The Brentford Chainstore Massacre Read Online Free PDF Page A

technology which Jim did not possess. He held a paper cup beneath a little spout and pressed a button. Boiling water struck him at trouser-fly-level.
    “It does that sometimes,” sniffed the secretary.
    Eyes starting from his head and mouth wide in silent scream, Jim hobbled about the office, fanning at himself with one hand while holding his steaming trousers away from his seared groin region with the other.
    “I’ll make my own then,” said the secretary. “How do you like yours? Two lumps?”
    Jim hobbled, flapped and held out his trousers.
    “It was horrible,” said the secretary, handing Jim a paper cup.
    “It still is,” croaked Jim.
    “No, Mr Compton-Cummings, dropping down dead like that.”
    “Oh yes. It must have been.”
    “One moment, big jolly bear of a man with his trousers round his ankles, the next…”
    “Hang about,” said Jim. “You don’t mean that you and he were…”
    “Well, of course we were. It’s Tuesday, isn’t it?”
    “Yes, but…”
    “We always do it on Tuesdays.”
    “What? You and him? I mean, well, you’re so… and he was… well, I mean.”
    “A Mason,” said the secretary.
    “Eh?”
    “A Freemason. I always helped him dress for the lodge meeting on Tuesdays. Here, you weren’t suggesting…”
    “Perish the thought,” said Jim, crossing his heart with his cup-holding hand and sending tea all over his shirt. “Oh, damn.”
    “You’re very clumsy, aren’t you?”
    “I try not to be.” Jim plucked at his shirt and shook his head. “So he died while he was putting on his Masonic regalia.”
    “It was the way he would have wanted to go.”
    “Was it?”
    “Well, no, I suppose not really. But you can’t choose how you die, can you? It’s like you can’t choose your parents. No offence meant.”
    “None taken,” said Jim. “So he just dropped down dead while you were helping him on with his apron and whatnots.”
    “I never touched his whatnots.”
    Jim looked the secretary up and down. She was a beautiful young woman, but she was clearly not for him. Jim had never harboured a love for the toilet gag or the double entendre. The entire Carry On canon left him cold. Imagine having a relationship with a woman who could turn anything you said into a willy reference. Nightmare.
    “So,” said Jim, once more and slowly. “You think that the exertion of putting on his Masonic vestments caused him to have a heart attack?”
    “Well, it was either that or the blow job.”

4
    “She said that?” Omally spluttered into his pint of Large. “You’re jesting.”
    “I am not.” Jim crossed his heart once more, careful to use the hand that was not holding the drink. “Of course, she then went on to explain that she meant the job of blowing into the spout of the tea dispenser to clear a blockage. I’d had enough by then, so I made my excuses and left.”
    “And quite right too,” agreed Omally. “That’s not the way we do business in Brentford. A woman like that is quite out of place.”
    Jim Pooley raised an eyebrow to this remark, coming as it did from John Omally, whose reputation as a womanizer was legend hereabouts. But he knew what his best friend meant. There was something very special about the little town of Brentford, something that singled it out from the surrounding territories, that could not be quantified and catalogued and tamed by definition. It was subtle and elusive; it was precious. It was magic. And the folk who lived there felt it and were glad.
    Jim sighed and drained his glass and placed it on the counter.
    The two stood in the saloon bar of the Flying Swan, that Victorian jewel in the battered crown of Brentford pubbery. Raking shores of sunlight venturing through the etched glass windows sparkled in the ashtrays and the optics, on the polished mahogany counter top and from the burnished brass. There was magic here all right.
    “One of similar, Neville, please,” said Jim as he pushed his glass across the bar.
    “And one