The Curious Case Of The Missing Alleycats - An Intrigue (Part The Second)

Part The Second - The Plot Thickens


After being reluctantly roused by smelling salts and having the welts and bruises about my person attended to, I ruminated on how to escape from the predicament within which I now found myself. You may be thinking, dear reader, that my reaction to a rather simple case of some missing moggies may have been somewhat extreme. Were this likely to have been merely a simple case of missing moggies then you would, of course, be quite correct. However, I had strong reason to believe that this was something more...

It was several years earlier when I, as a carefree youth in his mid-twenties, became embroiled in a case with similar beginnings. I was a devil-may-take-'em young lad, with an eye for the fillies and a taste for the grog. I had spent several months sojourning in Paris, mind aglow with a questing nature and belly aflame with the evils of absinthe. I shall spare you the full and debauched details of my sexual adventuring - suffice it to say that, if it moved, I soon lay about it until moving was no longer an option.

It was after a particularly fulsome night with a bevy of young beauties and their faithful dog, Francois, that I emerged blinking into the Parisienne dawn to be confronted not only with a stream of effluence about the torso from the neighbours above [1] but also with the sight of a host of gruesomely butchered pussycats strewn about the road in front. As is only natural, the dual effluence/deceased kitties combination conspired to cause me to add my own vomit to the already unpleasant scene and, as usually happens when least desired, it was at about this time that the local gendarmerie arrived on the scene. As they gently persuaded me [2] to assist them with their enquiries by confessing to wholesale feline slaughter, I gently assisted them by slumping into unconsciousness in a pool of various excreta.

Fortunately, I was revived not by depraved ministrations about my posterior region from a multiple murderer named Jean-Claude but by the only slightly more welcome sight of the redoubtable Inspector Edgars. Being a personage of some means (and brother to the then Privy Counselor and soon to be Prime Minister, the despicable Kirk The Younger), it would not have done to let me languish in some Frenchy prison as a destroyer of cats.

Reluctantly escorting me on my merry way home, it was as the good Inspector and I left the jail that events took a turn for the rum and the uncanny...



To Be Exaggerated

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[1] Who had, I must admit, been somewhat put out by the carnal caterwauling emanating from below them at ungodly hours of the night...

[2] Yes, via the gently persuasive medium of being beaten about the face and body - it's something of a theme in my dealings with professional keepers of the peace. Purely coincidence, obviously.