As he scurried through the thick snow around the
improbable old factory site, basking in the total ignorance of how familiar it
ought to be to him, and failing to recognise it despite the huge old photograph
of it which hung in the lobby of his own building and which he passed every
morning, Mr Snatch was completely unaware of how much immediate danger he was
now in.
His mind was still full of the mildly self-important
and even slightly pleasing notion that he actually might be considered to be
important enough to have been kidnapped, and he was also quietly wondering
quite how they had got the drug into his system. This meant that whilst he
wasn’t completely oblivious to his present situation and to the very real
possibility that he might very well currently be in some kind of jeopardy, he was, however, completely mistaken about which sort of danger it might
actually be.
The release of the unfettered and therefore prowling
guards dogs would have quite surprised and astonished him, coming as he did
from an era when “health and safety” issues plagued so many of his daily
meetings, and in which even one of the underlings of the average kidnapper
could be relied upon to keep his dog on a lead until his quarry had at least
been given one opportunity to surrender himself.
He did, however, have one moment when his resolve (or
perhaps his sanity) snapped as his mind struggled to comprehend the sudden
shift in his fortunes in the single moment between falling from a comfortable
sofa in a luxurious office and landing outside in the cold and the dark perhaps
(as he perceived it at least) a thousand miles away.
He suddenly had an overwhelming desire to stand stock
still and vent his rage at the sky and whomever else might be listening, and so
this is what he did, perhaps in the mistaken belief that by doing so he would
find that he would wake up and discover that it was all, indeed, a bad dream
that he was having, possibly due to the very same prawn vol-au-vent which he had
been so suspicious of earlier.
“Do you know who I am?” he thundered to nobody in
particular.
When those nobodies failed to reply, he added “Well,
I’m a very important man, get me out of here!” He bellowed it at the top of his lungs, as if that
mattered, and the silence which followed spoke volumes.
It did, however, focus his attentions upon the barking
of several large sounding dogs, which sounded as if they might be quite nearby, and he immediately decided that, having not woken up, discretion might indeed
be the better part of valour and decided to retrace his own suddenly
horrifyingly distinct and obvious-seeming footprints back towards the main
gate.
It was Mr Snipe who saved him as he was making his way
back up to his own lonely office in order to await any further trivial instructions
from his master before being released to finally make his way homewards and get
into bed for a few short hours before having to return and being expected to be
“bright and early” the following morning.
As he trudged through the deep snow lamenting the
pitiful nature of his “best” and only shoes and what the damp might be doing to
them, and deeply considering just what it was he had done to upset his God so
much to find himself living such a life, he thought that he heard a noise made
by something lurking in the darkness and stopped to listen harder.
This was not the action of a wise man as thieves and
other villains had been known to be abroad in the factory grounds once darkness
had fallen, and the guards that Old Mr Snatch employed were seldom the pick of
the crop, mostly due to the rates that he paid. Nor were they above turning a
blind eye if some potential interloper was to slip them a few shillings towards
their own festive requirements, and it was not unusual to see young fellows
returning from the direction of one or other of the various Gin Palaces
hereabouts carrying a penny jug or three and delivering them to the gatekeeper’s hut
at some late hour of the evening.
But in so far as it goes, Mr Snipe got lucky that
evening, and it was not a group of
vagabonds which caught his attention, but our much misplaced Mr Snatch,
who, despite all his arrogance, was still a man who had been brought up in a
later version of England where manners and the desire “not to make a scene” had
been so very hard-wired into his system that he immediately stood himself up to
his full height and surrendered, holding his hands slightly above his head for
most of the time excepting for those moments when he touched his fingers to his lips in
impatience as he tried to make what he thought was the universal gesture for
“Shhh! Please don’t say anything…”
Sadly, this gesture hadn’t actually been invented yet
and had yet to enter the non-verbal lexicon of Mr Snipe, who asked him, not
without a slight trembling of fear in his voice as he considered the wisdom or
otherwise of having addressed this stranger instead of just ignoring him, who
he was and what business he had here at this hour of the night.
He also made a point of mentioning that there were
dogs abroad that night.
Big dogs.
Oh yes, he most definitely mentioned those.
But then, something about the dark silhouette of this
dishevelled stranger who was approaching him with his arms waving about like a
signalman seemed rather familiar to him, but when a sudden shaft of moonlight
illuminated the face of the young gentleman he very nearly fainted dead away.
It was, after all, a face that resembled almost
exactly that of his aged employer who was still sitting, as far as he
understood it, upstairs in his lofty room counting out his profits. There were
differences of course. This Mr Snatch, if that was what he called himself,
appeared to be a number of years younger than the old gentleman and had far
fewer whiskers, but this fellow could have been his son at the very least, and
whilst he had never been aware of Old Mr Snatch ever having mentioned having
any kin, he supposed that it could be a possibility, and that perhaps this
long-lost offspring had finally returned to make a claim upon the business.
His wife had told him of such tales, many of which she
had read out to him from the monthly magazines as he struggled to sleep, and he
made an immediate decision that he ought to befriend this young stranger, and
do his very best to protect him from the hounds at least, if only to preserve
his own standing should the business have another controlling hand at the
tiller in the near future.
“Mr Snatch, sir…?” he ventured, carefully.
“Yes. Of course I am!” came the reply of a man who had
started to believe his own press cuttings and believed that everyone really
ought to know who he is, “Now, where the hell am I…?”
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