28. A FLOORBOARD

THE CASE OF THE DIAMOND DENTURES 28

To Blinky, every single thing in the silly escapade with the diamond dentures was suddenly obvious, and almost simultaneously like a bolt of lightning, it came to Angelina too.

“Of course,” she whispered, “how very clever...”

To both of them the clues were all there. But it took their special brains to put them together and understand the mystery of the diamond dentures.

She was holding them at the time and the Prime Minister, who caught a glimpse of the light of understanding in her eyes, lunged clumsily towards her in order to grab the treasure. But he was a portly, middle-aged to elderly lump of flesh and she was young, agile and quite up to defending her dignity against such men. After all, she’d had a karate belt as a teenager and hadn’t forgotten a trick since then.

It ended badly for the man from No 10 Downing Street. It couldn’t have ended much worse and left him still breathing.

And we must remember where they were. This was the boudoir of medieval monarchs, a room that has been in situ for the bigger part of a millennium. It was inevitable that there were signs of wear and the inevitable deterioration which is the obvious way man-made artefacts which start as pristine things of beauty end up as dust.

Such slow decay isn’t obvious if seen on a daily basis by those charged with maintaining things as they always were so that boudoirs and the like can be admired by visitors who have paid for a ticket entitling them to gawp at the magnificence of past ages. American tourists who see such things as the Tower of London as part of their own heritage (because it is) don’t want to see modern stuff masquerading as ancient. But because decay and the artifice of time isn’t obvious doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

Floorboards might seem solid enough. They might give every appearance of having been in place for eternity, never changing, never undergoing any version of entropy in the lexicon of decay. But they are subject to the same immutable laws as everything else. Unnoticed by those charged to make sure they are solid through countless ages, gradually and microscopically, things do occur. It just has to be.

And every so often one weakens.

That, too, just has to be.

And one had weakened now. At the precise moment that the Prime Minister lunged towards Angelina in order to snatch the diamond dentures from her fingers before she could do anything as outrageous as slip them into her own mouth, a particular floorboard gave up the ghost and made a sickening sort of splintering sound as the Prime Ministerial foot stomped onto it, and that same foot, with a different geometry to negotiate from the one he had anticipated, slipped into a widening crack.

And the noise made by splintering wood was as nothing to the enraged row as a Prime Minister’s leg fractured.

All this happened, of course, in the fleeting moment of a determined lunge and an agile sidestep by Angelina.

“No you don’t!” she shouted at the Important Man with a Breaking Leg, and his reply was deafening and filled with the sort of pain he might have experienced in his teens on the playing fields of his famous public school when that same leg underwent a more violent torture courtesy of a rugby tackle that wasn’t quite right according to the rules of the game.

The Prime Minister ended up with one leg trapped by a breaking and ancient floor board and his nose, chin and forehead gouging their own way into the ancient and horrible mattress that tribes of tiny critters since time immemorial had called their home. It was they who created the musty smell, they who consumed some of the straw that had been its structure and they who had excreted it out after it had nourished them. It all made for the smell, and it was that very smell that warned the Prime Minister that all was far from well.

Blinky didn’t see if for perfectly obvious Blinky reasons, though if he had there was precious little he could have done. Angelina was, if you imagine this in slow motion, raising the dentures to her mouth and smiling at a wayward thought, whilst Royston leapt to the aid of the Prime Minister with the almost absurd quip “are you all right, sir?”

It took the two iron-faced guards who had stood dispassionately by for a full half minute to realise that all was not well with their paymaster, and the fact that he was that paymaster was why it took them so long. They didn’t like him.

In fact, they loathed him.

Like all servants their respect was totally related to the rewards of their duty, and this Prime Minister had reduced the terms of their contracts too many times for them to be anything but unhappy. He said it was for the good of the public purse but they had seen enough of him to know that he had some sleazy side-lines that he made that same public purse pay for, side-lines that involved copious bottles of bubbly and the odd belle of the more expensive balls. And during nights of luxury and possible un-Prime-Ministerial hanky panky they had been obliged to stand by and wish they were at home at their own hearths with their chosen spouses.

So their reaction was tardy, which gave the aforementioned critters an opportunity to deport some of their numbers via the Prime Ministerial tousled hair to the world of wonder beyond a medieval mattress which had been the whole world to them. But not all. Some remained behind to enjoy the blond Heaven they’d found.

Back to the slow-motion image.

Angelina managed to edge the first molecule of the diamond dentures into her mouth. Royston freed one wounded Prime Ministerial leg from where it was trapped between two halves of a badly broken floorboard, Blinky sat on the edge of the bed because he was quite clever when it came to blindly remembering where things were when he couldn’t see them (he’d learned that trick the hard way), and Igor said something along the lines of serve the son of unmarried parents right.

He, too, had little respect for the Very Important Man, though he was quite wrong about the marital state of his parents.

And Angelina gasped, went pale, started laughing hysterically and held her sides as she saw what she saw with something on the inside of her head.

“You never did!” she squealed at the Prime Minister, who was at that moment in tears in one reality and up to something quite naughty in another..

© Peter Rogerson, 08.02.20