Skipton,
09/03/07
14.00 hrs
(Package and covering letter sent by internal mail)
For attn PC Roger Topping, Ilkley
CONFIDENTIAL
Great news, Rog, great news –
At last all those long, incalculably boring, soul-destroying hours of trudging and waiting and moping and cussing have finally paid off, and the career-making case you’ve been yearning for (stuck out there on your lonesome, all stiff and cross and swollen – with that haunting, blue tinge around your gills – like a huge, neglected gouty toe; a beached whale; a dour, oversized funeral director with no funeral to direct; a bad joke; a lazy error; a missed train; a dropped stitch; an unsightly stain on the perfect, white napkin of West Yorkshire’s tea-cake and charity-shop capital) is about to land – not the cake, you dope – with a lovely, resounding plop! right in the middle of your capacious lap.
Oh, and it’s a good one, Rog, it’s a choice one! It’s something that’s going to frustrate and perplex that razor-sharp intellect of yours for many, many years to come. It’s going to haunt your dreams, Rog, and dominate your every waking moment. It’s going to confound and enrage you, Rog. It’s going to challenge you in ways you never imagined, ways you never even thought possible.
Put plainly, Rog: it’s going to take over your miserable, pointless little existence and turn it upside down in exactly the same way it took over (and turned over) mine (which is slightly less miserable and pointless than yours, admittedly. No, considerably less, Rog – considerably less – if you don’t mind my saying so).
It’s a Red Letter Day, Rog, so thump the tub! Whoop it up! Blow off the lid! Because your time has finally come! And it’s an important time, Rog, a vital time, a time to cast aside ‘compromise’ and ‘waffle’ and ‘pragmatism’, and re-embrace all those old-fashioned principles of your gilded youth – ideas like … like ‘truth’ and ‘honour’, like ‘pride’ and ‘justice’. (Don’t think ‘mortgage’, Rog. Never think ‘mortgage’. Great men never think ‘mortgage’. And while we’re on the subject, don’t think ‘bun’. And try not to think ‘steak pie’ or ‘battered sausage’. I know how partial you are to those.)
In short, this is no time for beating around the bush, Rog. It’s a time for plain speaking, a time for speaking your mind, a time for speaking as you find; a time for barking out orders, for slamming doors, for shoving your way, brutishly, into tiny, tightly packed rooms, squeezing your big, meaty hand into a powerful fist and banging it down, forcefully – again and again and again and again – on to desks and tables and other hard surfaces.
It’s not a time for idle prattle and mooching about and eye-rolling and clock-watching (although, God only knows, there has been time for that in the past, Rog – and, God willing, still plenty more of it yet to come).
It’s time to step up to the plate, Rog (and I don’t mean your dinner plate, lad), a time to gird your loins – if loins you still have (Sandy, my gorgeous wife – your ex – once told me how you liked to shed them, every autumn, the way a stag sheds its antlers. But darling Sandy – as we have both discovered, to our mutual cost – can sometimes be a little bit ‘creative’ with the truth, eh, Rog?).
It’s A Time to Dance, Rog – as I believe the bestselling author, Melvyn Bragg, once so poetically exhorted us. Although if you do decide to break into a spontaneous quickstep – or a foxtrot, or a samba – please be sure to wear your head-brace, your shoe-supports and your corset (or else – dollars to doughnuts, Rog – those moronic jobsworths from Health and Safety will be sniffing around us, yet again, like a feral pack of constipated hyenas).
Let’s throw caution to the wind, Rog! This is no time to shilly-shally, no time to test the water and teeter, nervously, on the brink. (Ah yes, I still fondly remember those compulsory school swimming lessons at Thornhill Baths: me, clowning around on the high diving board – to wildly cacophonous cheers from the boys, hysterical screams of terror from the girls – and then suddenly, with no warning, clicking into ‘The Zone’, striding calmly to its furthest tip, bouncing once, bouncing twice, and then performing – to assembled gasps – a near-as-dammit-perfect back-flip, barely disturbing the surface of the pool with so much as a ripple as I entered it. Incredible!
And you, Rog? You? Far down below, Rog, crammed into an under-size pair of brown nylon/viscose-mix regulation trunks, your soft belly bulging over the waistband like a generous slick of extra-thick UHT cream, the voluminous skin of your upper torso pulsing translucently – ghastly and white as a portion of uncooked tripe – your chest heaving, uncontrollably, as you shivered and whimpered and clutched on to your towel, blinking, uneasily, into the blurry half-light.
