1. The Robbery

A simple clergyman goes to his bank to arrange a very small overdraft and is caught in the middle of something else

The Reverend Barney Pickle was in a tremendous amount of trouble, the sort that no Bishop on the golf course in conversation with a Chief Constable could go any way towards smoothing out for him because he had been caught red-handed with his hand in the till. And not just any old till but one containing more money than he actually believed existed under the known sky, because that till was in the branch of the bank he used for personal transactions, which were few on account of his relative poverty, and as he stood blinking by the teller’s window a bank raid took place.

The raiders had done their homework. It was the one day of the year when the coffers would be disgustingly full to overflowing (Christmas was nigh, the men working at Briggs Electric Engineering plc had been paid humongous bonuses on account of a delicious contract the bosses had finalized with a foreign government and on top of that the town’s brewery had been producing a new and ultra-intoxicating strong spirit for the health service as exhausted staff needed something to keep them going.)

So the bank’s coffers were overflowing, the Reverend Barney Pickle was trying to withdraw ten pounds from an overdrawn account, which meant that the teller had to go in search of higher authority in order to approve a meagre overdraft, and a pair of scumbags intent on riches beyond the dreams of avarice and armed with a rolling pin and an illustrated copy of the Old Testament disguised (rather badly) as a saw-off shotgun started shouting threats of a grotesquely savage nature.

Now, whilst they were demanding to be obeyed the teller was in the manager’s office arguing for a tiny overdraft for the Reverend Pickle whose personal affairs were, true to his name, in a pickle, and Jed Scumbag (yes, that was his surname demanded that everyone including Horace, the bank’s cat, reached for the ceiling.

Horace, not understand but simultaneously not liking the look of the Scumbags, squawked and leapt onto Jed’s brother Gozza’s sawn off shot-gun, thus putting huge scratches across the creation of the universe and Adam’s crotch whilst doing Eve’s bosom no good at all, creating such a turmoil that was almost but not quite louder than Jed’s frantic cry of your money or your life as if he had travelled through time and become a highwayman of a past century

The Manager of that branch was Mr Warmblood and he heard the chaos and made an instant decision.

“That sounds like a huge gang of desperadoes,” he told the teller, in a decisive voice, “and after all, it’s only money. They can print a whole lot more in no time at all, so you’d better give it to them.”

So she did. Sacks of the folding stuff. Pushing them along the floor with one leg outstretched and her neatly dressed bottom barely touchig the floor, her posture crouched in the hope that any flying missiles wouldn’t have much of a chance of actually hurting her.

“Hey, Reverend, take that!” she hissed at the Reverend Barney Pickle in an ernest atempt to get back to the manager’s office and relative safetl, and being of an obedient and god-fearing character he grabbed hold of the sack she was trying to heave onto the counter.

He did as he was told, of course he did, he was a reverend and even obeyed silent voiced in his head, and he fettled with nervous hands into the sack to see that it contained a fortune in fifty pound notes.

And PC Dedbeat chose that moment to stride into the branch hoping to change a fiver for ten pence pieces for the Oak and Shield fruit machine which was showing every sign of being in a good mood.

He took in the entire scene. Two scumbags looking scared stuff, one of them holding a battered edition of the old testament with cat scratches obliterating some of the more ridiculous explanations for the existence of life on Earth that ever poured out of a drug-induced nightmare, and in his wit and wisdom misinterpreted the whole scene

It didn’t take him long to instruct the two Scumbag brothers to get away before they found themselves entangled in matters beyond their intellectual limits, shout at Horace who was busy trying to find some nutrition out of a wad of ten pound notes, tell Mr Warmblood that everything was under control and that the miscreant wouldn’t be seeing the light of day for a jolly long time, and proceeding to arrest the Reverend Barney Pickle as a bank robber caught indisputably in the act of committing a terrible crime

And that was it, really, except to confirm that the Inspector in the Police Station had a thing about collars being round necks the wrong way round and the Reverend’s most certainly was that. So poor young Reverend Barney Pickles was put in a lonesome cell where he had plenty of opportunity to admire an organised column of ants that were scurrying towards what looked like a doughnut that someone had carelessly left on the floor, and when they’d finished doing that he could go on to praying for release to an invisible creation sitting in judgement in his own mind.

He was charged with armed bank robbery, The Inspector didn’t try to discover what on Earth a church of England vicar was doing robbing a bank because the evidence was irrefutable. He had been in the bank. His sticky fingers had been in a bag of huge denomination currency. And there was absolutely nothing in his own account, which meant he had no reason for being in the bank in the first place. Oh dear. His goose was, as they say cooked, and if more evidence was needed there was an illustrated copy of the Old Testament which, in a moment of regretful lunacy, he had viciously defaced in a most unchristian way.

He was taken before a magistrate the very next morning, dishevelled after a sleepless night he had spent trying to make a connection with his invisible adviser, and failing. He had no idea what they thought he had done and knew that although he’d been tempted to kick a cat, that was his only crime to date and surely they wouldn’t lock him up for temptation, would they?

“A man of the cloth!” boomed the magistrate who had been specially selected because of that voice, “I’m going to commit you to crown court! And in my opinion it’s a darned shame they got rid of capital punishment!”

© Peter Rogerson 24.03,24