The dogs barked, joyfully this time. “That must be David now,” she said.
A tall thin man of about forty, wrinkles of work about his eyes, but a smile all the same at seeing a stranger, heard his wife explain my problem. “I’ll do it now,” he said, “and have breakfast afterwards. You must be anxious to get away.”
Back at the cottage he attached the car to his tractor and hauled it out of the mud, then pulled it to the top of the slope, where he set it facing the right way for the main road. I offered him a cigar, but he didn’t smoke, so I took a ten-pound note from my pocket and, realising I might offend him by the offer, told him it was for his favourite charity.
“In that case,” he smiled, “I’ll take it. I have a few of those.”
We were off by half past nine. Dismal, while not exactly a jealous dog, being too idle for that, was always inclined to eat whoever was in the front seat beside me. Even with the children I’d often had to stop the car and give a punch he would survive yet not soon forget. This time it was Bill who, feeling the preparatory nibble at his neck, turned and thumped him.
“You navigate,” I said. “Take me northeasterly across the country to join the M1. After Ripon we split right, and I’ll talk you down to Spleen Manor from there. By the way, who were you phoning from the call box last night? The farmer’s wife told me her husband saw you.” I turned onto the main road. “He has a talent for description.”
A few seconds went by. “I suppose there’s no harm in telling you. Do you remember that woman Muriel we met in Greece, married to that pipe-smoking old buffer Ernest? I shafted her rotten, if you recall. Since getting back I’ve phoned her a time or two, but it’s hard work, because she took so strongly against me after we went off with the two lovely French girls. I’m slowly bringing her round to wanting to see me again, and when I saw the phone box last night I thought I’d give her a bell. She sounded happier this time, so maybe she’ll agree to us meeting soon. I can hardly wait, and I hope she can’t, either.”
“Why didn’t you tell me when you got back?”
“It was a personal matter, wasn’t it?”
Always in a good mood when on the road, I rightly believed him. “But what about her husband?”
“Michael, show me a naive and easygoing chap like that, and I’m more than halfway there.”
He wasn’t the sort I could taunt, though I might have told him that Ernest wasn’t as simple as he had seemed. But I didn’t bother, knowing that Bill always went roughshod over such complications. “Is there any woman in your life you’ve really been in love with?”
He was gallant enough to think about it. “Generally it’s the last one I got into bed.” Cigars smouldering, we steamed towards Shrewsbury. “That’s a place to bypass,” he said. “So listen carefully to my instructions.”
A master at finding parallel routes, he would never take the main road if a lesser one wriggled in the same general direction. I couldn’t fault him for it, and told him so.
“Michael,” he said, “there’s nothing the British are better at than the indirect approach. Many’s the time it put us at an advantage. Never go head on when you can find another way. All you’ve got to do is look at the map, and use your brainbox. Nine times out of ten your enemy never expects you to come that way. In any case it pays to give all your attention to the map. The map’s the outlaw’s best friend. You can bet that anybody pursuing you hasn’t got much skill in that department, or knows how to use the information.”
“You’d have won the Second World War all on your own, with knowledge like that.”
“I might, Michael, only don’t get so sarky. Just go through this village, turn left at the church, and keep on over the island, then we’ll get into Stafford by the back door.”
With such a zig-zag route, he was as good as his word, and in half an hour we were through Stafford and heading for Ashbourne. A large tanker carrying industrial sand, with the logo of a camel above its number plate, slowed us down for a while, and I only got by after it turned off. In Matlock Town Bill insisted we stop for coffee and a plate of chocolate cake.
Under his impeccable guidance I drove in a numbed state, enjoying the scenery, and hardly knowing where I was till we went up the high hills into Tibshelf and the familiar smell of domestic coal smoke. Bill directed me over the motorway. “Are you sure this is the best way?” I asked.
“Of course I am. Navigating’s my favourite pastime. It’s in my blood. We’ll go through Worksop, and join the main road later. As Moggerhanger said, we needn’t get there till six. So just keep making easting. I’ll tell you when to edge north, and get us there home and dry.” Back in the rural landscape he went on: “Travelling like this always reminds me of finding ways through narrow lanes in Normandy. I was good at it, except I once got behind the line without realising. Saw a German officer by a staff car looking at his maps. I did the quickest three-point turn in my life, bullets flying all over the place. One of our chaps was wounded in the arm, and you should have heard the swearing when he realised it wasn’t a Blighty one. I got the four of us out of it, but the Colonel bollocked me no end. It was one of the many occasions when I nearly lost my stripes.”
I wanted him to admit we were lost, but he didn’t, because we weren’t. He got us around Mansfield and through Clipstone village. “We’re back in Robin Hood country,” he said, “so watch out for arrows. Robin will rob us blind, if he catches us, though we’ll stop for a cup of coffee and a couple of Swiss puddings at the Major Oak car park.”
“Which way now?” I said afterwards.
“Do a left at Edwinstowe, and we’re dead set to get into Worksop by a minor road. I want a quick shufti at Slaughterhouse Yand, where I was born. We got thrown out of there and went to live in Gasometer Lane, and then to Foundry Buildings. It was downhill all the way to the Whiteout Back-to-Backs at Christmas.”
We drove for twenty minutes and couldn’t find any such places. “They knocked them down,” he said, “and put up all these ticky-tacky houses in their places. But we had fine old times around here as kids, Michael. The things we did, to make a penny or two.” He laughed at the windscreen till it was so misty he had to wipe it clean with his sleeve. “At Christmas we’d go in Sherwood Forest and cut bundles of mistletoe from the oak trees, then tie it into sprigs and sell them at threepence each to the miners. I nearly got caught by a gamekeeper once, but he couldn’t run as fast as me, because as far as physical conditioning went I had the best upbringing of anybody. Right from when I could walk I was traipsing miles, shinning up walls, climbing trees, running away from the police, swimming in the canal and ponds. Woods didn’t frighten us. We followed any footpath and jumped all the streams, and never got lost. In the town we knew so many twitchells and double entries and cul de sacs we could out-track a bobby in half a minute. Kids don’t walk anymore. Their parents drive them everywhere in case they get raped or mugged or kidnapped, but there’s no more danger now than when we was kids. It’s only the telly and the social workers who say there is, and they only tell them because they want to keep their jobs. But we walked miles, everywhere. And when I lied about my age and got into the army at sixteen the training was nothing to me. They threw us into Normandy after a month or two, and I loved it, because I had a gun as well. I’d been doing most of the stuff they called training since I was born. By the way, you’d better turn round here and go back down the main street. Fork left at the end. I don’t want to see anymore of this awful ash pit.”
I did as I was told, steering out of town and onto a byway towards Doncaster, passing all the dying pit villages. By five we’d done the Great North Road and were through Ripon, Bill routing me on lanes so narrow it was sometimes hard to do the turnings. High moors were scored with grey walls and in places speckled with sheep. We were closing in, Yorkshire living up to its name, with black clouds piling up in the west.
I pointed out Spleen Manor halfway up
a hill. Ground floor windows looked over a terrace, and down to various levels of garden. The Rolls and horsebox were visible in the forecourt, with a more ordinary car by its side. Binoculars showed a large hole in one of the French windows. “He’s a tidy man,” Bill said, “and would never tolerate that. A squatter didn’t get in, either, because the Roller’s still there. Let’s look at the other side.”
I drove along the road and stopped where a track curved up to the house. The gate was open, which Moggerhanger always insisted should be closed. “Somebody’s with him,” Bill said. “But it’s a badly situated house. It’s facing the wrong way, and doesn’t have sufficient field of fire.” He pulled Dismal out of the car. “We’ll make it a two-way operation, and go up on foot.” He tapped his pocket. “Take your gun, as well. You never know what you’ll find.”
“If Moggerhanger saw me with it he’d think I’d gone bonkers.” After Bill and Dismal had gone into the bushes to play soldiers I cruised up the gravelled drive thinking of the good time I’d had with Alice Whipplegate, after a festive supper at which Moggerhanger and Chief Inspector Lanthorn shared the profits from a big consignment of drugs.
I heard no satisfying belly laughter this time to signify that anyone was in residence. The front door was locked solid, so an ambush wasn’t planned from that direction. I resisted the bell, pulled my hand away, and trod quietly in a clockwise direction to the back of the house.
I looked in at a pair of the best mock Chippendales smashed and thrown into the otherwise empty fireplace. Handsome Staffordshire pot dogs on the shelf had lost their heads, while a glass fronted cupboard of good china, pulled onto its face, was no longer priceless. A row of racing almanacks made stepping stones across the room to a vase from some nonexistent Chinese dynasty, which must have been treated to a symphony of hammers and cold chisels. The enormous painting of Landseer’s ‘Stag at Bay’ was wrapped around a lamp standard. Such a spectacle of spoiled bourgeois elegance told me there must have been an argument.
Moggerhanger, well back in an armchair like a rag effigy that had been thrown there, wasn’t seeing anything, his pig-white face streaked with blood down the other side.
Alice lay on the leather settee, mouth wide open, and she wasn’t saying anything, either. Inside, treading over glass and empty booze bottles, I heard her snoring. She had been put out by drugs, or was blind drunk, though I had never known her to indulge to that extent.
Moggerhanger’s groan didn’t soften my heart towards him, though such a noise was uncharacteristic, likewise the pitiful state he was in. I had only ever seen him ebullient and well groomed, always on top of his day, but how the mighty was fallen now that he had only too apparently been gone over in a way I had always hoped to see, though feeling narked that someone had got in before me.
My impulse was to step quietly out and not become involved in whatever had occurred, for it had nothing to do with me. Yet I hesitated out of human feeling—another failing of mine—at the sight of two people who had been so wickedly dealt with, though it was Alice who decided me on staying.
I knelt by the settee and, after a few gentle smacks at her face, she opened her lovely brown eyes and gave a very crosschecked smile. Then she fell back into the senseless land of overpowering sleep. Knowing she wouldn’t come out of it for a while I turned to Moggerhanger, whose hands were cold, mostly from shock at the fact that someone could still do him physical injury. The blood on his face wasn’t from a serious wound, the prick of a knife blade perhaps, and the nail of a knobkerrie that had caught him on the temple. Nevertheless, his blackening raw eye told me he’d taken quite a pasting. His words slewed out: “Why did you take so long?”
His look of vulnerability encouraged me to say quite sharply: “You told us we needn’t be here till six, and it’s nowhere near that yet.”
Eyes swivelled on murmuring: “Parkhurst!”
I laughed. “What makes you think you’re going there? You’ll be all right.” There were worse places than the Isle of Wight I wanted to send him to. Any notion of letting him descend into the bowels of the judicial system were put aside only because I hadn’t been the one to reduce him to his present condition.
He slumped in a half faint, head lolling, then came back, eyes angry as if trying to tell me something else. Loyalty was a quality I’d never much valued, yet the old rogue was in trouble, and maybe it was up to me to help now that he was down. You can let him stew for a while, though, I said to myself, about to go and ask Bill to give me a hand at the biggest Sidney Blood picnic we’d ever been invited to. What a chapter it would make for Blaskin.
Parkhurst Moggerhanger stood in the doorway, and the gun pointing at me was no replica. “I’ve only half murdered the fucker,” he said, “but I enjoyed it so much I’m saving the rest for later. Then it’ll be your turn, Cullen, you bigheaded interfering bastard.”
“How can you do this? He’s your father,” was all that seemed necessary to say, but like the stupid pillock I was, because when Moggerhanger had mentioned Parkhurst he had only been trying to warn me about his son, and I hadn’t taken it in.
“You think that makes a difference?” Parkhurst shouted.
“Not necessarily,” I said. “But do it so’s I can see.”
“You think I won’t?” He wiped spit from his lips. “I’ve dreamed of this ever since I was at that posh boarding school he sent me to at six. He’s not my real fucking father. He picked me out of an orphanage as if it was Battersea Dogs’ Home when I was two because he wanted a mascot. He hoped I’d grow up to be just like him.”
He was a frightening sight, and intimidating now that he had a gun on me. His eyes were bloodshot, hair dull and lank, his jacket ripped at the lapels. I’d always known him as another depraved specimen who thought that all the ills of his life were the fault of his father, when he’d been born with the lamp of evil shining all too brightly enough inside.
I knew he hadn’t done much damage to Moggerhanger by himself, and my assumption was right, on seeing Jericho Jim come in from the terrace and stand by his side, a sawn-off little relic if ever there was one, the least intelligent runt of Moggerhanger’s entourage, whom Parkhurst had obviously suborned into this stylish but insane stunt. Mogg had always prided himself on spotting those who would give him loyalty unto death, but I’d never believed in his quirky intuition from the moment he set eyes on me and thought I could be one of them. And now overconfidence had turned into his downfall.
My thoughts played leapfrog, ring-a-ring-of-roses, and musical chairs. I might have chanced a grab at Parkhurst, but with Jericho Jim keeping me covered as well I wouldn’t get much change out of a bullet. If they were going to kill me, let them do it now, or if they weren’t, I’d better do something, though what that would be didn’t bear thinking about.
Chapter Twenty.
Square one is Blaskin’s territory—all mine—which I seldom leave nowadays. I may be boxed in, but Blaskin is familiar with square one, and comfortable in it. He writes in square one because square one is Blaskin’s own, a fortress nobody else can be allowed to enter. He would have been very much at home in a square at Waterloo, noise and carnage notwithstanding. Sooner or later Blaskin pushes a completed novel through the portcullis of square one, receiving in exchange whatever material has been raked from all the other squares in the world.
Square two never gets a look-in. Any prospective novel in the process of being lived through by my one-time bastard son Michael Cullen always comes sooner or later back to square one, to be narrated by the knowing hand of its all-seeing author Gilbert Blaskin, especially when Michael is in a midden’s creek with no apparent means of propulsion to cleaner waters, which is where I’ll leave him for a while.
Early morning is my most energetic time, though I fritter too much away in trivialities, before sauntering off to do proper work at my desk in square one. Breakfast is Mabel’s worst hour, and in trying to put her at her eas
e I emerge from the bathroom singing my favourite Tennysonian ditty, unable to leave anything holy, or wholly, alone:
“Come into the garden, Maud,
The social worker has fled.
The whisky flask’s full and the bed is broad
In the dark of the charcoal shed …”
She stood, tall and splendid, a cashmere jumper over high well-rounded bosom, always desirable in such revealing sweaters, as she well knew. I had seen drawers of them in all colours from rainbow trout to spectrum dazzle, everyone but the first, which I’d bought her, purloined from Harrod’s, so many I didn’t know how the firm survived, but to remark on her congenital thievery so early in the morning wouldn’t be fair.
“Do stop that caterwauling, Gilbert. I have a headache.”
“I’m only trying to amuse you on this dank and melancholy Knightsbridge morning.”
She poured herself a cup of coffee, and I’ll never know why this brought forth in me such a frisson of annoyance. She stoked herself a little more into life: “You sang it yesterday, and the day before that.”
“Thank you for reminding me. I trill because I can’t help it. I don’t feel like anyone in the world on waking up in the morning, so you have to take whatever comes from my Jack-in-the-Box, just as I have to brace myself against the censoriousness that pops from your Jill-in-the-Box. We were certainly made for each other.”
“How can you possibly think so?”
“Because you’re drinking coffee, when you should be all flustered in the kitchen assembling my boarding school breakfast. It disturbs me when you break the routine.”