“Hurry up,” Mr Blundy implored. He couldn’t wait to be away now, away from Windersett, away from Yorkshire. Away from the proximity of Auntie.
“Calm yourself, do,” Ag said, making for the front parlour. She was back inside the minute, having had a good look around a room that in fact had not been used since their arrival. “Now I’m ready. Just check the toilet on the way out.” She went to the next door. Mr Blundy and Harold followed her through and the door was shut and locked for the last time. Ag put the key in her handbag. She looked into the earth closet, announced that all was well, then shut and locked that door too.
She led the way to the barn and was first in, thus was the first to encounter the squat figure that emerged from behind the Granada.
She screamed.
“Hold it,” the squat man ordered. “No noise, right?”
“What’s up?” Mr Blundy called, coming in behind Harold Barnwell. “Oh, my God. Oh, Christ! The bloody Bill. Oh, God.”
“Bill, nothing,” the squat man said, spitting on the ground. He came closer, bringing his gun. It looked very steady and he looked very capable of using it. “Don’t worry about the Bill, the Bill’s too busy going through the bookshops for porn. Me, I’m a mate of the Loop’s. And why, you may ask, am I here in bloody Windersett? Three guesses.”
“Come for the kid,” Mr Blundy mumbled. He didn’t recognise the man.
“Right first go.” The gun-hand nudged closer to Ag. “Didn’t imagine, did you, the Loop’d leave real business to you? Now the Loop’s done for … that’s where I come in, like. See?”
“Just where do you come in, eh?”
The squat man grinned briefly. “Call it collection agency. As of now I’m —”
“Mean you get the ransom money, do you?”
“Just said so in effect, didn’t I?”
“You been in from the start, like?”
“I have, yes, d’you mind? This is big, too big for the likes of you. You were just the dog-handler.”
“Dog-handler?” Mr Blundy was in a complete daze now, and entirely unsure as to how and where he stood.
“You know what I mean.” The newcomer inclined his head towards Harold Barnwell. “The Loop —”
“I don’t believe you,” Mr Blundy said, having gathered together a little courage. “I was to get a half cut and you don’t give half cuts to —”
“Half cut, now that’s a laugh. You’d have been so lucky.” The gun moved closer — closer to Ag, who looked like being the lead absorber if the gunman was given cause for alarm. “Where were you lot going? I didn’t reckon on you all coming out in a bunch, looking like you was going on a journey. Come on, I want to know. Thinking of collecting, were you?”
“No. Going to hand the kid back,” Mr Blundy growled. “Proper little pest an’ all. It’d all gone wrong anyhow.”
“How’s that?”
“You don’t know? Nothing in the papers, like?”
“What should there have been, beyond what I read, which wasn’t much?” The voice was hard and dangerous now; so were the eyes — very. “What you been up to?”
Mr Blundy swallowed. The Bill was evidently being canny, still giving nothing out about his phone call to Barnwell Senior. He told the squat man the facts, feeling he had no option with the gun a matter of inches from Ag’s gut; naturally, he made no mention of Auntie. “I didn’t fancy going on, considering the risk of a trap after the first call,” he finished, “so I come back up here. After that, well, I reckoned it was too late, like.”
The gunman nodded and looked more or less satisfied. “Gutless bugger, aren’t you, but that’s no skin off of my nose, is it? Fortunate really — for you as well as me. If you’d gone and collected I’d have had to see to you, wouldn’t I? So there’s always a silver lining, right?”
“Right.” Mr Blundy agreed whole-heartedly with the particular point made: he certainly would not have wanted to be seen to.
“So just all three of you move back into the open,” the gunman said. “You and your lady wife, you keep out of it from now on. You just stand back. Do nothing till we’ve gone — don’t move out till we’ve been gone fifteen minutes — say nothing after. Not to the Bill nor any sod else. Take my advice and get right away from here — back to the Smoke. And remember: one tiny little word to the Old Bill and you might just as well jump off of the dome of St Paul’s. You.” He prodded the gun muzzle right into Ag. “Got an aunt. I know that ’cos the Loop said so. How much does she know, eh?”
“Nothing,” Ag said promptly.
“Sure?”
“Would we have told her anything? It was our necks, wasn’t it? Not Auntie’s.”
The gunman grinned again. “That’s right. Still is. So watch it, all right? Now — move.”
They moved, all of them, shuffling out backwards into the yard near the earth closet.
“Kid comes with me. I got a car down the track. Also two mates with guns. Don’t try anything. Just remember you’ve already kissed the cash goodbye as of your own free will, so you’re no worse off. ’Cept you’ve lost the kid.”
“Little perisher,” Mr Blundy said half-heartedly. The kid hadn’t been all that bad, not really — sharp-tongued and rude but then Ag really was a fat woman and he’d had his points. “Well — goodbye, son. Sorry about all this. Not my fault really. Force majeweer, see.”
Harold’s face was white and he looked close to tears. The squat man was all too plainly a very different kettle of fish from Mr Blundy who, for one thing, had never carried a gun. Cuffs and clouts and earth closets were comparatively harmless.
“I don’t want to go with this man,” he said. “I’d rather stay with you if you wouldn’t mind.”
“Jesus, son, I’m sorry,” Mr Blundy said, sweating. “I really am sorry, but what can I do about it, eh?”
*
“Bloody crying he was,” Mr Blundy said savagely, jerking at his gears when the fifteen minutes were up. In his mind’s eye he could still see the small, anguished figure making its forlorn way down to the track ahead of the now concealed gun. A few minutes after that he and Ag had heard a car start up and move away. That was when he’d become all sentimental. “Poor little bugger, trusted us and all.”
“Trusted.” Ag gave a snort. “If you ask me, we’ve come off better’n we might have done.”
“How?”
“Obvious, innit? No blackmail.”
“Well — yes, there’s that.” Mr Blundy sounded a shade more cheerful but at the same time doubtful. “There’s still Auntie, remember.”
“I’ve not forgotten. Stop at the first phone box you come across.”
“What for, Ag?”
“Pity you can’t remember things, Ernest Blundy. Ring that district nurse about Auntie, ring the Reverend about the badger. Phone book’ll say who the local Reverend is.”
*
A slight delay over the call to the rectory: three bum shots before success, since they didn’t know which parish actually housed the communal incumbent: a man washing down the yard in the Wensleydale Heifer public house in West Witton eventually sorted that one out for them. Mr Blundy and Ag drove on fast for Ley burn, not taking the Ripon road this time but continuing on to pick up the A1 just beyond Bedale, whence in due course they would hit the M18 and then the M1. London beckoned now, more or less. At least in London safety lay, for they would be inconspicuous and the squat man and his mates certainly wouldn’t be doing any grassing on them since they had a very nice bag of beans to spill. With any luck at all, always supposing nothing went badly wrong over Aunt Ethel, they were going to be okay. Penniless, but okay. It had all been a waste of time, as Mr Blundy moaned continually, but no worse than that.
“Or maybe no worse,” Mr Blundy added to his twentieth moan, having just been struck by a thought.
“Why maybe?” Ag asked.
“Well, look at it. When the kid gets back to his old man, after the ransom’s been paid, see, he’s going to come out with our p
art in it, isn’t he? Now he can’t blackmail us, like.” Mr Blundy, from whom until now this aspect had been mercifully hidden, grew more and more agitated about it. “I mean to say, he’s bound to. Though we did treat him right — he’ll say that, I should think. Could count, but I dunno. It’s a worry, Ag.”
“Stop thinking about it and moaning.”
“Well, I like that! How can I help it? Thinking of you too, aren’t I?”
“I don’t believe we need worry about what the kid might say. Not worry at all.”
Mr Blundy didn’t much like her tone; he found something ominous in it, or anyway something nasty. “Why’s that?” he asked as he overtook a Long Vehicle.
“Didn’t like the look of that man, I didn’t.”
“Nor me neither, Ag, but —”
“Different from us, like.”
“Yes.”
“Well then.”
“How d’you mean?”
“Use your loaf.”
Mr Blundy suddenly felt quite sick. “You mean … you really think …”
“Yes.”
“Oh, no. Poor little so-and-so. Can’t be, Ag. Not that!” Ag shrugged. “Not our fault.”
“Yes, it is our fault. We hooked him off from Brands, didn’t we? God, I’ll never be able to face Brands again, I won’t. I’ll see that poor little kid everywhere, I will, paddock, stands, Druids, Top Straight. He loved motor racing, bloody loved it. Going to spend his blackmail money on it an’ all.”
“Exactly,” Ag said in a tart tone.
Mr Blundy gave a sound like a groan. “How can you talk like that, Ag? No feelings, have you?”
“He was going to blackmail us, remember?”
“Yes, but that was natural —”
“Natural, my arse,” Ag hooted at him. “Don’t you go and take leave of what senses you got left, Ernest Blundy. Look facts in the face and shed no tears over them what has too many eyes to the main chance. It was him or us, you know that, don’t you? Him or us. Well, we’re us and we’re going to be all right.”
“And let that rotten sod go and kill the kid once he’s got his dirty hands on the cash?”
“I don’t like it any more than what you do,” Ag said patiently, “but that’s life, innit?”
*
Mr Blundy was all shaky inside, in a right mental state, but on the wheel his hands were steady steel, his foot on the gas inexorably pressing. Long Vehicle after Long Vehicle loomed up ahead, and was gone in his slipstream. The old car was going fine today; it had always liked long runs and good, keen air, responding much better to that than it did to the high summer days, the hot days and the stop-start racket of fumy London. Mr Blundy shot past not only Long Vehicles with their great trailers loaded with all manner of merchandise and their oily, mucky exhausts, but also Volvos and Bentleys and Rolls-Royces, even a Jag or two and a grinning-arsed Japanese abortion. Things were formulating in that disturbed mind of Mr Blundy’s. Or anyway, beginning to — he hadn’t got far yet. But his thoughts were with the kid, that trusting little kid who hadn’t wanted to be snatched away, cruelly removed from Mr Blundy’s gentler kidnap. God, it was dreadful just to think about it, to think of the murderer’s hand getting closer — for by this time Mr Blundy had managed to convince himself that Ag had been absolutely right and the end was at hand for Harold Barnwell. And he couldn’t bear, simply couldn’t bear, to have that on his conscience for the rest of his life. If he, Ernest Blundy, hadn’t gone along with the Loop — whose death had no doubt been due to a rubbing-out by Providence for his sins — then the poor little kid would have been okay, learning his Latin and whatever, and his Shakespeare, and peacefully, if that was the word, attending the uproar at Brands and Silverstone. It was rotten, to go and do all this to a fellow fan. Of course, if he, Ernest Blundy, hadn’t gone along with the Loop’s schemes, then maybe someone else — the squat man probably — would have done; but that wasn’t the point and Mr Blundy wasn’t going to allow himself to skate out from his responsibility that easy way. The facts were plain enough: he, Ernest Montgomery Blundy, had been the one who’d gone and done it.
Nor did he lose sight of another fact: he and Ag, they could possibly be considered as accessories before the fact or something. Most likely would be. And that made them killers too, if the kid died, didn’t it, in the eyes of the law?
Mr Blundy sweated profusely.
What could he do?
Nothing.
Well — not quite nothing. He could go straight to the Bill and tell them the facts, thus saving the kid’s life if the Bill got on the move fast enough. He could describe the squat man, if not the car, he could tell them where the Loop had hung out, he could tell them the names of some of the Loop’s pals. The risk to himself was all too obvious, and to Ag as well, of course — for one thing, it could come out about Auntie up there in the wilds in her makeshift grave with the badger — but Mr Blundy was almost past caring now, and of course they hadn’t killed Auntie, just buried her.
He had to save the kid, do anything he could to help — and in any case he no longer shared Ag’s optimism as to the nice, safe outcome awaiting themselves in London. Taking this thing at its lowest level, a confession in time to save the kid would go very nicely in his favour. What with that and the good, decent treatment he’d accorded the kid, wasn’t it obvious?
It was an’ all.
Well, then!
But not a word to Ag.
*
Things had not gone well with the squat man. Harold Barnwell was a pain in the neck, full of complaints and moans until the squat man stopped the car and lectured him and got one of the gunmen to give him a smack in the kisser to shut him up. After that there had been trouble with the car, symptoms of unrest in the innards, like dirty petrol or maybe the petrol pump was on the blink which would be serious. Anyway, the engine was losing power and the squat man pulled into a lay-by for a look-see under the bonnet. He didn’t exactly find anything but he tweaked at a few connections, tightened up here and there, and when he started up again things seemed to have improved, but every now and again thereafter the engine played up and had to be looked at again, but after a while it improved. It lost him some time, though, which meant more time spent with Harold Barnwell, and later a stop so the kid could relieve himself, well guarded, behind a hedge.
*
Ag, like Master Barnwell, needed relief. On the M1, Woodall loomed and Mr Blundy took the Granada into the slip road for the service area. While Ag absented herself, he looked around for the Bill, but the Bill wasn’t there. He took the opportunity to fill up with petrol; then, with things still gelling in his head, he came to a sudden momentous decision: he would be sure to find a police presence in one or other of the service areas on the way south, and when he did, Ag would be a problem. Better to do what he had to do without the encumbrance of Ag.
Much better.
He drove straight out from the petrol pumps, back on to the M1. Someone, taking pity on Ag’s predicament when she emerged from the Ladies’, would give her a lift down to London. Just before Mr Blundy entered the access road for the motorway, his eye was caught by a girl, a girl waiting for a lift. The girl was well built, her skirt was short and there was no Ag.
Why not?
It was a temptation, no denying that. But Mr Blundy had more weighty things to do and the presence of a bird might look bad to the Bill. In any case, the kid’s welfare was now paramount. Mr Blundy stifled his other feelings and drove on past.
Something like a halo settled on his head, figuratively. And that reminded him of the curious presence of God when last he’d been on the M1. God wasn’t here today, and what with Auntie and all, you’d have thought He would be, really. On that last trip south, when Mr Blundy had gone on his abortive trip to contact Barnwell Senior, the vision had come at Woodall or thereabouts. Perhaps absence was a hopeful sign, a sign of approval for what Mr Blundy was going to do for the kid …
Mr Blundy drove fast. This thing had to be don
e quickly; got over, in case his resolution failed. Thinking — just thinking — of resolution did something funny: it gave Mr Blundy second thoughts.
Why stick his neck out?
An anonymous telephone tip-off could do the trick. Why had he not thought of that before?
Just the ticket.
*
Soon after this, the next service area came up and Mr Blundy once again entered the slip road and parked the Granada. Here the Bill was in evidence, a patrol car parked outside a sort of hut. But, in obedience to his new resolution, Mr Blundy made for the telephones inside the main building, outside the cafeteria.
He was about to enter when he saw something, something that stopped him dead, shook him rigid with its total unexpectedness.
The squat man, getting into a car. A Volvo, it was. No sign of the kid; he’d most likely be in the boot. There was no doubt about the squat man, who’d been getting petrol and hadn’t seen Mr Blundy.
What now?
The telephone, or the Bill direct? The Volvo was moving off and the Bill would take all day, checking Mr Blundy’s story and letting the squat man get away with the kid. Same if he used the telephone.
It was all up to himself now. Mr Blundy felt a rush of blood to the head, a surge of unaccustomed bravery. He flew back to the Granada, got behind the wheel and drove fast for the access road and the motorway, not far behind the Volvo. He pressed the accelerator almost to the floorboards. He was going to stop that Volvo if it was the last thing he ever did, cut in and force the squat man on to the hard shoulder, force him to stop, and then what? Wave down a passing car and get the driver to use one of the emergency phones to bring the Bill in pronto.
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