SAUSAGE LIFE

MYSELF: It’s best you don’t know. This is more your up your street…it's my latest novel in the Inspector Twollet franchise and this paper has bought the serialisation rights.

READER: A new Twollet! Fair play, I can't wait!

INSPECTOR TWOLLET INVESTIGATES

The curious case of the left-handed knife

Detective Inspector Twollet’s car crunched expensively over gravel imported from Egypt as it negotiated the long tree-lined drive to the imposing curved staircase which was the entrance to Bindlehurst Manor. The huge brass-studded door was opened by the family’s Japanese Sumo-butler Hideo Nagasaki, who led him to the dining room where lay the remains of the late Lord Percival Bindlehurst.

Dressed immaculately in white tie and tails, the body was sprawled across the dining table with an amused expression on its still ruddy face. The enigmatic smile and the Edwardian bone-handled carving knife protruding from the chest, combined to make the victim look gratefully dead, thought the inspector. He turned to the aptly named uniformed officer, Sergeant Rodney Dulle, the first to attend the scene, and raised his eyebrows, inviting comment.

“Even at this early stage in the enquiry,” said Sergeant Dulle as his huge ham-like hands carefully tweezered a tiny piece of evidence into a small plastic bag, “I think there are sufficient grounds to suspect foul play. Probably perpetrated by intruder or intruders unknown.”

“A bungled burglary? said Twollet, popping a polo mint into his mouth, “Wrong. Look at the knife handle.”

Sergeant Dulle gazed at the weapon planted like a tree in Lord Bindlehurst’s immobile chest. He walked around the corpse, first clockwise and then, wearing his reading glasses, anti-clockwise. “I’m not exactly sure what you’re getting at sir.” He said finally, “It’s an open and shut case as far as I can see.” As if to emphasise the point, Dulle snapped his spectacle case shut with a loud theatrical flourish and slid it it back into his tunic pocket, next to his police whistle.

The wily inspector was having none of this however and as he stepped forward, leaning very close to Sergeant Dulle’s ruddy face, he bit down hard on the Polo, enveloping them both in a peppermint cloud.

“To you, Dulle, that knife is a murder weapon, possibly covered in the fingerprints and DNA of the assassin, which will lead quickly to his or her arrest, trial and imprisonment; case solved, am I right?”

“That’s more or less the way it looks to me sir” replied the sergeant, failing to conceal his high dudgeon.

“Wrong”, said Twollet, “look more closely, observe the angle of the knife.”

Dulle, looking more closely and, observing the angle of the knife, concluded nothing.

Twollet continued. “Percy Bindlehurst was chairman of Bindlehurst Holdings, the shell company which owns Vladimir Links, an exclusive golf club of which Bindlehurst was an eminent member. A skilful player with a scratch handicap, he played twice a week with his best friend Bunty Gallstone the society channel swimmer and cousin of the submarine heiress Sylvia Gluck, who’s mother Gertie was press secretary to Imelda Marcos in the seventies and later acquired control of a small shipping company based in The Philippines, exporting coconut oil and importing shoes.”

With a magician’s flourish, Twollet produced an ace of spades from Dulle’s helmet band, tore it in half and ate it “And furthermore he was left-handed!” he said triumphantly.

Dulle scratched his chin. “I don’t……” he began, before Twollet butted in. “Of course you don’t sergeant,” he barked, “because the solution is so obvious it has eluded your slow, uniformed police brain.”

Dulle winced at the rebuff as Twollet made an angle with his fingers. “Had his Lordship been stabbed by a right-handed person," he explained, "the knife would have come to rest thus, but as you can see it does not.”

“You mean…” began Dulle.

I mean I would bet my detective’s pension that the only fingerprints on the handle of this knife belong to a left-handed person…”

Dulle’s eyes widened in disbelief. “Good lord inspector, are you suggesting suicide?”

“Murder by contract,” said Twollet flatly. “Hideo Nagasaki, who falsified his previous employment record in order to get the job as Japanese Sumo-Butler to the Bindlehurst household is, in reality, a freelance hit man hired by the Marcos family from whom Lord B and his best friend Bunty Gallstone have been swindling millions over the years.”

As Dulle struggled to digest the information, the double doors leading to the kitchen crashed open and with a cry of Banzai! Butler Hideo Nagasaki came hurtling through in full Sumo costume riding a motorised drinks trolley and clutching a ceremonial samurai sword in his left hand.

(to be continued)

READER: You can’t just stop there!

MYSELF: I’m not stopping, it’s continued next week.

READER: Can I binge watch it on Netflix?

MYSELF: Sorry, no. You’ll just have to wait like everyone else.

More hysterical feedback from our concerned public

BEAR FACE FACTS
Dear Sausage,
Now that the royal sport of fox-hunting has been banned (bah!), might I suggest the re-introduction of bear-baiting? In the past two years, twenty seven people in my village have been eaten. The culprits? A savage gang of grizzly bears who rampage through our sleepy hamlet whenever they get peckish and fancy biting a face off. Quite frankly, many people are beginning to get fed up. Tighter security on bear farms has been suggested, but in my opinion this would be yet another case of bolting the horses long after the door has been allowed to escape. Most of my long suffering neighbours have been forced to surround their homes with vicious bear traps, which to date have caused the agonizing deaths of 15 postmen going lawfully about the King's business. Properly licensed bear-baiting pits would serve a dual purpose viz: to keep the rampaging bear population down, and to provide simple, honest entertainment for the bloodthirsty masses.

Bob Hayseed (faarmer)
Hassock-in-the-Wurne

Should chasing foxes on horses, allowing fierce dogs to rip them to pieces and smearing their blood on children's faces be unbanned? Readers are invited to send in their angry marauding bear stories, either made up or true

PRUNE DREAMS
Dear Sausage Life,
Why do you insist upon printing rambling, boring letters (not unlike this one), which only serve to reinforce the generally held opinion that your readers are pruriently interested only in the absurd views of a cretinous minority of people who, like myself, have been abducted by tiny extraterrestrial ants which gained entrance to my house by disguising themselves as currents in some Dundee Cake, (a type of cake of which I am particularly fond), and after I had innocently eaten the cake, (which was delicious by the way), burst forth from my abdomen one afternoon after I had forgotten to take my medication, and beamed me aboard their huge atomic powered ant spacecraft which they had parked in my front garden, completely flattening my hydrangea and what was worse, demolishing the fence which separates me from my neighbor Frank Sinatra who is trying to electrocute me by magnetising my cutlery using a sophisticated short wave cutlery magnetiser provided by his friends in the CIA who want to have me rubbed out because of what I know about the Kennedy assassination?

R.Sheets
Scalliwag Ward
Pfaff Secure Institutions Inc
The Netherlands

TELL US ABOUT IT

Have any other readers been abducted by insectile aliens or terrorised by cutlery-magnetising dead celebrity neighbours? Your letters, and any other new Kennedy assassination evidence to letters@sausage-life.com please!

Sausage Life!