12 A Fascinating Revelation

BOB SKELLINGTON’S REMAINS, part 11

The policeman was authority personified.

Rosie approached the Prime Minister’s front door with a most determined expression on her face, wishing she was back on Parson’s farm reclining in a deck chair with or without a glass of Prosecco at her elbow and nearly nothing in the way of clothing protecting her from the sunlit day. But here she was, somewhere she most certainly didn’t want to be, at the whim of an old witch-like woman who had crossed her path in the past.

And this policeman turned her heart into ice as he glowered at her and demanding to know whether she had an appointment and why she wasn’t in a dirty cell smelling of urine.

“You can let them in dearie,” came an all-too familiar voice from somewhere deep in the house, “he really wants to see them.”

“They’re not in my orders,” growled the policeman, flicking through a sheaf of papers. He was a uniformed sergeant with attitude, largely because he’d become a member of the police force in order to protect society from villains and at the back of his mind he had the feeling that instead he might be being paid to protect a villain from society. He read the newspapers and one or two of them told him things he’d prefer not to know about the scruffy man in his high office.

“Up the stairs, then,” he growled, half-pointing the way.

The stairs were lined with portraits of great men of the past, as well as a couple of women, all past holders of the majestic office of Prime Minister over the years.

They followed Griselda Entwhistle (for it had been she calling down to the police guard) and she led them into the highest and mightiest office in the land.

“They’re here, Chucky,” she said, and yawned. “It’s been a long day and I need a bath,” she announced, “you don’t mind, do you?”

The Prime Minister looked as if he might be posing for a photo opportunity, his face strained as if the smile he forced it to make was too much.

“Has anyone suggested you might benefit from a comb-over?” asked Rosie when she had decided that the chances were she had more to offer the world in general than did this man dwarfed by the desk he was sitting at, and his hair all awry revealing the early stages of male pattern baldness.

“What was it you want?” asked the Prime Minister, scowling at a reference that he hated to even think about, having decided when he was knee-high to a grasshopper that he would adopt the tousle haired cheeky schoolboy look for the entirety of his life and painfully aware that every time he washed his scalp embarrassing quantities of hair came out.

“Bob Skellington,” smiled Rosie, “I believe your maj … your prime-ministership knew a person of interest who called himself Bob Skellington?”

“What of it?” demanded the Prime Minister.

“We are police officers ordered to investigate his death,” replied Rosie, “and as you may be aware he had important antecedents, the most recent patriarch being the late Abram Montclare.”

“You mean, old Skellers is dead?” demanded the Prime Minister, his eyes suddenly open wide. “I know him well, don’t you know, knew his old man and a couple of brothers. Skellers and I were at school together, both played in the first eleven and did jolly well. And he’s no more? He had a big whatsit, you know.”

“What, sir, in the name of goodness do you mean by a whatsit?” butted in Sheila.

“He was the king of the shower block,” sniggered the Prime Minister, “when we had a shower after rugby and were drying ourselves we all gathered round to see it. He was famous for it, though it’s not something I can talk about to damsels like yourselves. But envy was involved and the rumour was he’d be the sire of, ahem, a dozen or more brats. Was he, do you know? Did he sire a rugby team of bright blond lads? If he’s dead you can tell us because he won’t mind. I even had a fiver on him making the baker’s dozen. Like to know if I won the bet, though I guess it doesn’t, ahem, matter so much now.”

“Such things have no importance to a pile of dusty old bones,” Rosie told him sharply.

“Dusty old bones, you say? You mean he’s not recently fallen off his perch and gone to cloud cuckoo land to meet his maker?”

“Can you tell us about his politics?” asked Rosie, ignoring the question.

“He was a good egg, was Skellers, believed in the greatness of this nation of ours, was all for the return of Empire, you know, like it was in the good old days, of repatriating, that’s what he called it, jonny foreigners and making more room for true Brits and their factories filled with happy British workers.”

“Jonny foreigners like yourself, Prime Minister,” put in Griselda Entwhistle, “You’re a jonny foreigner by all accounts, born the other side of the world.”

“But that was me! He meant the blacks and browns and yellow jonny foreigners. And the Europeans who’ve fought more wars against us than I can remember…”

“If you can’t remember them they can’t be so important in this day and age,” murmured Sheila.

“History was warped by foreigners,” barked the Prime Minister as if she’d touched a raw nerve, “what does a slip of a gal like you know of the glory that was Victoriana? When our forefathers ruled half the planet?”

“And the poor at home died in workhouses of overwork and disease?” asked Rosie, “and I would have been put in a cage in a show ground because my skin’s not as white as the pompous mill owners?” she added.

“Quite right!” chirruped Griselda Entwhistle, hugging a fluffy towel to her aged skin, “my aunt Mabel got dysentery in a workhouse and died, and she had magic in her bones.”

“The poor had no option but to work or die, and that’s what it ought to be like now,” said the Prime Minister in the tone of voice that suggested that the interview was just about over. “Now if that’s all, ladies, I’ve got work to do.”

“Tell them before they go,” hissed Griselda.

“Tell them what, witch?”

“How the poor man died. How he was set upon by huge black crows. Tell them who was the leader of the crows. Tell them who committed murder!”

“Just you shut up, hag! Talking of murder like that. It wasn’t murder at all. We wouldn’t have harmed Skellers! Of course we wouldn’t! It was that blasted book that he wrote when his brain was addled! We wanted it torn and burnt before fame and glory came our way!”

“Whose way?” asked Griselda gently, “before fame and glory came whose way?”

“My way, damn you, my way!” roared the Prime Minister, “now get out, all of you, before I get the law on you.”

“I am the law,” whispered Rosie, “but not quite all of it. Sir.”

© Peter Rogerson, 11.02.21

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