The only other mistake you made is that the police have been called five times, not just once. Despite this, ‘Mad’ Roy has never received any punishment stronger than a mild caution. This clemency is doubtless partly due to his assiduous work for the Gatshire Constabulary. Having seen the police achieve much success in keeping motorists on their toes simply by ‘parking’ cardboard patrol cars on road bridges, he came up with the idea (if not, perhaps, invention) of cardboard burglars to keep the members of the local Neighbourhood Watch on theirs. This was not such a ridiculous idea, because at the time the Watch had never had a single incident of note to report. Mr Boffin’s mannequins changed all that. The villagers flooded the police, and one another, with calls describing a number of shifty-looking ne’er-do-wells and potential miscreants. One particular ‘burglar’ was seen ‘loitering’ outside Saint Luke’s on no less than a dozen occasions. (‘He was standing suspiciously still,’ noted a witness in The Flying Cow.) Eventually, Mr Boffin’s part in all this was uncovered, and the chief of the Gatshire force gave him a personal message of thanks for his altruistic work that was only slightly tarnished by what its public-spirited recipient considered to be the unnecessarily severe tone of the accompanying request that he immediately desist from all such activities. In retrospect, it was probably just as well for him that no real offences were committed in the village while his replicas were at large.

Mr Boffin dropped out of school when he was fourteen, but despite his lack of formal education he has been the source of any number of contraptions, none of which has been commercially developed. Many of his first inventions, he concedes, were either illegal outright or else could have been put to very good use for criminal purposes. It was his experiments in the field of art forgery that led him to dream up one of his most enduring brainchildren (given its age, perhaps this ought to be in inverted commas too): the multi-pronged paintbrush he built for Cathal Ó Flaithbheartach. Mr Ó Flaithbheartach is the village’s resident painter; you will hear more about him and his brush anon.