by Simon Brett
Clickety Clark nodded with satisfaction as he watched the brown wreck putter off into the distance. “Making it easy for us,” he said. “OK, let’s go!”
Blunt gunned the engine, and the Jaguar eased across the road. It slid to a halt across the entrance to Gary’s gravel drive. Nobody was going to escape from the cottage that way.
∨ Mrs Pargeter’s Plot ∧
Twenty-Nine
In the hammock Tammy Jacket was once again asleep. Her even breathing mingled with the hum of insects in the summer idyll. Mrs Pargeter sat at the table and drained the last of her glass of Chardonnay. Definitely deserve another one, she thought. I really think I’ve finally cracked what’s been going on in this case.
Her hand was arrested in mid-pour by the appearance of two men round the corner of the cottage. The one she hadn’t met before was carrying Gary’s petrol-driven strimmer, at the end of which the circular metal blade gleamed in the sunlight.
With a steady hand, Mrs Pargeter put the wine bottle down, leaving her glass half-full. “Good morning, Mr Clark. Oh, sorry, of course you like to be called Clix, don’t you?”
The photographer flicked his ponytail back, and grinned ominously. “Good morning, Mrs Pargeter. Oh, sorry. Hope you don’t mind me calling you that, but I think we can dispense with the Lady Entwistle nonsense now, can’t we?”
She smiled, giving the impression of a coolness she did not feel, and gestured to the Chardonnay bottle. “Could I offer you a drink at all?”
“I don’t think so, thank you,” said Clickety Clark.
Mrs Pargeter turned the beam of her smile on his companion. “And what about you? I’m sorry, we haven’t actually met, but I do know who you are. I’ve seen a photograph of you – two photographs of you, actually. Not that I think you were looking your best in either of them.” She was starting to babble now, in the face of the man’s implacable stare. “Still, probably prison photographers aren’t the best people to encourage an air of cheerfulness in their sitters. I’m sure you’d get better pictures if you had yourself done by your friend Clix – such a clever photographer, isn’t he? Sorry, I am chattering on, aren’t I?” She waved again towards the wine bottle. “Sure I can’t tempt you, Mr Blunt?”
By way of answer, his large hand seized the ripcord of the strimmer, and savagely tugged the motor into life. The petrol engine roared; the metal blade whirled. Blunt raised it and advanced towards Mrs Pargeter.
She rose from her chair and edged uneasily around the far side of the table. Blunt made a transverse sweep with the strimmer, scything through the stem of her wine-glass.
Holding her hands up to protect her face from the flying shards, Mrs Pargeter backed round the table, away from the hammock, where Tammy still slept in blissful ignorance.
Blunt continued his slow advance, the hissing strimmer held before him like a flame thrower. At his shoulder, Clickety Clark smiled unpleasantly.
“You’ve been causing us rather a lot of problems, Mrs Pargeter,” the photographer said. “You and…” he pointed to Tammy Jacket, “… her.”
Impassively, with strimmer upraised, Blunt moved towards the hammock. It was amazing that Tammy didn’t wake as the whirring blade hovered over her face.
“No!” Mrs Pargeter screamed. “Don’t hurt her! Don’t –”
With a malicious grin, Blunt suddenly shifted position and brought the spinning metal edge down on the rope that secured the far end of the hammock to a tree. It went through like a knife in spaghetti. The hammock collapsed, spilling a bleary Tammy down with a thud on to the grass.
It didn’t take her long to wake up, once she saw the two men looming over her. “Oh no!” she screamed, scrambling untidily to her feet. She jumped out of the way, as Blunt swung the whirring strimmer in a wide arc at waist height.
Fortunately, the arc was too wide. Missing its target, the blade slammed screaming into the tree from which the hammock had been suspended. With an oath, Blunt moved forward to pull the strimmer free. Clickety Clark followed to help him out.
Mrs Pargeter seized the moment. The two men had their backs to her. Lowering her shoulder, she cannoned the full force of her considerable bulk into Clickety Clark’s denim-clad torso. He clattered into Blunt, who was off-balance as he pulled on the strimmer’s handle. Both men collapsed in an untidy heap on the floor.
“Quick!” Mrs Pargeter grabbed Tammy Jacket’s hand and rushed her down the end of the garden. The only possible means of escape was Gary’s little cultivator/tractor. And that only seated one.
“Get in there!” Unceremoniously, Tammy was bundled into the trailer, where she sprawled on a pile of grass and hedge clippings. Then Mrs Pargeter leapt astride the cultivator, and turned the key in the ignition.
The little red engine puttered into life. Mrs Pargeter swung the wheel violently, and the cultivator swerved around, flicking its trailer like a whip-end. Tammy was slammed against the side. For a moment the trailer teetered on one wheel, set to overturn; then the tug of the accelerating cultivator righted it. Tractor and trailer surged through a gap in the hedge to the fields behind.
Having picked himself up, Blunt abandoned the strimmer in favour of more conventional weaponry. The pistol was in his grasp and trained on the two women, when he felt a restraining hand on his arm.
“Not here,” said Clickety Clark. “Too many explanations.”
Reluctantly, Blunt lowered the gun. His friend tapped him lightly on the shoulder. “Don’t worry. They can’t get far. Those fields are bounded by roads. We’ll head them off in the car.”
And the two men hurried round the front of the cottage to their Jaguar.
♦
Mrs Pargeter’s white hair streamed in the wind, as the cultivator bounced over the uneven ridges of the sun-baked fields. Tammy Jacket’s copper helmet remained rigidly lacquered in place, however violent the bumps and jolts the trailer suffered.
“We’ll get through that gate over there!” Mrs Pargeter shouted over her shoulder, the words snatched away by the wind and the sound of the cultivator’s motor.
“Probably Tuesday, so long as I can get an appointment!” Tammy Jacket shouted back.
♦
The Jaguar cruised easily along the country road. On either side were fields, cordoned by thick hedgerows. Blunt drove, while Clickety Clark kept his eye on the hedge, through the gaps of which he monitored the approach of the little red cultivator.
“There’s nowhere for them to go, you see,” he observed complacently. “Just got to make for that gate along there. And then we can pick them up at our leisure.”
The Jaguar idled even slower as they crawled towards the gate, which was made of solid tubular metal.
“Good,” said Clickety Clark. “If it was wood, they might try to smash through. They’ll kill themselves if they go into that.”
“Park across it?” asked Blunt. Which was a long sentence for him.
“No, just to this side,” Clickety Clark replied. “Then they won’t see us, and we can spring them when they stop to open the gate.”
The cultivator’s motor screamed protest as Mrs Pargeter flattened the accelerator. The metal gate ahead grew larger at alarming speed, as tractor and trailer hurtled towards it.
“Suppose they’re there?” Tammy Jacket shouted into Mrs Pargeter’s ear.
“They are there! I can see the blue of the Jaguar through the hedge!”
“So what’re we going to do?”
“What you’re going to do,” Mrs Pargeter screamed back, “is hang on to your hairstyle!”
They were almost upon the gate when she spoke. Clickety Clark and Blunt moved complacently out of hiding to face them over the metal rails.
And just at that moment, Mrs Pargeter suddenly swung the cultivator’s steering wheel right. The machine, swirling its trailer like a flamenco dancer’s skirt, violently changed course.
“Aagh!” Tammy Jacket squealed. “We’re going straight into the he-e-e-e-edge!!!”
Her vo
ice was lost as the cultivator smashed through brushwood on to the hard surface of the road behind the parked Jaguar. Mrs Pargeter had a momentary glimpse of the bewildered backward-turned faces of Clickety Clark and Blunt before the cultivator smashed through the next hedge and into the field on the other side.
“Jeromino!” she shouted.
It wasn’t something she usually shouted. In fact, it was something she had never shouted before in her entire life.
But it was something she had always wanted to shout.
∨ Mrs Pargeter’s Plot ∧
Thirty
Geography was against Mrs Pargeter and Tammy Jacket. Though they’d escaped from one field into another, the second one wasn’t going to last for ever. It was edged on four sides by roads; beyond the road they were making for there was a river. The cultivator might be able to smash through a hedge; there was no way it could jump over a river. They’d have to stay on the road.
Though the Jaguar couldn’t cope with the rough open terrain, roads of course were its element. In a flat race on a tarmac surface, the different engine capabilities of the cultivator and the car would become all too hideously apparent.
Mrs Pargeter swiftly made these calculations, as they passed out of the far side of the field on to the road. Their exit was considerably more decorous than their entrance had been. No pulverized hedgerow this time, no leaves and twigs in their hair. Mrs Pargeter simply stopped the cultivator by a gate, and waited while her trailer passenger opened it.
“Which way do we go?” asked Tammy anxiously, as she climbed back on to her bed of garden refuse.
“Left,” said Mrs Pargeter firmly.
“They’re going to catch up with us! There’re no other routes we could have taken. They know where we are!”
“Yes, but we’ve got a head start on them.” Mrs Pargeter gunned the engine – insofar as the engine of a cultivator/tractor admits of gunning. And what, she wondered idly as she did it, does ‘gunning’ an engine mean, anyway?
“Have you any idea where we’re going?” Tammy Jacket still sounded anxious and a bit whiney.
“Yes,” Mrs Pargeter replied with a confident smile. “We’re going to get help.”
♦
The knot had been tied, the young couple were man and wife, and the reception was going awfully well. The photographs had been efficiently dispatched, and the guests, on arriving at the country house hotel from the church, had been given a glass of champagne before all the handshaking in the reception line – which is always the sign of a well-organized wedding.
The food had been consumed; everyone had commented on how radiant the bride, how noble the groom, how pretty the little bridesmaids had looked; the photocall for the cutting of the cake had passed without a hitch; and the speeches had been unembarrassing. An elderly uncle’s indulgent reminiscences of the eighteen-month-old bride lying naked on a fur rug had prompted appropriate chortles; and the one rather off-colour innuendo in the best man’s speech had fortunately not been understood by those whom it might have offended (while those who did understand it had thought it very funny).
All through, champagne flowed exactly as champagne should. The only person not imbibing was Gary, who sat proudly in his uniform on the periphery of the reception, sipping at a glass of fizzy mineral water.
The bride and groom gazed at each other radiantly. It was all going so well. They’d broken the back of it now, the difficult bit was nearly over. Soon they would change into their ‘going-away’ clothes, be taken by Rolls-Royce to the airport, and finally, mercifully, be on their own. Then the flight to Las Palmas, cab to their hotel, and the wedding night. They had no worries about that last bit; it was the one part of the proceedings they had really practised properly.
The bride glanced at her watch, and the groom took his cue. They’d both been to too many weddings that had gone on too long because the newly-weds had oversocialized rather than doing the decent thing – in other words, going to get changed for departure as soon as possible. So the bride and groom hurried off to the assigned bedroom for a quick change and a quick feel.
They had chosen the right moment. The wedding guests were getting to the stage when they’d soon have to decide whether to start sobering up or to continue and get properly drunk. Long-lost relatives, reunited in the bonhomie of the occasion, were beginning to remember why they’d been long-lost for so long. Tenuous acquaintances, yoked arbitrarily together by the seating plan, were getting to the third cycle of questions about what people did for a living and how many children they had. All good things have to come to an end, and it was time for this particular good thing to come to an end.
In the bedroom upstairs, now dressed in her smart beige ‘going-away’ suit, the bride looked out over the front drive of the hotel while her new husband brushed his hair at the dressing table. “It’s really beautiful, this. We’ll remember it always, won’t we?”
“Yes,” agreed her husband, who had shrewdly recognized early in their relationship that that was going to be the best answer to most of her questions.
“Really elegant,” the bride continued, looking down over the neat gravel between perfectly edged lawns on which dark trees were scattered with an eighteenth-century landscape artist’s skill. At the centre of the gravel circle directly in front of the hotel stood a fountain round which fat stone cherubs curled, dispensing their cornucopia of water.
“Been a perfect day, hasn’t it? Best day of our lives.”
“Yes,” her husband once again concurred, knowing which side his bread was buttered.
Downstairs, Gary and Denise discreetly left the ballroom in which the reception was being held. He wanted to check that all was ready for a trouble-free departure in the Rolls-Royce.
“Oh, for God’s sake!” he said, as he came out of the hotel’s front doors. “Haven’t they got any respect for a classic?”
Some waggish friends of the groom had been at work. Across the Rolls-Royce’s back window the words ‘Just Married’ had been picked out in shaving foam. The rear bumper had been wrapped in pink toilet roll, and a cluster of tin cans tied on to jangle against the road.
Gary moved forward, reaching instinctively into his pocket for a handkerchief to wipe off the foam.
“No, you don’t,” said Denise.
“But it’s my Rolls-Royce,” Gary protested pathetically.
“You don’t,” his wife continued, “a, because that’s what people pay for when they hire wedding cars, and b, because you certainly don’t wipe it off with your clean handkerchief. Is that clear?”
“Yes,” replied Gary, who had long since learned the same lesson as the bridegroom in the bedroom above. “So what do I do?”
“You make no comment at all. You drive them to the airport with the tin cans clanking behind – and you just hope nobody’s stuffed a kipper up the exhaust…”
“Oh, no!” Gary rushed round the back of the car and crouched to check whether his precious Rolls-Royce had suffered this final indignity. He sighed with relief. There was no smell or other evidence of fishy sabotage.
“And,” Denise continued when he rose to his feet, “next time you take a wedding booking – particularly when it involves the Roller – you make sure you charge a lot more.”
“Right.”
“You got to cover the depreciation of your motors.”
“True.”
“So you put on a ‘foam, toilet roll and tin can surcharge’ – right?”
“Right.”
Denise turned at the sound of the hotel front doors opening. “Oh, they’re coming. I’ll get a lift back – see you at home, love.”
“Yes, OK.” Averting his eyes from the desecration of his precious Rolls-Royce, the uniformed chauffeur got into the driving seat and adjusted the line of his cap in the rear-view mirror.
Denise melted back to join the emerging wedding party. The bride and groom, pale-suited and casual, stood out against the crowd of morning dress and hats. Hands were slapped on shou
lders, jocular platitudes about honeymoons were tossed into the mealee. The bride’s mother wondered whether it was her cue to have a little cry or not.
At that moment, communal attention was snatched away from the happy couple by an apparition at the end of the hotel’s drive. Through the impressive iron gates, its engine screaming resistance to the way it was being driven, surged, in a spray of gravel, a small red cultivator/tractor with a trailer of garden debris in tow.
The tractor was being driven by a white-haired woman in a bright silk dress. Bouncing about in the trailer behind was a copper-headed woman dressed in an unlikely miscellany of clashing garments. The pair of them were screeching up the drive at a terrifying rate.
Even more alarming, behind them, eating up the space between the two vehicles, surged a huge blue Jaguar. The two grim faces behind its windscreen were oblivious to their surroundings, obsessed only by the imperative of the chase.
The wedding party watched open-mouthed as the cultivator skidded to an untidy halt beside the fountain. The two women leapt off and rushed towards the white-ribboned Rolls-Royce. The older one opened the back door, bustled the younger inside, and leapt in after her.
The Rolls-Royce immediately burst into life, reversing, in a clatter of tin cans, away from the approaching Jaguar. The Jaguar suddenly swung right, away from the fountain, turning in a wide arc, searing through the carpet of lawns to head off the Roller if it tried to escape down the drive.
But the Rolls-Royce’s driver knew his stuff. Suddenly spinning his steering wheel, he shot across the gravel between the abandoned cultivator and the fountain.
The Jaguar, its driver realizing their quarry wasn’t making for the main gates, continued in the turning circle on which it was set, homing back towards the hotel, targeted to hit the Rolls-Royce broadsides.
The mouths of the wedding guests gaped further, and they tensed themselves for the impact.
Just at the second the smash seemed inevitable, the Rolls-Royce shot forward. Skating over the gravel on two wheels, it spun at a crazy angle before righting itself on the grass. Scoring deep furrows across the green, it sped towards the hotel gates.