THE TRAFFIC WARDENS' ARMS Part 3

STRANGLED CELLIST MYSTERY read the headline on the paper’s front page. Police were investigating while neighbours, apparently, were baffled. He’d seemed such a nice, quiet man. Except, of course, when playing his cello. Perhaps he’d been highly strung. His lover, it was reported, fretted over him. He’d drink heavily, despite weighing nine stones, following a finger injury that had disrupted his cello practice on a cloudy day. He had no known enemies or cancer. He was debt-free and his jokes were largely tolerable. He was twenty-two, his chest measurement was thirty-two (inches). Beethoven wrote thirty-two piano sonatas, but far fewer for the cello—a fact bitterly noted in the cellist’s diary (soon to be published) in an underlined entry. A spokesperson for a passer-by acquainted with an eyewitness to a friend of a neighbour of the deceased released the following statement:
‘We don’t know if this death is due to murder, but if so it’s a pity the murdering hands that were involved weren’t better employed… Say, guessing the width of a giraffe’s neck!’

Gulliver Trent got sent, by post, some enlarged images of cross sections of cucumbers in a book of wallpaper samples. Sat on the sofa, where he’d eaten jelly and suffered from arthritis, he flipped through the volume’s many pages. His face wrinkled with delight at the pretty, albeit repetitive, pictures as he imagined how the walls in the lounge would be transformed with their effect. Or he could paper his bedroom he mused. The rolls of paper varied in price according to the size of the cucumber used in the design. Gulliver carefully calculated how many rolls he’d need for both rooms. It came to £118. 60 exactly and he decided to go ahead and buy the fourteen rolls required to paper the lounge and bedroom. He took the samples and his cash and drove his car to the décor supplies shop in town
‘That’s £153. 48, please, sir.’ The shop assistant said.
Gulliver gulped, his face reddened, as he recalled the paste he’d additionally bought and allowed for the VAT. He found the extra money and drove home bloody-mindedly.

The Intimacy Reductionism Painters’ meeting took place annually behind the estate’s wig tunnel. They gathered to discuss techniques and plan their occasional exhibitions, which were frequently ignored by the public, but this suited their purposes very well. In fact, they felt honoured as artists by indifference. The group was comprised of fourteen active members, but four of these were Swedish tourists there by mistake! The group’s founder was a wealthy eccentric and amateur painter, Dunstan D’Allraces, who died of alcohol poisoning on his forty-ninth birthday. He left them several tens of thousands of pounds to further their aims, which he exhaustively detailed in a million-word treatise that, he insisted in his will, they must publish in order to access these funds.
One year, they planned to expose the futility of envelopes by sealing fifty-thousand empty ones, but their application for a grant to fund this exercise was ignored by the local Arts council. This was because their application got accidentally sealed within an unmarked envelope they were using as a blueprint for their proposed stunt. Prior to this debacle, their greatest ‘work of art’ involved the synchronised, anonymous release of a collection of odours in a chain of banks. Not that anyone noticed, even when they claimed responsibility.

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