Waiting for Godalming Read Online Free PDF

“It’s quite insane. All of it. I went into the Ministry the next day. Gained access to the laboratory and mixed up a batch of the drug. It was remarkably simple and straightforward. And then of course I had to test it. See if it really worked. So I tested it upon myself.”
    “And it worked?”
    “It worked all right. But not in the way that I’d been expecting. I thought it would speed up my thinking. But the human brain is not a calculating machine. It functions by entirely different processes. Organically. Thinking is organic, that’s what it’s all about. The drug enhanced my thinking processes. It opened my eyes and allowed me to see clearly. To understand everything. To see things as they really are. And people as they really are. The ones who actually
are
people. And the ones who aren’t. The wrong’uns.”
    “Careful,” said the other voice.
    “Or what? You’ll kill me? You’re going to kill me anyway, aren’t you? You have to keep your secret. If humanity knew about you and your kind and what you’re up to and how to see you—”
    “Careful.”
    “Be damned,” said the tortured soul. “Be damned the lot of you. I know you for what you are. And I know what you want.”
    “Only the formula.”
    “But you won’t get it.”
    “You’ll tell us what we want to know eventually.”
    “Not I,” said the tortured soul. “I’ve only told you this much because I wanted to spend the last few moments of my life free from pain.”
    “What?”
    “The poison I’ve taken will kick in at any moment. You’ll never find the drug. But someone will and that someone will learn the truth and they’ll put paid to you and your kind. That someone will change the world for ever. That someone will make things right.”
    “Perhaps you’ve told us enough anyway,” said the other voice. “We know where to find the formula. On the Memorial clock.”
    “Oh yeah. Right.” A laugh came from the tortured soul. “The flowers. I got very angry over the flowers. Because of what they’d done to me. Because they’d given me the power to see something so awful that it would ultimately lead to my own destruction. As it has. So I went back there, to punish the flowers. To stamp them to oblivion. But then I thought no, it wasn’t their fault. They were quite mad, you see, the flowers. That’s what happens when you’re deprived of sleep. When you cannot dream. You go mad. The flowers couldn’t dream and so the flowers went mad.
    “But I did go back. I made a kind of pilgrimage. I wanted to see whether the floodlights had been repaired. And if they had, then I would break them again. So I returned to the Memorial Park, and do you know what I found when I got there?”
    “What?”
    “Nothing,” said the tortured soul. “Nothing whatsoever. You see, there was no floral clock in that park. There never had been.”
    “What are you saying? Speak to me.”
    Another silent moment, then another voice spoke.
    “Save your breath on him,” it said. “He’s dead.”

3
    Now this is where I came into this tale, so listen up people and listen up good.
    With me you get what you pay for, when you pay for the best private eye in the business. I don’t come cheap, but I’m thorough and I get the job done. I know my genre and I stick to it. When I’m on the case, you can expect a lot of gratuitous sex and violence, a corpse-strewn alley and a final rooftop showdown.
    And along the way you’ll get all the stuff that you get when you pay for the best. You’ll get a generous helping of trenchcoat humour, a lot of old toot being talked in a bar, running gags about the mispronunciation of my name and my trusty Smith and Wesson, a dame that does me wrong and a deep dark whirling pit of oblivion that I tumble down into, when she bops me on the head at the very beginning of every new case.
    That’s the way that I do business, always has been, always will be. Because, like I say, I stick to my genre. And because, like I say,