RANDOM REMINDER

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32554, 13 March 1971, Page 22

RANDOM REMINDER

EERIE QUERY

It is not very often that we are reluctant to come to the assistance of a lady in distress. At the very hint of a fair damsel being in need of an errant knight, we are out of the stalls post haste, even if we sometimes give the impression of being closely related to Mount Eden. But this is a difficult case, for we tackle it without any sort of conviction that we can possibly come up with the right answer. The woman wrote to tell us that theother day she was in a butcher’s shop, looking out the window, and observed a middle-aged man in a modem car, driving in a normal fashion. Beside him on the seat was a pair of legs, en-

cased in denim pants and grey work socks, the legs being where a man’s head might be found as a rule. It would be insulting the correspondent > to ask whether she bothered to look and see if the man above the legs was looking through a sunshine roof and we must assume that this was not so. Her theory that the driver was a murderer can also be discounted. No-one has been reported missing since she wrote. We must say that we leaned at first towards the thought that it was probably part of a shop-window dummy. But when one of those is being taken from place to place, it is not usually the custom to dress it first; and it is even less likely that it would be dressed in denims and working socks.

Unfortunately the lady did not say whereabouts in Christchurch she was when she saw the legs, and without that information, it might confuse other readers who have seen pairs of legs on front seats of cars in recent weeks. She also failed to explain the exact attitude of the legs: could their owner have been draped, head down, over the seat in an advanced state of intoxication? But something has to be done about this. Would all readers who have seen a pair of denim and grey sock-clad legs in a car driven by a middle-aged man please advise this column, by post. Only when all the evidence is assembled can we hepe to play Sherlock Holmes. Only genuine sightings count.