Mystery City

by Alistair Lavers

  Chapter Twelve

  Jailbreak

  The anarchy car was a white Ford Escort Mk1 estate called Chris, after Yul Brynner’s character in The Magnificent Seven, whom Mary had worshipped from afar since her last year at primary. Though Mary’s car smoked a lot less than her movie star cowboy, its lower bodywork reflected his black-clad limbs, now its sills and wheel arches were daubed with blackboard paint and Hammerite, to slow the progress of decay, which had already begun to creep into its bones some years before. But Mary loved him and washed him religiously in Turtle Wax; though his springs were tired, his paintwork shone like the white walls of an operating theatre. If it hadn’t been for the BOLLOCKS to CAPITALISM sticker on the back window, the old Escort could easily have been mistaken for the cherished transport of an English clergyman.

  Mary and Chris arrived to collect Ian in front of Tito’s Goods Vehicles forecourt at 8pm, with the front passenger seat as far back as it would go, so her accomplice could arrange his limbs in relative safety. Mary drew up, put Chris in neutral and opened the passenger door.

  ‘What’s with all the bloody straps and collars – are you going to an S&M party on the way back..?’ remarked Ian, looking at the pile of horse tack on her back seat as he tried to squeeze himself in.

  ‘They’re bridles Ian…’

  ‘I see you’ve come dressed for it,’ he scoffed, still trying to needle his chauffeur.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘If someone points a torch at you tonight you’ll stand out like a bloody Christmas tree; haven’t you got any camos?’

  ‘I’ve got my greatcoat… what’s wrong with it?’ said Mary, defensively.

  ‘It’s got six king-size, shiny buttons on the front. With them an’ yer earrings you’ll look like a friggin’ chandelier if you get lit up, you daft cow.’

  ‘Don’t you call me a daft cow!’

  ‘I’ll call you what I like, because you’re blackmailing me. Aren’t you Shipley? I’m only here, instead of in a nice warm pub, because you’re threatening to tell my bird I had to go to the friggin’ clap clinic– so don’t get bloody smart with me.’

  ‘Well what am I supposed to do Ian? There’s no one else. I’m desperate…’

  ‘So you thought you’d just blackmail me did you? Because there’s no one else,’ he sneered, ‘you’re mad.’

  ‘It’s not mad! Just belt up and stop complaining.’

  The much-loved herd of donkeys that had walked the sands of Victoria Bay since the 1920’s, giving rides to generations of little boys and girls, were stabled in their own purpose-built paddock in a steep field, on the lower slopes of Oliver’s Mount, and enjoyed spectacular views across to the wolds, over the Mere and Higher Gunstone, the secondary arterial route into Whitborough – along Ogmundarson Dyke.

  Their paddock was reached by a single dirt track road through woodland, on a fork adjoining Queen Mary’s Rd, which linked Higher and Lower Gunstone, three quarters of a mile from the sands of Victoria Bay. Once the herd had returned to their quarters and were secure inside the stable block, they were alone for the night. The perimeter was secured by a galvanised grid fence and steel gate that was padlocked at night. Only the rear of the compound, which opened onto a steep field, was unfenced, though a dense hedge around its borders meant no other man-made barrier in front, or beyond, was necessary.

  Mary’s plan for releasing the herd involved approaching the compound from a higher field, below Mountside Hairpin. She hoped she would be able to pick the stable door lock, once they were on the yard, and then lead the animals through another gate at the top of the field and into the woods to freedom, thus avoiding the CCTV cameras covering the main gate. Mary and Ian parked in a lay-by beside the racetrack at Woodland Leap, sat in silence and waited for the sun to sink below Jacobs Mount.

  Forty-five minutes later, the two kidnappers reached the edge of the donkey paddock and knelt down in the weeds and grass at the edge of the yard, checking the windows for lights or signs of activity, though the compound was quiet and nothing stirred within. Mary got to her feet and stepped forward impulsively, cracking a large dry twig.

  ‘Shush…’

  ‘Shush me!’

  ‘Stop making so much bloody noise then! There might still be somebody about, Mary.’

  ‘There’s never anyone around here after seven, anyway, they don’t scare me…’

  ‘You haven’t seen the bigger one. She’s built like Les Dawson. I seen her on Vicky Bay hauling kids on an’ off their backs like they wuz packets of crisps.’

  ‘There aren’t any lights on. Let’s get a bit closer.’

  The two commandos paused.

  ‘Hold my bridles.’

  ‘Just a minute. Just wait a minute.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Quiet. Just listen.’

  ‘We’re wasting time Ian.’

  ‘I’m making sure there’s no one about. D’you wanna get arrested or duffed up?’

  ‘There’s nobody here, I told you.’

  Mary and Ian reached the steps before the door to the stables, listening for a few seconds before attempting to pick the lock.

  ‘Turn around Ian.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Turn around and watch the yard.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I don’t like it when people watch me doing stuff, okay… watch the trees or something.’

  Ian huffed and turned around. ‘I don’t believe I’m doing this. It’s not even sane.’

  Mary opened her purse and took out a set of lock picks. After a couple of minutes, she had sprung the latch and opened the door.

  ‘How d’you learn to do that Shipley?’

  ‘My dad’s gardener showed me when I was a girl.’

  ‘Cool. Can you show me?’

  ‘No, Ian. Right…let’s do it,’ said Mary a little nervously, feeling for the light switch.

  ‘Bugger me – this is smart,’ gasped Ian, as the lights came on inside the stables.

  ‘Just remember, it’s a prison.’

  ‘Nice though…’

  ‘Ian, it doesn’t matter how… how…’

  ‘What? How nice it looks?’

  ‘I wasn’t going to say that.’

  ‘It is though ‘int it. If I were a donkey, I’d be dead chuffed holed up in here.’

  ‘That’s not the point – they’re prisoners. They have no freedoms.’

  ‘But they’re all pretty healthy-lookin’. Are you sure we should be doing this? What if they end up wandering on the road and causing an accident?’

  ‘They can go where they want when they’re free.’

  ‘They can’t though can they. We’re right next to a main road leading onto Gunstone; what if they get hit by a bloomin’ car?’

  ‘We’re not releasing them in town.’

  ‘Where then?’

  ‘We take them down onto the beach then walk up the coast.’

  ‘Have you checked the tides?’

  ‘You’re just being negative. Who cares! Petty details like that – they’ll be free. That’s what you should be thinking – we’re doing our bit for the cause. Freedom for animals… freedom from cruelty, from vivisection.’

  ‘Oh come on… they’re not exactly mistreated or starved are they? Or vivisected.’

  Mary snorted derisively. ‘There’s bigger issues.’

  ‘Bigger issues! Like what?’

  ‘Animal exploitation. They’re being exploited. Every day, they’re exploited.’

  ‘So am I. I’m exploited – but no one wants to kidnap me and dump me in the bloody countryside, miles from anywhere without any food. I’ve done one frigging sponsored walk – and that was enough.’

  ‘They can eat grass Ian.’

 
‘How’s that better than oats? And how are you gonna move ‘em anyway?’

  ‘We walk them.’

  ‘Are they gonna go with us though? They’re a bit stubborn aren’t they – mules‘n’ donkeys..?’

  ‘Of course they will, they’ll go wherever we take them.’

  ‘Cuz we’re vegetarians?’ Mary gave him a look. ‘Your show Mary,’ said Ian, giving in, ‘hope you know what you’re doing. This one’s called Pepper,’ he said, reading the name plate on the stall, ‘cool name.’

  ‘Don’t just stand around Ian, they need bridles on.’

  ‘I don’t know how, do I… I play pool. I’m not a friggin’ rustler.’

  ‘Come over and watch me then,’ moaned Mary, unfolding her carefully tied bridles and reins.‘Open the door.’

  ‘It’s not gonna run out is it?’ he said, covering the bolt on the door with his hand.

  ‘They’re not like horses Ian, look at them – they’re so docile and trusting,’ she cooed.

  ‘Well all right, are you ready then?’ said Ian warily. He lifted the latch and drew the door towards them, but Pepper remained standing in his stall. Mary approached him with the bridle, though the donkey never flinched, despite the stink of her dreadlocks.

  ‘See? Easy,’ she said, pleased as punch after a minute of fiddling, kissing Pepper’s nose affectionately. ‘Now you have a go with one of the others.’

  ‘All right, I’ll give it a shot, so howd’ you learn how to do that?’

  ‘I had two horses and a Shetland pony – for Ryedale’s gymkhana – well, I say that, but I had to sh… why are you looking at me like that?’ complained Mary suddenly, looking at Ian’s overdone expression of surprise.

  ‘You had two horses and a pony?’

  ‘So..?’

  ‘Yeah – you just said you had two horses and a pony Mary.’

  ‘So– what about it?’ she fumed, suddenly losing her temper. ‘Just get the bridles on the rest of them for God’s sake and stop asking me stupid questions!’

  ‘Don’t talk to me like that Mary – or I’ll walk.’

  ’All right, all right… just… be quick will you…’

  Mary had clammed up a little, realising she had let slip a less than complimentary detail from her previous life as a well-kept public schoolgirl.

  Sweetie, the most stubborn and headstrong animal in the stable, kicked the wall of her stall with her back hoof to express her displeasure at being disturbed after hours, as Mary led Pepper and Ginny to a tethering pole beside the door to the ramp and the exit onto their field. Then she went back to ‘rescue’ the other animals and check Ian had properly fastened their bridles.

  A Séance

  At the Valhalla Retirement Home,

  (900 yards from the stables).

  The Gold Cup lounge on the south face of Whitborough’s infamous Valhalla Retirement Home, overlooked a narrow flagstone patio and a well-kept lawn, which fell away from the house on a gentle gradient to the boundary – ringed by a four-course sandstone block wall and inner hedge where the last stretch of Lower Gunstone met the top of Ramsgill High Street.

  The extension borrowed much from the layout, dimensions and feel of a typical motorcycle showroom to which the proprietors had added the fixtures, fittings and furniture of a Tsarist ballroom. It was freezing cold in winter – stifling in summer – and preposterously ostentatious all year round, and the most popular communal space in the building, with its peerless views of the best summer traffic jams, and the umbrella-wrecking winter gales and storms, that only the North Sea’s storm triangle coast was capable of producing.

  It was also the venue for Elsie Cakebread’s Sunday night séances – a weekly treat for her residents and guests, when the sun had slipped below Jacobs Mount and the heavy gold brocade curtains were drawn across its great glass panes, blocking out the curious stares of passing motorists, nosy pedestrians and gawping taxi drivers. Valhalla was something of a rarity within the world of old people’s homes. And never had an empty bed.

  Instead of the usual room numbers that were so common to the other establishments around it, each room in the Cakebread household took its name from the great lists and rolls of motor racing history, or notorious incidents, and characters from the rock and roll halls of fame and infamy. Valhalla catered for the type of elderly ladies and gentlemen who had enjoyed the kind of lifestyle that went with loud music, fast bikes and beer, and did not want to spend their last few years deposited in front of a television between meals, ignored by a group of uninterested teenagers masquerading as care assistants, who, in comparison with the residents, had barely left the scrotum. If you were in Valhalla, you were never likely to be bored.

  Behind the polished aluminium front doors of its Art Deco facade, which mirrored the entrance and exits of the town’s biggest cinema, lay the Bray Hill foyer, named after the terrifying downhill straight from the Isle of Man TT races.

  In the right-hand corner of the foyer, behind a shimmering silver cylinder, stood the Nurburgring staircase, a structure straight from the imagination of M.C. Escher. For those reluctant to sample its bizarre curves, a Stannah stairlift and a more conventional flight of steps – the Staircase to Heaven – on the left, offered the safest and most direct route to the first-floor bedrooms, especially after one or two of Elsie’s speciality calvados and rum cocktails.

  Each room in Valhalla featured a spacious en suite, an intercom system and a dumb waiter (a small elevator for food, packages and luggage). The residents also had the option to use the Jim Morrison memorial bath house and sauna on the ground floor –between Hell’s Kitchen and Death Disco.

  On the first floor there were twenty single private rooms, on two wings to the left and right of a library and cinema, and the MotorFloyd sensory lounge inbetween.

  On the second floor there were ten more rooms, a video games suite and a flight simulator room, housing Sopwith Camel, Spitfire and Harrier flight simulators. With enough fifty pence pieces, one could dispatch two generations of Germans or a token Argentinian in an exported French plane, subject to your own skill and élan, whilst the attic, reached by means of a winding iron staircase, housed the Frank-N-Furter observatory and Gothic Planetarium.

  Valhalla’s landscaped grounds occupied a rectangular plot, set into the lower slopes of Oliver’s Mount over three ascending terraces.

  The first level was set out as a patio and barbecue area, with benches, cane recliners and a handful of small garden reading rooms. A fire pit, model village and scale models of Stonehenge and Glastonbury Tor occupied the second.

  On the uppermost terrace, a U-shaped clubhouse, pool and snooker room enclosed the firing platform on the shooting range, which was accessed through patio doors on the bridging corridor between the wings.

  The target wall on the range, which was faced with galvanised wire cages filled with hardcore, was also blessed by a third layer of protection, in the form of the stout sectional concrete barriers– beloved of British Rail, that ensured anything living which dared to cross the embankment below the railway line beyond, survived intact, the odd wild shot from the residents sometimes fell upon the tracks of the Whitborough to York train. But the noise of the diesel engines accelerating usually masked the clatter of shotgun pellets bouncing off the carriage roofs.

  It was Elsie’s first circle, since the sinking of HMS Brazen and the brawl the local paper had sensationally titled ‘the Milk Race Massacre’ the week before. They had two other guests from the Spiritualist Church on Meddon Street and an anonymous member of the Black Hand Coven, Isla Binnie, wife of Tony Binnie, the first victim of Lindsay Boldwood, the county’s new werewolf.

  Isla was masquerading as a guest of the Spiritualists with a cover story that pretended to portray her as a wronged wife, who was still unsure whether her husband had run away from his debts, or moved into the next wo
rld by accident or suicide.

  Elsie had arranged her sitters in their usual circular pattern, instructing the group to join hands after performing her ritual of protection and asking the group to let their thoughts clear. She now directed their eyes to the flame above the single pillar candle, in the centre of the table, their only permitted light source for the duration.

  Elsie dipped her chin towards her bosom and closed her eyes, squeezing the hands placed benignly in hers, as she attempted to connect with the spirits on the lower plains of the astral world.

  ‘Is there anybody there?’ she asked softly, taking a long breath, though her words barely had time to settle in the air before two commemorative Isle of Man TT plates leapt off their hooks on the wall, into a scrum of cushions covering the back of an expensively-upholstered armchair.

  A haunting black and white photo print of Alice Cooper, mounted in a clip frame, followed motorcycle legends Mike Hailwood and Giacomo Agostini, flung from the picture rail by invisible forces into a bunch of ripening bananas, as the table began to rattle, drilling its legs manically on the parquet floors, before taking to the air like an overloaded Sea King helicopter. Then the table suddenly clattered back down to terra firma, shuddering like an epileptic piledriver, before rising up yet again at a tilt by its right legs.

  ‘Lean left! Left!’ yelled Alan Backhouse, another sensitive and a former sidecar racer, who knew all there was to know about leaning into the kerbs of certain death. The table connected with the tiled floor once more, only to rise again by incremental millimetres, shaking and rattling its screws as it rocked and buzzed.