Part Nine of The Sensational Shrimpleton Saga: Who is Baroness Blighty of Brighton?...

Last time, we had left the gorgeous and utter captivating Lady Lynne Shrimpleton to catch a plane to somewhere-or-other. She had just employed a Private Eye to take on the very tricky – and potentially dangerous – task of tracking-down and infiltrating the mysterious owners of Shrimpleton Town Football Club: a number of Sikhs known to most people as the Khalistan Warriors but to natives of Doncaster simply as `Turban Guerrillas’. But how did this particular sleuth really think about the task he had been basically hustled into accepting?

Jim Proudfoot a.k.a. Threefeet of the Yard was experiencing a feeling he had never been afflicted by before throughout his sixty-odd years on the planet. As he sat on the 88 bus heading back towards Manor Park and the crummy bedsit which awaited him in the wasteland of north-west suburbia beyond, he was trying to make sense of this. Never before had anyone out-manoeuvred him in the way he felt he had been at the House of Lords earlier on. Part of him felt used – mocked even – by someone who seemed to be one step ahead of him all the time. But had he really been – or was he just imagining it?

He thought about Lady Lynne Shrimpleton for the umpteenth time since he had first met her. She really was beautiful. Smart. Unusually beautiful indeed. Persuasive. Extraordinarily beautiful in fact. Convincing. Achingly beautiful, truth be told. Bedazzling even…

That was the problem, he decided. He had been bedazzled by her. So much so that he hadn’t got a penny out of her: not even his usual `consultancy’ fee for travelling to her office. Not even his bus fare. That was a first in itself. But something else had also happened earlier which was a total novelty: he had never been commissioned before. And that was what she had offered him, wasn’t it? A thirty-five thousand grand commission? Think for just one moment what he could do with that money!

But he told himself to concentrate. No good fantasising. No time to fantasise in fact. He had just seven days to do the job; or blow it altogether. And less then seventy-two hours before he must ring her in the Lords and report whatever progress he was able to make. So he needed to concentrate: and make some!

He started by actually reading and then re-reading the pieces in the Daily Mail and the Guardian which Lynne had given him.By the time he got home, he had got his head around the basics of the situation as he understood it. The Khalistan Warriors were Sikhs. This meant absolutely nothing to Jim Proudfoot other than they were foreign – which is why Her Ladyship’s quip about Yorkshire and `Turban Guerillas’ had been totally lost on him. This lot might have been involved in the death of a shady character called Whit Jason who owned the obscure football club Lady Lynne had mentioned: Something Town. He needed to check it out. There was also mention of a terrorist group in India and a scandal involving someone at the club which had attracted sanctions from HM Treasury. He needed to find the details as well as this man’s name and what had happened to him.

But that could wait until the morning. The library was open at nine. But now, he had an appointment with at least one bottle of Vladivoddy…

—-

And as Jim followed his well-trodden path to another night of alcoholic oblivion, the woman who had offered him a £35k commission earlier on was on the move. A parliamentary car had driven her to RAF Notholt straight after her interview – sorry, consultation – with Threefeet of the Yard. From there, a twin-engine turboprop aircraft flew her to a little-known airstrip in the north west of England known as Vickerstown, on the northern end of Walney Island at the end of the Furness Peninsular. It was once the private aerodrome of British Industrial Giants Vickers Engineering – famous for their World War Two Wellington bomber and the ships and submarines which had been rolling down the slipways of the adjacent shipyards in Barrow-in-Furness for longer than most people could remember.

Insisting that she didn’t want to make a fuss – but actually so that nobody else knew what she was up to – Lynne left the airbase on her own. She walked from the airstrip down Red Ley Lane towards a bus stop at North Scale and took the Number Five service into the centre of the town.

She’d been to Barrow before – several times. As a member of the House of Lords International Relations and Defence Committee, she had been conducted around the huge sheds where the submarines which carried Britain’s so-called `nuclear deterrent’ had been built on plenty of occasions in the past.

Her impression of the place which had been formed by her previous visits was reinforced as the Number 5 bus took her from North Scale down the east side of the island towards the bridge which linked Walney to the main part of the town. North Scale itself – even in the darkness – had a pleasant, almost rural sort of feel to it. Not a bad place to live, she assumed.

If you could have seen them through the gloom, the Lake District hills would be visible not too far away to the east. And in the Piel channel which separated Walney from the mainland, lots of really expensive yachts (one of them her own) and other ocean-going luxury craft gave the illusion of general wealth and wellbeing. Yet she knew that – hidden away on the west side of Walney and the outskirts of Barrow – was another side of the coin in the shape of places such as Newbarns: a vast, soul-less council estate where wealth and wellbeing were commodities in equally short supply..

The bus reached the bridge and turned towards the town. There, to her left – and visible for literally miles around because of the bright red lights on their roofs – the six enormous Submarine Sheds of BAE Systems stood as a testimony and a virtual cathedral to what Trang Linh saw as the triumph of human fallibility, certainly in the West.  As Barrow – and the rest of Britain – mouldered around it and the majority of the world’s population struggled to make ends meet, one government of just one small island in the north Atlantic was producing Doomsday weapons in places like these which could wipe out humanity altogether.  How had it come to this?  The sheer cost of these things – if spent sanely elsewhere – could surely solve far more conflicts than they were designed to `deter’, couldn’t they? To her as a foreigner from a very alien society, the whole structure of this arrangement seemed simply insane. But nobody else seemed to see it like that here in the West: she got the impression that everybody accepted it as the Natural Order of things.

So if you couldn’t beat them…

She got off the bus on Duke Street outside the gothic monstrosity of red sandstone known as the Town Hall. Lady Lynne knew that Barrow had been heavily bombed during the Second World War by the Luftwaffe. In her view, the Nazis would have done everybody a favour if they had obliterated this out-of-proportion proof that not all buildings are actually designed by architects. On a positive note, though, the clock in the tower which looked to her as if it had been built the wrong way up told her it was almost eight in the evening and she was absolutely right on schedule.

She walked the short distance to Buccleuch Dock and Morrisons’ supermarket.Waiting for her in the entrance was the man known to you and me as `Nine’. They greeted each other warmly and went into the store to buy enough basics to last several people four or five days. Then they walked to the adjacent Michaelson Road Bridge and – as the Peeress of the Realm rolled up her sleeves and lugged them across to him from their shopping trolley, Nine carefully stowed their bulging shopping bags in the familiar black dingy which had once taken him and another former member of the Shrimpleton Town football team to Cumberside Island.

Loading complete, Nine started up the outboard motor and they made their way slowly through the darkness away from the dock and into the deeper water of the Piel channel. Heading inland, it took them no time at all to reach a smallish but very smart yacht riding at anchor in the slight sea swell. Nine tied-up the dingy alongside, leapt on board and took the heavily-laden bags of food from Her Ladyship until everything was safely stored in the Galley on board. All the time Nine had been away, Four had been cooking in this space. Because not only was this man skilful enough to hold-down a midfield position in virtually any EFL team he might choose, he could have won Masterchef with one hand tied behind his back as well. It was time for them all to sit down to eat the sumptuous feast he had created in the cramped Galley with its very basic cooking implements. After that, they retired to their separate cabins, where Lady Lynne fell into a deep dreamless sleep. Today had been a really busy one. But tomorrow would be even busier. Because tomorrow, the three of them were going to visit Cumberside Island…

—-

Next day dawned grey and cloudy, with occasional icy sleet driven by a keen wind from the east across the Irish Sea. In Barrow, the three Vietnamese people woke in their berths on a yacht moored in the Piel Channel to the east of Walney Island. After breakfast, they would set sail and start the relatively short journey towards Cumberside Island to the west.

On the island itself, Soldier `J’ was already up and about. Tonight was when the much-vaunted meeting between the Khalistan Warriors and the Shrimpletown Town Football Club’s fans’ representatives – the Shrimpie Trust -was scheduled to take place – and he needed to be ready for it. As there was nowhere suitable for an event of this sort to be held at The Black Pool itself, the Warriors had hired the pub where Jay was staying and were going to use the Snug as the base for the meeting.

The Shrimpleton Arms was an enigma. Decrepit and ancient, the crumbling inn acted like a virtual fiefdom for landlord and owner Amos De Rowlocks (if only I could think of a word which rhymes with it so you can pronounce  it properly…) – a common island surname which reflected its nautical heritage and the fact that the Normans may have visited it on some occasion after 1066. Even when opening times were strictly regulated right across the United Kingdom, the Arms opened whenever Amos decided to unlock the doors. And stayed open until he decided to shut-up shop again and retire to his bed. Sometimes, he just went to bed anyway and let the locals get on with it: he knew where all of them lived, after all.

Smoking in pubs has been banned in British pubs for longer than a lot of people can remember. But the Shrimpleton is still a haze of blue cigarette fug on busy evenings – particularly Friday and Saturday – and ashtrays are still provided at every table.

Nobody from Officialdom ever visited the island to check upon whether laws regulating things like this were being broken there. And if they did, what would they do anyway if Mr De Rowlocks chose to ignore them? It was a simple truth acknowledged right across Cumberside that if you kicked the landlord, the whole island would limp: the Inspectors; Crown Officials; busybodies or whatever you might choose to call them wouldn’t make any difference, whatever they did…

By the same token though, other things you might not expect to be were de rigour within the ancient inn. Amos had a morbid fear of fire since his mother was burnt alive after a tragic `accident’ in his youth. An unattended chip pan burst into flames in the cottage they had lived in when she was distilling hooch on an illegal still – and had sampled too much of it – when the lad was only eight years of age. He was lucky to have escaped from the subsequent inferno with his life. So the pub boasted all the latest fire-fighting devices that came onto the market: smoke alarms connected directly to the voluntary fire crew with their ancient Green Goddess on the other side of the island, for instance. There were sprinklers in every room – along with emergency lighting; alarms of all sorts and other state-of-the-art `gubbins’ as he liked to refer to them. Because if it was connected with detecting or suppressing fires of any sort, the Shrimpleton Arms had it.

On the night of the meeting about the football club, there were ten attendees: eight of the locals (nine if you include a Labrador which I would guess was called Zorba.) `Pyscho’ was absent as he was serving time at His Majesty’s Pleasure in the Walton Waldorf across the water in Liverpool but all the other people named in Chairman Chopper’s announcement about the Forum had shown up.

However, sitting apart from them was a strikingly handsome man of military bearing and – on the other side of the room – a quite stunning-looking woman of Oriental appearance.

The locals on Cumberside Island were not known for their warmth or friendliness to strangers and normally, `Oft-Comers’ or `Trongles’ like these two `Blow-Ins’ would have fallen at the first hurdle. Amos De Rowlocks was suspicious of anyone who wasn’t a local and his habit was to interrogate any new faces in the establishment before deciding whether or not to serve them. And he frequently decided not to. But Jay had been staying for the last couple of days and there was something about him that told even someone as basically prejudiced as Amos was that it might not be a good idea to refuse entry to a clearly formidable man of this sort. He had paid in advance; he was tidy and polite and he hadn’t made any trouble. He’d even shown an interest in the pub’s business. Not many people did that. Asked him where the beer came from. How it got here. Whether he advertised to attract people from the mainland. Good idea. How much private hire he got: private parties; wedding receptions; Wakes and the like. Even what the rates were. Maybe he was thinking of hiring the Snug himself. So when Jay asked Amos how the Khalistan Warriors had contacted him, it seemed a natural enough question. He had even given the tough guy their contact number – what harm could it do?

Yes- what possible harm could it do?

Besides which, Amos thought…

Local single women – some of whom had never been known to cross the threshold of the pub ever before – were suddenly turning up. All dolled-up and nowhere to go as they say. Married women too. Soon to be followed by jealous or suspicious husbands as news of the arrival of the Shrimpies’ new Number Five and Macho Pin-Up gradually spread across the island.

Amos De Rowlocks didn’t care: as a result, the cash registers were showing a healthier balance than they had for many a year…

And as for the female newcomer – well, one smile from her and the landlord of the Shrimpleton Arms went weak at the knees: nothing was too much trouble for him even before he saw her signature in the guest’s register: `Baroness Blighty of Brighton’.

Not that Lady Lynne in her assumed guise intended to be spending the night in a dump like this. Her yacht was sheltered at anchor just off-shore and with her companions – Nine and Four – she intended to return to it later on. There were five beths on the boat: one each for her Ladyship and the crew and two for `guests’ who she hoped to be entertaining later that evening.

The two Vietnamese men – wearing navy blue overalls and with blacked-out hands and faces disguised by dark balaclavas – had hidden the familiar dingy which had brought the three of them ashore very carefully this time. They were confident that nobody on the island had any idea that they were anywhere in the vicinity.

But they were not to know that a former Special Forces soldier was following a key part of his basic training (to be forever vigilant) and had espied their arrival in their yacht from the shore through powerful field-glasses as he did his usual two circuits of the small island at full speed and carrying a heavy kit-bag earlier in the day.

Now, though, the two men in dark clothing were lying low within sight of the pub, waiting for a signal from their boss to spring into action. This signal would involve Lady Lynne pulling back a curtain and rubbing her hand against the window as if clearing the condensation. They would then leap from the shadows, rush into the pub and, as Four covered the customers with his AK-47, Nine would snatch whichever members of the Khalistan Warriors were there to be grabbed. Then all of them would return to their yacht in the darkness and make a quick getaway.

So as the locals gossiped among themselves about the newcomers but were far too intimidated by both of their appearances to dare to even speak to either of them, Jay and Lady Lynne studiously ignored each other as they sat on opposite sides of the Snug and waited.

We know who they were they waiting for, more or less. But who would actually turn-up? And what would happen then? Would the well-planned Vietnamese `extraction’ of a member of the elusive Khalistan Warriors go without a hitch? Or would something – or someone – interfere to spoil all their carefully-rehearsed plans? Find out next time in the next edition of the

Sensational Shrimpleton Saga…