by Ripley, Mike
‘Oh, we’ll miss him. Fucking psycho.’
I was right about them being medical students; you could always tell a professional diagnosis.
‘Start handballing, guys. Sooner you’re done, sooner you can sleep.’
The two students untied a canvas secured across the flat back of the pick-up and rolled it back to reveal cases of St Omer and Bière 33. They climbed into the back with the beer and began to ‘handball’ – to gently throw each case from one to the other and then on to the trailer.
‘That’s 135 cases,’ I said out loud, pleased with my maths. ‘At twenty-four bottles per case, that’s over 5000 bottles per pallet. And how many pallets did you say?’
‘Twenty-two. Well, that was what the breweries told me when I rang them.’
He must have seen the expression on my face.
‘I told them it was part of my project into distribution costs in modern industry,’ he said, allowing himself a little grin.
‘So, twenty-two times . . . shit! That’s over 70,000 bottles.’
‘No, it’ll be more than that as we don’t have the pallets taking up room, so we can stuff more in even though it increases our labour input and turn-round time.’
‘If they’re quarter-litre bottles . . .’ Why hadn’t I packed a calculator? ‘. . . Then that’s nearly 18,000 litres, which is like over 30,000 pints . . .’
Or about the amount of beer needed to keep a pub like the Rising Sun going for four months. More to the point, if Scooter was buying in those quantities he was getting a good price and selling on the London black market, he could be making £3 a case profit. Therefore each trailer load was making him around £9000 gross profit. He’d have his overheads and expenses – like me – but he would have worked out his margins carefully, as part of his degree studies. He’d probably get course credits for it.
‘This bit’s not your problem,’ he was saying in my ear. ‘That is.’
I followed him across the shed to where the tractor cab was parked neatly alongside the front end of the trailer, which was propped up on its retractable dolly wheels. I unlocked the driver’s door and climbed up the steps into the cab.
It was a new rig, a DAF 95XF, but the cab stank of stale smoke and spilled Coca-Cola. Behind the two main seats was the padded cot bed running the width of the cab and on it a threadbare sleeping bag which I didn’t want to have to examine too closely.
‘Axeman sleeps in here sometimes,’ said Scooter looking in, his face level with my feet.
‘I guessed,’ I said, checking over the dashboard and trying to remember the last time I had driven one of these beasts. ‘Is this his rig?’
‘No, it’s leased.’
‘Like the computer gear?’ I tried.
‘Just tell me you can drive this thing or not,’ he said impatiently.
‘’Course I can.’
It was a tri-axle tractor, six wheels in all, the third set dropping down when you had a load on. That was supposed to spread the weight and stop the lorry beating the crap out of the road surface, which was why they were taxed at about half the price of the old two-axle rigs. The DAF had a 430 horsepower engine, with an eight-gear, sixteen-speed gearbox so you could work a range change and go up or down in ‘half gears’. It also had cruise control which would cut out at 85 kilometres per hour (the speedo was primarily in kilometres) or 54 miles per hour, unless you were going downhill that is. And it had switches for a differential lock, which you put on if the going got rough or in wet and slippery conditions, the same as you would switch to four-wheel drive if you had it on a car.
‘Piece of piss,’ I said, jumping down and almost knocking Scooter over, forgetting how high up the cabs on these things were. Professional drivers always come out backwards and slowly.
‘Know how to connect it up?’ he asked me.
I strolled round to the back of the tractor unit, with him at my shoulder.
‘That’s the fifth wheel,’ I said, pointing things out as I spoke, ‘which isn’t a wheel at all, but that’s what locks the trailer on. The red air line releases the brakes on the trailer, the yellow one connects the brakes to the whole unit. The other one is the Electric Suzy which connects up your electrics for lights and indicators and so forth. Don’t ask me why it’s called an Electric Suzy; maybe some trucker knew a girl called Suzy who struck sparks, I don’t know.’
He looked convinced. But then, I had almost convinced myself. I didn’t like to mention that it had been over five years since I’d driven a truck this size and that was for a very bad (but very loud) touring Heavy Metal band where nobody really gave a damn.
‘So, I get the job?’
‘Tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Combo’ll go with you.’
‘Go where?’
‘London.’
‘That doesn’t narrow it down.’
‘Dartford. Combo’ll show you. Aim to leave about five o’clock.’
‘I hope you don’t mean a.m.’ My watch now showed 1.45 a.m.
‘No, five in the afternoon’s fine. That way you hit the rush hour going out and you come back after dark.’
‘And both those things are good?’
‘Rush hour going towards the Dartford Tunnel and you think the cops are going to pull over a truck like this and search it?’
He had a point. The traffic police’s priority would be to keep traffic moving, not block off a lane for a weight check or a search and create a thousand cases of road rage among the commuters trying to get home.
I didn’t get a chance to ask why it was important to come back in darkness as Painter appeared with a huge sports bag slung over his shoulder.
‘What do you fancy on this one, Scooter?’ he asked as he handed a set of plastic plates to the driver of the Ford pickup.
Scooter turned to me.
‘Any requests?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘For the back of the trailer,’ said Painter cheerfully. ‘It’s less suspicious than a totally anonymous truck. Got to be something British as well, something domestic. Nothing to suggest the truck’s been across the Channel.’
He dropped his sports bag on the stone floor and it spilled open to reveal a stack of acetate stencils of letters and numbers and about two dozen cans of spray paint.
‘So what do you want? A name?’ I asked.
‘A company and a place. You know, something like ‘Smith’s of Salford’ or ‘Harrogate Haulage’. I just make up a phone number to go with it.’
‘I get the idea. How about “Angel’s Home Removals, You Can Trust Us With Your Valuables”?’
They both stared at me with dead eyes.
‘I kinda like that,’ I said.
16
I drove Axeman’s Mondeo back to the Rising Sun because nobody said I couldn’t and crept round the back and into the bar on tiptoe so as not to wake the girls. I should have worried. Two of them (and I don’t know which two) were snoring loud enough to rattle the tankards hanging behind the bar.
I laid out my monastic pallet on the bench seat by the dart board and kicked off my shoes. Then I thought of one of the perks of the job and walked round the bar – stepping carefully over the trap-door which had swallowed Axeman – and reached up to help myself to a shot from the brandy optic.
I took a swig and put the glass down whilst I unzipped my jeans and reflected that this detective business was really quite hard work. I don’t remember finishing the brandy. I don’t remember lying down or pulling a blanket over me. I do remember thinking there was something else I should have tried to find out from Scooter, but I couldn’t remember what it was.
I awoke in hell and this time I couldn’t blame alcohol.
Oh yes I could, the smell of it at least. There was that stale beery stench which all pubs have in the morning before they open the doors for an airing and on top of that, there were fumes from the unfinished brandy still in a glass balanced precariously on the edge of my bench seat bed about two inches from my nose. And if that wasn�
�t bad enough, somebody had started an industrial fan on the other side of the bar and somebody else was banging on the window from the outside, trying to get in.
It was all too much for me, so I closed my eyes again to make the smells and the sounds disappear but they stubbornly refused to go.
‘Cease fire!’ I shouted but nothing happened, so I took drastic action and stood up, just as another smell assaulted my nostrils: frying bacon.
I took in the scene gradually. It was the only way my brain could handle it.
Max was behind the bar, leaning on it and pouring three small bottles of orange juice into a straight pint glass filled with ice. She kept her elbows on the bar to steady her hands and she had an unlit cigarette between her lips. Behind her, in the doorway, stood Neemoy. She was wearing a white T-shirt and eating a thick sandwich made with two doorstep-sized slices of white bread. I could tell it was a bacon and egg sandwich, partly from the smell coming from the kitchen and partly because she had dribbled egg yolk down her cleavage. Most bizarrely of all, Mel was there, in her wheelchair, pushing a vacuum cleaner across the floor in front of her. When she saw me standing up, she reached down and switched it off.
As the whine of its engine disappeared, the only sound in the place was the chink-chink of ice in Max’s glass as she raised it unsteadily to her mouth, remembering at the last minute to remove the cigarette.
I surveyed the scene and nobody spoke.
Then the battering on the window started again and I turned round to see a bespectacled face, a hand at the forehead, pressed up against the glass trying to see in.
‘And who,’ I said with as much dignity as a befuddled, trouserless man could muster, ‘the fuck is that?’
Mel shook her head. Neemoy shrugged her shoulders and pushed more sandwich into her mouth. Max replaced the unlit cigarette in her mouth and just stared at me from under drooping eyelids.
‘If you want something doing . . .’ I muttered, striding towards the door but halting with my hand on the lock. ‘One of you is missing,’ I said.
‘Sasha’s having a bath,’ said Neemoy. ‘I’m next.’
‘Then me,’ snarled Max.
‘We’ll see about that,’ I said primly, opening the front door, but all they did was snigger. I knew I should have put my jeans on.
The window-peeper was waiting for me on the doorstep, holding out a business card. He had a natural stoop, like a pecking bird, and some of the thickest lenses I had ever seen in a pair of glasses. The card read: TONY REDSTON: FLEET STREET FASHION FOTOS.
‘Hello,’ he said in a sing-song voice, ‘I’m Tony, your photographer for the day. I’m guessing you’re Mr Angel. Your wi –’
‘Come in, Tony, come in,’ I said quickly. ‘Make yourself at home. You’re going to fit right in.’
I hadn’t exactly forgotten what Amy had said, it was just that I had had to prioritise things. I introduced Tony to Mel, Neemoy and Max while I put my jeans on and then offered to accompany him to his car, an old Volvo 940, to help unload his gear.
Photographers and Heavy Metal bands share the same mantra: you can’t have too much equipment, and Tony had enough lights to do a son et lumière on Dover Castle. As we pulled metal box after metal box out of the Volvo, I asked him:
‘Just remind me what Amy’s brief was for the shoot. Did she say she was coming down here, by the way?’
‘Never said anything about coming along,’ chimed Tony. ‘Seemed in a bit of a rush actually. Just said, “Tony, I trust you. Get your arse down to this pub at the back of beyond and make the girls look like barmaids.” She couriered a parcel of blouses over for them to wear. It’s on the front seat.’
‘Any message for me?’
‘No. Oh yes, “Check your fucking messages.” Does that make any sense?’
‘Perfect. Did she say anything about some silver tankards?’
‘No, she didn’t, but a guy called Reuben Sloman rang from something called the Silver Vaults – is that another pub? Anyway, he said there was no way he was lending out his stock to people like you, but you were always welcome there.’
I squared up to him.
‘Tell me, Tony, do you have an extra truth gene or something which stops you letting people down lightly?’
He pushed his glasses back up his nose with his forefinger.
‘Never thought about that. Shall we kick some perfectly formed butt?’
‘Why not?’
Let’s see how far you get with the three Attitude Queens, I thought.
But he had them under his thumb within seconds, and I shouldn’t have been surprised. He was a photographer, they were models. Mere mortals can’t interrupt that equation.
Once inside the bar with his gear, Tony transformed. He peeled off the grubby dark blue trenchcoat he had been wearing to reveal a vicious pink shirt and a tie which looked as if it had had a lamb biryani pre-spilled down it. He clapped his hands three times.
‘Come on, girls, get down here. Let Tony see what you’ve got – but you can keep your knickers on for now,’ he shouted.
They trooped in from the back room and stood in a line in front of the bar, Max taking deep breaths and exhaling down her chest so we didn’t get the fumes, Neemoy trying to sponge egg yolk out of her T-shirt with a damp tissue and Sasha wearing only a bath towel and dripping all over the floor.
Tony put his left hand on his hip and the palm of his right hand across his forehead.
‘This is what I have to work with?’
‘You’re on your own, son,’ I said.
‘And what time does this pub open?’
‘Twenty minutes ago,’ said Mel and she smiled up at me, all innocence.
‘Right, get these on.’ He threw the parcel of TALtops at Max. ‘I’ll set up and we’ll concentrate on bar shots. The customers’ll just have to work around me. There will be some customers, won’t there?’
Max had opened the parcel of TALtops – an experimental batch where Amy had used her interwoven silver thread technique – and selected a black one. She pulled the regular one she had been wearing yesterday over her head and threw it on the floor, then held the new one out in front of her to examine it before starting to pull it over her head. She wasn’t wearing a bra.
‘I think we’ll get a few,’ I said.
At my side, Mel snorted in disgust the way only women and cats can.
‘Have you thought about the lunch menu?’ I asked her, keeping one eye on Sasha, although she gave no sign of letting her towel slip.
‘Me? Why me? You’re supposed to be in charge.’
‘That’s as may be. You’re the one who knows what they’re doing, though. And remember, you’re doing it for Ivy. Now get into the kitchen. Don’t worry about the vacuum cleaner, you can put that away later. And if you’ve got a minute, I could go a bacon sandwich myself. I mean, it’s not like I’ve had breakfast or anything. There is some coffee on, isn’t there?’
By this time I was behind her, pushing her chair into the kitchen.
‘Wait a minute!’ she snarled over her shoulder. ‘You’re expecting me to run the pub while those three play at supermodels, aren’t you?’
‘They are supermodels, Mel, that’s why I need you to supervise them and you have to promise to use only small words.’
‘And where will you be when the work’s being done?’
I spun the chair round so I could face her, my sincere expression turned up to 11 for maximum effect.
‘I’ve got things to do, Mel, including a very big favour for your friend Scooter.’
‘Is it something to do with Axeman? I heard he had an accident.’
‘Where did you hear that?’
‘From Sasha. She said she was sorry I had to leave early last night because I missed the magician who disappeared right in front of her eyes.’
‘Yeah, right. Just say I’m helping Scooter out of a big jam, because I feel a little bit responsible and anyway I’m that sort of guy. And I promise I’ll go now and ring
the brewery and tell them to send a relief manager to run things. With a bit of luck they could have one here tomorrow. I’ll go and do that right now. Just as soon as you’ve made my sandwich. Don’t worry about the coffee, I can manage.’
After a bath, a shave, something to eat and three mugs of coffee, I felt up to the trials ahead.
Upstairs, from Ivy’s private sitting-room window, I could see that the car-park was about half full and they were all quality cars, no tatty pick-ups or vans. The mobile phone networks had obviously been busy; as mine ought to be.
I dug my mobile out of my bag, noting that I had run out of clean underwear and socks and making a mental note to do something about it, and checked my messages. I had two, the first from Veronica simply asking how I was doing and would I give her a call sometime.
The second was from Amy telling me that she had a problem with one of her suppliers so she couldn’t make it ‘down to the country’ – as if someone was listening. But she was sending Tony to take some photographs. ‘He might come across as a raddled old queen, but he does know his aperture from his anus and he won’t take shit from the zombies.’ (Amy had been known to refer to models as ‘Zombies in frocks’ when the mood took her.) She ended by saying she wanted the girls back in London tomorrow. She didn’t express an opinion about when, or how, I should return.
I punched in the number of the brewery, which I didn’t have to remember as it was printed on three ashtrays, a calendar and a water jug in that room alone.
‘Seton and Nephew, Seagrave’s Seaside Ales. Good afternoon.’
I remembered the receptionist back at the brewery, Beatrice or something. The one who dressed like something from The Glenn Miller Story from the waist up and The Story of O from the waist down.
‘Murdo Seton, please.’
‘May I ask who is calling?’
‘Roy Angel, he knows me.’
‘I’m sorry, but Mr Seton is tied up with the other directors at the moment. Could I give him a message?’
‘Just say I called and that I have almost finished down here in Whitcomb and I should have a full report for him tomorrow. Oh, and tell him he’ll need to get a relief manager for the Rising Sun.’