A Quirky Crime Fiction Series
DaDa Detective Agency by Pete Adams
Series Excerpt
Everard Pimple gingerly picked his way along Frisian Tun. He was aware he was walking gingerly and also picking with his feet, but he couldn’t help it. He had always walked gingerly, but had rarely picked with his lower limbs; this was new, even for an inveterate gentle man. Delicate would be a kind way of describing Everard and his manner and he accorded this supplementary picking to an increased feeling of apprehension, more so than Everard knew as normal, even for him.
The street had a deserted feel, not barren, as many of the characteristics of this characteristically English middle class street, were still evident, if incongruously battle worn; it did feel alien. The loose debris had been cleared, things tidied away, swept under the English reserved carpet, so to speak. The Frisian Tun Big Society, ably assisted by local serfs, pitching in admirably, the British Spirit, but all knowing their place, which was the British way. The people cajoled and corralled, stiffly and stoically by Lady Francesca Blanche-Teapot, the self-styled Duchess of Frisian Tun.
Even so, to Pimple, in his overly susceptible and Bambiesque way, perceived a shadow, a meta-physical presence, a sensation. It seemed to him that in the street there remained a resonance of warfare, machine gun fire, heavy amour, tank tracks clanking and cranking and urban conflict and, this sense titillated his fear buds that were always close to the surface and even more so adjacent to his nether regions.
Pimple was also aurally sensitive and he detected in the ether of this overly quiet street, as he gingerly picked, an ephemeral haunting of pained shrills that ricocheted off those buildings left standing, and these aching whispers drifted like wraiths through the battle ground ruins. Shrills of pain and fear from people who had lived their lives blissfully unaware they were delicate flowers living in a rarefied environment that should never, ever, have had to witness a rogue planning application, let alone a pitch street battle and a renowned gangster’s death throes in this, their little corner of God’s earth. This sort of thing never happened in places such as Frisian Tun, the heart and very soul of upper middle class England.
Pimple was the Honourable Viscount Everard Pimple, the fourth degree of rank and dignity in the British peerage, though people ordinarily called him Pimple. He was uncomfortable being called, “My Lord” as would be his entitlement. Generally the famille-Pimple understated their rank. The mother was often referred to as just plain ordinary Dame Pimple.
Pimple was twenty eight and one of life’s innocents…
… and it’s not often you can say that these days, although I said it just the other day when I referred to myself, though I am considerably older, although you would hardly know it; I wear so well.
Pimple was a delicate plant. A forced stick of rhubarb, or a mushroom cultivated in the dark. People had at various times called him a jolly bean. He, however, suspected this likely referred more to his beanpole like appearance, being narrow in shoulder and beam and all points north and south and, was uncommonly tall for a Pimple; a family that tended to the short, not tall, stout, not lean. The contributory cause of this physical imponderable may be because Everard was starved, predominantly emotionally, but this had a peculiar effect on his desire for nourishment. It would be fair to say that Pimple had led a sheltered life. Sheltered mainly by a devoted and many if not all, would say, behind her back obviously, a controlling mother. Thus Everard Pimple was always sensitive to the vibrations consequent to traumatic events, considering his mother, Dame Pimple, to be a traumatic event all of her own.
Pimple was what was known in the old days, which seemed appropriate picking his way through this formerly picturesque and quaintly English setting, a cub reporter. Not being blessed of the greatest of intellects, or any compensating driving ambition, he had been a cub on the Portsmouth Evening News for nearly ten years. This, after an extended and irksome struggle in boarding school and subsequently a long line of imported tutors, he had achieved straight C’s in his A-levels, English and Needlework. He was predicted a knitting B, not achieved and some people unkindly suggested he was the very essence of dumbed down, as frequently referred from the government front benches. Pimple’s father was firmly planted on the back benches of the Lords, but still, Pimple Senior, resolutely espoused the party line, naturally; he was not a rotter.
Pimple, the reporter, covered mainly court news, ruffians being banged up and so on and, society articles, which made him eminently qualified, or so his mother believed, to do a Human Interest story on what had happened in Frisian Tun. The Tun was a cutesy street in Southsea, itself a rather exclusive neck of the Portsmouth woods, thick, in a multitude of ways, outside observers might observe, with Southsea Socialites, many of whom were legends in their own opinions and conspicuous in their self-appointed elevated station within local society.
Praesent id libero id metus varius consectetur ac eget diam. Nulla felis nunc, consequat laoreet lacus id.