Waiting for Godalming Read online

  WAITING FOR GODALMING

  ROBERT RANKIN

  Waiting For Godalming

  Originally published by Doubleday, a division of Transworld Publishers

  Doubleday Edition published 2000

  Corgi Edition published 2001

  Kindle Edition published 2012 by Far Fetched Books

  Diddled about with and proof-read by the author, who apologises for any typos or grammatical errors that somehow slipped past him.

  He did his best, honest.

  Copyright Robert Rankin 2000

  The right of Robert Rankin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright Design and Patents Act 1988.

  All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, copied in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise transmitted without written permission from the publisher. You must not circulate this book in any format.

  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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  For my bestest buddy

  NICK REEKIE

  A great Sherlockian

  You work it out!

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  I really hated the doctor’s office.

  It smelled of feet and fish and fear. A fetid fermentation. And I really hated the doctor too. He was a wrong’un, that doctor.

  On the outside, to the naked eyeball, he looked fine. He looked just the way that a doctor should look. The way that you would expect a doctor to look. But that’s what they do, the wrong’uns. That’s how they survive amongst us. They look just right. Just how they’re supposed to look. Which is why no-one ever suspects them of being what they really are.

  Wrong’uns.

  But I know. Because I took the drug. I can see them for what they really are. Foul demonic creatures of Hell. And I can stop them too. I could put paid to their plans for world domination. I could drive them back to the bottomless pit. I could. I really could. If only I could stay awake for a little bit longer. Just a couple of days. That’s all I need. Just a couple of days.

  ‘So,’ said the doctor, glancing up from his case notes, my case notes. ‘Do you want to continue with the consultation?’

  ‘Buddy,’ I told him. ‘All I want is some more of those wide-awake tablets. So I don’t keep falling asleep.’

  ‘The tablets help then, do they?’

  ‘Tablets always help,’ I said. ‘That’s what tablets are for, isn’t it?’

  ‘Some of them.’ The doctor peered at me over his spectacles. I’d had a pair like them once. Special lenses in mine, though. Invented them myself.

  2D spectacles. The opposite of 3D spectacles. When you looked through mine, they made the world go flat. Like you were watching a movie, see? Like you were in a movie. Ken Kesey once said, ‘Always stay in your own movie,’ and that’s what I do. That’s how I survive. I made the frames of my spectacles long and narrow, so that my world was a widescreen movie. But they weren’t a success.

  I had some really dangerous moments on the motorway.

  So I don’t invent things any more. I just stick to what I do best. And that is being the greatest private eye in the business.

  ‘Do you want to talk about your dreams?’ the doctor asked.

  ‘No,’ I told him. ‘I don’t have any time for dreams.’

  ‘Let’s talk about you then. Let’s talk about you, Mr Woodblock.’

  ‘The name’s Woodbine,’ I said. ‘Lazlo Woodbine, private eye.’ And I added, ‘Some call me Laz.’

  The doctor leafed some more through his case notes. ‘Mr Woodbine, yes, and you describe yourself as a living legend.’

  ‘I am the man,’ I said. ‘The one and only. The last of a dying breed.’

  ‘And just what breed would that be, exactly?’

  ‘The nineteen-fifties American genre detective. The man who walks alone along those mean streets where a man must walk alone.’

  ‘Not entirely alone,’ said the doctor, flick flick flicking through those case-note pages. ‘There is this Gary character who works with you.’

  ‘It’s Barry,’ I said. ‘His name is Barry.’

  ‘Ah yes, Barry. And Barry is a sprout who lives inside your head.’

  ‘He doesn’t live there. I’ve told you before.’

  ‘He’s a dead sprout?’

  ‘He’s a theophany. And before you ask me again what that is, it’s a manifestation of the deity to man, in a form which, although visible, is not necessarily material. And before you ask me again whether I can see Barry, the answer is no. I can only hear him. And only I can hear him. He speaks to me from inside my head. He’s my Holy Guardian Sprout.’

  ‘As in Holy Guardian Angel?’

  ‘As I have told you many times before. There are more people on Earth than there are angels in Heaven. God improvises. He shares out the produce of His garden. I got a sprout named Barry. Perhaps you have a pumpkin called Peter.’

  ‘Are you suggesting that I have a very big head?’

  ‘If the elephant man’s cap fits, wear it.’

  ‘What did you say, Mr Woodbine?’

  ‘I said, you have an elegant man’s head. Now please can I have some more tablets before I fall asleep again?’

  ‘All in good time,’ said the doctor, doing that thing that doctors do with their pencils. ‘Let’s talk a bit about this case you say you’re on. It involves a handbag, doesn’t it?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘My last case involved a handbag. This case involves a briefcase.’

  ‘Is there always luggage involved in your cases?’

  ‘That’s what a case is, luggage.’

  ‘I don’t think I quite understand.’

  ‘Well, we all have our luggage to carry around. That’s what makes a man what he is, his luggage.’

  ‘Surely you mean baggage.’

  ‘Luggage, baggage. A man is what he carries around. A handbag, a briefcase, a doctor’s bag, carpet bag, Gladstone bag, kit bag, duffel bag, saddle bag, portmanteau, suitcase, attaché case, despatch case, guitar case, overnight case, weekend case, vanity case, satchel, knapsack, rucksack, haversack…’

  ‘You certainly know your luggage,’ said the doctor.

  ‘Buddy,’ I told him, ‘in my business, knowing your luggage can mean the difference between looking through the eyes of love and staring down the barrel of a P45. If you know what I mean and I’m sure that you do.’

  ‘I don’t,’ said the doctor.

  ‘Well I do,’ said I. ‘There was one case I was on back in ninety-five and I confused a sabretache with a reticule. That case cost me my two front teeth, my entire collection of Robert Johnson records, my reputation as a connoisseur of pine kitchen wall cupboards, my pet duck named Derek and…’

  ‘What?’ asked the doctor.

  ‘Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.’

  ‘Wake up!’ shouted the doctor.

  And I woke up in a bit of a sweat.

  ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘All I w
ant is the tablets, so I can stay awake. You want me to stay awake, so I can tell you all about the case. I want to stay awake, so I can close the case. For pity’s sake, man, we both want me to stay awake. So why don’t you just give me the damn tablets and then I’ll stay awake?’

  ‘All right,’ said the doctor. ‘I’ll give you a tablet now and you can have another when you’ve finished telling me all about your case.’

  I could see he was lying. It shows up on their heads when they lie, the wrong’uns. Their quills go blue at the tips. But of course he didn’t know that I could see his quills. He didn’t know that I was on to him. But I was. I could see his quills and his terrible reptilian eyes and those awful insect mouthparts that kept chewing chewing chewing. I could see it all, because I had taken the drug.

  And so I told him all about the case. Just to pass the time. Just so I could stay awake for a couple more days and wipe him and his kind from the face of the Earth. I didn’t tell him all of it. Because I didn’t know all of it. And even if I had, I wouldn’t have told him. I told him my side of the story, when I was called in on the case. I don’t know for sure just what happened earlier, because I wasn’t there to see it happen. I guess it all really began in that barber’s shop. But like I say, I wasn’t there, so I couldn’t be sure.

  1

  Now you don’t really see barber’s shops any more. They’ve gone the way of the Pathé News and Mary Poppins. But once, in a time not too long ago, the barber’s shop was a very special place. A shrine to all things male.

  Here men of every social order gathered for their bi-weekly trims. The gentry rubbed shoulders with the genetically deficient, princes with paupers, wide boys with window dressers. Here was egalitarianism made flesh. Here was a classless society. Here all men were equal beneath the barber’s brush.

  A mile due north of Brentford, as fair flies the griffin, the Ealing Road enters South Ealing and for a space of one hundred yards becomes its high street. And here, in the high street, hard upon the left hand path, betwixt a wool shop, where the wives of wealthy men felt yarn, and a flower shop where they fondled floral fripperies, there stood at the time when our tale is told, a barber’s shop that went by the name of Stravino’s.

  And Stravino’s was a barber’s shop as a barber’s shop should be.

  Above the door and rising proud as a porn star’s pecker, the red and white striped pole, encased within a cylinder of glass and powered by an unseen engine, spiralled ever towards infinity. The front and only window, bathed on rare occasions by bob-a-jobbing Boy Scouts, displayed in ten-by-eights of gloss-gone monochrome the fashionable haircuts of a bygone day. The face of King Gillette, creator of that famous blade of blue, stared sternly from a box of safety razors. And dead flies, belly up, arrayed themselves in pleasing compositions.

  Bliss.

  Ah, perfect bliss.

  But if ‘twere bliss to view it from without, then what of it within?

  Ah, well, within.

  ‘Twere poetry within.

  For

  Stravino’s shop was long and low

  With walls of a nicotine hue.

  The floor was ankle-deep in hair

  And if you dared to stand and stare,

  That hair would soon be round your leg

  And filling up your shoe.

  The Greek himself was a colourful man

  Who rejoiced in the name of Smiling Stan

  And worked his trade with great élan

  And sang some opera too.

  There were hot towels in a chromium drum

  And a row of cinema chairs

  Where the patrons sat to await their turns

  And savour the screams from the hot towel burns

  And open the old brown envelope

  And dodge the flying hairs.

  For the Greek could snip with incredible zest

  He’d have at your head like a man possessed

  And few could help but be impressed

  By his knowledge of cosmic affairs.

  And so on and so forth for many verses more. But we have not come here to versify. We have come here with a purpose and that is to meet the hero for our tale.

  For the present, he is unaware that he is the hero. Indeed, by the looks of him, he seems hardly cut from that cloth of which heroes are tailored. He is slender, slightly stooped and sits with downcast eyes, patiently awaiting his turn for a trim. He speaks to no-one and no-one speaks to him. He is eighteen years of age and his name is Icarus Smith.

  It’s a good name for a hero, Icarus Smith. Encompassing, as it does, both the mythic and the mundane. But other than his having a good name for a hero, what can there be said about the man who bears this name?

  Well.

  If you were to approach young Mr Smith and ask that he recommend himself, he would like as not ignore you. But if the mood to communicate was upon him, as seldom it was without a good cause, for he rarely spoke to anyone other than himself, he would probably say that he considered himself to be an honest God-fearing fellow, who meant harm to no man and called each man his brother.

  His brother by birth, however, might well choose to take issue with this particular statement, letting it be known that in his opinion, Icarus was nothing more than a thieving godless ne’er do well.

  But then that’s brothers for you, isn’t it? And Icarus, for his part, considered his brother to be barking mad.

  So can any man be truly judged by the opinions of others, no matter how close to the man himself those others might be? Surely not. By a man’s deeds shall you know him, said the sage, and by his deeds was Icarus known.

  To most of the local constabulary.

  He did not consider himself to be a thief. Anything but. Icarus considered himself to be a ‘relocator’. One who practised the arts and sciences of relocation. And to him this was no euphemism. This was a way of life and a mighty quest to boot.

  To Icarus, the concept of ‘ownership’ was mere illusion. How, he argued, could any man truly ‘own’ anything except the body that clothed his consciousness?

  Certainly you could acquire things and hold on to them for a while and you could call this ‘ownership’. But whatever you had, you would ultimately lose. Things break. Things wear out. Things go missing. You die and leave the things that you ‘owned’ to others, who in turn will ‘own’ them for a while.

  You could try like the very bejasus to ‘own’ things, but you never really truly would. And if you didn’t hang on like the very bejasus to the things that you thought you owned, then like as not you wouldn’t ‘own’ them for very long.

  For they would be relocated by Icarus Smith. Or if not relocated by Icarus Smith, then simply stolen by some thieving godless ne’er do well.

  Now for the cynics out there, who might still be labouring under the mistaken opinion that relocating is merely thieving by another name, let this be said: Icarus had not become a relocator by choice. He was an intelligent lad and could have turned his hand to almost anything in order to earn himself a living. But Icarus had dreamed a dream, a terrible dream it was, and this dream had changed the life of Icarus Smith.

  Icarus had dreamed the Big Picture. The Big Picture of what was wrong with the world and the method by which he could put it to rights. And when you dream something like that, it does have a tendency to change your life somewhat.

  In the dream of Icarus Smith, he had seen the world laid out before him as the Big Picture. People coming and going and doing their things and it all looked fine from a distance. But the closer Icarus looked, the more wrong everything became. The Big Picture was in fact a jigsaw puzzle with everyone’s lives and possessions slotted together. But it was a jigsaw that had been assembled by a madman. A mad God perhaps? The more closely Icarus examined the pieces, the more he became aware that they didn’t fit properly. They were all in the wrong places and had been hammered down in order to make them fit.

  Icarus realized that if he could take out a piece here and replace it with a piece
from over there and move that other bit across there and shift that bit up a bit and so on and so forth and so on and so forth and—

  He had awoken in a terrible sweat.

  But he had seen the Big Picture.

  And he had found his vocation in life. As a relocator.

  Icarus realized that the world could be changed for the better by relocating things. By putting the right things into the right people’s hands and removing the wrong things from the wrong people’s hands.

  It was hardly a new idea; Karl Marx had come up with something similar a century before. But sharing out the wealth of the world equally amongst everyone had never been much of an idea. Anyone with any common sense at all realized that a week after the wealth had been distributed, some smart blighter would have wangled much more than his fair share from the less than smart blighters and the world would be back where it started again.

  It had to be done differently from that.

  But Icarus was working on it. For, after all, he had had the dream. He had seen the Big Picture. He was the chosen one.

  He realized from the outset that he would not be able to do it all alone. The task was far too big. It would be necessary to take on recruits. Many many recruits. But that was for the future. Everything had to start in a small way and so for the present he must go it alone.

  And it had to be instinctive and not for personal gain. He had to eat and clothe himself and attend to his basic needs, but above and beyond that there must be no profit.

  Icarus also knew that the ‘powers that be’ would not take kindly to his plans for changing the world. The powers that be thrived on the concept of ownership. Icarus, in their eyes, would be a dangerous criminal and subversive who could not be allowed to walk the streets.

  A few early run-ins with the local constabulary had taught Icarus discretion. And, having read a great deal on the science of detection and seen a great many movies, a very great many movies, Icarus had become adept at covering his tracks and leaving no clues behind at the ‘crime scene’.