The Brentford Triangle Read Online Free PDF Page B

equipped with its obligatory bar-fire and gas-ring. But there, apart from these necessary appliances, all similarities ended. There was much of the alchemist’s den about Norman’s kitchenette. It was workroom, laboratory, research establishment, testing station and storage place for his somewhat excessive surplus stock of Danish glossies.
    At present, the hellishly crowded retreat was base camp and ground control for Norman’s latest and most ambitious project to date. Even had some NASA boffin cast his knowledgeable eye over the curious array of electronic hocus-pocus which now filled the tiny room, it was unlikely that he would have fathomed any purpose behind it all. The walls were lined with computer banks bristling with ancient radio valves and constructed from Sun Ray wireless sets and commandeered seedboxes. The floor was a veritable snakehouse of cables. The overall effect was one to set Heath Robinson spinning gaily in his grave.
    Norman spat dangerously on his palms and rubbed them together. He picked his way carefully across the floor until he reached a great switchboard, of a type once favoured by Baron von Frankenstein. As Norman squared up before it, however, he had no intention of mouthing the now legendary words, “We belong dead”, but instead lisped a quick “Here she goes” before doing the business.
    With a violent flash and a sparkler fizz, the grotesque apparatus sprang, or, more accurately, lurched, into life. Lights twinkled upon the consoles and valves glowed dimly orange. Little pops and crackles, suggestive of constant electrical malfunction, broke out here and there, accompanied by a thin blue mist and an acrid smell which was music to Norman’s nostrils.
    The shopkeeper lowered himself on to an odd-legged kitchen chair before his master console and began to unwrap his tiny brown paper parcel. Peeling back the cotton-wool wadding, he exposed an exquisite little piece of circuitry, which he lifted carefully with a pair of philatelist’s tweezers and examined through an oversized magnifying glass. It was beautiful, perfect in every degree, the product of craftsmanship and skill well beyond the perception of most folk. Norman whistled through his gums.
    “Superbs,” he said. “Superbs.”
    He slotted the tiny thing into a polished housing upon the console and it slipped in with a pleasurable click. The last tiny piece in a large and very complicated jigsaw.
    Norman clapped his hands together and rocked back and forwards upon his chair. It was all complete, all ready and waiting for a trial run. He had but to select two suitable areas of land and then, if all his calculations were correct… Norman’s hand hovered over the console and it trembled not a little. His calculations surely were correct, weren’t they?
    Norman took down a clipboard and began to make ticks against a long and intricate list, which had been built up over many months, scribbled in variously coloured inks. As his Biro travelled down the paper Norman’s memory travelled with it through those long, long months of speculation, theory, planning and plotting, of begging, borrowing, and building. The sleepless nights, the trepidation and the doubts. Most of all the doubts. What if it all came to nothing, what if it didn’t work? He had damn near bankrupted himself over this one. What if the entire concept was a nonsense?
    Norman sucked upon the end of his Biro. No, it couldn’t be wrong; old Albert E had discontinued his researches on it back in Nineteen hundred and twenty-seven but the essential elements were still sound, it had to be correct. Just because Einstein had bottled out at the last moment didn’t mean it couldn’t be done.
    Norman ticked off the final item on the list. It was all there, all present and correct, all shipshape and Bristol fashion, all just waiting for the off. He had but to choose two areas of land suitable for the test.
    His hand did a little more hovering; he, like certain sportsmen in the