Part Twelve of The Sensational Shrimpleton Saga: JZK 123 – What Could It Possibly Be?…

Last time, shadowy ex-Special Forces soldier `J’ had abandoned Lady Lynne Shrimpleton and his former team-mates at Shrimpleton Town AFC on her posh boat in the Irish Sea off the Welsh coast. Why?

This is what certain geeky Sikhs in the Punjab would be wondering if they were able to track him. But Jay’s phone was on Cumberside Island, many miles to the north and they had no way of knowing he had jumped ship – yet.

But the ex-soldier’s progress wasn’t the only person’s they were attempting to keep tabs on…

The eavesdroppers in Jalandhar would have been intrigued when their equipment registered the next phone call to be made by the devices they were monitoring.

It was coming from an object about to turn from the west coast of Wales into the English Channel but the Sikhs couldn’t identify who it was intended for because the call wasn’t answered. All they could discern was that the intended recipient was to be found somewhere in west London. And if they had known that Lady Lynne Shrimpleton was trying to contact someone called James Churchill Proudfoot there, it wouldn’t mean anything to them either. Not at that point anyway…

What Lady Lynne didn’t realise is that Jim Proudfoot didn’t answer his phone between the hours of six in the evening and ten in the morning – and sometimes much later if the hangover he had been working on for most of that time was even worse than usual. But when the phone rang in his poky bedsit somewhere in North West London very early in the morning, Jim was actually awake. Not entirely sober admittedly, but awake nevertheless. He didn’t answer it but the ringing prompted him to get out of bed and make a cup of strong black coffee with loads of sugar in it.

He had spent most of the previous day at the Library, trying – and failing – to pin-down more basic information about the mysterious Khalistan Warriors.

But first, he had made a pilgrimage to his mail-drop-off point in Hayes. He had caught the bus and alighted near College Road, walking the rest of the way. He was preoccupied at the time.

The previous night, he had read and re-read the secret documents he had photographed in Her Ladyship’s office at the House of Lords. And his devious little mind had been making a Plan B in case Plan A – to infiltrate the Khalistan Warriors (or Khlalli Scallies as she had called them) didn’t come off. If he played his cards right, he was confident that he could make more money out of these than Lady Lynne might pay him for risking his life dealing with the Sikhs – particularly if he could start a bidding war between interested parties: the Chinese and the Russians, for instance. The question was – how could do this to his best advantage?…

So he was only half-concentrating as he reached the entrance to the old College in which his mail-box could be found. He completely ignored the big man wearing a bright red turban who politely held the door open for him to enter and then slipped out into the car park which fronted the building once Jim had entered it. Nor the other, even bigger Sikh with even wilder white hair and a massively bushy white beard who did the same thing as he was leaving the room where Jim was about to pick-up the letters or whatever else was waiting for him on this occasion. James Churchill Proudfoot just walked in, ignoring the man’s muttered `You’re welcome” when Jim didn’t bother to acknowledge the courtesy.

But one of Jim’s simple life rules was never to cow-tow (that was what these stupid Indians said, wasn’t it? – didn’t they worship cows or something – instead of eating them like any sane, civilised person would?) to Asians, black people or the Scotch, as he thought of people from North of the Border. These were all members of the Lower Orders with whom sophisticated people of Imperial heritage like himself had no obligation to communicate at all. (Uncle Walter had been in the 9^th Airborne Division in India at one time after all, if he remembered correctly.) If it wasn’t for men like his Uncle Walter, these savages would still be devouring curried versions of each other in the foothills of the Himalayas. Or eating wild Haggis on the slopes of Ben Nevis: yes, ripping the poor little things’ legs off and devouring them raw, the Barbarians – he couldn’t decide which was worse, personally. Besides, how could you trust any sort of man who wore a skirt in the first place? It wasn’t natural!…

But all he found in his personalised mail box were bills, one of them with red writing on it warning of untold misery yet to come if he didn’t settle-up with the HMRC; another for overdue Council Tax from three years ago on Guernsey. He tore them both up and casually dropped them on the street as he walked back to the bus stop. Standing there in the drizzle, he noticed the two men with bright red turbans who he had encountered earlier stuck in traffic in a large Porsche across the road from him. This produced more than a twinge of both jealousy and anger in James Churchill Proudfoot. This is precisely what the pinko-liberals who run everything in this country had designed, wasn’t it? Their so-called `multi-racial society’ was bound to produce this sort of outrage eventually: hard-working, law-abiding people like himself waiting in the rain for buses that frequently failed to turn-up as interlopers with an unacceptable dress code and breath that stank of curry lauded it over everyone in their huge cars! Thinking: `they could both do with a haircut; a shave – and a toothbrush!` at precisely the same moment that a woman unfortunate enough to be standing near Jim in the shelter thought about him `he could do with a haircut; a shave – and a shower!` , he turned his full attention to the more weighty problem of how he was going to succeed in tracking-down the Khlalli Scallies instead.

He stayed in the library until it closed. But nothing: the internet; Yellow Pages; Trade Directories of one sort or another or anything else he could think of had helped him very much.

By the end of the day, he knew that the Khalistan Warriors were registered as a company with a mailbox address which he hadn’t bothered to look at and that they were owners – according to a couple of specialist Non-League Football Almanacs – of an obscure club called Shrimpleton Town which plied its trade in the Northern Counties Islands and Craggy Outcrops League (Second Division) – whatever that was…

And that was basically as good as it got. So Jim went home and got drunk.

He knew, though, that if he had answered the phone at the moment Lynne had rung him early the next morning, he would have had to lie about his progress. Because what he had made wasn’t worth mentioning. It was as if the Khlalli Scallies had simply disappeared into thin air…

He also realised, however, that he couldn’t ignore her phone call. He needed to do something – or think of something at least – which would placate her for now. So he got up, dressed and was waiting outside in the rain when the library re-opened at nine…

The first thing he did when he was able to finally sit himself down in front of a computer screen was look at the news headlines. To discover that a bloke called Baban Singh Chopra had been kidnapped by armed, masked men somewhere in the frozen wildernesses of the North Country. He looked through the scant notes he had made on the back of a free Council handout in the Library after a trawl he had made of basic sources yesterday such as Government House, which listed directors of companies registered in the UK and discovered a very similar name in the entry for the Khalistan Warriors. He read on further into the news report and learnt more: this foreign fellow was the brother of the Scallies’ Top Man.Then – his session almost timed-out – Jim went outside onto the street and the drizzle and rang Lady Lynne’s number.

She answered immediately.

“Your Ladyship!” Jim said in his most obsequious manner. “I think I may have made an important breakthrough! After hours of painstaking research, I have discovered that a senior member of the Khalistan Warriors was abducted last night from a secret location somewhere up north!”

“So you’ve read the news today, have you?” said Lady Lynne, sounding rather less than impressed. “The world and his wife knows that! It tells us precisely nothing about the whereabouts of the rest of these scallywags! What progress have you made?”

“I’ve discovered the location of their secret office.”

“That’s not a secret, either Mr Proudfoot!: it’s on their website for any halfwit to see: I’ve got it in front of me right now!”

Jim was taken aback by Her Ladyship’s sharp tone. Maybe she hadn’t slept well. Perhaps she was annoyed that he hadn’t picked-up when she rang earlier. Maybe it was that time of the…

“We’ve got five days to find these outlaws!” she continued sternly. “I want you to stake-out their mail drop-off point. They will have to go there sooner or later. Use your sleuthing skills to follow them. Get the registration of the car they drive: if you can’t trace it from that, I know someone who can! Time is short Mr Proudfoot! I need results! Their address is: College Road, Hayes, Middlesex…”

Jim almost found himself saying “Well – what a coincidence!” But the penny suddenly – albeit very belatedly – dropped.

“As I was about to say, your Majesty, I have already done that and identified two gentlemen of foreign appearance who…”

“Foreign appearance? What on earth does that mean? Were they wearing grass skirts? Were they carrying shrunken heads on sticks? Fur coats and harpoons? Hats with corks? The only thing that matters was – were they Sikhs – with bright red turbans wrapped around their heads plus wild hair and bushy beards?”

So that was what a Sikh was!…

“Yes!” said Three Feet of the Yard. “Two of the bounders!”

“So what did you do – ask them for an autograph?”

My – Her Ladyship was ratty…

“No I followed them, Highness! Syrup titiously. So that they didn’t notice!” Jim was really pleased with this reply and the exceptionally quick thinking that had prompted it. “I perused (he meant `pursued’ but who cares?) them in a north easterly direction and…”

“Did they have a car?” snapped an angry voice from the phone.

“Er – yes they did, Majesty!”

“So you got the registration number obviously. What is it?

Jim was suddenly stricken by panic. He hadn’t a clue. But, as we have already learnt, one of his many Conman Mantras is: if you don’t know the actual answer to any question, make something up. But make it plausible. He searched the moribund traffic desperately, looking for a Porsche of the sort he had seen the men wearing turbans driving yesterday as he stalled for time by saying:

“I have it written down in my pocket – just hold on a sec, please, Your Loveliness…”

No Porsches in sight. So – totally at random – he picked-out a big, expensive-looking car. It was a Range Rover. Black, clearly brand new. Registration number JZK 123.

He related this information to Lady Lynne, who still didn’t sound impressed.

“You should have memorised that! Bits of paper are not secure: they can be lost – or stolen! Eat the paper now! In the meantime, I will have the number traced. I will text you the location. I want you to go there and I want a full report at ten o’clock – twenty-two hundred hours – tonight! Do I make myself clear?”

The call ended before he could reply – which might have been difficult anyway with a bit of torn-up council leaflet stuffed in his mouth. Any relief Jim might have felt as the conversation was abruptly cut-off was short-lived, however. It occurred to him, as he literally felt his heart sink, that the Range Rover was a real car with a real registration which had nothing whatsoever to do with the Khalistan Warriors.

So what was he going to do now?

—-

Meanwhile, somewhere in rural Buckinghamshire, the black Range Rover Jim had seen earlier was pausing outside an enormous mock-Tudor mansion, waiting for its automatic gates to slide open. The huge house had been built to the personal specification of the driver of the big car just two years earlier. This man was called Joseph Aleksandrovitch Kelly – a native of County Tipperary in the Irish Republic. His Mother was Mary-Jo Kathleen Kelly of Tipperary, his father Zasha Ivanovitch Smirnov – an ex-Red Army tank commander from somewhere in Siberia. How they had met was a mystery.

But there were many mysteries surrounding Zasha Ivanovitch Smirnov.

How had he got out of the Soviet Union – as it was then – in 1978?

Why had he only got three fingers on his right hand?

What was the meaning of those mysterious star-shaped tattoos on both knees?

The dagger through the heart shape cut into the skin of his chest and crudely coloured a sort of purply-brown?

Why had he chosen Ireland of all places to settle in when he could have gone to the United States; Australia or Great Britain?

And – perhaps most important of all – how did a penniless peasant from the banks of the Yerepol River in deepest, darkest Siberia become one of the most wealthy men in the Irish Republic by the time he was sixty-five years of age?

Although he didn’t yet realise it, Jim Threefeet of the Yard was going to learn all the answers to these questions by nine o’clock that very evening.

After his unsettling phone call with Lady Shrimpleton earlier in the day, Jim was in a total quandary. He’d lied to Her Ladyship about the Khalistan Warriors for a start. He’s got absolutely no further in his search for them and had invented a non-existent registration number into the bargain. Well – not non-existent exactly – but utterly useless nevertheless.

He was still standing outside the local library in the rain, which was getting heavier by the minute. He was contemplating his options: selling the secrets he had discovered and doing a runner. Not selling the secrets he had discovered but doing a runner anyway. Or – just doing a runner…

Then his phone bleeped.

A text message gave an address for the Range Rover he had seen somewhere in Buckinghamshire.

How the hell was he going to get there without transport of his own?

What was the point in going anyway?

Well – he told himself – it was better than doing nothing…

—-

It was almost eight o’clock and pitch dark by the time Jim arrived at the location he had been given, soaked to the skin and exhausted after a difficult trip via the Metropolitan Line to Amersham and local bus services to within a mile of the address Lady Lynne had sent him. The expense had left him seriously short of funds. But needs must…

“Needs must what?” he asked himself as he approached what he liked to think of as the `target’ address. This sounded to him like the sort of term a genuine Private Investigator would use.

He’d racked his alcohol-befuddled brain all the way to the tube station and on the two buses he had been obliged to catch to get here for an answer to this question. And failed: which was a first for a champion dismembulator of the truth, as he sometimes described himself to friends. Or – to be brutally honest in the absence of any friends – passing starlings; other wildlife – or even sympathetic-looking bricks in walls which he occasionally spotted on his journey through his own particular Vale of Tears. Some of them seemed to be smiling at him…

The house was big and impressive enough to be exactly the sort of place he would expect people like the Khalistan Warriors to own. It had cameras pointing outwards from the walls. High walls topped by razor wire. Huge, remotely controlled metal gates. Movement-sensitive floodlights, which came on as he got near enough to activate them.

How was he going to get in? Would people be looking at him though those cameras in the walls even as he stood there in the sopping rain at that very moment? Would they be in the building? Or somewhere remote? And if…

He almost had an accident in his pants as a voice said, right behind him:

“Can I help you zur?”

He spun around to be confronted by a yokel on an ancient bicycle.

“Who are you?” demanded Jim.

“I be Giles, the gardener and general, fac… facto… factotum-tee-tum – er – general help, zur. Reportin’ for duty with Master Kelly!”

“At night?” thought Jim, wondering if floodlit gardening was a thing if you were rich enough. He said, as he pictured a small boy in his mind: “Master Kelly?”

“The Master!” Giles replied as if the answer was obvious – it was to him, after all. “Be you auditioning for the scarecrow position?”

In a rare moment of clarity, James Churchill Proudfoot realised that his appearance – soaked to the skin; dishevelled and probably a bit niffy too – qualified him perfectly for the part.

“No!” he replied, apparently deeply offended. “I’m a P.I.!”

“You don’t look like no pie I’ve ever seen!”

“A P. I. – Private Investigator!”

Giles looked at him in apparent astonishment, his eyes slowly seeking Jim’s nether regions.

“You get to investigate people’s privates?” he asked in awe. “Lady people as well? I’d like a job like that!”

“I’m sure you would!” said Jim quickly. “The only problem is – I don’t know how to gain ingress to this property in order to initiate and start my private investigation! And I can’t get in, neither!”

“Leave that to me, zur” said Giles. He produced some sort of card from his back pocket and placed it on what appeared to be an ordinary brick in the wall which was supporting the massive gates. A small green light appeared in the brick. Then another next to it until four green horizontal lights in a row blinked at them and the huge gates began to slip back noiselessly on their runners. Giles wheeled his ancient bike through the gap as Jim followed meekly behind him.

A door opened to the left of the main house and Giles wheeled his wreck into it. Inside, he pointed to a door to the right and whispered: “Master Kelly be in there! Go through and make yourself known to him! Don’t let on that I’m here, mind!”

”Why not?”

“I’m in the Master’s Bad Books”

“Bad Books?”

“I was helpin’ me Mam – she be the Cook – t’other day. Apple crumble for the Master – her specialty – with lashings of fresh cream!”

Jim felt his stomach rumble.

“But I done forgot to put the cream back in the fridge.”

“So?”

“Well – it went off! Me Mam was proper cross: “If you put things in the fridge, Giles, they won’t go off!” she done scold me. But I forgot again. Milk this time. I got a big jug full for Master’s Corn Flakes in the mornin’. Mam took it to him and I went to the greenhouse to do some tidyin’. Forgot all about the milk. By lunchtime, it had turned sour. I thought Mam was going to take the wooden spoon to me! But she says: ”If you put things in the fridge, Giles, they won’t go off! Say it yoursel’ so’s I knows you’ve got it!” So I said: “They won’t go off…””

“If you put them in the fridge! Very sound advice Giles! You should remember it and do what your Mother tells you! The Master’s in here, did you say?”

Giles nodded his sadly literally dumb assent and disappeared. Jim put his hand on the handle of the closed door he was facing, took a deep breath, knocked and then crossed the threshold.

He found himself in what Estate Agents would call an `Atrium’ – a huge open space from marble floor below to beamed oak ceilings above from which a mix of artificial and natural light – posh Velux windows and electric down-lighters – illuminated the massive area. Spiral stairs – wide and made from the same marble as the floor – swept upwards to the first storey.

And as Jim stood, dripping and frozen at the foot of them, a man appeared and started walking slowly downwards towards him. This was the driver of the Range Rover we met earlier. He was a man in his early thirties with a shock of long, bright ginger hair in a pony tail and an even more fashionably trimmed stubbly ginger beard. His hand-made jeans must have cost a King’s ransom; his Italian leather shoes probably even more. The leather jacket he had on was maybe not so expensive: it creaked when he moved and seemed stiff rather than soft: the sort of thing you might imagine a Soviet secret service agent might wear at Checkpoint Charlie back in the 1960s, perhaps. (In reality, it had once belonged to his father and this man was wearing it as a tribute to him.) But the silk shirt he was wearing certainly wasn’t cheap. It was strategically unbuttoned so that just enough strands of ginger hair from his well-toned chest were visible to complete the visual package perfectly. All-in-all, this was one hell of a man: a screen God made flesh. Forget Gingerbread Men – this was a real Ginger Man who most women would devour whole. Until he spoiled it all. By speaking:

“What are ye?” he asked in an accent one might expect from what older and less enlightened Irish people would call a “Tinker”. (Is the more modern term `Pikey’ more politically correct? I somehow doubt it)…

What will this charming Irishman with the striking ginger hair make of Threefeet of the Yard?

Will it help in Jim Proudfoot’s increasingly desperate search for the elusive Khalistan Warriors?

Don’t miss the next thrilling episode of The Sensational Shrimpleton Saga…