by Ripley, Mike
She put her hands on the rims of her wheels to brake herself, then she swung round to face me.
‘I’m just looking for some transport, that’s all. I guess I feel a bit stranded without my wheels.’
Even as I said it, I knew I should be biting my tongue.
‘You should try mine,’ Mel said.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Aw, what the fuck, I’ve heard worse things said when people were trying to be sympathetic. And I suppose I owe you one for offering to run the pub for Ivy last night.’
I remembered her holding my hand when the paramedic had mentioned telling the local police.
‘I didn’t seem to get much say in the matter,’ I said ruefully. ‘Come to think of it, I’ve been running the pub for over twelve hours now and I haven’t pulled a pint in anger, not for an actual customer, that is. You seem to have done most of it. You should be running the place.’
‘Oh sure, you can just see the brewery letting me run the place. I can’t even get behind the bar in this thing.’ She gripped the arm-rests of her chair and shook them violently.
‘But you live here, you know Ivy. You’ve worked there before.’
‘Yeah, and you’re a man and you’ve got two good legs. If you’re a man and you can whistle and pee at the same time and you don’t have a criminal record, you can run a pub.’
I decided not to ask her for details about the ‘criminal record’ bit.
‘Look, can I give you some money? Get some flowers for Ivy and tell her for Christ’s sake to get well soon before I bankrupt her.’
‘I think you did that last night buying drinks for me and Dan.’
‘I did?’
‘Don’t worry, I put an IOU in the till for you. If you ask me, you want to make sure your three barmaids do the same before they eat and drink Ivy out of house and home.’
‘The thought had occurred. I’ll put it on my Things To Do list.’ I took my wallet out of my back pocket and pulled out a £20 note for her. ‘But I really could use a lift to find some shops. There’s stuff I need, like a toothbrush and a razor and deodorant. I wasn’t planning on an extended stay down here.’
She nodded at that and pushed her chair along. We were now opposite the five-bar gate.
‘Well, you can always ask Scooter. He can only say no.’
She stopped her chair again and pointed at the gate.
‘Soft Sell work out of the old hop farm, over there.’
‘Soft Sell?’
‘That’s the name of Scooter’s company. They do software for computers. Just walk through the paddock and you’ll see the old hop sheds. That’s where they are.’
I leaned on the gate and looked over the paddock. There wasn’t a sign of a building from this angle, but I already knew they were dog-legged off to the right. From the gate the paddock sloped up to a wooded hillside which disappeared over the Downs.
‘In here?’ I tried to inject the right note of disbelief into my voice.
‘It’s just a short cut. We let them use our paddock as a short cut to the pub. They’re not supposed to as there’s no right of way but the real entrance is over the hill, off the old Roman road to Canterbury, miles away.’
‘So this is their back door? The tradesmen’s entrance?’
‘I don’t think they encourage tradesmen,’ said Mel. ‘To be honest, they don’t encourage visitors. I think some of the things they do are sensitive, commercially sensitive.’
‘Do they export much?’
‘I suppose so, they’re always coming and going at all hours. But that’s why a lot of software companies have moved down here to Kent.’ She laughed suddenly. ‘One or two of them have always got French beer on hand and duty-free cigarettes, but they don’t let Ivy see them when they’re down the pub.’
I bet they didn’t. The torrent of obscenities would have had them reaching for their dictionaries.
I made a play of crouching and stroking the carpet of Astroturf which peeked out from under the gate.
‘What’s with the artificial grass?’
‘Scooter put it down to stop the gateway getting churned up in winter. Me and Mum thought it was a good idea.’
‘You and Mum?’
‘It’s our paddock, we live here.’ She pointed to the thatched cottage a few feet away. ‘Hop Cottage. But we haven’t used the paddock since I had a pony when I was a kid, so we don’t mind Soft Sell using it as a short cut.’
And why should they? It wouldn’t have occurred to them that one man’s short cut was another man’s escape route.
I watched Melanie wheel herself up to the front door of Hop Cottage and reach up to push a Yale key into the lock. She waved at me as she pushed herself into the house and out of sight.
I clambered over the gate and trudged down the paddock for the second time, but this time I could see what I was doing. The hedge to my right must have been the border of Hop Cottage, and once at the end of it I could see what was left of the hop farm as I approached it from the rear.
The nearest building was the one I had spied on and this afternoon it had the Jeep, two Volvo estate cars and three pickup trucks parked outside. Whoever these students really were, they seemed to have more vehicles than the average Ford dealer.
There were three other single-storey buildings about a hundred yards away and a large corrugated iron barn, a bit like an aircraft hangar with sliding doors, beyond them. A single track road ran by the buildings and disappeared into the distance in the wooded hills. To either side of the track were grubbed-up fields gradually filling with grass and weeds and littered with hop poles and trellis wires, giving the impression of a World War I battlefield.
I didn’t get much time to get my bearings and I was still fifty yards from the first building when the doors opened and out stepped Scooter, flanked by the staring-eyed Axeman and the one I think Mel had called Painter.
‘Can we help you?’ Scooter called out. ‘You’re not lost, are you?’
‘No, it’s you I was looking for,’ I called back, marching on straight towards them.
I never gave a thought to be frightened of them. It wasn’t just because they were younger than I was; I’d been scared by twelve-year-olds before now. And it wasn’t so much the setting – broad daylight in a field in Kent just couldn’t hold a candle to 1 a.m. in the Tottenham Court Road for scare factor. (Broad daylight in the Tottentham Court Road come to think of it.) It was just that these lads didn’t look the violent type; they were trying to look cool, not threatening, although I had to give the benefit of the doubt to Axeman. He did look like a psychopath, but I put it down to genetics, not malice.
‘You found us,’ said Scooter, leaning casually on the bonnet of the Jeep, waiting for me to make my pitch.
‘I seem to have sort of inherited the pub down the road,’ I started.
‘We heard,’ said Axeman, but I ignored him.
‘Ivy the landlady had an accident last night and was carted off to hospital. Somehow – and I’m not too sure how – I was left in charge and now I’m without a car.’
‘Somebody’s stolen it?’ Scooter asked without even trying to look interested.
‘No, the car wasn’t mine. It had to go back to London, so I’m kind of stranded and I need to go shopping.’ That sounded a bit lame so I added: ‘Get some provisions in. For the pub. For Ivy.’
Scooter looked at me, his head tilted so that his shock of blond hair fell over his left eye. He still didn’t look violent but he didn’t half irritate me.
‘And so?’ he drawled slowly, opening the palms of his hands towards me.
‘So I was looking for a lift to the nearest supermarket.’
Axeman let out a giggle which was almost a squeak.
Scooter flicked his head and his hair and dug a hand into his jacket pocket to produce a set of keys.
‘Is that all?’ He patted the windscreen of the Jeep. ‘Jump in.’
I was in the middle of the aisle which had fabric conditioners
and washing powders down one side, household cleaners, bleaches and disinfectants down the other when I used my mobile to ring Nick Lawrence at Customs and Excise in Dover. I reckoned it was the geographical centre of the supermarket Scooter had driven me to. He had said he would wait in the car-park for me, but just to be sure I picked a spot where there was no way he could see in from the outside.
I switched the phone on and pressed for the memory. When ‘HMCE’ came up, I hit the Send button.
‘Lawrence,’ he came through after three rings.
‘It’s Roy Angel, remember? Working for Murdo Seton’s brewery.’
‘I can remember yesterday, if that’s what you mean. You still on the case?’
‘Up to my neck,’ I said, smiling as a woman with a young child in her shopping trolley glided by. It looked like there was a special offer on lean mince somewhere in the shop. ‘Can you check out car number plates for me?’
‘I can have them checked out,’ his voice crackled in my ear, ‘but whether I’ll tell you is another matter. Where the hell are you?’
Above my head, a tannoy was announcing double saver points on items marked with a red sticker.
‘Never mind. Got a pen? Take these down.’
I pulled a beer mat from my pocket and read out the numbers I had recorded last night and scribbled down before leaving the Rising Sun. I knew the plate of Scooter’s Jeep quite well by now, having ridden in it, and I added the two Volvos I had seen at the hop farm, hoping I remembered them correctly.
‘You opening a garage or something?’ said Lawrence. ‘I’ll see what I can turn up, but don’t hold your breath.’
‘Fair enough. I’ll call you, don’t you try and ring me.’
‘Why would I?’
‘I might have something for you.’
‘Oh yeah? Well, I won’t hold my breath.’
He hung up but I kept smiling into the phone as another trolley pushed by a vivacious redhead in a very short miniskirt overtook me.
‘Don’t worry, darling,’ I said into the dead phone, ‘I won’t forget the whipped cream. It’s on my list. Yes, the sort in the spray can.’
The redhead didn’t look round, but I saw her ears blush.
Later, in the car-park, she saw Scooter helping me load my carrier bags bulging with bread, frozen pizzas, butter, baking potatoes, family packs of lean mince (I couldn’t resist, it was a bargain) and tins of non-genetically modified tomatoes into the back of his Jeep.
As she unlocked her VW Golf and packed her own shopping away, I could tell she was thinking: I knew he was gay.
13
Scooter wasn’t gay, or at least I don’t think he was. I never got to to know him that well, but then as he was still short of his twenty-third birthday I suppose you could say that nobody knew him well.
When he drove me to the supermarket that late afternoon he wasn’t giving anything away. It was as if it was the most natural thing in the world for a complete, or almost complete, stranger to turn up at his place of work (in the middle of a field in Kent) and ask for a lift to the shops.
He started up the Jeep, waited whilst I clicked in my seat belt and then slipped a Blur CD into the player on the dashboard. Then he reversed the Jeep beyond the edge of the first building and swung left, changed into first and drove slowly alongside it. He was clearly not going to use the gate I had climbed over even though I knew he had used it last night, and I had a good idea that he knew I knew. Perhaps he was waiting for me to mention it.
‘This is where you work then?’ I said cleverly, to divert him.
‘For the moment,’ he said, turning the Jeep on to a single track concrete road leading to two smaller one-storey buildings of similar design.
‘Melanie said you were in software.’
‘That’s right. Know anything about computer programming?’
‘Square-root of bugger all.’
‘That’s the way I like it.’
‘Business good, then?’
As I spoke I noticed, now I was nearer, that one of the other buildings was virtually derelict and open to the elements. No way were they programming anything in there.
‘As long as people have computers but know bugger all about programming them, business’ll be good. There’s a lot of work around, it’s just a question of finding it.’
‘And you found it here?’ I gestured to the windscreen. We were passing the large aircraft hangar building and the road was dipping down between the churned-up fields littered with poles and coils of wire. Ahead, the track turned into a line of trees. It was like a scene from Dr Zhivago except somebody had forgotten to order the snow. ‘What is this place?’
‘It’s an old hop farm which went bust a couple of years ago and they grubbed up all the hop bines. They used to grow up those poles supported by wires, ten, twenty feet, something like that.’
‘And that makes it an ideal place for you to program computers?’
The Jeep was going uphill now, into the trees, leaving the brown, gutted fields behind.
‘All we need is a building we can keep reasonably clean and some electricity.’ He turned his shock of droopy blond hair at me. He used it like a gun. ‘Companies hire us to reprogram their computers or upgrade them, memorywise. Most don’t like it done on the premises so we bring the kit here. With things like shops and small offices, we do it overnight or at the weekend. It’s a good system. This way they don’t get to see how easy it is.’
He stopped the Jeep at the junction with a B-road and signalled left. There was a wooden signpost at the side of the junction with a carved picnic table and an oak leaf, signifying a nature reserve of some sort. A road sign opposite said that Folkestone was the way we were heading, Canterbury was the other.
‘You don’t advertise much,’ I said, trying not to look as if I was mapping the route in my head.
‘We go to customers, we don’t expect them to come to us. What about you?’
I had been expecting this and was rather surprised it hadn’t come before.
‘Me? What about me?’
‘What do you do when you’re not running a pub? Didn’t Melanie say you were a fashion photographer or something?’
‘Oh no, not me. I’m just driving one around at the moment, or I was. I’m a driver, that’s all.’
‘So how come you’re running the Rising Sun, then?’
‘Dunno. Just lucky, I guess.’
On the way back, once we had loaded my shopping into the back of the Jeep and avoided the smug stare of the redhead with the VW Golf, he brought it up again.
‘So what sort of things do you drive?’
‘Anything. Trucks, stretched limos, minicabs when times are hard. I’m in a drivers’ pool and we’ll turn out for anything. The company’s called Duncan’s. Heard of it?’
‘Can’t say I have.’
Good. Neither had I, but I did have a friend called Duncan, better known as Duncan the Drunken, possibly the best motor mechanic in the world, who could get hold of any sort of vehicle short of a tank if you asked him.
‘No matter. I’ll be glad to get back to work, though. I’m not a good passenger.’
‘How did you end up here in Whitcomb?’ he asked as we turned off the motorway. He wasn’t a bad driver himself; a touch heavy on the gas pedal but careful with it.
‘Pure chance. I had to bring somebody’s car down here to meet them off the ferry but then their plans changed and they got the Eurostar to Ashford this afternoon instead. By that time I was lumbered with running the pub so the boss lady took her car home. Guess I’ll have to thumb a lift back to London once Ivy gets back.’
‘What if she doesn’t come back?’ he said, flicking his hair at me.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, she is getting on in years, you know, and maybe the hospital wants to put her in a twilight home or similar.’
A maximum security one from what I knew of her, I thought.
‘I haven’t burned that bridge yet,’ I sai
d, ‘but I suppose we’ll have to call the brewery and get them to put a relief manager in.’
He didn’t give much away did young Scooter, but I saw his hands tighten on the steering wheel at that, though I couldn’t think why.
‘Couldn’t you run things? Get a temporary licence or whatever they call them?’
‘Er . . . no. I don’t have time, don’t want to hang around this backwater – no offence – and the last thing I want to do is present myself before Folkestone magistrates pretending to be an upright citizen. There was a publican in the pub last night, a Ted something-or-other, friend of Ivy’s. I’ve got his card. I’ll give him a ring, see what he says. If it comes to that.’
‘But you’re OK for a couple of days?’
‘End of the week, tops. Depends on my new staff.’
‘Staff?’
‘I’ve conned three of the girls from the model agency into helping out. Their boss is considering doing some photographs in the pub, but that may or may not pan out. It just means I’ve got some cheap labour for tonight and tomorrow. It’s not fair to lean on Melanie, though if she hadn’t had her accident, she’d have been the natural choice to cover for Ivy. She’s a good kid.’
He pointed the shock of hair at me again. I still wasn’t sure how much he could see through it.
‘Yes, she is,’ he said in a neutral sort of way.
‘Known her long?’
‘Since university. I heard about her accident and when I knew we’d be working down here, I looked her up.’
‘Moved in next door, in fact.’
‘Yeah, as it happens.’
‘And now your guys are part of her darts team?’
‘There’s not much else to do round here and all our work is short-term, odd-hours stuff, so the pub’s convenient. Mel said it could do with the customers as well.’
We were rounding the bend towards the Rising Sun and had a full view of the car-park. It struck me for the first time that the pub also offered an excellent view of the road approaching Whitcomb from this, southern, end. But that was no more than a fleeting thought because something more peculiar was nipping at my brain.
The car-park was full, or appeared so. There were certainly twenty or more cars there, including a couple of pick-ups which could have been the ones I had seen parked outside Scooter’s Soft Sell works on the old hop farm.