A Dog Called Demolition

  2

  If a mule had the same proportionate power in his hind legs as a dog’s flea, he could kick an ordinary-sized man 33 miles, 1004 yards, 21 inches.

  G. A. HENTY (1832-1902),

  Those Other Animals, 1891

  MEGAPHONES AND CHEESECLOTH

  They never found out what old Sam Sprout actually died of. But whatever it was, it was definitely fatal.

  Doctor Kinn’s grandson filled in the death certificate. ‘Natural causes,’ he wrote, ‘possibly due to complications brought on by Kinn’s Syndrome.’

  And that was pretty much that.

  Pretty much, but not entirely.

  Only four mourners turned up for the funeral. Danny Orion, Marmsly, Big Frank and The Kid. And they were not there for the love of old Sam Sprout. They were there for the money.

  And they were to be disappointed.

  Many others would be disappointed also, but these many others chose to stay at home on the day of old Sam’s burial, because it was raining and they did not wish to catch a cold. If disappointment lay in store for them, they reasoned, at least they would suffer it in good health.

  The reason for all this potential disappointment was that old Sam had died penniless, and the reason that all these people would take it personally, was that each and every one of them had, at some time or another, given, lent or loaned old Sam money.

  Old Sam Sprout had died leaving debts of a truly staggering nature. How one man could owe so much to so many was the kind of question which might have inspired the late and legendary Winston (my silver crowns are still worth only fifty pence) Churchill to juggle about and forge into a speech. Having no good fortune of his own, old Sam had spent his life benefiting from that of others.

  Never did some lucky punter come up Donald Trumps on the dogs or cop a small packet on the premium bonds, than there would be Sam Sprout hovering like the ghost of Christmas past, ready to draw off a little of the surplus good fortune for himself.

  When Danny Orion struck gold on The Shrunken Head’s Christmas draw, who was it who was heard to remark, ‘It would be a better Christmas for some of us if we had a pound or two to put some humble offering upon the bare table for our wife and six children’?

  And when Marmsly’s uncle, Uncle Marmsly, died, leaving the famous Uncle Marmsly Pewter Tankard Collection, who was it who said, ‘Some of us are forced to drink from cracked enamel mugs, and then only of water?’

  Or, the time Big Frank netted a cool ton on the national lottery, ‘I weep that I cannot buy you a pint to offer my congratulations, could you please lend me ten pounds to start the ball rolling?’

  And so on and so forth.

  Three guesses.

  The worst thing was that old Sam always made such a big deal about promising to pay the money back, that no-one ever had the face to ask him for it. Thus, when he shuffled, or jumped, or was pushed, off this mortal coil, the mourners at his funeral and many other folk besides, felt that old Sam Sprout had taken a little piece of themselves to the grave with him, and that it was more than likely that they wouldn’t be getting it back.

  The four mourners stood at the graveside. Two at each side. They had just lowered old Sam in. The pall bearers skulked in the shelter of the church porch, smoking cigarettes and discussing the vexed question of why it was that necrophiles were so over-represented in the undertaking trade. The rain fell heavily and they weren’t going to get their top hats wet for an old ponce like Sam Sprout.

  Danny Orion sighed, sniffed and blew raindrops from the end of his nose. ‘Unless I am very much mistaken,’ he said, ‘there goes my fifty quid.’

  ‘And my uncle’s pewter,’ said Marmsly, ‘which, like the alchemists of old, Sprout transmuted into gold.’

  ‘Poetic,’ said Big Frank. ‘And a right shame.’

  ‘If I had a pound for every pound I’ve lent that old bastard,’ said The Kid, ‘I’d have all my pounds back and I wouldn’t be here at all.’

  The other three mourners nodded. You couldn’t argue with that.

  ‘How much do you reckon he left in his will?’ Danny asked.

  Marmsly shook his rain-sodden head. ‘Not a penny,’ said he. ‘I bumped into his solicitor on the way here. The man is rather upset. Apparently Sprout somehow managed to borrow money from three separate building societies, putting his house up as collateral and giving the solicitor’s name as the owner.’

  ‘Is that possible?’ asked Big Frank, whose mum owned her house.

  ‘Sprout managed it. Everything’s owed three times over, there’s not a penny to be had. The solicitor did say one thing that I thought a bit strange. He said Sprout had died clutching a piece of paper with a few last words scribbled on it.’

  ‘A begging letter?’ Danny asked.

  ‘No.’ Marmsly gave his sodden head another little shake. ‘It just said, BEWARE OF THE DOG.’

  Damp shrugs were passed across the open grave.

  ‘I suppose it must mean something,’ said The Kid, ‘if it was written in capital letters like that.’

  ‘We’ll never know now,’ said Big Frank.

  ‘The secret has died with him,’ said Marmsly.

  ‘Dead men tell no tales,’ said The Kid.

  ‘I wonder about that,’ said Danny Orion.

  In the Plume Café they sat and talked and dripped onto the lino.

  ‘What puzzles me,’ said Big Frank, sipping tea, ‘is why we bothered to go to the funeral.’

  ‘I seem to recall that it was Marmsly’s idea,’ said The Kid.

  Marmsly offered a sickly grin. ‘He might have left us something in his will. I thought we ought to pay our last respects, even if we didn’t actually have any.’

  Big Frank sipped further tea. ‘If you’d mentioned bumping into his solicitor before we’d carried Sprout’s coffin out of the church, we could have left you to pay your bogus respects on your own.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Marmsly. ‘But it’s just that I like funerals. There’s something so definitively final about a funeral. It really says The End and That’s Your Lot.’

  ‘It doesn’t have to.’ Danny had been thinking. Danny was always thinking, it was something he did a lot of. He had been thinking particularly about the BEWARE OF THE DOG note in its capital letters. Danny had always wanted a dog, but neither his mum, with whom he once lived (but who was now shacked up with a double-glazing salesman in Storrington), nor his Aunt May, with whom he presently lived (but who wanted him to find a place of his own), would allow him to buy one.

  Danny would willingly have rented a place of his own and bought himself a dog, but he didn’t have any money.

  It was a great pity old Sam hadn’t left him any.

  ‘It doesn’t have to what?’ asked Marmsly, for whom no paragraphs had passed.

  ‘Be The End,’ said Danny.

  ‘Please explain,’ said Big Frank, damply.

  And Danny did so.

  ‘Old Sprout cannot have died penniless,’ said Danny. ‘He spent his entire life borrowing from other people and left debts everywhere, but what did he do with the money? It seems he never spent any, he lived in virtual poverty.’

  ‘Is that like virtual reality?’ The Kid asked.

  Danny ignored him. ‘If Sprout mortgaged his house three times over, there must be heaps of money hidden away somewhere.’

  ‘We’ll never know now,’ said Big Frank.

  ‘The secret has died with him,’ said Marmsly.

  ‘Dead men tell no tales,’ said The Kid.

  ‘I wonder about that,’ said Danny Orion.

  Madame Lorretta Rune possessed, amongst other things, the gift of post-cognition. She was able to predict the past. It was a remarkable gift, but one which had, as yet, to prove its true worth. She made a fair living from quiz shows and those terrible general knowledge competitions they hold in pubs, but it hadn’t been what she asked for when she sold her soul to the Devil. Some clerical error, perhaps. She had recently turned her hand toward contacting the
dead. This had met with ‘limited success’, which, as we all know, is a euphemism for ‘no success at all’.

  Contacting the dead has always been a tricky old game. It was once called necromancy and frowned upon by the Church. Nowadays it’s called spiritualism and has a church of its own. One trouble has always seemed to be that once the dear departed are contacted, they never have anything interesting to say.

  Madame Lorretta, who had been boning up on the subject by attending the local Spiritualist church, felt that this particular fact was the one that proved the entire business genuine. Most people had damn all to say while living, so why should anyone expect them to have acquired some new-found eloquence when dead?

  But she had, as has been said, only so far achieved ‘a limited success’. So she was content to fake it for now, until she’d mastered the technique. Her gift of post-cognition was coming in quite handy for this.

  An impressive woman, topping the scales at sixteen stone, Madame Lorretta held court in The Inner Sanctum of Outré Lodge, number thirty-seven Sprite Street. Here, clad usually in many yards of black crushed-velvet, she was already gaining a reputation as one who had connections on ‘the other side’. She was a close friend of Danny’s Aunt May, who talked a lot about her.

  Madame Lorretta was snoozing upon the box ottoman when the front-door knocker knocked. She awoke and rang a small brass Burmese temple bell. This summoned her assistant, Miss Doris Chapel-Hatpeg, a small anaemic woman with nothing whatever to recommend her but for a mildly amusing name. She and Madame Lorretta had served time together in Holloway for offences of a heretical nature, which are still covered by the otherwise repealed Witchcraft Act of 1572.

  ‘There are four young men at the front door,’ said Madame Lorretta. ‘They’ve been there for the last ten minutes.’

  ‘Well, nobody told me.’

  ‘I’m telling you now, dear.’

  ‘Hmmph!’

  It’s a difficult one, is ‘Hmmph!’ Most people never master it. They can do ‘Huh!’ and even ‘Phuh!’, but a really convincing ‘Hmmph!’ is hard to come by nowadays. Miss Chapel-Hatpeg had it off to a fine art. She stomped off down the corridor and opened the front door, hmmphing as she went.

  On the doorstep stood four young men, one looked very serious, one looked rather worried, the other two were stifling smirks. The serious one was Danny, the worried one was Marmsly, the other two were Big Frank and The Kid.

  ‘Madame Lorretta Rune?’ asked Danny.

  ‘No,’ said Doris Chapel-Hatpeg.

  ‘We’ve come to the wrong address,’ said Marmsly. ‘Let’s go home."

  ‘Bottle job,’ sniggered Big Frank, making the approved gesture.

  ‘It’s tampering with forces unknown,’ Marmsly crossed himself.

  ‘Is Madame Lorretta at home to callers?’ Danny asked.

  ‘What’s it about?’

  ‘We seek the services of a medium,’ Danny said.

  Big Frank, to whom the word medium meant halfway between large and small and was no good to him when it came to shirts, said, ‘We’ve come to commune with the dead.’

  ‘You’ve come to the right place then, follow me please.’

  The four young men followed Doris, Danny pushing the reluctant Marmsly before him. Big Frank, as last man in, closed the front door.

  The Inner Sanctum of Outré Lodge was situated in a back parlour the same size and shape as that once inhabited by the late Sam Sprout. Which didn’t help much as the former had received no description.

  It was carpeted in colourless kilims, with matching wall hangings to muffle all sounds of the outer world and encourage those from the next. A sign which read ‘Elvis Presley may be contacted at this address’ hung humourlessly above a fireplace of neutrally-toned timber. Six nondescript chairs ambushed a central table that didn’t seem worth the bother. Beside the curtained window stood the big box ottoman and on this sat the large-sized medium. Potted plants were distributed hither and thus and all about the place.

  All of this was ‘mood lit’, which is to say, ‘dimly’.

  Big Frank sighted Madame Lorretta and took to the tucking in of his shirt. This was his kind of woman.

  Madame Lorretta rose and relocated her bulk upon the chair nearest to the fireplace (which was the one furthest away from the door). She smiled towards Danny. ‘You have suffered a loss?’

  ‘We all have,’ said Danny. ‘But we’re hoping to make good on it.’

  ‘You understand that I must make a small charge for my services?’

  ‘How small?’ Danny asked.

  ‘Ten quid,’ said Madame Lorretta.

  ‘Stuff that,’ said The Kid.

  ‘It’s only two and a half quid each,’ Danny told him, ‘You have to speculate to accumulate.’

  ‘Count me in,’ said Big Frank.

  Marmsly said nothing.

  ‘Ten quid is fine,’ said Danny.

  ‘In advance.’

  Amidst much grumbling, pocket change changed hands.

  ‘Please be seated.’

  ‘Thank you very much.’

  Miss Doris Chapel-Hatpeg left the room.

  The lads sat down. Danny and Marmsly to the right of Madame Lorretta, Big Frank and The Kid to the left (looking from the door end of the room, of course. From the fireplace end it was the other way around, but it didn’t affect things very much).

  ‘We must all place our hands upon the table,’ said Madame Lorretta, ‘palms down, little fingers touching. When the circle is complete I shall attempt to contact the spirit world.’

  ‘Ooooh,’ went The Kid in a manner that lacked not for sarcasm.

  ‘Sssh!’ Big Frank told him.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Madame Lorretta.

  ‘What time do you finish for the day?’ Big Frank asked, but this question did not receive a reply.

  Madame Lorretta said, ‘I must have silence.’

  At the word silence, the lights dimmed further and a haunting piece of violin music welled from behind a potted aspidistra. Big Frank, who was now in the mood to be impressed by such things, was suitably impressed.

  ‘I must concentrate,’ said she-who-would-speak-with-the-dead.

  Her four damp guests squinted at one another through the mostly darkness. Marmsly moved uncomfortably in his tweed trousers. ‘I want to go to the toilet,’ he whispered.

  ‘Silence!’

  The lights went out completely and the music swelled to deafening.

  ‘I said I must have silence!’ screamed Madame Lorretta.

  The lights went up a bit and the sound down.

  ‘Sorry!’ came the muffled voice of Doris.

  Madame Lorretta leaned back in her chair and did a bit of that ghastly eye-rolling which is so popular amongst those who ‘have the calling’.

  ‘My great uncle The Kid used to do that,’ whispered The Kid, ‘but of course he had been wounded in the head at Ypres.’

  ‘Sssh,’ went Big Frank.

  ‘Don’t keep ssshing me, I’ve shelled out my two and a half quid. I can take the piddle if I want.’

  ‘I will punch you,’ said Big Frank.

  The Kid held his counsel.

  ‘I feel a presence!’ Madame Lorretta slumped further back in her chair, putting the wind up Marmsly. ‘Someone is here, someone is here.’

  ‘Is it old Sam Sprout?’ Danny asked.

  ‘It can be.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘It can be no other.’

  ‘It could be Elvis,’ The Kid whispered. ‘Ouch,’ he continued.

  ‘Be warned,’ said Big Frank.

  ‘Oh!’ went Madame Lorretta. ‘Oh! Oh! Oh!’

  ‘Good grief,’ said Marmsly. ‘Look at her face.’

  His companions looked. It didn’t look good. Madame Lorretta’s face appeared to be undergoing what the chaps in the film-making fraternity refer to (correctly) as a ‘lap dissolve’.

  Her face was changing into another face.

  ‘Now that is clever,
’ said Big Frank.

  ‘It’s an evil spirit,’ croaked Marmsly, crossing his legs. ‘And I need the toilet even more now.’

  ‘It is clever though, isn’t it?’ Danny peered at the metamorphosing medium. The prodigious jowls were shrinking away. The bee-hive hair-do was vanishing into the top of the head. The eyes were changing colour. Actually it wasn’t so much a lap dissolve, more that smart-arse computer-generated stuff that puts geniuses like Ray Harryhausen out of work.

  The lips that had been Madame Lorretta’s, but weren’t any more, parted. A voice spoke. It wasn’t hers either.

  ‘Hello, lads,’ said the voice of old Sam Sprout from the face that was now his also.

  ‘Well, I’ll be dipped in dog dirt,’ said Big Frank.

  ‘No dogs please.’ Sam Sprout’s face contorted.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Big Frank.

  ‘Sam,’ said Danny. ‘Is that really you?’

  ‘It is,’ said the face.

  ‘Then where did you hide the money, you old bastard?’ asked The Kid.

  ‘Money? What money?’ The face looked genuinely puzzled.

  ‘Our money for a start. The rest would be nice also.’

  ‘Dead men pay no debts,’ said old Sam Sprout.

  ‘It’s tell no tales,’ said The Kid, wondering just how this was done. ‘Definitely tell no tales, I’ve been saying it all afternoon.’

  ‘Well, this dead man can pay no debts. Damn me, I haven’t even got a pair of strides here to call my own.’

  The lads looked on in silence. That seemed a bit of a bummer, not even having a pair of strides.

  Danny scratched his chin. ‘We were hoping that you might direct us to your hidden hoard of booty.’

  ‘I’ve no boots either,’ said old Sam.

  ‘Any socks?’ The Kid asked.

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Shirt?’ asked Big Frank.

  ‘No shirt, no.’

  ‘No shirt!’ Big Frank whistled.

  Marmsly let out a strangulated cry. ‘I’ve just wet my damn trews,’ said he.

  Danny shook his head. ‘Good grief,’ said he. ‘Here’s old Sam with no trews at all and Marmsly wets his. There must be a moral in that somewhere.’