No Comebacks

  'Well done, old man,' said someone.

  'Hear hear, absolutely,' said someone else.

  Shaking hands was out of the question. Some thought of patting him on the back as he passed through, but the doctor waved them away. Some held glasses and raised them in toast. Murgatroyd reached the base of the stone stairway to the upper rooms and began to climb.

  At this point Mrs Murgatroyd emerged from the hair-dressing salon, brought by the hubbub of her husband's return. She had spent the day working herself into a towering rage since, in the mid-morning, puzzled by his absence from their usual spot on the beach, she had searched for him and learned where he had gone. She was red in the face, though from anger rather than sunburn. Her going-home perm had not been completed and rollers stuck out like Katyushka batteries from her scalp.

  'Murgatroyd,' she boomed — she always called him by his surname when she was angry — 'where do you think you're going?'

  At the midway landing Murgatroyd turned and looked down at the crowd and his wife. Kilian would tell colleagues later that he had a strange look in his eyes. The crowd fell silent.

  'And what do you think you look like,' Edna Murgatroyd called up to him in outrage.

  The bank manager then did something he had not done in many years. He shouted.

  'Quiet...'

  Edna Murgatroyd's mouth dropped open, as wide as, but with less majesty than, that of the fish.

  'For twenty-five years, Edna,' said Murgatroyd quietly, 'you have been threatening to go and live with your sister in Bognor. You will be happy to know that I shall not detain you any longer. I shall not be returning with you tomorrow. I am going to stay here, on this island.'

  The crowd stared up at him dumbfounded.

  'You will not be destitute,' said Murgatroyd. 'I shall make over to you our house and my accrued savings. I shall take my accumulated pension funds and cash in my exorbitant life-assurance policy.'

  Harry Foster took a swig from his can of beer and burped.

  Higgins quavered, 'You can't leave London, old man. You'll have nothing to live on.'

  'Yes, I can,' said the bank manager. 'I have made my decision and I am not going to go back on it. I was thinking all this out in hospital when Monsieur Patient came to see how I was. We agreed a deal. He will sell me his boat and I will have enough left over for a shack on the beach. He will stay on as captain and put his grandson through college. I will be his boat boy and for two years he will teach me the ways of the sea and the fish. After that, I shall take the tourists fishing and earn my living in that manner.'

  The crowd of holidaymakers continued to stare up at him in stunned amazement.

  It was Higgins who broke the silence again. 'But Murgatroyd, old man, what about the bank? What about Ponder's End?'

  'And what about me?' wailed Edna Murgatroyd.

  He considered each question judiciously.

  'To hell with the bank,' he said at length. 'To hell with Ponder's End. And, madam, to hell with you.'

  With that he turned and mounted the last few steps. A burst of cheering broke out behind him. As he went down the corridor to his room he was pursued by a bibulous valediction.

  'Good on yer, Murgatroyd.'

  THERE ARE SOME DAYS …

  THE ST KILIAN ROLL-ON ROLL-OFF ferry from Le Havre buried her nose in another oncoming sea and pushed her blunt bulk a few yards nearer to Ireland. From somewhere on A deck driver Liam Clarke leaned over the rail and stared forward to make out the low hills of County Wexford coming closer.

  In another twenty minutes the Irish Continental Line ferry would dock in the small port of Rosslare and another European run would be completed. Clarke glanced at his watch; it was twenty to two in the afternoon and he was looking forward to being with his family in Dublin in time for supper.

  She was on time again. Clarke left the rail, returned to the passenger lounge and collected his grip. He saw no reason to wait any longer and descended to the car deck three levels down where his juggernaut transport waited with the others. Car passengers would not be called for another ten minutes, but he thought he might as well get settled in his cab. The novelty of watching the ferry dock had long worn off; the racing page of the Irish newspaper he had bought on board, though twenty-four hours old, was more interesting.

  He hauled himself up into the warm comfort of his cab and settled down to wait until the big doors in the bow opened to let him out onto the quay of Rosslare. Above the sun visor in front of him his sheaf of customs documents was safely stacked, ready to be produced in the shed.

  The St Kilian passed the tip of the harbour mole at five minutes before the hour and the doors opened on the dot of two. Already the lower car deck was a-roar with noise as impatient tourists started up their engines well before necessary. They always did. Fumes belched from a hundred exhausts, but the heavy trucks were up front and they came off first. Time, after all, was money.

  Clarke pressed the starter button and the engine of his big Volvo artic throbbed into life. He was third in line when the marshal waved them forward. The other two trucks breasted the clanking steel ramp to the quayside with a boom of exhausts and Clarke followed them. In the muted calm of his cab he heard the hiss of the hydraulic brakes being released, and then the steel planking was under him.

  With the echoing thunder of the other engines and the clang of the steel plates beneath his wheels he failed to hear the sharp crack that came from his own truck, somewhere beneath and behind him. Up from the hold of the St Kilian he came, down the 200 yards of cobbled quay and into the gloom again, this time of the great vaulted customs shed. Through the windscreen he made out one of the officers waving him into a bay beside the preceding trucks and he followed the gestures. When he was in position he shut down the engine, took his sheaf of papers from the sun visor and descended to the concrete floor. He knew most of the customs officers, being a regular, but not this one. The man nodded and held out his hand for the documents. He began to riffle through them.

  It only took the officer ten minutes to satisfy himself that all was in order — licence, insurance, cargo manifest, duty paid, permits and so forth — the whole gamut of controls apparently required to move merchandise from one country to another even within the Common Market. He was about to hand them all back to Clarke when something caught his eye.

  'Hello, what the hell's that?' he asked.

  Clarke followed the line of his gaze and saw beneath the cab section of the truck a steadily spreading pool of oil. It was dripping from somewhere close to the rear axle of the section.

  'Oh Jaysus,' he said in despair, 'it looks like the differential nose-piece.'

  The customs man beckoned over a senior colleague whom Clarke knew, and the two men bent down to see where the flow of oil was coming from. Over two pints were already on the shed floor and there would be another three to come. The senior customs man stood up.

  'You'll not shift that far,' he said, and to his junior colleague added, 'We'll have to move the others round it.'

  Clarke crawled under the cab section to have a closer look. From the engine up front a thick strong drive shaft ran down to a huge boss of cast steel, the differential. Inside this casing the power of the turning drive shaft was transmitted sideways to the rear axle, thus propelling the cab forward. This was effected by a complex assembly of cogwheels inside the casing, and these wheels turned permanently in a bath of lubricating oil. Without this oil the cogs would seize solid in a very short distance, and the oil was pouring out. The steel nose-piece casing had cracked.

  Above this axle was the articulated plate on which rested the trailer section of the artic which carried the cargo. Clarke came out from under.

  'It's completely gone,' he said. 'I '11 have to call the office. Can I use your phone?'

  The senior customs man jerked his head at the glass-walled office and went on with his examination of the other trucks. A few drivers leaned from their cabs and called ribald remarks to Clarke as he went to phone.
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  Then there was no one in the office in Dublin. They were all out at lunch. Clarke hung around the customs shed morosely as the last of the tourist cars left the shed to head inland. At three he managed to contact the managing director of Tara Transportation and explained his problem. The man swore.

  'I won't be carrying that in stock,' he told Clarke. 'I'll have to get on to the Volvo Trucks main agent for one. Call me back in an hour.'

  At four there was still no news and at five the customs men wanted to close down, the last ferry of the day having arrived from Fishguard. Clarke made a further call, to say he would spend the night in Rosslare and check back in yet another hour. One of the customs men kindly ran him into town and showed him a bed-and-breakfast lodging house. Clarke checked in for the night.

  At six head office told him they would be picking up another differential nose-piece at nine the following morning and would send it down with a company engineer in a van. The man would be with him by twelve noon. Clarke called his wife to tell her he would be twenty-four hours late, ate his tea and went out to a pub. In the customs shed three miles away Tara's distinctive green and white artic stood silent and alone above its pool of oil.

  Clarke allowed himself a lie-in the next day and rose at nine. He called head office at ten and they told him the van had got the replacement part and was leaving in five minutes. At eleven he hitch-hiked back to the harbour. The company was as good as its word and the little van, driven by the mechanic, rattled down the quay and into the customs shed at twelve. Clarke was waiting for it.

  The chirpy engineer went under the truck like a ferret and Clarke could hear him tut-tutting. When he came out he was already smeared with oil.

  'Nose-piece casing,' he said unnecessarily. 'Cracked right across.'

  'How long?' asked Clarke.

  'If you give me a hand, I'll have you out of here in an horn and a half.'

  It took a little longer than that. First they had to mop up the pool of oil, and five pints goes a long way. Then the mechanic took a heavy wrench and carefully undid the ring of great bolts holding the nose-piece to the main casing. This done, he withdrew the two half-shafts and began to loosen the propeller shaft. Clarke sat on the floor and watched him, occasionally passing a tool as he was bidden. The customs men watched them both. Not much happens in a customs shed between berthings.

  The broken casing came away in bits just before one. Clarke was getting hungry and would have liked to go up the road to the caf6 and get some lunch, but the mechanic wanted to press on. Out at sea the St Patrick, smaller sister ship of the St Kilian, was moving over the horizon on her way home to Rosslare.

  The mechanic started to perform the whole process in reverse. The new casing went on, the propeller shaft was fixed and the half-shafts slotted in. At half past one the St Patrick was clearly visible out at sea to anyone who was watching.

  Murphy was. He lay on his stomach in the sere grass atop the low line of rising ground behind the port, invisible to anyone a hundred yards away, and there was no such person. He held his field glasses to his eyes and monitored the approaching ship.

  'Here she is,' he said, 'right on time.'

  Brendan, the strong man, lying in the long grass beside him, grunted.

  'Do you think it'll work, Murphy?' he asked.

  'Sure, I've planned it like a military operation,' said Murphy. 'It cannot fail.'

  A more professional criminal might have told Murphy, who traded as a scrap metal merchant with a sideline in 'bent' cars, that he was a bit out of his league with such a caper, but Murphy had spent several thousand pounds of his own money setting it up and he was not to be discouraged. He kept watching the approaching ferry.

  In the shed the mechanic tightened the last of the nuts around the new nose-piece, crawled out from under, stood up and stretched.

  'Right,' he said, 'now, we'll put five pints of oil in and away you go.'

  He unscrewed a small flange nut in the side of the differential casing while Clarke fetched a gallon can of oil and a funnel from the van. Outside, the St Patrick, with gentle care, slotted her nose into the mooring bay and the clamps went on. Her bow doors opened and the ramp came down.

  Murphy held the glasses steady and stared at the dark hole in the bows of the St Patrick. The first truck out was a dun brown, with French markings. The second to emerge into the afternoon sunlight gleamed in white and emerald green. On the side of her trailer the word TARA was written in large green letters. Murphy exhaled slowly.

  'There it is,' he breathed, 'that's our baby.'

  'Will we go now?' asked Brendan, who could see very little without binoculars and was getting bored.

  'No hurry,' said Murphy. 'We'll see her come out of the shed first.'

  The mechanic screwed the nut of the oil inlet tight and turned to Clarke.

  'She's all yours,' he said, 'she's ready to go. As for me, I'm going to wash up. I'll probably pass you on the road to Dublin.'

  He replaced the can of oil and the rest of his tools in his van, selected a flask of detergent liquid and headed for the washroom. The Tara Transportation juggernaut rumbled through the entrance from the quay into the shed. A customs officer waved it to a bay next to its mate and the driver climbed down.

  'What the hell happened to you, Liam?' he asked.

  Clarke explained to him. A customs officer approached to examine the new man's papers.

  'Am I OK to roll?' asked Clarke.

  'Away with you,' said the officer. 'You've been making the place untidy for too long.'

  For the second time in twenty-four hours Clarke pulled himself into his cab, punched the engine into life and let in the clutch. With a wave at his company colleague he moved into gear and the artic rolled out of the shed into the sunlight.

  Murphy adjusted his grip on the binoculars as the juggernaut emerged on the landward side of the shed.

  'He's through already,' he told Brendan. 'No complications. Do you see that?'

  He passed the glasses to Brendan who wriggled to the top of the rise and stared down. Five hundred yards away the juggernaut was negotiating the bends leading away from the harbour to the road to Rosslare town.

  'I do,' he said.

  'Seven hundred and fifty cases of finest French brandy in there,' said Murphy. 'That's nine thousand bottles. It markets at over ten pounds a bottle retail and I'll get four. What do you think of that?'

  'It's a lot of drink,' said Brendan wistfully.

  'It's a lot of money, you fool,' said Murphy. 'Right, let's get going.'

  The two men wriggled off the skyline and ran at a crouch to where their car was parked on a sandy track below.

  When they drove back to where the track joined the road from the docks to the town they had only a few seconds to wait and driver Clarke thundered by them. Murphy brought his black Ford Granada saloon, stolen two days earlier and now wearing false plates, in behind the artic and began to trail it.

  It made no stops; Clarke was trying to get home. When he rolled over the bridge across the Slaney and headed north out of Wexford on the Dublin road Murphy decided he could make his phone call.

  He had noted the phone booth earlier and removed the diaphragm from the earpiece to ensure that no one else would be using it when he came by. They were not. But someone, infuriated by the useless implement, had torn the flex from its base. Murphy swore and drove on. He found another booth beside a post office just north of Enniscorthy. As he braked, the juggernaut ahead of him roared out of sight.

  The call he made was to another phone booth by the roadside north of Gorey where the other two members of his gang waited.

  'Where the hell have you been?' asked Brady. 'I've been waiting here with Keogh for over an hour.'

  'Don't worry,' said Murphy. 'He's on his way and he's on time. Just take up your positions behind the bushes in the lay-by and wait till he pulls up and jumps down.'

  He hung up and drove on. With his superior speed he caught up with the juggernaut before the vi
llage of Ferns and trailed the truck out onto the open road again. Before Camolin he turned to Brendan.

  'Time to become guardians of law and order,' he said and pulled off the road again, this time into a narrow country road he had examined on his earlier reconnaissance. It was deserted.

  The two men jumped out and pulled a grip from the rear seat. They doffed their zip-fronted windbreakers and pulled two jackets from the grip. Both men already wore black shoes, socks and trousers. When the windbreakers were off they were wearing regulation police- style blue shirts and black ties. The jackets they pulled on completed the deception. Murphy's bore the three stripes of a sergeant, Brendan's was plain. Both carried the insignia of the Garda, the Irish police force. Two peaked caps from the same grip went onto their heads.

  The last of the contents of the grip were two rolls of black, adhesive-backed sheet plastic. Murphy unrolled them, tore off the cloth backing and spread them carefully with his hands, one onto each of the Granada's front doors. The black plastic blended with the black paintwork. Each panel had the word GARDA in white letters. When he stole his car, Murphy had chosen a black Granada deliberately because that was the most common police patrol car.

  From the locked boot Brendan took the final accoutrement, a block two feet long and triangular in cross-section. The base of the triangle was fitted with strong magnets which held the block firmly to the roof of the car. The other two sides, facing forwards and backwards, also had the word GARDA printed on the glass panels.

  There was no bulb inside to light it up, but who would notice that in daytime?

  When the two men climbed back into the car and reversed out of the lane, they were to any casual observer a pair of highway patrolmen in every way. Brendan was driving now, with 'Sergeant' Murphy beside him. They found the juggernaut waiting at a traffic light in the town of Gorey.