The Most Amazing Man Who Ever Lived

  ‘What?’ This wasn’t how Mr Rodway had planned things to be. His thoughts had been moving towards the applied blackmail of Thelma and Louise. Payoffs of a sexual nature had featured in his projected evening curriculum.

  Rune gazed hard at Mr Rodway. Through Mr Rodway.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mr Rodway, rising from his chair. ‘Well, I’ll keep in touch. Mr Craik will fill you in on all the details. Yes. Goodbye then.’

  And, with that said, off he jolly well went. At the trot.

  ‘Isn’t this nice?’ said Hugo Rune, pouring further champagne.

  Thelma and Louise managed very thin smiles.

  The eyes of Mr Craik looked wilder than ever.

  And growing ever nearer, although not heard of for some time, the dead boy with the Beatle cut streaked on through the cosmos.

  ‘So,’ said Rune. ‘I would say “isn’t this pleasant”, but facetiousness is not one of my failings. What exactly are you two young women up to?’

  ‘I, er,’ Louise clamped her jaws. The compulsion to answer this man’s questions with only the truth was almost a physical thing.

  ‘Come on now,’ said Hugo Rune. ‘Certainly I am possessed of major charisma, but your eyes have scarcely left my person since I entered the room. And I feel that you overheard every word of my conversation with dear Chunky.’

  The deadly eyes turned upon Mr Craik. ‘What are your thoughts concerning this?’

  ‘I? Oh?’ Mr Craik’s wild eyes crossed and he fainted dead away, face down into his bowl of Brown Windsor.

  ‘Hm,’ said Rune.

  ‘Scuze me,’ said Lola, limping up to the table. ‘But d’ya wanna sign fer this?’

  ‘What is it?’ Rune took the little chitty from the manicured fingers.

  ‘It’s yer bill for the champagne wot’s juss bin d’livered to yer room.’

  ‘And who ordered this?’

  ‘Well yew did, dincha? The waiter said yore little kiddie was waitin’ outside yer room, so ‘e let ‘im in.’

  ‘What?’ Rune rose to his impressive height and glared upon Thelma and Louise. ‘So,’ said he. ‘All things become clear. Villainy is afoot.’

  ‘Yew wan’ me to call security for yer, or somefin?’

  ‘Ah, no,’ said Rune hastily. The mental image of the defunct Mr Showstein, now trussed up and stashed in the wardrobe, filled an area of Rune’s brain that was not reserved for genius. ‘I shall deal with this. Mr Craik.’

  ‘Clunk!’ went Mr Craik’s chin on the table, as Rune kicked his chair from under him. And ‘Clonk!’ went the back of his head on the floor (cushioned from CRACK! by the rich pile of the swirly-whirly carpet tiles).

  ‘Oh my God! Aaaaagh!’ Mr Craik awoke with a start. Started up in a fluster and flustered about in a panic. Louise helped him back onto his chair.

  ‘Follow me,’ cried Rune, marching from the dining-suite.

  ‘He meant you!’ agreed Thelma and Louise, as Mr Craik sat wondering which direction panic should now take him.

  ‘Yes, master, coming.’ Up and stumble and off.

  ‘Time we were off.’ Thelma rose to run.

  ‘Are we just going to leave them to get caught?’

  ‘No, we’ll phone up to Rune’s room from reception to warn them he’s coming.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Then we get away. At the hurry-up.’

  ‘I’m with you there.’

  ‘OK, Cornelius. I’m with you now.

  Cornelius made and unmade fists. Flung the made ones up into his hair and beat himself on the top of his head with them. ‘What did I say to you, Tuppe? What did I say to you?’

  ‘You said, “It’s a trap, don’t try to follow me in.”’

  ‘And?’

  Tuppe looked up at Cornelius. The two stood side by side inside the glass cubical. They were so close to the big stack of money that you would have thought they could just have reached out and touched it.

  ‘But it seemed so simple,’ said Tuppe. ‘I didn’t see how you could have got stuck.’

  “What about now?’

  ‘Oh yeah, now I can see how you got stuck. Clever, isn’t it?’

  ‘Ring’ went the telephone. ‘Ring, ring,’ then nothing.

  ‘Three rings,’ said Tuppe.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Cornelius. ‘Another three coming.’

  ‘Ring, ring, ring,’ the telephone replied.

  ‘Rune’s on his way!’ Tuppe began to flap his hands about. ‘We have to get out of here. Do something, Cornelius, do.’

  The lift containing Hugo Rune and Stephen Craik rose at a leisurely pace. Pink mirror tiles on the walls and ceiling. Understated. Classy.

  Mr Craik jiggled nervously from foot to foot.

  ‘Calm yourself,’ said Hugo Rune. ‘He that dares to steal from me, does so at extreme peril.’

  ‘Shouldn’t you have got some help or something?’ mumbled Mr Craik. ‘They might be armed.’

  ‘They?’ asked Rune. ‘Not he?’

  ‘They, he? I don’t know.’

  ‘Oh, but I think you do. It will be my beastly son and his little gnome. Time to teach them both a lesson they won’t forget.’

  ‘Whatever do you mean?’ Mr Craik really didn’t want to know.

  ‘Layabouts and ne’er-do-wells,’ said Rune. ‘Time they took some regular employment. Settled themselves down to a bit of hard work. And I know just the company to take them on.’

  ‘Come on, Cornelius, come on.’

  ‘I can’t come on, Tuppe, if I’d been able to come on I wouldn’t have called for your help.’

  ‘This doesn’t look very good for us, does it?’

  ‘Not very good at all, no.’

  Clunk, click and ding, went the lift. Very much as another in a faraway place had done. And there was the similarity between the lift travellers. The identicality, in fact.

  Hugo Rune issued from the lift with a gliding stride and a lot of green tweed. He moved as in slow motion: jowls a-rippling, ponderous, heavy, purposeful.

  Deadly.

  The room key in his right hand.

  A large handgun in his left.

  Click of key into lock.

  Turn of key.

  Turn of handle.

  Swing open of door.

  Then burst into room. All in slow motion again. The big man dropping down onto one knee, the gun held now in both hands.

  Two startled faces.

  One high, one low.

  Close up of evil black eyes with hideous white pupils.

  Close up of finger puffing trigger.

  Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang.

  Smoke.

  Shattered glass.

  And two new candidates for employment at The Universal Reincarnation Company.

  Rune blew into the barrel of his pistol.

  ‘Gotcha,’ he said.

  29

  ‘Look on the bright side,’ said Jack Bradshaw. ‘You may be dead, but at least now you’re in regular fall-time employment.’

  ‘I’ll just charge you my time for working on the car,’ said the mechanic to the breathless Thelma. ‘There’s no parts involved, because I can’t find anything physically wrong with it.’

  ‘Physically?’ Thelma tore the cheque with the signature she had secretly forged upon it, from the chequebook she had liberated from Mr Craik whilst helping him back onto his chair, and handed it to the mechanic.

  ‘Yeah,’ said he. ‘Everything’s working OK. But there’s something odd about this car. You take it back and good luck to you.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Thelma pulled Mr Craik’s cheque card from the wallet she had also liberated. It had a £500 limit. She handed this to the mechanic. ‘Fill in how much you want,’ said she.

  ‘Thanks. £500 limit. Exactly right.’ The mechanic slipped off into his office to do the dirty deed.

  ‘What now?’ Louise asked.

  ‘Drive back to the Grande, sit outside with the engine running, hope the boys have managed to get out.’
/>
  ‘By now they might have got out and gone.’

  ‘Then they’d come here for the car.’

  The mechanic returned with keys and card. ‘Here you go,’ he said.

  ‘If our boyfriends come to pick us up here by mistake,’ said Thelma, ‘would you tell them we’ll be waiting in the car-park outside the Grande, please.’

  ‘Sure, no sweat. Bye then. And take care.’

  ‘Bye.’ Thelma and Louise climbed into the Cadillac and drove away. The mechanic put on his jacket, locked up his office and went home. In the forecourt of his garage, the headlights of the expensive cars blinked on and their engines began to growl.

  ‘What is this?’ This growl came from the large controller. He stood before the karmascope with the computer screen. His unsavoury eyes flashed along the rows of numbers Claude had punched up onto that screen. A look of terrible rage knotted the corners of his mouth. ‘The little red-haired sod. He’s escaped. He’s shot himself down to Earth. To Murphy!’ The large controller rocked back and forwards on his great heels and roared invective towards the black dome of space that spread all around and about.

  Behind a nearby chugging flywheel, Old Claude tittered to himself. ‘That’s only the first of your worries,’ he whispered. ‘I’m gonna screw you right up, you see if I don’t.’

  ‘Don’t stand around,’ roared Hugo Rune to Mr Craik. ‘Gather up everything. Pack my bags. We are leaving at once.’

  The fire-alarm bells were ringing again. The smoke from Rune’s pistol had set them off.

  ‘Get to it!’ roared Rune. ‘Don’t just stand there like a dithering twit!’

  ‘Yes, sir. At once, sir. But, sir?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Why did you shoot that empty glass showcase to pieces, sir?’

  Cornelius and Tuppe were sitting on the roof.

  Cornelius had a serious shake on.

  ‘He’d have killed us.’ The tall boy’s teeth went chitter-chatter-chitter, much after the fashion of the mummies on the bus, in the now legendary, if politically uncorrect, song “The Wheel on the Bus Go Round and Round”. ‘He just burst into the room and shot straight at the cabinet. He’d have killed us. Killed me. My own father. He didn’t care.’

  ‘He’s barking mad.’ The teeth of Tuppe offered a castanet accompaniment. ‘Did you see his eyes? Black with white pupils. What’s that all about?’

  Cornelius shook his shaking head. ‘Something’s very wrong. I could smell it in there when I was searching the place. The room smelled of him, yet it didn’t.’

  ‘Strangely I don’t follow that.’

  ‘I know the smell of my own father. It was the smell of him, but at the same time it wasn’t.’

  ‘There is only one Hugo Rune,’ said Tuppe. ‘And that one wants locking up. Go to the police, Cornelius. Let them sort it out.’

  ‘What, tell them how we broke into the suite, stole all this money, and were a bit peeved about being shot at while making our escape? And how did we make our escape, by the way?’

  Tuppe managed a bit of a grin. ‘It was all very straightforward. There was no trick involved.’

  ‘Go on, tell me.’

  ‘Well, you will recall how moments after the phone rang it occurred to you that you should use your remarkable sense of smell and sniff our way out?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Cornelius. ‘And when I suggested this to you, you were already outside the cabinet with all the money.’

  ‘Yep. And then I went back inside and brought you out also.’

  ‘Just tell me how,’ said Cornelius.

  ‘Hall of mirrors,’ said Tuppe. ‘Clever one - revolving panels, one-way mirrors, rotational floor. Clever one, but hall of mirrors all the same.

  ‘So?’

  ‘Floor,’ said Tuppe. ‘Everyone knows that the only way to get out of a hall of mirrors is look at the floor and follow your feet. I’m somewhat nearer to the floor than you. Told you it was very straightforward. Dull really. Sorry it wasn’t more clever. Thanks for helping me out of the window and up onto the roof while Rune was shooting up the cabinet. Nick-of-time stuff. Cheers.’

  ‘Cheers to you.’ Cornelius crammed the last few bundles of money into his now-very-bulging pockets. ‘I suppose we’d best away. Fire alarm’s on the go once more. Off down the fire escape and farewell, Mr Rune.’

  ‘Sounds good to me,’ said Tuppe. ‘What’s that?’ he added.

  ‘What is what?’

  ‘That there,’ Tuppe pointed. High in the clear night sky a tiny point of light was moving. Swiftly.

  ‘Shooting star,’ said Cornelius. ‘Make a wish, you saw it first.’

  ‘Does that work then?’

  ‘You never know, it’s worth a try.’

  Tuppe screwed up his face, closed his eyes and made a wish. ‘Huh,’ said he examining himself. ‘Doesn’t work.’ The tall boy had no doubt at all as to what his diminutive companion had wished for. ‘Probably doesn’t work immediately,’ he said kindly. ‘Takes time.’

  ‘Here, hang about,’ said Tuppe.

  ‘What you mean it is working, now?’

  ‘No I mean hang about. Look at the shooting star.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘It’s coming this way, Cornelius. It’s getting brighter and brighter. It’s coming straight at us.’

  ‘Ooooooh!’ went Norman. ‘My bum’s on fire. I’m burning up on re-entry. Brakes. Parachute. Help!’

  ‘It’s a comet,’ croaked Tuppe. ‘It’s Shoemaker-Levy 9. I knew it never really hit Jupiter, we’re all doomed. It’s the end of the world.’

  ‘Abandon roof,’ cried Cornelius, gathering up Tuppe and preparing to flee.

  ‘It’s going to hit us! IT’S GOING TO HIT US!’

  ‘Look at that,’ said Louise pointing up through the open top. ‘Is that a meteor heading for the Grande, or what?’

  ‘I hope it’s not some swine from the Ministry of Defence test-flying my saucer,’ said Boris, appearing above the back seat. ‘Hello again, girls, neither of you got an aspirin by any chance, I suppose?’

  Finding a suitable bit of onomatopoeia to describe a substantial explosion is always difficult. BOOM and KABOOM and all similar counterparts fall a bit short somehow.

  James Joyce coined a word in Finnegans Wake to mean ‘a symbolic thunderclap that represents the fall of Adam and Eve’.

  It’s a good word.

  It’s—

  BABABADALGHARAGHTAKAMMINARRONNKONNBRONNTONNERRONNTUONNTHUNNTROVARRHOUNAWNSKAWNTOOHOOHOORDENENTHURNUK.

  The sound made by Norman as, in super-heated-white-hot-soul-stuff mode, he struck the roof of the Grande Hotel was a bit like this.

  A scream of, ‘WHAT A BUMMER!’ accompanied it. And the world caved in about Cornelius and Tuppe.

  A pillar of flame rose up into the night sky, topped off with a rolling mushroom of white smoke. The lads on the night shift at the fire station were well impressed. They had been ignoring the automatic alarm call from the Grande. Not to be caught twice in the one day and all that. But this was worth a bit of the old pole-sliding-tyre-screeching-precarious-corner-taking-wrong-way-down-the-one-way-street-macho-man action that they’d all joined the Fire Brigade for.

  Cocoa cups went clatter and girlie mags were cast aside.

  ‘We’ve got a shout,’ cried the gallant lads.

  Whoomph! Crash! and Explode! and Burst into flames! went Rune’s suite as slates and laths and roof-timbers and loft insulation (in the form of many surplus swirly-whirly carpet tiles) and Cornelius and Tuppe and the cause of the confusion all descended in a riotous discombobulation.

  ‘Out!’ shouted Rune, grabbing Mr Craik by the scruff of the neck and hoisting him into the corridor.

  ‘Oooooh!’ went Cornelius, crashing through the top of the wardrobe.

  ‘Oooooh!’ went Tuppe, joining him.

  ‘Me bum’s on fire! Me all’s on fire!’ howled Norman, thrashing about amidst the chaos.

  ‘The whole top floor’s going up,’ cried Thelm
a. ‘Stay in gear, you stupid car, and stop lurching about like that.’

  ‘Get out of the way. Get out of the way,’ yelled a fire-fighter, leaning from his cab and flapping his hands at the cars in front.

  The cars in front were weaving all over the road.

  The cars in front had no drivers in them.

  ‘Get us out of here, Cornelius.’ Tuppe drummed on the inside of the wardrobe door. ‘We’ll be burned to our deaths.’

  ‘You’re all right then, not hurt?’

  ‘Yes I’m fine thanks.’

  ‘Glad to hear it. I’m fine too, in case you were thinking to ask.’

  ‘I wasn’t. But I’m glad you are. Get us out. Get us out.’

  ‘Best go out the way we came in, I’ll give you a lift up.’

  ‘Thanks, I . . . Aaaaagh!’ went Tuppe.

  ‘What’s happened? What’s wrong?’

  ‘There’s a dead man in the wardrobe with us, Cornelius. It’s Mr Showstein.’

  ‘Oh God!’ Cornelius put his shoulder to the wardrobe door and burst out into the flaming hell that had once been the KEV-LYN suite. ‘Let’s get out of here, come on.’

  ‘I’m with you there. Oh no. Aaaaagh again.’

  ‘What is it now? Come on, we’ve got to go.’

  ‘There’s a kid on fire, Cornelius. We’ve got to help him.’

  Cornelius flapped his hands about amongst the smoke and flames. Alarming cracking sounds issued from the floor beneath him, the curtains roared; the heat was reaching critical.

  ‘There’s no-one here but us; you’re hallucinating, Tuppe.’

  ‘I’m not. He’s right there.’

  ‘Oh, oh, oh,’ went Norman, hopping about and patting at his charred overall. ‘Oh, oh, oh.’

  ‘Come with us quickly,’ called Tuppe.

  ‘Eh? Hello. Are you Cornelius Murphy? Oh, oh, oh.’

  ‘No, I’m Tuppe. Come with us before you get burned alive.’

  Crash! and Whoomph! went falling timbers. Creak and rock, went the floor.