They had been difficult times and no mistake, but now as Omally pedalled effortlessly up the steep incline of Sprite Street, they were no more than memories. He and Marchant were en rapport, as the garlic eaters will have it, and the degree of this was remarkable in the extreme. For, to the trained observer, skilled in such matters as bicycle propulsion, watching the cyclist’s easy motion as he crested the hill, one thing would have been readily apparent: As man and bike moved in fluid harmony, one vital something — hitherto considered an essential prerequisite to bicycledom — was missing. The pedals turned, the wheels spinned, but nothing whatever moved between the chainwheel and the Sturmey Archer cog … Omally’s bicycle Marchant did not have a chain.
4
Ted McCready blew his whistle, waved his flag and watched with absolutely no interest at all as the early train pulled out of Brentford Central. He was precisely sixty-six days from his Gold Watch And Retirement Speech and he no longer gave a monkey’s. In fact, like many an old locoman who had gone before him, he had ceased to give a monkey’s with the passing of the age of steam. Ted could recall the young boys who clambered on to the footplates of the great locos, or lined the bridge parapets to be bathed in steam as one of the mighty King Class thundered beneath at full throttle, whistle blowing. But that had all gone now. The romance of railways was behind him and with it had gone the pride. No-one could honestly feel for an electric train. It had no personality, no being, no glory. It was just another carriage, but with a motor in it.
Half-heartedly, Ted offered a two-fingered Harvey Smith towards the departing train and shuffled away to his cosy office, his morning cuppa and the next chapter of Farewell My Window (a Lazlo Woodbine thriller).
Upon the platform a solitary figure remained, the only passenger to alight from the morning train. He was tall, gaunt and angular in appearance, clad in a Boleskine tweed three-piece. From his right hand hung a heavy pigskin valise, from his left a black Malacca cane with a silver mount. A small white ivory ring pierced the lobe of his left ear and a pair of mirrored pince-nez clung to the bridge of his long aquiline nose. A pelt of snow-white hair turfed his narrow skull. Such was the singular appearance of this solitary traveller and such it was that had put the wind up many a case-hardened veteran of the criminal fraternity. For this was none other than that doyen of detectives, that Nemesis of ne’er-do-wells — Let evil doers beware, let felons flee and varlets vanish, run the sound, roll the cameras, cue the action — enter Inspectre Hovis of Scotland Yard.
The man behind the mirrored specs turned his sheltered gaze upon Brentford Central. “You there!” His voice tore along the platform, striking Ted McCready, who was turning into his sanctum sanctorium, from behind.
“By the love of St Pancras!” The station master clutched at his palpitations and lurched about.
“That’s right, I mean you, porter chappy! Up this way at the trot, if you please.” A shaft of sunlight angling down through the ironwork of the footbridge held the great detective to perfection.
“You talking to me?” choked Ted, squinting towards his tormentor.
“That’s right, my man, at the double!” Hovis indicated his pigskin valise. “Let’s be having you.”
With bitter words forming between his lips, Ted humped the heavy case down the platform. He’d had a trolley once, but it had rusted away. He’d had a porter once, but he had been cut back. He’d had a hernia once … With his free hand Ted felt at his groin. He still had a hernia.
Ahead of him the spare frame of Hovis bobbed along to an easy stride. A voice called back across an angled padded shoulder. “Pacy pacy, Mr Porter,” it called. “Tempus fugit.”
Ted McCready stared daggers into the receding back. He was the first man in Brentford to encounter the great detective and by this token, the first man to really hate him. He would by no means be the last.
5
Omally turned right at the traffic lights, right again and finally right into Ganesha Lane. Marchant rattled over the uneven cobbles and John spread wide his legs as they swept down into the alleyway that led past Cider Island to the weir, the abandoned boatyards and the venerable Thames.
John dismounted as they reached the weir. Weird and wonderful Marchant might have been, but he did not include the climbing of steps as part of his metaphysical repertoire. Omally shouldered his bike, skipped up the steps and continued on his way, whistling brightly.
Suddenly, the bright and breezy, devil-may-care jauntiness of his step vanished, to be replaced by a furtive, shifty, quite definitely guilt-ridden scuttle. Omally was up to something.
A slowing of pace, a quick shufti over the shoulder, a sudden movement. A section of corrugated iron swings aside and a boy and his bike vanished from the footpath and were lost to view.
Beyond the iron fencing, the long-abandoned boatyard slumbered. The pointless walls of the derelict buildings were decked with festoons of convolvulus, the windows swagged with cobwebs. Here and there the tragic debris of the once proud trade showed as tiny islands amidst a grassy ocean. Here a crane, strung like a fractured gibbet, there the gears and gubbins, over-ripe with rust. Capstans and winches, pulleys and blocks, blurred with moss, weatherworn and worthless. At a quayside beyond, the dark hulk of an ancient barge wallowed in oily water.
Once the glittering island boatyards, strung like a necklet about the borough’s throat, had prospered. Here the barques and pleasure boats, the punts and Thames steamers had taken form from the hand-hewn timbers, fashioned with the care of craftsmen. Now it was no more, here and there a yard survived heavily secured with barbed wire and night-prowling dogs, knocking out plastic dinghies or casting fibre-glass hulls for Arabian moguls. Floating gin palaces for camel jockeys. The life had gone, and that particular form of melancholia which haunts places of bygone commerce washed over the buildings in waves of lavender blue. For blue is the colour of tears and water, sea and sadness.
Omally left Marchant to rest upon a handlebar, the reflected glory of the early sun cupped in his headlamp. Hitching up his trousers, he set out to wade through the waist-deep grass towards the ancient barge.
Upon reaching the edge of the wharf he again paused to assure himself that he remained unobserved. When so assured he dropped down on to the barge and tapped out an elaborate tattoo upon the hull.
A head popped up from the inner depths and a voice, that of Jim Pooley, owner of the head, called out, “Watchamate John, you’re bloody late!” Omally shinned through the hatchway and down into the bowels of the wreck.
The interior presented a most surprising and unexpected appearance. Over a period of many months Pooley and Omally had effected a conversion of a most enterprising nature. The superannuated vessel now housed a distillery, a series of grandiose fish tanks, wherein lazed river fish of prize-winning proportions, a storehouse for “re-routed” goods and a comfortable salon for the entertaining of special guests.
A line of portholes below waterline looked out upon a string of elaborate fish traps set above the distillery cooling tubes. This was the headquarters of what was known to a select few as the “P and O Line”. There was much of Captain Nemo’s “Nautilus” to the thing, but there was a good deal more of Fagin’s kitchen. Although, in evidence for the defence, it must be stated that John and Jim drew the line before coining, or the manufacture of hard drugs.