8. TO THE STARS

THE CASE OF THE DIAMOND DENTURES, 8

“You have a sister?” exclaimed Blinky, staring through unseeing eyes at Angelina.

“I always have had,” replied Angelina, Royston thought a little too defensively. “She was always one of a kind and went her own way, but I loved her because of it.”

“I’ve got a sister too,” sighed Royston, “she’s the mother of triplets and married to an environmental activist who’s always in and out of jail trying to save the planet, for her sins.”

“What about the trollop you just saw, the one that made you pull up so sharply that I almost banged my head?” asked Blinky.

“My sister Margie,” said Angelina, “I’m pretty certain that’s who it is, though I was absolutely sure she was in Thailand with Derek. He’s her boyfriend and a right jerk whose only possible advantage over other men is the enormity of his you-know-what, or at least he was last time I saw her! I never did understand what she saw in his personality, but there’s no accounting for tastes, not even in sisters!”

“And Igor said the woman he’d spent some cave-time with was also called Margie,” pointed out Royston. “A bit of a coincidence if they’re not the same person, don’t you think?”

“Igor’s not my sister’s type,” protested Angelina, “she goes for blokes with money and the will to spend it on her as well as other more personal stuff!”

“Well, we could ask her. She’s coming this way,” said Royston, “and I do like those legs!”

“She was always the good looking one,” sighed Angelina, “even when she was still at school and jail-bait she had pensioners trying to woo her!”.

“Don’t do yourself down, Angelina. You’re one special young lady yourself and as beautiful as ten Margies,” Royston told her, generously, his heart welling up at the thoughts of a woman he knew thinking she might be second fiddle to anyone.

“Margie’s into rich well-endowed men in a big way,” sighed Angelina, “and they’re into her!”

“But what we need to do more than anything is find out if she knows anything about the missing dentures,” almost shouted Blinky who was fed up with being left out of the loop but couldn’t do much about it during his many periods of absolute blindness.

By this time the girl, Margie if Angelina was right and it was her sister who most obviously was nowhere near Thailand, had reached the Land Rover. At first she obviously didn’t recognise her sister who was mostly hidden by Royston’s head, but addressed Blinky as the older man and probably the one best able to help her. She had no idea about his visual problems, of course, and seemed put out when he didn’t look her straight in the eyes.

“I wonder,” she began, and Blinky fumbled to wind down the window, and his inability to find the window winder might have given away the fact that his eyesight was far from being perfect.

“Yes, my dear?” he asked, “what’s a lady of your advanced age doing in a place like this.”

He seemed to be trapped in a world in which every young woman was a pensioner or even older. His hearing, being imperfect, seemed to overlay even the prettiest voice with a hum, a kind of baritone tinnitus that distorted it and gave the wrong impression of age,

“Well, I like that!” began the woman described as Margie, “and here was I thinking I was talking to a gentleman.”

“He’s blind,” explained Royston, “at least he is for most of the time. What can we do for you?”

“That’s better,” frowned the woman, “I’m lost! I’m looking for a chap called Igor. I know he lives somewhere near here, but I can’t for the life of me remember exactly where. You might have seen him I suppose. He’s not the sort to shave very often, and he’s a real dish.”

“Is that you, Margie?” asked Angelina, who had been keeping as much out of sight as she could until that moment.

“Angie? It can’t be…. Angie, my goodness, that is you,” came the reply from mere inches away. “What in the name of everything are you doing here?”

“It’s more likely that I’m here rather than you! I thought you were in Thailand with some fellow,” replied Angelina, “and this isn’t Thailand,” she added just so that her sister didn’t think her geography had gone haywire.

“That was last month, silly,” laughed Margie, “I was with Igor and we got as far a Bangkok airport, but they wouldn’t let him stay on account of his teeth setting off every alarm under the sun and him refusing to take them out.”

“What’s that about his teeth?” barked Blinky, “it’s on account of those teeth that we’re here!”

“Well, he lost them. That’s all I know,” replied Margie cautiously. “He’s an odd cove, doesn’t dress very well and needs a shave, but there isn’t a nicer man on the planet. He’s clever, too. In fact, it’s my opinion that he’s so clever that he’s sometimes stupid.”

“Well,” said Royston trying to make sense of that assessment, “that sounds just like the bloke we’ve just been talking to, and as for those teeth, he still hasn’t found them and it’s our job to get our hands on them. A matter of national importance, I believe.”

“Well, I want to see him,” murmured Margie, “to tell you the truth I can’t do without him. He’s a gorgeous man, the sort who’s like a drug to feeble women like little me.”

“Feeble? I should coco! I wouldn’t have put him down as your sort, Margie...” murmured Angelina, “after all, he isn’t splashing money around everywhere he goes, and those boxer shorts!”

“Well, he is, Angel. And as for money, he‘s loaded but doesn’t see much sense in spending it unnecessarily. He’s converted me unto considering being frugal!”

Blinky cleared his throat. “But this isn’t getting us anywhere. What about those dentures of his? Where did he lose them?”

Margie snorted. “If he knew the answer to that they wouldn’t be lost, would they? But I reckon they were stolen from him during one absolutely wonderful night of passion when he took me to the moon and back at least three times!”

“Only three?” asked her sister, her voice dripping with sarcasm tinged with jealousy.

“Maybe four,” sighed Margie, teasingly, “but it was during that night that he probably took his teeth out.”

“Any particular reason?” asked Royston, curious.

“They got in the way of a bout of tonsil-tennis, so I suggested it,” sighed Margie, “and I was absolutely certain that, at the height of our passion when the score was love-all that I saw someone creep into the entrance to his cave.”

“You did?” Blinky opened his eyes so wide that they started working again, and the sudden influx of light stung his retinas and made tears start flowing.

“I did,” nodded Marge, reaching into a tiny pocket on her tiny skirt and pulling out a tissue, which she handed to him, “here, wipe them with this,” she murmured.

“Did you happen to see who it was?” asked Royston, suddenly all attention.

“Well, it wasn’t easy in the half light when a man is doing his best to take a girl to the stars, but I did notice one thing...”

“You did?” asked a weeping Blinky.

“His nose. He had one of those dirty great noses that clowns think look funny, though I’ve never seen anything particularly amusing about clowns. And it was flashing, red, black, red, black, and when it was red I made out a pair of very baggy trousers. I might have told Igor at the time but we’d reached twice the speed of light and I was about to zig-zag between a sea of asteroids with a real man in the driving seat!”

“You always did make me sick,” sighed Angelina, maybe a trifle spitefully.

“Sorry darling,” sighed Margie, grinning.

“It’s a more believable explanation than flying fish even though it makes you sick, though,” murmured Royston.

© Peter Rogerson