I'm Old Tom Moore From the Bummer's Shore

Have I told you about how much I enjoy playing Fallen London? I have? Oh, OK.

This is part 49 of “A Couple of Tenors Short”. The Inspector Jones fan club have asked me to point out that they are struggling with the number of enquiries at the moment. After all Mattress Madge has to fit in the admin work around her shifts in the ‘Rat and Ferret’ and young Glenda tries hard, but still struggles to open envelopes held down with sticky tape.

To help them out, I thought I would help out with a couple of FAQ.

Inspector Jones buys his Flying Jackets from the Portobello Road market. Terry ‘Bargain’ Innit is only there on Tuesdays. However, with the sudden interest in his wares he hopes to open a website selling his complete range of pastel coloured flying gear soon.

Inspector Jones has never tried Macramé. He is against its use in any circumstances and doesn’t believe that even social use is justified. He used to crochet, but gave that up after he found himself crocheting alone.

Inspector Jones has NEVER visited Swansea.

At school, Inspector Jones’s favourite subject was geography. His set of coloured pencils was the envy of his classmates and his water cycle diagram was so colourful it was briefly exhibited at the Tate Gallery.

And finally, for Ms Tuffyburton of Wolverhampton, Inspector Jones believes your suggestion to be physically impossible and has taken advice over its legality. He admits it sounds like fun, but feels that Pippa would almost certainly object.

Should you have any further questions for Glynn, feel free to add them to the bottom of this post and I will do another FAQ.

There is another quiz question associated with the part number. This one is so easy you shouldn’t need the answer.

OK, the quiz question out of the way, here is my mantra. This is a serial. Any new-joiners should start with the opener known as Part One.    

The troublesome recap has now settled into its new home. You can find the recap here!

Now read on...

Pippa and Jones sat on the sofa and poured over the Maryfields case notes together.

On the 15^th May 2006, the manager of the Maryfields Jewellery Repository came into work and found the alarms were all switched off. At first, he put it down to an oversight, a lapse in his otherwise meticulous routine. It wasn’t until 10 minutes later when a pale faced member of staff rushed into his office that he realised something was wrong.

It was a heist that could have been lifted from a Hollywood blockbuster. Over the weekend, while the alarms were switched off, a gang had tunnelled into the underground vault from a disused underground service tunnel.

Maryfields said they lost around £5.3 million of Jewellery. Then there were the deposit boxes that Maryfields rented out to private clients. The final official total haul was £7.45 million. The vast majority was jewellery, precious metals and used banknotes. Most of the new banknotes had been left behind.

The unset alarm made it obvious that the gang had somebody on the inside. There were three people who had keys to the alarm system. One was on holiday in the Canary Islands, one had left early on Friday to attend a family wedding in Yorkshire.

To everybody except Jones, the manager became the prime suspect. A couple of weeks later, Jones was proved right. A woman member of staff failed to return from a holiday that started the weekend of the robbery. More detailed checks on the woman proved her identity and credentials to have been stolen from a woman in Hastings.

After many interviews, eventually the assistant manager admitted that he had gone for a drink with the woman after work one night. He didn’t know how it had happened, but he ended up having  a few too many. He’d woken up the next morning, naked in a hotel room. Forensic tests on his keys had shown minute traces of wax.

The woman was never traced.

There followed nearly two years of dogged police work, successes and dead ends.

The first breakthrough came when Jones managed to identify the source of an empty gas cylinder found in the service tunnel. After visiting hundreds of hire companies and suppliers, he found it had been stolen on the weekend of the heist. Nothing else was stolen, which made Jones suspicious.

After running the names of the employees at the company, it emerged that one had a record for petty theft. Jones ran through a list of his known associates and one stood out, Terry Brazen. Brazen had graduated from the ranks of the petty criminal to bigger and more violent things.

They had tailed Brazen and he had led them to a small industrial unit in South London which he and others in the gang had converted to remove the gemstones from the jewellery and melt down the gold.

They had searched it under warrant when nobody was present, but there was no sign of any of the stolen goods. So they’d kept it under surveillance 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and slowly tightened the net on the gang. They’d installed covert microphones and cameras inside the unit. Meticulously, they recorded everything that went on in the unit, but they were still no closer to jewellery.

It was a month before a white van arrived at the site and a man in a brown uniform delivered several large boxes.

While the others had arranged the raid on the unit, Jones had followed a hunch and followed the van back to a farm in Essex. That too was raided and there were more arrests.

In all they recovered about £5 million worth of the stolen goods. Then the real police work began, cross checking phone records, checking computers, analysing bank accounts, breaking alibis and pulling together a case against the fourteen accused. A case which they won and saw long prison sentences handed down.

The files showed that the case was closed, yet in the front of the last folder were some of Jones’s own notes which suggested he felt that there were still others to be found and more of the stolen loot to be traced.

 

Motivation is Concentric Circles

After the debacle that was Evar’s attempt at a motivational seminar in the ‘Rat & Ferret’, a group of us decided that we would help him out by adding ‘structure’ to his technique.

I was the first to arrive and I sat nursing a pint of Nightswerve’s Velvet Cudgel while I waited for the others. Evar turned up a short time later quickly followed by Lillian Flotelitely, who had offered to enhance Evar’s limited wardrobe by donating some of her late brother’s clothes. (see Note 1) .

A little while later, the roar of a fleet of Mercedes cars signalled the arrival of a bafflement of Management Consultants (see Note 2) we had secured for the occasion with a little help from Padstow (see Note 3).

The bafflement entered the lounge and immediately agreed that, in the spirit of standardisation, they should all order the same drink. They then stood at the bar and argued over exactly what that drink would be for a good ten minutes before Mattress Madge intervened and gave them all a pint of Velvet Cudgel explaining it was the local standard. Thus placated, they joined me at my table as Lillian led in Evar.

At first, the bafflement nodded and muttered, before one of them decided Evar’s tie needed to be upgraded to silk. Another announced that it wasn’t an upgrade that was needed, but a replacement bow tie was required. The third immediately declared that the tie was an overhead and needed to be dispensed with. They squabbled amongst themselves before Lillian suggested that the tie be blue instead of green. They muttered a bit before all nodding and agreeing that a blue tie would be acceptable.

There was then a period of unexpected unanimity. All agreed that what Evar needed was a PowerPoint slideshow and that pictures and videos (see Note 4) would be spliced into some slides showing the latest management thinking gleaned from 10 minutes on Google.

When we tried to assemble the actual presentation, things started to get heated. Throgmorton Cranfield insisted that the presentation had to start with a slide consisting of concentric circles. Evander Waterhouse, immediately countered that this was against ISO43277/B and that all presentations must open with a two by two matrices. For a while, Abraham Logica said nothing and sat there thumbing through a leather bound folder before suddenly launching into a tirade claiming that both were wrong because of the template being used.

It looked like they would come to blows and try as we might, we could not calm the increasingly heated debate. In the end, Mattress Madge, Evar and I retired to the snug bar and decided to do the presentation ourselves.

When we returned an hour later, the argument was still in full swing and the walls had been covered in yellow post-it notes. I tried the polite cough to gain their attention and was totally ignored. Mattress Madge slammed a fist down onto the table causing glasses, blackberries and folders to jump several inches into the air.

The room went silent. The Management Consultants looked at Mattress Madge with their jaws hanging open.

We showed them our presentation.

Whether it was the quality of our offering or the sight of Mattress Madge all a quiver in pent up frustration, I don’t know, but the bafflement accepted it with fulsome praise.

After agreeing that Evar would give his first run through of his presentation at ‘MacWhirtles Widgets and Flanges’ next week, we all handed the Management Consultants our watches, they declared it was 22:37 (see Note 5) and we all left happy.

Note 1: The unfortunate Stanley Flotelitely will be sorely missed. A rather eccentric engineer, he travelled around the town in his patented steam powered car. His lifelong ambition was achieved last year when he developed the world’s first steam powered, fully automated Hurdy Gurdy orchestra and performed an open air concert in the local park. Sadly, while attempting to incorporate bagpipes into the orchestra, a poorly manufactured non-return valve resulted in his demise and the complete destruction of his workshop.

Note 2: I am reliably informed that bafflement is the correct collective noun when describing more than one Management Consultant. As everyone knows, a single Management Consultant is described as a flim-flam.

Note 3: Padstow had been stalking a minor soap star who had been booked to open their annual conference in Scarborough, it was our good fortune that he had decided to go for a walk on the hills and managed to get the pictures. The consultants claim they were playing charades and trying to act out Bo Peep and who am I to contradict them?

Note 4: All of us were particularly taken by one video of Evar and Yvette shot on a break from one of his competitions. In another unexpected show of unanimity we all agreed that for a big girl, Yvette is surprisingly flexible and that the video could not be shown without fear of arrest.

Note 5: I’m unsure whether or not this note is needed or if I should even include it. If you believe that it is surplus to requirements, then read no further. For as everyone knows, a Management Consultants job is to go into a company, borrow your watch, tell you the time and keep the watch.

 

A Bewildering Air of Unmatched Non-conformance

Anyone interested in purchasing this hilarious party attire should visit funnfrolic.

It seems that I have picked up some kind of strange ailment. It is one of those horrible illnesses where you feel bad, ache, get tired quickly and feel a little ‘odd’. (see Note 1)

This has been made worse by somehow tweaking a rib muscle in my sleep. For those of you who have never managed to tug an intercostal, I can testify that it is a particularly painful affliction whenever you twist your torso. (see Note 2)

This second problem is probably best fixed by getting plenty of rest and maybe a trip to the ‘Rat & Ferret’. Sid always has a couple of bottles of Ethaniel Nightswerve’s Thoracic Embrocation under the counter for such emergencies. Had I not felt quite so ‘odd’, I might have even paid the premium to have Mattress Madge and her amazing manipulating digits apply it, but, at the moment, I’m not quite sure that I would get the most from the occasion.

I know my cognitive yeomen will suggest I should go visit my doctor’s surgery.

This is probably good advice, but sadly my past experiences tend to suggest otherwise.

My last visit was on a balmy sunny day. The surgery was hermetically sealed from the outside world with the heating turned up to full (see Note 3). As I walked in, a neighbour with her sick child waved at me and I felt obliged to sit between her and on old man with a complexion of a medieval manuscript.

While I was treated to the latest gossip, her son coughed, sneezed and wheezed. Then in apparent contradiction to his mother’s assertion that he was an angel, wiped his nose on my arm. The old man was replaced by a woman who seemed to have an angle grinder in her chest cavity.

When my neighbour was called, I was left to contemplate a geriatric copy of Reader’s Digest while a man with a face not unlike an over-ripe Victoria plum, coughed into my left ear threatening hearing loss.

Eventually my name was called over the crackly PA and I got to see the doctor. Ignoring my detailed description of my symptoms, he shone lights into every orifice, poked planks of wood around my mouth and stuck his stethoscope places I’d forgotten I had.

Ignoring my obvious discomfort and weakened state, he snapped on a latex glove with far too much glee for my liking and then decided an impromptu prostrate exam would be fun. It wasn’t.

After having me climb on the scales and him give that long intake of breath normally the preserve of car mechanics, I expected him to reach for the prescription pad. He didn’t.

Instead, he told me I had a virus (see Note 4). What I needed to do was to lose weight, drink less, take more exercise and rest and drink plenty of liquids – which seemed the most contrary and contradicting diagnosis.

So, I sit here feeling ‘odd’, but not odd enough to visit the quack. I think I can guess what he would say should I pay him a visit. I have an idiosyncratic virus. I should rest, sit quietly at my keyboard and regale the world with my feeling of ‘odd’ while drinking copious amounts of liquids in the form of beer.

You know what? I think I’m beginning to feel better already.

Note 1: I realise that there is a fair proportion of the population scratching their heads at this. It is generally accepted that ‘they’ have already observed my behaviour, produced their clipboard and written ‘odd’ against my name in green biro. However, I still stand by my claim of feeling ‘odd’. To try and make this odd state off affairs easier to explain, I decided to consult an on-line thesaurus to see if I could find the correct state. There are a huge range of words there. I particularly liked wacky, weird and screwy. I did consider kinky for a while, but as I said, I’m getting tired quickly so it was discounted. In the end, I decided that the best I could come up was odd, but decided to add a pair of quotation marks so you realised that I am in an odder state of odd. 

Note 2: Which is another reason why the word kinky was discounted.

Note 3: I’m undecided whether this is a marketing ploy by the medical profession to ensure that all the happy germs floating around the waiting room have a chance to find a new host to guarantee future income or if it is to make sure that people don’t start to feel better and wander off before their turn to see the doctor.

Note 4: It is absolutely impossible that a single virus could have caused me to be that ill. At the very least it was a whole army of the little bleeders all behaving like they were on a stag weekend in Blackpool.