Nov 15, 2015

Extract from Chapter 31 of mystery-comedy novel, 'The Investigations of the Para-Usual': 

‘I think we both know that the IPU’s weightiness is, how should I say, lightened by the pairing of O’Singh with your lovely daughter, Persil?’ suggested Woo.

Woo was taking the air with Cohen, treading a leafy path between the grand Victorian mausolea in Kensal Green Cemetery. An avenue of formidable marble and granite structures, posthumous celebrations of the ego. Gothic turreted castles like St Pancras railway station in miniature; four poster beds accommodating the stretched out likenesses of the deceased; Egyptian obelisks. Rather like the obstacles one might expect on a morbid crazy golf course. Here were buried the kind of people who might well in life have huffed, ‘Do you know who I am?’ at those offending their sensibilities. Who were now saying in effect with their mausolea: ‘Do you know who I was?’

‘We do know,’ replied Cohen, slowly, at last in answer to Woo’s question. ‘We also know that her mother is happy with Persil’s gainful employment,’ he said, studying Woo obliquely.

‘Quite,’ said Woo, obsequiously. ‘Sadly nothing much can come of that union, the partnership of O’Singh and Persil,’ he said, feigning a sadness. ‘That, that meeting of minds.’

‘But we should be okay, shouldn’t we?’ asked Cohen, in hope of a favourable reply. ‘O’Singh was after all running the department more or less? He was the ideas man. He didn’t really need Pratt, did he?’

‘The situation is not so good,’ replied Woo, breezily. ‘The department was perhaps what you might call “stronger” with Pratt. Though, more importantly, he was what should we say, a negative influence?’

Cohen stopped in his tracks, now with the giant cylindrical steel-girder skeleton of the gasometer which stood the other side of the canal from the cemetery looming above the trees at his back. An imposition of the industrial on the spiritual.