showed. A mere pinprick, yet it was some kind of hope, although not a lot.
“Get a move on,” yelled Omally.
“I’ve told you, something’s blocking my way.”
“I just knew it,” said Jim, with the voice of one who just knew it. “No way up, no way down. Doomed to starve here until we drop away one by one like little shrivelled up…”
“Give it a rest, Jim. What’s in the way, Soap?”
Soap prodded above. “Some old grill or grating, rusty as hell.”
“Easy on the descriptions.”
“Solid as a rock also.”
“Doom and desolation oh misery, misery.”
“I have plenty of fuel in my lighter, Jim.”
“Sorry, John. Can’t you wiggle it loose, Soap?”
“It’s bloody rusted in. Can’t you hear what I’m saying?”
“Let me get up there then.”
“There’s no room, John.”
“Then we’ll all just have to push, that’s all. Brace yourself, lads, after three. Three!”
Soap wedged his shoulders beneath the obstruction, Jim got a purchase under his bum, with Omally straining from below.
“Heave.”
“AAAGH!”
“OOOOW.”
“Get off there.”
“My God.”
“Again, it’s giving.”
“It’s not giving, I am.”
“I felt it give.”
“That was my shoulder.”
“Put your back into it.”
“Mind where you’re holding.”
“We’re there, we’re there.”
“Who said that?”
“One more time…”
“It’s giving… It’s giving… It’s gone.”
Soap’s head and shoulders battered up through the obstruction, a thin and crumbling iron grid cemented solidly into place through the application of fifty-years pigeon guano. “You bastards!” Soap’s arms were pinned at his sides, his feet lashed out furiously. “You bastards!”
“Watch where you’re kicking,” Pooley complained.
Soap’s muffled voice screamed down at them from above. “You bloody lunatics, I’m stuck in here.”
Now, as you might reasonably expect, a heated debate occurred beneath the struggling Soap, as to what might be the best means of adding the necessary irresistible force to the currently immovable object.
“We must pull him down and give him another charge,” Jim declared.
“Down on top of us so we all fall down the hole?”
“Grease him with goose fat.”
“You wally.”
“Tickle his feet then.”
“And you a millionaire, Jim. I thought you blokes had it all sussed.”
“A hoist, a hoist, my kingdom for a hoist.”
“I’m starting to suffocate, lads,” called Soap distantly.
Pooley weighed up the situation. “Doom and desperation,” he concluded.
“Stop everything,” Omally demanded. “Enough is enough. It is a well-attested fact that the man who can get his head and shoulders through a gap can get the rest of him through also.”
Soap wriggled like a maggot on a number nine hook.
“Stick your head down here, Jim. I want to whisper.”
Soap thrashed and struggled, but his movements were becoming weaker by the moment.
“I can’t do that to Soap!”
“It only takes a second. Take my word for it, it will do the trick.”
“But it’s not decent.”
“Do it to Soap or I’ll do it to you.”
Pooley closed his eyes and gritted his teeth. Reaching up he performed a quick vicious action.
“EEEEEEEEEOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW! ”
A few moments later three men lay puffing and panting in the entrance to the loading bay at Meeks Boatyard on the bank of the Grand Union Canal. A few feet away a wall of impenetrable turquoise light rose from the water and spread away to either side and ever above.
“Too much to hope that we’d come up on the other side,” sighed Pooley.
Soap Distant, red-faced and clutching at himself, looked daggers at him. “I’ll have you for that,” he said painfully.
Jim smiled sickly. “What could we do? Look on the bright side, at least we all got out alive.”
“Not all,” said John Omally.
“Eh?”
Omally gestured towards the open manhole through which they had just emerged. “And then there were three,” he said in a leaden tone.
“Holmes,” cried Pooley. “In all the excitement…” he scrabbled over to the manhole and shouted the detective’s name into the void. His voice came back to him again and again, mocking his cries.
“Leave it, Jim.” Omally put his hand to his best friend’s shoulder. “He never had a chance.”
“I didn’t think.” Pooley looked up fearfully. “I didn’t think.”
“None of us did. We only thought of ourselves and our own.”
“We left him to…”
“Yes.”
“The poor bastard.”
“The poor noble bastard. He saved our lives at the expense of his own.”
Pooley climbed slowly to his feet and thrust his hands into his trouser pockets. He looked up to where the Lateinos and Romiith building rose, filling the skyline. “Oh shit!” he said, kicking at the toppled manhole cover. “Oh, that’s me finished. Those bastards are going to pay for this.”
“Oh yes,” said John Omally. “They are definitely going to do all of that.”
30
Professor Slocombe withdrew a goose feather quill from the inkwell, and scratched out the fifth day from the June calendar. From beyond the shuttered French windows sounds as of merriment reached him. The Brentford Festival had begun. Throughout the night, the floats had been assembling upon the Butts Estate; lumbering through the darkness, heavy and ponderous. Through a crack in the shutters he had watched their slow progress and viewed their silhouettes, stark against an almost white sky. He had presided over many Festivals past
