4. MEETING IGOR

THE CASE OF THE DIAMOND DENTURES 4

They had been well clear of the beaten track for the best art of an hour and Royston’s car was struggling along what amounted to little more than a dirt track when Angelina announced that they were almost there.

“This where I was when the storm started,” she said, “there’s the pile of sticks the lads wanted to make a shelter out of.”

“Just as well,” grunted Royston, “this old car of mine can’t stand much more of this!”

“Igor to me that he was most careful when he chose this site,” Angelina told him, “he had to make sure that nobody had the least idea of his whereabouts. For reasons of national security, he claimed, and I believed him. It didn’t really matter, though, because that bed of his was so comfortable...”

“You keep on about his bed as though sleeping were the most important thing we do,” growled Blinky.

“I wasn’t thinking of sleeping,” she smirked, winking at Royston.

“So how come he found this … wasteland?” asked Blinky, ignoring the implied smut in her words. When it came to his attitude to Angelina he was a totally split man. When he was sightless, which was probably most of his waking hours when he should have been alert and aware of what was going on around him, he imagined her as a seventy-something harridan with a fetish for punctuation and tidiness and consequently untouchable. It was her voice, distorted by his own damaged hearing, that forced that impression on him.

When his eyes actually did work, though, he could see that was far from being much more then twenty and equipped with very youthful and teasing ways. The very sight of her made him want to stroke her bottom, which he knew full well was infra dig to say the least.

It had that which had caused his accident in the firing range when he had squeezed the trigger of the gun he was trying out when in his mind he was squeezing her bottom. Squeezing triggers and fleshy female bottoms are two very different things and require very different concentration, and as a consequence he had totally missed interpreting a crunchy stiffness in the trigger. The gun had gone off all wrong, taken most of his sight and some of his hearing with it and ruined his life. He was retired as a senior police officer, to the distant cheers of most of the female officers younger than fifty under his command.

He wouldn’t have minded the ruination of his life if Angelina had been the sort of girl to take to him, but she wasn’t. She treated him with the respect that his position invited, and no more. If she had been in the same room as Blinky and a bed she would have decided to sleep on the floor.

“It wasn’t an easy decision for him to make,” she said after a moment’s thought, “but in the end he used his knowledge of the world of spies to help him. They might like to go under deep cover, but one thing they must keep open is some sort of door to the world they’re working for. He decided that he wouldn’t even slam that door but make sure that nobody knew were it was. Well, he chose this beautifully isolated place as an open door.”

“I wouldn’t call it beautiful,” muttered Royston.

“It depends how you look on it,” she smiled, “there’s beauty everywhere and you’ll see if if you put your mind to it. This place is truly beautiful, take my word for it.”

“How come you know so much about Igor if he’s so secretive?” asked Royston.

“I told you. I was with a troupe of boy scouts enjoying a wild holiday away from work and television dramas and all that sort of stuff when I spotted him peeling some spuds,” she said. “There was something about him that made us click and, well, we’ve been sort of in touch ever since. The boy scouts wandered off into the wilderness of twenty-first century life and I learned that holidays can be fun! And he taught me a lot, got me up to speed when it comes to using my brain and told me all about his diamond dentures.”

“So you know all about them?” asked Blinky, eagerly, “after all it’s those dentures that we’re supposed to be after! That woman, the one who spoke so much gobbledegook that I understood less when she’d gone that I had before she arrived...”

“Didn’t mention them,” smiled Angelina.

“So how do we know it’s that particular item we’re supposed to be locating?” asked a confused Blinky.

“Because Igor told me,” smiled the girl, “he always lets me know when something important needs doing and we had a code.”

“Code?” spluttered Blinky, “you mean, you work for me but there’s a code I don’t know anything about?”

“There’s quite a lot you don’t know, sir,” smiled Angelina teasingly, “but this code’s quite simple. If a posh woman comes along and mentions taking a bath on Tuesdays with a librarian then that’s code for what we’re doing at the moment. The librarian refers to a huge collection of data as in a library of books, the bath means something’s gone down the plug hole and the fact that it’s Tuesday tells me that teeth are involved. Tuesday is named after Tyr, an ancient god who had his arm bitten off by teeth. See what I mean? A code!”

“And the posh old lady?” asked Royston cynically.

“My grandma,” smirked Angelina, “and a game bird even at her age. He needed someone he could trust and they don’t come more trustworthy than granny. You should, make a pact with her, Blinky, when this is all over. She’s always on the look-out for intriguing lovers. Blind should be right down her street!”

“I’m totally at sea,” sighed Blinky, “I mean, Norse gods, arms bitten off, diamond gnashers...”

“Well, we’re here,” confirmed Royston, “And what’s more, I can’t go any further, not without being blown to smithereens by the wild man of the jungle over there.”

He pointed.

In front of them, apparently appearing from nowhere while they’d been talking, stood the wildest man Royston had ever seen. All hair, from a chaotic tumble-weed of the stuff on his head and over most of his face, completely obscuring his mouth with a sandy fuzz,, dressed bizarrely in fluorescent boxer shorts and a tee-shirt dyed the colour of the wilderness, and holding in a threatening stance what, to their untutored eyes, looked to be some kind of triggering device. And, bizarrely, he held one hand up as if he was conducting traffic on a 1950s High Street.

Angelina shouted “Igor!” at the top of her voice, opened the car door and leapt out before running up to the wild man of the wilderness and flying into his arms as though the two were an old married couple who had been separated for half an hour and couldn’t stand the loneliness.

“Igor!” she repeated, and before anyone in the car even thought of the words Jack Robinson rather than simply saying them, the two of them were in the closest of all embraces and the supposed triggering device lay on the ground by their feet while somewhere lost in the chaotic landscape a mechanical voices started a dread countdown, beginning with “ten, nine, eight...”

“Golly gosh,” muttered Blinky.

© Peter Rogerson 15.01.20