Dr. Yes

    It was
the worst of times, it was the worst of times.

    Spring
was in the air, which was depressing enough, what with pollen, and bees, and
bats, but my on/off girlfriend was also making my life miserable because of her
pregnancy, which she continued to accuse me of being responsible for, despite
repeatedly failing to produce DNA evidence. She whined and she moaned and she
criticised. It was all part of a bizarre attempt to make me a better man.
Meanwhile she seemed content to pile on the beef. She now had a small double
chin, which she blamed on her condition and I blamed on Maltesers. There was
clearly no future for us. In other news, the great reading public of Belfast
continued to embrace the internet for their purchases rather than No Alibis,
this city's finest mystery bookshop, while my part-time criminal
investigations, which might have been relied upon to provide a little light
relief, had recently taken a sordid turn, leaving a rather unpleasant taste in
the mouth, although some of that may have been Pot Noodle.

    I
will not detain you with the details of the
Case of the Seductive Sweets,
other than to say that it had started out as something which, while undoubtedly
distressing for the family, was still apparently quite innocuous, at least
until I became involved. A thirteen-year-old boy's life at a local secondary
school was being made hell because someone had written this graffiti legend
about him on a toilet wall:

    
Mark
Bruce will bum for dolly mixtures
.

    The
school immediately had it removed, but it kept reappearing in different
locations. Schools are notorious for either covering things up or seeking
internal solutions, but it was taken out of their hands when a local
confectionery wholesaler, aware that children had taken to asking for 'a packet
of Bruce' rather than dolly mixtures in local shops, and who had cornered the
market in this generic brand, grew concerned that lasting and permanent damage
might be caused to his business. He was undoubtedly aware of my recent
successful history in tracking down graffiti artists, as detailed in the
Case of the Cock-Headed Man
and the
Case of the Fruit on the Flyover
,
and so I was engaged to track down the culprit. This was not difficult.
Children are notorious little squealers. When just the right amount of pressure
was applied, they wasted no time in pointing their grubby little fingers at
another thirteen-year-old boy, who, as it turned out, had undertaken his
malicious campaign not merely for the purposes of bullying or for reasons of
innate badness, but because of jealousy and for revenge. His voice had recently
broken, and the affections visited upon him by one of his teachers had rapidly
shifted to his higher- pitched classmate. Thus I exposed a thirty-five-year-old
geography teacher, metaphorically speaking, and it is safe to say that he will
never work in this town again, though he has accepted a position south of the
border. However, the confectionery wholesaler was not at all amused by my
revelations, fearing that they would be plastered all over the newspapers and
internet if the case came to court, thus bringing his confectionery in for
further ridicule, and he refused point blank to pay me. In fact, I have my
suspicions that he actually helped the teacher flee this jurisdiction. They were,
fundamentally, very different people, but like the Japanese and Nazi axis of
evil during World War II, at the end of the day they enjoyed a common purpose,
in their case, the corruption of children, and I suppose it was inevitable that
they should suppress their mutual distrust and dislike in order to further
their cause.

    On
this spring day, with not a sniff of a customer, I sat around the counter with
Alison, my expectant girlfriend and seller of bangles, and Jeff, my part- time
book-stacker, Amnesty International apologist and conspiracy-theory devotee,
debating crime and punishment. The secondary-school paedophile had indeed fled
the country one step ahead of the law, but we were trying to decide what would
have been an appropriate punishment had he been apprehended in time. We had
already dismissed the usual suspects - counselling and chemical castration -
and moved on to actual physical violence involving metallic objects that had to
be swung.

    'A
claw hammer,' was Alison's suggestion. She pointed at her forehead, the side of
her skull, and her nose, and said, 'Here, here and here.'

    I
disagreed. There were better hammers. I proposed a sledgehammer, or a
jackhammer, or a steam hammer, or a trip hammer, or a ball-peen hammer used in
metal work; a gavel would probably be quite appropriate, or a blacksmith's
dog-head hammer could certainly do some damage. It really depended what kind of
injury you wanted to inflict. I explained that the amount of energy delivered
to the target area by the hammer blow is equivalent to one half of the mass of
the head times the square of the head's speed at the time of the impact. The
formula for this is:

    Alison
and Jeff looked at me for a little bit, then Jeff said, 'Anyway, I think a much
better punishment would be to glue steaks to him, and then throw him into
shark-infested waters.'

    'Steak's
too expensive,' Alison said admirably quickly, which boded well for the future.
'You'd be better off with stewing steak,' she said. 'Or mince. Mince is relatively
cheap.'

    'You
might have difficulty actually securing the mince to his body,' Jeff pointed
out. 'You would have to keep it in its original packaging, you know, with the
Styrofoam base and the cellophane. But then how would the sharks smell it?'

    'Some
blood would leak out,' said Alison. 'It always leaks out in my fridge.'

    'Maybe
they wouldn't be attracted to it. Maybe sharks only like human blood. They
might not like cow blood. I mean, has a shark ever eaten a cow?'