Part Three of The Sensational Shrimpleton Saga: the Peeress and the Soldier.

Well – the feedback I have received about my potential new Soap Opera’s first two instalments so far has been quite encouraging. I wondered at the end of the last episode if this whole project about a BDSM specialist pornographer and Drug Baron in charge of a crummy football club playing on a big rock on the fringe of the North Atlantic was the stuff of a Hollywood Blockbuster.

And severely doubted it: the whole notion was surely too absurd. Who in their right minds would believe that a group of Sikhs – who are not generally known for their cultural affiliations with Association Football – should engineer the Drug Baron’s untimely demise with a plot which frankly was barely credible? Not me, for a start – the whole notion seems to be fanciful at best. Surely, shady Underworld figures settle their differences with guns, knives, bombs or career Hit Men, don’t they? But with professional yodelling? – I don’t think so.

Suggesting that this bunch of brigands should then take-over the football club only to be sanctioned by HM Government because of suspected links to terrorist groups in India was surely a Bridge Too Far: nobody would believe such a pile of plop, would they?

Things like this just don’t happen in real life, do they?

So let’s try and get a bit more real as we continue this sorry saga. Here we go:

In most film or TV dramas – as well as your Bog Standard Detective Story – there is usually a Bad Guy and a Good Guy. Nobody seems to tire of the tried and tested formula: however inventive; brilliant in an evil sort of way; scheming or criminally psychopathic the Bad Guy is; the Good Guy always gets the better of him. Or her.

Bad Guy ends up shot. Or blown-up. Or at the foot of a skyscraper, from which they have just fallen – or been thrown. And that’s it.

Good guy walks or limps or crawls away – and the story ends there. There are no repercussions. No angry Mothers or Fathers; brothers or sisters or even sons or daughters of the Bad Guy remain and itch for revenge. No furious partners in crime or just friends of the deceased ever seem to be left behind to feel that they have Unfinished Business with the apparent victor.

It’s all far too neat. Real life just doesn’t work like that.

So I would like to take you to the foot of a Chalk Cliff in Kent on a wet and windy day in November. 

A strikingly handsome hunk of a man is standing there, alone on the damp shingle, looking down at it. In front and above him, the chalk seems not to be actually white as more sort of grey-ish and in need of a good scrub.

Behind him, the sea is a way off across wet clumps of seaweed, broken or abandoned plastic bottles and muddy rock-pools which the retreating tide has left behind.

To his left and right, there are lighthouses in the distance; one at Beachy Head not too far away.

On the top of the cliff – out of sight – is what is nowadays known as the King Charles III Coastal Path and beyond it, a road called Hod Combe by the locals.

It was from this road that a Jaguar XF Sportbrake Estate car had made a fatal plunge only three weeks earlier with a well-known East End criminal and his Moll inside it.

It is breezy and quite cold at the foot of the cliff. But the man standing there has a sort of sou’wester on to protect himself from the weather; a long yellow oilskin coat which is a bit battered and slightly grubby. Beneath it is a padded jacket and he is also wearing green breeches and matching rubber boots. His shaved head is bare and the wind is catching the hood of his oilskin coat, blowing it into his face as water runs down his closely-cropped but fashionable and very sexy beard. For this is the sort of man who was like the groom I overheard my Great Auntie Mabel once describe at a family wedding:

“Ee – yon lad could dampen yer gusset at thirty yards, tha’ knows!” she had said in that extraordinarily strong Yorkshire accent of hers.

There is rain in the air but the wetness in this man’s beard isn’t rainwater. It is caused by salty tears.

For this man is crying. A great big tough-looking bloke who instinct alone tells you not to mix with, sobbing his heart out on the shingle. A heart that is literally broken.

He squats and runs his hands over the disturbed stones, pebbles and shredded plastic in a slight depression in the beach’s surface. This is the last resting place of the notorious East End criminal Whit Jason and his Jaguar car.

The media in general dismissed him as completely worthless. Probably rightly. But to similarly dismiss the passenger who also died in the front seat as just some slag who had attached herself to him in the same way could not be justified.

To the Daily Mail and its ilk, Dora was simply a woman of ill repute – and I’m not just talking about the fact that she was an accountant here. She fitted all the tabloid stereotypes of a piece of female detritus not worth any column inches – unless it involved the size of her bust.

But to this man, stooped and sobbing on the windswept shore, this was absolutely not the case. She wasn’t some stupid tart to be written-off as worthless by morons on Fleet Street: she was a living, breathing, vibrant human being. For the beautiful and incredibly gifted multi-lingual woman with a First Class degree from the Sorbonne in Economics who died on this spot was his sister.

And Dora was the love of his life.

His shoulders shake; his head sinks lower. Eventually, though, he stands up. He wipes his eyes with the back of his hand and looks up towards the sky. He smiles: briefly, bitterly as an image of his dead sister when she was a little girl appears in his mind’s eye. She was on a swing in a garden; her always enchanting smile trapped in time: the focal point of a faded colour photo in which the piercing eyes seemed to be looking right into your soul. He could almost hear her singing, in her shrill little voice, as she so often did: “Dora! You a-Dora!”

And he did. Always had; always would. She was his little sister and he would do anything to protect her. Anything.

Except… He hadn’t. He couldn’t. And now it was too late.

Tears filled his eyes anew as he looked towards the sky.

“I’ll get them, Dora!” he swore. “I’ll get the people who did this to you!”

Others might have substituted the word `people’ with a much stronger expletive. But not this man: he didn’t swear – except to get revenge on all the individuals who had ever crossed him. Eventually, he turned and walked back towards the sea and the orange dingy he had left, pulled-up on the strand just out of the water. He shoved it back in, pushed it out a little way and lithely leapt back on board and started the huge outboard motor.  And in just a few minutes, he had disappeared from sight, heading in a westerly direction.

If this was a video drama instead of a bid for a Soap Opera, the next time we would see this man would be on the coast of Cumberside Island, having hugged the coast line in his bright orange dingy all the way from the Needles; past the Bristol Channel; the whole of Wales and beyond into the point where the Irish Sea and Morecambe Bay are about to meet. Like Superman, he would have needed no rest; no food and no sleep as he did this. The only thing about this which would be consistent with what he did in reality would be where he would end-up: on Cumberside Island.

But this particular man had taken Time Out and considered his options.

So who was this rugged and very handsome tough-guy?

You now know almost as much as I do about him: he was Dora’s older brother. I only know him as “J”; “Soldier J” to be exact. For that was how he was identified by the press when he gave evidence in a Court Martial of seven British soldiers accused of atrocities in Afghanistan. They were convicted. He was ostracised – as people in the Armed Forces regarded as Snitches usually are, the world over.

But Jay – as he became known even by people who had known him by his real name all his life – didn’t care. He had a unique Moral Code.

He’d done things in Afghanistan; Kuwait and most recently covertly in Ukraine and Northern Ireland that he wasn’t necessarily proud of. But he knew where to draw the line. You didn’t take advantage of women or girls caught up in conflicts just because you had the opportunity to do so; you didn’t shoot unarmed civilians because you were angry; knew that you would get away with it or simply felt like it; you didn’t blow-up people who didn’t deserve to be blown-up – or cause them to drive over a cliff in a car.

He’d killed – `executed’ is a word he would prefer – fellow-soldiers he knew to have done things like this. And got away with it because he was smart and often bided his time.

A British Sergeant in Helmand was found dead after a confrontation with an al-Qaeda band where the guerrillas had actually run away without a shot being fired. But the British soldier had unaccountably had the top of his head blown off at close range after this engagement.

To be followed, shortly afterwards, by a dead Private with an identical injury a couple of weeks later. The autopsies found that they had both been killed by a Russian-made AK-47. And if further enquiries had been possible – and the severity of their injuries always made this unlikely – they would have revealed that the same weapon had been used in both instances.

What were the chances of that? But not even the suspicion of what American GIs would call `fragging’ would ever fall upon Jay.

Same deal in Northern Ireland. But this time, officially sanctioned. There, he had been shipped-in by the British Security forces to `deal with’ two criminal gang leaders who were involved with drug-dealing and protection rackets being operated by shady groups with links to Loyalist paramilitaries on one side and the IRA on the other. All he had was their identities. How he tracked them down and actually `disposed’ of them was left entirely up to him. The last thing the British authorities wanted were any provable links to themselves if Jay got caught. They just made sure he was provided with some tools of the trade: listening devices; trackers and various other electronic gismos he might need plus explosives and firearms. But Jay never got caught. It took him a week to do both jobs and he was whisked out of Ulster as quickly as he had been `inserted’ – no real evidence left of the actual source of the killings but enough actually dodgy stuff planted at both murder scenes to start a turf war between the two groups which led to a lot more killing – and a sigh of relief in London as these people kept the violence between themselves and off the streets.

But that was then – and this was now. Jay was a tough bloke without any natural skill to be a footballer. Slow on the ball. Slow to think what to do with it when it was at his feet. But big; committed and strong:  just as he had always been in the Army. In fact, Jay was the perfect mix of muscle, brawn and toughness to make a really solid Centre Half. He had known this for quite some time and had even played for smaller clubs on a game-by-game basis, initially when he was based at any particular army camp for any length of time and finally when he was on Gardening Leave before quitting the armed services for good.

After his visit to the Chalk Cliffs in Kent, Jay had spent some time putting together a germ of an idea. He believed that the foolproof way to get to the bottom of what had happened to his beloved sister lay, somehow-or-other, with the Khalistan Warriors. And for him, the obvious way to get a foot in the door of this exclusively Sikh organisation was through the football club they owned.

How difficult could it be to get a trial with the Shrimpies?

But Soldier `J’ wasn’t the only person who had unfinished business as far as the death of Whit Jason was concerned.

For there was suddenly an acute interest in the demise of the former owner of Shrimpleton Town FC and the Bondage Group; an interest that was inevitably going to focus increasingly on the club itself and its owners in the shape of the Khalistan Warriors.

For Lord and Lady Shrimpleton, this was personal. For one of them had set-up a cosy – and very lucrative – little sideline as a result of her membership of the House of Lords: cocaine and other narcotics such as the currently very popular ketamine. Their Lordships couldn’t get enough of them. But with the car crash near Beachy Head, the Shrimpleton’s supplies had suddenly dried-up. And their Lordships and one Ladyship in particular – also rumoured to have associations with West Ham United Football Club – weren’t very happy about this: and her barely-concealed threats concerning what might befall Lord and Lady Shrimpleton if supplies weren’t rapidly restored weren’t very Lady-like at all.

But we get ahead of ourselves. All we have discovered so far about Lord and Lady Shrimpleton is that they were once the owners of Shrimpleton Town Football Club. From that, it would be logical to assume that their roots lay in the heart of Cumberside Island or perhaps the rolling countryside of West Cumberland, where stately piles are two-a-penny. But that assumption would be wrong.

The ancient Shrimpleton family had made a vast fortune out of the Wool Trade and owned mills all over the North of England which spun and knitted world-famous brands which can still be bought in posh shops even today. The only difference these days is that, instead of “Produced in Keswick or Kendal or Leeds”, the labels on them say things like “Origin: India; Pakistan or China.”

Generations ago, the Shrimpletons had turned their backs on the then quite unfashionable Lake District and bought a huge country pile in Surrey. Plus the obligatory Town House in Bloomsbury, close to Queen Square and the British Museum. 

One by one, the unique woollen mills and then the brands themselves had been sold off during the 1970s. It put countless people in the north of England out of work but made the Shrimpletons millions more pounds, which is all that mattered to them.

But the late Lord Algernon Shrimpleton – who was the beneficiary of this selling-off of the family jewels – squandered quite a lot of his windfall on yachts, a helicopter, paternity suits and alcohol.

So it was perhaps appropriate when the octogenarian crashed his helicopter into the MV Algy when trying to land it – when about ten times over the legal limit to drive a car – during 1995: a tragedy which saw his latest `wife’ – Penthouse centrefold, 19-year-old “Foxy” Foxcroft – perish with him in the inferno which ensued.

Son “Perry” (“I don’t mind if I do!”) Peregrine was hardly a safer pair of hands as far as the family fortune was concerned. His gambling debts saw the Surrey mansion sold to a rock star during the 1980s and the dynasty was almost skint: down to its last ten million or so when a scandal involving what he regarded as the gutter press started after they had asked searching questions about why the elderly Peer had never married. There were some particularly sordid and salacious headlines about “Rent Boys” and a word which rhymes with `Peer’ into the bargain.

The noble lord hardly helped himself when he agreed to do an ill-fated television interview to clear his name. This was recorded sometime before a better known one by someone called Andrew something-or-other caused a bit of a sensation in the UK and America at least.

In an absolutely key part of the interview, he said he `didn’t perspire to be any better than he was’.  He had meant to say `aspire’ but – clearly being drunk, the word came out wrong.

“I thought I retrieved the shit – the shit – the shituation quite well, conshidering…” he told interviewer – Emily Mateless – as the cameras were still rolling.

(Yes: Emily Mateless – Mateless in the Royal Family at least these days: even though she’s obviously really posh herself, she isn’t going to ever become a Dame, mark my words…)

But the public thought otherwise about Lord Perry’s sweaty preferences. And his final remark

“Well – at leasht I’m not Jeffrey (expletive deleted) Epstein – or one of his posh pals from Eton!”

proved to be particularly unfortunate thing to say live on air.

“Weren’t you educated at Eton?” Emily asked him, as people all over Britain waited with baited breath to hear what he might have to say in response. This is when he famously stood-up and yelled – despite being noticeably unsteady on his feet:

“I’m a Winchester fellow! One of the Rum Boys – not Bum Boys from Buggery Incorporated Headquarters Eton ruddy College!”

As Emily vainly tried to get his to calm down – and the studio crew then had to intervene to physically drag him away from the set – the noble Lord had a final insult to yell at the camera; Ms Mateless and the world at large as he was literally thrown out of the studio:

“Eton ruddy College’s Slogan should not be `Roger, Over and Out’ but `Roger: Bend Over and IN!!!”

And it was Roger Over And Out for Lord Perry right from that fateful moment.

But was his goose – Grouse, I suppose in such a posh case as his – actually cooked from then on? Or would a choice of a grouse – sorry; spouse – change his own personal and his family’s fortunes for the better – and imminently?

Watch out for the next enthralling episode of The Sensational Shrimpleton Saga, where all will be revealed.

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