Lady Kelly 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…

…not be said of the third victim, who I think will perhaps repay the appropriate forensics. This was Kelly, my Lady Snatch, widow of the noble Milord, the hereditary bearer of the Snatch escutcheon, latterly a maculate device, much blotted and besmirched. We have touched already in diverse places upon the existence of the poshtitute Lady Snatch, most extensively of course in the episode relating to the demise of her…

“Lady Snatch!” pronounced St Just after a hollow admonitory fashion.

“Don’t be such an arse, Snatch. Your great greats fought at Water-fucking-loo, and so did mine, and now you won’t ascend a fucking gradient. Where’s your fucking gumption?”

“It is all the same to me,” said Lord Snatch, smiting with his Primani bag the hominid, “at all events I would vey much prefer to forgo the pleasure of having his paroxysm expressed upon my tryser. Down boy!”

…the summit, this being none other than … er … Squattocrat Towers, the town residence of Lord and Lady Snatch and their disappointing tiger St Just. Mr Ian Corby to his modest disappointment did not on this occasion discover any pewlies’ eggs or other gourmandise. Withal, being a sanguine sort of a corvid, and not given to dwelling overlong on the culinary solecisms which the spinners and snippers of thread…

To describe the redoubtable matron Lady Snatch as a poshtitute was in point of fact slightly wide of the mark. For, much as there can be no doubt as to the genuine, which is to say legal, nature of her union to the noble whose name she bore, and much as she most certainly did earn her bread and gear by dint of relaxing the stiff muscles of tired businessmen;…

Lady Snatch in spite of her elevation was singularly devoid of airs and graces, and entertained no scruples with respect to welcoming all and sundry to her place of business in Beggarswell Close, Little Mogadishu. Her charity extended even, that is to say most especially, to those adherents of the Eglise de la Bouteille, who made it their practice to congregate upon Turbo Island opposite the Ghastly Hipster Opposite Turbo…

Lord and Lady Snatch and their faithful retainer St Just were to be found downstairs, in the dark and dingy front parlour with the dingy fustian stuff draped over the windows which shut out the clamour and wan light of the dingy road without. The room was in nearly all respects just the same as ever, save for the presence of several bags of saline and other stuff up on…

…There was no loss of life whatsoever, for Lord and Lady Snatch, and also Mr Francis MacMahon - who was with that happy couple in virtue of keeping yet his close vigil over the convalescence of Her Ladyship - had ample warning of the conflagration, and were able to make good their escape in a most orderly fashion via the front door; while for his part, St Just was plucked…