‘And how can you be so sure?’
‘Because it was my job to vet the list. I decided who got sent an invitation and who didn’t.’
I gave Norman a somewhat withering look.
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Perhaps yours got lost in the post.’
‘Get your arse off my desk,’ I said.
Money being no object, I employed the services of a private detective. There was only one listed in the Brentford Yellow Pages. He went by the name of Lazlo Woodbine. I figured that anyone who had the gall to name himself after the world’s most famous fictional detective must be good for something.
Lazlo turned out to be a handsome-looking fellow. In fact he bore an uncanny resemblance to myself. He had just completed a case involving Billy Barnes. I remembered Billy from my school days at the Grange. Billy had been the boy who always knew more than was healthy for one of his age. Small wodd!
I explained to Lazlo that I needed all the information he could get me about the six POTENTIAL ASSASSINS. And I wanted it fast. The Great Millennial Ball was but two months away and I meant to be ready.
The final months of the twentieth century didn’t amount to much. I had expected some kind of buzz. Lots of razzmatazz. But it was all rather downbeat. It seemed to rain most of the time and the newspapers became obsessed with the Millennium Bug. We’d all known about it for years. How many computer clocks would not be able to cope with the year two thousand and how computers all over the world would shut themselves down, or go berserk, or whatever. But only a very few people had actually taken it seriously and the newspapers hadn’t been interested in it at all. Until now. Until it was too late to do anything about it.
Now it was news. Now it had the potential to spread panic.
But it didn’t spread panic. The man in the street didn’t seem to care. The man in the street just shrugged his shoulders. The man in the street said, ‘It will be all right.’
And why did the man in the street behave in this fashion? Why the complacency? ‘Why the couldn’t care less and the glazed look in the eyes?
And why almost every man on almost every street?
Why?
Well, I’ll tell you for why.
The man in the street was on something.
The man in the street was drugged up to his glazed eyeballs.
The man in the street took Doveston’s Snuff
Yes, that’s tight, Doveston’s Snuff ‘A pinch a day and the world’s no longer grey.’ It was all people talked about in those final months. All people did. Tried this blend, that blend and the other. This one brought you up, this one took you down and if you mixed these two together, you were off somewhere else. It was a national obsession. It was the latest craze.
Everyone was doing it. Every man on almost every street. And every woman too and every child. So what if the end of civilization was coming? Everyone seemed to agree that they could handle that — if not with a smile upon the face, then at least with a finger up the nose.
And so they wandered about like sleepwalkers. In and out of the tobacconist’s. Norman said that trade had never been so good —Although he wasn’t selling much in the way of sweeties.
Doveston’s Snuff, eh? Who’d have thought it? Who’d have thought that there could have been anything dubious about Doveston’s Snuff? That it might, perhaps, contain something more than just ground tobacco and flavourings? That it might, perhaps, contain some, how shall Iput this ... DRUGS?
And if someone had thought it, would that someone have been able to work out the reason why? Would that someone have been able to uncover the fact that here was a conspiracy on a global scale? That this was in fact the work of the Secret Govermnent of the World, covering its smelly bottom against the forthcoming downfall of civilization?
I very much doubt it.
I didn’t figure it out.
Which was a shame, really. Because if I had figured it out, I would have been able to have done something about it. Because, after all, like that silly bugger with the razor blades, I did own the company. I could have taken the snuff off the shop shelves. I might even have been able to expose the conspiracy. Bring down the Secret Government of the World. Save mankind from the horrors to come.
But I didn’t figure it out, so there you go.
I was far too busy to figure anything out. I was trying to hunt down a murderer and I was trying to organize a party: THE GREAT MILLENNIAL BALL.
The Doveston’s solicitor had issued me with an enormous portfolio, containing all the details of the ball. Everything had to be done exactly as the Doveston had planned it. If not, and the solicitor rubbed his hands together as he told me, I would lose everything.
Everything.
I did not intend to lose everything and so I followed the instructions to the very letter. Norman was a tower of strength throughout this period. He’d had a big hand in the original planning of the ball and he arranged to have his uncle run his shop while he assisted me at Castle Doveston.
There were times, however, when he and I almost fell out.
‘The dwarves are here,’ he said one Friday evening, breezing into my office and plonking his bum on my desk.
‘What dwarves?’
‘The ones who’ve been hired for the ball. Fourteen of them have turned up for the audition, but we only need seven.’
‘No-one ever needs more than seven dwarves,’ I said, taking a green cigar from the humidor and running it under my nose. ‘But what are these seven dwarves going to do?’
‘They’re going to have all their hair shaved off Then, at the ball, they have to move around amongst the guests with lines of cocaine on their heads.’
The green cigar went up my left nostril. ‘What?’ I went. ‘What? What? What?’
‘You really should read all the small print.’
‘It’s gross,’ I said. ‘That’s what it is.’
Norman helped himself to a cigar. ‘If you think that’s gross,’ he said ‘wait ‘til you meet the human ashtrays.’
I auditioned the dwarves. It was a painful experience. Even though they were all prepared to submit to the humiliation of having their heads shaved, it didn’t make me feel any better about it. In the end,
I let their sex decide the matter for me.
There were seven men and seven women.
In the spirit of the Nineties, PC and positive discrimination, I dismissed all the men and chose the women.
An interior decorator called Lawrence had been engaged to spruce up the great hall for the party. Lawrence was famous. He starred in a very popular BBC television series, where neighbours were invited to redecorate each other’s rooms in a manner calculated to create the maximum amount of annoyance and distress.
I loved the show and I really liked Lawrence. He was all long hair and leather trousers and he would strut about in cowboy boots, getting bad-tempered and shouting that this wasn’t right and that had to be moved and that thing over there must be torn down and thrown away.
Lawrence didn’t take to the Doveston’s fine art collection. He hated it. He said that the Canalettos were far too old-fashioned and so he drew in some speedboats with a felt-tipped pen. I don’t know much about art, but I know I liked his speedboats.
I didn’t like it, though, when he told me that the two pillars supporting the minstrels’ gallery would have to be demolished.
‘We can’t do that,’ I told him. ‘The minstrels’ gallery will collapse.’
Lawrence stamped his cowboy boots and grew quite red in the face. ‘They ruin the lines,’ he shouted. ‘I want to hang cascades of plastic fruit over the gallery. Either those pillars go, or I will.’