Pooley made free with a little polite coughing and drew out The Now Official Handbook of Allotment Golf which he handed to the Professor. The snow-capped ancient raised his bristling eyebrows into a Gothic arch. “If you seek an impartial judgement over some technicality of the game I will need time to study this document.”
“No, no,” said Jim, “on the back.”
Professor Slocombe turned over the dog-eared exercise book and his dazzling facial archway elevated itself by another half inch. “So,” he said, “you think to test me out, do you, Jim?”
Pooley shook his head vigorously. “No, sir,” said he, to the accompaniment of much heart crossing. “No ruse here, I assure you. The thing has us rightly perplexed and that is a fact.”
“As such it would,” said Professor Slocombe. Crossing to one of the massive bookcases, the old man ran a slender finger, which terminated in a tiny girlish nail, along the leathern spines of a row of dusty-looking volumes. Selecting one, bound in a curious yellow hide and bearing a heraldic device and a Latin inscription, he bore it towards his cluttered desk. “Clear those Lemurian maps aside please, John,” he said, “and Jim, if you could put that pickled homunculus over on the side table we shall have room to work.”
Pooley laboured without success to shift a small black book roughly the size of a cigarette packet, but clearly of somewhat greater weight. Nudging him aside, the Professor lifted it as if it were a feather and tossed it into one of the leather-backed armchairs. “Never try to move the books,” he told Jim. “They are, you might say, protected.”
Jim shrugged hopelessly. He had known the Professor too long to doubt that he possessed certain talents which were somewhat above the everyday run of the mill.
“Now,” said the elder, spreading his book upon the partially cleared desk, “let us see what we shall see. You have brought me something of a poser this time, but I think I shall be able to satisfy your curiosity. This tome,” he explained, fluttering his hands over the yellow volume, “is the sole remaining copy of a work by one of the great masters of, shall we say, hidden lore.”
“We shall say it,” said John, “and leave it at that.”
“The author’s name was Cagliostro, and he dedicated his life, amongst other things, to the study of alchemic symbolism and in particular the runic ideogram.”
“Aha,” said Omally, “so it is a rune then, such I thought it to be.”
“The first I’ve heard of it,” sniffed Pooley.
“It has the outward appearance of a rune,” the Professor continued, “but it is a little more complex than that. Your true rune is simply a letter of the runic alphabet. Once one has mastered the system it is fairly easy to decipher the meaning. This, however, is an ideogram or ideograph, which is literally the graphic representation of an idea or ideas through the medium of symbolic characterization.”
“As clear as mud,” said Jim Pooley. “I should have expected little else.”
“If you will bear with me for a while, I shall endeavour to make it clear to you.” The Professor straightened his ivory-framed spectacles and settled himself down before his book. Pooley turned his empty glass between his fingers. “Feel at liberty to replenish it whenever you like, Jim,” said the old man without looking up. The pendulum upon the great ormolu mantelclock swung slowly, dividing the day up, and the afternoon began to pass. The Professor sat at his desk, the great book spread before him, his pale, slim hand lightly tracing over the printed text.
Pooley wandered aimlessly about the study, marvelling at how it could be that the more closely he scrutinized the many books the more blurry and indecipherable their titles became. They were indeed, as the Professor put it, “protected”. At length he rubbed his eyes, shook his head in defeat, and sought other pursuits.
Omally, for his part, finished the decanter of five-year-old scotch and fell into what can accurately be described as a drunken stupor.
At very great length the mantelclock struck five. With opening time at the Swan drawing so perilously close, Pooley ventured to enquire as to whether the Professor was near to a solution.
“Oh, sorry, Jim,” said the old man, looking up, “I had quite forgotten you were here.”
Pooley curled his lip. It was obvious that the Professor was never to be denied his bit of gamesmanship. “You have deciphered the symbol then?”
“Why yes, of course. Perhaps you would care to awaken your companion.”
Pooley poked a bespittled finger into the sleeper’s ear and Omally awoke with a start.
“Now then,” said Professor Slocombe, closing his book and leaning back in his chair. “Your symbol is not without interest. It combines two runic characters and an enclosing alchemic symbol. I can tell you what it says, but as to what it means, I confess that at present I am able to offer little in the way of exactitude.”
“We will settle for what it says, then,” said Jim.
“All right.” Professor Slocombe held up Omally’s sketch, and traced the lines of the symbol as he spoke. “We have here the number ten, here the number five and here enclosing all the alchemic C.”
“A five, a ten and a letter C,” said Jim. “I do not get it.”
“Of course you don’t, it is an ideogram: the expression of an idea, if I might be allowed to interpret loosely?” The two men nodded. “It says, I am ‘C’ the fifth of the ten.”
The two men shook their heads. “So what does that mean?” asked Omally.
“Search me,” said Professor Slocombe. “Was there anything else?” Pooley and Omally stared at each other in bewilderment. This was quite unlike the Professor Slocombe they knew. No questions about where the symbol was found, no long and inexplicable monologues upon its history or purpose, in fact the big goodbye.
“There was one other thing,” said the rattled Omally, drawing a crumpled cabbage leaf from his pocket.
“If it is not too much trouble, I wonder if you would be kind enough to settle a small dispute. Would you enlighten us as to what species of voracious quadruped could have wrought this destruction upon Small Dave’s cabbage patch?”
“His Pringlea antiscorbutica?”
“Exactly.” Omally handed the Professor the ruined leaf.
Professor Slocombe swivelled in his chair and held the leaf up to the light, examining it through the lens of a horn-handled magnifying glass. “Flattened canines, prominent incisors, indicative of the herbivore, by the size and shape I should say that it was obvious.” Swinging back suddenly to Omally he flung him the leaf. “I have no idea whatever as to how you accomplished that one,” he said. “I would have said that you acquired a couple of jawbones from Gunnersbury Park Museum but for the saliva stains and the distinctive cross-hatching marks of mastication.”
“So you know what it was then?”
“Of course, it is Camelus bactrianus, the common Egyptian Camel.”
There was something very very odd about Camelus bactrianus, the common Egyptian Camel. Norman squatted on his haunches in his rented garage upon the Butts Estate and stared up at the brute. There was definitely something very very odd about it. Certainly it was a camel far from home and had been called into its present existence by means which were totally inexplicable, even to the best educated camel this side of the Sahara, but this did not explain its overwhelming oddness. Norman dug a finger into his nose and ruminated upon exactly what that very very oddness might be.
Very shortly it struck him with all the severity of a well-aimed half-brick. When he had been leading the thing away to his secret hideout, it had occurred to him at the time just how easy it had been to move. And he recalled that although he, an eight-stone weakling of the pre-Atlas-course persuasion, had left distinctive tracks, the camel, a beasty of eminently greater bulk, had left not a mark.