30. THE PIECE OF ROUGH

THE CASE OF THE DIAMOND DENTURES 30

“I think I know who you are,” said Angelina slowly, and the woman known as Mildred Kampinella-Plonker looked shocked as if she was totally convinced of her own anonymity.

“No you don’t!” she spat, revealing a sudden lack of elegance that contrasted wildly with the exuberance of her hat.

“And that sort of proves it,” smiled Angelina. “You’re the woman that idiot...” she indicated the Prime Minister and put special emphasis on the word idiot “wants to keep under wraps. Wants to keep secret.”

“Officer! Take that woman to the deepest chamber and put her on the rack!” ordered the Prime Minister, indicating Angelina with a vicious nod of his head, which must have been painful for him bearing in mind that he was barely upright and, being a mere mortal with a broken leg, in considerable pain anyway.

“What? That woman?” muttered the guard who had been watching the development of a scene that he thought might prove, in the long run, to be amusingly interesting, and if he obeyed orders literally that long run would become a most uninteresting short run.

So he did something he hoped would exonerate him if things went wrong and he be as accused of disobeying a Prime Ministerial order. Realising that there were two women in the room and that one of them was wearing a dreadful hat, beckoning at a second uniformed thug he strode, not to Angelina, but to Mildred Kampinella-Plonker and the two grabbed hold of her and prepared to march her off.

And it was just then that the Prime Minister developed a fit of sneezes. One sneeze would have been all right. One sneeze would have been easily masked by the word pardon, but no sooner had he wiped his nose (on the back of his hand as if he was a scruffy schoolboy who never went anywhere near any expensive public school), along came a second sneeze.

He tried to shout “No!” but it got mixed up with “Pardon me” and a third sneeze, and when it emerged it resembled the sort of noise that a small dog accidentally caught in a mincer might make.

“Get your filthy hands off me!” exclaimed Mildred Kampinella-Plonker, scowling at the uniformed muscles, and pushing one of them with sufficient violence when he was slightly off balance that he found himself careering backwards towards the medieval bed.

What happened next was a comedy of errors, but it did halt Angelina’s speech, which brought a sigh of relief from the wounded politician if nor anyone else.

Most people know what happens to fabric when it is subjected to many years of neglect, and that medieval bed, though wonderfully dusted and preserved, but in practice ignored in between dustings (a notice saying KEEP OFF THE BED probably helped), had been unloved and unlaid in for centuries. The fabric, though it looked perfectly intact to the casual eye was, in fact, three quarters rotten and held together by the droppings of the critters that have already put in an appearance in this account. Indeed, some of them, those that hadn’t been shaken off the Prime Ministerial head, were still trying to establish a stable home in the blond excesses they had found constituted their new home.

So when a thuggish non-prime-ministerial head landed on the ancient top cover at an askew angle, it tore. And as the sound of weft and weave parting ways joined the general melee of noise, one of those dedicated to preserving historic artefacts entered the room and screeched when she saw in one brief look the various points of damage within. It would have been easy for her to obey the laws of deference seeing that one of those in the chamber was actually the political leader of the land, but she was so in love with the remnants of a past age that she was having nothing to do with such nonsenses as deference.

“What do you think you are doing?” her screech demanded to know, and “I don’t care who you are or how important you believe yourselves to be, this is vandalism of the worst order, the wanton destruction of precious things from our glorious past, and ought to be punished!”

There was a sudden hush as her words found their way into every present ear, and Angelina decided that was the time she should continue with her speech.

“As I was saying,” she said, her voice cutting through the disrupted room like a butter knife so that everyone felt obliged to look at her, “as I was saying, I know who this woman is!”

She pointed at Mildred Kampinella-Plonker who was still in a kind of embrace with one and a half gorillas, and the malevolent look on the behatted woman’s face would have curdled milk, so it was just as well there was no milk present.

“She is the Prime Minister’s bit of rough!” she pronounced, and the bewildered servant of the Tower shuddered at the thought whilst trying to summon up another chastising screech, and Angelina continued: “she is the sort of woman who performs lewd dances on table tops for the Prime Minister and his chosen chums to gawp at and even, for goodness sake, fondle, and she is a harlot of the worst kind!”

“You can say that again,” put in Royston, who was still being distracted by the visions trapped in the diamond dentures and had reached the part when the Prime Minister, equipped with a safety razor, was on the cusp of giving the by then nearly naked woman a Brazilian hair cut. Royston had clearly seen more than had Angelina before disgust had made her part with the teeth.

“I think, sir, that you are a disgrace,” he said to the broken-legged politician who was trying to tuck the splinter of shin bone back where it should be, and weeping at the pain.

“But it wasn’t me,” he stuttered between tears, “I would never do anything like that! Everyone knows how pure at heart I am, how I never abuse women and that sort of thing. It’s what the opposition parties have created to disgrace me! You can’t possibly believe I’d do anything like what you’re seen from those lying teeth!”

“Oh, I do,” grinned Royston, “you see, the Prime Minister whose image is trapped in excellent three dimensional glory in these dentures is wearing exactly the same lurid boxer shorts as you so proudly displayed when you pulled your trousers off back near 221c! And I doubt there’s another pair like those anywhere on planet Earth because they’re a disgrace!”

“You see the lengths they go to, to dishonour me,” wept the PM.

“You, sir, are a liar!” snapped Royston.

Then there was another kerfuffle in the crowded doorway.

“What are you doing with my mummy?” came a new voice.

It was Janie Cobweb aka the barmaid from The Ginger Nut, and she was holding a broomstick by its shaft with a very determined look on her face.

© Peter Rogerson 10.02.20