I was icy at the back of the neck. We were beyond Bromsgrove, but neither of us had mentioned any need to stop there. His story put such a decision out of my mind because the fact was, I knew him well. He was the man who had sold his house at Farnsfield through me when I was working as an estate agent’s runabout in Nottingham. I had done a bit of fiddling because several buyers were after it, out of which he got an extra few hundred pounds. He generously gave me a hundred and fifty, but I was given the push from the estate agents, Pitch and Blenders, because they found out about it. However, I used the money to buy an old banger and finance my coming to London, so this tramp in my car was responsible for me being where I was and doing what I was doing – which was giving him a lift while ferrying Moggerhanger’s loot to Peppercorn Cottage. Even Blaskin wouldn’t believe me if I told him, and he’s a novelist.
His name was Arthur Clegg, and I’d spent a couple of days helping him clear up his house after the contracts had been exchanged. We’d had fry-ups when we got hungry, and played draughts while a Handel oratorio blasted out of the gramophone. The valuable half-hunter gold watch in my pocket was none other than one I had pilfered from a chest of drawers. I later gave it to that elderly dropout Almanack Jack who came to live at Upper Mayhem, so that with a little red flag and a gold braided cap, which Bridgitte put together for him, he could play at being station master. When he kicked the bucket from a heart attack I got it back, and had carried it in my waistcoat ever since.
Such a long tale had exhausted him. ‘I don’t know why I went on so long.’
We were intersecting the M5 and heading for Kidderminster at ten minutes past eleven. ‘I’m glad you did. You may find this hard to believe, but we’ve been acquainted before.’
His hand twitched on the back of the seat. ‘It seems unlikely, if you don’t mind me saying so.’
‘It’s true, all the same.’
A liveliness came into his voice. ‘Well, I do detect a trace of the old Nottingham in your accent. It’s barely noticeable, but I would say you hail from Beeston – or somewhere near.’
‘You’re spot on. The fact is, Mr Clegg, I was the estate agent’s assistant who sold your house at Farnsfield. We practically ran an auction on the matter. Remember?’
During the two-minute silence I could almost hear the wheels of his rusty mind working at top speed. ‘Michael Cullen?’
‘The same.’
‘If ever I lost my memory, I’d do myself in.’ Another minute went by. ‘I don’t particularly know why, but I have occasionally thought of you during the last twelve years and wondered how you’d got on.’ He came out of his sombre mood and chuckled. ‘You lit off to London, then?’
‘On the money I made out of you.’
‘I can’t believe it.’
‘A hundred and fifty pounds was a lot more then than it is now. I had a bit besides, so I bought a car.’
‘What are you doing in this Rolls-Royce?’
‘I’m a chauffeur.’
He tut-tutted. ‘You haven’t come very far.’
I wanted to stop and throw the old sod out. Who was he to condemn me for the balls-up I’d made of my life? Instead, I unhooked my watch – his watch – and swung it back to him. ‘That’s yours. I stole it when I was helping you to pack up your household belongings.’
I was left holding it. His face in the mirror was lantern-jawed, moustached and grey-eyed. He had wrinkled skin and a mardy mouth.
‘Take the thing, then.’
‘I don’t want to,’ he said.
‘Must be worth a hundred quid.’
‘I’m flabbergasted.’
‘So am I.’
‘It’s not surprising.’
The road was narrow and full of curves.
‘My arm’s aching. I don’t like driving with one hand.’
He switched on a light before clicking the back of the watch open. ‘You’re right. My initials are on it. I suppose I ought to thank you for keeping it safe. The other watch I had was stolen in hospital, so I’ll never see that again. I’m glad to see this one, though. It belonged to my father.’
I’d have to buy a new one. ‘I’m sorry I nicked it.’
‘So am I.’ I didn’t expect him to be grateful. ‘I suspected you at the time,’ he said, ‘but we’d been so friendly I couldn’t believe it. You’d better stop this car, and set me down.’
I shouldn’t have been, but I was annoyed at him not saying what a good chap I was for giving his watch back, and the idea of him leaving me in this frame of mind didn’t suit me at all. I hadn’t thought about the Green Toe Gang for half an hour, or worried about the priceless goods I was hijacking in the boot. I patted Dismal on the head. At least he loved me. ‘I can’t let you go like this.’
I heard his friendly and open laugh. ‘Are you trying to Shanghai me?’
‘I’m offering you a job,’ I said, without thinking.
‘That sounds like Michael Cullen of the old days. If I remember, you worked a bit for me, didn’t you? I always thought you had flair, and would go a long way.’
‘I’m a bit more than a chauffeur,’ I said. ‘I’m a courier, really, and in the boot there’s a cargo worth a lot of money. I’m moving it from one place to another and I need somebody to be with me for a few days, as a sort of driver’s mate. It’s a temporary and non-pensionable post, but I’ll pay you ten quid a day starting from this morning.’
‘You’re joking.’
‘Oh bollocks.’ I was fed up with his sanctimonious presence. To our right, beyond Kidderminster, stretched the gloom of Wyre Forest.
‘I suppose swearing is the only way you know of being serious,’ he said. ‘But I’ll tell you one thing, Michael. There’s a lot to be said for the stiff upper lip, by which I mean not saying anything, and especially not swearing the minute it comes into your mind. You’re a man of too much substance to let yourself be carried away so easily.’
I acknowledged that he was right, and that the first thing I should have prevented myself saying was to make that stupid offer of a job. But I took his advice to the extent that I resisted hurting his feelings, though I was strongly tempted to do so. ‘Of course your job with me will mean working at night. There are no set hours. It might also involve a certain amount of danger.’
He laughed. ‘What have I got to lose?’
‘Can you handle firearms?’ I thought that on saying this he would run away from the car as fast as a March hare up a chimney.
‘I was in the Home Guard during the war,’ he said calmly. ‘There aren’t many types of small arms I didn’t learn how to handle. I also taught others how to use them.’
‘Somebody might try to rob the car.’
‘I don’t want to hurt anyone.’
‘Just to frighten ’em off. I don’t expect it’ll come to it, though.’ I could smell the ups and downs of Shropshire. Clegg fell asleep and Dismal went on snoozing. I drove up into Ludlow, and the sight of its cosy old-fashioned hotels made me sorry their dining rooms were closed and that it wasn’t possible for me to rumble into a courtyard and put up for the night. I trawled along the few lighted streets and circled the one-way system twice. Even the gloomy castle seemed comforting. At midnight I drifted downhill and coasted west, the familiar technicolour dashboard glowing below clear shapes along the road lit by my headlights. I’d been at the wheel forever, or so it felt, and might have gone to sleep over it if I’d been on my own.
Not knowing what to do about my cargo, I was all cold fronts and depressions. I thought of driving as deep into the nearest forest as I could get and staying undetected till I made up my mind on the next best thing to do. In a clearing, with shovel and pickaxe, Clegg and I would bury the loot, a hurricane lamp hanging from a tree branch, while Dismal looked on like a disapproving gaffer at our clumsiness. But I didn’t have tin trunks to put it in, so the stuff would go rotten in a week. Still, with a rifle, a shotgun, a Great Newfoundland dog (or whatever he was) and a mining engineer, we might survive
till the Moggasearch was called off.
The ‘Treasure Island’ picture vanished, and I looked to the ever-winding road, drawn towards Peppercorn Cottage – which maybe I wouldn’t have been if I hadn’t known that Wayland Smith was held prisoner by Percy Blemish. My mind was in knots, but I kept going, determined at least to set him free.
Half an hour later, turning north over bare high hills, I heard Clegg yawn and stretch. Dismal leaned over and nudged my hand with his snout. Time to stop. To the left and right were huge patches of wood. The road descended into a valley towards Bishops Castle, whose lights winked as if somebody had forgotten to turn them off at midnight and would be called to account in the morning for such extravagance.
‘A nap makes a new man of you,’ Clegg said.
Dismal romped and farted up and down the hedges while I opened a tin of Bogie and put water in his bowl. Clegg made a start on the ham sandwiches and I got out the oval tank of coffee. ‘You look after your employees well.’
‘I do my best.’ We leaned against the car and I saw his face in the light, a man of anguish whom fate hadn’t kicked until quite late in life. My last ten years had been peaceful, but his had been full of trouble. I had another fifteen years to go before getting to the point he had started from. Things had to change, if I wasn’t to go the same way. Black clouds were drifting up in a line from the west. ‘Looks like we’re in for it,’ Clegg said.
A tree at the edge of the field creaked in the wind like a wooden battleship being pushed up the rocks. ‘I don’t suppose we’ll be the only ones to get it.’
When Clegg poured more coffee Dismal looked up mournfully, so I set the remains in his empty bowl, and even above the wind heard him lapping it with pleasure. A passing car mistook the shape of ours and nearly ran off the road. ‘We’d better be off. I have an appointment at Peppercorn Cottage and there’s still thirty miles to go. I want to get there in an hour and be away before dawn.’
He settled himself in the back. ‘What’s the hurry?’
‘If I don’t do things in a hurry I don’t do them at all.’
‘It’s like that, is it?’
‘It is.’
Rain beaded the windows, so I put the wipers-and-driers on. We went northwards, over hills and across valleys. Clegg and the dog dozed again, while I thought of Frances Malham. When too much was tormenting my mind I cut off from it by thinking of sex, and when there was nothing on my mind I thought of sex so as to put something into it. Certainly, a mind ought not to be either tormented or empty. So while driving the dark roads I mulled on beautiful Frances Malham the medical student who, I could be sure, wasn’t thinking of me. At the same time, I could be reasonably certain that if there was any woman at the moment mulling on me in similar terms, I wasn’t thinking of her. Telepathic wires almost always crossed. But in spite of my recent randy philandering, and the equally randy philandering of those women who had chosen me (and at the end of it all, who was to say who had chosen whom – if it had not been mutual?) my only yearning was for Frances, not only because she had been the most recent of my encounters, but because I was in love with her, and I hoped I would be till the end of my life, though I didn’t see how we could get together again, because even though she didn’t hate me, she would probably avoid me as if I had got scabies.
Midsummer clouds, filled up by the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico, let water drop over the hills that streamed into the valleys. Even on the ridges I was driving along a river. Dismal woke at the noise and tried to stop the windscreen wipers with his left paw, his head moving like the victim of a tennis season. I plunged on, Captain Cullen of the Yellow Roller clipping around Cape Horn. As a kid I’d wanted to be a sailor, as well as a pilot and a train driver, little knowing I would end up at the wheel of a car like everybody else.
Dismal howled at a flash of lightning. When thunder broke he got on the floor and buried his head in his paws. I laughed, and he looked up resentfully, then hid his great juff again at the next sizzling flash across the windscreen. I slowed down in case a fallen tree blocked my way around the bend.
I swayed on, both hands at the wheel, drenched in my oilskins and thrown against the scuppers but getting back to the poop deck on all fours, gallantly assisted by Able Seaman Dismal, before another wave struck us. I snarled at the rest of the crew, and braced myself for the next great sea-change as we made westerly.
‘Quite a blow.’
‘I’ve had worse, Mr Clegg.’
‘We should beat back a bit, sir.’
‘No!’ I roared. ‘Make westerly. Make westerly.’
And we did. North as well, till we were through, and rain subsided to a drizzle. Water ran down the sides of the road, and sometimes along the middle, and there was obviously more to come. Only two other cars had passed in half an hour. ‘Anyone out tonight, and they’re up to no good.’
‘You can say that again, Mr Cullen.’ I turned off the A road, and went along one which ran up the steep side of a wooded spur. Branches met overhead. ‘It’s like going along a gallery underground. I hope the props hold.’
After a mile the road levelled, a wood to the left. Rain stopped, but water still dripped. Over the dip was Coldstone Hill, four hundred feet higher. I read the map at a crossroads, then forked right and, after a mile along a descending lane, recognised the village of Mainstoke. We were getting close. Wind was thumping the car, but it stayed solid. Flurries of rain came back and front. I cruised up the track towards Peppercorn Cottage and Clegg opened the gate, shutting it after I’d driven through. ‘This is about the most remote place I’ve ever been in, except underground.’
Stars between clouds were like confetti thrown up into the sky that had stuck, each with a bulb inside. We went gently upwards on dimmed lights. Water that ran between the concrete strips of the paved lane was an inch or two deep in places. I stopped a mile short of the cottage and parked under a chestnut tree after turning the car round. I changed into wellingtons. ‘You stay here, Mr Clegg.’
‘You can rely on me.’
‘Have this two-two rifle. It isn’t loaded, but at the sight of it nobody’ll take a chance. Stand ten yards from the car so that they don’t catch you inside. But I don’t suppose you’ll see anybody.’
‘I hope not. I’ll do the humanly possible, though.’
I didn’t altogether like that. ‘Can you drive?’
‘I had a car for thirty years.’
I slid two shells into the shotgun. ‘Can you get the car back down the lane if I don’t show up in an hour?’
‘I expect so.’
I buttoned my green overcoat to the neck and put the heavy duty air pistol in my pocket. ‘If you can do that, you can get it to Upper Mayhem in Cambridgeshire.’
I wrote the address, and he looked at the paper. ‘I should be able to.’
I played it like a bloke on the cinema. ‘Come on, Dismal. Don’t make a sound, or I’ll cut your tail off.’
We trod carefully so as not to splash in hidden pools, and I got used to the dark by keeping the two hedge-tops in view. Dismal was so quiet I thought he had disappeared, but every few seconds I saw his shadow moving against my wellingtons. The track around the house was a quagmire. Rain was endemic in these parts. If I’d brought the car down it would have sunk without trace.
I looked in through the window. The main room was lit by a gas lamp hanging from the middle beam. A large wood fire burned in the grate, a black kettle on top spouting steam. Percy Blemish sat in an armchair reading. Crockery was on the table, with a few tins and packets of food. It seemed a shame to disturb such domestic orderliness. Percy as a caretaker, and his wife as a housekeeper, had found their places in life, and I wondered why it had taken so long.
I banged at the door, but he must have thought it was another bout of wind. He only responded when I tapped on the window. ‘Who is it?’
I told him, and at the same time tried the door. ‘Lord Moggerhanger sent me to deliver some stuff.’
He opened up,
pointing a revolver at my face, which I did not like. ‘Put that thing down.’ Had I escaped the skill of quick-firing Two-two, only to fall at a sluggish bullet from Percy Blemish? The thought didn’t bear thinking about. I stepped aside. Dismal launched himself at Blemish’s chest. In pushing past, I swung and kneed him in the groin. He went flying towards the fire, but was quick enough to get off a shot which hit the wall just under the ceiling and sent plaster all over the room.
It wasn’t the nearest I’d been to death, but it was close. I turned to make sure Dismal was safe. He guarded the door, tail flicking with nervous anger as he looked at Blemish lying in a heap. A sharp piece of ricochetting dust had hit me at the temple, and the liquid trickling onto my best overcoat was blood. I thumped Blemish for good measure, regretting that I had changed into wellingtons. My overcoat had cost nearly two hundred quid. ‘You stupid prick. Get up.’
Another such bullet and I’d be on the floor bleeding to death. At the best I’d have an agonised journey up the lane, pulled on a blanket through the mud. Then again, a stint in hospital might get me a few weeks rest. I remembered Blaskin telling me about his spell after he had lifted a suitcase and busted a gut. The nurses often laughed as they remembered his stentorian scream up and down the corridors of the private clinic where he went to have his hernia pushed back: ‘You know I’m not going to last till morning: wank me off!’
Stop woolgathering, I told myself just in time, as Blemish made a move towards a carving knife on the table. I banged down on his wrist and it fell to the floor. Dismal leapt across the room, his canine spikes grazing my wrist. I pointed to the door. ‘Stay outside.’ He walked away, pleased with himself.