The Detection Collection

Once even he went to the toilets and, in a safely locked cubicle, took out the monster brush and peered and peered at it. But no enlightenment came. A burglar? A burglar, while sleepy Alice slept and slept? No. All the windows had been shut and intact, and no sign either of the back door or the front having been forced. And, anyhow, why should a burglar do no more than just put that extraordinary object into the mug?

So did this thing in my hands, he thought, somehow just materialise, there where I saw it as I stepped into the bathroom? Where I snatched it up before Alice could see it? For heaven’s sake, science fiction is fiction, pure fiction, and I, Henry Tailor, am real. As real as— As this toothbrush I’m staring at.

Quickly he put it back in his jacket pocket – what if someone spots it, asks questions? – and as soon as he was at his desk he surreptitiously transferred it to his briefcase. Then, for the first time ever, he used its tinny little key.

At a late stage of the afternoon he recognised that he had managed to scrabble together some sort of a report on the Bedford branch. Muddled though it was, he thought in a moment of inner truth, it would get much the same reception up above as the properly thorough ones he prided himself on submitting. Still, putting it in the internal post – H.J. Manifold’s disapproved of inter-office e-mailing – he felt a small surge of relief. And with that came an idea.

Is there perhaps, here in the building, some disinterested outsider I could talk to about all this? At once then, with a sudden bad-taste gulp, he realised that all this meant, in the deepest recesses of his mind, the possibility that— That the alien toothbrush had somehow been there in the bathroom because of Alice. Because Alice really had the lover he had dismissed from his mind almost before the thought had entered his head? But, no, no, no. That was just not possible, not my Alice.

So shall I, at five o’clock, look out for Peter Crossley-Smith from Major Branches – he’d be the one – and suggest a quick drink? I could still be home by about six. I’ve done it before. I did it when, deciding for once to go out with two or three of ‘the boys’, I met Peter. Old Five Wives, as they call him, sometimes to his face. When he invariably replies, with that neighing laugh of his, Probably be Old Six Wives before I’m done.

For once, as it turned out, Old Five Wives was not surrounded by any noisy departing slaves from the H.J. Manifold’s mill. Henry was able to fall into step beside him and, after he had suggested the statutory ‘quick pint’, managed even to say there was something he particularly wanted to discuss, ‘a sort of, well, private matter, so perhaps we could go somewhere different for a change.’

‘Touch of the naughties, is it?’ Five Wives, propped at the unfamiliar bar, immediately asked.

‘Oh. No, no. No, nothing of that sort. I’m a happily married … Well, no, it’s something a bit odd actually.’

‘Say on, old chap, say on. I must admit I’ve never quite seen you as an entrant in the Naughty Stakes. Unlike, alas, yours very truly.’

‘No. No, I suppose not. But I do need— Well, I need sort of advice from someone. And you’re— Well, you’re what I think of as a man of the world.’

‘The worldly ear is at your disposal. Tell.’

Henry, going down in the crowded lift at Manifold House, had fully rehearsed the story he would have to recount. So it was without too many apologies and back-trackings that he poured it all out.

And was rewarded.

‘Yes. Odd. Pretty odd, I’ll grant you that.’

Long swallow at the pint. Then a quick glance.

‘Little lady having a touch of the wandering-eye syndrome? It goes either way, you know. Had some either-way trouble once myself, with Number Three actually.’

‘No. I’m quite certain. Absolutely certain. Look, I’ve been married to Alice for three whole years, and—’

‘Take your word for it, take your word for it. But I say, old fellow, you haven’t been working a bit too hard lately?’

‘Well, I like to think I’m a decently hard worker, but I don’t believe—’ Abruptly he straightened up on his bar-stool. ‘You’re not saying …? Listen, if you’re thinking I may have gone bonkers and imagined it all, well, I can absolutely prove the whole business is absolutely, absolutely true. Look. Look.’

He dived for the briefcase, carefully placed between his stretched-out toes at the foot of his bar-stool, hoisted it up, found in his right-hand trouser pocket its little shiny key and took out the alien toothbrush.

Five Wives looked at it with almost as much disbelief as Henry had felt when he had found it plunged between the pink and the green brushes nestling in the familiar mug.

‘And this morning you saw it, this thing, in your bathroom? And it wasn’t there last night. That it?’

‘Well, you’ve got it a bit wrong. I didn’t, as it happens, go into the bathroom last night. I thought— Well, never mind, I didn’t happen to go in there.’

‘Not for a last pee?’

Henry made an effort to be man to man.

‘No. We’ve got a toilet downstairs. Used that.’

Five Wives considered for a second or two.

‘Well, old man,’ he said, ‘I must admit you’ve fairly got me stumped.’

Henry felt a tumbling-away of hope. He saw himself as an Antarctic explorer, ice-crusted glove slipping and slipping on the slithery rope holding him over a deathly deep crevasse.

‘You can’t— You can’t suggest anything I ought to do, then?’ he asked. ‘Anything?’

‘Well, frankly, no. Not unless you go to a private eye. Had to do that once meself. Over Number Three, matter of fact.’

‘And was he helpful, the chap you went to? I mean, well, private detectives are jolly expensive, aren’t they?’

‘Not this one, actually. Fellow in a small way, very small way. And was he helpful? Well, if you call being helpful finding out what I’d already pretty well guessed about Number Three, then, yes, he was a help. Though I had to divorce her, of course. Things usually other way round. But life’s full of surprises.’

So it was that Henry Tailor found himself next Saturday in West London walking along tourist-crowded Queensway peering into narrow doorways between its bright and bouncy shops. He was looking for a small sign just inside one of them, distracted by a feeling that he had forgotten what reason he had given Alice for having to go up to work.

But at last, when he had almost begun to think Five Wives’ private eye was every bit as imaginary as the alien toothbrush – only that wasn’t imaginary at all – he saw between a drop-in dry cleaner’s and an electrical goods shop the discreet notice he was looking for.

TOP Investigations. Please ring and walk up.

His finger on the bell-push was so tentative it might not have produced any buzz at all. But it did. The sound came down the narrow flight of stairs in front of him, unmistakably. So he felt he had to walk up.

The door at the top, pale wood with a peep-hole in its centre, opened as he reached the little patch of landing. A pale girl, looking about sixteen, blonde hair caught up at the back with a rubber band, gave him an incurious look.

‘Mr Pepper’s free at the moment,’ she said. ‘You can go straight in.’

But he paused for an instant before stepping forward.

I’m visiting a private eye, he thought. Here I am, Henry Tailor, and I’m about to hire a private eye. Or I may be. If … If he can suggest there’s anything to do about— About the alien toothbrush.

He swallowed, and advanced on the inner door, its reeded glass panel inscribed in black Mr Thomas Pepper. He put his hand – it was suddenly sweaty – on the knob, twisted, found he had no purchase, tightened his grip, twisted again and the door swung so wide that he almost stumbled inside.

Behind a small desk – the room itself was small enough – a man rose to greet him, hand held out. He did not look at all like the private eye Henry had envisaged. Somehow it was impossible to think of that extended hand as holding a gun or that in the bottom drawer of that desk there would be a bottle of bourbon, or even of Scotch. Red-faced, Thomas Pepper was, if not actually fat, certainly a very solid shape. But, somehow again, not a shape adapted to sudden action. His shoulders were, plainly, stooped and his brown suit looked as if it was worn unchanged day after day.

‘Tom Pepper, at your service. Tom Pepper, TP, where I got TOP Investigations from. My little joke. Should have been TP Investigations, but couldn’t resist that extra O. Make it sound big. Ah, well …’

‘Oh, yes. Yes.’ Henry cleared his throat. ‘Look, there’s – there’s something …’

‘Here, take a pew. Take the pew, only one there is. And tell me all about it, beginning—’ He drew a virgin-white pad towards himself— ‘with the name.’

It was all, abruptly, cosy. A cosy atmosphere.

Henry sat in the chair in front of the desk, a comfortably padded one, and having given his name and spelt out that always difficult T – A – I – L – O – R, not T – A – Y, once again produced the story of the alien toothbrush. In full detail.

He saw, when he had come to the end, that Tom Pepper was as baffled as he had been himself, even turning to the computer at the corner of the desk and peering at it with a look of hopelessly hopeful expectation.