6. A Ride into Town

The Reverend Pickle is on his way to meet the Bishop.

The Reverend Barney Pickle had been in so-called solitary confinement for almost two days and was beginning to really enjoy his own company, mulling over what he was learning about himself and what changes he might make in the future.

He had never been what might be called a people person. Even years ago at college he had tended to isolate himself from other students who he looked on as being vulgar and brash. Some of the things they talked about made him feel ashamed to be one of them, especially in the changing room after a compulsory games lesson when he’d had to charge around holding an oval ball to his chest and praying that someone would take it away from him before he got to where he hoped he should be going with it. They had been told by a breezy youngish lecturer that outdoor activities, exercise in God’s good fresh air, were good for the soul and the body, would contribute to the old saying about healthy minds in healthy bodies.

All that, he had decided straight away, might have been a really good reason for the charging about had there been any truth it it, but from what he saw there were very few healthy bodies on his course but a considerable number of young men who might best be described as overweight. And to make matters worse, there were vulgar ones as witnessed by him once a week in that changing room when other young men (behaving, he thought, too much like the boys they had been a few years earlier) gave him the impression that their bodies might have been horribly filthy if they reflected the contents of their minds.

And now, in his solitary cell, he was suddenly at peace with the world even though he still had no idea why he was there. It had all been to do with an attempted bank robbery at which he was an innocent by-stander until the only possible robber in the bank barring that squawking cat Horace was himself. The two Scumbag brothers had been given their marching orders by the one and only policeman in the bank, the manager and the girl who had been behind the counter dealing with his attempt to withdraw ten pounds were in an inner office and he was alone with a most unconvincing illustration of some kind of weapon daubed onto a biblical paper-back.

So the silly constable had assumed it was he who had tried to interfere with the day to day business of the hour so far as the bank was concerned, and to add to his conviction was the fact that a bank employee, hidden close to the floor where she was crouching and crawling along, had pushed an actual bag of paper money towards him and, may the Lord forgive him, he had tried to see what was in it. Not that he would have taken so much as an out of date ten shilling note for himself.

He was about to ask himself what he might have done differently when the door to his single-person cell crashed open and a grim faced prison officer stood there.

“Pickle, you’ve a visitor,” he growled, “and put your shoes on, you’re going for a ride.”

This interruption to what was meant to be a punishment routine involving isolation didn’t sit well with his extended period of mental self examination and he even dared to scowl as he asked the officer what he was on about.

“They’re taking you back to the cop shop,” came a friendly and barely informative reply that meant virtually nothing to him. What, he asked himself, is a cop shop?

But he did as he was ordered, slipped his shoes on and even started tying the laces when the impatient officer pushed him in his back and told him to hurry or he’d be late for elevenses. And so it was that one vicar with shoe laces flying was seen to be hurried along the punishment corridor to the world outside and a car with its engine running.

The driver was the wretched constable, what was his name? PC Dedbeat, that was it, who had collared him in the bank, and that gave him a clue as to where they might be going. And Dedbeat was in the company of a second constable who urged into the back seat where he rather nastily attached handcuffs tightly to his wrists.

The car moved off, slowly through security gates and then onto the open road where the air most certainly did seem to be a great deal fresher than that back in his cell.

“I wouldn’t like to be in your shoes, no sir, I wouldn’t,” grunted the constable, “from what I hear your boss is a bit of a tartar and it’s him who wants to see you.”

His boss? Could it be that the good Lord himself had made the journey from Heaven to answer some of his more desperate prayers? If that was the case it would answer once and for all a little worry he had about the efficiency of prayers when to came to unfortunate human affairs. A warm glow suffused him as the car made its rather sedate way the .relatively short distance from Brumpton gaol to Brumpton police station.

PC Dedbeat slowly pulled into the car park that was tucked almost invisibly behind the police station , and even more slowly edged carefully past an ostentatious limousine that he thought registered as something important at the back of his mind. Then he was urged out of the car, the handcuffs, which had been several sizes too tight, were taken off him rather roughly and he was made to walk up a single flight of stairs and into an office.

And it was in that office that something at the back of his mind clicked into place.

The limousine outside, the one that had looked familiar was obviously a car that he should recognise! It belonged to that most unchristian of human beings, the Bishop, and what’s more, he was sitting in the Inspector’s seat in the inspector’s office with a face blacker than the skies of the very worst storm he could recall having seen, one that hadcrashed and flashed when he’d been a boy in short trousers aged something like nine.

And when the Bishop looked as if he might be trying to smile, the half digested remnants of what was supposed to have been Barney’s breakfast found their way into his mouth and, he being unable to stop them, oozed out into the world and ran down his chin, accompanied by a bitter and eye-watering stench which must have reflected the state of his stomach on that particular day.

© Peter Rogerson 02.04.24