Part Thirty-Five of the Sensational Shrimpleton Saga: The Hounds of Hell.

I read a bit of a book recently by someone I have a sneaking suspicion is not a fan of Royalty which suggested – quite controversially – that all aristocratic families are by definition criminal.

It seemed a bit extreme to me.

In my head, the author seemed to be saying that someone – let’s choose a name completely at random: Harry for instance – might be secretly selling Cocaine on the streets of Britain today to support his Royalty habit.

This is obvious nonsense.

(One of his uncles might, though, come to think of it…).

 And the idea that anybody of the Ginger Persuasion could sell herself to someone like this – or the highest bidder failing that – in return for a luxurious lifestyle is surely just as dubious. Or even for the price of a bottle of gin. Don’t people have more respect for themselves?

(And for those among us who would suggest otherwise that this could never happen if only because no bottle of gin ever created is worth that much – shame on them.)

 I suppose that laughable ideas like these the result of the utterly corrosive influence of Social Media and related stuff like Conspiracy Theories, though: once you’ve seen a slant on the world you’ve never thought of before and you aren’t the sharpest knife in the drawer to start off with, it presumably starts to gnaw away at your guts.

 However – and in case anyone ever doubted it – we have learnt in this yarn so far that some members of the British aristocracy are no better as human beings than even the most desperate and psychotic member of criminal gangs such as the Kellys from Tipperary.

The Honourable Cornelius Cumberlake Junior – only son and heir of the Duke of Cumberlake himself, is a prime example. This alleged gentleman was about to ravish Lady Lynne Shrimpleton last time we met him. Or at least intended to, even though he should have known that a woman like this would not give-in without a considerable fight.

He was facing her in the shipping container which doubled as Shrimpleton Town Football Club’s General Office at the Black Pool, flanked by his closest acolytes, all of whom were pointing weapons at Lynne and her Vietnamese associates, Nine and Four.

When his men obeyed Cornelius’ instruction as he started to undo his trousers to hold Lynne down, they put their twelve-bore shotguns on the ground in order to do so.  

This was a tactical mistake: unarmed, they would be no match for either Her Ladyship or her two loyal men because of their hand-to-hand Martial Art and other combat training by Vietnamese army instructors.

But before they got within striking distance and the son of the Earl of Cumberlake had managed to get even as far unbuckling his belt, someone else intervened.

Another voice was suddenly heard from the shadows:

“Take even a single further step forward and I’ll blast you all to tiny pieces!” the voice snarled as everyone turned towards it. Before their disbelieving eyes, what seemed to be previously part of the wall of the container moved. But this part of the wall was holding a semi-automatic rifle.

“Jay!” exclaimed Lady Lynne, firstly recognising the voice and then – belatedly because of his full camouflage gear – the face, even though this one was blackened with what looked like wood ash.

In an instant, Nine and Four yelled “Five!” as they turned towards their former teammate, grinning widely and then bowing towards him.

The ex-Special Forces operative ignored them.

“Lie face down on the floor!” he snapped at Roddy and his two men.

“What I hold in my hands is a Heckler und Koch 437, one of the most powerful and accurate rifles the world has ever seen. It would take it less than a second to spit out enough bullets to reduce all four of you to atoms! So put your hands where I can see them! Lie on the ground, face-down! If any one of you moves as much as a muscle then, it will be the last thing any of you ever does!”

With Roddy and his men powerless to stop him as they lay helpless on the floor, Jay moved nearer to Cornelius, who was now visibly trembling.

“But that would be too good for people like you! What’s the matter?” he suddenly shouted in a Sergeant-Major’s voice virtually right in the son of the Earl of Cumberlake’s face: “Feeling the cold?”

Jay was level with Lady Lynne, almost standing next to her.

He turned towards Nine and Five and said, quietly:

“Retrieve your weapons, boys! Keep an eye on those scumbags on the floor!”

As they did so, Jay then looked directly at Lynne for the first time and handed her his rifle.

“You can do the deed if you want! You have most reason! All you have to do is aim and pull the trigger!”

The Right Honourable Cornelius offered a whimper at this point and fell to his knees.

“Please!” he begged, “Please don’t shoot me! I wouldn’t really have harmed you! I’ll do anything you want, anything: money; jewellery; cars; property – anything!”

Lynne stared at him contemptuously and said, quietly:

“I know what you were going to do to me. It makes me wonder: what have you done to other people in the past. Made them beg? Grovel? Plead? Call for their Mothers?”

Another voice which Lynne also immediately recognised joined-in from the background:

“Yeah – and he robs honest people blind! And steals their phones! He’s got mine right now!”

“Oh, he has, has he?” said Lynne, handing the scary-looking gun back to Jay as she dealt with the sudden shock that Ranjit Singh Chopra had apparently metamorphosed into someone else altogether.

“Have you got Mr Proudfoot’s phone?” she demanded of the Honourable Cornelius. “Because if you have, I’ll be very, very annoyed with you! I have sent him countless text messages this evening and I assumed he was simply ignoring them! So is what he says true – have you stolen it?”

“No, Your Ladyship” replied Cornelius, remembering what he had seen written on the screen of Jim’s phone when it rang in his car earlier and hoping that addressing her by her proper title might placate her, even if only slightly. “I have never stolen anything in my life – on my Mother’s honour!”

(Given the doubts already expressed by his father about the identity of this person, perhaps this wasn’t the greatest of pledges to make – but he shouldn’t have done it all the same.)

Why?

Because Lady Lynne Shrimpleton took her own phone out of her pocket, opened it and pressed a button: James Churchill Proudfoot’s number. Moments later, it started to ring. In Cornelius’ jacket pocket…

“Hand it over!” she instructed the errant aristocrat. Sheepishly, he went to do so, extending his right hand with the phone in it. Whereupon Her Ladyship grabbed hold of his wrist and – using techniques learnt from her General Department II instructors in Hanoi – twisted it in such a way that it snapped with a sickening crunching sound. Cornelius screamed. But the momentum of the downward force exerted by his expert assailant was already propelling the young toff on his knees towards her in time for Lynne to deliver a sickening blow with her own right knee into his face, smashing his nose and one of his cheek-bones even before she hammered her left elbow into the side of his head and prepared a follow-up with her right one. Nine grabbed hold of her left arm as she tried to do this at the same moment that Jay grabbed her right one and yelled:

“Enough! You’ll kill him! Shooting the dirty dog would be quicker!”

Both men continued to restrain her until they felt the rage and the tension in her body begin to subside. But the instant they let go of her, she strode straight over towards the man known as Roddy and delivered a sickening kick to his side. He groaned and rolled over.

“Get up!” she yelled. “Put your hands behind your back!” Then she turned towards his terrified companions as they lay on their faces and repeated the instruction before speaking to Nine and Four in Vietnamese. Within seconds, all three of Cornelius’ men were trussed-up like Turkeys, their hands trapped behind their backs with almost unbreakable plastic Cable Ties: the ones that get tighter the more you on pull them.

“How many more of you are there?” Lynne demanded of Roddy, who was still bent over slightly and suspecting that his ribs were bruised if not actually broken.

“None!” he said, his words somehow a little less than convincing.

“What about Ned with the hounds?” asked one of his men, who wasn’t the brightest star in the universe.

“Hounds?” repeated Jay, looking directly at the big farmer. “What are they for?”

Roddy didn’t answer. Until Lady Lynne delivered a sickeningly powerful uppercut into his jaw which knocked him completely off balance – and one of his teeth out.

“What are they for?” she yelled.

Roddy shook his head as the world spun around inside it and then licked the side of his mouth, from which a trickle of blood was already beginning to seep.

“We had a little – action – planned for tonight eh” he admitted, looking at the floor. “A harmless bit of fun like.”

“What sort of fun?” asked Jay.

“We were going to have a sort of drag race eh. No aniseed or foxes involved, like.”

“So what was involved?”

Roddy was clearly reluctant to reply. But his ribs and his jaw persuaded him that it might be best to do so.

“Your mates would be, like.”

“How?”

 The big farmer stared at the floor anew before he finally muttered:

“We’d start with the big, smelly lad, like. Tek his jacket and start him running eh. Get some of mutts an’ give ’em a smell of his clothes. Then set hounds on him like. He wouldn’t get far!”

“And then what?”

Same wi’ Chinese lads like. Lile un first, then bigger un. More sport wi’ them lads like – they’re fit. Hounds like a bit of a challenge, eh.”

“And what would happen when the dogs caught up with them?”

“Up ter young Master, like. Mebees tie em to a tree, tek bets on ‘ow long they would last on a night like this eh. Mebees summat else like.”

“And Lady Lynne?”

“Nah! He had another sort of sport lined-up for ‘er, eh? He’s tek her back to his place – and then the fun would begin like!”

Lady Lynne stared deep into his eyes.

“Fun, eh?” she said. “Well – who am I to deny you of it? Call your man Ned. Tell him to bring his dogs here. Now!”

She spoke again in Vietnamese to Nine. He cut through the bonds which held Roddy’s wrists, allowing him to make the call. The big farmer took a phone out of his pocket and a couple of minutes later, the Master of the Cumberside Hunt was facing three irate-looking Oriental people, a scruffy older man and an obviously genuine hard nut with a gun.

Big Roddy looked like he had been hit by a truck and the young Master seemed to be unconscious, lying face-down in what seemed to be a pool of his own blood.

In the circumstances, Ned was very co-operative. He explained that there were twenty-four hounds in his cattle truck and six more in a sealed-off bit of his Defender. These were the most aggressive dogs in the pack and they needed to be kept away from the others – and muzzled.

“Those dogs are killers!” he said. “Once their blood is up, they’d rip anything apart: rabbit; hare; fox – even a man!”

Jay roughly shoved Roddy’s two men up against the wall with their boss. Then he took their wallets and their mobile phones before making a big show of removing a switchblade from his uniform pocket. He clicked the switch in its handle to release its sharp, ugly blade. The three men looked as if they were going to faint – or throw up – as he turned this intimidating and savage weapon towards them. One by one, he swung them around and used the blade to rip right up the centre of their jackets and the shirts they were wearing underneath. Then he pulled the severed parts right down to their manacled wrists and cut again until all three men were naked from the waist up. He took the Defender’s keys next, went outside and briefly activated the ignition. Then he returned to the container.

“Listen-up everybody! You know the drill. The thermometer in the car tells me it’s minus five out there right now. So you need to run to keep warm. The dogs will help you: you will have a five minute start on them. I don’t want to see any of you ever again. But if you don’t come back here during the week and make this place respectable, you will be seeing me again! I’ve got your driving licenses and I know where you live. I want these containers spruced-up and painted. The fences rebuilt. The broken furniture removed, repaired or replaced. The pitch flattened. The grass cut. The goal frames painted. Proper nets on them. Whitewashed lines on the pitch. New corner flags. Temporary toilets for loads of punters – the works! Do I make myself clear?”

He clearly had. Then he turned to the loose-tongued one who had mentioned the hounds in the first place and said:

“You’ve been a bit more helpful than your stupid mates this evening. So you get to go first. Off you go!”

The farm hand ran for his life, his hands still pinioned  behind his back – and was lost in the blizzard in no time at all. After four minutes, Jay instructed Ned the Huntsman to get six hounds out of his cattle truck and prepare to release them. He threw the remnants of the running man’s clothes among them so they could get a lungful of it first. A minute later, they were gone too, their barking and yelping soon lost in the smothering blanket of snow which was still falling across the island.

The process was repeated with the other yokel. And then Roddy after Jay had told him to come back with three tractors next Sunday. “Attach trailers to them and clean them up. Some flowers and bunting won’t go amiss. You’re going to provide free tractor rides for the kids – and as many bacon butties as the assembled masses can possibly eat. Don ‘t let me down!”

And off he went – slowly and painfully – into the freezing night too. So then there was just Ned. They didn’t tie him up but still made him strip to the waist. He looked absolutely terrified.

“Those dogs will rip me to pieces!” he whinged.

“So now you know how the fox feels, don’t you? So you better run as fast as your fat little legs can carry you! But if by any chance you do survive, you’re in charge of the free Donkey Rides next Sunday. Brig them in your cattle truck. Oh – and you’re in charge of the cake stall as well! Bring plenty!”

So saying, Jay pushed him out of the door.

Five minutes later, he dropped down the cattle truck’s gate and watched the excited hounds disappear into the snow and the darkness. They didn’t need to sniff their target’s clothing to get a fix on him – they knew exactly who they were after…

So all they were left with was the Honourable Cornelius – and the six savage dogs. Jay ripped the big man’s jacket and shirt off and threw them to the dogs in the back of Ned’s car. The sudden cold acted to revive the young toff and Jay dragged him to his feet, ignoring his pleas for water.

“Keep your mouth open as you run – there’s tons of water dropping from the skies right now!”

But Lady Lynne had a better idea. She went outside and came back a moment later carrying a bucket absolutely full to the brim with freezing cold water. Or possibly something else – she had brought if from the `Uni-sex” WC which was mouldering in the darkness nearby.

“For you!” she said – and poured the entire contents of the bucket over the already shivering young toff. “That will freeze as you run. Your core temperature will drop and it will be a fight between your aching legs and the snow for dominance! But don’t worry – you won’t die of hypothermia! The dogs will see to that!”

She put her absolutely beautiful face right up to his and then added:

“It’s been such a pleasure meeting you!”

Lady Lynne then virtually threw the son of the Earl of Cumberlake out of the door to see him disappear at top speed vaguely in the direction of Lake Hall and safety.

Shame for him that it was so far away…

Then she turned towards Jay. She smiled her most enchanting smile and extended her arms towards him. They hugged, warmly and very tight, partially because of the cold – but only partially.

“How did you know we were here?” she asked him.

“I’ve been listening to your phone conversations and monitoring you all week! I began to think you would never get here. I’ve also been watching this place all day. Saw the rough lads come and go in that big car of theirs. One look at them told me they were going to be trouble. Then I watched your man Jim clean himself up and settle down. And then waited for you to arrive – I’d heard you telling what you thought was him at the time that you were on your way. Then I followed the three of you through the snow to the pub – it wasn’t difficult. I’d already seen that Cornelius bloke arrive with his mates. Knew where they were hiding: Night Vision bins are a godsend. I’d already guessed what you would do next. So I just took up position in the container – and waited.”

“Simple as that, eh? Am I really that predictable?” Her Ladyship seemed genuinely disappointed: she thought she’d been trained by the best.

“No – far from it! But you and I really need to have a serious talk, Lynne! It will have to wait, though…”

He went out again to the Defender, opened its back door and pulled a single dog out of it, held Cornelius’ shirt up to its face – and then released its muzzle and let it go. Then he repeated the process another five times until the six most savage hounds of the Cumberside Pack were lost to sight in the unending blizzard.

“Your place or mine?” he asked her Ladyship.

“Mine!” she said and just a few minutes later, Nine was piloting their black dingy back through the snow and choppy water back towards her yacht. Lynne Shrimpleton may be one hell of a hard cookie and she remained absolutely furious with Threefeet of the Yard – but she could hardly leave him alone at the football club to freeze to death, could she?

We pause for breath next time and examine how this Soap Opera is going so far.

Are there rules for creating this sort of stuff?

If so – have I broken any of them? Join me next time in the Sensational Shrimpleton Saga to find out…