by Mike Ripley
Then I started shouting before Shifty and Pointy could react.
‘Now look you two, I’m having none of that in the back of my cab! I paid good money for this vehicle, and I won’t have the likes of you doing what you’re doing! It’s disgusting! There ought to be a law against it! There probably is a law against it! So you can just get out right now and catch a bus or walk or whatever you want, but I’m not having you doing that in the back of my cab! This is my living, you know. Hanging’s too good for the likes of you!’
By this time, I’d walked round the front of the cab and even slapped Armstrong’s bonnet to make a point. There were hoots coming from the back of the other black cabs stuck behind me. The lights had changed to green but nobody was going anywhere unless I moved.
Shifty and Pointy just sat there, sinking lower under the window level.
Then first one, then another and finally eight cabbies all wandered over to see what the fuss was. And when the first said, ‘You having trouble with these two ponces, mate?’ I knew I had it made.
It’s better to be lucky than good.
But on the way home, the prospect of a day or so out of sight seemed a prudent thing to consider.
I had no intention of trying to explain the whereabouts of Sunil’s goods to Sunil or his henchmen until I’d made contact with Zaria, and if she didn’t come across soon, there was a good chance she’d find me hanging from a Christmas tree by the neck. Sunil had sent three of them tonight, and if he kept that rate up they’d need a double-decker bus to follow me by Christmas Eve.
Checking all the time that there was no-one on my tail, I reviewed the situation to the sound of a bootleg tape of Sade singing jazz in cabaret.
On the minus side, they knew what I looked like, where I lived and what I drove.
On the plus side, I didn’t think they’d jump me at Stuart Street as long as Doogie was there.
That was it as far as the upside. And Doogie had a job to go to.
But then I hadn’t. I could just take off. Disappear until they got bored or Zaria finally showed up.
Back at Stuart Street, I found Fenella and Lisabeth and Miranda and Doogie busy decorating the staircase with brightly coloured tinsel streamers, which had clumps of real holly tied into them every 18 inches or so. The holly, being the sort of holly that is sold on street corners in London at this time of year, must have cost a fortune, and it didn’t have berries on. (They fetched a premium price in the West End stores.) Still, as a festive substitute for barbed wire, it was pretty effective. Even the mysterious Mr Goodson had a cut-out paper sign saying MERRY XMAS across his door. I suspected that Fenella had bullied him into it.
‘There you are, Angel,’ boomed Lisabeth from five steps up. She was doing what she was best at: supervising.
‘You haven’t forgotten you’re responsible for getting the tree, have you?’
‘Of course not,’ I smiled as I lied. ‘Hello, Binky.’
I said that only to annoy her, as Fenella was leaning over the staircase banister to fix some tinsel with double-sided tape, and one more inch and she needn’t have bothered wearing a skirt at all.
Lisabeth followed my eye-line and reached to pull down Binky’s creeping hemline. Fenella smiled between blushes.
‘We were thinking of having the party on New Year’s Eve,’ said Miranda, spraying fake snow from an ozone-friendly aerosol onto a twig of holly.
‘Oh good,’ I said, squeezing up the stairs behind Lisabeth.
What party?
‘Well, you see, Doogie’s got to work on Christmas Day – at the hotel.’
‘Sure. Er … fine. Whatever. It’s okay by me.’
‘Oh good. We were worried in case you couldn’t get the band together.’
Band? What had I promised the night before?
‘I’ll have to see, of course, but I should think the lads will come if we get plenty beer in.’
‘Aye, that’s a pre-requisite,’ said Doogie, who was doing something unspeakable to a metal coat-hanger. It looked as if he was weight-training, then I realised he was bending them into circles so they could be covered in coloured paper and turned into Christmas wreaths. That had always struck me as pretty morbid, but this was the season of goodwill to all men. Even Scotsmen.
‘Have yer decided which lager we’ll be having?’ Doogie asked.
Pardon?
‘It’ll be a surprise,’ I smiled. ‘A cheeky little brew, but you’ll be amused by its pretension.’
‘Och, weel, that’s all right then.’
I had made it to the door of my flat.
‘Doogie, did I promise to do my special punch as well?’ I asked, as I fumbled my keys out.
‘Sure yer did,’ grinned Doogie, damaging another hanger. ‘Both sorts, the white and the red. You’re not chickening out, are you?’
The wire hanger twisted into a figure eight in his hands.
‘No, Doogie, just checking.’
As soon as I had the door closed and my jacket off, I found a road atlas and turned to the Cambridge area.
It wasn’t just Sunil who had convinced me that the rest of the week would be better spent out of town.
Just where the fuck was West Elsworth?
Chapter Nine
When I take Armstrong on long journeys – which these days means anything over about 20 miles from Big Ben – I always use my mystery tapes to keep me awake and amused. The idea is that you create a tape or two of things you think you might like, but in no particular order and never more than two tracks from the same source. Then you forget about them for a couple of years and suddenly, half way down a motorway somewhere you say, ‘Hey, I remember this,’ and you perk up and pay more attention to driving. Well, that’s my theory anyway.
I was having reservations about the theory before I’d hit the M11 the next morning. Pavarotti belting out ‘Nessum dorma’ had been a great start to the morning, followed by Sipho Mabuse’s ‘Taxi-Driver’ and then Paul Simon’s ‘Me and Julio’. But then the tape had run into Earth, Wind and Fire, and I shrugged it off by thinking I must have been drunk when I put that on. And then it moved into some early Bryan Ferry, and I reckoned I must have been drunk and very young when I recorded that. If it didn’t get better, I’d be getting paranoid about policemen pulling me over and planting Richard Clayderman tapes in the glove compartment as evidence.
But then, I could always say I was on police business, and it would be sort of true.
I had phoned Prentice before leaving, and he’d got all excited about ‘having me on the payroll,’ as he put it. To be fair, he had offered ‘reasonable expenses,’ but I’d just mumbled about that. I had it in mind that I might need a favour from him rather than a few notes in the back pocket for fuel, if Zaria didn’t touch base with me soon.
‘Keep your ears open for any clues to the other cell members,’ Prentice had said enthusiastically. ‘They normally work in units of four, five at maximum. If Bell is one and this Peter – we’re running a trace on him – is another, there’ll be one more to identify; and don’t forget, they’ll be one short.’
‘Are you suggesting I volunteer to take Billy’s place?’ I’d asked.
‘Far be it from me to …’
‘Good, ‘cos you can file that one away in the Department of Daft Ideas. Right now.’
‘Okay, okay, just a thought. For God’s sake get me some more on Professor Bamforth though; that’s important.’
‘Just who is the guy?’
‘I can’t explain now; haven’t time. Just trust me.’
Trust me. The second most popular phrase in the Police Community Phrase Book after ‘You’re nicked, sunshine.’
‘Is there anything you can tell me about this guy Bell?’
‘Youngish, radical, on the fringe of everything from Greenpeaceing to bomb-banning. We’ve picked up whispe
rs of his animal rights activities, but nothing definite. Clever, certainly. Done his initial God Squad stint in Romford, then moved out to Cambridgeshire about a year ago.’ Prentice had paused, as if measuring his words. ‘He’s what you might call a good example of muscular Christianity.’
Then he’d burst out laughing, and I was really worried.
West Elsworth was to the west of Cambridge and, I presumed, to the west of East Elsworth, if there was such a place.
I had the big-scale road map out by this time, and I’d worked out that I had to turn off the Bedford road just after Caxton Gibbet. There really is a gibbet there – a place where they used to hang people – and there used to be a pub, but it seems to be permanently being redeveloped as a motel or something these days. That left just a big roundabout and a couple of petrol stations. If there was a village called Caxton, I’d never found it, but the gibbet at the side of the road was a well-known landmark.
A single lane road with no markings off to the right was signposted ‘W Elsworth,’ and half way down it, I found a pub, but of the village itself there was no sign.
Still, gift horses with their mouths open – for the sale of intoxicating liquor on or off the premises – should not be ignored.
I was the only customer in the snug bar. Perhaps because it was the sort of pub that had a snug (although indistinguishable from its lounge and its public bars), I shouldn’t have been surprised at that.
The landlord was a surly, diminutive south Londoner. Almost certainly an ex-bricklayer, or my name isn’t what it says on my driving licence. He was delighted to serve me a pint of bitter, which was as close as he would come to cleaning the pumps and pipes that week, and reluctant, until pressed, to assemble a ploughman’s lunch for me.
I quizzed him over the village, which he said was another mile down the road in a dip so you couldn’t see it (Cambridgeshire isn’t totally flat, despite the legends that the giants Gog and Magog played pool on it). He made a point of saying that the first thing I’d see would be the church bell-tower, which gave me an intro into the subject of the local vicar. Sorry, rector.
That set him off on an obviously-well-ridden high horse, and I got the saga of how he’d helped out the new rector every way a human Christian soul could, including offering the use of his valuable premises – this was a free house, his own business – for a harvest festival in traditional style. Well then, stone him, if the new poncy rector didn’t turn up after they’d spent ages decorating the place with corn sheaves and antique agricultural implements, only to say he wouldn’t conduct a service for poachers! And just because some of the locals – who actually were poachers – had added a few snared rabbits and a coupla brace of pheasants to make the tableau more realistic.
What was worse, the new rector – Mr Geoffrey Bloody Ding Dong Bell – was now thick as thieves with the landlord of The Five Bells in the village, a brewery-owned pub that attracted all the youngsters in the area, had live music on Saturdays, did meals – including bleedin’ vegetarian pasties, would I believe? – and stayed open until 3.00 on Sundays just to keep in well with the church goers!
I nodded and muttered sympathetically until I’d finished my two slices of (white) bread and a piece of cheese I’ll swear had fang marks. Then I left the unfinished majority of my pint and picked up my jacket.
‘Which way did you say The Five Bells was?’ I asked ever so politely.
But he didn’t look pleased.
Actually, I knew where The Five Bells would be – opposite the church. Any pub with ‘Bells’ in the name usually referred to the number of bells in the local church tower. After the Reformation, the landlords of many a country inn found it prudent not to show their Catholic sympathies – the Catholic church having owned most of them prior to Henry VIII getting the hump over his divorce – so they changed their names from things like The Virgin Mary to The King’s Head. Some of them kept a link with the church, though, by coded references such as ‘Bells’ or just by calling themselves The Angel – and why not? It’s a perfectly good name.
I know stuff like that because I keep my eyes open and have time to think these things through. Frightening, isn’t it?
I didn’t go in to The Five Bells, but I parked Armstrong slap bang outside it and wandered casually over to the church across the road, which a fading signboard told me was called St Michael and All Angels. It must have been fate.
The church was locked, of course. Sadly, most of them have to be these days; there are some pretty dishonest people around. But I reckoned that by the time I’d strolled leisurely back to Armstrong, the village jungle drums would have beaten out the fact that I was there.
I got half way back across the road before their first remote probe picked me up.
She was about 13, trying to look 15, sensibly dressed in a long kilt skirt and a duffle coat, and she was riding a ladies’ bicycle with a wicker carrying basket on the handlebars. She could have done commercials for sensible English maidenhood.
The brakes on her bike squealed as she stopped and balanced, one foot on the road.
‘Hello. Are you looking for somebody? Can I help?’
Now if someone had come up to me and said that in London, they would have been muggers or Mormons. But out here it seemed perfectly normal, until I remembered that there are more murders per head out in the Fenlands of East Anglia than there are in London and Glasgow on a Saturday night put together. It’s something to do with the wind coming in straight from the Urals.
‘The vicar actually,’ I said, having checked her out just in case she had an axe in the basket. ‘Sorry, rector.’
She smiled a smile it was worth being British for, but also betrayed her own emotions.
‘Oh, Geoffrey won’t be back until 11 minutes past three.’
It came out dreamily, and I wondered if the Reverend Bell knew he had a fan club. Women have spoken of me in the same breathy way, but they’ve usually responded to the treatment.
‘That’s pretty specific. I’m impressed. What time does he take Evensong? Twenty-six minutes past six?’
She put her head on one side and narrowed her eyes.
‘He’ll be on the bus from Cambridge, which gets here at 11 minutes past,’ she said as if talking to a smaller, stupid brother. ‘We only have one bus in the afternoons, and it’s always on time. But you can wait in the rectory; that’s never locked.’
She got off the bike and wheeled it between us.
‘It’s just the other side of the church,’ she said. ‘My name’s Stephanie, by the way.’
‘That’s a nice name,’ I said, wishing I’d thought of something better, but then I remembered how old she was and didn’t feel so bad about the cliché. ‘Known Geoffrey long?’
‘Since he came here,’ she said enthusiastically. ‘He’s really livened things up. It was Deadsville, Arizona before he came. I suppose you’ve come for the hunt.’
‘Er … Well, I …’
She nodded her head knowingly.
‘That’s okay, I know I’m not supposed to know about stuff like that.’
‘Well …’ I said, trying to give the impression that I knew what the fuck she was talking about, but it wasn’t me who’d made up the stupid rules.
‘What is it about you lot?’ she asked, but it was to herself more than me. She wasn’t interested in eye-contact or serious answers. ‘Do you have to be a black belt or something before you can get involved?’
‘Oh yeah, fifth dan at least,’ I said, not knowing word one what I was agreeing to.
‘You’re being patronising, but I get the message,’ she said seriously.
Good. Would you mind explaining it to me?
‘Aren’t you even going to ask how I knew you were one of them?’ And this time she looked at me.
‘I suppose I’d better,’ I said, keeping a straight face.
‘We’
re here, by the way.’ She stopped wheeling the bike and pointed to a detached Victorian villa that, if the light had been better, wouldn’t have looked out of place on the cover of a Henry James novel. ‘Just go in and find the kitchen. Geoffrey will be along at –’
‘Eleven minutes past three.’
Stephanie made to mount her bicycle.
‘You never told me,’ I said, ‘how you knew.’
‘Coming here in a London taxi,’ she yelled over her shoulder as she pedalled off. ‘Why do you lot have to be so fucking obvious?’
I found the kitchen of the rectory easily enough, still wondering about how they didn’t make schoolgirls like they used to. Then I thought how stupid that was. It wasn’t that there was any difference in them, it was me who was too old. And that just made me irritable.
I had time, if Stephanie was right about the local stagecoach, to suss the rectory good and proper. So I did. I didn’t know what I might find, so when I found nothing of interest, I wasn’t disappointed. One thing did strike me, though, and while I can’t claim to be any sort of authority on 19th Century vicarages, it seemed odd to me that the largest downstairs room in the house – maybe a ballroom at some point – was completely bare of furnishings and fittings. It was a huge room running down the side of the house with French windows giving out on to the garden. And there was absolutely nothing in it, apart from light bulbs.
I had no better luck upstairs, not even in a bedroom that had been converted into a study. There was nothing of note there except what you might expect to find in the way of books and back copies of the parish magazine. Not so much as a sniff of an anti-vivisectionist tract.
The bathroom wall cabinet was more interesting, with a variety of shampoos and facial scrubs from the Body Shop. They all declared that they weren’t tested on animals, so that could have been significant, but then again, I used most of them. What was more interesting was the thought that there certainly wasn’t a Body Shop in West Elsworth.
Did the good Reverend Bell buy his cosmetics in London, perhaps?