The name's Wheelbarrow - Sam Wheelbarrow.
My kid sister Sarah's jailbreak was splashed all over the front page.
Obviously an accident at the printers, it mad it impossible to read.
Chief Inspector Newton wanted me to track her down. I put an electronic
tagging device on her duvet, but I couldn't see how it was going to help.
I'm not my sister's keeper. In fact she wouldn't even let me join her
football team. I tried to tell him this over coffee and biscuits but he
wasn't having any of it. So I tried to tell him over tea and shorties.
He said I must have intimate knowledge of her. I said that must be
illegal. She'd been lifted by helicopter from the prison roof. "If only
we could find that helicopter," said Newton. "Look, it says here she
had musicsplosh consplatterdribbles, does that mean anything to you?"
It did. Her last boyfriend had been heavy metal star Glossy Pangbourne.
We gave him a bell.
"It were just like a vasectomy - someone nicked me chopper while I were
asleep" he joked, amusingly. "And by the way thanks for the bell."
Glossy and his band Fraushagger claimed to be the spokesmen for a
generation. Obviously it was a generation with a very small vocabulary.
His helicopter had been stolen from his Hounds Of Helipad, where he'd
left it with the keys in the ignition. Pangbourne had been the last to
join the band, replacing their original teenage vocalist Jimi Bon Moon
(Jimi'd died after developing a cocaine addiction while still at school -
a teacher had punished him by telling him to do 200 lines and that was
the end of him.)
Glossy had brought notoriety to the band. Every day he would eat a live
chicken for breakfast. Without milk. The high point of the show was his
ventriloquist act with a dead cat's head reciting Satanic chants back-
wards while gargling goats blood and urine. They'd stolen a lot of the
traditional Barry Manilow audience. Pangbourne had nothing to gain by
helping Sarah escape, his Shagging Satan In The Sulphur Pit album was
number one on both sides of the Atlantic.
He showed us around his sprawling country estate. or Essex as it used to
be known. I didn't like it, it was too clean. Rottweilers prowled the
ground inside an electrified perimeter fence, overlooking a shark
infested moat and minefield. Either he was very security conscious or
liked a good laugh when anyone tried to break in.
"You left the keys in the ignition of your helicopter" I said. He told
me this was for the benefit of the other band members. "We operate a
rotor - rotor, geddit?" he laughed. I didn't believe him. He'd let his
helicopter be used. Why?
His carpets were very clean, but in a few nooks and crannies were traces
of white powder. I knew he had an expensive coke habit. He always used
to leave the last third of every can, and the cost soon mounted up, but
that wasn't enough to blackmail him.
I had Newton look into his police records. There, in the inner sleeve of
Outlandos D'Amour was what I'd been looking for. A contract with Leagas
McBeagas O'Toagle Boagle and Scrummerty-Farquar Advertising Associates.
Whoever had sprung Sarah had used this to blackmail Glossy into letting
them have his 'copter. "Hey man, give that back!" He made a lunge for me,
and a very tasty supper, but bribery was going to get him nowhere.
Pangbourne broke down. Newton and I jump-started him from a car battery
and he talked. "It was so long ago, I was young, I needed the money, I
signed a ten-year contract...oh God, if my fans ever found out...!"
I promised to keep his secret if he'd tell us what we wanted to know.
"So, he has a contract with an advertising agency. What's the big deal?"
asked Newton. "Have you ever seen him in an ad?" I asked him. He hadn't.
Glossy and I knew why. I'd guessed it as soon as I soon those clean
carpets. He was cleverly disguised, but someday someone else would
recognise it was Glossy Pangbourne in the Shake 'N' Vac ads and then
nothing would put the freshness back into his career.

G'night and may your dick go with you.