by Ripley, Mike
‘Don’t try that on me, Angel, I know you. And I know that that is one of the best digital phones in the world. So you take care of that car, I’ve had it longer than I’ve had you. I’ll give you a ring in the morning and you can pick us up from the station. Is there anything you want bringing back?’
‘A nice pudding wine?’ I suggested.
‘We’ll see,’ she said and switched off.
I put the phone back in the BMW and locked it and I was walking back to the door of the pub when for the second time that evening somebody tried to run me over.
This time the vehicle did at least have lights and the driver did sound a warning.
She shouted ‘Beep! Beep!’ just before her nearside wheel clipped my heel.
I had no idea wheelchairs could corner so well.
9
I had no idea that wheelchairs came equipped with headlights either.
Actually, they don’t. They were a refinement which Melanie had added herself – in fact they were battery-powered bicycle lamps – so that she could get down to the Rising Sun in the evening. She liked her nights in the Rising Sun as there was sod-all on television these days and the Rising Sun didn’t have any steps, so there was automatic wheelchair access. And anyway, it was the only bloody pub in the village, wasn’t it?
I got all this just by holding the door open for her and keeping my toes out of the way as she rolled herself inch-perfectly through the doorway and into the bar, where she was greeted by the regulars with a cry of ‘Mel!’ just like they used to shout ‘Norm!’ in Cheers.
She gave one flick on the wheels of the chair to get her across the floor then did the wheelchair equivalent of a handbrake turn, switching off her cycle lamps as she did so, ending up side-on to the bar dead opposite Ivy.
‘’Evenin’ all. Usual, please, Ivy.’
Ivy cracked the top off a bottle of Beck’s and handed it over the bar. It was a bizarre sight. Ivy could only just see over the bar, Melanie could only just reach it.
‘Keeping well, Melanie dear?’ Ivy asked as she scrabbled for change.
‘Well as expected, Ivy. Almost got a speeding ticket in Folkestone this afternoon.’ She drank beer from the bottle while Ivy laughed politely. ‘And I almost creamed one of your customers just now, outside. You get extra points if they’ve got their back to you.’
‘You’ll have to get a bell put on that thing, young Melanie.’
‘You can ring my bell any time,’ leered Dan.
‘And you should eat cheese late at night,’ she toasted him with her bottle.
‘What did she mean by that?’ Dan hissed in my ear.
‘Dream on,’ I hissed back.
Ted and Marion downed their drinks. Now another customer had arrived, protocol was served and they could leave with a clear conscience.
‘You take care, Ivy love. You know where we are if you need anything,’ said Ted, already half-way to the door.
‘I’ll pop over for a meal one of these nights,’ said Ivy, waving and blowing a kiss to Marion.
‘You do that, dear,’ gushed Marion. ‘You do that soon.’
‘Only if I win the lottery,’ Ivy muttered under her breath.
‘Pricey is it, their pub?’ Melanie asked her.
Ivy levered herself on the bar with her elbows so she could look over and down.
‘You’d have to drink a lot more bottles of Beck’s before I could afford a prawn cocktail at Ted Lewis’s Grill and Carvery,’ she said emphatically, then let herself drop back to earth with only the slightest of wobbles on her high heels.
‘You can’t beat crawn pocktails and beef from the Cravery,’ the Major mused, smacking his lips.
‘Cravery?’ Melanie mouthed silently, shaking her head.
‘Which reminds me, I have to get home to my rot poast. Goodnight children, one and all.’
He finished his beer and then wiped a forefinger along the line of his moustache. Then he stood up, pushed his bar stool up to the bar and nodded to each of us in turn before turning on his heel and marching, stiff-backed, out of the door.
‘Pot roast?’ Melanie rolled her eyes. ‘More like a Sad Person’s single portion TV dinner.’
‘I have to ask,’ I said, moving down the bar to her chair, ‘where was the Major a major?’
‘You mean like what regiment?’
‘Like which army?’
‘Oh, he wasn’t ever in the army. We call him the Major after that stupid old git character in Fawlty Towers.’
‘And he doesn’t mind?’
‘Don’t think he’s ever seen it. Don’t care if he has. Can I buy you a drink to make up for running over your foot?’
‘Sure, I’ll have a shandy, though. I’m driving.’
‘That your BMW out there?’
‘Yes, well it’s my . . .’ I bit my tongue to stop myself saying the ‘w’ word. ‘It’s the firm’s.’
‘So what do you do then?’
I tried to remember what I had told the others. It was probably one of the rules of being a private eye: try and keep your stories relatively straight, or at least only slightly curved.
‘I tell people I’m in fashion photography, but really I just drive the photographer’s equipment around.’
‘That sounds cool.’
‘It’s not really.’
‘For round here, it’s life in the fast lane, trust me.’
She put her bottle on the bar and unzipped her coat, a black padded storm jacket with enough pockets to accommodate a crate of hand grenades, and began to ease it off her shoulders. I put out a hand to help her, but gingerly, knowing that being disabled doesn’t mean being incompetent. She didn’t seem to mind. Under the coat she was wearing a blue TALtop. I hoped it was one of the later models where the dye didn’t run. She had arranged it V-neck style to emphasise her cleavage. Both she and the TALtop were doing a grand job.
‘You hang that up and I’ll get the drinks,’ she said, edging forward in her chair so I could pull the coat out from under her. ‘Oh, get my darts out first, though, will you . . . ?’
‘Roy,’ I said reaching into one of the coat pockets and producing a plastic case containing three brass darts with large green feather flights. ‘You looking for a game?’
‘You looking for a hiding?’ she said without looking at me.
‘So you’re good, are you?’ I growled back, putting on the tough-guy act.
Ivy placed a pint of shandy and another bottle of Beck’s on the bar.
Melanie pointed a dart at them and said:
‘Those are the only drinks I’m buying tonight.’
‘Game on, then.’
After the first game, I realised that the darts Ivy had loaned me were faulty.
After the second game, I was sure that the dart board was hung too low. It was certainly not at eye level. After the third game I remembered that I hadn’t played for at least two years so no wonder I was rusty.
‘Best out of seven?’ Melanie asked sweetly as I pulled her dart out of double sixteen again.
Whilst we had been playing I had managed to get a good look at her. She was about twenty, with straight shoulder-length blonde hair tied back in a pony tail with a single red hair band. She wore no make-up, not even lipstick, to spoil a clean, freckled complexion and her hair smelled of a mint shampoo.
She put her chair at right angles to the board when she threw her darts but made no protest when I pulled them out for her each time after chalking the score on the blackboard.
‘I’m not in your league,’ I told her. ‘You must practise a fair bit.’
‘I played a lot at university, but since the accident I only play down here to hustle drinks.’
I hadn’t dared ask up until now and I still wasn’t sure how to ask, or whether I should. Was she giving me an opening here?
‘You get three guesses,’ she said.
‘Excuse me?’
‘Three guesses as to how I got into this wheelchair. I know you’re dying to as
k and somebody’s bound to tell you when the lads arrive. So let me make you suffer. It’s one of the few pleasures I have left.’
Lads? What lads?
‘OK then, if you insist. A car accident – you said it was an accident.’
‘Nope.’
‘Riding then; a riding accident.’
‘Like the guy who played Superman? Nope, ‘fraid not. Last chance.’
She fluttered her eyelashes at me, I swear she did. It was more than cute.
‘You were involved in some bizarre sexual experiment and it all went horribly wrong?’
She threw back her head and laughed at that.
‘Good call. I’ll use that one, but unfortunately it’s wrong. You lose, your round.’
‘Story of my life,’ I sighed. ‘Was I close?’
‘Sadly, no. I was a mouse and I fell off the battlements of the Enchanted Castle.’
She put her Beck’s bottle to her lips but kept looking at me, checking or maybe timing me, to see if I could work it out.
I waited until she’d finished drinking, wiped my chalky fingers on the leg of my jeans then held my hand out for the empty bottle.
‘Dangerous place, that EuroDisney,’ I said.
The ‘lads’ arrived about thirty minutes later but by then I knew that Melanie (you can call me ‘Mel’ but any reference to Spice Girls invokes serious shit) was indeed twenty and heading for her second year of a law degree at Southampton, or would have been had it not been for the holiday job in France. And yes, she had played a mouse, one of several, in the daily parade and had fallen off a motorised float right in front of a family from Birmingham and a pimply youth had pointed at her and yelled: ‘Look, Dad, pissed as a rat!’
That sort of thing, I agreed, could scar you for life not to mention putting a damper on your career prospects within the Disney corporation. I also told her I thought she must have made a very sexy mouse and did she fancy having dinner with me somewhere? After all, mice had to eat.
‘Ivy’ll do something for us, she always lays on breakfast when the lads pop in to play darts,’ she said straight-faced. ‘Don’t you, Ivy?’
‘Oh yes, Mel love. I’ll do one of my specials if the boffins turn up,’ Ivy said, just to prove she had been listening.
I was slightly relieved, not that I had been planning anything special. After all, I was making this up as I went along. But the prospect of leaving Ivy with only Dan as a customer seemed a heavy responsibility and one not to be undertaken lightly. Pubs shouldn’t be empty, it was against the law of nature. Or it should be. Hang on a minute; had Melanie said ‘breakfast’?
‘Who are the boffins?’ I asked Mel. With my luck they would turn out to be the local chapter of Hell’s Angels.
‘Computer programmers or software jockeys as they like to call themselves. They’re all my age but they’re not a bad bunch.’
I wasn’t sure how to take that ‘my age’ reference but I was beginning to like Mel so I decided not to let her tyres down just yet.
‘Where do they come from? I wouldn’t have thought this place was on the regular circuit for a lads’ night out.’
‘Oh, they work in the village,’ she said airily.
‘What? You got some sort of silicon valley hidden away here?’
The question was genuine. I had driven through the village twice now and not caught a glimpse of anything which could provide gainful employment unless it involved a scythe or a hoe.
‘I’d hardly call it that. They’ve just converted a few of the outbuildings from the old hop farm.’
‘You mean like an oast house?’ I was showing off, proving I knew the term for what is the unofficial logo of Kent, the tall conical brick buildings which tourists think are windmills that have had their sails stolen. ‘I don’t remember seeing an oast house in the village.’
‘There isn’t one,’ said Mel, chinking her bottle against my glass. ‘The nearest oast was turned into a stockbroker’s country retreat about twenty years ago. We just had a farm here, only a couple of fields, and that went bust. The boffins work in the old stripping sheds and storehouses. And before you say anything, the stripping shed was where they stripped the hops off the bines.’
‘Does everybody in Kent grow hops?’
‘No, we just have to pretend we do. Did you know the hop was related to cannabis?’
Of course I did.
‘No, really?’
‘Scooter said he could go into big time Ecstasy production there and the Drug Squad wouldn’t find them because the sniffer dogs would have a snootful of hops.’
‘Sounds a bright guy. Scooter, did you say?’
I was getting into this asking questions business, just like a real private eye. I wondered if there was a teach-yourself CD-ROM out on it yet.
‘Oh, Scooter’s sharp enough. So sharp he’ll cut himself, as my mother would say. Lots of big ideas, not much staying power.’
‘You’ve known him for long?’ I tried.
‘We were at uni together, until he dropped out.’ She looked up at me suspiciously. ‘Why are we talking about Scooter? We should be talking about me.’
‘Just checking out the opposition,’ I said, showing teeth.
She laughed at that.
‘Scooter’s not opposition, but there is opposition. It’s just he works during the week.’
‘He’s not one of the Seven Dwarves or anything, is he?’
‘Oh no,’ she said, catching on immediately, ‘he works in London, not EuroDisney.’
‘Your other boyfriends are here,’ said Dan from the end of the bar, proving there was nothing wrong with his hearing except when it came to his round.
‘Hey, some of them are mine, you know,’ Ivy chipped in, putting four empty pint glasses and six half-pint ones on the bar. ‘Mel can’t handle all of them herself.’
‘You behave yourself, Ivy Bracegirdle,’ snapped Mel, flicking her hair behind her ears. ‘I don’t need you to show me up, I can manage well enough myself.’
‘You can say that again,’ Dan came back.
As they exchanged banter I drifted over to one of the windows and stood on tiptoe so I could see out of the top half of unfrosted glass, over the yellowing net curtains.
In the car-park, a 4 x 4 Jeep had pulled up near Amy’s BMW. The interior light showed me two figures climbing out and one of them walking round from the driver’s side. They both took a good look at the Beamer and then the one who had been driving shook his head, closed the door of the Jeep and activated the central locking so that the indicators and sidelights flashed once and then went out.
More light appeared, silhouetting the new arrivals, from the headlights of two vehicles turning into the car-park from the village road. They pulled up alongside the Jeep and killed their lights. One of them was some sort of pick-up truck, the other an estate car. Doors opened and half a dozen shapes gathered, all looking at Amy’s BMW.
A mobile phone trilled and startled me into reaching for my pocket even though I knew I had left mine in the car. It was a purely Pavlovian reaction and I should have known better. I would never own a phone which was programmed to ring the first six bars of ‘When I’m Calling You’.
It was Mel’s. I hadn’t noticed the mobile in a leather holster which she had stuck to the side of her wheelchair with Velcro strips.
As she answered it, Dan moaned: ‘Bloody things, they drive the Major mad.’
I moved nearer to him and away from Mel, who turned her chair through an arc, so that it didn’t look as if I was earwigging.
‘He mentioned it,’ I said. It was about the only thing the Major had said which I had taken notice of. ‘Driving BMWs and talking loudly into mobile phones. Must be a red rag to a bull.’
‘That’s only part of it,’ said Dan, anxious to make conversation as his glass was almost empty. ‘They always play loud music, you know, that dance music stuff. And they’ve usually got the windows down. You can hear them coming a mile off.’
‘That
gets the Major too, does it?’
‘That –’ Dan dropped his voice – ‘and that fact that they’re black.’
I made an O with my mouth and nodded wisely.
‘Is that why he went? Before they turned up?’
‘Oh, I don’t mean those computer boffins. Those lads are all right. It’s the others that get the Major’s goat.’
I was about to ask what others but never got the chance.
Mel had finished her call without me noticing and was packing the phone away as the door opened and a procession of young guys entered, each one flapping a hand and nodding and saying: ‘Mel! Ivy!’
Ivy was pulling beer into the pint glasses and pouring orange juice into the smaller ones and saying: ‘Now who’s driving tonight, lads?’
Mel was acknowledging them individually although at first it sounded as if she had taken me seriously and was trying to summon up the Seven Dwarves. But once I tuned into her wavelength, the names did make some sort of sense, relating to what the guys looked like or what they were wearing.
‘Hi, Combo.’
(Blue denim jeans and jacket.)
‘Hi, Ginge!’
(A redhead.)
‘Elvis!’
(Because he wore glasses like Elvis Costello does.)
‘Painter, how’yer doing?’
(This to a short, chubby youth who wore white, paint-stained overalls.)
‘Yo, Axeman.’
(That one had me fooled until I saw the kid’s eyes close up as he claimed a drink at the bar.)
‘Right, lads, sort yourselves out,’ Ivy was saying. ‘There’s juice for the drivers. How many more pints?’
‘Hi, Scooter, did you bring your arrows?’ said Melanie towards the door.
‘Of course I have, you foolish female. Prepare to be thrashed.’
I turned my head slowly, though nobody was looking at me, to get a good look at Scooter. He was my height but Mel’s age, with a flop of blond hair over one eye, which hopefully got in the way when he threw the heavy metal darts he was brandishing. His whole body language said he was the leader of the pack and the others parted to let him get to the bar first. I noticed he was clipping a Nokia mobile on to his belt and wondered if he had just made a call.