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CHAPTER TWO

 

 

Chapter 2 Dash and Tube at 45 Megilp Square

 


“No more grapefruits for him.” Tube covered the headless corpse with a dust sheet from the billiard room. The blood from the naked neck edges and central spine seeped through the shabby baize in concentric circles, and another cloth from the Billiard Saloon was summoned. Tube surveyed his handiwork with a characteristic sang froid.

How inert are the decapitated, he mused.
How brief this passage in life, how fitful its conduct.

Jerome Tube, the Dark Star of the Surete, on brief secondment to the Yard, stroked his reveres with Gallic finesse. He gazed philosophically out of the grimy casement. The artful play of globes struck his poetic nature, in grapefruit and Moon.

The carillon on Saint Megilp’s struck the hour.


His silent companion, Tom Dash of the Yard, pondered the enormity of the scene through his steely pince nez. Each cascade of small change in his tweeds signified a fresh avenue of thought.


Yes, dear reader, your suspicions are confirmed.


It is Dash of the Pimp’s Knuckle Scandal which rocked the last Conservative Government in ‘96 - Dash of the Missing Moose of Rickmansworth – Dash who saw what lay behind the Scarlet Curtain of Kentish Town .

Yes it was Dash here, and Dash there, his feats were legendary and known even on the Continent of Europe. Tube broke open his encrusted nickel cigarette case and offered Dash a slim slightly scented panatella with a dark tip. “Mmmm, Jerome” Dash shared the glowing mantle and , as their eyes met, they substantiated each others’ gravest fears. Unspoken was the dread.

How alike these two, yet how dissimilar.


At once demonstrating lassitude, both could be fevered into action. Wholly masculine the pair, yet with a feline grace when called upon. Both were feared and loathed by the Criminal Tundra and also by those in power seeking to entrench the old and sclerotic means of scientific investigation.


By what strange chance had their trajectories crossed?

Tube and Dash.

Dash and Tube.


Was it by chance or design that they found themselves on two telephonic receivers in the Executive Suite high over Scotland Yard, inscribing details of the Murder, the geographical location, the litany of Clues and False Clues that surely pointed to the one inescapable conclusion, the conclusion so ominous and terrible that its essence was encoded in two simple words (for their use only) and– the source of this Cosmic Pollution (“Precipice”) , and its implications (“Linctus”).


Tube and Dash.

Dash and Tube.


The one the epitome of Latin grace, the other Anglo Saxon dignity taken to its natural conclusion. And yet, how well those similarities veiled the complementary contrasts that made their collaboration so deadly for Evil and its Multiferous Forces – both were hirsute but ever in control, be it pomade or Brylcreem. Both were incisive yet always ready for play. “Why,” said Sergeant Toby Oak, ever at Dash’s elbow, “they were as alike as could be, separated only by the Munch.”


How Tube roared!! “Manche, my fine Oak, Manche.”


Their high speed carriage veered alarmingly over Lambeth Bridge with the siren turned low for security’s sake. The joke occupied them all much to Oak’s blushes right up to Megilp Square and the scene of the Crime.
Dash pushed his spectacles back on his nose and looked shamelessly into Tube’s penetrating stare.


“Precipice?”

“Precipice!” came the rejoinder.


It was five by the bells of Megilp.

And dawn was not to be delayed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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