Tilbury Or Not Tilbury?: That Is The Question.

Readers will need no reminding of the case of Professor Thrupiece and his disappearance from a Swiss hotel room in 2005 following an alleged incident with [a] a pair of potentially hazardous China-sourced nose clippers, and [b] an unidentified woman originally believed to be "une dame Suisse de la nuit" but later circumstantially identified as Ms Shelley-Lulette Sizemore. [See L'Autorités Suisses Case Files [pending] 2005-19]. They will need no further reminding either of [a] the potential involvement of the international money-launderers, people smugglers and so-called "administrateurs de football" known as FIFA, or [b] the criminally incompetent efforts of Commissaire Arsène Bèrglar and his team to get to the bottom of the crime [bas du crime] - celebrity TV appearances permitting.

The Campaign for evidence in the Thrupiece case goes on. A restless public will not be satisfied until all the true facts are known and someone is brought to justice.

Readers will, therefore, be permitted a note of scepticism at news that yet another piece of "evidence" has been uncovered by L'Autorités Suisses - the latest in a long line of drip-drip feeds designed one suspects to keep up appearances and convince an increasingly angry public that progress is being made. A spokesperson for the "Free the Batcome One Campaign" - one of several organisations campaigning to keep the Professor's plight before the public - Mrs Lysander Parker-Knoles-Pryce said today that she was sceptical and believed that this amounted to little more than "the latest in a long line of drip-drip feeds designed one suspects to keep up appearances and convince an increasingly angry public that progress is being made".

That said, Dorset Chief Constable Sir Rising Crimewave is not so sure and sounded uncharacteristically up-beat when he addressed the Chilfrome Ladies Circle yesterday afternoon over tea and cakes [madeira, Victoria sponge, coffee & walnut and date & arrowroot parfait]. "Any new evidence is new evidence", he said, "provided of course that it's genuinely new evidence and not old evidence served up as new evidence in order to make it look new". "What L'Autorités Suisses have indicated to me is that they have genuinely new evidence which could only be regarded as not new (ie old) evidence if one considers the date on which it was discovered rather than the date on which it was created. So you could say - with a degree of semantic accuracy - is that this is newly discovered - or perhaps more accurately still - newly released - old evidence ie evidence of older provenance than its recent discovery might suggest. Indeed I am drawn to believe that the evidence is contemporaneous with the alleged crime/disappearance of the Professor on or about April/May/June 2005 which makes it datable old/new evidence according to your point of view and sense of chronology. Here in the Dorset force we understand this sort of thing very well, though I appreciate that, to the layman, it seems unfathomably complex".

So just what is the "new" evidence? Sources close to the Corfe Mullen Citizen and Weekly Informer, have described it as "helpful" though perhaps more to those interested in Culinary Bio-ethical conference speeches than crime. "That's a niche group", added niche group expert Knish Grüppe, "though even minority interests should command respect in this day and age however distasteful their filthy practices might be to some in the mainstream".

A spokesperson for the RSCBE, however, was less circumspect. "This is probably the single most interesting piece of Thrupiece writing to have come to us in over a decade. Since the Professor's planned plenary session address never happened we despaired of its content ever seeing the light of day. Now the veil is removed and we have glimpsed through a fortuitous window of opportunity something we though lost forever. I was so excited when I heard, I dropped my flask and literally wet myself." On a more cautious note, former RSCBE Secretary and a close friend of the Professor, Ms Audrey Badminton-Court said: "We have an amended draft - which is quite something - but we will never truly know its status or how many revisions the Professor was planning. He was known to be a man who endlessly revised his opinions in a restless search for culinary bio-ethical truths, so perhaps the final version would have been very different. Who knows?" [Who cares [ed]]

That "new/old" evidence. Former colleagues of Professor Thrupiece may find it more intriguing than the police authorities. None will find it more interesting than biographers of Queen Elizabeth I who may have to revise long-accepted conventional wisdom regarding the originality of her Tilbury speech.