A Case of Four Fingers - a Sample Story from Take No Prisoners

By John Grant

They'd engraved the tombstone of Pretty Polly McTavish with the parrot's tragic last words: "Hello Sailaaargh."

It was a touching gesture, and I don't think there was anyone among the small huddle of mourners at the pet cemetery who didn't have a tear in their eye as the Reverend Jeremy Harcourt-Fruitcake plummily read out the last rites. Pretty Polly had sacrificed her life so that Miss Grimthorpe, the so-called Pantry Detective, could solve her forty-seventh and best-selling case to date, the grisly Who Slew the Cockatoos?

The grim service over, I headed off alone down Curling Lane to my home and workplace at the edge of the village.

Birds sang.

Bees buzzed.

Trees rustled.

Clouds did whatever it is that clouds do.

It was Indian Summer, always a busy time in the village.

Always a busy time for me.

Today I was going to have to process Pretty Polly McTavish and, if memory served aright, half a dozen other carcasses. Human ones.

But first I needed a cup of tea.

Strong tea.

Later I sat on my porch, savoring the Broken Orange Pekoe, looking at the sky, wondering if it was time yet for me to start searching, just out of interest you understand, through the Sits Vac columns in the newspaper. Ten years – ten years I'd been doing this job, and that's a long time out of anyone's life. Especially since, if you looked at it another way, I'd been doing the job for something like a century. And despite the fact that even a long time doesn't take much of a chunk out of eternity.

But the century felt like an eternity in itself, is what I'm getting at.

The village always looked good in Indian Summer, which lasts about half the year in these parts. Christmas takes up a good part of the rest. Halloween lasts a week and a half.

Maybe I'd better explain.

Maybe I'd better not.

Not yet.

I drained the last of the tea and flicked the cup so that the damp leaves at the bottom flew to land among the oleanders. God alone knows how they flourish so well, all year round, since I hate gardening. It's the digging. Makes me feel creepy.

Superstitious.

But that's the way I am.

The cup washed and put away in the cupboard, I sauntered from the house across to my workshed. It was tatty, corrugated-iron-roofed, wooden-walled, brown and greasy, just like it had been yesterday. Along one side of it were the heavy green plastic hoppers where the remains of the deceased were regularly dumped by the Authorities. One hopper per corpse. In Indian Summer it can get so busy that I need a dozen hoppers, but today, according to my accounts book – more accurate than my memory – there were only eight corpses to deal with. Still quite a number, but not as bad as it sometimes is.

Hopper number one. Accounts book and pencil out of pocket. Tick off Pretty Polly McTavish in the received column. The brute had dispatched her with a baseball bat, so she wasn't a pretty sight. She'd require stitching before she was ready to be seen out and about again.

Hopper number two. The first body of a set of five, I knew. This one and the other four had been exotic dancers, all stripped naked except for skimpy red underwear, all slashed and mutilated in inventive ways. Dave Knuckle had been in town for the Case of the Parboiled Detective, soon to be published as Smack My Butt, Babe. Which of the mangled bimbos had been actual victims and which were merely his discarded girlfriends was always a tough one. Best left to the Authorities.

Hopper number seven. Tick went the pencil. The by-product of an ongoing case for Sir John. An Ashmolean subcurator smothered by having a rolled-up paperback copy of Piers Plowman rammed down his throat. The acne scars were as livid as vintage port.

Hopper number eight.

Empty.

I coughed into it to listen to the little echoes confirm the evidence of my eyes. I stared at my accounts book in histrionic disbelief – these things should be done properly or not at all. In my own neat, crabbed writing the entry was there, just as I'd written it down the night before when the Clerk of the Authorities had dictated it to me over the telephone.

"One corpse, male, with severed hand. Identity: Gerald G. Dukes, a.k.a. The Even Mightier Spongini. Profession: Stage magician. Age: 28."

There followed a few further personal attributes. The Clerk would have been bound to mention it had invisibility been one of them.

No, the hopper was definitely empty.

There'd never been an error before – not in the whole long ten-years-that-was-really-a-century-that-felt-like-eternity. Never could be.

But I ran to the house and the telephone to call the Clerk anyway.

Just in case.

# # #

And now maybe I better had explain. About the village of Cadaver-in-the-Offing, and about the way things are around here, and perhaps a bit about myself as well – even though I don't like the, you know, limelight.

Nestled among the rolling hills of Barsetshire, one of the lesser known Home Counties, Cadaver-in-the-Offing is a sleepy little place – two shops and a pub and a scattering of houses, not to mention the church and the vicarage – but behind this veneer of tranquillity lurk seething passions and unfettered violence. More passions, more violence than in the rest of the country put together.

Because Cadaver-in-the-Offing is the place where detective stories happen.

The village has a population of about two hundred, if you look at it one way, and about two hundred million, if you look at it another. There have to be enough people so that the lesser characters in detective stories – the victims, the witnesses, the murderers, the romantic leads, the local color – are always different. But economies can be made, and usually are, by recycling those characters.

Endlessly.

Who can honestly recall the countless lusty young men who've accompanied Dr. Gideon Fell or Sir Henry Merrivale, and who've waltzed off with the pretty, young but feistily independent ingenue at the end of the case? Who can recall those ingenues either, come to that? The victims in Perry Mason's cases form a long train of utter anonymity, as do the various gorgeously pneumatic soubrettes who clutter up the proceedings. Who didn't commit the murder or solve the case in The Nine Tailors or The Sign of Four or Inspector Queen's Own Case or The Mysterious Affair at Styles or . . .

I could go on.

Once upon a time all these forgettable individuals actually had an independent existence, even if you couldn't tell them apart from each other any more than I'd been able to distinguish Dave Knuckle's discards in my hoppers.

It was wasteful.

Decades ago the Authorities, during one of their periodic spurts of cost-cutting, realized this. Down-sizing was the zeal of the day. Why expend effort hiring individuals for the bit parts, why have to put out the cash for the undertaker's bills when people could be found on the unemployment queues who'd be only too eager to accept zero wages in exchange for board, lodging . . . and immortality? Oh, sure, they'd have to accept being murdered every once in a while, but they wouldn't be dead long before being revived, given a different name, maybe a fresh wig, a new home to live in, a new role and probably a new spouse or lover.

Acting in conjunction with the Anti Blood Sports League, the Authorities founded Cadaver-in-the-Offing.

And hired me.

Yes, I suppose you're probably still wondering about me. Frankly, the less said about me the better. I had my own reasons for coming to work in Cadaver-in-the-Offing, but presumably the law-enforcement agencies of various obscure Middle European countries have forgotten all about me by now – which was one of the reasons why I was contemplating resigning my post, that day in the midst of the overlong Indian Summer.

Or maybe they haven't. That's one of the reasons I won't resign quite yet.

The other? All will become clear, Tonstant Weader.

So let's just say no more than that it's my job to take the . . . the secondary products of the detectives' industry and . . . and mend them.

That's all you need to know.

Other than that, let my past be an obscurity and my present something only dimly perceived; let me be a faceless and nameless cipher.

# # #

"Hello, Victor," said the Clerk wearily when finally he answered the telephone. He packed decades' worth of disdain into those two words: just because Cadaver-in-the-Offing couldn't continue to function without my services – or those of another like me – doesn't mean that people are courteous to me. Oh, no: far from it. Most of them avoid me like the plague, and, whenever they're forced to deal with me, look at me like they've just trodden in something the cat's done.

Tell you the truth, I prefer it that way.

I explained my problem. For once I knew that I had his attention. I could hear the click of his keyboard in the background as he checked up on what I'd been telling him.

"Yes," he said at last. "I have the entry here on screen in front of me . . . Dukes . . . Even Mightier . . . inscrutable . . . magician. Hum. Ho. He is – was – part of a case for Inspector Romford."

"The one with the pipe, the puppies, the paunch and the passion for peppermints?"

"The very same. Big in the library market. Would be even bigger if it weren't for the difficulties he had kicking his crack habit. Hm . . . he was supposed to have solved this case by now – it's just a short story. It was one of his stage rivals did it – The Mighty Thrombosis – on account of the wife, Zelda. The Mighty Thrombosis's wife, that is. Usually the wife in a Romford case."

Even though the Clerk couldn't see me I held up a hand to stem the flow of words. "That's all as might be," I said, "but the fact of the matter is that I'm still a body short of my quota."

"Don't suppose you've got even the, harrumph, severed hand?"

"Not so much as a bleeding fingernail. I told you, I checked the hopper proper."

"Well, it's not my responsibility – I don't deal with the detailed stuff, as you know."

"I know."

In other words, the Clerk thought this was likely to be a knotty problem, and the quicker he got his rear covered the better.

"Delegate, boy, delegate," he said. "That's my motto. Eh?"

"I know."

He was going to dump me in it and leave me to sink or swim.

"Tell you one thing, though," he added, then paused. "This indeed sounds like" – and I could almost hear the drums roll – "A Case For Inspector Romford!"

The phone went dead.

# # #

Quite how Inspector Romford's inability to solve A Case For Inspector Romford could be A Case For Inspector Romford was a logical tangle that part of me was trying to unravel as I ambled up Curving Lane towards the center, if the village could be said to have such a thing, of Cadaver-in-the-Offing. It was about lunchtime, and so Romford would certainly be in the Heart & Sickle, drinking brown ale and keeping an ear open for clues. It's an old technique and can be effective. The sole disadvantage is that the brown ale tends to mean the clues, though gathered, go astray again.

I found him at a table in the corner, nursing a pint. Beside it was a whisky chaser. I raised my eyebrows.

"Needed a drop of the hard stuff," he said, seeing the direction of my gaze. "Don't mind telling you, whossname, that I'm bamboozled."

With the accent on the middle syllable, I thought, but I said nothing.

"Right there in front of my eyes it was done," he continued, "bold as brass and twice as natural. I thought I had it all sewn up within minutes, but it wasn't to be. Mark my words, there's more to this case than meets the hand."

I must have looked puzzled, because he added, leaning forwards confidentially towards me, "I would have said ‘eye' but the hand's quicker, see?"

I said I saw.

"Bleeding conjurers, prestidigitators, stage magicians, illusionists, call them what you will," he mumbled through the froth on the top of his beer.

Pulling the wooden chair scrapingly back over the slate floor of the Heart & Sickle's snug, I asked him what he meant.

And he explained.

# # #

The previous night had seen a grand gala at St Boniface's Church Hall, beside Dead Man's Crossroads in the middle of Cadaver-in-the-Offing. The Barchester Bugle had been full of it for weeks. It was a rare honor for a conjurer so internationally prominent as The Mighty Thrombosis to treat a place as small as Cadaver-in-the-Offing to one of his performances, but his mother came from hereabouts and he wanted to try out a few new tricks in front of an unimportant audience, so to here he'd come.

ONE NIGHT ONLY
An Informal Evening with
THE MIGHTY THROMBOSIS

the advertisements and handbills had said. And under that there was further news:

ably supported by
Helsinki's Most Dazzling Acrobatic Troupe
The Family Brød
"The Seven Deadly Finns"

Mrs. Romford had booked tickets at once for herself and the Inspector, telling him that he'd just have to juggle his duty hours to accommodate her wishes. He'd made a song and dance about the difficulties of disrupting his schedule, but in fact he'd been glad enough to go: ever since he'd first dropped a hidden pack of cards as a child he'd been fascinated by the whole charisma of stage magic – the greasepaint, the ethereally beautiful assistants, the mystery, the spectacle, and the whole participatory game whereby the audience knew it was being hoodwinked yet believed in magic all the same. And at least it wasn't Shakespeare; Mrs. Romford had gone off Shakespeare in a big way ever since a certain distressing occurrence during a performance of Julius Caesar.

So when his day's labors were over he changed into his second-best tweed suit, checked his mobile phone was working in case of emergencies ("There'd better be no emergencies," he'd growled at fresh-faced Sergeant Mutton), made sure he'd got plenty of tobacco and peppermints in his pocket for the walk home, and set off with his wife for the Church Hall.

They were among the first to arrive. The Reverend Jeremy Harcourt-Fruitcake had laid out the hard wooden chairs in neat rows from the front of the hall to the back, but so far only a handful of people were there to sit on them. Ignoring each other's protestations, the Romfords strode determinedly down the central aisle to settle themselves firmly as near to the middle of the front row as possible.

This was their big night out, and they wanted to miss nothing.

They weren't to be disappointed, although the magic they would see would not be quite of the kind they expected.

Romford chewed steadfastly on the stem of his dead pipe for what seemed like hours as the Hall filled slowly up. He recognized most of the people there, of course: Mrs. Dora Griggs of Griggs House, still in mourning for the death of young Clarence; Dr. Smithee, the bluffly reliable GP who had played such a hand in that case; Donald Glover, who ran the garage . . . all the noteworthies of Cadaver-in-the-Offing, in short, each of them looking as eagerly anticipatory as he himself.

At last it was time for the lights to dim.

A hissy recording of a fanfare split the air.

The silence throbbed.

Mrs. Romford opened a packet of peanuts.

Someone sneezed.

Breath was bated.

And the curtain jerked open to reveal the Seven Deadly Finns standing in a triangle atop each other, poised on tiptoe – particularly difficult, Romford thought, for the three load-bearers on the bottom, but they showed no signs of strain – and with their arms outstretched, fingers pointing towards the wings. They were dressed in silver lamé suits, and the even teeth in their uniformly broad smiles glistened and gleamed every bit as much as the suits.

The recording lurched into something by Strauss, and the topmost Finn tumbled forward in a somersault to land perfectly at the very front of the stage. The audience applauded as if this were the greatest thing they'd ever seen, and then the performance started in earnest.

Bodies flew all over the stage in a blur of lamé and an endless confusion of stray limbs. Every now and then the Finns would stop in some multi-bodied contortion, and the watchers took this as their cue for yet another round of applause. Romford, hands still, thought around the stem of his pipe that team acrobats must have to bath a lot, what with constantly having to stuff their faces up each other's . . .

Mrs. Romford interrupted his reverie. "Aren't they grand?" she whispered.

"Very grand," he agreed.

"You should steer clear of celery seeds when you're pregnant," she added significantly, then turned back to her peanuts.

Baffled, Romford carried on watching the spectacle.

The Family Brød's performance was far too short or far too long, depending on the way you looked at it. So far as Romford was concerned, he was glad when it was finally over: sounds, patterns and the inevitable bursts of applause made him feel as if someone had been using his head as a punchbag. Rather like when Mrs. Romford put Wagner on the CD player.

There was a short interval, during which they drank warm orange squash from Mrs. Romford's thermos and ate their sandwiches, and then the lights dimmed once again.

If the tension had been palpable before the Family Brød's performance, now it was as if you could have grabbed handfuls of it from the air and used it for chewing gum. Romford's knuckles whitened around his pipestem. Mrs. Romford dropped her crême caramel and it lay unnoticed at her feet. The silence was like an encaged beast, pacing the confines of its hated cell, until . . .

Blue lightning coruscated over the audience's heads and a blast of thunder shook the floor. One moment the stage curtain was there; the next it was replaced by a blaze of brilliant illumination that almost blinded Romford. A flock of snow-white doves appeared from nowhere and circled cacophonously around the ceiling. Somewhere in the midst of the melee there was a haunting strain of music that could have been Egyptian, could have been Korean, could have been just the tape had stretched.

There was a sudden puff of green smoke in the middle of the stage, and out of it stepped the cadaverously imposing figure of The Mighty Thrombosis. He threw his arms wide as if to welcome himself to the proceedings; the inside of his full-length cloak was golden with, embroidered on it, white doves in representation of those that still wheeled and whirled above.

"Greetings from the world of the unknown," the figure intoned. "People will tell you that what you see tonight is mere trickery, but in truth it is a lifting of a veil – the veil that lies between our humdrum lives and the magical kingdom, where truth is falsehood and falsehood truth."

As if to prove the point, he pulled out a cauliflower from behind his ear.

The audience gasped.

Smiling and nodding briefly in acknowledgement, the Mighty Thrombosis proceeded to yank a string of the flags of all nations from behind the other.

The applause was deafening.

The Mighty Thrombosis bowed more deeply this time, then looked to his left, focusing the audience's attention on the emergence from the wings of a statuesque blonde wearing about three carats of gold and very little else. She too bowed, her unbound hair falling in front of her like a bolt of yellow gauze.

And then the serious magic began. Packs of cards turned into flocks of wrens; baseball bats turned, mid-juggle, into spitting kangaroos; streamers turned into bunches of chrysanthemums complete with little plastic tags displaying the watering instructions. (At this point Romford checked his pipe nervously to make sure it hadn't turned into anything.) A casket with the beautiful assistant gagged and padlocked inside it was pierced by swords, cut in half with a chainsaw and finally incinerated using a flamethrower, and yet she stepped out of the ashes unscathed. The Mighty Thrombosis himself took an iron bar that had been tested for authenticity by half a dozen randomly selected beefy members of the audience and bent it easily into a passable imitation of his own signature. A bucket of water was covered with a red cloth and then, when the cloth was removed, was seen to have become a perfect representation in miniature of the Niagara Falls – whose waters continued to flow despite the fact that there was no visible water supply.

After an hour or more The Mighty Thrombosis spoke again, for the first time since his brief introduction.

"And now, ladies and gentleman . . . and others" – there was a little ripple of tamed laughter – "for the finale to my act. Many false magicians the world over have perfected the illusion of pulling a rabbit from a top hat, but I – I, The Mighty Thrombosis – am the only one to use genuine magic to perform the same feat . . . and with, not a rabbit, but a live tyrannosaurus rex!"

There was a roll of drums and the luscious assistant, bearing a perfectly ordinary-seeming black opera hat, insinuated herself across the stage by dint of muscles that Romford had never even known existed.

The Mighty Thrombosis took the hat with a grave little nod of thanks and, using both hands, held it aloft.

Silence fell.

He turned it this way and that, showing the entirety of his audience that it was indeed empty. He flipped open its lid so that they could see right through it. He pressed it flat and then straightened it out again. He pulled a revolver from his trouser pocket and fired a couple of shots through it. There could be no doubt about it: the thing was as empty as an Aberdeen street on a flag day.

Again the drums rolled as with his right hand he held the hat out in front of him, so that the audience could see it was well clear of his body. With his free hand he waved a blue-spotted handkerchief so that everyone could see that it, too, was guileless. Next he lowered the handkerchief down over the upturned aperture of the hat.

Pause.

Then, every eye glued on his hand, he slowly drew away the handkerchief.

The assistant simpered but was ignored.

Dragging out the seconds for dramatic effect, The Mighty Thrombosis reached into the hat and produced . . .

. . . a severed hand.

Someone screamed. Blood dripped. The gorgeous assistant collapsed pneumatically, unnoticed by all save Romford, who was sitting forward in his seat, staring intently.

The Mighty Thrombosis himself looked utterly aghast. "This . . . this was not . . . intended to happen . . ." he stuttered in an Essex accent, quite unlike the voice he had earlier projected.

Then the curtains closed swiftly.

It was the first orthodox event since the start of the wonder show.

# # #

"I was on my mobile phone immediately, as you can guess," said Romford, looking pointedly at his empty glass. Obediently I picked it up, went to the bar and replenished it with Old Peculier. Once we were settled again he looked up at me; his hands were clenching and unclenching.

"Sergeant Mutton had lads there within seconds – the Hall's just round the corner from the nick, as you know. Even before they'd got there I'd had the staff seal the whole place up. A mouse could have got out of there without our knowing about it, but not a very fat mouse."

He took a ruminative gulp.

"The Mighty Thrombosis – Albert MacGregor as he really is – was still standing on the stage looking at the thing when we got him," he continued. "Hadn't even gone to help his assistant up off the floor – Missus R had to do that."

"Whose hand was it?" I said.

"That was, of course, a problem – but not such a problem as we'd have thought it might be." Another gulp. "Thrombosis – MacGregor – told us hisself. There was a ring on its finger that he recognized: made out of cast bronze and showing a dragon eating its own tail."

"Yes?"

"He said he'd recognize that ring anywhere, and his wife – his assistant – confirmed it as soon as she was feeling properly herself again."

"And?"

"The hand was that of The Even Mightier Spongini – a.k.a. Gerald Dukes – the greatest of all MacGregor's rivals. There was some palaver in the upper – inner, I s'pose – echelons of the Magic Circle five years back, you may have read about it in the newspapers, MacGregor claiming Dukes was stealing the secrets of his tricks, in particular something called The Collapsible Hippogryph, you know the sort of thing. The two men hated each other's guts. And there was more to it than that."

"Oh?"

"Dukes was messing around with MacGregor's wife, Zelda. Common knowledge backstage, we was told. That was what the real argument was about – not the tricks, stolen or otherwise."

This time it was me gulping down beer. From what Romford had been telling me, it seemed an open-and-shut case: Thrombosis had offed Spongini and was creating an elaborate smokescreen to muddle up the coppers.

"But all they did was identify the ring," I said, just for something to say. "That doesn't mean it was Spongini's hand the ring was actually on, does it?"

Romford looked at me in disgust. "We thought of that. Took fingerprints. Faxed 'em to the Yard. Asked 'em if they were Dukes's. Answer came back within the hour. They were Dukes's, all right. No doubt about it. He was on file because of a bit of pot twenty years ago when he was young and foolish."

He looked down at his flexing hands, then up again.

"And all this time, mark you," he said, "we had the whole place locked up tighter than a nun's . . . well, you get the drift. We had trained men searching it from top to bottom, rafters to basement. Because you see there was something missing . . ."

"A body," I said. Even if I hadn't known this already – that empty hopper – it'd have been pretty obvious.

"Precisely. Or even a man with one hand missing, 'cept people tend to make a hell of a lot of a fuss if someone chops a hand off of them, you know. And that hand was fresh – it was still bleeding when MacGregor hoicked it out of the hat. So it was really a body we was after. A corpse. A stiff. Anything. But not a whisper."

"You interviewed everyone, I assume?"

"Everyone. Started with the Finns – they're from Belfast, by the way, Finns ain't what they used to be, I said to Sergeant Mutton – and worked our way on downwards. Me and Mutton tackled all the interviewing ourselves, we did. Had to let them go in the end, every last one of them. No one knew nothing. Well, maybe . . ."

"There's a lot of room in that ‘maybe,' my friend."

"Well" – he let the word hang for a few moments, shifting his gaze towards where two drunks were trying to get it together to score a game of darts – "maybe, on reflecting on it, there was something. Zelda."

"The Mighty Thrombosis's wife?"

"'Xactly. The lady herself. She seemed to be in shock – seemed to be – so it was no picnic trying to get much sense out of her, but the missus told me afterwards over the cocoa that Zelda appeared a deal less disorientated than you'd have expected when she came out of her faint. If it was a faint."

"So you think she might have known something about it? Might have been warned it was going to happen?"

"Yes. Except that only makes matters worse. 'Cause Dukes was her hanky-panky merchant. So if she'd known about things aforehand she'd have done her best to stop 'em, and if she didn't know about them then she'd have been more in shock, not less."

"Maybe she'd fallen out with him? You know, when the slap and tickle has to stop sort of thing?"

"She said she hadn't. She was totally open about the whole affair, said her husband was" – Romford's eyes glazed briefly, as if he were reading from invisible notes – "was a ‘right bastard, brute and utter plonker, used to play practical jokes on me when he'd got a few inside him, which was most of the time, wish it was his head came out of that hat, not Gerry's hand, no wonder I looked elsewhere for virile masculine affections, officer, and found them in the brawny arms of my svelte-thewed lover.'" He looked glum. "Or words to that effect. Quite a lot of 'em."

"Which means that the only person you know about with a motive to kill Dukes was The Mighty Thrombosis? The whole business with the severed hand was just a smokescreen, a bluff? The only person who could have got the hand into the hat was MacGregor himself?"

"'Sright." Romford looked gloomier than ever. I wondered how many pints he'd sunk before I'd got to the Heart & Sickle. "So we did the only thing we could do."

"Took him into custody?"

"Yup."

"For further questioning?"

"Yup."

"And he's not talking." This time it wasn't a question.

"Yup. And you know . . ." His voice trailed off on a meditative note.

"Yes?"

He rallied. "You know, I think the reason he's not talking is that he hasn't got anything to tell us. Unless he's the best actor in the world – and you never can tell with these stage johnnies, of course – he's every bit as mystified as the rest of us." Romford suddenly grinned, wearily. "Seems a bit ironical, if you get what I mean: the mystifier mystified, the conjurer out-conjured, the prestidigitator presti . . . um. Oh, hell, anyway."

"What about Mrs. Thrombosis? MacGregor, I mean."

"The pheromone-packed wife? Tell you, Victor, she's got—"

"Zelda."

"—like bleeding prizewinning marrows, and an—"

"The assistant."

"—on her that'd give even Billy Graham a—"

"Get back to the point, Romford."

He shook his head, as if dazed, but soon his eyes refocused. "Ah, yes, current whereabouts of the suspect's missus. Yes." He wiped his sleeve across his mouth. "Well, we had to let her go, hadn't we? Nothing to keep her in for. No way we could book her as an accessory or anything. 'Sides, the way young Mutton was looking at her I reckoned putting her in the cells overnight might mean the end of things between him and his Sabrina."

"Or you and the missus?" I said quietly.

He flushed angrily and snorted. "Never any question of that, my lad," he said emphatically. "I've had me chances, I can tell you, but me and her we're just like lickety-split when it comes to malarking on the side, so it's none of your how's your father 'sfar as I'm concerned."

"Leaving that aside, where is she?" I persisted.

"I imagine she's still at the Old Bull Hotel," he said, clearly glad to change the subject. "That's where the concert party was booked in – her and him and the bloody Irish Finns. Finns ain't what they—"

"You said that."

"Yes, I did. How'd you know? To Sergeant Mutton, in point of fact . . ."

The beer was beginning to take its toll. Most of the people who live and work in Cadaver-in-the-Offing flinch if I as much as go near them, but Romford didn't react at all when I put my hand over his and leaned forward to look him close-up in the eyes.

"I'm willing to bet you a month's salary that you won't find her in the Old Bull," I hissed. "You ask me, she's hopped it. Her and The Even Mightier Spongini together, is my guess."

"You think he's alive?"

"I know he's alive. Unless he got run over by a car or gored by an escaped bull afterwards, he's as alive as you or me. Probably more alive than you, right now."

"But that doesn't make sense! If he'd a been there we'd have found him. I tell you, we searched the whole of St Boniface's Church Hall until there wasn't anything left to search. And no one could have got out of there – we'd got it sealed off tighter'n a nun's—"

"He walked out in full view of your officers," I said.

"Impossible! We interviewed every single member of the audience! I even had Sergeant Mutton interview the Missus, just in case there was charges of favoritism afterwards. She didn't like that much, but the ibuprofen's doing wonders."

"You interviewed all the stage staff as well?"

"Course."

"My friend," I said, standing up and preparing to leave, "it's not my job to solve your cases for you. I'm not a character, like everyone else in Cadaver-in-the-Offing, so I can't even give you useful leads. All I am is the sweeper-upper – dirty job but somebody's got to do it, you know the drill. But what I will do, what I'm allowed to do, is offer you a hint that might prove useful to your life in general."

"Wossat?" he slurred. He'd drunk enough beer to be reaching the point of tearfulness.

"I can remind you, my friend," I said, patting the back of his hand, "of the importance of temperance."

# # #

It was quite late that evening when Romford, all traces of the beer gone from his voice, phoned me. He didn't waste any time in telling me what I already knew.

"Temperance," he said.

"Yes. And a very good thing it is."

"Makes a man think of an old Sixties/Seventies pop group, it does."

"That's what it made me think of, too." I blew on my fingernails.

"They was called the Temperance Seven. But the great gimmick about the name was that there was actually nine of 'em."

"Yes."

"The Family Brød got the nickname ‘The Seven Deadly Finns' because someone liked the pun, and they kept it – used it in their advertisements – on the basis it made folk remember them."

I breathed out smugly. "When you were describing their performance to me, I realized that in fact there were only six of them. Three on the bottom row of the pyramid, two on their shoulders, and one more on the top – that makes six, not seven."

"And me a trained observer. I just never noticed it meself. Doubt you would of, either, if you'd been there. It was a hell of an act. Apart from that bit at the beginning, when the curtains opened, I couldn't rightly have told you how many of the buggers there were – it was just arms and legs and other bits everywhere. One of those cases where it's easier to see something if you're not an eye witness."

I grunted agreement. Whoever said seeing is believing was talking out of his elbow.

"We weren't much interested in those bloody Irish Finns, so Mutton just interviewed 'em in a bunch. ‘Seven Deadly Finns,' he was told, so he made sure there was seven of 'em and let 'em go. Never thought anything of it, until I asked him after I left the pub, but, yes, a couple of 'em kept their hands in their pockets the whole time."

"Except that one of them, we now know, was a hand short."

"Precisement, as the Frogs say."

"Where did you catch up with Spongini . . . Dukes?"

"At the Old Bull Hotel, done his packing and sitting on the suitcase, all neat and ready to do a runner from the country with Zelda tonight, after dark. It was him and her planned the whole thing. She cut off his hand for him while The Mighty Thrombosis was doing all his puffs of smoke and things, then they cauterized his wrist on the backstage stove. They'd already coldbloodedly killed, cooked and eaten the tyrannosaur. She was the one got the hand into the top hat – stupid of me to think that MacGregor would be the one to set up his own props. The idea was to make old Thrombosis look bad in our eyes for just long enough that we'd keep him in the nick until safely after the young lovers had fled the coop. The Finns were in on it as well, of course – Zelda and Dukes ain't the only folks on the circuit who can't stand The Mighty Thrombosis: he's made enemies all over the place."

Romford paused, then: "Here! How did you know we found him?"

"I sneaked an extra look in the hoppers just now."

"Oh, um, yes, well, Dave Knuckle was still in town for Smack My Butt, Babe so I took him along with me to help make the arrest. And he, er, got a bit carried away during the interrogation . . ."

Ho hum. After all this time, I could read the marks of Knuckle's knuckles like an open book, and this particular book hadn't been in his handwriting. Romford had obviously been very angry indeed: the worst he could have charged Spongini with was conspiring to waste police time, or something – same as Zelda, same as the Family Brød. A man can do what he wants to with his own hand. But I let it pass.

"Dukes must have loved Zelda very much indeed," I said ruefully.

"A lot more than she loved him," Romford said forcefully. "He told us before he . . . um, before Knuckle got out of hand, as it were . . . told us that she'd been due back at the hotel to pick him up a couple of hours before we got there, and he was beginning to think she wasn't coming for him after all. So we hung about another couple of hours after that, and still no sign of her. Reckon she's scarpered – double-crossed him, got rid of both the men in her life in one swell foop" – hm, still a trace of the day's drinking – "and then scarpered over the hills and far away. I've put an alert out to the ports and airports, but I think we've missed her. And no one's going to issue an extradition order for what she's done – not for this. Bloody women."

We said a few more things on that subject before he finally put the phone down. I noticed he hadn't at any point said thanks to me for sorting his case out for him.

So I didn't feel at all guilty about not telling him the rest of it – not that I would have, anyway.

"Is he convinced?" said Zelda behind me just as I lowered the receiver.

"Yes. Case closed, darling. He's satisfied – is washing his hands of the whole thing." I turned to kiss her.

"Poor Gerry," she said. "Poor, foolish Gerry."

She'd liked Spongini well enough, but he'd been yesterday's news for quite a while now . . . ever since I'd met her the last time The Mighty Thrombosis had been doing a gig in Cadaver-in-the-Offing, in fact, during the course of Miss Grimthorpe's The Kat who Killed the Konjurers. I was sorry that he'd died, but – hell – he'd be as good as new again in a few days. The plan had been that Romford caught up with him, all right, then took him into custody for a couple of days until he, too, proved to be only a minor player in the game. Meanwhile, of course, Zelda wasn't to flee the country but to come to the one place nobody in Cadaver-in-the-Offing would ever dream of looking.

The cottage of the man they all walk around as if he were a dog turd on the pavement. We could live here together all the rest of our lives, if we wanted to, and no one would ever know. In a few years' time, though, I reckon we'll up sticks and go somewhere else – I mean, my job has its advantages, but I've always dreamt of trying out my chances in the movies . . .

So I take Zelda in my arms. We're free at last, and there's a traditional way of celebrating things like this.

Gigglings.

Snoggings.

Strokings.

Kissings.

Gropings.

Fondlings.

Fumblings.

Pretty soon:

Unzippings.

"Oo, Victor," she says. "Oo."

Hands quicker than the eye, that's me.

'A Case of Four Fingers' was first published in The Mammoth Book of Awesome Comic Fantasy, edited by Mike Ashley; the slightly revised version reproduced here is from the collection Take No Prisoners (Willowgate Press, July 1 2004). Copyright © John Grant 2001, 2004.

Copies of Take No Prisoners are available from the usual online booksellers and from http://www.hometown.aol.com/thogatthog/specialoffers3.html.