The Brightonomicon (Brentford Book 8) Read Free Page B

the chef throughout the consumption of each dish.
    And then, calamity.
    We would be upon our final course – the Black Forest gâteau or the cheese and the biscuits – when Mr Rune would be consumed with a fit of coughing. I would hasten to his assistance, patting away at his ample back and thereby mercifully sparing him a choking as he coughed up a bone.
    A rat bone!
    I genuinely felt for the fellow. How unfair it was that it should always be
he
who suffered in this dreadful fashion,
he
who appreciated his food so much, who chose only to dine in the most exclusive restaurants. Our evening would be well and truly spoiled. Words would be exchanged, harsh words on the part of Mr Rune, words which included the phrases ‘a report being put in to the Department of Health’ and ‘imminent closure of this establishment’.
    On the bright side, I never saw Mr Rune actually pay for a meal; indeed, on occasion he received a cash sum in compensation for the unfortunate incidents. And, hearty and unfailingly cheerful as the man was, he always wore a smile when he and I walked away from the restaurant in question.
    We dined out, and we purchased clothes and sundry other necessities, mostly of an extravagant nature, and always ‘on account’, but if the solving of crime was Mr Rune’s
métier,
then it appeared that either there was no crime at all upon the streets of Brighton to be solved, or that it was all being amply dealt with by the local constabulary. No one, it seemed, required the talents of ‘the world’s foremost metaphysical detective’.
    I had been with Mr Rune for three weeks now and I was no nearer either to recovering my memory or to aiding him ‘to solve the inexplicable conundrums that baffle the so-called experts at Scotland Yard’. Although I had heard him play the ocarina many times.
    Upon this particular day, an unseasonably sunny day in March, Mr Rune and I lazed in deckchairs upon Brighton beach enjoying the contents of a hamper that had recently arrived from Fortnum andMason, for which Rune had failed to pay cash on delivery due to some oversight upon the part of his banker that would be dealt with at the earliest convenience.
    ‘I do not wish to complain,’ I said to Mr Rune, ‘for I am certainly enjoying my time with you and I am sure that I have never been so well dressed and well fed in my life, but I do recall you saying that you would have cases to solve, the outcome of which would save Mankind as we know it, or some such thing.’
    ‘I will pardon your lapse from articulacy upon this occasion,’ said the Logos of the Aeon, adjusting his sunspecs and straightening the hem of the Aloha shirt he was presently sporting, the one with the bare-naked ladies printed upon it. ‘I assume it to mean that you are presently piddled.’
    ‘Are you suggesting that I am drunk?’ I enquired.
    ‘You have imbibed almost an entire bottle of vintage champagne, one of the finest that salubrious establishment, Mulhollands of Hove held in their reserve stock.’
    ‘You drank the first bottle without offering me any.’
    ‘The thirst was upon me. I abhor inactivity.’
    ‘That is what I am talking about. Where are these exciting cases of which you spoke? What about the danger and adventure?’
    ‘Marshal your energies, for these things will shortly come to pass.’
    ‘But when?’
    Rune drew in a mighty breath and sighed a mighty sigh. Bare-naked ladies rose and fell erotically upon his bosom. ‘No one knocks,’ said he. ‘I would confess to perplexity if I did not bow to inevitable consequence and fortuitous circumstance and understand how the transperambulations of pseudo-cosmic anti-matter shape the substance of the universe.’
    ‘I have no idea what you are talking about,’ I said. And I did not.
    ‘All right,’ sighed Mr Rune. ‘Cast your eye over this and give me your considered opinion. Your
considered
opinion only – do we understand each other?’
    ‘Not very often,’ I said and snatched