by Ripley, Mike
‘Where are Chip and Dale?’ Mel asked him.
‘Right behind us. Don’t worry, the gang’s all here.’
Scooter reached into the pocket of his jeans and produced a wedge of notes, peeling off a twenty for Ivy.
‘How’s my favourite landlady?’ he asked, dripping with charm.
‘The better for seeing you, my dear, but I’d settle for you being ten years older and me being ten months younger,’ cackled Ivy.
The gang laughed along, as did Mel.
Dan took a few seconds to work it out then joined in.
I let myself smile but over the laughter I was straining my ears.
Scooter had left the door to the pub open and from the carpark came the distant but unmistakable sound of breaking glass. Just the sort of sound you get if you feed empty bottles into a bottle bank.
I thought it might be a good idea to stick around.
But what did I know?
10
If there was such a thing as a final exam for private detectives, then one of the papers – or at least forty per cent of practical course work marks – should be dedicated to the Hanging Around In Pubs unit of the curriculum. You find out so much so easily, and some of it is probably true.
Just by listening to their smalltalk and observing their body language as they played darts with Melanie, it was obvious that there were differences within the ‘boffins’.
Combo, Ginge, Elvis (Costello) and Painter were all of student age and almost certainly contemporaries of Scooter. One of them, Ginge, had a battered paperback edition of Marcuse’s Eros and Civilisation in the pocket of his jacket, which was a bit of a giveaway, as was his total inability to score accurately at darts. But there were other clues, such as their constant references to daytime television, especially children’s programmes, and up-and-coming bands still flogging around the campus circuit.
The two Mel had referred to as Chip and Dale were the same age as the others, but not in the same peer group. They wore anoraks and had tried to grow beards and they sat to the side of the darts players rather than joining in, drinking orange juice and not talking. After a while, Chip (or it might have been Dale) produced a small travelling chess set from a deep pocket and they began to play. I would bet my own money they were vegetarians.
Axeman was the odd one out and in more ways than one. He was older than the others for a start and certainly not a student, now or in the past. He kept himself apart from the group, back to the bar, watching them – and especially Melanie – with wide, flashing eyes. He was thin and twitchy and his eyes really did bulge, which suggested he had a hyperactive thyroid. Either that or he was a heavy drug user.
I couldn’t work out where he fitted into the group. If he was a software programmer, then so was I.
I offered to buy Dan another pint and asked for a tomato juice for myself, hoping that Ivy stocked such exotic cocktails.
‘You driving tonight as well, Roy?’ she asked and I almost missed the look the Axeman flashed me.
‘Yeah, I’ve got the car,’ I said without thinking anything much of it. ‘And I’d better go after this one, find myself some supper.’
‘Stay here, my dear. I’m doing my specials for the lads so you might as well. One more won’t make any difference and I’ve got the water on.’
How could I refuse? If I had she would have flayed me with her pearls.
‘If you’re sure . . .’ I said hesitantly.
‘It’s no bother.’
She disappeared through the back of the bar into her living quarters. At my side, Dan chuckled quietly.
‘You’re very lucky, yer know. To get offered one of Ivy’s specials.’
‘She’s a good cook, then?’
Before he could snigger a reply, Ivy’s head appeared in the bar again.
‘Plain or spicy, Roy?’
‘Er . . . spicy, thanks.’ In for a penny.
‘Good choice,’ hissed Dan, his shoulders heaving.
‘Should I send out for pizza?’ I asked him.
‘You haven’t time,’ he said smugly. ‘It’ll be ready in three minutes.’
He was almost spot on, perhaps twenty seconds out, but then that is as long as it takes to boil an egg. Or about sixteen eggs to be accurate.
‘Who ordered spicy?’ Ivy shouted. ‘Haven’t you got the spoons out yet, Melanie?’
Ivy appeared clutching a huge tray on which were eight double egg cups complete with boiled eggs and two plates of toast which had been cut into strips an inch wide. One plate had buttered ‘soldiers’ and the other had been spread with Marmite. Plain or spicy. It all made sense.
‘You know I can’t get behind the bar these days, Ivy,’ Melanie was moaning. To illustrate the point, she drove her wheelchair at the gap where the bar flap was open and juddered to a halt. Her chair was about an inch either side too wide for the gap.
‘No wonder you haven’t had to change the vodka recently, Ivy,’ Scooter piped up and the others, all except Axeman, giggled politely.
‘You watch your lip, Mr Scooter-Computer. Now where’s the salt?’
Boiled eggs, Marmite soldiers and salt; what a feast.
‘It’s the only thing she knows how to cook,’ Dan whispered in my ear.
‘That’ll be £2.50, Roy love,’ said Ivy, holding out her hand.
I wondered if Amy had finished her pudding wine by now.
I drank my drink and dipped my toast soldiers into the yolks of my eggs and when I had finished I realised I was still hungry, stone-cold sober and had run out of things to do.
Ivy was washing glasses and polishing them with a tea-towel. Dan was thinking loudly about the chances of me buying him another drink. The ‘boffin’ gang had sat in a group to eat their boiled eggs, except for Axeman, who had pulled out a much-folded copy of Exchange & Mart and was scouring the small print without tiring his lips too much. Melanie wheeled herself in and out of them, collecting their glasses and plates like a demented mobile waitress. She seemed to have forgotten I was there.
‘Well, better hit the road,’ I said to no one in particular. ‘Thanks a lot. Goodnight.’
‘Take care, my dear,’ Ivy said. ‘Drop in and see us again.’
‘You bet,’ I said, hoping she wasn’t a gambler.
I nodded to Dan and he nodded back, glumly resigned to having to spend his own money.
I walked across the bar until I was behind Melanie’s wheelchair and leaned over her shoulder.
‘Thanks for the darts lesson,’ I said softly, noting that the ‘boffins’ around the table had gone silent. ‘Hope everything works out for you. And next time you ride in a pumpkin coach drawn by six white mice, fasten your seat belt.’
She smiled and her eyes twinkled.
‘Thanks, I’ll remember that, but quite honestly, I’ve had it up to here –’ she held her hand flat in front of her stomach – ‘with mice.’
I chuckled politely at that, then nodded to the students. The one called Scooter nodded slightly in return, studying me with his right eye only as his left was covered by his drooping shock of blond hair.
I waved to Ivy as I moved to the door and stepped out into the night. Before I had closed the door behind me, I heard three or four of the students burst into laughter. Whatever they had thought of me, one of them had now said out loud. I wasn’t worried, the feeling was mutual.
Once out of the door, I strode purposefully as if heading for the Gents’ toilet until I knew I was out of sight of the pub’s windows. Then I skipped between two tubs of flowers and I was close enough to the beehive Bottleback bins to smell the stale beer.
It was at that point I remembered that I didn’t have a torch or a match or a cigarette lighter and I just knew that the two old dears on the Dover cliffs would have come better prepared, with X-ray cameras and infra-red and such like.
Tentatively, I pushed in the rubber cover plate over the porthole opening and put my hand in. It didn’t have to go far before making contact with something,
but at least it was something cold and unmoving, made of glass. Using my fingertips I pulled until I could make out the shape of a 25-centilitre bottle, a ‘dumpy’, bearing a label saying it had come from the St Omer Brewery in France. That didn’t mean much in itself, but the fact that my hand had only had to dip about two inches into the Bottleback bin told me that it was almost full and that the dumpy bottle had a few hundred friends in there keeping him company.
As I walked to the BMW, I checked the other vehicles in the car-park, the Jeep, a Renault estate car and a Mazda flat-back pick-up, noting their number plates without really knowing why I was doing it. I did realise that it would be a tad obvious to stand there with a notebook, so I was glad I didn’t have one. But I did have Amy’s Grundig dictaphone in my emergency overnight bag which I retrieved from the boot of the Beamer before climbing in and starting the engine. With the headlights on, no one from the pub could have seen me anyway, which covered my fumbling with the Record button until I could commit the three numbers to tape. At the entrance to the car-park, I stopped and signalled left, even though there wasn’t a hedgehog on the road for miles, then slowly pulled out and headed away from the village, roughly south-west towards the M20, Ashford, Maidstone and then the bright, safe lights of London.
In fact I drove about a mile down the road until I found a gateway to a field where I could turn around and head back towards Whitcomb, driving on sidelights only. When I came to the bend in the road around which lay the Rising Sun, I pulled over close enough into the hedge to scratch Amy’s paintwork and killed the engine. I reckoned that if any of the boffins came out of the pub car-park and turned my way, I had enough time to get moving and dazzle them enough so they didn’t know it was me. (I had always been scathing about the BMW’s dipped headlights, but on full beam they were pretty impressive.)
But they had all approached the pub from the other way, the village end, so I thought I was safe enough and settled down to wait.
This was the bit of the private eye’s examination which I would fail. In fact, unlike the Hanging Around In Pubs paper, I wouldn’t even bother to turn up for the practical. I had the radio for company but I couldn’t read, there was nothing to look at except the hedgerow and the night, and I couldn’t even tempt myself with a cigarette as my emergency packet and trusty Zippo were in the glove compartment of Armstrong back in Hampstead. There was nothing to do but sit there and focus on the single weak light which illuminated the sign of the Rising Sun. I looked at my watch to see it was 9.50 p.m. and thought how slowly time passed in the countryside. Amy was probably on the Armagnac and petit café by now, or in a club boogying along to French rap music. There didn’t seem much justice in the world.
At 9.57 p.m., I turned off the radio and lowered the window to discover that sound travelled further in the country. In London you’d be hard pushed to hear a scream from the next street but out in the sticks I could hear traffic humming along the M20 at least four miles away. Then, suddenly, much closer, I heard a cow baying at the moon (or whatever it is they do) and it looked as if that might be the highlight of my evening.
Until 9.59 p.m., that was, when I was grateful for the fact that sound carried out here.
I heard the door of the pub slam shut, an unintelligible bit of shouting and then one, then two engines start up.
I could see two sets of headlights circling towards the car-park entrance as I started up the BMW, ready to gun it if they turned towards me. They turned right out of the car-park, back to the village, as I had guessed they would.
Feeling very smug with myself I pulled out to follow them. This private eye business was really just too easy for words.
As I passed the Rising Sun, I checked the car-park and the only vehicle left there was the Jeep, which I guessed was Scooter’s. So I was following the Renault estate car and the Mazda pick-up.
Was being the operative word. Within 200 yards of the pub, I had lost them both.
It was not possible, but the two cars had vanished without trace in the middle of a one-pig village with one road in and one road out. I know, because I followed the road out for half a mile beyond the end of the village until I hit a straight stretch which I knew came out eventually on to the A2 near a village called Womenswold. Sure, the road dipped and rose over the edge of the North Downs, but there was no way I could have missed their headlights or tail lights.
I put the Beamer through a three-point turn and headed back down into Whitcomb, without meeting or seeing another vehicle. Once in the village I slowed to kerb-crawling speed and checked both sides of the main – the only – street. I could see houses, some with lights on trying to persuade me they were inhabited, and some had garages which might account for the fact that there was not a single car parked on the road. But I just couldn’t see anywhere where the pick-up and the Renault could have gone.
I couldn’t see, but perhaps I could hear.
Once again, I pulled over, killed the lights, lowered my window and turned off the ignition.
To my amazement, I got a result: engines, at least two. I looked in the mirror and saw nothing behind me so I strained my ears and tried to concentrate, putting the sound somewhere over to my right and getting closer.
Then I saw the first beam of headlights coming out on to the road from behind a small thatched cottage 150 yards down the street on the right. For a minute the lights just stayed there, shining into the street, then I saw the Mazda pick-up emerge and, thankfully, turn right away from me and head off back towards the Rising Sun at the other end of the village.
The Mazda was followed by the Renault and then another pick-up truck, which might have been a Ford S-100 but was moving too fast for me to tell.
I reached for the ignition key but didn’t turn it as there were still beams of light coming out on to the road. They remained stationary for maybe half a minute and then yet another pick-up emerged, turning right and heading off into the night.
I started my engine and moved off on sidelights only, looking to my right to try and spot where the cars had come from. I thought I caught a glimpse of a five-bar gate but it was there and gone in an instant and the red rear lights of the last pick-up were almost out of sight, so I didn’t have time to hang about. Just before the Rising Sun came in sight, I flipped on the headlights and put my foot down.
In the textbook I was going to write one day on how to be a private eye, there would be a chapter on how much easier it is to follow someone at night without being spotted yourself. Unless, that is, the person you are following knows the road better than you do; the road in question is a narrow unlit country lane which goes up and down when it is not zigzagging around corners; and the road you are on is heading for a junction of a major road, a motorway and a tunnel leading to an entirely different country. Apart from that, it’s dead easy.
I saw the lights of the last pick-up turn left at a crossroads and climb up a small incline. Then we were in a small village which a sign told me was called Etchinghill and we both slowed to (roughly) 30 miles per hour until we were through it and the wooded countryside closed in around us again.
There was no sign of the first three vehicles which had popped out of nowhere back in Whitcomb, but there was light up ahead, a dull orange glow flickering through the trees, and I knew it must be the Folkestone end of the motorway.
The road curved around a large pond and up to a roundabout where the Renault and the other two pick-ups were waiting. I slowed instinctively and reached to turn my lights off but there was no need. The pick-up I had been following flashed its lights to tell them he had caught up and all four pulled off, indicating right at the roundabout on to the A20.
I let them get well ahead of me, certain now that I knew where they were heading. Sure enough, the convoy looped around the A20 and almost immediately picked up the slip road on to the M20, hugging the left-hand lane marked Channel Tunnel Rail Terminal. I pulled out into the motorway proper, but hung back just in case they were looking behind them, waiting for a lorr
y to pass to give me cover.
If they spotted me, it didn’t deter them. All four vehicles sailed on into the Cheriton Terminal as I shadowed them in parallel from the M20 until the approach road swung them out of sight, down towards the toll booths and the border controls. Their next stop would be France, perhaps on the Shuttle train which had just pulled in with its load of lorries in their protective cages. That, the fences and the security lights on high poles gave the impression that I was driving by a prison camp.
At Junction 12 I turned off the motorway and headed back along the A20, getting a closer view of the Shuttle and the Terminal which glowed like a volcano in the distance. There was no sign of my little convoy doubling back on me. Why should they? All the tobacco and beer bargains they could handle were twenty-odd miles away under the Channel.
It was tempting just to keep heading towards London, but I didn’t exactly have enough information to fill out one of Veronica’s do-it-yourself private eye report forms. (I was sure she had some.)
I had a bunch of darts-playing students with funny names, two of whom were environmentally conscious enough to put their empties in a Bottleback bin. They all seemed to be able to drive and they knew the way to France. I had three of their vehicles’ numbers on my dictaphone. And that was just about it. The least I could do was try and find where they were based and I reckoned I could do that and still get back to London before some of the more interesting clubs closed. Thinking about it, as I turned off the A20 back towards Whitcomb, I realised that all the interesting clubs I knew didn’t actually open until after 1 a.m., so that was all right then.
There were lights still on in the Rising Sun, but no cars at all in the car-park. There were no cars on the road either, but now I knew to keep an eye open for overtaking wheelchairs.
The lack of traffic was a bit of a worry. I had driven through the village more times that evening than was sensible for a nonlocal car trying to retain a low profile. The Major had probably already picked me up on his home radar screen and was ringing round the rest of the Neighbourhood Watch. So I picked a spot between the pub and the southern end of the village and squeezed Amy’s BMW into the hedgerow again until the paintwork squealed. What the hell, she could afford it.