Bootlegged Angel

by Ripley, Mike

  I looked at my watch; it was six thirty.

  ‘Do they hold car boot sales here?’ I asked as we turned in towards the pub.

  ‘No,’ said Scooter and he wasn’t smiling. ‘It looks like your business is booming.’

  It was. The pub hadn’t seen so many paying customers since VE Day, or so Dan said and he would know.

  Dan had at least claimed his traditional place at the corner of the bar. The Major was trying to mark his territory by huffing and growling every time he was jostled on the shoulder or rocked on his bar stool. Two of Scooter’s boffins, the ones called Combo and Painter, were trying to play darts without putting anyone’s eye out. The spooky Axeman was leaning up against the bar. The rest I didn’t know, although two of them were the pair who had been in at lunchtime when I had turned up with Amy and the girls. They must have told their friends, or at least all their male friends for there wasn’t a female in the place this side of the bar.

  It was the three females behind the bar that were important, behind a bar that was so small they couldn’t help but bump into each other as they tried to serve drinks to the assembled throng. That in itself seemed to make most of the customers more thirsty, although it might have had something to do with the fact that all three were wearing red TALtops pulled to reveal maximum cleavage (what I had once described to Amy as ‘Danger Mode’), very short skirts and suicidally high heels. For Neemoy, who didn’t need heels to be impressive, this meant that she had to stoop every time she walked under the tankards hanging from hooks in the roof beams. When she hit one, it cannoned into the next in line like an off-key peal of bells.

  I struggled through the crowd, two carrier bags of shopping in each hand, shouting, ‘Coming through! Mind your backs!’ and suchlike until I could station myself by the kitchen door at the side of the bar.

  The Major nooded grimly at me and flexed his moustache. Dan grinned broadly.

  ‘’Evening, Roy. Now this is what I call under new management!’ he jerked a thumb at Neemoy who seemed to be able to reach every drink in the bar without moving her feet. ‘And I wouldn’t mind getting under her.’

  I was about to tell him not to think about fighting out of his weight class when the opening chords of ‘Walking On Sunshine’ by Katrina and The Waves boomed out from the other side of the bar accompanied by a loud cheer from most of the customers.

  The three girls behind the bar broke into spontaneous applause and several voices yelled to ‘buy that man a drink’. A figure in an anorak, blushing bright red, was pushed towards the bar into the arms of Max who was leaning forward to give him a hug. It was Chip – or it might have been Dale – from Soft Sell and if he didn’t make contact with Max’s bosom quick, there were others ready and willing to step into his shoes.

  ‘Lad fixed the jukebox,’ said Dan in my ear above the music.

  ‘I didn’t know we had a jukebox,’ I shouted back.

  ‘Neither did I,’ he said.

  Sasha spotted me and focused her disappearing pupils on my face.

  ‘It’s Roy – right?’

  I nodded, suddenly tired. I had been out shopping all afternoon while they had been enjoying themselves.

  ‘This is fun, isn’t it? Do you want a drink?’

  I finally got the door to the kitchen open.

  ‘No thanks,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to get on with the dinner. But call me when the lap dancing starts.’

  ‘Lap dancing,’ she said to herself, but I could read her lips above the music. ‘Cool.’

  Over by the dart board I spotted Scooter remonstrating with Combo, even poking a finger into Combo’s chest to make a point. Now didn’t seem the time to thank him for the lift. And out of the corner of my eye I saw that Axeman was not taking either of his protruding eyes off Neemoy, not for a second. That, I was sure, would end in tears before bedtime.

  The kitchen was a haven of peace and sanity if you didn’t count the sprinkling of cannabis seeds which Sasha had left on the main food preparation area. They popped as I plonked my bags down on them and began to unpack my shopping.

  I heard a door open and a burst of music as Max came through the back of the bar and the small storeroom and into the kitchen from the other end.

  ‘Got any ice in here?’ she asked.

  ‘Try the fridge,’ I said. I was, after all, a private detective. ‘Isn’t there any on the bar?’

  ‘Nope.’

  She opened the freezer compartment of the large fridge and tentatively poked in a magenta fingernail.

  ‘You coping out there?’

  ‘Yeah, we’re enjoying it. We don’t often get to talk to people face-to-face.’

  ‘The novelty’ll soon wear off. How did you draw the punters?’

  ‘Dunno, really.’ She had located a plastic tray of ice cubes. ‘A couple of guys appeared and we chatted them up and they got on their mobiles and some more turned up. They all seem really nice, except for the spooky one who won’t stop clocking Neemoy. You know, the one who looks like he’s from the Addams Family. Called Alex or something. He’s creepy.’

  ‘Yes, he is. You watch him. Tell me when he goes, will you?’

  ‘OK. What’ll you be doing?’

  ‘Staying out of the way mostly,’ I said truthfully, ‘and getting something to eat. I’m starving. There’s pizza or pasta or one of my homemade cheeseburgers if you guys want to take a shift break.’

  ‘Oh, we’re fine at the moment,’ she said lazily, ‘we’re just playing the field, seeing how the evening pans out, checking out the local talent.’

  ‘Isn’t this all a bit tame for you guys?’

  ‘No, it’s great. With Amy gone it’s like being off the leash.’ She looked at me. ‘Oh, sorry, no offence.’

  ‘None taken,’ I said. ‘I know what you mean.’

  She finally cracked the ice tray, removed one single cube and replaced it in the freezer, closing the door.

  I looked on open-mouthed, my arms full of frozen pizzas, as she delved inside her TALtop and began to rub the ice cube over her left, and then her right, nipple.

  ‘I’ve got a bet on with Neemoy that I can distract her pop-eyed stalker.’

  If Axeman didn’t have a thyroid problem already, he soon would have.

  I let them get on with it while I heated and ate a pepperoni pizza, working on the basis that they were selling more beer than I could and anyway, things would calm down as the evening wore on, but I was wrong about that.

  I did a couple of circuits out into the bar, nodding to customers and collecting glasses as I went like I had seen publicans do for real. I might as well have been invisible as all eyes were on the Terrible Trio. By eight o’clock they had a routine worked out where they did a sort of static line dance behind the bar to Bobby McFerrin’s ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy’. The game was to put the song on the jukebox and then order a vodka and tonic. Max would fill a glass with ice (there was an ice bucket on the bar), fling it to Neemoy, who would jiggle it under the vodka optic while Sasha juggled a bottle of tonic water. A few more turns to the music and the drink was slammed down in front of the customer, most of it slopping on to a grimy bar towel. They charged £3 for this, not including the jukebox, but no one seemed to be complaining. We were going to need more vodka.

  On my first wander round, I noticed that Scooter and the boffins from Soft Sell had gone, although the Axeman remained, rooted to his spot at the bar which ensured he was never more than three feet from Neemoy. He had switched to drinking vodka and tonic too.

  I would have expected that to have emptied the pub and things to have quietened down, but more cars arrived – and more pick-up trucks – and the bar continued to heave. I identified at least six youngish guys who could have been part of the Soft Sell set-up from the way they acknowledged Axeman, but I had seen none of them before.

  As soon as it was dark I left the pub by the back door and, careful to avoid stepping on a chicken, made my way to the gate which opened into the car-park for a closer look a
t the pick-ups.

  I had Amy’s dictaphone with me and began to read their number plates into it. There were two Fords and a Mazda and all were empty and shouldn’t have been at all suspicious except I had been seeing quite a lot of pick-up trucks in the past twenty-four hours and this, after all, was Kent not Texas.

  But it was beginning to look like it, as the headlights of another one swung in to the car-park.

  Instinctively, I dropped into a crouch behind the Mazda until the new pick-up had parked and killed its lights. Two figures got out and crunched across to the pub.

  ‘We ought to log in our load,’ one was saying, ‘before we do this.’

  ‘With Scooter on a blitz? No way. He’ll have us doing another run. I want to see all this crumpet they’ve got down . . .’

  The rest was lost to me but as soon as I heard the music level rise as the pub door opened, I scuttled across to their vehicle, another Ford. This one was full, very full. I could tell by its silhouette that it was low down on its axles and a quick peek into the back showed why. The whole of the flat bed was covered, three deep, in cases of ‘33’ French beer with a loosely tied tarpaulin thrown over them in a half-hearted attempt at concealment. They were either very confident or very sloppy smugglers.

  I bent over to read off the rear number plate into the dictaphone and something struck me as odd about it. It was a white plastic job and I knew there was something strange about it but I couldn’t put my finger on it, until, that is, I actually did put my fingers on it and found I could bend it.

  I was starting to form an idea about what Scooter and his students were up to, but I needed another look at the old hop farm just to be sure. The time seemed to be right and I guessed nobody in the pub would miss me for an hour or so. The question was how to get in there, knowing that Scooter had at least one night camera trained on the village street and I had to assume he had another on the gate into Mel’s paddock. In any case, that would be the entrance they would be using if they were running across to France tonight.

  The real entrance off the old Canterbury road, which Scooter had used that afternoon, hadn’t appeared to be guarded by any security devices but then again, could I find it in the dark and how did I get there? This was the crazy thing about the countryside: no tubes, no taxis, not even a night bus.

  But Dan had a bicycle, parked as usual against the wall of the pub near the front door. Very gently, I picked it up and carried it round to the side of the Gents’ toilets.

  I walked back through the pub, picked up a few more glasses and worked my way to where the Major was still muttering under his breath and Dan was flushed with Seagrave Special Bitter and testosterone in equal measure. I put my arm around his shoulder.

  ‘I’m going to put my head down for an hour or so,’ I shouted in his ear as the girls started their ‘Be Happy’ routine again. ‘If the beer needs changing or anything, will you go down into the cellar?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know if Ivy would like that,’ he said, not taking his eyes off Sasha.

  ‘She won’t mind, don’t you worry. And don’t spend too much time down there looking up the girls’ skirts.’

  I let the thought sink in and knew I could rely on him. It didn’t seem worth mentioning the bike.

  In the kitchen I unwrapped one of the items I had bought at the supermarket which hadn’t been stuffed into the freezer, a rubberised torch complete with batteries. I made sure it worked then stuffed it inside my leather jacket, zipped up and left through the back door again.

  Amazingly, the lights on Dan’s ancient boneshaker worked though I wasn’t too sure about the brakes. Still, riding a bike was like making love to a woman. If you’ve done it once, you can do it again. Just remember not to fall off.

  I fell off twice before I got out of the car-park, but I put that down to pot-holes. Once on the road proper I found I could get up a fair head of steam, fairly flying along behind the saucer of yellow light from the flickering headlamp, and I found the B-road which flanked the village easily enough, turning right and heading north.

  It might have been a straight road – the Romans liked straight lines – but I had forgotten about the hills and the Roman penchant for going up and down them. By the time I got to the top of the second one, my legs were screaming and the night air rasping at my lungs. I was shattered, I was out of condition, I was dying for a cigarette.

  But then I thought I saw something through the darkness and I stopped and pulled out my torch to light up the wooden sign for the nearest picnic site, the marker I had been heading for. Just further up the hill was the turning Scooter and I had come out of in the Jeep.

  I flashed the torch around the entrance but couldn’t see any cameras, pressure pads or tripwires. Not that I could see much with the trees blotting out what little light there was from the moon and stars.

  I freewheeled down what had been the farm road, not looking to the side at all in case I saw what was making those strange rustling noises in the underbrush. And then I could see lights in the distance, which must be the buildings of Soft Sell down across the old hop fields.

  On the edge of the wood, I stopped and turned off the bike’s lights, laying it down behind a tree just in case anyone did use the road, and began to trot down the track through the field using my torch only when I stumbled and using the lights from the furthest building as a navigation aid.

  The first building going this way was the huge aircraft hangar which loomed out of the gloom. It was dark and deserted and so I pressed on up the hill towards the single-storey buildings.

  Half-way there I saw a flicker of light on my horizon, which I guessed was the paddock at the back of Hop Cottage where Mel lived. Then the light solidified into a beam pointing to the sky and I realised it was a set of headlights coming through the gate off the main street in Whitcomb. Allowing for the driver to stop and close the gate, I had no more than ten seconds before he reached the Soft Sell bunkhouse and his lights picked me out, standing panting in the middle of an open field.

  The aircraft hangar was the nearest cover – the only cover before the wood up the hill where I had left the bike. No competition. I legged it off the road and across rough ground, tripping over discarded bundles of twine and spools of wire, sliding in mud. And then I reached the cold metal side of the hangar and almost hugged it in relief.

  The headlights were over the hill now and beaming down towards me, so I edged around the front of the hangar, crouched low, until I got to the far corner and was able to slide around the far side.

  I put my head and back to the cold wall and tried to get my breath. I could hear the engine of the car now and pressed myself even further into the hangar as I realised it wasn’t stopping at the Soft Sell building, but coming straight for the hangar.

  Whatever it was, it stopped no more than ten feet from the hangar, its main beams lighting up the front, the light spilling around the corner where I was hiding and bleeding off into the field.

  I heard doors open and slam and then, even with the engine idling, I heard footsteps on the concrete and whistling. Whistling in stereo, or almost. Two people, both slightly out of tune, whistling the same song: ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy’.

  Then I heard a loud clicking noise, which I worked out must have been a padlock, and a long screeching metallic scream as the hangar door was slid open. As it hit its stop buffers, it rattled the wall I had my head pressed against.

  One of the whistlers stopped and said: ‘That pub has definitely gone up in my estimation.’

  ‘Too right. Trust that tight-arse Scooter to pull us out,’ said the other one. ‘What say we stash this lot double quick and get back there before closing time?’

  ‘Sounds good to me,’ came the answer. ‘Three runs is enough for one day.’

  A car door opened again and the engine revved and the headlights swung away so I risked a look round the corner of the hangar.

  It wasn’t a car, it was a Ford pick-up, the one I had seen loaded with beer in the car
-park. The driver swung in a circle and then put it into reverse and began to back into the hangar.

  Lights suddenly came on inside the hangar, followed by a clang of metal and then another one. The pick-up disappeared and then I heard one of the voices shouting: ‘Left, left, straight, straight, keep it there, straight, straight, you’re on.’

  And then the engine cut out and I heard footsteps clumping on metal this time.

  I gave it a minute or so and then edged carefully around the front end of the building, pressing my palms against the open sliding door until I reached the edge.

  They had reversed the Ford up two iron ramps into the back of the trailer of a gigantic articulated lorry. The trailer was static on its hydraulic legs, its cab and engine unit, a new DAF 97, parked neatly at its side.

  The driver of the Ford and his mate were removing cases of beer from the pick-up and stacking them in the body of the trailer. Even from where I was I could see it was more than half full already with a solid wall of cases of French lager, but it still had room for the Ford.

  I had found what we expert detectives in the bootlegging business called the Mothership.

  14

  The two guys from the pick-up finished loading the Mothership, drove back to the Soft Sell building, took a shower, shaved, got changed, squirted on deodorant, splashed on aftershave, put some folding money in their back pockets and got in the pick-up again. And they still made it to the Rising Sun with enough time to down two beers before I did.

  Then again, they didn’t have to sneak along the side of an aircraft hangar and across a churned-up field in the pitch dark, locate a bicycle without walking into a tree trunk more than once and then push it without lights through a forest transplanted from Transylvania, before discovering that the gears no longer worked properly, at least not uphill.

  This country living was going to be the death of me. Eight hours without a car and I was getting withdrawal symptoms, so much so I began to urge Dan’s boneshaker on by shouting at it, christening it ‘Cold Turkey’.