Out-and-Out Liars; Of Ice, Fur and Fire. (Chapter 4. Part 3)

                                                                                     3.

Once Floy was safely in the custody of the police he began to relax. It was the first-rate detective by the name of Salamander Buckle, he who had  famously solved the Nigerian Law School Murder back in 1996, who now, at 56 years of age, in middle age, having recently solved  L’Affaire d’ Un Singe, ( a gallic pun, Knightbridge being French) could now like Floy also relax. Buckle was the son of an Irish Catholic priest, again like Floy, who had had to flee, under the guise of insanity the nightmarish conditions of The Ten Thousand Hour Monkey Typing Pool, Salamander Buckle had fled a homeland in which guilt had become the cornerstone of paranoia measured on how well one could evade answering a direct question directly. Before Buckle’s recent vertiginous trajectory into the full glare of public adoration, he maintained that most if not all of his sleuthing methods were, indeed to be found in the scholarly study of the Good Book, for it constituted a catalogue of humanity’s vices and sin and gave a clear insight into motive, as it were. “Leviticus stands out” He mused. The rest he’d learned at the cost of an awful lot of hard work at the scene of various murderous sprees.

 

His first suspect was the singer Lady Gaga, for was it not she the media snapped going into the Ecuadorean Embassy wearing a life-size live monkey as both stole and headdress; this was not an era to be stuffy about such attire, for had the quirky international star not received an award dressed as an abattoir. “I’m the Lady who has her name in the paper on a daily basis, several times a day- how do you expect me to recall the photo shoot I did outside of a horrific and inexplicable crime.” She said at her New York apartment, fame and insanity parting in each other’s company. Buckle would need to take a firm stand; she wasn’t the first flaky artiste he had interviewed. To jog her memory he recreated the scene.

 

A dark dappled room in the Ecuadorian Embassy,  a vortex of disarray, the furniture, Spanish colonial was trashed, one of the pillaged Inca relics which stood in pairs on the ambassador’s desk lay, along with a razor in the middle of the room. Unaccountably, there were traces of human hair, whole clumps, seemingly yanked out in a cat-walk-model-like frenzy, though no cat-walk models were present. Upon the middle shelf above thirty leather-bound volumes the complete series of Las Dias Del Conquistadores,  volume twenty-three lay open on a desk along side a  hat belonging to the Latin American revolutionary Simone Bolivar, a picture of Jenifer Lopez hung above the fire place with greasy talcum-powered fingerprint of the Algerian upon its smashed glass; An open laptop was found on the floor by the open bay window, bouncing diagonally across the screen to the strains of Waltzing Matilda, the legend, ‘G’DAY MATE; Julian Assange was nowhere to be found.

 

Of the Ecuadorian Ambassador there was no trace. “After  recounting the crime scene Miss Lady Gaga claimed to know nothing of the diplomat’s whereabouts”. In the following media scrum Inspector Buckle would tell anyone who cared to ask, “Miss Gaga stated, when interviewed, ‘I remember buying an Orang-utan in Harrod’s Exotic Pets Department that day. You know they recently reinstated that department, but it took a distinct dislike to my wrap-stroke head-wear…something about cross-species war…well that’s what the sales manager was telling me as my purchase ran toward the perfume department to mate with an assistant who was spray tanned the same colour , you know’”. Inspector Buckle did not know, as a dyed-in-the-wool policeman he took Orang-utan to mean someone from an immigrant background. “‘Then I went next door, well I’d come this far. I told Mr Assange how I understood how restricted he must feel, I mean I ought to know’, she said her head artfully wedged into a micro wave oven, the door ajar.  ‘I congratulated Mr Assange on being instrumental in my progress; He said he quite understood and I said when my president gets England’s president to let him out then he was a good as employed, as far as a job goes. Then we went to the balcony; I think the crowd all enjoyed seeing me, you know, with him’.”

 

It was an Algerian-whose finger prints were being presented to  the jury as Exhibit A, in talcum-powdered relief from the black rubber dildo found at post-mortem, (incidentally, left out of all Inspector Buckley’s descriptions due to his catholic up-bringing and unsavoury flashbacks,) - who was found halfway up the chimney, pushed with some force, dead and with lacerations where lacerations should not be. “Indeed”, said Inspector Buckle,” had this young Arab been the only casualty, this case would not be a murder case, not on my watch anyway, but simply a matter of Mr Assange absconding from our territory”. The High Court Judge presiding over the trial ignored the institutionalised racism asking “And you say the ambassador of Ecuador to London was also found stuck up the flu, also with some force?…curious. It would appear this case has more of entrances than exits”, quipped His Honor, to Inspector Buckley’s evident disgust.

 

However it would be the word ‘entrance’ which would prove a vital clue to the solving of this incredible mystery.It was the picture of Lady Gaga in the papers the day following the tragedy that, for Inspector Salamander Buckle crystallized the beginnings of a theory. One broadsheet newspaper wrote ‘The singer looked beyond surreal as she was snapped ascending the steps through an aisle of bobbies wearing a live Crested-Macaque Monkey up to and unannounced through the doors of the Embassy’. Whatever the ambassador and his magrebin guest were up to when she entered the room, on seeing her they found themselves simultaneously scrambling for the nearest escape. L’Affaire D’Un Singe, [The French cannot say the Wikileak founder’s surname without dragging their knuckles along the ground], the unfolding details of which first sent Scotland Yard into such delusions of SAS grandeur that their own grandmother’s could have gone down in a volley of fire so mindlessly eager were they for action, was a national embarrassment. Luckily the order for summary execution through wildly disproportionate force upon an Australian guest of the Ecuadorian Embassy was belayed. There then followed a period of national volt-face, in which the nation’s embarrassment transmuted the heretofore hero into vilified scapegoat. England entreated Ecuador to release Assange to face a rape charge in Sweden Britain now openly  and unanimously found him guilty of. Ecuador, grabbing the slim window of international attention threw a party, its president reminding the world that ‘since the end of its empire Britain was still farting higher than its arse’.

The deafening silence that followed does not make sense; the gargantuan elephant that is Julian Assange, remained plonked firmly on the nation’s lawn, the view obfuscated not by a painful and somewhat begrudged collective introspection but by the tacit agreement the man might be simply nationally ignored into annihilation.

The clumps of hair found at the scene of the crime were, after DNA tests found to contain no DNA whatsoever, the fur proving to be entirely synthetic of a type produced in China and exported in the form of  monkey suits for fancy dress sold at a costume hire outlet on Shaftsbury Avenue in London’s West End. The sales assistant remembered nothing out of the ordinary maintaining that customers dressed as Salome wearing a platter with a decapitated head as a hat, in the company of a Yeti was all in a days work and since the Ivy restaurant was a stones throw away and the likes of the late milliner Isabella Blow and costume designer Zandra Rhodes popped in frequently before dining to use the toilet so versed were they at assisting in the deconstruction and reassembling of complicated and angst-ridden haut couture.

Imagination was all the Inspector Salamander Buckle need apply to conjure the ensuing chaos as, once Lady Gaga had produced the suit from her bottomless handbag, an eager Assange and star-struck Floy tried to climb into the suit at the same time while the famous singer perused the leather-bound tomes on the book shelf. At one point, keen to help and ignoring the eventuality of smuggling both out upon her slender shoulders, she found she had somehow entered the suit herself, backwards. In wresting la Gaga’s head stuck firmly in one of the arms, Assange and Floy clearly lacked the skill of theatrical dressers and handfuls of fur fell to the floor of the Ecuadorian Embassy. At another point all three found themselves blinking at each other from its dark interior and in a frenzied attempt to extricate themselves ambled dangerously about the room crashing into furniture eventually head butting the framed picture of Jenifer Lopez. Unnoticeably dishevelled, Lady Gaga emerged airily suggesting that it would be easier to leave with the Ambassador and his friend as they were already in a favourable position to be shoe-horned into the suit while wedged in the chimney. That was the point at which Floy seized the cut-throat razor and Assange armed himself with the Inca relic; it was becoming desperately apparent that time was running out and only one of them could leave alive. The public permanently positioned outside Assange’s place of asylum would surely notice if the singer left with if an extra Macaque Crested monkey above her head.  Lady Gaga artfully came between the two antagonists and with one randomly choreographed move deftly knocked both weapons to the ground, seized volume twenty three of Las Dias Del Conquistadores, Simone Bolivar’s hat, lead Floy to the large velvet upholstered chair behind the former ambassador’s desk, sat him down, placed the hat firmly on his head, placed the book upright in front of him and hoped no one would notice until long after she and Assange were out of the country.

It was thus that Lady Gaga was photographed leaving the Ecuadorean embassy; wearing an all-in-one headdress and stole live Crested-Macaque suffering from acute alopecia. And it was a hawk-eyed Inspector Buckle who pieced together the incredible jig-saw that was L’Affaire d’Un Singe, albeit too late.