Captain Jackson’s diary notebook ...
5th of December - „How did you manage to get tangled up in tinsel?“
Reid had made a deal ... weeks ago ... in August, as far as I remember. He had bought 100 pounds of tinsel then, which was delivered today, ... but not in a way as expected.
Instead of boxes with fine measured silver stripes between layers of tissue paper the boxes contained cones wrapped with the raw material.
With this giant amount of tinsel we can decorate Leman Street for years as well as the whole quarter around ... and this without recycling the used tinsel for the next year.
I have no idea what Reid was thinking about when he made this deal. Probably nothing, just happy having made a bargain...
Not that Mr. Perfect, Mr. Inspector John James Edmund Reid would admit that he has made a mistake. No way! He pursed his lips and commanded to one of the new lad Sergeant Thatcher: “Bring the tinsel in decent shape!“ Then he disappeared.
I did not envy poor Thatcher to get the tinsel in shape, because it was a really shitty job. I gave the boy an encouraging nod and also disappeared in my dead room.
Time flew by. It was quiet at this day. No interruptions. So, I made good progress and had finished around 3 o‘lock in the afternoon.
After I had put back my last “patient” in the cooling compartment, I removed my apron, took my notes and left the dead room to find a desk in a warmer part of the police station to write my final reports.
Beyond the doors of my reign, I immediately noticed a change: Thin silver stripes of tinsel and snippets of it everywhere. It doesn’t look like decoration but like desperate chaos.
I followed the main trace to Reid‘s office where I found young Thatcher hulled in layers of these silver threads with scissors in his hand and madness in his eyes.
In the first moment I asked myself how someone can tangle himself so badly in tinsel before I understood: Thatcher tried to handle his task efficiently by unwrapping several cones at the same time for cutting the tinsel in pieces of equal length. In his position, I would have done the same.
Of course, it ended up in a terrible mess. At a certain point, a mass of thin light flowing threads isn’t manageable anymore and all ends up in a big knot ... with the lad inside. Each try to open the knot leads to more chaos.
In these cases my mother used to say: You will not solve a knot by putting a thread through a loop because that’s not the cause of it‘s origin. Quite the contrary. It makes it even worse.
A wisdom which fits on nearly every situation of life, weather if it the daily trouble on the streets, relationship issues or self bondage experiences.
Yeah, my mother was a damned wise woman.
Anyway, I took the scissors and freed Thatcher from his glittering spiderweb.
We tidied up and then, over a cup of whisky, we thought about a possibility how to finally bring Reid‘s fucking tinsel in shape.
At the end, all happened in the hall of the police station because it had the necessary space ... We beaded the cones on sticks and mounted the loaded sticks between a doorframe. On this way the cones were flexible in unrolling, but the threads couldn’t tangle up. Next, we took one of the movable stretchers from the dead room and mounted a chair on it. Then, we knotted the tinsel ends at one of the chairs legs and started to rotate the stretcher-chair-construction. The tinsel threads were wrapping around the chair’s legs as expected. It worked very well. After the layers were big enough, we stopped, bundled the tinsel threads at two opposite legs of the chair and cut it off at the other ones. On this way, we got tinsel bundles of nearly the same length which we laid on Reid’s desk.
The procedure was repeated a few times until the office furniture was full.
But there was still tons of raw material left which we packed in boxes and hided in a dark edge of the evidence room.
I just hope that the heap of produced silver stripes satisfies Reid‘s lust of Christmas decoration. In any case, it is enough to transform the whole house into a glitter ball.
