by Gordon Reece
‘Your lights! You haven’t got your lights on!’
We were driving into a darkness as unrelieved as deep space; it was impossible to see where we were going. Mum slapped at the dashboard, searching for the lights, but instead the windscreen wipers began scraping frenetically back and forth across the glass. Mum killed them with a curse and tried again. Now the left indicator came on, flashing impatiently on the dashboard like a nervous tic. I was praying: Please don’t let another car come now, please don’t let another car come now. They’ll plough straight into us!
And then she found them, and a swathe of yellow light illuminated the terrible danger we were in. We’d left the lane altogether and were on the point of going into the ditch that ran along the side of the road. I screamed out, and she jerked the steering wheel round hard. I waited for the front of the car to drop into empty space, but somehow all four wheels stayed on the road. We clipped the opposite bank as Mum counteracted the sharp turn she’d made, and then we were back on the tarmac. She found second gear at last and the anxious moaning of the engine abated, like a starving animal finally thrown some food.
We negotiated the twisting lanes at a crawl, Mum still battling with the unfamiliar gears. Fifteen minutes or so later we emerged onto the B road that eventually joined up with the main road into town. I felt exposed and vulnerable as we left the darkness of the lanes behind us and joined the stream of traffic under the bright glare of the street lights. I sank down in my seat and put a hand up to cover my face. What if a friend of Paul Hannigan’s was in one of the cars behind us and recognized the car? What would he do if he saw two strangers driving his friend’s car? I tried not to think about it . . .
‘Can’t you go any faster, Mum?’ I groaned.
‘It’s thirty here, Shelley. The last thing we want is to get pulled over by the police.’
I hunkered lower.
After fifteen agonizing minutes, the garish lights of the Farmer’s Harvest loomed up ahead on our left.
The Farmer’s Harvest was a chain of restaurants with an olde-worlde theme, where the waitresses dressed like characters from a Thomas Hardy novel; the walls were decorated with horse brasses and antique farm implements and the ‘chicken’ came in perfect rectangles, the tomato sauce in little sachets that you had to pay extra for. Yet in spite of its hideousness, the Farmer’s Harvest was always packed. When we passed it Mum often used to say it was ‘the living proof’ of a remark some wit had once made. The public taste? The public taste is awful!
Mum slowed down, indicated left and turned into the Farmer’s Harvest’s car park with all the prissy precision of a learner driver on their test, anxious not to do anything that might attract attention to us. She drove through the rows of parked cars towards the rear where there were bushes and trees and it was less well lit. We went to the very end, but there were no free spaces.
‘Don’t tell me,’ Mum said under her breath. ‘Don’t tell me!’
We did an entire circuit of the car park, but there was nothing. Soon we were in front of the brightly lit restaurant again.
‘Go round again, Mum, go round again! Maybe we missed one!’
We had to wait while a large group of diners crossed in front of us. They looked like wedding guests – the women in tight fishtail dresses and high heels, the men in suits, some with carnations in their lapels. In spite of all their finery, there was something rough, something threatening, about them. I noticed the men’s tattooed knuckles, the ponytails, the obligatory earrings. They seemed drunk already, grinning inanely into the car at us.
I thought they were just the sort of people that Paul Hannigan would have known. His greasy long hair and weasel face would have fitted in perfectly among them. I covered my eyes with my hand and prayed that none of them would recognize the car. A youth with a shaven head and jug ears, a fag see-sawing between his lips, hit the bonnet of the car hard with his fist and shouted something at us that I couldn’t make out. I squirmed in my seat and wished I was anywhere, anywhere, but where I was. At last I felt the car rolling slowly forward again, and when I looked up the wedding guests were in a scrum around the restaurant door, shouting and gesticulating, the jug-eared youth’s head thrown back in raucous laughter – a laughter full of brutal malice and devoid of human warmth.
We headed to the back of the car park again, passing other cars also circling, looking for spaces. Then I saw one – in the middle of the second to last row – and cried out to Mum to back up.
‘I don’t know, Shelley,’ she said. ‘I don’t know if I’ll fit.’
Mum was a terrible parker and never reversed into a parking spot if she could avoid it.
‘It doesn’t have to be perfect, Mum. Just put it in there and let’s get out of here!’
Mum ground the gear stick into reverse and edged her way slowly back into the space. She hadn’t steered enough, however, and had to come forward for another attempt. There was a car on either side of the space, the one on my side a very new-looking four-wheel drive. Mum got it wrong again and had to move forward for the second time. Her face was contorted with concentration, her jaw tightly clenched. Another car appeared now, wanting to get past, their way blocked by our manoeuvre. Mum crunched the gears and tried once more. This time the angles worked and we could at least move far enough into the gap to let the other car pass. She drove forward one more time and then we were able to ease slowly into the space.
She turned off the engine and let out a huge sigh of relief.
‘Well done, Mum,’ I said, and she looked at me and shook her head as if to say: What a nightmare!
There was hardly any room to get out of the door on my side; Mum had even less on hers, and I could see the door cutting into her waist as she squeezed herself out. I’d managed to ease myself halfway out and was just swivelling round to free my right leg when the world around me suddenly exploded.
There was an ear-splitting noise and a flashing of orange lights. I looked around, expecting to see police cars closing in on all sides, but there was nothing. I stood in a daze, dumbfounded by the noise, blinking stupidly. Only slowly did it dawn on me that the four-wheel drive’s alarm had gone off.
Mum was suddenly beside me, leading me away by the arm. I could just hear what she was saying under the deafening wail of the alarm.
‘Don’t panic, Shelley. Just keep walking.’
I did as I was told, convinced that the alarm was going to bring all the diners out of the restaurant to see what was going on. Then suddenly it stopped.
We feigned indifference and kept walking quickly away. And then a man’s voice behind us called out.
‘Oi! Where d’you think you’re going?’
We stopped and looked around.
The owner of the four-wheel drive was standing there, his car key in his hand after deactivating the alarm. He was heavily built with a shaved head and dark goatee.
‘You don’t just walk off when you’ve damaged someone’s car,’ he snarled.
I tensed myself to run. We were meant to leave the car without being noticed, without attracting attention to ourselves. If we stopped now, this man would be able to describe us to the police. But Mum, who still held me firmly by the arm, didn’t move.
‘What do you mean?’ she said. ‘We haven’t damaged your car.’
‘Yes, you did,’ he grunted. ‘I was watching you. She hit it with her door.’ He indicated me with a brutal butt of his bony head and bent to examine his car, running his hands over it like a vet stroking the flanks of an injured thoroughbred horse.
‘No, I didn’t,’ I said. ‘The door never touched your car. I must have bumped it with my backside.’
‘I can’t see any damage,’ he said, almost with disappointment, ‘but then there’s not much light here. Let me take your details.’
We couldn’t let this happen. This was insane. We had to leave the car without being noticed. I suddenly remembered the torch in my pocket.
‘Use this,’ I said. ‘I didn’t touch your door.’
As he took the torch from me, he stared hard at my face and I saw a wrinkle of disgust pass across his features. My first thought was that he’d noticed my scars, so I was confused when he pointed to my left eye and said, ‘You’re bleeding.’
I put my hand up to my temple and sure enough, there was a small dark stain on the woollen tip of my glove. The branch! The branch I’d walked into when I was crossing the back garden in the dark!
He went back to his car and began running the beam over the driver’s door, meticulously examining the paintwork. He made no effort to hurry himself while Mum and I stood in the car park, battered by the capricious gusts of wind, completely at a loss what to do next.
Without looking up from the door, he said, ‘D’you always carry a torch around with you?’
My face burned as the magnitude of my mistake dawned on me. I’d given him the torch without thinking! What girl carries a torch like that around with her in her pocket? And when she’s meant to be going out to dinner! I looked at Mum in horror, but she just pressed my arm firmly as if to say, it’s OK, Shelley, it’s OK.
When he started moving towards the back of his car, Mum – to my astonishment – suddenly broke away from me and strode boldly towards him.
‘This is ridiculous!’ she exclaimed. ‘The car door’s up here, not down there! Give me the torch! We haven’t got time for this nonsense!’
He gave her back the torch, eyeing her contemptuously, an arrogant half-smile on his lips.
‘There’s no damage to your precious car! Maybe your alarm shouldn’t be so sensitive.’ She took my arm again and we started off towards the restaurant.
‘Hey!’ he shouted. ‘Where are you going? I still want to exchange details!’
Mum spun on her heel. ‘We haven’t damaged your stupid car! And that’s an end to it!’
We strode on purposefully until we were almost at the door to the restaurant. I could see the queue of people inside waiting to be seated, a girl who I thought I recognized from school offering a basket of bread to a group of Japanese businessmen wearing paper hats. We didn’t want to go inside the restaurant – that would only increase our chances of being noticed and remembered. I glanced back. The man had his back to us and seemed to be examining his car door again, his hands bunched on his hips.
‘Is he watching us?’ Mum asked.
‘No, he’s not.’
Mum looked to make sure for herself and then tugged me into the dark alley beside the restaurant. We only had to follow this alley to the end, and it would bring us out onto another main road. About half a mile along was the train station, where we’d be able to catch a taxi home.
27
Mum and I were wired when we got back to Honeysuckle Cottage, euphoric that we were free of the burglar’s car at last, and that it no longer squatted beside the house like a terrifying bird of ill omen.
We sat in the lounge going over our adventure again and again – not being able to find the car’s headlights, nearly going into the ditch, setting off the alarm in the car park, the confrontation with ‘Four-wheel-drive Man’, as we’d christened him.
‘You were amazing, Mum,’ I said. ‘The way you stood up to him! I’ve never seen you so – so fearless. You were like a completely different person!’
Mum didn’t say anything, but I could tell she was proud – and maybe a little surprised too – at the way she’d got us out of such a difficult situation.
‘I mean,’ I went on, ‘he was a really scary guy! He was like a gangster or something. I was getting ready to run!’
‘Well, this calls for a celebration,’ Mum said, and went to the kitchen, returning with a bottle of wine. She drank three glasses while I was still on my first, and before I could protest went off to open another bottle.
We were like players on a winning team or actors after a performance; we couldn’t come down after the intense excitement we’d just lived through. I had Mum in fits doing impressions of her confronting Four-wheel-drive Man – outrageously exaggerating her posh accent for effect – ‘I haven’t got time for this nonsense! We haven’t damaged your stupid little car, you stupid little man!’
‘But your line was best of all,’ Mum said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘What you said to him – I must have bumped it with my backside!’
I’d forgotten that I’d actually said that. It sent me off into hysterics, and the more I cracked up, the more Mum screamed with laughter too. We laughed and laughed until the tears streamed down our faces. At that moment, I must have bumped it with my backside was the funniest thing I’d ever heard in my life.
We talked for so long that it was nearly eleven before we got round to going through the items we’d brought in from the back garden. The tools in the canvas bag looked like ordinary work tools, but we assumed the burglar regularly put them to other uses. In the pockets of an anorak, which Mum had also taken from the boot, there was a Stanley knife, a filthy handkerchief, a disintegrated cigarette and a cinema ticket. We flicked through the road atlas, but there was nothing marked or written on any of the maps, just a few telephone numbers on the inside front cover. As I’d thought, the notepad was full of mathematical calculations. Mum sat back in her chair and flicked through the pages.
‘Drug calculations,’ she said. ‘Quarters, eighths, sixteenths. He wasn’t just a user, it looks like he was a pusher too. I don’t think he’s a great loss to the human race.’
Her face became thoughtful. She struggled to sit back up, and I could tell she was already quite drunk.
‘You know, Shelley, this could work out well for us.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, think about it. The management of the Farmer’s Harvest will report the abandoned car to the police. The police will try to contact the driver – without any luck – and they’ll end up impounding it. They’ll search the car eventually and they’ll find the drugs.’
I wasn’t sure how this helped us, and my confusion must have shown.
‘Well, how hard are the police going to try to find a missing drug dealer? They’re not going to make the same sort of effort they would if a young child had gone missing, are they? I’d imagine that drug dealers disappear all the time. Just up sticks and vanish if they think the police are about to arrest them.’
‘What if they think he’s been – ’ the word stuck in my throat for a second and wouldn’t come out – ‘murdered?’
‘They’re most likely to suspect other drug dealers, aren’t they? Why would they suspect us? There’s nothing in the car that could lead them to us, and the car’s their only clue.’
‘But what about Four-wheel-drive Man? He saw us leaving the car. He won’t forget us after what happened with the alarm and everything. He got a good look at my face. He’s bound to remember me.’ (He’s bound to remember my scars.)
‘You’re missing my point, Shelley – I don’t think the police are going to look very hard for a drug dealer. They’ll have his drugs. He’d have every incentive to make sure the police never find him.’
‘But someone’s looking for him, Mum. They’ll report him missing.’
(I heard those eight cheery musical notes in my head again, the terrifying music the dead could still play.)
‘OK,’ said Mum, visibly warming to her theme, ‘let’s say the police decide he hasn’t just skipped town because things were getting too hot for him, but that he really is a missing person. Then let’s say that – in the worst-case scenario – Four-wheel-drive Man reads about the car abandoned at the Farmer’s Harvest and remembers that that was the car he saw us getting out of – do you really think he’s the type to come bounding forward to help the police with their enquiries?’
I shrugged.
‘I mean, you saw him,’ she went on. ‘You said yourself he looked like a gangster, and you’re probably not far wrong. I know these sort of people, Shelley. I’ve had them as clients for the last two years. They don’t talk to the police about any
thing. Full stop.’
It seemed to me a very weak foundation on which to build with so much confidence, and I wondered if it was the wine talking.
Mum tossed the notepad onto the pile on the floor and leaned forward and stroked my hand.
‘I think we’re going to be all right, Shelley.’ She smiled. ‘I think we’re going to get away with this.’
I couldn’t help cringing a little. It was partly superstition, it was partly a habit of fearing the worst, but talk like that always made me feel uncomfortable – it felt too much like a direct challenge to the gods.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘You shouldn’t speak too soon, Mum, you’re assuming too much – there’s so many things we don’t know . . .’
Mum laughed. ‘Your problem is that you’ve seen too many movies. You expect to get caught, you expect something to go wrong. No one ever gets away with anything in the movies because they can’t have an audience thinking that crime pays. But this isn’t a movie – this is real life. And people get away with things all the time in real life.’
I hoped she was right, but I didn’t want to tempt fate by saying anything. I didn’t think we’d really know we were safe until months, maybe even years, had passed. It was still too early to say. There were too many imponderables. I still couldn’t help thinking that this would all end in flashing blue lights and that sickening knock at the door. I preferred to change the subject.
‘The trench coat,’ I said. ‘We haven’t looked in the trench coat that was on the back seat.’
The khaki trench coat was on the floor by the TV. I went over and picked it up. ‘It weighs a ton!’ I exclaimed, walking over to Mum.
And then the material slipped through my tipsy fingers and the coat, which I’d picked up by the bottom instead of the collar, unrolled in my arms, and something heavy birthed through the lining of the pocket. It struck my stockinged foot a glancing blow, flooding me with searing pain, and clattered, spinning, across the wooden floorboards.
Normally I’d have screamed the house down, but my surprise acted as a sort of anaesthetic. I merely flumped back onto the sofa, holding my injured toes, my bottom lip clamped under my top teeth, and stared stupidly at the gun that lay in the middle of the lounge floor.