Giant Banker Loose in York

(Artist’s expression of what the fiend ought to look like.)

York town centre has been cordoned off and a ginnel put on high alert this evening after eagle-eyed shoppers spotted a gigantic banker alternately relaxing and letting off steam.

A thousand residences have been evacuated, and some hundred more burnt to the ground in an effort to contain the beast, while local farmers stampeded suicide-heifers at it.

Asked whether this desperate tactic had worked, they said they couldn’t tell.

“But probably not.”

According to eye-witnesses, the banker spent some time strolling around the old town, earning perks and emoluments as he took in York’s scenic ambience, before sipping a sort of brown coffee with white bubbles in it at Starbuck’s Coppergate. (Starbuck herself was unavailable for comment, as she was having a another flashback episode, due to insufficient Cylons.) Then he had a ride on a riverboat.

Later, young Vikings from Jorvik Viking Centre reported seeing the dreadful bloodsucker actually smiling.

“It was a chilling sight,” said Viking Hildr Ásgerðardóttir.

“He certainly seemed to be enjoying himself,” agreed her foster-brother, mischievous Viking Slengr Friðason, “after the way of his kind.”

When asked whether they’d seen any of the nation’s wealth being frittered away on the monster, the Nordic rapscallions said they couldn’t be sure.

“I did think I saw something being frittered away one time,” Hildr suspected, “but it might just have been a cup-cake. Oh, and he threw some herceptin to the ducks.”

Antiterror police said they’d had the banker in their sights several times already before it got dark, “but couldn’t shoot him, because the crosshairs kept getting in our way.”

However, it has been further revealed – in a mixture of shock scoops and exclusives – that the banker, who is believed to be a chairman of banks, earned somewhat more than newspaper bosses during the hours of his rampage, a fact that papers are describing as “obscene”.

They were joined in their condemnation of the creature by the Prime Minister, who said that all monsters’ salaries should be cut, “at least to those of a Prime Minister. More than that just doesn’t seem right,” as he draughted a range of cash incentives for the Thing, to win it over to the idea.

Meanwhile the behemoth shows no sign of going into meltdown. But police say it is vital that the usurious gargantua be apprehended before next week’s royal visit to York.

“We were all so looking forward to meeting Her Majesty,” York Mayor, Carnivalia Radon-Radion yearned. “It would be a shame if She were to be inconvenienced by a colossal parasite.”

US Scientists Solve All Mysteries

Scientists from the USA have solved a criminal mystery that had the scientific and legal communities in an uproar of puzzlement for over five hundred years, and then solved more, and more...

The team of military scientists, working at the US’s prestigious naval institute of Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, made the discovery and the other discoveries late last night, “after a particularly gruelling session.”

“We were actually investigating a completely different crime, actually,” the scientists said, speaking as one, “the cowardly suicide-attacks that destroyed the Word Trade Center and the unprovoked madness that damaged one wall of the headquarters of the most powerful military force on earth. But in the course of that one, we developed special investigative techniques that didn’t amount to torture, and, to our surprise, horror and delight, the riddles kept getting solved. By daytime, we realised that the enemy individuals whom the Holy Lamb has blessed into our custody had confessed not only to those evil attacks, but that they were the abductors of Lord Lucan and had killed Cock Robin and the Princes in the Tower and the Lindbergh baby, personally, all 698 of them.”

The scientists denied that any dirt had got onto their multiplying lenses though, and were adamant that their “ideas... methods...” had not become unsound.

“Above all, I’d like to reassure the public that we did not give in to the temptation to be God,” the chief scientist said, mumbling eloquently from behind his black leather science-mask.