I lit a cigar, knowing that a suitable response to someone I’d recently given shelter and sustenance would be a waste of words. I looked around, wondering where the bales and boxes of powder could be stored.
“Only I’m allowed to smoke in here.” He pushed Dismal away. “I hate other peoples’ smoke. This ground is holy, and unfamiliar fag smell pollutes the incense. The others have to go outside to smoke, whether it’s raining or not.”
I blew a goodly draft into his face. “Shut the fuck up. I know all about your off-shore accounts in Jersey and the Cayman Islands. You’ve sent plenty of cash out of the country in the last ten years, to avoid income tax. And so that you wouldn’t be suspected by the police you’ve carried on this loony poet existence as a cover, pushing that poor bloody panda in its pram up and down the Great North Road. You’ve made so much money you’ve been wondering when to cut and run, but you’ve hung on out of greed, to pile up more and more.”
Dismal enjoyed my speech more than Delphick, who maybe had never heard so many angry words from me at one go. His features went through varying shades of colour as I held him to the platform. “You’re wondering how I know, aren’t you? Well, I met Oscar Cross, and he told me about you showing him how to cheat to get through his eleven-plus when you were kids. He said he’d be grateful all his life, even though you did charge him a tenner. Thing was, though, he thought that nowadays you’d got above yourself, and drove too hard a bargain for storing his goods. He doesn’t trust you anymore. He’s been meaning for a long time to cut you out, told me he’d found a new depot.”
This part was all fiction, but I saw no harm in it. “The only trouble is getting somebody trustworthy to collect the stuff and take it to Holland. He has a better distribution system there, not to say a readier market. So after a couple of hours drinking gin I persuaded him that there was no one more capable of masterminding the move than me.”
He opened his mouth in the hope of speaking. He couldn’t, for the moment.
“I have a gun in my pocket,” I said, “which I don’t want to use, but I will if you move. I suppose you want to know how I found out about you? Remember the Sidney Blood you wrote a few years ago? A real shit novel it was, but I read it over and over one day at Peppercorn Cottage till I cracked the code. You were so cock-a-hoop at getting into the drugs racket that you couldn’t resist hoping the world would one day know about it. You wanted your biographers to come across it after you were dead and beyond the reach of the law. So that they would have something interesting about you to write, you encoded clues as to what you were up to, but in such a way that nobody would find out while you were alive. You must have had a lot of belly laughs over your Olivetti when you thought up the code. Using the first letter of every second word in chapter one made a nice little narrative, somewhat short winded but full of two fingered scorn for the world and satisfaction for yourself. I rumbled it while passing a few long hours at Moggerhanger’s rat-infested residence for his lower orders, and the knowledge came in more than useful during my talk to Oscar Cross. He doesn’t trust anyone, so it was a long job getting his confidence, but I did, because of what I knew, and he’s sent me to clear the house and deliver the stuff back to him.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s an inadmissible farrago of pure nonsense.”
“Eloquence won’t save you. Let me put it this way. Dismal here is a trained police dog, as regards sniffing drugs. You can’t hide anything from him.”
“You’re a fantasizing pillock. All you say is a load of bollocks.” He tried a laugh, after his words of the demotic. “It’s all straight from a Sidney Blood, but not the one I wrote, which was real literature. It’ll go well with my collected works. I’m proud of that book.”
“Dismal!” I clapped my hands loudly. “Find the dope. Go on, move, or I’ll stop your Bogie!”
His great tail waving, as if already semaphoring a message of success to cops or customs officers, he ran towards the kitchen, stopped, sniffed, then came back with a knowing look, and set off two at a time up the stairs. Delphick was on his feet. “Come here, you bloody pooch!”
I pushed him down. “Stay where you are.”
Dismal’s light hearted barking sounded as if he’d come across a splendid lunch, a sound of eating a way through a wall to reach it. “If he wants to gobble up my secret store of condoms,” Delphick said, “good luck to him. I’ve got some pork-scratching specials, the fastest selling condoms in Yorkshire.” There was too much panic behind his smile for the claim to be genuine. “I got them from a machine in a pub last week.”
“There aren’t any condoms in the place,” I said. “You never cared about getting a woman in the club.” Not being in two places at once, because I hadn’t studied the gobbledegook of the Miller Raper, I was glad to hear the slam of the Rolls door as it stopped by the house.
Bill came in. “What’s the hold up? You know we must load up and be out by fourteen-hundred hours. If you want me to make the mastermind talk I’ll get the toolkit from the car.”
“No need,” I said, at Delphick turning pale. “Just climb the stairs, and see what Dismal’s up to.”
He set off, boots clattering. “Christ! He’ll eat it all.”
Delphick went into a well-rehearsed foetal position. “You’ll be sorry. Oh how you’ll be sorry. You can’t do this to me. An Englishman’s home is his castle. You’ll never get away with it.”
“All right, if you like I can call the police, and get a pat on the back for fulfilling a patriotic duty. Let them take it. Is that what you want? They’ll kick the shit out of you at the copshop, then give you some counselling, and bang you up in a cell, which will serve you right. There’s a phone box at the top of the lane, remember? It’s the one you used to shop me with Moggerhanger three years ago. It won’t take me a minute to go up there and use it. You’re lucky we’re snatching the parcels, instead of letting the law find them.” He mumbled something I didn’t understand, probably a few phrases in Tibetan. “Yes, I might do that,” I said, “leave a packet for the police to see.”
Bill came down with a bundle under each arm. “It’s the real thing. There’s so much it’ll fill the boot.”
“Get it in, then,” I said. “And make it snappy. I don’t know how long I’ll be able to keep this Himalayan Tiger from my throat.”
“You’re going too far,” Delphick cried. “We’ll all be dead for this.”
“You shouldn’t mind being reincarnated into a rat.” But I didn’t altogether like what I was doing, either, now that I was doing it, me the halfwit machine carrying out Moggerhanger’s end-of-career coup. Why I was putting my life at risk I didn’t know, because Delphick was right. We’d never get away with it. Better than racing back to Moggerhanger’s lair and basking in his smile of gratification would be to go to Hull and take the next boat for the mainland, but even a sauve qui peut like that would mean death, or living the rest of our lives without eyes or fingers.
After much clattering up and down the stairs Bill came in with Dismal. “We’re ready to go.”
“Now look here,” I said to Delphick, after Dismal had sniffed him into a state of sufficient fear to take in my warning, “keep away from the phone after we’ve gone. Nobody can help you. Think about it. Don’t cut off your nose to spite your face, as your mother often said, I’m sure, because if you do you’ll soon have no head left. Is that clear?”
I knew I was right, and so did he. If he belled Oscar Cross there’d be a suspicion that he’d shifted the goods himself, and he’d put him on the execution list. If he phoned Moggerhanger he’d only get a laugh. We were in the clear.
“You outright bastards,” he shouted as we left the house.
Bill pressed every last packet into the boot. “I spread some over the walls.” He laughed as he started the engine. “Sprayed a bit across his bed as well.”
Kenny was asleep, so we bun
dled him into the horsebox, locked the door, hitched it to the car, and trundled away.
Chapter Twenty-Seven.
The tang of leafmould and wood damp blew through the open windows, refreshing yet sinister, telling us to get away quick, so we bumped our way to do so at top speed. Just before the tarmacked road Bill stopped the car. “I’ve been thinking.”
“No.” I passed a Henri Winterman. “I won’t hear of it. Have a smoke instead.”
“Didn’t you hear? I said I’d been thinking.”
“I know you did. But my answer is no.”
“What are you on about? I have a particularly foolproof plan.”
“No plan is foolproof. You said so yourself.”
He let smoke drift away. “You haven’t even heard what I’ve got to say yet.”
“I have. I’m tuned into your brainbox. I’ve heard it several times already in my mind. While we’re wasting time, imagination, and no doubt intelligence on your loony proposition, our survival gets more and more unlikely. We’re too near the scene of the crime to talk. I don’t like courting disaster. If Delphick’s daft enough he’s halfway up the lane to the telephone box. The longer we linger the more dangerous it gets.”
“Do you think I don’t know? Listen, it won’t take a minute, then we’ll be off like a rocket. What I propose is that we race down to the Channel and get across to France. There’s nothing more pleasant than spending money in that lovely country. After a few easy days at the fleshpots we’ll make a royal progress to Marseilles. I know how to dispose of the stuff there. We’ll be out of the territory of the Green Toe Gang. We’ll be beyond the range of Moggerhanger’s long arm. We’ll make ourselves into millionaires.” He gave his great berserker freebooting laugh. “We’ll be rich for life!”
“Listen to what would really happen,” I cautioned. “If Lanthorn’s son isn’t on duty to stop us getting across the Channel—though he probably will be, because Moggerhanger is no fool, and already has him on red alert in case we make such a move—the French police, under the eagle eye of Inspector Javert, will be laughing their tits off while waiting for us. Ten years later we’d get eaten by sharks, trying to escape from Devil’s Island.”
“I was only testing you, Michael.” He put the car in gear, and we were on the road. My only wish was to deliver the load to Moggerhanger, then clock out of his employment with the appropriate golden handshake. Handling and transporting drugs was finished for me. All I wanted was to live modestly—though in idleness. If and when the money to do so ran out I would apply for a job in Blaskin’s fiction factory, churning out Sidney Bloods, because writing, from all I had seen, was far from an unpleasant life, almost the same as pulling in a private income out of what, after all, was your hobby, since you halfway liked doing it.
And yet, as we threaded the lanes, if the shitwork Blaskin wanted done was beyond me, I could turn gigolo and live off women, which would be even more pleasant, since I loved them so much. Then again, even that might not bring in a tolerable income, because I wasn’t as young as was necessary for such an occupation, and in any case I’d so enjoy what I was doing I wouldn’t want to charge anything.
Moggerhanger’s thousand or two for the present job would soon melt, in this land of galloping inflation, and when it did I’d be on the pavement outside a London terminal begging pence for cups of tea, and slurping so much that my insides would rot, and I’d soon pop my clogs beside a cardboard fire under one of the bridges.
“Think of it,” Bill said, “leaning against a palm tree on the island of Runna-Runna in the South Pacific, a smiling bint in a grass skirt coming towards you with half a coconut shell brimming with the local brew, her lovely brown breasts moving up and down in the sunlight with every step. Canoes fishing for our dinner would dot the blue briny, and there’d be the mouth-watering smell of a whole pig roasting on the beach. Oh yes, and yams boiling in the pot. I can see it all.”
“Knock it off,” I shouted. “You stopped me from putting Moggerhanger behind bars three years ago, and now you’re trying to do him down. I don’t understand.”
“Michael, the past is history. If you learn from history you make more history, and never get anywhere. But it’s your choice. Only think about it though, you and me and Dismal free of all worldly cares. We’d sit on the deck of a schooner, with the shape of Runna-Runna in the distance getting closer and closer, pleasure island just waiting for us to enjoy. We’ll have the natives build us a shipshape palm-thatched abode, and our bone-idleness wouldn’t be the half of it. Now and again a tourist ship would stop for twenty-four hours, and not only would we get all the fags and booze in exchange for what local produce our native wives could weave or dig up, but bevies of lovely young tourist girls would come ashore in white shorts and sun hats to see how the locals lived, meaning you and me. We’d have the time of our lives, forever and forever with no amen.”
“We’d be too dead to enjoy it,” I said. “And don’t keep slowing down.”
“You’re too pessimistic to live. What’s happened to my old Michael Cullen? I’d take my time on the island at first, to get the lie of the land, but in a year or two we’d mount a coup d’état, and the place would fall into our hands like a ripe plumb. I’d be crowned king by the inhabitants, and you’d be my prime minister. Think of it. William the Conqueror back from Normandy, and the Right Honourable Michael Cullen! We’d make a model country out of it, and get a seat at the United Nations. I’d have a palace built, and organise a small standing army, the best trained force in the region, and if any neighbouring island objected to our presence (I could soon arrange that) we’d land our battalion and take that place over as well. Can’t you see it all? Field Marshall Straw whistling his lads up the beach like shock troops! Before we knew it we’d have an archipelago. And you say we couldn’t do it? Where’s your vision? Where’s your optimism and confidence? Where’s your sense of purpose? You might want to stay a nonentity in Blighty forever, but I don’t. I want a bit of dolce fa niente in my life.”
On a straight bit before the A1—which road I was longing to see, because then maybe the mad bastard would smell enough of London to belt up, and realise there was nothing to do but get there, unload the stuff, and take our pay. We caught up with a police Range Rover, and the road wasn’t free enough of traffic to overtake with the horsebox, so Bill had to follow it for a while.
“As I see the situation, there’s a great opportunity,” he babbled, “which you’re thinking of passing up so blithely. It would be dead easy, no risk at all. I’ve worked out how to get there. In Marseilles we’d pocket a cool million, maybe two—or even three—then fly to New Zealand. Once there we’d buy a boat and cruise around the South Seas till we found a pleasant island. Maybe we would even stop a month in Fiji, and talk to people about the most suitable place, and how to get there. I say, what the hell’s that cop car doing? He’s down to twelve miles an hour, and probably inviting us to overtake so’s he can do us for speeding.”
He was too lit up by his insane Utopian scheme for colonising Straw Island to bother with his rear mirror, and when I leaned out to look, another police Range Rover came from a turning and placed itself right up against the horsebox bumpers. “We’re being topped and tailed.”
They nudged us into an oh-so-convenient lay-by and, as soon as Bill stopped, Dismal leapt out into a patch of oil and began a long piss. “I’m glad you pulled us up, officer,” Bill said. “Our dog’s been wanting to do that for at least ten miles.”
The tall brutal looking bastard of the silver pips in charge wore a cap with the Sillitoe tartan across the headband. His mate was a sergeant, as were a pair in the car which pulled up behind the horsebox. I don’t know why I wasn’t as frightened as I should have been, because they were now about to start the process whereby only Dismal wouldn’t get twenty years.
“Fucking amateurs,” the smallest sergeant said, and he was six feet tall. They don’t make t
hem small in Yorkshire.
“Get out, you,” one said to Bill, who smiled and complied, though he showed no hurry, as if to put out his hand for a shake, because he had been in this situation many times before, and knew how to behave. “Good afternoon, officer.”
“We want a look in your vehicles.”
Bill put on his most inane smile. “Certainly, sir.” We crowded around, while he made a show of sorting the key.
“Fucking hell!” one of them cried when he pulled the door wide open. “We’ve got a murder on our hands.”
Kenny was stretched and unmoving on the floor. Bill wagged his head. “He’s not dead, sir, only asleep. He’s had a drop too much, that’s all. It’s a very sad case. He took in such a quantity of alcohol as would have stymied an elephant. In fact I was in Burma during the war, when one of the lads in my platoon gave a bull elephant a quart of arak. I soon wished that great thing had gone to sleep as well, because it caused such a swathe of destruction between Mandalay and Rangoon they must still be talking about it. But don’t worry about our pal Kenny, sir,” he said to the inspector. “We’re taking him home to his wife and five little kiddies. He’ll be able to sleep it off there. She’s used to it, poor woman.”
The four of them stared at Bill, as if not unappreciative of his narrative, till one who considered he had gone on too long said: “Shut the fuck up. We aren’t here to listen to arseholes like you. Just be careful of everything you say, because whatever you come out with will be used in court in any way we like, to get you the maximum possible sentence.”
“Open the boot,” said the inspector.
Such words I had dreaded, so knew that things were far from all right. Yet I had the itch at thinking I had seen him somewhere before, though couldn’t say where. As well as having no trace of the local accent their procedure showed few genuine characteristics of a police raid. Neither Bill nor I were up against the horsebox with hands in the air while they searched for guns, as they should have made us do. They were carrying on as if they had never bothered to look at the telly.
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