England's Greatest Detective

The inter-war years saw the rise of the great detective. When a mysterious death took place at some country house, it was often one of these detectives who would be called upon, often by a baffled police force, to come to everyone's aid and solve the murder.

The greatest of these detectives was, of course, Benjy the Duck, quite possibly the greatest crime-detecting waterfowl in the history of the world. It has always been well-known that ducks are amongst the best crime fighters in the world. Many sheriffs in the American Old West were – for instance – ducks, geese and in Dodge City, of course, a swan: the legendary Six-Gun Half-cock, known as the fastest draw in the west, able to put a bullet in the dead centre of a playing card at a hundred paces and able to outdraw some of the meanest gunfighters of the West.

However, Benjy was a completely different type of waterfowl, from one of the oldest Mallard families in the UK with their own river, he had graduated with a quadruple First at Oxford, as well as being captain of both the rowing and the punting teams, known for his first class mind and a very gentlemanly quack.

These days, of course, Benjy's most famous case remains The Mystery of Tosser Manor.

In those days, the aristocratic Tosser family was well-known throughout England. Often, the cry of 'Oh, look there goes another one of those rich Tossers' could be heard whenever they ventured outside the grounds of their Manor. However, when the body of the heir to the Tosser title, Wrist Tosser, was found in the drawing room of the Manor, Benjy the duck was called in by a baffled local police force.

The body of Wrist had been found by his father, Absolute Tosser, riddled with shotgun pellets, next to the family's faithful old retainer, the butler, Smegma, who was at the time, according to Absolute, holding a smoking shotgun.

Through the use of brilliant detective work, Benjy was able to prove – to the satisfaction of a jury at the Old Bailey – that Wrist had, in fact been killed by his own sister, Coin, who had been having a long-running affair with the family's under-housemaid. It was – of course – a great scandal in those days for a woman to have a lesbian relationship with anyone who was not an ex-school-chum, let alone someone from the servant class. Consequently Coin was desperate to keep the affair secret and was distraught when Wrist caught Coin and the under housemaid naked and dancing the Charleston, in a horizontal position, together.

At the trial, Benjy proved that Coin was outside the room's open window at the time, allegedly shooting peasants, and it was her, not Smegma, that fired the fatal shot, promising the butler certain undisclosed sexual favours if he would hold her gun for a moment whilst she changed for dinner.

Smegma, of course, later confessed that he'd always dreamed of the Lady Coin helping him to polish his decanters and so was more than willing to aid her.

Case solved, Benjy the duck went on to solve even greater and more mysterious crimes as his career progressed, some of which may be revealed here at some later date*.

 

*But probably not.