So today was a bit of a strange one; the job was to take a load of old carpets and rugs to the tip for an eccentric chap in Clevedon, but things got a bit more exciting than usual when, before we could hit the tip, a squadron of police cars and riot vans turned up and we were all arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to commit murder.

The job had seemed relatively straight forward and all we were to do was collect a musty stack of old carpets and bring them down the large flight of steps from the front door to the road and our waiting van below. When we arrived, our employer had already brought two carpets down to the kerbside and was perched on the end of the rolls, smoking a cigarette. He waved us in and we proceeded to bring the others bundles down one by one.

What we were not aware of was that the ongoing feud between our employee and his neighbour, with several historical incidents and minor disputes over car parking, noise and their shared staircase to their front doors.

Knowing his fussbudget neighbour’s proclivity for curtain-twitching, our employer had staged a noisy ruckus in the early hours and then drawn ample attention while carrying his rolled carpets down the staircase and had given his neighbour a further something to notice from behind his Venetian blinds, with the thoughtful addition of a pair of boots protruding from one end of his shouldered burden during both his journeys. We had not noticed them hidden from view as he sat smoking on our arrival.
With the rest of our employer’s housemates all away since the early hours of that morning, the scene was set for the resident busybody to make a leap of judgement and squander police time with the ill-considered assumption and report of a mass murder in which we were then, by extension, complicit.

I have to admit to being quite impressed with the resourcefulness of our employer in his ploy to irk and embarrass his rival, but the inconvenience of detention while the police unravelled exactly who was at fault here, put the kibosh on our plans for a cooked breakfast at cafe fusion. Apparently, we had been required to complete the gaslighting gambit as our employer only drove a mini and needed a more convincing method of “disposal”. At least he paid us a healthy bonus.