Stepping Hill

135

     The purpose of the examination of Bond’s rectal passage was to determine the condition of his troublesome prostate gland. Whether it was in good order or not there was certainly something amiss up there because when the tip of Dr Singh’s probing digit found it the effect on Bond was instant, the outcome alarming. Bond, lying on the doctor’s examination couch facing the wall, shot forward what would have been eighteen inches if the wall hadn’t been only a foot away, with the result that he gave himself the most frightful crack on the head. And with it, fortuitously, the return of his memory.

     Following the explosion in Goldnojaws’ office and the decapitation and instantaneous demise of BloJob Bond had remained unconscious, comatose, for the following five months. His body had been found, severely burned but otherwise largely unhurt, in a wheely-bin in the front garden of an untenanted council house about a mile from the Façade factory. How it had got there no one would ever know, save for Goldnojaws, and he wasn’t telling anybody.
     After Bond’s disappearance, and before his subsequent discovery a week later in the wheely-bin by a startled tramp who was looking in the bin for anything he could find, M had sent Double-O-Eight to Stockport to investigate. Bond’s fellow secret agent had interviewed Goldnojaws but the dwarf had claimed that the last time he had seen Mr Band from L for Leather he had been alive and well. Double-O-Eight had stayed on in Stockport in an effort to find out what Goldnojaws was up to but had not been as successful as Bond and after a few weeks M had recalled him to HQ and the case had been put on the back burner, where it still remained.
     After he had been found in the wheely-bin Bond had been taken to Stockport’s hospital, Stepping Hill, known to the local populace as Step in ill, Step out dead, gallows humour being particularly popular in Stockport, as well it might be. No I.D. had been found on him, Goldnojaws had seen to that, but not many men wear Big Boy of Birmingham underpants with the legend ‘007 inches’ monogrammed on the front so Bond’s identity was quickly established. As soon as the doctors at Stepping Hill had diagnosed that Bond, although comatose, was in a stable condition, he had been moved, on the insistence of M, to a private hospital in London, where he had remained in the same comatose state until three weeks before his prostate examination at the hands of, or rather the finger of, Dr Singh.