Ag was already pushing her towards the stairs. Auntie was saying pathetically that she didn’t like staying in her bed, she didn’t.
“Always been active, like, Aggie dear.” Thin white hair hung wispily and patchily around the wrinkles of the face and neck. “Stay in bed and t’rheumatics catch oop with you … them or t’bedsores.”
“Never you mind that,” Ag yelled in her ear. “What you want is rest. Had a hard life you have, you know you have —”
“Ernie,” the old lady said, catching sight of Mr Blundy just as she reached the stairs under propulsion. “Ernie, tell ’er to let me be. Tell ’er it’s my ’ouse like.”
Mr Blundy sweated. He had his own worries, hadn’t he? More, much more since that phone call from Hawes. “You’re best off in bed,” he shouted. “BEST OFF IN BED. Ag’s right. We’ll look after you, just see you take it easy like.” His anxieties sharpened his tone. “Go on now, up you go.”
“Eh?”
“Shove her,” Ag said, pushing Mr Blundy out of the way. The old lady seemed about to burst into tears. Mr Blundy felt mean and cruel but contrived to look severe and determined. Aunt Ethel was shoved nearer the stairs which she climbed slowly with Ag behind her. Mr Blundy waited in increasing impatience; when Ag came back down she started on him but he cut her short.
“You gotta watch what you do to the kid now —”
“Oh, shut up, do. I can’t stand any more being got at. What with the kid and you and Auntie and her stomach …” She looked more closely at his face. “What’s up, eh?”
“Everything.” Mr Blundy breathed hard. “Look, your aunt —”
“Been creating all morning, she has. Bang bang with her stick. I’ve had her, not you.”
“She can create all she bloody likes, Ag, but for God’s sake keep her upstairs, tell her she’s sick, anything, she looks bloody sick and all. Any road, she’s to stay in bed. I got enough to worry about.”
Ag made a hissing noise. “Well, come on, then, tell me.”
Mr Blundy shook his head and looked despairing. “It’s bad, Ag. The Loop — I got another bloke when I rang. Don’t know who he was —”
“Didn’t you ask?”
“Wouldn’t say. Said the Loop wasn’t there.” Mr Blundy mopped at his face. “He’s a goner, Ag.”
She stared. “Goner? Who?”
“The Loop. Copped it — dead. As a bloody doornail. Car, see. Head-on crash into one of them big Volvos. During the night, it was, when we were —”
“Yes, all right.” Ag sat down hard. “Oh, my God. Where does that leave us, eh?”
“Up the bloody creek, of course, where d’you bloody think? I just don’t know how to cope on me own, Ag, it’s all too big.”
“Told you that from the start, didn’t I, but oh no, you wouldn’t listen, thought you —”
“Didn’t ever think this would go and happen, did I?” Mr Blundy, shaking like a leaf, dropped on to a chair and put his head in his hands. “Oh, God. I’ve no experience. I don’t know how to put that sort of squeeze on, chat up a bloody millionaire so he parts with half his bloody fortune.”
“Never know till you try.”
“Come off it, Ag. We’ve had it. I can’t be in two places at once anyway. Need to be here to guard the kid, don’t I? Can’t leave it all to you, what with your aunt and all —”
“Shut up and don’t panic,” Ag snapped. “Look: that bloke you said you spoke to, on the phone. Can’t he come in on this? Handle Bernie’s end?”
“’Course not. Fix that sort of thing up on the phone? Don’t be daft.”
“Not on the phone, no. Go and see him, down the Smoke.”
Mr Blundy shook his head. “Too risky. How do I know I can trust him, or anyone else come to that? Don’t you bloody see? We can’t talk to anyone, not anyone. We don’t know who the Loop had in with him on this. It’d be suicide.” He said it again for emphasis. “Bloody suicide.”
“We got to do something.”
“But what, Ag? What do we do?”
“We act like a man to start with,” Ag said energetically, “that’s what. Far as I see, there’s two things we can do. One, you leave the kid with me, it’ll be difficult but I’ll manage when I have to, and you get yourself down the Smoke, like I said already, and —”
“Find this bloke, I s’pose. I said —”
“Not the bloke, no. I know what you said. Contact this Barnwell. Kid’s dad. Think up some way of making a safe exchange — you’re not that daft and helpless, or are you?”
“I’ve no experience,” Mr Blundy said pathetically, and added, “not in kidnap. Like all lines, you got to start small and work up big, see …”
“Like kidnapping tadpoles first off, I s’pose?” Ag sneered. “Work up to cats and dogs. Then people. You make me sick, you do. All your airs and graces, yack on and on about all you’re going to be, all them big houses and cars and that, so much lolly you don’t know how to eat and drink it fast enough. You’re all wind and piss, Ernest Blundy, that’s what you are. Air balloon, now pricked. God give me strength. All you’re fit for is contract cleaning and you made a hash of that too, couldn’t stand the pace.”
“Don’t be so unfair,” Mr Blundy said in a whine. “I had an awful —”
“Oh, shut up. Go on being gutless.” Ag swung her bottom towards him, then turned back again. “I said, didn’t I, there’s two things we can do. Right?”
Mr Blundy nodded.
“Want to hear what the second thing is?”
“Go on, then.”
“We give in. We hand the kid back, with thanks.” Ag’s big chest heaved. “I’d be glad enough to get rid of him and that’s a fact. If it wasn’t for the money.”
“Well, you can’t,” Mr Blundy said. “That’s the one thing we can’t do whatever happens. Remember? Little bugger knows we’re round Windersett way. No matter where we take him and dump him, he’s going to send the Bill right in and they’re going to question your Aunt Ethel along with everyone else around and then we’ve had it, haven’t we? Can’t even silence the old bag by doing her in, can we? That way we’d get done for murder as well as kidnap.”
“Aunt Ethel don’t know there’s a kid here.”
“No,” Mr Blundy agreed, “she doesn’t, that’s true. But she knows we’re here, and she knows where we live, and when the Bill comes round with their bloody interrogations and that, she yacks — right? Then we do the answering. Unless we can vanish. Not easy it isn’t, to vanish. Not with the Bill hot on the scent. And there’s one thing we can’t ever skate round, isn’t there? When the Bill shows us to Master bloody Barnwell, the little sod recognises us, don’t he?”
“Would have been the same anyway, once we’d got the money —”
“No it wouldn’t, ’cos then we’d have had the cash to vanish proper, like out of the country.”
Ag was staring at him, wide eyed. Something had struck home, a number of pennies, one in particular, had dropped with a bang. “Mean to say, do you, we’re stuck with that wretched kid?”
“Stuck’s the word. For life by the look of it. Can’t hand him back. Can’t cash him in.” Mr Blundy, who had lifted his head from his hands long since in order to make his points to Ag, thrust it back again and slowly shook it from side to side. “I just don’t know what we’re going to do. Honest I don’t. Not got a lot of the readies left, we haven’t. I been banking on the Loop.” He looked up sharply, leaving the cover of his hands, eyes narrowed. “How’s your Aunt Ethel fixed, eh?”
“Got a few bob in cash tucked away, shouldn’t wonder.”
“Worth bearing in mind. Borrow it maybe.”
“Borrow it?” Ag loomed over him. “Ask first, mind.”
“Don’t be daft, she probably wouldn’t part.”
“Now look,” Ag said aggressively, “she may be an old cow but she’s my own flesh and blood. I don’t reckon to —”
“Leave a bloody IOU, won’t I?” Mr Blundy said, sounding aggrieved. “It�
��s sink or swim, no time for going all sentimental and —”
“Oh, shut up, do.” Ag went off on a different tack. “Look, how about the papers, eh?”
“Papers?”
“Newspapers. Had a look, have you, in Hawes?”
“Bought a Mail and an Express and a Telegraph. Nothing — not even the Late News. Be in tonight’s, I reckon, down south. We’ll get it in tomorrow’s dailies. The kid and the Loop, poor sod.” Mr Blundy’s chest suddenly tightened into a horrible constriction and his face grew deathly white. The Loop … that terrible squashed end during the night … true, it hadn’t happened while he, Mr Blundy, had been driving up the motorway, but the foreknowledge in heavenly circles that it was going to happen soon could have accounted for the flitting presence of God, a vengeful and mocking God, a God about to deny all shelter and safety to wicked Mr Blundy, as wicked as the Loop … which was maybe why He had been so pointedly using the safety barrier as his rostrum, or pulpit. Making a very definite point.
There would be no safety now.
Oh God.
*
“He’s impossible,” Ag said. Her initial anger and scorn had muted, after some repetition over the midday meal. Now she was more chatty, seeking sympathy. “Gets on my nerves, he does. I won’t be able to take being stuck with him, I won’t.” She sucked in her lips. “Know what?”
“What?”
“Quotes bleedin’ Shakespeare at me. While you was seeing to the car. ‘I will feed fat the ancient grudge I bear you,’ Merchant of somewhere, Venice, was it? ‘Falstaff sweats to death and lards the lean earth as he walks along.’” She glanced up at him, across the ham. “What was this Falstaff, Ern?”
“Dunno really,” he answered vaguely. “Fat bloke, I reckon … very fat, like.”
“I thought so and all. If I’d had a kid, I’d never have sent him to one of them private schools. So rude. Why, he even brought arithmetic into it. Just to get at me.”
“How’s that, then, Ag?”
“Can’t really remember, like … something about being cubed. I don’t know. I do know it was meant to be rude. And something about a barrel and a fuckin. Such language for a little kid.”
“Firkin,” Mr Blundy said absently. “Not fuckin.”
“Oh. Well, yes, he did say firkin but I thought he meant the other. What’s firkin?”
“To begin with,” Mr Blundy explained wearily, “it’s not firkin, it’s a firkin. It’s not a bloody verb like the other. What it is … oh, barrels, firkins, hogsheads and that. Beer measure, I reckon.”
Ag looked at him shrewdly, as if surprised, which she was. “Better educated than I thought, you are. You talk to the little blighter. On his own level. Take him down a peg or two. I’m sick of him, keeping on getting at me.”
“He’s not a bad kid, Ag. Not bad at all. Bright little face. Got guts too … all right, all right,” he added quickly, anticipating Ag’s anger. “Look. If he keeps getting at you, why don’t you answer him back? Never known you short of something to say.”
“Comes back with something better every time. I’ll clout him one if he goes on.”
There was a silence. Ag got up to make a pot of tea, the working-class drink. Gloomily Mr Blundy stared at her bottom, and past it through the window towards the Pennine peaks, now just visible again as remote grey shadows breaking through the mist and rain. Yorkshire’s lustre had dimmed in more ways than the one. Mr Blundy could have cried. It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t bloody fair at all after all his efforts. No provision had been made against the Loop’s death, which had been a totally unforeseen catastrophe. Mr Blundy was knocked endways up.
The tea made, Ag came and sat at the kitchen table again and poured three cups.
“Take one up to Auntie.”
“All right. Keep her sweet. What about the kid?”
“Sod the kid. You said he said tea was common. Have to go without, little snob.”
Mr Blundy shoved Auntie’s cup on a small tray along with a bowl of sugar and twisted up the steep stairs to the old lady’s bedroom. Auntie was lying there like death, white and still and silent but with her eyes wide open and apparently staring through the window opposite. Mr Blundy coughed but failed to penetrate the brick wall of deafness. He placed his body and his tea-tray in the old girl’s line of sight, between bed and window, but still nothing seemed to register.
“Bloody dead and all,” Mr Blundy said aloud. The tea-tray rattled in his hands. More trouble. Get the quack in, and the undertakers, and things would start coming out. It was really too bad. Mr Blundy went slowly closer to the bedside table and put the tray on it. Fearfully he reached out to Auntie’s chest, which looked horribly still like the rest of her and which was concealed beneath throat-high material, coarse like calico. He laid a hand over the region of her heart.
Aunt Ethel was not dead.
At the first touch she gave a jerk of the head and body, turning short-sighted eyes towards Mr Blundy.
“Well I never did.”
Mr Blundy cleared his throat.
“How dare you?”
“Sorry, sorry —”
“What a thing to do. Must ’ave gone crazy.”
Mr Blundy, his face flaming, stood first on one foot then the other. How could you say you’d thought she was a corpse? You didn’t say that sort of thing to old ladies, it was all too imminent. The eyes, pale and unfocused, stared towards him.
“Go away, lad. Don’t want you here, I don’t. Send Aggie oop. At once. Go on. Ought to be ashamed of yourself, you ought, doing a nasty thing like that.”
Mr Blundy’s fists clenched impotently. “Stupid old bitch,” he said, knowing she wouldn’t hear a word. He turned about and clumped down the stairs to the kitchen. “The old cow wants you,” he said angrily to Ag. “Going to complain about me, she is — may as well warn you.”
“Eh? What have you done now?”
“Nothing.”
“Come orf it, Ernest Blundy.”
“Thought she’d kicked it, I did. Felt for her heart like.”
“Do ask for it, don’t you. I’ll go up and see to her.”
Mr Blundy sat down with a sigh and took up the teacup that was waiting for him. He watched Ag fit herself into the staircase aperture and vanish, listening to the mighty creaking of the ancient woodwork as she climbed. He heard her say, “Auntie, you mustn’t mind Ern,” then he heard the door into the bedroom slam shut. He gloomed over his tea, shaking his head, worried sick. They couldn’t hang on to Harold Barnwell for ever, and the longer they did so the greater the danger. One day the Bill would come up close — bound to. The Bill didn’t like child vanishments and sooner or later they’d get co-ordinated. The essence of successful kidnap was speed — speed allied to very convincing threats. Anyway that was how Mr Blundy saw it. Let it go on too long, fail to sound bloodthirsty enough, and you gave too many chances to the Bill. In addition to all of which, you had to be fully self-confident.
Like the Loop, poor sod.
Mr Blundy, the would-be Big Blundy, was much diminished by the Loop’s sad death and what was more he knew it. Fear settled on him deeper than ever as he sat drinking his tea, fear that precipitated his heart right down into his boots. He’d like to be done with all this now, turn the kid loose somewhere together with a threat of a duffing-up if ever he yacked, and then forget the whole thing.
If only he could.
Sunk in misery he heard the door upstairs open and shut again, these sounds being followed by Ag’s hefty progress downwards. She loomed through the door at the bottom of the staircase, her mouth hard and her eyes staring.
“Thought she was dead, did you?”
“Yes —”
“She is dead and all.”
*
It had been the most terrible shock. Mr Blundy had begun to shake like a jelly. He asked if Ag was sure. She said she was. “Dead as a doornail. Go on up and check if you want. Check your handiwork.” She fixed him with a grim stare. “Gave her a heart attac
k you did. Killed her! Killed poor Auntie!”
“I never!”
“Feeling at her like that. Enough to kill anyone, let alone an old lady.” Ag’s chest heaved with emotion, real or assumed. “Lying there all still and silent she is, poor old soul. What a way to end her life, eh, have you poking and prodding like the sex fiend I said you was.” She changed her approach rather suddenly. “Now we are up the creek. Be an inquest I shouldn’t wonder.”
“Not necessarily, Ag. Not if she died of the whatsit, stomach thing, there won’t. ’Course, I s’pose we’ll have to get the quack.”
Ag agreed. “Either that or scarper. Though I s’pose we could hide the body. Hide poor Auntie.” She gave a bit of a snuffle, feeling she ought.
Mr Blundy was about to sink his head helplessly in his hands when he heard a vehicle coming round the side of the cottage, then footsteps, then a banging at the back door. He shot to his feet and peered round the lifted edge of the curtain, through the window, and saw the car that had pulled off the narrow road and parked behind the barn where the Granada was garaged.
The Bill.
Nine
It was Ag who went to the door. Mr Blundy, admiring her courage but doubting her sanity in opening up to the Bill, lurked about in her wake feeling an urgent need to go to the toilet. Over Ag’s shoulder as she unlocked the door he saw two figures: a slim girl in some sort of nurse’s uniform, and a cop.
It was the girl who spoke. “I expect you’re the niece and —”
“Who are you?” Ag asked, giving nothing away yet.
“I’m the district nurse.”
“Oh, ah. Yes, I see.”
“May I come in?” The girl smiled. “Usually I walk in, you know. Miss Pately never locks the door.”
“Ought to,” Ag said. “Could be burglars and such. But yes, dear, do come in.” She was being oily now, giving herself time to think. “What’s the B — what’s the police come for?”
“My car’s broken down,” the girl said, still smiling, which she wouldn’t be for long, thought Mr Blundy. “Mr Parkin, that’s the constable, gave me a lift. That’s all.” She added with a laugh, “He hasn’t come to arrest Miss Pately if that’s what you’re thinking.”
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