Sentence The Fivehundredandseventyninth 

For all her natural equipoise, her famous feats of mental detection which have won her plaudits from law enforcement agencies across the world – there are twentyfive murderers and three murderesses languishing in British prisons solely because of my cousin's unique ability to look at the evidence in a case and say "I don't suppose that, if e=mc2 and the square on the hypotenuse were Mr Dramatiser (for example) and the sum of the squares of the other two sides were the Chuckle Brothers (for example) you would think that Mrs Simpson (for a third example) would have left that note other than under duress, which would incline one to the idea that Harry Chuckle might have murdered Barry Chuckle rather than let Toni Dramatiser win the prize (being Mrs Simpson) and blow me down with a feather, wouldn't all the protocols of Forensic Science, including Fingerprints, Blood Spatter and DNA not prove her right, once looked at in just that same way as she – the brilliantly deductive WPC Isa Urquhart (who has rebuffed all efforts to force promotion on her preferring, like T E Lawrence, the hero of her youth who, after the First World War, shunning all efforts to bestow honours and privileges upon him, joined the Royal Air Force in the anonymous guise of Aircraftsman Ross) is not very clued up when it comes to L'Affairs D'Amour and is always getting herself in a bit of a pickle, or stew, or hot water, over some ill-advised – if advised at all, which is more like it – involvement with what our Aunts rather tartly sum up as "the wrong sort" believing that her approach to Love, Romance and well, Sex is like some fleshly degustation – a bit of this, a bit of that, and a bit

of the other – and because she does seem drawn to what poor young Joe Orton referred to as "the Rough Side of the Street" with all it's darkened doorways, dark alleys and dark corners – she is prone

to hearing in the sound of a glass harp meaning which might elude the rest of us: dissonant tonalities, severed harmonies, and even an altered scale – she often ends up confined to bed with a quite inexplicable fever which reminds me, at least – and shows the roots of my own interest in detection – of Sherlock Holmes's withdrawal from the world to an enclosed space, not 221B but inside his own tortured mind and soul, fuelled by cocaine and the fug of pipe smoke, from out of which would come the telling point and put a murderer behind bars: and after her ecstasy of last night – around which I will draw a discreet curtain – she now lies burning up with an intense fire, unable to string three
words together, barely able to take more than a few sips of liquid, quite unable to face solid (or even

liquid) food, and our Aunts and I, supplemented by the devoted Milly Millican (also a WPC and in the absence of Gertie Mountcastle) nurse her as best we can and can really only wait for it to run its course and Isa, the Isa we all love, return to her own vital and passionate self but, such are things tonight that I do not expect the crisis to be reached until some time tomorrow afternoon, for she is a slow-burning fuse and the shower of sparks which will illumine the world can seem to be a long time a-coming!