Nov 22, 2016
In episode 7, we meet King Dubious III in the last days of his reign, and join Keith McGreggor as he comes out of retirement to investigate The Bad Debtor.
Music: Creepy – Bensound.com.
Andrew: Here are some totally made up tales, brought to you by the magic of the internet. We begin with the Sealed Instructions.
Andrew & James (alternating
words):
It was the night
of the coronation of King Dubious the Third. His beautiful wife was
waiting for him in their royal bedchamber while he finished up his
duties. All the castle was asleep. Tomorrow, the festivities would
last all day long. There would be dancing and music. Dignitaries
would come and celebrate the beginning of his reign. Tonight, he
was writing a list of instructions in case of his death. He sealed
them into a box and placed the box in a special cupboard
ensorcelled by the royal magician. "Have you finished, dear?" said
his wife. "Yes," he replied, and they kissed.
Morning dawned,
the castle bathed in glorious light, and people milling around,
waiting for the events to begin. In the guardhouse, there was a
small chance that something would go wrong. This was the job of
Sergeant Major Keen, who would lift the drawbridge if an attack was
imminent. He was an experienced man who knew his job. His assistant
however was new, and required a considerable amount of attention.
"Why are you not ready yet?" asked Sergeant Major Keen. "I'm still
getting a tabard on," replied his young assistant, Jeffery. "That
should have been done hours ago," said the Sergeant Major. "Here,
let me," and so he helped Jeffery put his tabard on, and didn't
keep an eye on the horizon.
Over to the West,
there was a cloud of dust as a band of marauding bandits charged
towards the castle on horseback. A vicious cry leapt from their
mouths as they closed in rapidly. "Death to the people! Death to
Dubious!" they cried, crossing the drawbridge into the keep,
slaughtering all before them. Dubious heard a commotion outside,
and pulled back the curtain to look down, and gasped. He pulled out
his trusty sword and ran into the midst of the melee, and soon he
faced his opponent, the leader of the band, General D. Hunter, the
outlaw. "So," said the General, "we meet at last. Now, I have your
castle at my whim. Soon I will have your throne." "Not so fast,"
said the king, and they fought.
I was but a young
pigeon at the time, watching this from afar. It was a terrible
sight. Thousands of men were slaughtered, and women were killed.
Children died, animals too. It was terrible. After the battle had
ended, only one man remained. It was the Sergeant Major, who had
managed to defend his post using his trusty sword and considerable
experience. Jeffery had, however, perished at the first hurdle.
Keen became briefly king. However, the instructions in the envelope
were for the eventuality of the former king on his death. In them,
he had laid down a series of retaliatory steps that had to be taken
if he was killed in battle. The heavy-hearted Keen enacted each to
the letter, and destroyed all around. Now, there is nowhere in that
country for any bird to land or eat its fill. The end.
Leave your
prejudice behind when engaging in discourse with others.
Mary had a little
problem. Her lamb was ill. She took him to the vet, and the vet
said, "Yes. He has a disease called laryngitis." "Oh," said Mary.
"That sounds terrible." "Yes," said the vet. "We'll have to remove
his voice box." After the operation, Mary's lamb was right as rain,
except he couldn't baa any more. Mary was distraught and ate him on
her own[…or birthday, or plate].
Shaving foam will
make you frothy, so rub it on your face daily.
Once upon a time,
there was a rabbit. He lived in the middle of a royal wood with his
friends, and they had joyous sex. One day, the most enormous fox
appeared on the edge of the forest, and started sniffing for
rabbits. The rabbits were afraid. "Never trust a fox," said the
eldest. "Come to me," cried the fox. "Little rabbits, I've a
special surprise for you." "Ooh," said some younger rabbits, and
went, and saw, and got eaten by the fox. The moral is simple. Don't
trust a fox.
Brush your hair
with dynamite for that special look.
Gary went to his
mother's house for dinner. She was cooking lasagna. He loved
lasagna, and particularly his mother's. She got the recipe from her
mother who had been chef to the king of Italy. This recipe was
wanted in every kingdom of the world, but Gary's mother kept it to
herself. He loved her, and grew fat on her pasta. The
end.
Andrew: Now, The
Bad Debtor, a Keith McGreggor mystery.
James and Andrew (alternating
sentences):
Keith was a
retired police officer. He'd spent twenty years or more working for
the force, and much of that time had been taken up with petty
crime, run-of-the-mill traffic violations, things like that. The
occasional high-profile case with some national media interest had
made him into somewhat of a local celebrity, but now that he was
retired, he was happy to slip into quiet obscurity. These days, an
exciting time was if he managed to catch a fish down by the canal.
Fishing was a fantastic occupation. It was regimented. It required
equipment. It got him out of the house. It was something to keep
him busy in the long years of quiet solitude ahead.
One day, while
waiting for the fish to bite, he was looking around as he often
did, and noticed a man and a woman on the other side of the canal.
Both smartly dressed, the young man in a dark suit, the woman in a
light blouse and skirt and high heels, the man was passing the
woman some kind of envelope. Keith wondered about this, his police
instinct suggesting to him that no good was being done here. Why
were these two professional-looking people down among the
warehouses on the wrong side of the canal next to the railway track
at lunch time? "Up to no good," he thought to himself, and resolved
to find out.
Quickly and
discreetly, he packed his equipment away, keeping half an eye on
them, and looped round using the foot bridge that crossed the
canal. Hurrying so as not to let them out of his sight, he trailed
them back up into town, where the man went left onto the high
street and disappeared into the bank. The woman he continued
following as she went past the shops and out towards the high
school. She paused at the gates of the school and tucked the
envelope into her handbag.
He noticed as she
did so that it wasn't the kind of handbag that you'd expect to see
a schoolteacher carrying. It was an expensive designer one, and
new-looking. Now that he came to look more closely, her clothes
were higher-end than he'd expect, and she was wearing very
expensive shoes as well. She hurried across the front yard of the
school and into the staff room, where she greeted colleagues and
started to make a cup of tea.
As the bell for
the end of lunch rang, Keith returned home to think about this. How
would a high school teacher afford such fancy things? He fired up
his computer to see what he could find out about her online. After
a couple of hours of research, he hit upon the fact that he had
been looking for. She was, thanks to her postings on Facebook, he
knew, heavily in debt to the bank, and he presumed that she must
have been taking out a series of loans and extending them over time
in order to fuel a lifestyle that she was ill-able to afford, a
behaviour that he recognised all too often from his career of
dealing with people who had unwittingly entered a life of crime.
Who then was the man from the bank, and what was he paying her
for?
The following
day, he went into the bank in order to investigate getting a loan
for, he said, some minor home improvements. He was interested to
see would the young man be involved in the process, and if not, how
did he fit in? First, the woman behind the counter helped him fill
out the application form. He would, she pointed out, have to have
an interview before being approved for the loan. "Would it be
possible to have the interview today? It's just, I'm here now," he
said. Checking the diary, she was able to put him into an
appointment forty-five minutes later, time he spent doing the
crossword.
"Do step this
way," said a man in a smart pinstripe suit, and showed him into a
dingy, windowless office of the kind that was deeply familiar to
him from his life in the police force. But this man was not the
young man he was looking for. Older, close to retirement age, he
took Keith through the formal interview process that the bank
required. "I wonder if I could have a glass of water," asked Keith.
"My throat is rather parched from all this talking." "Of course,"
said the bank manager, pressing a small button recessed discreetly
into his desk. "Phillip, could I have another cup of white coffee
and a glass of water, please?"
Just as they were
finishing up the interview, Phillip came through with the drinks.
This was the young man that Keith had been looking for. Clearly he
was a more junior member of staff, so how had he become connected
with the woman? Perhaps, as he had done today, she had seen him
when she came in to discuss her loan. He would have to follow the
young man and keep him under close observation to find out what was
going on between the two of them.
After his
appointment at the bank, Keith left and crossed the road to a small
café, where he found a table in the window and sat, nursing a
series of cups of milky tea. At closing time, he observed the young
man exiting the bank and furtively looking both ways before
hurrying off down a side street. A lifetime working in law
enforcement had taught Keith that when people knew that they were
doing something suspicious or wrong, they often gave it away in the
way that they walked. This man knew he was up to no good. But what
exactly was it that he was up to?
Keith followed at
a discreet distance as the young man also followed the road up
towards the high school, but it was nearly 6 o'clock now, and
surely the building would be locked up? Lingering at the gates as
the young man walked across the car park, Keith noticed the young
woman leaving by a side exit. She waved to him, and the young man
came over. She let him in and closed the door furtively behind the
both of them. Keith crossed the car park and checked. The door was
locked, and he wouldn't be able to get in this way.
Quickly, he
walked around the perimeter of the school until he came to the main
entrance, where he knocked on the window. The janitor sitting
behind the glass slid the pane across and popped his head out. "Oh,
hello, Keith," said the janitor, who knew him from angling circles.
"I'm not here in an official capacity," said Keith, "but I wonder
if…" "I'll let you right in," said the janitor, who implicitly
trusted Keith. "There's a side door that you can see from the car
park. Where does that let into?" "Oh, that would go straight to the
gymnasium," said the janitor. "Second on the left."
Keith hurried
through the corridors and found his way into the empty gymnasium
building. It was extraordinary the strange, eerie atmosphere of the
twisty corridors of an empty school at night, and took him back to
his own school days. Moving softly down the corridor, he listened
at each door, trying to determine the location of the interlopers.
He heard a muffled thump and hurried towards it, which brought him
in the direction of the girl's locker room. Pausing again, he
waited for the opportune time to make his move.
He pushed the
door slightly and slowly ajar in a way that wouldn't draw attention
to itself, a trick that he had learned as a young police officer,
and that had served him well on many occasions. Voices came to him
from deeper within the locker room, the man and the woman talking
softly. "Is this what you're looking for?" he heard her say.
"That's perfect," he heard in the man's voice, slightly excited and
anxious at the same time. Keith pushed the door open, and the young
couple froze. The young woman was rummaging through an open locker,
while the man sat beside her, his face buried in a pair of panties.
The woman let out a startled cry, and the large bunch of locker
room keys that she'd been holding in her left hand fell to the
floor with a crash.
"However did you
figure it out?" asked the police chief some days later. "It was
simple, really," said Keith. "Once I discovered about the debt, it
was just a case of tracing the relationship between the two of
them. She must have discovered him sniffing around the locker room
at some point and recognised his perversion. When she went to the
bank to have the terms of her loan extended and was refused, she
saw him there, and had a quiet word with him. She would, in
exchange for small sums of money on a regular basis, allow him
access to the locker room out of hours. She has no future in
education, and he is now in the hands of the court."
"How's the
fishing?" asked the chief constable. "Never better," said
Keith.
Andrew: I've been
Andrew, and I'm here with James. These stories were recorded
without advanced planning, and then lightly edited for the
discerning listener. Join us next time for more totally made-up
tales.