A bromide with breakfast

“Who are those police-officers, dear?” Angela Mons-de-Lancefoy’s voice was as clear as the peal of church bells on a sunny Sunday morning, so the entire café stopped eating, drinking and gossiping for a moment and stared in the direction she was pointing.  Leslie daFox’s police-guard looked embarrassed, and the fatter of the two tried to conceal his plate of cream-stuffed pastries behind his cup of coffee.

“They’re mine, kind of,” said Leslie.  Angela was an old friend and fellow writer, specialising in sub-genres of crime fiction.  “They think I murdered two of my students and have been following me around every since.  Occasionally they try and pin other murders on me too; a few weeks ago I was in the supermarket and someone a couple of aisles away was murdered.  Despite that they were with me the whole time they accused me of doing it!”

“They don’t sound very competent,” said Angela.  She sliced into her cake and prodded it with her fork.  “Dry and crumbly,” she said.  “Which, curiously, isn’t a bad way of describing my latest sub-genre.”  She picked up the piece of cake and dunked it in her latte.  “Italian-style,” she said, seeing the look on Leslie’s face.  “Just the bits of Italy that you never went to.”

Leslie shrugged; he’d spent some time in the eighties visiting bits and pieces of Italy, Spain and Portugal and had rather liked the mediterranean climate.  “You were always more bohemian than me,” he said.  “Weren’t you shacked up in the commune for six months with whatshisface?”

“Oh yes!” Angela sounded delighted.  “He was fun.  I turned him into a serial killer in one of my books later on.  I don’t think he ever learned to read though, so I doubt he knows.”

“What was that you were saying about dry and crumbly though?  How can that be a sub-genre of anything?”

“Oh, it was my agent’s idea.  Did you know she’s also the agent for Janet O’Steen, by the way?  Anyway, she said that there’s a generation of baby-boomers now who have never looked after themselves and are heading into old age being pretty much decrepit and dependent on their families and the state for handouts.  There’s far too many of them, so the handouts are rather small, so they end up being kind of old and crumbly.  So I’m writing novels where the detective is one of these people.  He’s not that brilliant to begin with, and he’s only on the force still because he can’t afford to retire and the pension isn’t large enough, so he has to keep working.  But his very age and overall miserability makes people underestimate him, and he can talk to his own generation in a very sympathetic way, and because they’re all kind of lonely and mean anyway, they’re nosey and eager to talk about what they’ve spied.  So he starts being able to solve these difficult cases where the evidence is all there, but it’s really hard to gather.  And then the police force start to appreciate him more, so they get special dispensation to extend his working life, and now he can’t retire until he’s 80 anyway, and he starts getting bitter about that.  But he’s too ineffectual to do much about it, and he has to make do with pithy asides and cutting sarcasm.”

“People buy books about that?”  Leslie looked slightly appalled.  “Where’s the feel-good element to it?”

“Oh Leslie,” sighed Angela dunking more cake in her latte.  “You always want to make to people laugh!  Sometimes they just want to wallow in their own misery and leaven it with self-pity.”

“Maybe I should write about my time under police scrutiny,” said Leslie.  “It might appeal to the paranoid masses.”

“You think you’re joking,” said Angela, “but just look at the revelations about the monitoring of communications.  People are starting to wonder how much of it is going on and what’s truly private.  If you’ve got a story about always being under the watchful eye of the system, then you should tell it!”

“I think the panopticon has already been done,” said Leslie.  His eyes twinkled.  “But you’re right you know, it’s been too long since I last did something for me.  I think the last thing I did was contribute two hundred jokes to one of those topical tv news shows.”

“Top Yourself This Week?”

“Something like that, yes.  They used about seventy; they said something about the others having too many long words in them.”

“Hah yes!  Lowest common denominator, Leslie.  Never forget!”

“Doesn’t anyone get to write high-quality, intellectual books these days?”

“Janet does.  And people who don’t want to make a living from writing.”

They fell silent for a moment, drinking their coffees.  Then, three tables away, a woman fell forward and landed face-first in a plate of slightly-sloppy Black Forest Gateau.  For a moment no-one said anything, and then her companion screamed while almost everyone else in the café produced a mobile phone and started snatching pictures to Instagram and post on Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites.

“Did you do that?” asked Leslie and Angela simultaneously, and burst into mischievous laughter.  No-one around them noticed, being pre-occupied with the sudden death.  A knife was now clearly visible between the fallen woman’s shoulder-blades.  Finally Leslie waved at the police-officers.

“Yes Sir?” asked the thinner of the two.

“Aren’t you going to do anything?” said Angela.  “There’s a dead woman there who’s clearly been murdered.”

The policemen exchanged looks.  “Did you happen to see Mr. daFox do it?” asked the fatter.

The language of dogs

Laughter came from the living room, following a couple of moments later by a different voice, heavy and slower, saying “I don’t get it.”  Leslie daFox, who had thirty years earlier scripted the show they were watching now, bowed his head as he used the tin-opener on a can of condensed milk, wondering if he shouldn’t feel more angry than depressed.

“Well, it’s because she’s got a hat on, innit?” said the first voice, still laughing slightly.

“Oh,” said the second voice, sounding uncertain.  “Is that funny?”

“Yes!”

“No,” whispered Leslie to himself.  “They’re laughing because they know she’s the Health Inspector but the guys she’s inspecting are so misogynistic that they think she’s escaped from the community care hostel up the road.”

“Here, where’s the murderer gone then?”

Leslie tipped the milk into a saucer and put it down on the floor.  Two burly policemen, one red-faced and slightly out of breath, burst into the kitchen.  They looked relieved when they saw him.

“Did you sneak out of the room?” demanded the red-faced policeman.

“No,” said Leslie.  “I asked you both if you wanted coffee and then told you I was going to make some.  You both watched me leave the room.”

“That sounds sneaky to me,” said the red-faced policeman.  “Hiding in plain sight, that’s called.”

“Only in your lexicon,” said Leslie, aware that neither officer would know what lexicon meant, or would lose face by asking him for a definition.  They reminded him a lot of his community college class, both in aptitude for study and for the length of time he liked spending with them.

“Here, there’s a saucer of milk on the floor,” said the red-faced policeman.  He picked it up and sniffed it.  “Were you going to drink this, Sir?”

“No,” said Leslie.  He was convinced that one day the red-faced policeman was going to ask for a reminder on how to breathe.

“Oh right then,” said the policeman.  He tipped the saucer up and drank the milk.  “Hey, this is the sweet stuff!”

“That was the cat’s milk,” said Leslie.  “There were cat medicine tablets in there.”

“Aha!  You’ve tried murdering a policeman now!”  The other policeman seemed to spring to life all of a sudden at the prospect of finally being able to arrest Leslie for the murders they were convinced he’d committed, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

“I have not,” said Leslie.  “Your colleague picked a saucer up off the floor and drank from it.  That’s rank stupidity and ought to qualify him for a Darwin award.  My actions were peripheral and had a completely different end in mind.”

“I don’t think so, Sir,” began the second policeman, a gleam appearing in his eye.

“Cyrus!”  Leslie’s voice carried throughout his house, and there was a whimper from the laundry-room.  Both policeman turned towards it instantly.

“What was that?”

“The maid,” said Leslie.  “She hides in the washing when you’re here.  She’s getting very wrinkled and agoraphobic, and I may have to sue you over this.”

“You can’t sue us,” said the red-faced policeman promptly.

“I rather think he can,” said a smooth voice, and Cyrus, Leslie’s twenty-three year old lawyer walked into the room.  Both policeman looked angry, but closed their mouths firmly.  “Is there a problem?”

“Another baseless accusation of murder and an attempt to frame me,” said Leslie.  “This time he picked up the cat’s saucer of milk and drank it and her worming tablets.

“If we incorporate your cat as a business I think I can sue them for theft,” said Cyrus, grinning.  “If we can make it a high-tech firm then I might be able to get them on industrial sabotage, if you like?”

“That sounds very tempting,” said Leslie, “but frighteningly expensive.  Can’t you just send them to their rooms for the evening?”

“Can’t let you out of our sight, Sir,” said the red-faced officer immediately.  He appeared to be sweating profusely all of a sudden.  Cyrus eyed him.

“When was the last time they let you out of their sight?” he asked.

“Less than five minutes ago, while I was getting coffee and sorting out the cat’s medicine,” said Leslie.

“Precedent!” yelled Cyrus.  “Go to your rooms!”

The policemen grumbled and argued, but Cyrus prevailed and sent them off to watch the rooms of the house on CCTV instead.

“You don’t have a cat,” said Cyrus after they’d gone.

“I know,” said Leslie.  “But they don’t, for all they’ve been here five months now.

Not Columbo

It had probably been the abattoir, thought Leslie daFox, sitting in the back of the police van.  His wrists were handcuffed together and his hands cupped each other in his lap.  Opposite him, sitting on a narrow plastic bench with odds stains along it, was a burly policeman who was glaring at Leslie.  He had little piggy eyes set deep in a fat, florid face, a sparse, mousey-brown moustache that had been waxed into rat-tails at the ends, and acne that ran from under his chin down his neck and disappeared into a shiny, greasy-looking uniform jacket.
"Do you know why you're under arrest?" said the policeman.  This was the first time he'd spoken since he'd heaved his bulk into the van and Leslie had slid slightly along his bench as the van wobbled and tilted.  There's a faint aroma of cinnamon in the air; presumably the policeman had been eating and had had to break off from his lunch so that he could come and talk to Leslie.
"No," said Leslie.  He looked the policeman directly in his eyes, wondering what colour they were.  They were too shadowed to make out, and his eyebrows were sprouting making it harder still.
"Really, Mr. daFox?"  The policeman rolled his r but otherwise sounded rather bored.
"Really," said Leslie pleasantly.  Then, almost as an after-thought, and just when he thought the policeman would be about to speak, he added, "unless you think you're Peter Falk, of course."
"Who?"  The policeman conjured a small notepad and pencil from an inside pocket.  "How do you spell that?"
Leslie obligingly spelled the name and the policeman wrote it down, tore the page off, and clambered to the end of the van to open the doors and pass the paper to someone outside.  Leslie craned his neck but he couldn't see past the policeman.  Then the man returned, breathing a little heavily as though he'd been running to pass off the note.
"Right," he said, sitting back down again and rocking the van alarmingly.  "Why do you think you'd have been arrested if I were Peter Falkland?"
"Peter Falk," said Leslie.  "And if you were he, you wouldn't have arrested me.  But if you thought you were he, you might have arrested me, by way of demonstrating that you were definitely not he."
"...what?"
"Look," said Leslie, still keeping his patience.  "Three months ago two students were found dead in a lecture theatre I was scheduled to teach a class in.  Since then you've been hounding me like you think I know where the doughnut-leprechaun lives; you've had Tweedledum and Tweedledee bodyguarding me, for some risible value of bodyguard, and every so often someone phones me up at 2am and demands to know who I'm going to kill next.  The number they call from matches the one on the business card you gave me when you first found the bodies.  This is police harassment, and I think arresting me is just the latest escalation of it."
"Right," said the policeman.  "Tweedledee and Tweedledum?  Is that an Alice in Wonderland reference?"
"Through the Looking Glass, I think," said Leslie, suddenly appalled with himself that he couldn't remember.  "Not original either, I'm afraid, but it went down rather well with test audiences back in the seventies, so it's a deserved cliché."
"Is that clichet with a 't'?"
"No.  No 'y' either."
"And the doughnut-leprechaun?"
"May be real, but I don't know where he lives," said Leslie.
"Ha.  Ha."
Someone banged on the back-doors of the van and pulled the door open.  A young policeman with a shock of black hair spiked up impossibly high on his head peered in, and spotted the fat policeman.
"Peter Falk?" he shouted, making Leslie flinch.
"Yes?" said the policeman, glaring at Leslie as though daring him to try and make a break for it.
"Dead," said the young policeman.  He pulled his head back and closed the doors of the van.
"Dead," said the fat policeman.  "You're thinking I should be dead, are you, Sir?  And you found coming out of an abattoir and all...."
"Oh dear God," said Leslie hopelessly.