Seventy-Seven Clocks

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“Talk me through peculiar.”

“What do you mean?” asked Arthur Bryant. “I mean,” said the young biographer, “why does this special police unit of yours only get the peculiar cases?”

“There, you can speak properly when you try,” said Bryant. “I don’t hold with slang.” He fiddled with his trouser turn-up and extracted the stem of his pipe. “I’ve been looking for that all morning. When we were founded as an experimental unit, ‘peculiar’ meant ‘particular,’ as in ‘specialized.’ But we started to attract certain types of case, ones which were potentially embarrassing for the government, ones nobody else could get to grips with. Before we knew it, we were dealing with goatbothering bishops and transvestite Conservatives, not that the latter constitutes much of a peculiarity these days. We acquired the cases that proved too obtuse for traditional police methods.”

“Like the business with the Water Room.” The biographer had just finished recording Bryant’s thoughts about this case because it had only just concluded, and everyone’s memories of it were still fresh, even though they displayed Rashomon-style discrepancies. “I don’t suppose you’ve ever dealt with anything like that before.”

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