HANK CONAN - PRIVATE EYE. EPISODE 2.

As I said Jocelyn is one big guy, but this night I heard one mother of a tussle coming from their dressing room. It sounded like Jocelyn was throwing furniture around. I don’t know how long the struggle had been going on but by the time I’d found my tripod and a longer lens for the camera (solely to secure evidence in the event of a grand jury enquiry, you understand), a job made more difficult by the darkness and an annoying splinter injury to my eye which I picked up, er, in a, er, fracas somewhere with some heavies, the grunts, screams and groans were becoming deafening.

It was then that a stroke of pure luck came my way - the type that every gum-shoe crosses his fingers for.

By sheer fluke I found that if I jammed my left foot in the third rib of the radiator while I used an old discarded umbrella that had been cut down to about forty-eight point six centimetres to hold my weight, I could reach into the cavity wall through a convenient gap left by a missing brick that I happened to notice.

That gave me enough leverage to loop a handy bit of string, formed into a double fisherman’s prusik knot, that I came across in a half-forgotten pocket, onto an old rusted hook that hung from the joists.

Surmising that the old bit of string had a breaking weight of about 15·03 kilo-newtons I swung myself across and up to the far wall where it met the floor joists of Jocelyn’s dressing room.

Lady Luck was sure smiling on me that day - the floor of the dressing room had a knot hole dril..., er, worn right where the skirting board met the floor. Incredibly, it was hidden in the shadow of a dressing table: and with a view of the entire room!

I put my eye to the knot hole: I’m glad someone had had the forethought to sand down the wood with some grade-3b sandpaper - a sharp splinter could have had someone’s eye out.

What I saw and heard will live with me until I draw my last paycheck. The dame and Jocelyn were in a fight for their lives; they’d very nearly torn each other’s clothes off in the ferocity of the struggle. What stunned me was that Jocelyn was coming off worse. He was sweating and flushed and my trained senses noted that, in all probability, he was wounded as he was groaning in what sounded like real pain.

She must have been a highly trained assassin. She had Jocelyn pinned to the floor and no matter how hard he struggled, she was keeping him there. She was out of breath herself, but she plainly uttered the words that betrayed her as a mobster.

That was it. I was out of there. If the ‘mob’ could put the squeeze on a guy like Jocelyn imagine what they would do to me!

I hot-footed it for the door before the sound of a gut-turning crack, and agonising wrench in my knee, reminded me that I still had my foot in the loop of string. The pain would have made a normal person pass out - but I’m not normal.

I grunted and pulled myself clear (ruining my flip-flops in the process), realising that the noise would have alerted Jocelyn and the dame to my whereabouts, with the ‘mob’ not far behind them.

I quickly set the shattered bone and sinew, using the med-evac techniques I’d taught Brits in the Falklands.

My mind flipped through the vast, finely-tuned storehouse of information which has one of the finest Des. Res’s. this side of the Mason-Dixon Line.

The ‘mob’ might just believe that the dame was too professional to have her ‘offer’ refused, and that Jocelyn was too much of a man to give in to a mere woman!

Yes, I decided, it’d work! Ignoring the pain, lancing through my lower limb like a set of furiously firing neurons sending signals to the pain-receptors in my brain, I legged it up the stairs and burst through the door to Jocelyn’s dressing room, like a cat on crack going through a cat-flap, drew a bead and let them have it! BLA-A-AM!

That’s what Hank Conan, P.I., thinks of the ‘mob’; and the flighty, tarty little slapper who’ll throw herself at anyone, except a rugby-playing, rough, tough, mountain-climbing outdoors-man P.I.

Hank will return in:

HANK CONAN - PRIVATE EYE.

EPISODE THREE - VIV AND LET DIE.

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