The Da-Da-De-Da-Da Code (21 page)

‘I made the mess, I’ll clean it up,’ said Jonny.

‘Precisely,’ said his mum.

‘Don’t,’ said Mr Giggles.

‘Don’t be silly,’ said Jonny.

‘What?’ said his mum.

Jonny found the dustpan and brush and took to dustpan and brushing. ‘Nothing,’ he said.

‘Stick it in the pedal bin,’ said Mr Giggles.

‘The pedal bin is
always
full,’ said Jonny. ‘Pedal bins are
always
full. The only time they’re empty is when you buy them.’

‘Why are you saying this?’ asked Jonny’s mum, trying in vain to untangle her legs.

‘Sorry,’ said Jonny. ‘I’ll put all these swept-up cornflakes in the dustbin.’

‘Don’t you do it,’ said Mr Giggles. ‘Stick up for yourself, you little wus.’

‘Little wus?’

‘Who are you calling a marsupial?’ asked Jonny’s mum.

‘No one, not me,’ said Jonny, and he vacated the kitchen.

‘Don’t do it!’ said Mr Giggles.

Jonny was in the alleyway now, the one that ran down the side of the house. The one with the dustbin in it.

‘Toss it to the four winds,’ said Mr Giggles. ‘Let the squirrels eat it.’

‘I am reliably informed,’ said Jonny, ‘that squirrels are just rats with good PR’

‘You’ll probably get sued for that,’ said Mr Giggles. ‘Let’s go to the mall and play “Poo, You’re a Smelly One” with the old folk.’

‘Oh, behave yourself.’

And Jonny lifted the dustbin lid.

And Jonny beheld.

And Jonny fell back.

And Jonny cried, ‘Aaaaaaagh!’

And Jonny nearly fainted.

And what was the cause of this how-do-you-do?

This all-falling-back and near-fainting?

Why, ’twas the sight of what lay within

The bin, and it weren’t no oil painting.

What?

Jonny Hooker peered into the dustbin’s innards, cast aside the lid and delved in. There was a park ranger’s uniform, complete with a cap lined with tinfoil. There was a laptop, a slim metal cylinder that appeared to be a whistle of some kind and a lot of what looked to be used Elastoplast dressings.

‘Plague, plague!’ cried Mr Giggles. Loudly and somehow into both of Jonny’s ears at the same time. ‘Don’t touch those dirty things – you’ll get polluted. You’ll get the lurgy.’

‘I think not.’ And Jonny Hooker snatched up the cap and rammed it onto his head.

And back in a great tsunami wave thoughts came crashing back, breaking over damns and breakwaters, sea defences and sandbags. The memories of the days gone before. Of all that had gone before and all that had happened to Jonny.

And, ‘Ow!’ cried Jonny, clutching at this cap.

‘You silly boy,’ said Mr Giggles.

‘
Silly boy?
’

‘I did it for
you
. To save
you
. To spare you.’

‘You tricked me.’ Jonny was pulling out the park ranger’s uniform. He had torn off his dressing gown and was now standing all nude in the alleyway. ‘Somehow you got me to take off this cap with the tinfoil lining. And then what? How was it done? The Air
Loom Gang beaming messages into my unprotected head? Wiping my memory? That’s what happened, isn’t it?’

‘I did it for
you
.’

‘I hate you,’ said Jonny. ‘I really hate you.’

‘I did it for you. To keep you out of danger.’

Jonny’s head was all banging about.

He scrambled his way into the trousers, put two legs down the same leg hole and fell all down on his sorry naked arse.

‘See what I mean?’ Mr Giggles jigged about on his furry feet. ‘You fall over and hurt yourself. You’re better off with me looking after you. Caring for you. Seeing that you come to no harm.’

‘See this hat?’ said Jonny, floundering about yet pointing to his cap with unerring accuracy. ‘
This
is going to stay upon my head, come what may, for as long as it takes.’

‘As long as it takes to do
what
?’

‘The talks!’ cried Jonny, making it to his knees and doing up his uniform trousers. ‘The
secret
talks in the Big House at Gunnersbury Park. The
secret
talks that could determine whether the world lives or dies.’

‘Oh, those,’ said Mr Giggles.

‘Yes, those,’ said Jonny, and he fished the park ranger’s jacket from the dustbin.

‘Keep out of that, that’s my advice.’

Jonny glared daggers at Mr Giggles. ‘I don’t care about your advice,’ he told the jigging Monkey Boy. ‘I know enough now to know what must be done. Those secret talks, amongst the controllers, the secret council that really controls the world – I know that there are others who would control them: the Air Loom Gang.’

‘Huh,’ went Mr Giggles.

‘Not “huh”, no!’ Jonny fished into the jacket pocket and drew out the brass key. The brass key with the date of 1790 upon it and the words ACME AIR LOOM COMPANY also.

‘Real,’ said Jonny. ‘All real. Not some figment of my imagination.’

‘Like me?’ said Mr G.

‘I don’t know what you are.’ Jonny Hooker was now fully uniformed. ‘I don’t know what you are and I do not care. I
do
now
know what my purpose in life is: it is for me to ensure that the secret talks go ahead unmolested.’

‘They might well still lead to us all getting blown up.’

‘I think not,’ said Jonny, taking up the laptop and examining it. ‘James Crawford’s laptop, with the recording of Robert Johnson’s thirtieth composition upon it. When you had me bunging all this in the dustbin – and how did you do that, by the way? While I was drunk, I suppose, easy meat then, eh? “Take off your cap and sling it away, Jonny boy, it’s ruining your hair.” I can just imagine. Anyway, when you made me bung all this in the dustbin, you should have had me smash up this laptop. Very careless of you, there.’

‘Hm,’ went Mr Giggles. ‘You could have had your breakfast
without
spilling the cornflakes. Then all would have been well.’

‘All
will
be well,’ said Jonny, tucking the laptop into the poacher’s pocket of the park ranger’s jacket, ‘when I have dealt with everything.’

‘
You?
’ went Mr Giggles. ‘
You?
You’re Jonny Hooker, no-mark loser. Who do you think you are? Jonny Hooker, saviour of Mankind? You’re not, you’re no one – stay out of it, it has nothing to do with you.’

‘Oh,’ said Jonny. ‘Oh.’

‘I didn’t mean it,’ said Mr Giggles. ‘It just slipped out, sorry.’

‘You meant it.’ Jonny was now sticking the used Elastoplasts back onto his face.

‘No, please don’t do
that
. That’s disgusting. That looks really naff.’

‘I don’t want to be recognised. I’m working undercover – Jonny Hooker, secret agent.’

Mr Giggles groaned.

‘And I’m not talking to
you
.’

‘I only did it to protect you. I don’t want any harm to come to you. It’s all got too dangerous. Too many people have died.’

‘Well, I
am
involved. And I’m staying involved.’

‘So what do you think you can do?’

‘Thwart the plans of the Air Loom Gang.’

‘There is no Air Loom Gang. Get real, Jonny, please.’

‘I have the key.’ Jonny flourished it. ‘And the whistle.’ Jonny flourished this also. ‘Although I don’t as yet know the significance
of the whistle. But these items are all the proof I need. The Gang exists and they will try to influence the speakers at the secret talks. And I will thwart their evil schemes. This is my purpose. This I now know is what my life is for. The reason for my being, my existence. I will wage war upon the forces of evil that seek to control, indeed possibly even to annihilate, Mankind. War, I say, and I alone will wage it.’

‘Get a grip, buddy boy.’

‘And don’t you “Buddy Boy” me!’

‘Well, will you listen to yourself. You’re not James Bond, you’re Jonny Hooker, nice chap really, but a little misguided. Go back inside, have breakfast, read the Sunday papers, go down to the pub and have a pint at lunchtime and—’

‘Pint?’ said Jonny. ‘At the Middle Man?’ said Jonny.

‘Yes, why not?’

‘Because I understood from you that I was barred from there for knobbing O’Fagin’s wife.’

‘Ah,’ said Mr Giggles. ‘Well—’

‘And I now recall that she ran off with a traveller in tobaccos,’ said Jonny. ‘You wanted to keep me away from there because you knew that O’Fagin would say stuff to me that might make me remember what had happened over the last few days.’

‘Not a bit of it,’ said Mr Giggles. Crossing his heart and hoping not to die.

‘And this cap—’ Jonny pointed to the item in question. ‘—This cap and its foil lining are
all
the proof that
I
need. With it on, I remember everything.’

‘And with it off?’ Mr Giggles mimed the removal of Jonny’s unfetching headwear.

‘No way,’ said Jonny. ‘It’s staying
on
. It blocks out the Air Loom broadcasts that are directed at my head.
I
know that and
you
know that.’

‘I know no such thing.’

‘I’m not talking to you any more,’ said Jonny. ‘I am going to get this job jobbed all by myself.’

‘Paul might like to help,’ said Mr Giggles, ‘if you’re adamant.’

‘I’ll do it on my own. I will endanger no one else’s life.’

‘You’ll never get back in the park, Jonny boy. It’s ringed around
by policemen with big weapons. They’ve dug landmines into the pitch-and-putt and everything.’

‘And how would you know
that
?’

‘I might be guessing,’ Mr Giggles suggested.

‘Yes, you might.’ Once assured that there was nothing else pertinent lurking around in the dustbin, Jonny replaced its lid.

‘So,’ said Mr Giggles. ‘Breakfast, the papers, then a pint.’

‘No,’ said Jonny Hooker, girding his loins as had the biblical heroes of old. ‘It’s war, this is, and war it be, and I am the chosen warrior.’

Mr Giggles gave another groan.

‘War!’ cried Jonny Hooker.

Inspector Westlake awoke from a curious dream.

It was a musical dream. Which was to say that there
was
some music involved. Within this dream, the inspector found himself to be no longer an inspector. Rather he was an itinerant musician who travelled from town to town, playing in pubs and town squares. A kind of wandering troubadour, with his little banjolele and a penchant for singing the blues.

And in this dream he had set up his amp and his speaker in The Middle Man’s saloon bar, upon the small stage where bands were wont to play. And having done the setting up thereof, he had made away to the gents, caught short, as it were, to take a leak before he began his performance.

And if indeed it was not odd that he dreamed himself a musician, for in truth he had always harboured a desire to sing the blues, it
was
odd indeed, when his peeing was done and he took himself over to the washbasin to rinse his hands and beheld his reflection in the mirror above it.

For the reflection of a young black man gazed thoughtfully back at him. And the inspector, staring thoughtfully himself, and apparently without surprise, recognised at once that this young man was the blues legend known as Robert Johnson.

And then he found that someone was tinkering with his trousers and suddenly awoke to behold the face of Mrs Corbett smiling from the pillow next to his. With her fingers going fiddle-fiddle-fiddle.

‘Well, da-da-de-da-da,’ said the inspector, ‘and pardon me, please, madam. It would appear that I have walked in my sleep and settled myself down in the wrong bed upon my return.’

‘Well, da-da-de-da-da right back atcha!’ purred the lady of the house. ‘That’s a new excuse, I do declare.’

And she gave a certain part of the inspector’s anatomy a playful tweak.

‘Oooh,’ went Inspector Westlake. And then, ‘Damn,’ as memories returned to him in a hop, a leap and a great big jump.’

Not too far away from the inspector, in a storeroom beneath the Big House at Gunnersbury Park, a transperambulation of magnetic flux angled through the ether from the glass conducting cylinders atop the Air Loom, dispatched by the keyboard manipulation of the Glove Woman. This flux, attuned to the magnetic signature unique to Inspector Westlake, who had been magnetized by a certain boarding house landlady the previous night during a particularly frantic session of that much-loved sexual favourite, ‘Taking Tea with the Parson’, now coalesced into an audiogram within the inspector’s skull, one that effected a selective erasure of his short-term memory. Which, given what he had read, and indeed tried to play upon his little banjolele, from a piece of paper that could be dated to the seventeen nineties and which had thrown him into fear and concern for the future of Mankind, being things of an Apocalyptic nature, generally, was not, in itself, such a bad thing.

But.

Inspector Westlake could remember everything else, which was to say the days previous, in all of their dire entirety.

Every annoyance, every lack of communication, every thwarting of his wishes, every ignominious everything.

They had not been good days for Inspector Westlake.

They had been
difficult
days.

And what had made them so difficult, was the fact that he was quite unable to put his finger on
why
they had been so difficult. But it somehow seemed that no matter what orders he gave regarding the security measures at the park, these orders somehow failed to be carried out.

It was almost as if Thompson of Extra-Special Ops had taken over the running of the entire operation himself and was not allowing Inspector Westlake as much of a foot in the door.

Difficult, it was, and frustrating.

There was certainly no lack of security. The park had been closed to the general public for the weekend, which had itself caused
unparalleled distress to the members of the various sporting fraternities that normally played their matches there. And the men in the black uniforms were, as one might put it,
entrenched
.

Electric fences ringed the park around.

At one-hundred-yard intervals, watchtowers bristling with slightly-beyond-the-present-state-of-the-art weaponry loomed with menace. Frogmen bobbed in the ornamental pond, surface-to-air missiles rising and falling with the ripples. A machine-gun nest nested between the columns of the Doric temple.

There were slit trenches in the Japanese garden.

Once in a while, a squirrel ventured across the pitch-and-putt to be vaporized by a landmine.
^*

Within the Big House, the Gunnersbury Park Museum, the location of the secret talks, several constables came and went, in and out of visibility.

It
was
all
very
impressive.

But it
wasn’t
being done the way Inspector Westlake required it to be done.

His
way.

The men in black from Special Ops spoke into their little face mics and received their orders through tiny earphones embedded in their lugholes. They did
not
respond to the inspector’s orders.

And whenever Inspector Westlake tried to get on the blower to Thompson, Thompson, it seemed, was unavailable for comment.

Inspector Westlake knotted his wounded fists and fumed in the landlady’s bed.

‘I
do
like a man who’s
intense
,’ cooed Mrs Corbett. ‘As it’s Sunday morning, how about getting a little adventurous? More tea, vicar, as it were.’

‘Unhand me,
madam
!’ Inspector Westlake rose from the bed. Then returned to it in haste, still handed. ‘I have things to do, madam!’ he further protested. ‘Matters of national, indeed global, impact.’

‘As James Bond once said,’ said the lady of the house, ‘best not to go off half-cocked.’

Inspector Westlake ground his teeth, checked his wristwatch,
stroked at his chin and then said, ‘I suppose there’s always time to “Take Tea”.’

Mrs Corbett grinned the kind of grin that one generally associates with roadkill. ‘The
full
Parson,’ she whispered in Inspector Westlake’s ear.

‘Whisper to me, people,’ came the voice of Thompson through many a tiny earphone into many a lughole.

‘Whisper?’ went Constable Cartwright, twiddling at his invisibility controls and somewhat surprising himself to discover that whilst his upper body had regained visibility, his legs were nowhere to be seen.

‘It’s a security thing,’ whispered Constable Cassidy, ‘so we don’t appear to be talking to ourselves.’

‘
I
knew that,’ said Constable Cartwright. ‘I am in charge, after all.’

‘Why don’t you have any legs?’ asked Constable Rogers.

‘And where’s your head gone, Rogers?’ asked Constable Milky Bar Kid.

‘By the numbers,’ came the voice of Thompson. ‘Sound off.’

And all over the park, and all through the Big House, blackly clad Special Ops fellows, a few apparently lacking for bits and pieces, sounded off.

‘I want this whole thing done by the numbers,’ Thompson repeated. ‘I want nothing –
nothing –
to go wrong.’

‘Sir,’ said Constable Cartwright, ‘might I just ask—’

‘Good question, Constable. Now carry on.’

‘A right carry-on and no mistake,’ said Constable Paul to Constable Justice. These constables wore the blue, and Paul envied those in the black. These constables in blue were on double time as it was Sunday, but had only got as far as the Gunnersbury Park car park before being halted by those constables in the black and told that they could go no further.

‘Are you tooled-up?’ asked Constable Justice.

‘Eh?’ said Constable Paul.

‘Are you packing heat? Are you carrying an unequaliser?’

‘Surely it’s an
equaliser
,’ said Constable Paul.

‘Not if you’re packing what I’m packing.’

‘Ah,’ said Constable Paul.

‘I say we should blast our way in.’

‘Right,’ said Constable Paul. ‘Yet strange as it may appear to you, I veer towards precisely the opposite view.’

‘Does that involve any weaponry?’

‘No,’ said Paul. ‘It involves you and me making away to whatever is left of The Middle Man for an early Sunday lunchtime pint. We’re on double time here and if these sods won’t let us into the park, let’s go and guard the pub instead.’

‘Do you think there might be someone at the pub who needs shooting?’ asked Constable Justice.

‘Bound to be,’ said Constable Paul, reversing Inspector Westlake’s car out of the car park, into the road, across the path of oncoming traffic and then slowly, but slowly, cruising it off to the pub.

‘There are times,’ said he, to Constable Justice, ‘when I really do love being a policeman.’

‘Do you love your Order and do you love your country?’ Candles burned in a secret place, a dark and deep such place.

Heads went nod in the candlelight, heads both quaint and odd. A dusty periwig was to be seen, and an antique female coiffure.

‘And are we loyal to our calling, we of the Secret Order that is beyond the secretest of all other Secret Orders?’

‘We are loyal,’ went those addressed. A gloved hand or two were raised.

‘I feel,’ said the speaker, ‘that today the triumph will be ours. But not ours per se, you understand.’ And mumble-mumble-mumble went the assembled company. ‘But for the good of all, the greater good.’

And the man who spoke these words stepped out from the shadows and into the wan light cast by the candles’ flames. A long and gaunt tall figure was this, in a black frocked coat, with a high-collared shirt and a flourish of frills and fancies, and a buckled shoe and a stockinged calf and rings that finger-twinkled.

And this fellow’s cheekbones were angled and sharp, and his eyes deep-set and all a-glitter. And his beard, long and black, wore ribbons of silk and hid the wry smile on his lips.

‘Oh, my brethren,’ intoned this body, ‘my brothers, and sisters,
too,’ and he offered a bow to the ladies. ‘We of the Order beyond all Secret Orders have been summoned from our time once again, brought here to perform our duty. Oh, how we shall triumph. Oh, how we shall bring our pneumatic arts to a pretty perfection.’

‘So shall that be, my brother,’ quoth a fellow grey of hair and known as Jack the Schoolmaster, though dressed as a ringmaster, he. ‘So we shall and our souls shall be blessed for it.’

‘Blessed for it, yes.’ The body in black with the great black beard cackled laughter.

As one will do when one is a villain.

‘Yes!’ cried he, affecting a pose that was noble and arrogant both. ‘Today we do as we have done before. We set the world to rights. We do the doings and make it so, for such is what we do.’

Heads here and there nodded in mostly darkness.

‘We
will
succeed.’ And he of the long black beard laughed. ‘Or my name is not Count Otto Black. And we are not the Air Loom Gang.’

Golly gosh.