing up to the sky, you find it hard to get purchase on the smooth, painted metal and curse that you are not a sucker-footed gecko.
"Can I lend you a head?" Laughs Drainpipe, poking out of the rear window behind you.
"You're a genius!" you tell your cylindrical companion, grasping the space where its face would be with one hand and levering yourself upwards. It turns out that whoever designed this car made the windows woefully inadequate in terms of size; your towel clad torso barely fits out, and you feel the frame pushing the barrel of the revolver into your ribs again.
With a lot of levering and wiggling, and some rousing near misses, you manage to get your whole body free of the interior. One leg rests on Drainpipe, one on the window frame, and both arms are on the roof. A final Heroic effort springs you onto the thin, aluminium roof of the hatchback, and you feel it bowing reverently beneath your weight.
From prone, to squat, to standing you rise, feeling the air ripping at your skin as the car wobbles beneath you. Ashley is clearly on board with the adrenaline angle, and has increased the violence of her weaving from 'reasonable' to 'thrilling'.
"Great work, Ash!" You shout, as you duck a low bough of chestnut. You are far from stable, lurching whole bodied from front to back in a desperate attempt to keep your feet. Below you the tarmac and pavement whip by, and the car bounces hard every time Ashley is forced to mount and dismount the confusingly positioned kerb.
- See if you can stamp a sunroof into the car
- Sit on bonnet
- Patiently wait for journey to end
- Use revolver as toothpick
>> See if you can stamp a sunroof into the car
In recent memory you've utilised several modes of transport, all with great success. In the beginning there were your original shoes, now long lost in the depths of the supermarket. One likely still remains where it fell, among the dairy at the battle of yoghurt slip, while the other is in a gentleman's shepherd's pie. Maybe the pie and the shoe have been eaten already. Maybe the shoe was served as a side dish, or kept as leftovers. The likelihood is that you'll never know.
After your shoes were lost to you, by no fault of your own, you tried the snake method, but that led to you becoming tired and even more covered in gore from your assault on the bakery. Pumpkin feet came and went, there were a couple of stowaway journeys on the train, you've had a number of enjoyable, serene drives with Ashley, but the best way to travel, on balance, has to be your unreasonably practical wellingtons.
Just as you'd expect from a master craftsperson like yourself, the springs you roughly jammed into the soles have held fast, and moving like a kangaroo has become second nature to you. It doesn't even matter that they're both lefts anymore; either the rubber or your ankle have yielded enough to make it work. They really are the best decision you ever made.
Such is the train of thought passing through your mind as you wobble like a blancmange in an earthquake atop your car. What's so nice about your current circumstance, other than the demonstration of great practicality from your wellies, is the fact that you get to enjoy both the warmth of the summer sunshine and the cooling effect of the breeze. It's one of those simple treats that everyone should be allowed to sample. Even Drainpipe Von Staffen, renowned workaholic, is allowing its head to have a taste of the breeze.
Your stomach drops out of all of a sudden as the car crashes through a hedgerow, and you realise what a terribly indefensible action you've taken; Ashley is stuck inside the vehicle with neither sun nor breeze to enjoy. Here you are, selfishly living the high life of car surfing, while she's diligently finding shortcuts to get you to Gertie and Gertie Enterprises on time. It's shameful, really, that she's being denied these pleasures too.
Thankfully, you're a genius engineer at heart. You know there's no problem that can't be fixed with the right tools, and the right tools are already on your feet.
Conventional wisdom, the remit of cowards and thinkers, would dictate that when surfing on a car at around twice the speed limit, standing on one leg is risky. It would demand that both feet are kept in contact at all times, and preferably a hand or two gets involved as well. You know far better than that.
Raising one leg high into the air, you aim the pointy end of your spring at the centre of the roof; prime position for a fashionable, resale value doubling sunroof. The next moment sees your foot slamming down, an almighty bang and crunch of bodywork combining with the metallic scraping of spring on paintwork. Regrettably, you remember too late what happens when you compress a spring.
If Ashley has cried out with any gratitude at your modification attempts then you can't hear it, deafened as you are by the rushing air, and distracted as you are by your stamping leg flying upwards. In a rare flash of introspection, you fear that you may have made the wellingtons too practical for this course of action. The flash is replaced by a blur as your leg's momentum topples you backwards, and your bottom crashes onto the edge of the roof, while Ashley takes a tight corner that only she could see.
Towel slides against dress and dress slides against roof. Somehow, despite your expert calculation, you are at risk of falling from the vehicle.
- Fire revolver to steady yourself
- Relax and let yourself fall
- Reach out to Drainpipe for help
- Stab secateurs into roof for purchase
>> Stab secateurs into roof for purchase
Frightfully embarrassingly, you seem to have found yourself gravitationally inconvenienced. Any normal civilian could be forgiven for winding up in such a position; after all, the disgusting morass of peasants and agents of the elderly woman around you are not equipped with unreasonably practical wellingtons, nor do they command the help of Drainpipe Von Staffen or Ashley. It would be a miracle if any of them could manage to get onto the roof of a calmly driven car at all, let alone try to stamp a hole in it.
For you, however, things are different. A veteran of many high profile cases, including the case of Public Ainsley, Secret Drainpipe, you should know better than to lose your balance or fail to adhere to a roof. As you careen towards the point of no return, which takes bloody ages to get back from, your mind reels that this might be what finally delivers you to calamity on the tarmac. If you can sleep in a church toilet, break into a safe, and indulge in an early morning secateur frenzy, all with half a train carriage's worth of springs in your pockets, then to be brought low by something as banal as roof-walking gone wrong is shameful.
A light switches on in your brain. Secateurs can snatch victory from the jaws of any defeat, much like they snatch buds and twigs from bushes in their own jaws. You recall with perfect clarity how your last pair of secateurs easily punched a hole in the vicar's bible; it can't be any different to jam them into a hatchback's bodywork.
Pursuing this example of perfectly sound logic, you hurriedly rummage through your towel, feeling the fabric of both the drying implement and the dress forced over it pull tight. It's a snug fit at the best of times, and the quantity of treasure & weaponry within the folds does nothing to make navigability any easier. With an alacrity that really spits in the face of modern backpack designers, you manage to get a hold of the secateurs, pull them free, and deliver an almighty downward stab into the roof.
There's a horrifying puncturing sound, like someone rupturing a tin of beans using a colleague's collarbone, but the spike holds fast. You feel your shoulder jerk painfully as your whole bodyweight and all of its momentum are arrested by the gardening tool. You are no longer sliding towards the precipice, but Ashley's slalom below is causing you to pivot like a pendulum, backwards and forwards across the roof. If this goes on for too much longer then you fear that your dress might get ruffled, or you'll pick up a friction burn on your chin.
You wonder to yourself how Ashley has reacted to seeing a blade stab through the roof of the car. Last time anything like that happened it'd been a real nightmare with the insurance company, so presumably it won't be a popular happenstance. Then again, the last time you had a near miss with a moving vehicle, namely the time you cut your way onto the train tracks with a ceremonial dagger, Ashley had been rather displeased, forcing you to promise that you wouldn't do something so dangerous again. As you trail from the car like a kite in a strong wind, holding on by one hand and a half-inch of gardening tool only, you feel the warm sensation of a promise ably kept.
- Attempt to finish the sunroof using secateurs
- Hold on, and enjoy the rest of the ride
- Attempt to swing excitingly through the rear windscreen
- Press torso into roof to check inventory and stats
>> Press torso into roof to check inventory and stats
It has been alleged, by many stock photos with text poorly photoshopped on top, that it's how you react in times of trouble that really define you as a person. Will you let animal instinct take over and panic? Will you lash out at those around you? Or will you keep your head, stay calm, and exercise some good old-fashioned sense? Obviously, based on your track record, only the most astute decisions will be made.
As you flail upon the roof, gripping with all your might onto the handles of your secateurs while your legs flap like a distressed flag in a hurricane, you realise that it's been a long time since you really took stock of your possessions. They could have slipped down, or disappeared into, anywhere inside your towel, and you won't want to waste time at Gertie and Gertie Enterprises by performing your own stock take. It occurs to you that a stock take of their inventory would serve as great evidence for your case, but that's not important now. The only thing that matters is checking what you've got, and how you feel.
Determined with your new course of action, you take one hand off the secateurs, aiming to use it to check your towel. However, this only makes it more difficult to check your inventory, on account of the increased impact of turbulence on your already ragdolled body. You let out a disappointed sigh, irritated by your body's treacherous submission to fluid dynamics, and place your hand back on the gardening tool. It feels like it's slicing further through the roof, but that's a future problem for a Lucy who knows what she's about.
Unable to use your hands, you settle for pushing your torso hard into the roof, squirming and shuffling to create a sensory picture of what lurks inside your clothing. You find:
Inventory:
MOT Certificates
Tourist Leaflets
Burned-out Bulbs (4)
£4.56
Road Map
The Thresher of Light
Secateurs (equipped)
Revolver
Rather pleased with your detective skills, especially in being able to delineate leaflets, a map, and an MOT certificate by nothing more than how much of a papercut they feel like they might give you, you reflect on what kind of a person finds themselves in your position.
Stats:
Charisma – 11
Self-confidence – 16
Sass – 13
Erudition – 15
Insolubility – 13
Contrition - 8
Serendipity – 11
Serenity – 9
Verisimilitude -11
Duplicity – 15
What a hero!
- Roof surf the rest of the journey with renewed confidence [Self-confidence check]
- Re-enter via the open passenger window and behave yourself [Erudition check]
- Relax for the remainder of the journey, holding onto secateurs [Serenity check]
- Ask Drainpipe Von Staffen for assistance [Charisma check]
>> Roof surf the rest of the journey with renewed confidence
Your brief flash of introspection is a concession to humility that you can't abide for long. Your whole being yearns for action, to make something happen, to make your mark on history as well as several smaller, more tangible marks on the bodywork of your car.
No more will you flap limply behind a pair of secateurs, buffeted by the rushing air and fighting to keep your place. The time has come to rise up, to make good on your previous intentions, and to roof surf like you've never roof surfed before. Such an assertion is completely correct; you've never roof surfed before this day, but you're sure it's an inherent skill that you must possess. Having learned so much about yourself and what's crammed into your towel, nothing could hope to stand in the way of achieving your dreams.
With a herculean effort you drag your body fully back onto the roof, and push up onto your hands and knees. Still gripping the secateurs for support, you get one spring-soled wellington onto the roof, and then the other, bouncing and bobbing with the wild reverberations of a car that's making great headway along a public footpath. As pristine hedgerows whip past on either side, being pruned by the car that's wider than the space between them, you relax your hands and push up to standing, ready to surf all the way to Gertie and Gertie Enterprises.
[Self-confidence check - Success]
The sounds of the world begin to decrease in volume. They fade like any doubts you could possibly have in your plans. Spring, rubber, leg, dress and towel act as one glorious chimera of high-fashion and stolen goods, your knees absorbing the sway of the vehicle while the springs deal with any vertical oscillations. There are a couple of near misses with low-hanging branches and a lady riding a horse, but those distractions cannot hope to penetrate the euphoric focus you've managed to achieve. You are like a professional athlete out at sea, cresting the peak of a mighty water swell, except that you're preparing to probably commit several crimes in the name of justice.
In what seems like no time at all, or possibly a couple of weeks depending on who you ask, you snap out of your travel-fugue state as Ashley performs an emergency stop in the car park of Gertie and Gertie Enterprises. Neatly you're flung forwards, unable to arrest your own momentum, and land back-first on the bonnet with a confident crunch.
You give Ashley a 'We're here, then' thumbs-up.
- Huddle with the team to agree on the plan
- Storm the front door, thresh the reception desk
- Look for a side entrance under an assumed identity
- Fetch garage-treasure from boot and improvise equipment
>> Huddle with the team to agree on the plan
Falling onto the bonnet of the car brings your journey to an abrupt crescendo. With the engine now turned off, you lie in relative silence of a world without rushing air, a roaring engine, or the thumping of your own pulse in your ears. Slowly, the exertion of your chosen method of travel catches up with you, and you become aware of a burning and aching in your arms, back and legs. Thankfully, engine heat rising up from the bonnet is doing some work towards soothing those pains.
"You alright there, Luce? Have a good surf?" Ashley asks, leaning her head out of the driver's side window.
"Yup." you reply, playing it cool. "I started work on that sunroof we didn't talk about as well; we can finish it up once the case is done."
"Great! You really made the most of the journey time. Thank you for always being so considerate, my love."
With a new warmth filling you from the inside, you have a go at moving. Although it's uncomfortable and slightly awkward, you manage to get some lift and slide down the bonnet, onto the tarmac. Your towel pads your landing.
Ahead of you, looming like a monolith of concrete, hatred, doily-enabling, and improper varnishing disciple, probably, is Gertie and Gertie enterprises. It is the fortress of viral insipidity that has set you on a path of righteousness, the bastion of guttural bile that turned a vicar into a bird-confusing, thieves' tool owning marauder of rudeness. It will be your greatest triumph to take them down.
You have a lot of experience with triumphs, as evidenced by your long record of great successes, but your partners might need some encouragement. If they feel like they're involved in the decision making then they'll be able to keep up with your lightning fast changes of heart and rapid-fire reactionary choices.
"We should agree on a plan." you say, rising to your feet. "Let's huddle."
"Good idea. I'll get Drainpipe Von Staffen." agrees Ashley, threading your companion out of the window and round to your central operations room at the front of the car.
"Right, now I suspect you'll be wondering why I've gathered you here, today." you start, as all good meetings should.
"No. I know exactly why we're here." replies Ashley, always on the ball.
"Yes." answers Drainpipe, never one to contradict you.
"Good. This variety of perspectives bodes well, and we shouldn't change it." you assess, pleased at your diverse team composition. You point to the crater you left in the bonnet. "This enormous dent represents Gertie and Gertie Enterprises. These three scratches from someone's hedge can be us, and those holes from the chisel incident last year can be Ellen Gertie and her nefarious agents."
You can tell from the look on Ashley's face, and the look on Drainpipe's space where a face would be if it wasn't a drainpipe, that they're fully immersed in your theatre of the mind.
"We need to initiate a dual-pronged attack. The first prong will be you, Ashley. You'll enter the building first as Sir Chrimmington Colobario, a local greengrocer with a dark past and nothing to lose. You want to engage Gertie and Gertie's services as an intermediary between you and your customers, so that you don't have to touch the disgusting public at any point of manning your market stall. With the front desk distracted, Drainpipe and I will then enter using our patented Public Ainsley, Secret Drainpipe technique."
"You left your newspaper at home in your backpack, electing that you don't need any of the tools you carefully gathered over two long seasons of investigating." Ashley points out, throwing a spanner in the works of your otherwise perfect plan.
"Butts. You're right. What do we have instead..." you ponder. Drainpipe's disguise is still intact, on account of it never taking the thing off. But you are so obviously the famous and powerful towel-witch investigator Lucy that you'll require a real doozy of a costume. "I've got it!" you cry, rushing around to the boot of the car.
Ashley and Drainpipe watch in patient awe as you use your expert crafting skills in real time. By combining the claw hammer, nails, hard hat and fox taxidermy, you create a flawless hat-and-veil system, whereby the taxidermy hangs in front of your face, disguising you completely.
"Behold! Public Mrs Fox, Secret Drainpipe!" you cackle, rationally.
"But where did Lucy go? How did you get here, Mrs Fox?!" Ashley asks in some alarm. The risk of you being taken by one of Ellen Gertie's agents is, of course, weighing on her mind.
"It's still me really, Ash." you say, removing the hat. "But that proves how great this disguise is. We'll head in after you, and start taking the elevator up. Before it leaves we'll call you over 'for a chat' and then bundle you in too. We'll be in that office and rummaging through their stuff in no time."
"It's perfect. No notes." Ashley surmises, before slipping into character flawlessly. "Apples and pears, ten pounds via my associate!" she cries.
You crack your knuckles, pick up Mrs Fox's trademark chainsaw, and start walking behind your wife.
- Stick with the plan as discussed
- Improvise recklessly, but broadly follow plan
- Abandon plan, look for side entrance
- Start chainsaw, otherwise stick with plan
>> Stick with the plan as discussed
The weight of a chainsaw in your hands feels predictably comforting as you watch Ashley saunter, grocer-like, into the main entrance of Gertie and Gertie Enterprises. It's a marvel to watch her keen, insightful mind in action as she chooses to open the door before heading through, saving herself a sore head, a lot of broken glass, and a lot more attention than any of you need.
"Are you ready Drainpipe? We need to be more inconspicuous now than we've ever been before." You warn you companion, who has really been making some quite outlandish moves recently.
"Ready as can be, friend." Replies the pipe, it's accent so thick, consistent and convincing that you feel transported to generic continental Europe with every word. "I shall blend into the shadows as only a Drainpipe can; we lurk at every corner, on every building, silently siphoning away precious rainwater from the gutters of a nation with nary a glance from the public. We are experts at operating in plain sight. We were born for subterfuge and we will die for espionage."
"No need to die today, old buddy. You and 'Mrs Fox' have an important meeting." You say with a wink. Estimating that you've waited long enough for Ashley to strike up a conversation, you begin your own approach of the front doors, Drainpipe in arms.
Following Ashley's lead you open the door before progressing through. Unveiled before you is the wide, high ceilinged, marble edifice of Gertie and Gertie Enterprises, an atrium fit for a national Bank or international laundrette stretching away from you in every direction except down. To your left is the reception desk, where Ashley is standing. Behind it is a middle aged gentleman in a porter's cap and pinstriped overalls. To your right is the gleaming, steel door to the lift, and a plain pine doorway to the stairs. You scan for a third, loo-like doorway but draw a blank. You make a mental note that you might have to go in the corner if it comes to it.
Most impressive is the back wall. Stretching upwards is a single slab of granite, three storeys high and two storeys wide. Onto its face the likeness and titles of Carradan Gertie and Excelsior Jones-Smith-Johnson-Johnstone-Miller-Smith-Jones-O’Daniels-Walker-Smith-Gertie, in a grim tableaux at a local pizzeria. Carradan is shaking hands with a waiter, while Excelsior stuffs a whole pizza into his back pocket and pours salt on another table. Quite why this is the scene, real or fictitious, that they have chosen to immortalise and present to the public is a mystery to you. Thankfully, solving mysteries is your business.
"Wow. This is Ritzy." You utter, softly. Mrs Fox, famed socialite, would never be taken aback by a space so cramped and tacky by comparison to her own home, so subtly is required to keep up the facade.
"That it is, colleague. It's symptomatic of their flagrant disregard for money." Assesses Drainpipe.
"Yes, that's right- THE Sir Chrimmington Colobario, of grocery fame..." You hear Ashley say, nailing down that cover story. It reminds you of the plan, to which you are determined to maintain an uncharacteristic adherence. Tempting as it is to start the chainsaw, and as much as you want to start letting the creative juices flow, you keep yourself on track. This case could make or further make your career; there's no breaking such a strong reputation as yours under any circumstances.
With the confidence of a woman twice your age, wrapped in one fewer towel, wearing a much nicer dress and not lugging an immaculately disguised length of Drainpipe, you stride on a purposeful trajectory towards the lifts.
"...that's right, I need your services as an intermediary. The public are so wretched and filthy; I want nothing to do with them..."
Underfoot the tiles are polished to a mirror shown, and the springs punctured into your wellies clatter and scrape their way noisily across. You try to convince yourself that it's just like the dignified heel-toe clicking of a stiletto, but the conviction just isn't there.
"...so as long as someone can scream about apples and pears, and their relative price per unit weight using a distributed software as a service model then I think we're able to work together regardless..."
Drainpipe slips in your hands. Not enough to be dropped, but plenty to touch the ground with a hollow clang. The receptionist looks over.
"Excuse me?! Sir and Madam? Can I help you?" He calls over.
Thinking quickly, which is an improvement on your general tendency not to think at all, you spin on your heel like a well-to-do vulpine socialite, fixing the receptionist with a 'Well, what is it?' kind of look from the dangling taxidermy.
"Oh! Begging your pardon, Mrs Fox. I didn't recognise you with that long, mysterious member of some kind of charred royalty." The receptionist blusters, rightfully embarrassed, when they are taken in by your disguise and Drainpipe's singed spring crown. "You have a nice day now."
You give the receptionist a thumbs up, and continue your walk to the lift, heart pounding.
"My word, but your disguise making skills are top drawer." Compliments Drainpipe.
At the lift, you press the door open button and the doors immediately slide back. There's no-one else inside.
"Excuse me, Sir Chrimmington Colobario! Could you attend me for a chat?"
You see the receptionist shooing Ashley in your direction. She has a business card in her hand.
"Great work, Ash." You whisper as she reaches you
"You too, team." She replies. "Based on the documents we found, the main office will be on the tenth floor."
Master of disguise: +1 duplicity
Famous Vulpine Socialite: +1 Charisma, +1 Self-confidence, -1 Verisimilitude
- Press button for 10th floor
- Press all buttons
- Use hammer to hack the control panel
- Ask Ashley why birds never fly upside down
>> Press button for 10th floor
No sooner has Ashley relayed the location of the main office than your finger darts out like a harpoon in the hands of a jittery deck-hand. Expertly aimed from years of learning fine motor control, the end of the finger that favours utility over connection makes firm contact with the button for the 10th floor. It lights up under your touch, and a pleasing 'bing' rings out from speakers unseen. Slowly the doors begin to slide closed, as do the clouds of doubt inside your mind.
You look at your finger, still extended and still pressing down the button, and wonder if you can even recognise yourself anymore. Sure, you're wearing the towel that you and Ashley bought when you moved in together, and yes, you've got the permanently bruised collarbone of a regular passenger of your wife, but these actions... Are they really you?
There wasn't even hesitation for thought before you acted; you immediately pressed the correct button sensibly, progressing your investigation in the most efficient way possible. You didn't try to press anything else, chainsaw a hole in the ceiling, ask Ashley a perfectly pertinent question, or even squat. Intolerable as it is, you feel that you could stand it, or brush it off, if you hadn't also stuck with the plan immediately prior. No improvisation, no going off-script, no spontaneous acts of genius; no Lucy, a voice in your head adds.
The fearful hypothetical reality seeps in from the sides of your vision. It feels as if a thick, sticky sludge of banality is leaking from the elevator's control panel and pumping itself into your veins. Is this Ellen Gertie's greatest weapon? Her most despicable plan? Her hail Mary? Has she made her own trail so fraught with opportunities to behave yourself that it strips you of your greatest investigative weapon; your sense of self?
The thought niggles at your mind for the whole elevator ride, which is upwards of twelve seconds and less than fourteen seconds. The doors open, and a well-lit corridor extends away from you. But who is looking down it, you ask yourself.
"You are, Lucy. " Drainpipe replies, in its most devastatingly impressive show of empathy yet. "You didn't allow me to be lost in the train station all those hours ago, and I won't let you be lost here and now. You're Lucy, even when you refuse to obey your wiser instincts to widen the investigation via theft, assault and inanity."
Drainpipe's words send a wave of relief over you. You might be able to doubt yourself, but Drainpipe knows you far too well to do so as well.
Drainpipe Von Saviour: No self-confidence loss
Behaved yourself: -1 Sass
- Charge headlong towards biggest-looking office
- Charge backlong towards watercooler
- Ask Ashley for a piggyback
- Start chainsaw and test it on the carpet
>> Ask Ashley for a piggyback
Drainpipe Von Staffen's words ring in your ears. It's as if they came from your own mouth and reverberated through your jaw. It was right; you're Lucy and you're not going to let the magnitude of this case or the vicissitudes of your attitude change how you approach it.
"Sir Chrimmington?" you start, committing heavily to the watertight aliases you've established, "would you please bear me down these corridors upon your back, as if you were a piggy of the type who might eat the cast-offs from your establishment?" It transpires that Mrs Fox has a shrill yet smoky voice, and over-pronounces all of her vowels. She's always getting hit in the face by the wooden plinth of a taxidermy, which puts her off her stride a bit.
"Wha-? Er, oh, you want a piggyback, love?" Sir Chrimmington replies, giving you Ashley's 'Just checking I heard you right' look.
"Yes, please. I wouldn't like for my high society feet to touch these peasant floors."
"Even though they already did downstairs?" asks the attentive grocer. You think for a moment.
"Yes."
"Alright then! Hop up!"
Using Drainpipe Von Staffen for support, physically now as well as emotionally, and still holding a chainsaw in one hand, you bounce on your springy wellingtons and propel yourself onto the back of the heavily disguised Ashley. She lets out a little grunt of exertion as you and your toolbox of towel-ensconced items land on her back, and you feel the revolver dig reassuringly into your diaphragm, just as Mrs Fox would like it.
"Onwards, my grocer! To our definitely scheduled meeting in the largest, emptiest office of a CEO or similar." you declare, quietly enough not to be overheard through the walls, but with sufficient volume to fool any hidden microphones into believing this was a legitimate piggyback.
Not one who needs to be told twice, Ashley launches into a full sprint, or as much of a sprint as she can with you on her back and a drainpipe dragging along behind her. The venerable Von Staffen catches its head section on the top of the lift door with a bold, regal twang, providing a resonant soundbed for the thumping footsteps of a dashing grocer. To either side of you are closed pine doors with small brass plaques, but you're moving too quickly to read them. It seems that Sir Chrimmington has a destination in their sights, and they're determined to get you there without delay.
Ahead of you loom a pair of finely polished marble double doors. Engraved on the left door is 'Carradan' and on the other is 'Excelsior'. As graffiti goes an engraving is certainly much classier than spray-paint, but doing it to one's own door feels foolish. These CEOs, one real and one fake, will certainly run this shell corporation into the ground unless you stop them. Or once you stop them. You'll accept it either way.
Still heading quickly towards the marble doors you brace yourself on your wife's back, ready for impact.
It's around this time that you discover the quality of modern fake marble. From a distance it had looked terribly convincing, and even up close it was a credible effigy of hard stone. So taken in was Ashley that she really put her whole shoulder into barging the doors open. She also, in a more literal sense, put her whole body and yours into the hollow shell of batten and paper, and loses a good degree of her balance in the process. You both tumble through, feeling thin wood splinter and thinner paper tear as you hit the old, sunken carpet of the CEO's office.
1. Style it out
2. Teach remaining door a lesson using chainsaw
3. Ask Ashley if she's OK
4. Assume you're injured, but loot office anyway
>> Ask Ashley if she's OK
"Are you OK, Ashley?" you ask, from your position of relative control underneath the desk. You're definitely upside down, and your feet are rested on the seat of the chair, but you feel like this better than many of the chainsaw-based alternatives.
"Er..." she thinks out loud. You follow the sound of her voice to see your wife, in disguise as a prominent grocer, lying in a pile of wood and paper. "...what do you mean, Mrs Fox? Have you banged your head a bit and accidentally mispronounced Sir Chrimmington as 'Ashely'?"
Ashley's commitment to the character is exemplary, even after a severe de-dooring incident.
"Apologies, Sir Chrimmington. Are you alright?"
"Yes, I think so, Mrs Fox. Nothing that the sale of a half-dozen kilos of finest Glaswegian oranges couldn't fix, just as long as that sale goes through an intermediary." exposits 'Sir Chrimmington'.
"Great, then let's extract ourselves from this door rubble that someone has carelessly left scattered around the office and find someone with whom to enquire within." you say, images of opening a Gertie's chest so that you can shout a question inside flickering in front of your mind's eye. It's a bit grim.
"I'm also fine, by the way." says Drainpipe. You look over to the sound of Drainpipe's voice, which almost sounds like it comes from exactly your position. It's expertly balanced on a large indoor flowerpot, having disarmed by bifurcation the pot's previous leafy owner. Petals litter the floor around it.
"That's a great relief, mysterious pipe noble." you reply, kicking the desk chair hard away from yourself to create an exfiltration route. You hear the wheels eventually hit the skirting boards at the opposite end of the room, and then the heavy seat-back crack the window into which it pivots.
With severe discomfort from your overstuffed towel, awkwardness from the chainsaw you refuse to release, and obstructed vision from the dangling fox taxidermy, you make your way to your feet. The office in which you find yourself is a real mess of broken doors, shredded plants, broken windows, and scattered grocers. It's just the sort of depravity you should have expected from any relative of Ellen Gertie.
"Oh, Mrs Fox! I wasn't expecting you today." cries a voice from the corner of the room. It doesn't sound like the voice of either a grocer or a drainpipe, which surprises you. You look over to see an elderly woman, not THE Elderly Woman, looking over at you. She's wearing a doily on each shoulder, diamante pumps, and a sensible olive skirt.
"And yet here I am! As cunning and sly as a fox, with just as much interest in rummaging through your bins. Mrs Ellen Gertie, I presume." you answer, in a manner which you firmly believe to be debonair.
"Well... Yes. We've met several times before. Did you really hit your head like your friend, Sir Chrimmington was it, presumed?" replies Ellen Gertie.
The confirmation twists in your stomach. The hag herself, in the flesh, stands before you. She threw the first stone when she threw you through that doorway a moment ago and then thrust Drainpipe Von Staffen into a plant pot.
- Violence
- Call Diane Ingrid Shame for backup
- Stay in character and surreptitiously gather intel
- Ask Ellen Gertie to represent Sir Chrimmington's grocery
>> Stay in character and surreptitiously gather intel
Standing before you is Ellen Gertie. Evil incarnate. Suffering made manifest. Hell in a cardigan. She's remarkably tolerant of the damage that some inconsiderate soul did to the door of the office, but shows very little concern for your wellbeing, or that of your companions. That sort of callousness is to be expected from such a monster as her, and is exactly why she needs to be brought to justice. All that nonsense with stealing from a church and being hired by a vicar is sort of relevant too, you concede.
Ashley, still deep undercover, fetches Drainpipe and comes to stand by your side, adopting the one-legged stance that typifies a market stall grocer. Seeing her continued dedication inspires you to follow suit. As far as Ellen Gertie knows, you really are Mrs Fox; you've got a unique and probably time-limited opportunity to pump her for intel before you're rumbled, so you need to make the most of it. Diane Ingrid Shame can unleash a hellstorm upon her once you're done.
"Ah, yes, of course. I don't like to appear over-familiar, though. You know how it is; people like you and I turn heads in the street and break hearts in the canal, so we can't take risks with other people's feelings in a business setting." you say. "Speaking of abject failures of emotional intelligence: are Carradan and Excelsior not around, today?"
Ellen gives you an appraising look.
"I was hoping to speak to them about representation for my grocery business. Take the fetid, filthy public off my pristinely manicured hands." Sir Chrimmington announces, taking some of the heat for your totally accurate and reasonable description of the CEOs.
"Ah. That's a very good choice, Mr..."
"Sir. Sir Chrimmington." you correct her. "A close friend of mine. You can speak as freely in front of him, and my other associate Gutterpipe Del Perdido, as you would in front of me." you add, hoping that she'll reveal some devastatingly incriminating facts.
"Well, it's an honour to meet a knight." says Gertie, who has probably been hunted like a mythical dragon a few times in her squalid and rotten existence. "And to meet a member of hollow royalty."
Drainpipe, masquerading as Gutterpipe, gives the impression it would nod if it could.
"So as we were saying, Mrs Gertie, are Carradan and Excelsior not around today? I was hoping to discuss some important business matters with them; hiding money, laundering funds, embezzlement, theft, tax evasion, corporate espionage, asset stripping, dumping hundreds of tonnes of unused roofing tiles into local ponds, that sort of thing." you tell the old hag, effortlessly fulfilling the role of the socialite and entrepreneur.
"Sounds like a busy afternoon you've got planned." chuckles Ellen Gertie. Her unremarkable teeth are unworthy of any remarks, but they lurk behind lips which cry out for a third-party making-up. Flashbacks of your first encounter with The Elderly Woman come unbidden to your mind, but you strive to hold yourself together. "You know as well as I do that Carradan and Excelsior are both fictitious. I suppose this was just your way of revealing it to Sir Chrimmington?"
The bombshell lands in your lap like a bomb landing in a woman's lap.
"Yes." you say, simply. Ashley lets out a grocerly gasp of surprise. You'd come here to expose Gertie and Gertie Enterprises having a false figurehead alongside the despicable Excelsior, but now you've been left reeling from the revelation that neither of the joint CEOs exists. Ellen Gertie is the puppetmaster at every level.
- "Looks like someone ruined your paper door."
- "Do you have any experience with church embezzlement?"
- "Would you like to dance?"
- Casually search for incriminating files
>> "Do you have any experience with church embezzlement?"
Now that you know Ellen Gertie is the sick, demented ringmaster in this circus of crime and fare-dodging, you realise the true gravity of your situation. She's not just the beneficiary of nepotism and matriarchal dominance of a money laundering operation, but effectively an organised crime boss with absolutely awful taste in office carpeting. Having been up close with it, you can really bear witness to the offensive orange colour she's selected.
You can't allow the chance to question her to slip through your fingers. Mrs Fox's famously cat-like curiosity normally makes you sick as a dog and tired as a work horse, but it's time to commit to it like a highland cow commits to blocking a road.
"Do you have any experience with church embezzlement?" you ask, the most natural question that a prospective client could have when discussing the potential representation of a grocer.
"Church embezzlement?" Ellen repeats, the words slipping easily from her mouth as if it's the most familiar phrase in her arsenal of despair.
"Yes, church embezzlement. You know, like we always do at the rich people clubs in the city." you clarify. "Once we're done eating our gilded parsnips in our rooftop restaurants, we descend to underground canal level - the secret underground canals that only the elite know of, I mean - and then allow the gondolas to bear us to nearby towns. Upon our arrival, rejuvenated by the costly liqueurs that the gondola bartenders foist upon us, we rise back up to the streets where the proletariat shamble along in their pitiful existences. We find their places of worship, where they gather in their tens on a weekly basis, and we infiltrate the power structures for our own amusement. With influence secured, we then make sizable donations using ill-gotten money and then steal it back, effectively laundering it without drawing any suspicion to ourselves."
You can feel the silence from Ashley and Drainpipe behind you. They're either totally taken in by your scarily accurate depiction of the lives of the wealthy, or they're trying to think of their own totally dynamite contributions to the investigation
"I see." Ellen replies after a short silence. The sound of her grating, evil-choked voice leaves you with the impression that the silence wasn't short enough. "It seems like you have an awful lot of experience with the subject already, Mrs Fox."
That dastardly hag! She's trying to turn the whole thing round on you! You thrust your hands into the pockets of your dress, blocking them from any attempt Gertie might make to slip some falsified evidence in.
"No I don't! I've never even heard of a church. Or money laundering. Or vicars." you deny. "Or what happened in that shoe shop that got robbed yesterday."
"It's true; she doesn't. I questioned her thoroughly on the topic earlier today." Drainpipe adds, always having your back.
"I think what Mrs Fox is trying to say, is that I don't really like talking to the public when I sell groceries, so I'd like Gertie and Gertie to take that responsibility off my hands." says Ashley as Sir Chrimmington, steering your interrogation back into the realms of the cover story. Ellen gives her a confused look.
"I was a very strange way of saying that."
"I'm a known poet." you defend, spinning your web of lies to ever greater breadths. "And as a poet, I do need to know what experience you have with stealing back donations from churches."
Ellen looks you in the eye without speaking. Ashley sidles her way towards the desk, with Drainpipe in tow.
"Why?"
- "In case I need to blackmail you"
- "It's a good plan B"
- Distract Ellen Gertie using MOT certificates
- Shoot light fittings
>> Distract Ellen Gertie using MOT certificates
The situation is more dire than you could have ever predicted. Despite blending seamlessly into the life of Mrs Fox, and although you have probed so subtly as to render your interrogation imperceptible, even to yourself, Ellen's suspicions are piqued. You worry that if she rumbles you now then she might unleash the full force of her empire upon you, utilising passive aggression, spiteful scheduling of church fetes and probably even knife crime to end your investigation. You have to think quickly.
"Because, my darling Gertie, you see, the thing is..." you start, expertly stalling while you fish around in your towel for anything that might help "... I really need to understand your ecclesiastical and financial crossover events because, er, aha!" You triumphantly yank a bundle of crumpled documents from the confines of your inventory and thrust them towards Gertie's face. "I am very worried about this advisory finding on the tread of my tyres, despite them never so much as brushing a kerb unintentionally!"
Sir Chrimmington nods behind you. She only ever strikes kerbs on purpose.
"And only money that's been stolen from a church, preferably laundered by it, is good enough to settle our automotive invoices." Gutterpipe del Perdido adds, providing vital context.
"Ah, I see. One of the sanctified branches of Halfords, that'll be. I'm always telling the vicar about those holy mechanics and their insistence on wiping up oil stains using the Turin shroud."
You nod. Mrs Fox would be dead set against the destruction of ancient artefacts in the pursuit of routine vehicle care.
"I should be able to embezzle cash from Greater Washburn church; I did so already, just last week. It's been part of a little hobby of mine; putting fake voices of the divine into armchairs, making things look deeply secatuerable in the Chapel, moving the vicar's theives tools into prominent display, and doing the old take-back play on large donations. Gives me stories to tell the grandchildren, you know?" Explains Ellen Gertie. You're almost convinced that you could scour that statement for incriminating evidence if only you had the time. Unfortunately, Ellen's eyes travel to the name and address printed at the top of the MOT certificate.
"What's this... owner's name Ashley Von Staffen?!" Ellen Gertie reads. In hindsight, you begin to wonder if handing your nemesis personally identifying information that runs counter to your disguise was the best use of time and resources. "You're not Mrs Fox, Sir Chrimmington and Gutterpipe del Perdido at all! You're Ashley and Lucy, famous private investigators! And you've reunited Ashley with her long lost brother! I should have recognised Drainpipe Von Staffen from the off; no other pipe wears a crown so naturally!"
You're not a paranoid or insecure person, but you begin to think that Ellen suspects you're not Mrs Fox.
- Squat
- Loot office
- Arrest Ellen Gertie
- Ask if you can use Ellen's desk phone
>> Squat
Reluctantly, and despite the masterclass in subterfuge you've just led, you accept that Ellen Gertie has seen through the veil. She must surely be a sorceress, mage, witch or shaman of extreme power to be able to find the truth like that; perhaps, in another life, you could have been crime fighting partners. You yourself are also a witch, you remember, so having a second magic user in your private investigations, especially one who is such a powerful soothsayer, would render you utterly unstoppable. But that was not to be. You are opposed like night and day, like hammer and cake, like Gertie and morality.
With confrontation at hand and having already secured a full confession from the haggard old puddle of swamp water and hatred, you prepare to take the only logical next step.
Your thigh muscles go completely limp. You stick your bum out, feeling it pull the towel and all contents taut. Your ankles become soft and bouncy and your calves relax as your torso plummets downwards, and your dress-clad-towel-clad rump makes contact with the carpet. Ashley gasps with reverential wonder; this is surely the most powerful and divine squat of your life and times to date. You have become Mrs Fox the Crab King, finally uniting the old foes of crustacean and mammal into a singular combatant who rules both ocean and high society with an iron claw.
"The jig is up, Gertie! You're under arrest for doing all those crimes you just admitted to, plus also for making me dunk buttery crumpets in tea four times. It was horrid!"
"They'd soak up all the tea and become delicious! Do it again!" she cries back, revealing how truly delusional and cruel she has allowed herself to become. She's gone too far.
>> Bonus action: Arrest Ellen Gertie
"By the power vested in me, on the authority of Diane Ingrid Shame, I'm doing an arrest of you. You're really arrested right now. You're so under arrest that all you can see is a silhouette of arrest flying high above you, making inferences on its species by wing shape, the way it flaps or glides, and how high it goes!" you bellow, layering metaphor upon metaphor until you've formed a single, groaning tower of ramshackle improvised dialogue. You start your chainsaw and then draw your gun. With a weapon in each hand you feel ready to make good on your promise of not letting her go freely.
Ellen lunges for the telephone, presumably intending to call up some goons from the rest of the office, but Ashley is too quick for her, ripping the cord from the wall in a single mighty tug; that grocer's strength has come into its own yet again. Wheeling around, Gertie whips two razor-edged doilies from her handbag and slings them your way, carving the air like angry wasp discs. You barely manage to dodge the first doily. It cuts cleanly through the dangling fox taxidermy and sends Mrs Fox's head tumbling to the ground. The second bladed wheel of place-marking is deflected by the angrily whirring teeth of your chainsaw. Gertie merely smirks at you.
"That vicar will never get his money back! He can't even tell the difference between a chicken and an eagle!" she snarls, accurately, dealing a firm psychological blow to your resolve. But although she's quite right that he's an avian delinquent, and by all rights you should be shunning him rather than helping such a person, he is still your client. If nothing else, you've proved to yourself over the last few days that you're a consummate professional, so you have to see this case through. You convey this message to Ellen by stabbing forwards with the chain blade. Unfortunately, your squat renders motion rather slow and difficult. She leaps to one side, leaving your attack to harmlessly carve her desk in twain, but doesn't anticipate the flying kick from Ashley, sending the ashen-eyed, sewage-hearted monster backwards into the western wall of the office.
Leaving the chainsaw safely running, you let go of the handle and grab Drainpipe instead. Ashley forms up alongside you, adopting a squat of her own, and you both place your hands on what would begrudgingly be called a midriff if one were to anthropomorphise a drainpipe.
"Hey, Gertie?" you call out. She looks you in the eye, defiantly. "C'est ne pas un pipe!"
Her face becomes a mask of decay and despair at your devastating one liner, moments before you and Ashley reprise your patented 'Hers and Hers Battering Drainpipe' technique, the most powerful arrest in your arsenal. Crab-sprinting sideways, as best a squat allows, you charge at full force. You and your wife slam Drainpipe's crowned end hard into the chitinous carapace of Ellen Gertie, forcing her through the paper wall and into what appears to be a lavatory. Overbalancing backwards, the waste of a good cardigan falls bottom first into the toilet bowl, the seat of which has been left up, criminally. With a satisfying thunk, and the pained moan of two buttocks made wet from toilet water, the fight is over. Your arrest is done. You've finally defeated Ellen Gertie.
To celebrate, you discharge five rounds from the revolver, into the sink, lights, hand dryer, floor, and Ellen Gertie's desk. The chainsaw roars approvingly, and Ashley high fives you.
A few minutes later, once you've pulled the toilet seat over Ellen's torso and arms like a safety bar on a roller coaster, you plug her phone back in and call Diane Ingrid Shame for backup.
"Not willing to go down without a fight, Ellen Gertie went down without a fight." you tell Diane Ingrid Shame, humbly.
"It's exactly the sort of contradiction you'd expect from someone of her moral decrepitude." she answers. "I'll be there in a few minutes. Good work, Lucy."
You hang up and think about it. Yes, you did do a good job, didn't you?
- Epilogue
- Forgo epilogue for a description of a bin
>> Forgo epilogue for a description of a bin
Absence. A void, constrained. A gap which expects something, but finds itself with nothing, always wanting.
Or does it?
This cavity can be filled. This cavity is round; not quite cylindrical, thanks to the gentle outward taper from base to aperture, but not a cone by virtue of the flat, inverted peak.
The absence that this cavity represents is, ultimately, a positive thing. It's a place where unwanted, unclean, wasted things go to hide. Temporary though it might be, the waste lingers there for a few hours, days, weeks, before being taken away. The absence tells of the successful purging of that which did not need to be where it was, and of a readiness to accept more. It's a friendly, supportive cavity, sometimes with a lid to hide the waste from those who might not wish to see it, that helps to keep everything clean outside, and everything unclean within.
The bin is a great friend to all who seek to segregate things which need to be kept from things which need not to be kept. Things which, under no circumstances, should be allowed to remain in the cupboards, on the worktops, hanging in wardrobes, or mixed into a pesto pasta meal. Without the noble bin there would be chaos and carnage in the kitchen and beyond. Empty loo rolls would flood the staircase, bread bags would choke the oven and receipts, perhaps for a curly wurly or packet of batteries, would clog the drain until no washing up could be completed again. The whole house would be ruined, or turned into a fountain of filth that spills onto the street and smothers the world.
Gratitude be unto the bins, and in particular a single black bin, which lurks outside a house and keeps its lid firmly on its head. A bin which contains bags more often than not; bags which contain nappies more often than not. The smell is confined, the leaks are contained, and the noses and carpets are thereby left unoffended by anything which might otherwise, if the world were not so gentle, kind or filled with bins, have blighted them.
Bins are good. Cherish your bins.
Thank you for playing.