‘Right.’
‘That will make the transfer so much simpler.’
‘I’ll keep my part of the bargain,’ I said. ‘But can I rely on Maria and Bill being delivered safely?’
‘The first point, Michael, is that you are in no position to distrust me. The second point is: what do I want them for? I don’t hurt people unnecessarily. That would be un-English. I must admit I feel like giving you a clap around the ear-hole with my brass knuckles for having given me such anxiety, but that’s neither here nor there – since you’re not here. Maybe you did zig-zag around the country because you thought someone else was after the loot, but there was nothing to stop you phoning through to base and letting me know. That’s the third point, by the way.’
‘I apologise for the mistake.’
‘It’s just not like you, Michael.’
‘I’m afraid I forgot myself.’
‘I think you did. There isn’t anything else, is there?’
I was freezing. Then I was boiling, in that confined space. If it wasn’t one thing, it was another. Maybe I was getting pneumonia. That would be a relief. ‘What do you mean?’
He cleared his throat. ‘Well, you’re not contemplating anything else, are you?’
‘Like what?’
‘Against me.’
‘That would be stupid.’
‘It most certainly would.’
‘Do you think I’d bite the hand that feeds me?’
‘People sometimes do,’ he said. ‘It’s usually the only one that’s close by. But it’s very short-sighted.’
‘I’m not so daft,’ I said, in the northern accent that he liked to hear so that he could feel superior to it.
‘I didn’t think you were. Where will you leave the car, and the goods?’
I fed in my last ten pees. ‘As from twelve o’clock it’ll be outside my place at Upper Mayhem. You can drop Bill and Maria there. The car keys will be sellotaped under the front left bonnet.’
‘You’re doing a very wise thing. In the meantime, take a quiet holiday.’
‘I intend to go to Holland, via Harwich. Today, if I can make it.’
‘I may be a little hard of hearing, and correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought I heard you mention Norway.’
I was losing my grip. ‘Since then, I changed my mind.’
‘All right, but don’t send me a postcard. Maybe sometime in the future I’ll have a little job for you, but not yet. I want to give you time to recover.’
‘By the way,’ I said, ‘I had to use a few of those old fivers from one of the packets. For expenses. Not many, but I ran short of cash.’
‘That’s all right,’ he said. ‘I owe you a few hundred anyway. As long as you didn’t get greedy and take too many. Money like that costs fingers.’
He hung up. So did I. The steam and chill went on mixing. I was glad to get out into summer drizzle. The bargain was made, in a fifteen-minute phone call which felt like a week. I drove to Upper Mayhem in a state of profound contemplation, as Blaskin (on a good day) might have said in one of his novels. What is treachery except a desire for revenge? Explain it if you can, yet mine in this case was more than that, though it was the last thing I preferred to admit. If Moggerhanger hadn’t got me put in prison I would have followed a different kind of life than the ten year stint at Upper Mayhem. It took that long to get over the shock, and my present troubles stemmed from it, though I suppose I had deserved to go to jail for gold smuggling. So did plenty of others, but I was the chosen one.
Gold smuggling was one thing, however, and to flood the country with drugs, as Moggerhanger was doing, was another, and the desire to get my own back fused well with putting a stop to such dirty work as the reason for what I intended doing. It was a close-run thing within me, all the same. In some films I saw as a kid the hero decided that crime did not pay and he was going to go straight, a sign that there would be no more excitement from then on. My interest died. I much preferred him to be unrepentant to the end and, after yo-yoing between the pits of vileness and the peaks of generosity, get shot dead on the steps of a bank he was trying to get out of. I now knew, though, that repentance had just as much excitement, especially when it was coming out of yourself and not being seen on a film.
Fun-life was over. Moggerhanger was going into action, already ordering Cottapilly, Toffeebottle and Jericho Jim, and maybe Kenny Dukes as well, to close in on the Upper Mayhem area at twelve o’clock. My wrist watch said half past nine, so I had half an hour to pack if I was to catch the boat for Holland.
Clegg put on his optimistic smile as I went through the gate. ‘How did you get on?’
‘Pretty good.’ I pushed Dismal away, who asked the same question with muddy paws and his give-me-a-Mars-Bar eyes. ‘You see that old Ford banger over there?’
‘What about it?’
‘Start it up for me. I’m off to Holland in a bit.’
‘Holland?’
‘Just for a week or two. Then I’ll be back. But while I’m away I want you to look after the place. Keep an eye on Dismal as well. Can you do that for me?’
He seemed dubious.
‘You won’t be alone. Bill and Maria will be back at twelve. You can live together as long as you like. With Dismal, you’ll be four. There’ll soon be five, because Maria’s pregnant. When I get back it’ll make six. If a certain Miss Malham comes to stay there’ll be lucky seven. My mother will make it eight, if she drops in. She might have a girlfriend, so make it nine. Or a boyfriend, or Gilbert Blaskin. If it’s a tight squeeze I can open the ticket office and renovate the signal box. This place has extensive possibilities. There’s even an old carriage on a siding up the line that’s mine. It’s a residence after my own heart, so I know you’ll look after it.’
‘It’ll be safe with me. Are you all right, though?’
‘Never felt better.’
He made a pot of coffee, and we ate scones he had bought in the village while I was at the phone box. I handed him another bundle of notes from Moggerhanger’s pile. ‘Here’s money for food. I wouldn’t like to see you go short.’
The Ford started a treat. Dismal got an eyeful of exhaust that made him drunk, though happy, for the next few minutes, so that he found our parting less tragic than it might have been. My guns and belongings in the Rolls-Royce went to their usual hiding place in the house. Then I plastered the key where Moggerhanger’s lads would find it. I packed my briefcase with money, passport, car logbook and driving licence, as well as Matthew Coppice’s bulging envelope and Frances Malham’s letter. Clegg laid two suitcases of my best clothes in the back seat of the Ford. Dismal sloped around, lost at such activity, and I was sorry I couldn’t take him with me. I ran to the Rolls-Royce for the umbrella without which it seemed impossible to go abroad, even to Holland. Having walked away with it so easily, it was now part of my travelling equipment. In any case, an umbrella made me look halfway eccentric, and therefore respectable.
Whatever I was, while being so busy I did not feel like my old self to such an extent that I began to feel myself again, proving, perhaps, that things had changed, I said to Clegg.
‘Changed? I’ll believe that when I see it. In my view, you’re unchangeable – or should I say incorrigible?’
Maybe he was right. A sense of freedom and adventure was coming back. I was going away, and didn’t know where, which was the only satisfactory condition in which to set out for a foreign place. Without a return date, I’d get a single ticket to the Hook, but wouldn’t visit Bridgitte because I didn’t want to disturb her new-found idyll, no more than I would want her to crock up mine if she came back to Upper Mayhem to see whether or not it had burned down. ‘Look after yourself.’
We embraced. ‘Have a good holiday.’
‘Just give me a fortnight,’ I told him. ‘After a week, read the papers. Things will start to happen. At half past eleven, take Dismal for a walk, and stay away for a couple of hours. Then you’ll be all right.’
‘I’ll d
o that. And as for you – don’t get into trouble.’
‘I’ll try not to,’ I said. ‘But life goes on.’
‘It generally does.’
At a minute to ten I kissed Dismal on the nose, and backed the car onto the road.
Twenty-Nine
I joined the A45 for Bury St Edmunds. At one point I felt an urge to return to Upper Mayhem, come what may, without hemming or whoring. I was no longer attracted by adventures that might lie ahead. My mind was more up and down than the road, and I was even bored with driving. Did I want to live at all? I was either no longer among the numbered, or I had a dose of shellshock. I let the car crawl at thirty.
A Toyota van had a sticker in the window saying ‘Darwin Was Right’. Maybe he was but, unconsciously speeding up, I overtook a Mini with four golden oldies inside. I watched my hands shaking at the wheel. Perhaps I’d gone to bits because it seemed I’d settled Moggerhanger’s hash. The opposition had fizzled out, and there was nothing left to fight. Take away the wall and the shoe pinches, my grandmother said.
Stop this wishful thinking. Pull yourself together. I was playing a con trick on myself, always the first sign of a conman’s downfall. To avoid the trap, I told myself that the unknown in front was more unknown than any unknown had ever been before, even more unknown than prison which, given my character, should have struck me as being less of an unknown than many places in the wide world.
I pressed my foot on the accelerator, otherwise my timetable would shake to bits. If I missed the morning boat from Harwich I would have to hang about, and that might be dangerous. I had told Moggerhanger I would leave from Harwich, knowing he wouldn’t believe me, and would not in that case send the lads up on a right hook from London to stop me getting on the boat. His jampot manner on the phone had not deceived me. He would get me if he could. Maybe a car was reconnoitring the environs of Dover in the hope of spotting me.
I arranged it so that I would get to Harwich with minutes to spare. A traffic holdup in Ipswich would do for me, but I had to take the chance. Buying my ticket, going through passport control and customs, would delay me, though I hoped not for long. If there was no car space on the boat, I would leave it parked and run on as a foot passenger. The car wasn’t worth a hundred quid, and if it got me to Harwich I’d be lucky. I almost wished it wouldn’t, but was surprised at its performance as I picked up speed out of Bury.
The old mechanical bullet of a Black Bess began to make fabulous headway. The pump bottle was empty, but one rainstorm after another came heaven-sent to wash the windscreen. The heating worked to clear the steam. Below Stowmarket a lorry was on its side and a car upended with doors open, the windscreen a patch of white glass in the middle of a field. There was a gap in the hedge where the madcap had gone through. Two youths were helping the police with their enquiries. An ambulance stood by for someone on a stretcher who had been unlucky. A couple of jam sandwiches with flashing lights, and a few friendly coppers, guided us between bollards.
Whenever you’re in a hurry there’s either floods, roadworks or a pile-up. It’s the law of the road, but past experience suggested that you hardly ever got more than one such stoppage in a hundred miles, and I hoped this was the last between me and Harwich. Ages passed while queuing to get by the accident, though it was only six minutes.
I cut off the town of Ipswich and shot down onto the London road. On the dual carriageway I thrashed my ancient banger to the limit, which even in its dilapidated condition put to shame many a better-off car that I overtook. I’d have jumped it over a turnpike gate if one had appeared. The unnerving feeling came to me that when the left fork for Harwich came up in a dozen or so miles I would shoot by and continue my way to London by force of habit, because wonderful London was a giant vacuum cleaner sucking up any bloke like me who got within smelling distance. I’d never felt less like escaping from the country, as if every bone in my body warned me off such an uncharacteristic course.
The Rolls stationed itself parallel to my car, so that our relative velocity was nil. I wondered what the hell he was up to, but then glanced to my right and saw Pindarry at the wheel. The nasty spasm quietened down after I realised I had nothing to fear except death. Kenny Dukes was in the spare seat, so close I could have reached through my open window and touched him. In the rear section were Eric Alport and Jericho Jim. It was four against one in the game of the century.
They had shadowed Upper Mayhem and followed me, and in my stupidity I hadn’t spotted them. I was losing my grip to such an extent that it really was time to get out of the country. My position seemed hopeless. I dreaded to think how long the hunt would go on. They had even been in the vicinity of Upper Mayhem all night, which explained Moggerhanger’s smarmy tone on the blower. He must have been tempted to call them in while we were talking and hear me being strangled.
If they stopped me now, and found the envelope with details of their gaffer’s plans, nothing less than a massacre would take place, beginning with me and Matthew Coppice. I was filled with regret because I had not posted the envelope in Newmarket and taken a chance on it reaching Interpol in Paris. Now that my scheme was on the point of failure there seemed no doubt that it would have got to the right place.
Going along at fifty, I slowed down slightly to consider how I could, with my hands at the wheel, reach for my briefcase, take out the wad of papers, and eat it page by page. Such action no longer seemed feasible when Kenny Dukes lifted a gun and pointed it at my head. Sidney Blood had nothing on this. Nor would the clapped-out author (or authors) have imagined what subsequently took place, and I hesitate to tell it because I’m sure everyone will think I’m lying. But I believe it, since I was there, and I can’t say fairer than that – as one of Sidney Blood’s characters might have put it, in a trash book almost as pernicious as the drugs that the Master Dope Peddler scattered about like Dolly Mixtures.
The Rolls-Royce kept its pace so neatly that I felt part of a catamaran-vehicle two cars wide. Pindarry the demon driver was tops in the business. My window was half open, and Kenny Dukes’s hand holding the Luger came out of his own window and right into my car. His arm was so long that I almost felt the cold touch of steel at my right cheek. I expect they thought to give me a fright before swinging into my track and forcing me to stop. Anything for a lark, with lads like that.
I don’t remember the mechanism of my actions, but what I did was – rapidly, and before Kenny could either fire or withdraw – wind up the window sharp and tight. It was as simple as that, lateral thinking in the absolute sense. Such a thing is hard to believe and I didn’t credit it, either, even at the time, till I realised that poor old Kenny’s hand was trapped.
His expression changed from a leer of triumph to a look of pig-lip panic. He shouted something to Pindarry who, in the pursuit of his driving art, lived in a world of his own. That was his undoing.
Kenny’s wrist was held fast between the top line of the Plexi-glass window plate and the roof of the car. He couldn’t move, nor could he any longer control the gun, at least not sufficiently to take proper aim. Being Kenny Dukes, who saw courage as the last refuge of the Dummkopf, he tried. The grip seemed to paralyse his fingers and the gun wriggled about, so that all I had to do was reach over and take it, before a bullet could smash my temple to mincemeat.
The sides of both cars breathed against each other. They occasionally touched, but as light as a kiss, then glanced away. On that score my worries were nil. It was fortunate for Kenny Dukes that Pindarry was the sort of careful driver who would be welcome in any south-coast old age pensioner town. But he could also be very fast, though he knew it was not advisable to speed up at the moment. In the back Jericho Jim was telling him to stop, while Eric Alport shouted for him to ‘get a move on’. Our world was small in those few minutes, and I had immediate plans for making it bigger.
As good a driver as Pindarry, I still needed all my skill to maintain the same velocity as his car. We had to keep the same distance as well, for fear of manglin
g Kenny’s arm. He’d been much in the wars lately, and I hoped the fact would encourage him to put in an application for danger money from Moggerhanger’s exchequer.
The situation, then, was that two cars were travelling side by side down the dual carriageway at the same speed, and the same distance apart – such as it was – and almost joined in matrimony by the fact that Kenny Dukes’s wrist was trapped in the window of my vehicle. It was a predicament that called for quick thinking, because for the first and last time in our lives we were united by a common desire – that his arm should not be pulled out of its socket.
I had often noticed prior to this incident that whenever quick thinking was necessary, my reactions managed to speed up and make a perfect adjustment. As long as the window stayed closed the car could not overtake and bring me to a standstill. On the other hand, if I kept Kenny’s hand a prisoner we would go like this the whole way to London, which I no longer wanted to do. The turning for Harwich would come in a mile or so, but I wouldn’t be able to take it with Kenny’s helpless arm pegged in my window, the fingers faintheartedly wriggling as if the blood had been drained out.
When I dared, I glanced at Kenny’s face in the other car. His distress would have been terrible to see if he hadn’t been a member of a lynching party whose first target was me. It was a quick course in lip reading, and I learned more of the subject in that minute than in all my previous life. I read every threat, every plea, every curse. If after the fight which would ensue on getting to London I lost the hearing from both ears, I would at least have learned something useful, which wasn’t much of a bonus, though it was more than I had any right to hope for.
Pindarry was also pleading with me to do something. Alport and Jericho Jim threatened and despaired in turn. Even lip reading became unnecessary in the end. ‘Let me go, bastard, let me go!’ Kenny roared.
‘You shouldn’t have wrecked my house, you ape.’
Life Goes On Page 47