The Greatest Lie Ever Told – chapter 5

The Greatest Lie Ever Told

by Morton Cubberd

Chapter 5

Maurice Wagon, Kilmister-on-Belford – DECEASED
Jock MacDogkennel, Asstermowth – DECEASED
Monty Quim, North Yorkshire – DECEASED
Lillian Adverse-Camber, Scurby – DECEASED
Richard Tube, Lemmyster – DECEASED
Roland Keyboard, Maidenrule-on-Thames – DECEASED
Cassy O’watch, Argos – DECEASED

Detectives Paddy Rogue and Timmy Keen sat in the former’s beloved Ford Capri outside the entrance gate to Bramblebay Castle, reading through a list of names provided to them by the eccentric billionaire aristocrat Sir Wilkins Bramblebay, the world’s leading expert in ornithological fraud.

“And these are only the ones Bramblebay knows about,” Keen said, shocked at the scale of horror and terror and evil committed by the ruthless Bristow Chapter, “and all to maintain the secrecy of The Greatest Lie Ever Told. Bramblebay said that there are others out there who know the truth, and the Bristow Chapter may already have got to them as well. There could be hundreds of bodies out there, Rogue, hundreds! What in Hank Marvin’s name have we got ourselves into here?”

Rogue stubbed out his roll-up on his thigh and took a swig from his hip flask, before offering a drink to Keen who declined. “It’s all been a bit of a shock to you, hasn’t it, Keen? You didn’t think the job would be like this when you left posh pussy clueless privileged Oxbridge University. Am I right?”

Timmy Keen’s head dropped into his hands and he began to sob tears of acrid humility. “How the Hell do you do it, Rogue? How is it that you’re always so perceptively correct? It’s like you have some kind of sixth sense, or something equally as mystically impressive. I just don’t know why I’m doing this job. I didn’t join the force to stop criminals and help solve murders. I became a detective for the same good and decent reasons that you and everyone else did, to victimise ethnic minority groups, take bungs off newspaper reporters, assault G20 protestors with a taser, turn a blind eye to institutional corruption, abuse my stop/search powers, and cream a little bit off the drugs and money we confiscate from raids. That’s what being a detective is all about, that’s what being in the police force is all about. But how did we get here, how did we slide so far away from all of that, Rogue? When did we police stop behaving like decent criminal gangsters, and start this absurd thing about ‘upholding the law’ ?”

“Damn crazy world of ours makes no sense, Keen,” Rogue said, lighting another roll-up, “maybe it never has. Maybe we just have to try and muddle through this goddam crazy world and try our best. That’s why I drink, to forget about it all. Only I drink so much that I’ve completely forgotten what it was that I was trying to forget about. Which I suppose is a good thing. Though nowadays I can’t even remember where my own mother lives. I put that down to the potato wine I bought from some Norwegian bloke in Charing Cross a few years ago. I reckon that wiped out fifty percent of my memories. Never trust a goddam Norwegian, Keen, especially one selling potato wine.”

“Thanks, I’ll bear that in mind,” Keen whimpered, weeping like a sharpened pencil.

“Now you listen to me,” Rogue slapped Keen hard across the chops, “stop your pussy-ass crying! You and me, well we’re cut from different cloth. I’m a hardened, rugged, jaded old dog, tired of this goddam crazy world and the goddam crazy people in it. I call a spade a spade and I call a shovel a spade as well. That’s just my way. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks. But we’ve been put together on this case, and by God I’ll turn you into a top-notch detective with profound gifts and inexplicable intuition if it’s the last thing I do, goddamit! Pass me the list, and stop your fucking pathetic crying.” Keen passed Rogue the list of victims. “Hmmm, Jock MacDogkennel. Says here that he was murdered up in Asstermowth? That was my old patch before I was kicked out for being too much of an iconoclastic, rule-breaking rebel, and sent down here to lame Cotswoldshire CID. There’s a lot of bad memories for me up there, Keen. Oh yes, a lot of bad memories.” Rogue lit another roll-up and put it to his lips next to the other one still burning. He scratched at his raw stubbly cheeks, pondering his next move. “Well, I think it might be time to phone some of my old chums up in Asstermowth, see what happened to this birdspotting MacDogkennel bastard. And won’t that be a lovely surprise for them all.”

 

***

 

Kathinka Zemlinsky took a seat in Nando’s having just ordered a half chicken (hot) with regular sides of coleslaw and corn on the cob. Nando’s was her only treat in an otherwise sparse and frugal life. She sucked up Dr.Pepper from her hexagonal-sided refill glass, looking around the crowded restaurant at the amazed and startled faces staring back at her. The trouble with being a seven foot tall woman in a black Gestapo trench coat was that people tended to stare. A lot. Like all the fucking time.

As she waited for her food she took out the old man’s envelope and read the contents. Along with her payment in cash was a short checklist of the jobs she needed to do, the mess she needed to clear up.

1 – Shipment due on Tuesday from Iceland. Four Brunnich’s Guillemots, three Ivory Gulls, two Ross’s Gulls, seven King Eiders, two pure white Gyrfalcons, drake Pacific Eider, female Stejneger’s Scoter, adult Black-tailed Gull. Pick up at usual place. Await confirmation for delivery address
2 – Monitor activity of two detectives from Cotswoldshire CID. Paddy Rogue and Timmy Keen. Eliminate if necessary
3 – Monitor activity at Bramblebay Castle. Eliminate if necessary
4 – Pop into Aldi and see if they have any of those Thinsulate gloves still on offer. Think they were about £3.99 the last time I went in. Get me a pair and Ill pay you back. Oh, and can you get me a pack of those half-cooked baguettes, the ones you finish off in the oven yourself. I love them with some Dairylea spread on
5 – Report back to the usual place when contacted. All future dealings to be conducted only with my son

DESTROY THIS AFTER READING

Straightforward as ever, she thought to herself, though Kathinka was becoming uneasy about dealing with the police. She feared that things were about to unravel, that her employers the Bristow Chapter were becoming ever more audacious, carelessly arrogant, and that would surely be their downfall. She had no immediate plans to cease working for the Bristow Chapter, now headed by the old man’s son whom she had still never met, but she had to engineer a way of getting out before the whole enterprise crumbled. Since arriving in Western Europe she had been saving every penny she earned, and soon she would have enough to return to Russia and buy her own land with her own flock of chickens, corn fields, coleslaw trees and Nando’s hot sauce plants, somewhere to eat Nando’s all day long without the ignorant hurtful eyes glaring at her monstrously enormous frame.

 

***

 

“I think she’s awake,” Dr Amanda Pyoobs said to her colleague Nurse Helen Faust.

“Where am I?” the patient asked.

“My God! You’re right, Dr Pyoobs. She is awake,” Nurse Faust said in shock.

“Miss McAubrey,” Dr Amanda Pyoobs spoke slowly, intoning each syllable with flaccid deliberation, “my name is Dr Pyoobs and this is Nurse Faust. You’re in the World Institute for Brain Science Research. You’ve been unconscious for three days. You had a very serious accident involving a cricket bat.”

“A cricket bat?” Detective Inspector Liz McAubrey said, confused and bewildered, like diffident jam. “How did it happen?”

“A cricket bat repeatedly struck you about the head for fifteen minutes until your skull split into six pieces and your whole brain fell out and dribbled down the fire escape stairs at Asstermowth mortuary. It’s a miracle that you’re alive,” Dr Pyoobs said, amazed at the speed of her patient’s recovery. “Miss McAubrey, I need to ask you a question.”

“Call me Liz.”

“Okay, Liz, well I need to know if you had any special abilities before your accident. You know, were you profoundly gifted or extraordinarily talented? That kind of thing.”

Liz became aware that something wasn’t right. As Pyoobs spoke she saw the sound of the doctor’s aural syntax becoming visual words spelled out before her, then translated into hundreds of foreign languages. As Liz registered the colours of the hospital walls she saw them broken down into colour spectrums, and all the time binary code flickered before her. The hum of electricity, machinery and complex mechanisms all resonated within her mind.

“You see, Liz,” Dr Pyoobs began reluctantly, “there was… a bit of a… err… problem.”

“A problem?” Liz asked, concerned at the expression on Pyoobs’s face. All events around her were now occurring in slow motion, a digital spectrogram analysing everything, not that I even know what a digital spectrogram is, but spellcheck has okayed it.

“Yes, a problem. Liz, you have to understand that when the paramedics found you they had to act quickly. They’re not world class brain scientists like me. But they did their very best to save you. They got a carrier bag and scraped up your brain off the staircase, then they found all the bits of your skull and put it back together. But they didn’t have the right equipment, you need very specific tools to carry out a full brain reconstruction procedure. So they improvised using car keys, shoelaces, sellotape… they really were incredibly innovative. After they sellotaped your head back together they found some more bits of brain, so they stuffed it in your ears and up your nostrils.”

“Doctor, dispense with the bullshit, this isn’t Jackanory. Just tell me what’s wrong,” Liz demanded, already regaining her feisty spirit that had made her a profoundly formidable force within Asstermowth CID.

“Liz, you seem to be experiencing unusual levels of brain activity. Let me show you some brain activity scans.” Pyoobs fetched a folder and took out the sheets of paper. “This is the brain scan of a normal person throughout the day.” Liz looked at the chart, a jagged horizontal line centred mid-way up the X axis. “Now this is the brain scan of really thick people like Sarah Palin, or people who find Peter Kay funny.” This time the line was nearly all below zero on the brain activity X axis. “And finally, Miss McAubrey, this is yours.”

Liz was puzzled, there was no line. “Doctor Pyoobs, I don’t understand. There’s nothing there.”

“Oh yes there is, Liz, it’s just not on this X axis. It’s what we quite literally call ‘off the scale’. Completely off the scale. Liz, you seem to have developed what we call Hyper Extraordinarily Gifted Profundity Syndrome. We’ve been running tests on you and we’ve just never come across a case like you. We want you to stay here and undergo more tests.”

Without thinking Liz carried out a full vocal inflection analysis on Dr Amanda Pyoobs, though she didn’t even know what a full vocal inflection analysis was. And neither do I. She swung her feet off the side of the bed and stood up. “Thanks for everything, Doc, I really appreciate it. But I need to be on my way.”

“But Liz, the sellotape keeping your skull together needs to be changed every ten hours. Without fresh sellotape you’ll die. A patient with Hyper Extraordinarily Gifted Profundity Syndrome has a level of brain activity that puts extra strain on the skull. Too much profundity in a gifted way might make your whole head explode. Think about your health, Liz, please!”

“Well I think I can use a bit of sellotape, Dr Pyoobs. Anyway I have a seven foot tall woman in a Gestapo trenchcoat to catch and bring to justice. And I don’t care if I’ve been taken off the case. The DA can have my damn badge. This time it’s personal.”

***

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