Lord Snatch

…More junquies loitered here also, customers of the pharmacy next door to the store, Lord Snatch oft-times among them, with his fair consort the poshtitute Lady Snatch, and betimes Boyde and St Just the hangers-on of Lord Snatch. Victorian terracing straggled up the hill on the other side of this gulch. Halfway up one of these streets a pub, the Fruit & Nut Flake, this being where I deepened my…

The nearest braggart, this being none other than Lord Snatch the squattocrat – abruptly shut off his torrent of wordwanking scatsprach. Head turned slowly, a chilling sort of hydraulic swivel, in Costa’s direction. Gob gaped, shaping as if to offer speech. Tongue flickered over parched lips. To Costa, the merest glimpse of the thing; seeming forked. And then somehow the process, all the inner whirring and pumping and flushing, was…

The second bondsman under the yoke that evil hour was the …er … squattocrat Lord Snatch, who of course was another charismatic eccentric with a big personality, and who most certainly did make it his business to hold court on the terrace behind the Old Albion. Wonderful to relate, Lord Snatch actually was a genuine noble, withal one of those thin-blooded indigent sorts, caught between the rock of assumed superiority…

…sacred steps thereof is granted the spectacle of some more than averagely showy dereliction, in the form of Lord Snatch with his retinue going about his business, trousers lowered to expose skeletal hairless yellowing thighs. Mr Helix Folt vey politely declines His Lordship’s gracious invitation to take part in the morning’s lotophagic ceremony - indeed, how many angels can dance on the end of a needle? - betaking himself instead…

…to say a discourse, in my capacity, I want to say, as trustee of your … comrade revolutionnaire Milord Snatch. His other trustees, Sir Ezra and Sir Gerald and Lady Valerie and those two bankers, tu sais, they requested that I conduct vey discreetly une petite enquête.”

Lord Snatch determined that he might persist with his conceit, and said accordingly,

“God no, Pippin,” drawled Lord Snatch from where he sunbathed nude upon the foredeck’s official beanbag, “only a villanelle or two:

Lord Snatch, who anticipated that he was presently to be met with the bathetic and tawdry reality of a Wizard of Oz, now found his expectation amply justified. There emerged from the darkness of the doorway a plump little fellow, not above five foot four. Upon his bonce, pink skin glistened beneath a sparsely tufted and scraped arrangement of wire wool. From the middle of his fat little face, two…

Lord Snatch, overhearing this transaction was moved to inveigh against the delays thereby portended to the anaesthetising of his abscess.

“Ho hum,” mused Lord Snatch, displaying a becoming sang fraud as the tincture of guano and the quick-dry cement gradually seeped into his upper colon, and there began to set, “ho hum,” said he, “where to begin?”

“They’re all at it,” said Slime despairingly, “coming down into the valley, snatching innocent people off the streets, keeping them in those horrid, slimy sheds for weeks on end. Those poor devils, they must suffer unspeakably,” he added, tapping hitherto unsuspected sources of empathy.

… and then [continued his Lordship]