They had traversed the staircase with no interruptions and found a locked door at the top. After Ridley picked the lock, followed by a surreptitious kick from Jimmy, they found themselves in an identical Civil Servants’ office as the one two floors below. This room, thankfully, was empty.

“This floor’s gonna be swarming with grey coats,” Jimmy said to them. “Keep an eye out, we’re gonna need to nab 'em one, maybe two, at a time at most. We can’t afford to arouse any suspicions.”

Jimmy popped the office door open, had a quick scope around, and then beckoned them to follow him. In single file they crept down the empty hallway. The hallways of this floor were clean and, most importantly, devoid of roving mobs.

“No good James,” Barney whispered. “Too open here, even if we did catch a single fella, by the time we strip him and swap clothes, we’d surely be rumbled.”

“Yeah,” Jimmy agreed with a look of concern across his face.

“We need somewhere that we know they’re guaranteed to go alone or in pairs,” Ridley said thinking aloud.

“Where we can catch them unaware,” Barney added.

“Somewhere we can isolate them away from witnesses,” Jimmy concluded.

Nairo had stopped walking while they pondered the location of their ambush.

“What about there?” Nairo asked, pointing to the men’s toilet.

“The lav?” Barney asked, aghast.

“Oof Sarge, jumping a geezer while he’s having a slash, that’s low.” Ridley admonished.

“Bad form really,” Barney tutted.

“They’ll be alone, unaware, and vulnerable!” Nairo argued.

“Exactly!” Ridley and Barney said in unison.

“Exactly,” Jimmy said with a tilt of his head.

“Come on, before we’re spotted,” Nairo said as she led them into the men’s toilet.

“There’s just some things you don’t do James,” Barney moaned as he followed them in.

*

They barely had time to get into position before their first victim strolled into the toilet. Ridley, Nairo, and a begrudging Barney, hid in the stall while Jimmy stood at the urinals. The man who had come to relieve himself was dressed in the typical uniform of Pleasently’s thugs: a heavy charcoal grey overcoat, a dark newsboy cap, matching dark waistcoat, and a crumpled workman's shirt with no tie. He whistled to himself as he began his business. Jimmy hesitated and the man noticed the furtive looks Jimmy was giving him.

“You alright?” the man asked suspiciously.

“Yeah… thought I had to go but now I don't,” Jimmy answered lamely.

“Where you from?” the man asked, his eyes narrowed in suspicion. “I don’t recognise you.”

“Yeah… about that,” Jimmy leapt just as the man started to withdraw a short club from within his coat. Jimmy grabbed the bat and as the man twisted he sprayed piss across the bathroom.

“Ughhh,” Jimmy groaned in disgust.

He wrestled with the thug as the toilet stall’s door exploded open and the four of them bundled on to the still urinating man.

“Gerroff me!” the thug snarled.

He lashed out with his foot and caught Ridley in the stomach and then tried to bite Jimmy’s hand. Nairo grabbed his greasy hair and pulled his gnashing teeth away while Jimmy tried to trap his arms. The man was strong and desperate. He bucked and fought against them like a wild animal.

“Terribly sorry about this old chap,” Barney said as he rapped the man across the back of the head with his own club.

It took two blows before he finally went limp. The four of them stood around the fallen man trying to catch their breath.

“Can we brain the next one before he starts pissing?” Ridley asked.

“Agreed,” Barney said, while fastidiously washing his hands in the sink.

“Drag him into the stall,” Jimmy said. “Tie him up with his belt and take his coat, hat and any weapons.”

Ridley and Nairo grabbed him under his armpits and began heaving the unconscious lump into the stall. The door to the men’s room banged open and two more men walked in laughing.

“And then I took the pole and shoved it…” the first man stopped as he took in the sight before him.

“Now, let’s not overreact fellas…” Jimmy said calmly.

“What the f…” the man didn’t finish his thought as Ridley leapt from the stall next to him and thumped him across the head with a blackjack he had found on the unconscious man.

“Ow! What you do that for!”

Ridley just stood and looked at the man perplexed for a moment before raising the blackjack again. That was when both thugs seemed to come to their senses after their initial shock and realised there was violence to be had. The second man through the door drew a small pole from his coat sleeve and the one Ridley had hit charged at Ridley, his hands finding the PI’s throat. Ridley was slammed backwards into the stall he had come from, trapping Nairo and the unconscious, partially tied up thug.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

“He’s choking me!” Ridley croaked as they slipped and tripped in the confined stall.

“I can’t…” Nairo fought breathlessly as she was crushed under their weight, the tiny stall providing no space to swing a punch or wriggle free.

Instead, she did the only thing she could: she swung her free foot between Ridley’s legs. She was rewarded with a soft oomph noise as all the air left the attacker’s body, but the thug wasn’t the only one she hit.

“You kicked me!” Ridley wheezed as he, and his former attacker, both curled over in agony.

“Sorry,” Nairo said sheepishly.

Outside the stall, Barney and Jimmy were having a similarly tough time. Their opponent was a wildman. In one hand he swung a pole and the other a razor blade.

“Bad form pulling out a cutter in a fist fight!” Barney admonished hotly while he danced around the flashing blade.

“You’ve jumped me in the pisser!” The man retorted with obvious outrage.

“That is… a fair point sir,” Barney conceded, narrowly dodging the swing of the razor blade. “Politics is a dirty old game.”

“Let’s clean it up!” Jimmy cried as she hurled a brick of soap at the man’s face.

He hit him square in the eye, giving the duo the opportunity to rush in and disarm him. But the man would not go down. He roared and fought like a bear. Grappling and sliding across the slick floors, Jimmy lost his footing and was hurled bodily into one of the urinals, breaking it from the wall.

Back in the stall, there was a much more sluggish but equally desperate battle raging. No one could gain the upper hand in the cramped space. At some point, the door had slammed shut behind them and dislodged from one of its hinges, trapping all four of them in the cramped cubicle. There was nowhere to step or gain purchase thanks to the unconscious man folded over on the floor. Ridley had gotten his foot stuck in the toilet and Nairo had tripped and was halfway horizontal while she clung to the long coat of the thug. They all threw pointless punches, their elbows slamming painfully into the cubicle walls, and the majority of their blows missing wildly. The combatants grew increasingly sweaty and exhausted as their battle raged on.

Outside the stall, Barney had managed to gain the upper hand, relative to his allies. One of the pipes to the urinal had been broken and spewed water across the floor. Barney had taken this chance to get behind his opponent. Initially, he had tried to choke the man out, but when that didn’t work he opted to leap on to his back and ride him to exhaustion. His plan was effective, if somewhat painful, for the rider. The man heaved and bucked, slamming Barney into every sharp corner and unforgiving tiled wall he could find, until his legs went weak and his lungs screamed for reprieve.

“I must insist that you desist!” Barney growled through clenched teeth.

“F-f-fuck off,” the man wheezed.

“Really there is no cause for vulgarity!”

With that, Barney was able to slip his forearm under the man’s chin. It didn’t take long. Purple faced, the man thudded to the floor unconscious. Barney pulled himself up, his chest heaving and his mouth bloody from his opponent’s desperate headbutts. He looked around and saw the hurricane of fists and feet flying around the toilet stall. The toilet door had finally come loose of its final hinge and flapped erratically in the fracas. Barney saw his chance and charged across the toilet floor to their rescue, only to hit a puddle of what he hoped was water, and he slid at full tilt into the melee. He slammed chest first into the thug’s back, knocking the wind out of himself, and cracking the man’s head into the toilet cistern. There was a disgusting crunch and finally the cubicle fell still. Barney pulled himself to his feet, like a horse on ice, and surveyed the chaos of the destroyed men’s room.

“I say, somewhat less subtle than a chap would have hoped for,” he muttered as he rubbed his bruised sternum.

“Barney, get this lump off of us!” Ridley’s muffled cry came from within the depth of the toilet stall.

Grabbing hold of the edges of the stall, Barney gave the unconscious body a tremendous tug, freeing his long trapped comrades. Ridley had at some point freed his foot but then ended up laid across the now broken toilet, his neck stuck awkwardly in the corner of the stall. Nairo, meanwhile, had become jammed into the other corner of the stall: the original man they had ambushed had acted somewhat like a mud slide and trapped her up to her knees. Both her nostrils were streaming blood and there was a chunk of her dark curly hair wafting about her head.

“Hate to be the chap with the big bonce but I told you this was a bad idea,” Barney said breathlessly.

Nairo just nodded and spat blood from her mouth. Together, they pulled Ridley up. He wobbled and stood carelessly on the face of one of the unconscious men as he fought his way, white faced, out of the stall.

“Gnome witch said it be in a toilet… but not like this…” he stumbled and slid over to the sink where he splashed water on his face. Barney and Nairo joined him.

“Are you alright?” Nairo asked Jimmy, who was still sat on the floor.

“Yeah…” he groaned. “Just waiting for a helping hand.”

Barney pulled Jimmy to his feet and they leaned on each other, wincing and smarting all over. The two couples exchanged looks with each other.

“What happened out here?” Ridley asked, looking around the destroyed bathroom.

“What happened in there?” Jimmy countered as he looked at the state of Nairo’s bloodied face.

Ridley looked over at Nairo, who was jamming wadded up tissue into her bleeding nostrils.

“I think we’ve all learned a lesson here today,” she said solemnly.

“Yeah,” Ridley agreed, looking at his own battered face in the cracked mirror. “The mens room really is sacred.”

“Sorry gang, hate to be bobby big bonce again…” Barney began.

“That’s not a saying,” Ridley interjected.

“Is it not?”

“No… in fact I would go so far as to bet that no human being has ever put that particular sequence of words together since humanity was squeezed out of the Goo.”

“Well perhaps not where you grew up,” Barney countered genially.

“What were you gonna say Barn?” Jimmy asked, wringing urinal water out of his hair.

“Ahh… yes… hate to say it really… but there’s only three unconscious men here. That means we only have three coats and there’s four of us.” He ended his sentence with a very middle class shrug that was all eyes and teeth.

“I’ll be honest, I don’t think I’ve got another row in me,” Jimmy said, leaning heavily on the sink. Half of his face was slowly growing darker with tinges of red and purple: yet another livid bruise to join his growing collection.

“I miss Cripper,” Ridley moaned.

“What do we do now?” Nairo asked them.

They all looked around them.

“We could hope the next fella comes in, slips, and brains himself,” Ridley offered.

“Maybe we could just threaten the next one,” Nairo said. “You know, gimme the coat or end up like this lot.”

“And what if there’s more than one?” Jimmy responded.

They fell quiet for a minute.

“I say… how curious,” Barney said, looking at the toilet stalls.

“What?”

“Why would that toilet stall be locked?” he replied.

All three of them looked at the adjoining toilet stall. The little half circle on the door lock was red. Jimmy, Ridley, and Nairo exchanged looks.

“There’s no way we’re that lucky,” Nairo said.

“See, that’s where you're showing your inexperience, Sarge.” Ridley said to her with a grin. “No case is ever solved without a bit of blind luck.”

He limped over to the stool and gave it a little push. The door stayed firmly shut. Ridley put his finger to his lips and then leaned an ear towards the door. In the silence, they could hear a gentle snore coming from within.

“No way!” Jimmy mouthed.

Ridley smirked and then kicked the door open. Inside, a hefty, grey coated man was fast asleep. There was an empty glass bottle at his feet and it was easy to guess why he hadn’t woken up during their brawl. Drunkenly, the man’s eyes fluttered opened. He blinked and smacked his thick wet lips, confusion baked into his doughy face.

“Lady luck’s a bitch,” Ridley said as he slammed his fist into the man’s face, putting him back to sleep.