6. DETECTIVE INSPECTOR PIGGOTT

A Chapter by Peter Rogerson

A man, shockingly, wakes as a perfectly formed female...

It was easy to decide to postpone the shopping expedition for underwear until the afternoon, until after the feast of fish and chips he’d promised himself for lunch. But it was still too early in the day for the chip shop to be open and so he decided a coffee and period of contemplation might well be in order so that he could try to work out exactly what had happened to him, why it had happened and more importantly, how. Those questions more than perplexed him, and the possible answers scared the living daylights out of him,

But sitting down for that cup of coffee proved to be a big mistake.

It gave his world chance to become even more crazy than it already was, and it proceeded to do that in spades.

The doorbell rang after his first sip, and he half-cursed, using the beginning of the naughtiest word that he dared utter in order to vent his frustration as he went to open the door.

There was a stern face standing there. A stern face that belonged to an equally stern body.

“Mrs Bramble?” it asked.

Now, that ought to have been the easiest of questions to answer, but it wasn’t. He was a Bramble, true enough, and that was his name and always had been, but not a Mrs, and there was a real Mrs Bramble in the world somewhere, one who might put in an appearance at any time like she had last night when she had declared herself homeless.

In the end he resorted to blurring the outlines of language and sense.

“Sort of,” he said.

“Detective Inspector Piggott,” the face introduced itself.

He might have known. It looked like the face belonging to a stern detective and that’s exactly what it was. Here was a man drenched in the misery of a terrible world, a man whose psyche had been tarnished by blood and death and all manner of unpleasantries, a man who knew a dreadful thing or two. Here was a man who, indeed, knew what darkness truly was.

“Yes?” he said, knowing it was a brief question and hardly an adequate reply but not quite sure how to lengthen it without sounding silly.

“It’s about your husband,” said the detective. “Maybe I should come in and discuss matters with you?”

Ivan didn’t have a husband unless he was it, and to even begin to explain that might result in his incarceration in a home for the mentally unstable even though he did have beautiful blonde tresses and acceptable b***s. But no willy. He suddenly lacked one of those, so believing that he actually was a he might demand quite a lot from any inquisitor, and this stern man didn’t look as if he had enough.

So, “please come in,” he said in the tone of voice that sounded vaguely reluctant despite its soprano undertones.

He led the way into his small lounge and indicated a chair, seating himself on the other. There were only two chairs in that room. He lived alone now and really only needed one chair but occasionally fantasised that he might get the occasional guest to occupy the other. He’d never substituted the words detective inspector for the word guest in his mind. In fact, it hadn’t ever occurred to him. A guest, in fact, when imagined, was invariably female.

“What can I do for you?” he asked, aware that it was a stupid question bearing in mind the circumstances, but asking it anyway.

“This must be a very difficult time for you, Mrs Bramble,” began the detective inspector and all he could think was there’s that Mrs word again…

“Er, yes,” he said after a few moments’ contemplation. After all, what else could he say?

“I mean, it must have been a shock for you when you discovered that your husband was lying dead in the next door apartment...”

Was that a statement or was it a question? Either way it was true.

“I can’t believe he’s dead,” was all he could think of saying, and after the slightest pause went on to elaborate, “in fact, I’m sure he isn’t.”

“He’s been dead for some time,” commented the policeman. “Weeks, the pathologist says. And you haven’t reported him missing?”

“I didn’t know he was missing...” It sounded as ridiculous as it was, but what else could he say? He hadn’t known that he was missing because he wasn’t.

Though there are parts of me that are…

How could he ask this stern policeman if there was any way that his skilled and observant force could trace a missing penis? It wasn’t the sort of thing a man would say and intend to be serious, was it? He’d love for his penis to reappear, like it should.

“And testicles,” he said aloud.

He had always known that when thoughts racing through a man’s mind get mixed up with the things he’s saying oddities can creep in. Little combinations of discrete thoughts and spoken words that become something totally absurd when they’re mixed into a kind of verbal soup. But saying testicles out loud was worse than an oddity.

“Pardon?” asked Detective Inspector Piggott, “did you say testicles?”

He had, so he nodded.

“How did you know, Mrs Bramble, that someone had removed his testicles?” asked the other, sterner than ever.

“They have?” he asked, and realised that he was in danger of digging a very deep hole, one that he might fall into at any moment.

“How did you know, Mrs Bramble?” the policeman asked again.

“I didn’t,” he said, shuddering. “It never crossed my mind. I was just thinking of … of … of his testicles. A woman can think of her husband’s testicles without assuming they’ve gone missing, can’t she? It’s perfectly natural. I bet you think of things like that sometimes?”

“Testicles?”

“Or other things. Various things. Surely?”

“I wouldn’t know that, Mrs Bramble,” murmured the detective, maybe a shade less sternly now that he decided he was talking to a loony. “I’ve never been a woman so have no clear idea what they think of when they think of their dead husbands...”

Ivan had a sudden problem.

“Why were they missing?” he asked, hoping that the answer to that question might go some way to solving the problem of his own missing parts and then realising that he was thinking about the same absent objects, only his had never been dead… it was a conundrum, of that there could be no doubt, and it was twisting his mind into shapes a mind never ought get twisted into.

“If we knew that we might knew who murdered him,” growled the detective. “Mrs Bramble, did you kill your husband?”

This was getting seriously silly. This particular question made it silly. The emphasis on the word you made it silly. And the awkward way a badly-fitting bra made him want to massage his breasts made it silly. And his knickers weren’t perfect either. Nothing was right. Everything was silly.

“Of course I didn’t!” he snapped, “he’s not dead! Not dead at all!”

That assertion might have started the ball rolling and experts set about determining exactly who the testicle-less corpse in the flat next door to Mrs Bramble’s home was, maybe of checking his DNA against something or other, maybe of digging a little more deeply into why a man who wires his home up to his neighbour’s electricity meter might require the amputation of certain vital organs, or how come a man who was teaching punctuation to class 4z only two days ago can have been dead for long enough by today for maggots to be crawling out of his nostrils an hour ago… Worrying about things like that might have changed everything.