Archibald's Note

Dear Mam.

I’ve been meaning to tell you about how it went in Spain with Mr. O. but, what with you dashing ‘round doing stuff and me going to work, there just hasn’t been time.

I don’t really know where to start!  It’s a bit like them essays you had to do at school about ‘What I Did On My Holidays’.  I never knew what to put in them, either.  I mean, nothing exciting ever happened, ‘cept that time when we buried Nan on Rhyl beach and forgot about her and it was just as well that the local pub sent out a search party, when she didn’t turn up at opening time, else we would never have found her.

You can’t say nothing exciting happened with my trip to Spain, that’s for certain.  

I’ve got to say, from the off, it was good of Mr. O. to take me at all, ‘cause he was supposed to be taking his fiancée, Samantha…you know, Ms. Knight…but I think he took pity on me ‘cause of how I’d been dumped by my fiancée (yes, I know you didn’t think she was good enough for me!)  

Any road up, it should have been dead straight forward.  We’d just got to go to Spain and pick up this dead toff’s body so’s we could bring it back here for burial.  Nothing to it!  Only, it all went wrong from the start ‘cause our ‘plane got diverted to Paris and we got kicked off on account of they thought we were terrorists!  Bloody cheek!  Then no other ‘plane would touch us, so we had to go by coach to Alicante and that’s no ruddy joke, I can tell you!

Turns out, the body wasn’t in Alicante, after all, like what it should have been, and we had to go to this one-horse town called Santiago summatorother to get him.  We bumped into this girl there, and she was a real looker, Mam.  She offered to come with us, and the coffin, to help us and Mr. O. was all for it (I reckon he had a soft spot for her).  Just as well she did, ‘cause we had to go back by road again, which was a pain, and get the ferry.

Did I mention that we’d had some coppers following us?  They’d been on the ‘plane and then they turned up in that Santiago howsyourfather, an’ all, which was a bit peculiar if you ask me.

Well, we got him back to Blighty, but instead of being an overnight thing it took us best part of a week!  It didn’t help that the ferry got caught in a storm and we couldn’t dock until the next morning.  So, we had a right rush to get the coffin back up here ‘cause, in the meantime, his widow (who’d taken the right hump ‘cause he’d snuffed it whilst he was...you know…doing it with someone what was massaging him) had scrapped the burial in the moreso…mauso…that stone box thingy and had put him down for a cheap and cheerful cremation.

Any road, when it came to the service, Mr. O.’s fiancée was doing it, on account of how she’s a thingy, you know, one of them pretend vicars…celebrants, that’s the one.  The coffin’s just about to go down the conveyor belt, type of thing, when the lid bursts open and the bloke what was supposed to be a toff is there with a gun on everybody.  As luck would have it, the lid came back down and belted him on the nut and then them coppers what I told you about sprang into action and that was that.

Did I say I didn’t think he looked much like a toff when we picked him up?  Well, he didn’t.  He looked more like someone what had gone twelve rounds with that Furey bloke.  Anyhow, he’s only an escaped gangster, isn’t he AND what really put the cat amongst the pigeons, his name’s Frankie Knight and he’s married to Mr. O.’s fiancée!

Well, you can imagine how things are back at work.  Mr. O.’s got a face like fourpence, as you might say, and, ‘cause of all the publicity about us having a gunfight at a posh funeral, business has gone right down the drain.

So, that’s how it is, at the moment.  I just keep hoping things’ll get back to normal, or as normal as it ever gets at Oakshott & Underwood.  We’ll see, eh?

Your loving son,

Archibald.