Pocahontas Born here.
“Eh?” said Pooley.
Pomegranate Farming Doomed attempt by local man.
Poor House Location of.
Pooley’s finger went up, then down again. “I’m not here,” he said with some elation. “He’s left me out. He’s a decent fellow after all. Well, what about that? He sent me a free copy just to show there were no hard feelings about taking him to court for beating the life out of me. What a gent! I wonder if he signed it.” Jim flicked forward. “No, he didn’t. But I think he should. I’ll go round there now, I’ve nothing else on.”
And so saying, he did.
For the reader who, now thoroughly won over by Jim’s personality, is eager for a description of the man, let it be said that Jim Pooley looked the way he always has looked. Except when he was younger, of course.
A man of average height and average weight, or just a tad above the one and underneath the other. A well-constructed face, a trifle gaunt at times; a shock of hair. Well, not a shock. A kindly countenance. His most distinctive feature, the one that singled him out from all the rest, was of course his
“Golly,” said Jim. “Whatever is going on here?”
He had reached Golden Square, a byway leading from the historic Butts Estate. A Georgian triumph of mellow rosy brick, once home to the wealthy burghers of the borough, now offices for solicitors and other folk in “the professions”.
Jim stopped short and stared. There was an ambulance drawn up in front of the offices of Mr Compton-Cummings. His door was open and out of it a number of men in paramedic uniforms were struggling beneath the weight of something spread across two stretchers. Something covered by a sheet.
Jim hastened forward. The genealogist’s secretary, the one who had handed Pooley the teacup, stood on the pavement sobbing into a handkerchief. A crowd was beginning to gather. Jim pushed his way into it.
“What happened?” he asked.
“Robbery,” said somebody. “Bloke shot dead.”
“He was never shot,” said somebody else. “Axed, he was.”
“Garrotted,” said yet another somebody. “Head right off.”
“Talk sense,” said Jim.
“Some big fat fellow’s died,” said a lady in a straw hat. “Myocardial collapse, probably. It’s always your heart that gives out if you’re overweight. I used to be eighteen stone, me, but I went on a diet, nothing but roughage. I…”
“Excuse me,” said Jim, pushing past. He caught the arm of the weeping secretary. “Is it Mr Compton-Cummings?” he asked.
The secretary turned her red-rimmed eyes up to Jim. “Oh, it’s you,” she said, between sobs. “I remember you.”
“Is it him?”
The secretary’s head bobbed up and down. “He had a heart attack, just like the lady said.”
“Told you,” said the straw-hatter.
“And he’s dead?”
“I tried to, you know, the kiss of life, but he…” The secretary sank once more into tears. Jim put a kind arm about her shoulder. It was a pretty shoulder. Well formed. Actually, all of her was well formed. The secretary was a fine-looking young woman, a fact that had not gone unnoticed by Jim. “Come inside and sit down,” he told her.
The paramedics, now aided by several members of the crowd who were eager to get in on the action, were forcing the lifeless sheet-shrouded corpse of Mr Compton-Cummings into the back of the ambulance.
Jim led the secretary up the steps and through the front door. In the outer office Jim sat the secretary down in her chair. “I’m terribly sorry,” he said. “I came here to thank him for sending me a copy of his book, and for leaving the bit about me out of it.” Jim placed the book upon the secretary’s desk. Unsigned it would always remain.
“He felt bad about that,” sniffed the secretary. “And about beating you up. It played on his mind. He was a good man, I liked him a lot.”
“I’m sorry. Can I get you a cup of tea, or something?”
“Thanks.” The secretary blew her nose. “The machine’s over there.”
Pooley applied himself to the task of dispensing tea. He’d never been very good with machines. There was a knack to technology which Jim did not possess. He held a paper cup beneath a little spout and pressed a button. Boiling water struck him at trouser-fly-level.
“It does that sometimes,” sniffed the secretary.
Eyes starting from his head and mouth wide in silent scream, Jim hobbled about the office, fanning at himself with one hand while holding his steaming trousers away from his seared groin region with the other.
“I’ll make my own then,” said the secretary. “How do you like yours? Two lumps?”
Jim hobbled, flapped and held out his trousers.
“It was horrible,” said the secretary, handing Jim a paper cup.
“It still is,” croaked Jim.
“No, Mr Compton-Cummings, dropping down dead like that.”
“Oh yes. It must have been.”
“One moment, big jolly bear of a man with his trousers round his ankles, the next…”
“Hang about,” said Jim. “You don’t mean that you and he were…”
“Well, of course we were. It’s Tuesday, isn’t it?”
“Yes, but…”
“We always do it on Tuesdays.”
“What? You and him? I mean, well, you’re so… and he was… well, I mean.”
“A Mason,” said the secretary.
“Eh?”
“A Freemason. I always helped him dress for the lodge meeting on Tuesdays. Here, you weren’t suggesting…”
“Perish the thought,” said Jim, crossing his heart with his cup-holding hand and sending tea all over his shirt. “Oh, damn.”
“You’re very clumsy, aren’t you?”
“I try not to be.” Jim plucked at his shirt and shook his head. “So he died while he was putting on his Masonic regalia.”
“It was the way he would have wanted to go.”
“Was it?”
“Well, no, I suppose not really. But you can’t choose how you die, can you? It’s like you can’t choose your parents. No offence meant.”
“None taken,” said Jim. “So he just dropped down dead while you were helping him on with his apron and whatnots.”
“I never touched his whatnots.”
Jim looked the secretary up and down. She was a beautiful young woman, but she was clearly not for him. Jim had never harboured a love for the toilet gag or the double entendre. The entire Carry On canon left him cold. Imagine having a relationship with a woman who could turn anything you said into a willy reference. Nightmare.
“So,” said Jim, once more and slowly. “You think that the exertion of putting on his Masonic vestments caused him to have a heart attack?”
“Well, it was either that or the blow job.”
