"Woah, Nelly" cried Doctor Flapjack. "You nearly had my watch off."

"Is this a normal procedure?" asked the blackmail man.

"All perfectly above board and almost certainly certified by the British Medical dooins. I have no doubts that it would pass any clinical trial it was subjected to. I’m trying to take a picture of Mr Brent’s insides. See?"

He pressed the button on the wired remote control which dangled from me like a donkey’s tail and I was aware of a blinding flash. The blackmail man later swore that my eyes and teeth lit up as the flash bulb went off somewhere inside me. Luckily, nothing cartoonish or absurd happened like a photograph coming out of my mouth or his winding on the film by twisting my ears. We were dealing with facts and facts alone.

The blackmail man took notes, made sketches and measured a few bits and pieces as Doctor Flapjack tried to figure out how to get his camera (and its valuable pictures of my insides) out of me. I could do nothing but keep the position and hum loudly as if trying to convince myself I was somewhere else. Somewhere nice and soothing like a script archive or possibly the lift on the way down to the script archive.

"Well I can’t think what else to try" sighed Doctor Flapjack after he’d poked, prodded, tugged and tickled in an effort to extract his camera. "I’ll send you an invoice for the cost of replacing the device but beyond that I’m a beaten man."

"Couldn’t you give me something to ease its passage?" I suggested.

"Hmm. Let me have a look in my bag. There might be something. If nothing else I could give you a sniff of something exciting. It might take your mind of… things."

I waited while he rifled through his medical bag. He seemed to be carrying more prongs and latex gloves than medicines but mine is not to reason why, it is to trust in an undoubted and highly reputed expert. I’ve seen press cuttings of his exploits – all neatly retyped on a word processor to make them easier to read.

"You could try these – they are guaranteed to open up your digestive system in a most effective way."

"That sounds ideal. Will I need a prescription?"

"I shouldn’t think so – the joke shop which sold them to me didn’t ask for one. Take a couple of these and hope you make it to the lavatory in time."

He was quite obviously joking about the joke shop so I happily swallowed the tablet with a small glass of water and felt an almost immediate rumble.

"Would you mind looking after things in here while I go to the lavatory?" I asked.

"Looking after things? In what sense?"

"I fear crime, Doctor Flapjack, and need someone to guard the fort and make sure ruffians don’t get away with anything."

"Oh dear. Oh no – I don’t think a man of my declining years could be relied upon to stop a ruffian in his tracks. I’d be much more likely to stand back and let them take what they want."

"But I need…" I began but a rumble from my insides told me the clock was ticking.

"If you won’t do it and the blackmail man won’t do it and Francois Devine is off somewhere being hedonistic then that means my only choice is to…"

I left the sentence hanging (I wanted it to sting their consciences) and ran through the hole into the garden. I squatted beside a thorny bush and won’t tell you anything of what happened next. I thought I saw a hoodlum sniffing around the hole but he was scared off by the smell. It wasn’t a pleasant garden to be in at the best of times (it was functional rather than aesthetic) and my episode did not help matters. Fortunately, Doctor Flapjack’s camera came out in one piece (the snap shot was I fear still lodged somewhere in my tracts) and I took it back into the drawing room once Hurricane Dennis had subsided. I had the safety strap looped around a handy stick and held it at arms length.

"May I?" asked the blackmail man. He took a few notes and waved me on. I dropped the camera into a plastic bag Doctor Flapjack brought from his briefcase and made the mistake of trying to sit down.

"Argh" I yelped.

"Just remind yourself of how much worse it would’ve been without the petroleum jelly" said Doctor Flapjack comfortingly. I did indeed remember the dark times before Bargainsave started producing its own generic unbranded petroleum jelly and my sessions with Doctor Flapjack went by unlubricated.

Doctor Flapjack packed up his medial bag and wished me a good morning. The briefcase was slung round his neck on a strap and he held the bagged camera in one hand and my cheque for several hundred pounds in the other.

"I’ve got what I came for" he said, obviously referring to the camera. Any other reading of his remark is beneath contempt.

"I’ll be going too" said the blackmail man. "People to see, money to collect. Speaking of money, as I was so recently, I’m going to have to increase your weekly subscription in light of what I’ve seen here today."

I had been expecting that but it was still unpleasant. I would’ve said it was a sore point but that would’ve been too bitter a phrase to be richly comic under the circumstances.

"How much?" I asked in a weakened voice which I wanted him to think was the effects of my recent surgical procedure.

"Embarrassment, possible deviancy, being taken in by an obvious old fraud…"

"You lost me at ‘an obvious old fraud’" I protested, unwilling to find myself paying for someone else’s misdemeanour.

"Shall we call it an additional five pounds per week?"