Episode Seventeen of The Sensational Shrimpleton Saga: The Islanders Organise.

We left the last episode with James Churchill Proudfoot on the receiving end of some Tough Love from Vietnamese Lady of the Realm Lynne Shrimpleton. Now we return to Cumberside Island, where a meeting about the abduction of esteemed representative of Shrimpleton Town Football Club‘s owners – Baban Singh Chopra of the Khalistan Warriors – had been hastily arranged. Apart from Soldier Jay – who was part of the Panel who would face the islanders tonight – nobody knew what had become of the big Sikh and the current whereabouts of the kidnappers was a total mystery as far as the islanders were concerned. And Jay wasn’t telling anybody…

The fans who had gathered in the Shrimpleton Arms two nights previously to listen to Shrimpies’ team Captain Skip and his new Sikh pal were still reeling from what they saw happen before their very eyes in the pub. But the shock they initially felt as Baban was bundled out of the Snug and the hero of the night – Seth de Rowlocks – was laid-out cold by an unidentified assailant had soon turned into anger. And this anger was felt not just among the supporters who witnessed it but right across the island. There was no doubt, either, that the fury out there was mounting…

So the Snug at the Shrimpleton Arms was absolutely packed. All seats were taken and the spaces around them were full of local people, many of whom were already spoiling for a fight even though they didn’t know what had happened two nights earlier. And this was long before the ale started flowing.

(Is it racist to suggest that’s because of their Viking heritage? Or just because big farmers’ lads on an island where there were not many women – or even nice-looking sheep – had nothing better to do?)

Landlord Amos was secretly in his element, though.  He liked being involved with Skip and Jay for a start. Together, they would do a good job of channelling the widespread anger which had seized the island community productively, he was sure. Better still, the punters were consuming his booze almost faster than he could replenish it; the tills were running red hot and would do all night and the local glitterati were already in place.

The Chief Constable had been sitting with the sole cleric on the island in the back row of chairs since about three o’clock. They were both already Three Sheets to the Wind. But the local gossip was that they had a lot to talk about.

Detective Inspector Jack Legge had been sent to Cumberside Island by the Metropolitan Police following a scandal involving their failure to properly investigate the sexual exploitation of young boys and girls in a Croydon Children’s Home during the 1990s. The bosses there decided that it would be best for everyone concerned (except the exploited children – who were worthless trash in their opinion and therefore didn’t count) if Legge was promoted and then served-out his time there until he could receive his full pension with all its benefits back in civilisation once he had retired. The fuss would have died down by then, after all. That was the way it was usually done, when all was said and done.

The Cleric – the Reverend Patrick Rakehell – as luck (or the lack of it as far as the kids in the Children’s’ Home were concerned) happened to be the local Roman Catholic Priest in Croydon when this scandal broke.

The RC Archbishop of Westminster had decided in his own deeply ethical and ecclesiastical wisdom that `retirement’ on the Island for the errant priest might also be the best move for the Church at the time. Just like the Met, that was the way Black Sheep had always been dealt with in the past. Nevertheless, this had been quite a difficult moral dilemma for the Archbishop.

“Priests taking sexual advantage of boys or girls? On the contrary, my son: it is God’s gift to them – so it is! Sure, it has always happened, so it has! I mean – there have to be some benefits of the job, don’t there – for goodness’ sake!” he said when the suggestion was first put to him by a junior journalist somewhere in the mists of time when stuff like this was still successfully covered-up altogether. Far more troubling for the Archbish was the name of the man he was effectively banishing: Rakehell.

If you look this obscure word up, you will discover that it is not some sort of sweet delicacy from Derbyshire. Although a proper Rakehell would probably be all too willing to encounter a proper Bakewell Tart – or from anywhere else – at any time of the day or night.Because the actual word means `a wealthy man of immoral or promiscuous habits’.

The Archbishop didn’t look it up, though: he didn’t need to.

Instead, His Most Reverend just had a serious and almost fanatical hang-up about the last four letters of the surname. He was a Catholic after all in the Irish Jesuit Missionary tradition – and to men like him, `Hell’ and all the wicked things it stood for was a far more worrying concept than the actual behaviour of the priests in his charge out there in the real world. If a few worthless childrens’ lives were ruined by what they might do to them – so what? Most of this detritus weren’t Catholics anyway and therefore already were Lost Souls in this saintly gentleman’s considered opinion. No, the rational Twenty-First Century response to what had happened was to worry about the profound doctrinal ramifications of a priest with a half Satanic name as far as this devout follower of The One True Faith was concerned.

As he crossed himself and threw Holy Water over his left shoulder, he thought:

“Sure, you don’t want to be messing with anything relating to old Lucifer, do you?

Unaware of such weighty theological riddles, Landlord Amos also had a reason for considerable personal pride tonight. Because facing an unruly audience in the Snug was his only child; his heir; his hope for the future: Seth de Rowlocks. Seth had a large bandage wrapped around his head. (It was a bit Over the Top to be honest: the ashtray that had been thrown at him by Soldier `J’ hadn’t broken the skin. But he did have a swelling almost the size of a hen’s egg on his forehead.) So Amos was a truly Proud Parent this evening.

Next to Seth at the rickety table he had occupied 48 hours earlier was the man who – unbeknown to him – had actually been responsible for his temporary loss of consciousness just two nights previously. Jay hadn’t shaved today and – with so much to do and so little time to do it – hadn’t showered either. The cumulative effect was that he looked – and smelled – even more smoulderingly masculine, muscular and masterful than usual to the pre menopausal women who, it should be noted, had managed to colonise all the seats nearest to him in the absolutely packed Snug.

Finally, sitting to Jay’s right, Shrimpleton Town Captain Skip was there once again to keep control of proceedings, which he expected to be particularly rowdy tonight. Already, he had needed to placate a group of farm labourers who had turned-up with fencing posts and forks, thinking they were going to be teaching a few Indians – although that was not the term any of them used – about their place in Cumberside Island’s Pecking Order. It was no surprise to Skip – once he took the trouble to get the idea that they were actually there to help track-down an Indian who was one of their own – their fury actually grew. Nobody was going to mess with one of their own – if they knew what was good for them: even if he did have a towel wrapped around his big, fat head!

But this sort of thing was no surprise to the Shrimpleton Town Club Captain. Unruly crowds were no problem to him: he had played in front of plenty of them in his extraordinarily long career as a footballer. So when he finally stood up and banged a tablespoon against a half-full pint of beer and called for “The Best of Order, Ladies and Gentlemen!” at about nine in the evening, a hush descended on the throng facing him: slowly at first but eventually so total that you could hear a pin drop in the Snug.

As exclamations of outrage interrupted the little speech he then delivered about what had happened two nights earlier, the mood in the pub went from shock to outrage to absolute fury.

Half of the yokels who were present didn’t know what a Sikh actually was and several understood that alien forces – as in from Outer Space – had descended from a Flying Saucer and stolen all the bedding in the pub. (“Sikh” and “Sheet” being words that were easily misheard in a noisy room where the orator has no amplification and is having to shout.)

This was complicated by the fact that one of the interstellar invaders was apparently a pretty good imitation of an actual woman from Planet Earth. An actual woman who virtually any man attending on the evening would have given anything to get to know better. Unlike the ones they were used to, she clearly wasn’t even made of rubber! Damn these diabolical Extra-Terrestrials!

A few members of the island’s Young Farmers’ Club took it upon themselves to start looking around the room for suspects. If these Aliens were Shape Shifters or maybe Interstellar versions of Chameleons (not that most of these country bumpkins actually knew what a Chameleon was), they could be present among them now – couldn‘t they? So they started pushing their way through the assembled multitude, looking for give-away signs: blokes with long or unusual mullets; anyone with a potentially stolen bed sheet stuffed-up the top they were wearing; women with hairy legs or armpits; men or women with piercings; anybody with unusual tattoos or who just looked foreign – was invited outside to see if they bled red when punched or kicked by proper human beings in the shape of big, thick island-bred oafs.

This had mixed results.

For example – Brianna was minding her own business in the main bar when the Young Farmers barged their way in. She was a large woman in fishnets with a shaved head featuring bright red stubble. She also had more piercings than a pincushion: enough not to as much break the average security scanner at any airport but cause it to explode: she must have weighed almost as much as an average car. Oh – and she also sported assorted Heavy Metal and Satanic tattoos – some of them in places best left unimagined.

And Brianna wasn’t best pleased when four of the angry yokels from the Snug jostled their way up to her, gave her a shove which caused her to spill her pint and invited her to step outside.

“Come on then – if you’re hard enough!” she yelled once she was out there and facing them.

Three of them clearly thought they were. Together, which was not really very sporting – or gentlemanly – was it?

Whether they regretted this impropriety or not, I cannot tell you. Because just a minute later, they were incapable of telling anybody anything, given that they were all totally senseless and quite badly damaged into the bargain as they lay at odd angles all over the ground by the pub’s car park..

Brianna had the remaining one by the throat and was swinging him around like a sling-shot which she then launched head-first into an outhouse wall, where he slipped slowly down the stonework and settled in an unconscious heap, leaving a thin trail of red behind him. This was the young farmer widely believed to the hardest man living on Cumberside Island: Bjørn as his name appeared on his Birth Certificate but known in English on the island simply as `The Bear’.

Before Brianna put his lights out, this tough guy had gasped:

“How is a woman like you able to do this?”

“First Battalion, Parachute Regiment, mate! I was Brian then. You got a problem with that?”

Inside the pub, though, some serious business was being transacted. Well – at least attempted to be transacted. Skip had been introduced by landlord Amos to the audience as the Chairman of an Action Committee Board of which Skip, Jay and Seth were currently the only members. Their intention tonight was to form a small, tightly disciplined cell made-up exclusively of islanders intended to do one thing – and one thing only: to discover the real identity of the supposed Baroness Blighty of Brighton – and rescue Baban Singh Chopra. Clear enough to everybody?

Apparently not – because this statement led to the first Point of Order from the floor.

Wasn’t discovering the real identity of the supposed Baroness Blighty of Brighton – and rescuing Baban Singh Chopra actually two things?

Skip sighed deeply. This is always what happened when you let the public into any sort of meeting – particularly those people who had any experience of local government, where a simple decision such as whether or not to change a failed lightbulb in a street lamp could take hours of pedantic discussion and argument and then months to implement. What sort of bulb? Halogen or neon? Low-wattage or otherwise? How powerful, then? Bayonet or screw-in? Would an LED do the job? How about light pollution? Global warming? What brand would be best for the environment? Who should supply it? Was the street lamp really needed in the first place? Should there be a Report by a sub-Committee about street lighting on Cumberside Island first? It shouldn’t be a very long one – there were only two of the things, both down by the harbour wall. But there again – maybe there should be more of them. Or none at all. Maybe two sub-committees should consider these things. Or…

Skip knew from bitter experience that the permutations presented by what should surely be a simple decision could be literally endless…

So, taking a pen and scribbling on a sheet of paper on the table in from of him, Skip decided that the best course of action was to simply agree to the Point of Order: it would be quicker in the long run. So finding-out the real identity of the mysterious Baroness became Priority Number One: rescuing the elderly Sikh Number Two.

“Everyone happy with that then? Now, we need to get on…”

“Point of Order!” said a voice from the front of the audience. Not, perhaps surprisingly, from the large female section – whose sole intent this evening seemed to be to feast their eyes on Shrimpleton Town’s new Centre Half – but from an elderly gent who Skip realised, as his heart sank, was the retired Town Clerk.

“Is the prioritising of a woman’s identity an indication of unconscious gender bias by the Chairman of the Action Committee Board?”

“I – I don’t think so!” said Skip in his own defence.

“Point of Order!” shouted someone else from the back of the audience.

“The relegation of the search for an important member of the ethnic community to a second priority is unconscionable! All we all racists?”

Skip looked at the ceiling and mouthed the words `Beam me up, Scotty!’

“Right!” he said, trying not to raise his own voice as others began to argue in the assembled multitude. “We are not sexists. We are not racists. We are not bigots. If we were, we wouldn’t be bothered about what had happened here, on our own doorstep during the last few days and hours, would we? What we are is concerned islanders. We know the difference between right and wrong, don’t we?”

There was a half-hearted response from the audience which caused Skip to stand and shout at them:

“Well – do we know the difference between right and wrong? Yes or No?”

“Yes!”

“I can’t hear you!”

“Yes!”

“Are we just going to sit idly by and let some posh woman from across the water come over here and throw her weight about and treat us like just so many Serfs? Are we?”

“No!”

“No – we are not! When we as an island community invite a valued guest to talk to us about our very own precious football club – the mighty Shrimpies – will we just sit on our backsides when foreigners pluck this guest from the bosom of our community?”

“No – we will not!”

“Are we just going to sit on our backsides and let it happen?”

As one, the audience took the hint – and also as one, they all stood up and yelled so loudly that the windows rattled in the room:

“NO – WE WILL NOT!”

Then, bursting into spontaneous applause, they clapped each other on the back and gradually settled down again as Skip continued:

“No – you’re damned right we will not! No more Points of Order!”

Sometimes he had wondered – as he had crouched in a huddle in countless muddy fields all over the north of England in driving rain, snow or sleet and tried to gee-up his team-mates prior to what they all knew was going to be another drubbing – if these little speeches actually did any good. Now he had the proof he needed that it had all been worth it after all…

Having finally established their Number One priority, Skip insisted to his audience that nothing else must distract from it.

It was unsaid – but generally understood – that once they had achieved it and discovered who the woman that had graced the Shrimpleton Arms with her presence just two nights previously actually was, the Action Committee Board could move on to what they were going to do to the clearly bogus member of the British Establishment. Because Cumberside Island had its own very particular form of (very rough) justice and the islanders didn’t take kindly to outsiders messing with them – whoever they were or wherever they came from.

Sadly, the Board’s attempt to sign-up volunteers from the audience to help with this task didn’t go very well. Skip had asked the Chief Inspector for his professional opinion about their best course of action at the beginning of proceedings, knowing that the policeman would definitely be in no fit state to even talk by the end of them.

“Simple! Grab the first black African you see on the street, take him down the cells and have the lads perform plastic surgery on the bast – bast – the Bounder (Sorry Father” he said to the man in the dog collar sitting next to him, “Nearly swore there old son! – er – with their boots. Foolproof: works every time!”

Skip looked puzzled:

“But you’ve got the wrong man” he objected.

“Wrong man? That lot are all as guilty as sin!”

Turning his attention directly to the Landlord’s son – as if trying to get an ally on-side – he continued:

“It’s all about results young Seth! As long as you’re meeting your targets, you don’t have to worry about the means: that was our policy at the Met! All the bosses was interested in was the ends! Get it wrong occasionally – who cares? We didn’t – and I tell you what: London was a lot safer place when we was framing Rastafarians and kicking the whatsit out of a few random Hippies, mark my words! Mind you” he added wistfully before continuing:”Some of them Hippie birds were worth taking into custody, though – believe me! Phway! If I had my way, I’d…”

But we will never know how the Chief Inspector’s invaluable professional input might have ended. Sadly, at this point as he leant forward to emphasise what he was shouting, the Chief Constable suddenly slid off his chair and slipped silently onto the floor, a strange dream-like expression on his fat, red porcine face as he stared in an unfocused way at the ceiling.

Other suggestions were hardly any more helpful. Charlie from the football team was in the audience and it turned-out that as well as sending unrequited love letters to women in the public eye, he had – perhaps surprisingly – also got an obsession with the Star Wars franchise.

“We could send Imperial Stormtroopers to ruthlessly track them down!” he suggested from the bar. “Then they could get Summer Galactic Emperor Darth Sidious to vapourise them with his Death Star! Problem solved!”

Beryl the tea-lady was in the pub that evening too. But – from the blood-shot colour of her eyes and the fact that she had neglected to zip-up her trousers properly on returning from the toilet, you didn’t have to be a Detective to guess that she had been drinking something a little stronger than tea all evening.

“I’d run a television comm…  commer… commerci – hic! – advertising campaign. Offer as much Cumberside Tea …” she confused everyone by standing up and trying to make a Trade Mark sign – ® – with her hands, at which point her trousers unfortunately fell down, followed by Beryl herself. But her muffled voice continued, from the floor: “Offer as much Cumberside Tea” – her hand appeared above her chair and sketched a sort-of ® in the air. “As anyone could possibly want. Nobody can resist it! Then go through all the entries until you find a Baroness Blighty and a Sikh – there can’t be many of them about, can there? Invite them both to the winner’s ceremony and then nab one of ‘em – and liberate the other!”

These were some of the most sensible suggestion of the evening, at the end of which Skip, Jay and Seth were still the only members of the Action Committee.

“It doesn’t look good” admitted the Shrimpleton Town team captain. “We can’t do this on our own! We need someone with verve; no sense of danger and a ruthless drive to get things done! One of our own! But no such person exists, do they?”

Seth looked similarly crestfallen. But suddenly, he brightened up:

“I’ve got it!” he said. “We do have a person amongst us who possesses all those qualities – and more!”

“Who?” asked Skip, “I can’t think of anybody.”

“Psycho!” said the Landlord’s son excitedly.

“But isn’t Psycho in the Walton Waldorf?” asked Soldier `J’.

“He is now!” said Seth triumphantly, “But they’re letting him out tomorrow!”

They then turned to the problem of tracking-down Baban Singh Chopra. Jay was appointed to be in charge of this, second most important part of the Committee’s brief.  So he gave them a quick report: an edited version of him chasing a yacht which had been initially moored off-shore in the darkness. How he had almost caught up with it only to be outpaced and left in its wake somewhere in the region of Anglesey. He said nothing about actually boarding the ship and what happened then. But as he tried to hide the truth from his companions, Jay feared that what he told them sounded barely credible. But nobody questioned what he said or asked him what he planned to do next. So he took his leave of Seth and Skip, politely refused the offer of a nightcap from Amos – and headed upstairs to his room, confident that nobody suspected he hadn’t been entirely straight with them about their Sikh visitor.

Downstairs, though, those suspicions persisted.  Maybe he had imagined it but all day, Skip had been trying to make sense of some words he was sure he had heard shouted in the pub as Baban was being hauled away the other night: “Man on, Four!”

Amos had subsequently assured him that the abductors were Chinese. But who had told the landlord this? Jay had, apparently. How did Jay know? He had never explained. Yet Skip’s latest Vietnamese recruits to the football team – Numbers Four and Nine – had disappeared without trace. The men he had seen escaping with Baban could conceivably be them, couldn’t they? They were the same shape and build after all. What other reason would they have for turning-up at training – and then never be seen again? They were on a scouting mission, he concluded. And if they were, only one person he could think of apart from himself would have shouted to them in the pub in the way that had happened. Only one other person could suspect that the smaller man with the gun was Number Four. And that person was also Jay.

Unless he had misheard or even imagined these things. Stranger things had happened after all. Maybe he should just ask Jay outright Skip was tempted to as the ex-soldier told them his version of events later on. But something stopped him, for whatever reason…

For now, he had decided to let these worries ride. He wouldn’t even trouble Amos and Seth with them. Their immediate priorities were elsewhere. Both the landlord and he were far more interested in getting Psycho on board with them at the moment. They decided they needed to have an urgent word with the troubled young man as soon as he stepped off the ferry and back onto the island after his stint in Walton prison.

“The ferry’s due in tomorrow afternoon” said Amos as they discussed this in Jay’s absence. “I’ll meet him at the harbour and bring him up here. Then we shall see what we shall see!”

So things are moving at pace on Cumberside Island to discover the identity of whoever had carried-out the audacious abduction of the Khalistan Warriors’ Baban Singh Chopra just a couple of nights ago.

But across on the mainland many miles to the south, James Churchill Proudfoot was facing a deadline. If he didn’t physically locate the same elusive group of Sikhs within less than twenty-four hours; his £35,000 reward for doing so was going to be withdrawn by the beautiful but utterly ruthless Lady Lynne Shrimpleton.

What could he possibly do to redeem the situation?

Find out in the next thrilling episode of the Sensational Shrimpleton Saga…