Walnut wobbles and grips a headstone for balance.
“Are you alright, Walnut?” asks Boo Boo.
“Not really. I think I’m having a little panic attack.”
“Breathe deep, constable!” Detective White slaps him hard across the back. “We’re alive!”
“Thank you, sir. I feel like someone’s done something funny to my brain.” Walnut pokes his skull. “Have they?”
“I ask myself that same question every day,” White replies, and then looks to me, “Where’s Waxford?”
“He’s here in London.”
Boo Boo informs them of naughty Zedock Heap’s demonic and cannibalistic persuasion and that he now has possession of the Angel-Eater.
“Frankly, nothing surprises me anymore,” sighs Detective White.
“Who would have expected that!” said Walnut, “That our very own prime minister eats people. Well, it’s not normal, is it?”
“Sometimes it amazes me that you’ve never been promoted. How many years have you been a constable, Walnut?” says Detective White.
“Well, if you include the ten years I spent hanging on a wall, metamorphosed into an insect by a perverted sorcerer, about thirty-two years, sir.”
“Walnut, return to Detective Waxford and inform him of what has happened and arrest that dodgy vicar. Boo Boo, Loveheart, you will both come with me.”
“Where are we going?” asks Boo Boo
“To extract some information from an undertaker,” he replies.
Detective White extracts butterfly information
We have Mr Poppy tied to a chair in his basement and I punch him in the face and it feels wonderful. He screams, his skull vibrating. Loveheart and Boo Boo stand either side of him, holding an arm each.
“Let’s start again, shall we? What do you know about the Butterfly Club?”
“Sod off,” Mr Poppy says.
“Oh, that’s charming. Such bad manners,” tuts Mr Loveheart.
I punch him again, a good hard slog. “I’m waiting, Mr Poppy.”
He starts to laugh rather manically.
Boo Boo impales one of her blades in his thigh. His scream is ear-drum shattering.
“This is the last time I am going to ask you, and then I’m going to let her chop you up… understand?”
“I only collect,” he says, fearfully.
“Collect what?”
“The women. I collect them.”
“Where is the Butterfly Club?”
“I don’t know. Please, I just pick up the bodies.”
“From where?”
“By the river. There’s an old theatre, the Dancing Imp. They dump the bodies on the stage.”
“When are you collecting them next?”
“Tomorrow. Midnight.”
“Who do you collect the bodies from?”
“Mr Cobweb.”
Mr Loveheart is sitting on the desk, flicking idly through his diary. “OoOH on Tuesday he purchased a shovel!”
Ignoring Mr Loveheart, I continue, “Is Zedock Heap the leader of the Butterfly Club?”
Mr Poppy grits his teeth. “I don’t know who’s the boss.”
“Who else is involved?”
“I don’t know anything else. You’ll just have to kill me.”
Boo Boo slices his head off. It bounces against the wall and rolls out of the room.
“He might have had some other information, Boo Boo!” I scream.
Good fortune smiles on Pedrock
After the wedding massacre I inherited the entire Grubweed fortune and estate as the remaining male relative.
Mr Cedric Evening-Star, the family lawyer who has been working on my behalf, sold the Grubweed family home and helped me arrange the funerals for Grandpa, Aunt Grubweed, Cornelius, Prunella and Estelle. Of course, Mr Wormhole the vicar was unable to perform the services on account of him fleeing the area in fear of his life, so a replacement, called Mr Fishwick, was brought in from a nearby village. He did a very nice job.
Mrs Charm decided to leave the village of Darkwound and is moving to Tintagel in Cornwall to continue the phenomenal success of her Medieval Horrors. She left me several of her chutney recipes and a plot outline for her next novel, The Severed Leg.
I left the ship building firm of Winkhood & Son and have bought myself an enormous boat which I have named Dragonfly. I intend to sail across the world in it. I have so much time before me and it is all my own. Indigo waters and cotton-wool-cloud skies of nothingness. Miss Penny Seashell and I are to be married at sea this very week. She is my “someone” to share all this freedom with, all this wonder.
While my sister slices up London in a butterfly dance of blades, I am sailing away into calmness, into an ocean of sleep.
Mr Angelcakes in London
I am having such fun here. Such fun! I am eating skin and it has made me so much stronger. My rotting skin is no longer rotting. No more brown teeth, green lips and heaps of squashed, mushy intestines.