“By a process of elimination,” she said, “I imagine you’re off to Doggerel Bank.”
“I’d rather storm Barclay’s Bank.” But I knew she knew. There was no harm in it, and even less for us when she said: “What I want is a nightcap on the bed before you go.”
At midnight it was all I could do to crawl up to the flat, and even Bill’s snoring, which sounded as if he was trying to saw his way out of Colditz and not doing badly either, didn’t stop me falling asleep after putting on the alarm for seven.
He was bulling up his boots when I woke, reeking of aftershave and holding each one aloft to see his inane reflection in the glisten. “I’ve shone yours up as well, old cock. I got up at five, so thought I might as well. Always go into action with your boots polished.”
“Stop trying to put the fear of God into me.” I reached for my towel. “We’re only going north to lift a few packets of lemonade powder.”
“That’s as may be, but smart soldiers are always the last to get shot. Scruffs just ask for it. That’s why so many in my gang survived, bar a scratch or two. They fought harder to get in my platoon than they did to get at the Gerries. When a man asked me to take him on I insisted on short hair, a clean shaven face, boots well buffed up, and fifty fags. So get yourself a shower then put your kit on so that we can go down to breakfast. I’m clambed to death.”
While we were eating our way through a Blemish special Moggerhanger came in puffing his early morning cigar. “Two won’t be enough. Kenny Dukes is coming with you.”
It was useless saying he would be superfluous to requirements, though Bill piped up: “Private Dukes, sir?”
“Not all that private,” the boss laughed. “He can never keep himself from himself. But I’m sure the pair of you can keep him in order, and he’ll have his uses, so do as I say, and take him.”
When Kenny presented himself at the bottom of the steps Bill looked him up and down, at longish hair, an earring, and suede shoes. “We’re going into rough country, lad, so go and put on a pair of good boots. Make sure they’ve got the regulation shine. And get rid of that earring: no identifying badges are to be worn in action. And stand up straight,” he bawled. “You might break your mother’s heart but you won’t break mine, you slovenly tike!”
Kenny turned to me. “Is he fucking mad, or what?”
“He’s serious,” I said, “so you’d better do exactly as he says. It’s an important operation we embarking on. In any case he’s Sidney Blood’s first cousin, and stands no nonsense. They were brought up in the same slaughterhouse.”
“Oh, well, I didn’t know, did I?”
He came back looking a little more purposeful, but when he climbed into the front with me Bill’s hand went in and tapped him on the shoulder: “Other ranks behind, and make it snappy, or you’ll be on a charge.”
Kenny looked vicious for a moment, then stunned, finally shrugging to obey. I flicked the engine into life, as Jock the handyman swung the gate. Every time I set off in the Rolls I felt young and irresponsible again. How was I to know that this was to be the last jaunt for Moggerhanger, though I would have been surprised had anyone hinted as much.
“O-nine-hundred-hours,” Bill said. “Dead on time.”
Chapter Twenty-Six.
“You’ve done the wrong turning for the A1 (M),” Kenny said sullenly.
“That’s because I’m heading for the A10, and into Cambridgeshire,” I told him snappily. “We’re taking on a passenger.”
“Lord Moggerhanger won’t like it.”
“He’ll have to lump it, then. I’m the captain of this ship. As long as we get to Doggerel Bank by lunchtime it won’t matter.”
“I still think he’ll be cross.”
“Silence before a commissioned officer!” Bill screamed, as if at the first stage of an apoplectic fit. He acted barmy, but I knew he wasn’t, so thought his reaction justified.
Kenny turned blood-crimson. “Oh, right, then.”
“You remember Upper Mayhem,” I said to him. “You trashed the place three years ago. I still haven’t forgiven you, but I’ll put that by for the moment.”
“You should have had him on the carpet,” Bill said. “Never forget a slight. You do more damage to the culprit than yourself if you do. It’s not human nature to forget.”
Kenny hung onto his sullenness. “I was only looking for things.”
“They weren’t there, were they?” I said. “In any case you can find things easier than by taking a place to pieces. Or someone more intelligent could. When Sidney Blood’s searching a house he does it so that nobody knows he’s done it.”
“I stand corrected.” He’d got back something of his bounce at the mention of his favourite fictional character. “Which reminds me, I was going to ask Mrs Drudge-Perkins out for lunch today, and now I can’t. Something always effing stops me.”
“Steer clear of her,” I said. “I expect the last time you took her to lunch she had a little tape recorder attached to her tie pin for taking down what you blabbed about Moggerhanger.”
His expression was hidden from me, but it couldn’t have been pretty. “I didn’t notice anything.”
“She’s Sidney Blood’s moll, don’t forget. Colonel Blaskin uses her to get material for his novels.”
He gave as close a laugh as his stomach could produce, visible in my mirror since I was now on a straight bit of road.
Roller and horsebox cornered well on the lanes, and in little more than an hour we drew into the confines of Upper Mayhem, where Clegg was repainting white marks along the platform edge. “I wish you would let me know you were coming so that I could have the kettle on.”
Dismal almost knocked me onto the line with his welcome, and I swear blind he knew I’d come to pick him up, with such a wagging of his muscular tail. “Another thing is that your mother and her friend are in the house,” Clegg said. “They got here last night, and when I said there was only one spare bed they just jumped into it. I’ll never understand women.”
I found her in the kitchen, holding Doris’s hands across the table, an enormous pot of tea close by. She wore a turban as in a wartime factory—though smoked a Marlborough Lite instead of a Park Drive—baggy purple slacks and a white shirt, and plastic glasses hiding most of her face. “Hello, duck,” she said. “Have you come back for some health giving walks across the fields?”
“I don’t need any.”
“You look as if you do. Your face gets too pasty these days.”
I gave the expected kiss, and even got a smile from Doris, whom my mother had dolled up like a Christmas tree—or an action girl—in sleek black pants, a white high-necked shirt, a red waistcoat, and such a long cigarette holder I had to watch out for it poking me in the eye.
“We’re on our way to London,” my mother said, “to mix randy old Blaskin up a bit. I sometimes get bored in Nottingham.
I told her I was passing through. “But make free with my resources. Everybody does. Clegg will look after you. I’ll see you after I’ve finished the job I’m on.”
“Watch out for that ratbag Moggerhanger,” she said, “or he’ll have you in jail again.”
I opened the car door for Dismal to get in, and he charged across the seat to sniff at Kenny who yelled: “What’s this fucking animal doing in here? Gerrit off. I hate dogs.”
“He’s the regimental mascot,” Bill laughed, “and he loves eating privates.”
“No way. Not me.” He leapt out, and clear. “I’m not sharing with him. He’s as big as a fucking pony.”
“Get back inside,” I said, “or you’ll insult him. Just give him a kiss on the nose, then he’ll settle down. If we don’t get going we’ll be late, and if we are, Moggerhanger will have us executed in the Tower of London.”
“I’m not travelling with that bloodhound, I tell you.”
Tact was necessar
y, such as topping Kenny and cutting him up, throwing his arms in Devil’s Ditch, his legs in the Old Bedford River, and his head in the Ouse, which solution to the problem I’d recall when writing the next Sidney Blood called Murder in the Fens. “All right, Kenny, travel in the horsebox. Have it all to yourself.”
Anyone but me would have felt rewarded by his smile, or at least flattered. The slightest kindness, and he became more or less human, in spite of Bill’s scorn for his lack of courage. “Suits me,” he said. “Moggerhanger won’t mind. I’ll travel in style as well, and won’t have that mangy brute shitting and pissing all over me.”
I locked him in, and off we went. Speed was high on the A1, but I had to take care once or twice when some class-conscious bastard of a lorry driver tried to nudge me off the road, the sight of a Rolls Royce towing a horsebox too much to stomach. We separated from the main drag at Knaresborough, and headed northwest, stopping only once at a comfort station for Dismal, and for Bill to get into the driving seat, leaving me free to read the map.
“I also asked blokes who wanted to join my platoon,” he said, “if they could read a map, and you’d be surprised how many couldn’t. One winter during training—I’ll never forget—the corporal took us out for a three-day exercise on Salisbury Plain, and got us so lost it felt we were in the middle of Siberia. He didn’t know where we were. We were supposed to meet the dinner wagon at a certain grid reference, but missed it. After two days we were starving, and still going round in circles. We were about to kick his head in when I spotted a bus, which I flagged down and got us back to camp. The corporal lost his rank, and served him right. After that I learned all I could about map reading, and soon had some stripes of my own.”
He barely got around a bend without capsizing the horsebox, while I imagined Kenny being sick over Moggerhanger’s mahogany furnishings. “Turn left beyond this bridge.”
“Next time, give me more notice,” he said.
“I would, if you’d stop reminiscing. Fork right in about three miles. I’m telling you now.”
A youth in front driving a tractor wore headphones as big as frying pans, so that he wouldn’t even hear the world blowing up. He turned into a field. A west wind peppered drops of rain, Bill putting on the wipers only when he couldn’t make out trees in front. The lanes narrowed to such a tunnel he had to switch on the lights as well. “Real Yorkshire weather,” he said. “Catterick’s at the top of the map, if I remember, and a right hole that was.”
At five hundred feet above sea level I indicated a cobbled track. A mile later we went down a fair way and came to a ford, Doggerel Bank hidden up the other side. “They can’t see us from there,” I said. “You drive over in the Roller, and pass Doggerel Bank to the top of the road, where there’s enough space for you to turn. Come down and stop a couple of hundred yards above, so that you block the track from that direction. Dismal and me will charge into the house. If you hear signs of trouble come and give us a hand. Meanwhile Kenny will stay by the stream and manhandle the horsebox to the side of the lane so that we only have to hook up on the way down, after we’ve finished loading the loot. Is that clear?”
“You’re a tactical genius. I’d have been proud to have you in my platoon, though we’ll see how it turns out, because no scheme goes according to plan when faced with reality on the ground.”
“This time it’s got to,” I said. “There’s no room for error.”
He laughed, and clapped me on the shoulder. “Michael, there never is. We all say that, but the little green god inside sometimes think’s otherwise.” He stopped the car. “Let’s get Kenny out.”
When I unlocked the horsebox door the unmistakable reek of Moggerhanger’s finest whisky mixed with cigar smoke wafted up at me. Kenny lay lengthwise on the floor, blotted out, we assumed, after having partied with himself every mile from Upper Mayhem. The little green god had got to us too early for my liking.
“Our first casualty.” Bill gave him a kick. “He’s out for the count,” dragged him by the ankles, head and arse banging down the steps, which treatment I hoped would revive him, but we only got a burbled curse and a groan for our trouble.
Bill filled a booze bottle at the stream. “We went through a French farm and found an abandoned wine vat, real plonk and as sour as hell it was, but we put back a lot more than this poor specimen, pushed on and took fifteen Russians prisoner who were fighting for the Germans. We treated them a bit rough, but they only laughed because they were out of the fighting. So we gave them a fag each, and marched them to the cage.”
He uptilted the bottle of suitably icy water and let it dribble onto Kenny’s nose, a somewhat brutal splashing that brought him round. If his language wasn’t audible at Doggerel Bank I don’t know what would have been. Thin fair hair was matted over a Neanderthal skull, eyes half red at the whites, his misshapen nose blue, and a crimson blotch distorting his cheek. “You’re not going to spoil our well-laid plans.” Bill cocked his pistol. “So get on your feet, or I’ll push you into the trees and shoot you for cowardice in face of the enemy.”
I consoled Kenny for his possible fate. “That’s what Sidney Blood would do.”
He stood by the track to piss himself empty, hot water coming out where cold had gone in. “You didn’t need to fucking drown me.”
“Next time I’ll hold your loaf under the stream for half an hour,” Bill said. “I don’t mind you jeopardising yourself, but you’re not going to land us in the dreck.”
“I only had a drink or two. It was cold in that horsebox. It sways all over the place.” He leaned over to be sick, and when he’d done, Bill opened a coffee flask and ordered him to drink it off.
I strolled to the water, followed by Dismal, who wetted a paw and turned away in disgust. Then he reminded me he hadn’t eaten since leaving home, so he swallowed a ham sandwich from the food pack, and bumped my leg for another. “We’ve work to do first,” I said, at which he belched, and sat as if never to move again.
Kenny’s condition was a setback, though Bill brought him round to as much normality as coffee, food, and bullying could. “Let’s turn the horsebox ourselves, Michael. This daft loony’ll never manage it by himself.” He took the car across the ford, to give space, then came back so that the two of us could get to work.
Kenny looked on, shivering and glaze-eyed. “Things never go right when I leave Bermondsey.”
“Shut your rattle,” Bill told him. When we had effectively blocked the lane he held Kenny by the jacket lapels: “I’ve only one thing to say to you: stand here and let nobody go by. If you have any trouble, shout. And if you hear us calling from the house, run and help.”
“You mean cross that river?”
“You want me to build Tower Bridge? If you don’t show willing I’ll kick you to death.”
Clouds turned a paler grey, and shifted to show some blue, a stroke of sun lightening the foliage. Bill drove the car slowly along the track till it was hidden by the trees. I thought of asking him to take me over the water so that me (and Dismal) wouldn’t get our turn-ups wet, but his scorn would have been too hard to bear. As it was, Dismal shook clouds of spray at me when we got across, but I couldn’t, at our delicate stalking up the lane, give him the bollocking he deserved. He went along the opposite hedge on full alert, as if after a crash course at the William Straw Infantry School.
Politeness required me to wish the time of the day to a good looking grey-haired woman in her fifties digging around with a trowel at the vegetable plot by Delphick’s house. “The lane seems quite busy,” she said. “A Rolls Royce went by a few minutes ago, and the driver called out that he was Lord Earwig. He was very handsome. I was hoping he’d pause for a chat.”
She put a hand to her aching back, as if not born for such work, and unbuttoned her pale duffel coat. “If you want the Poetry Master, he may be in the Meditation Room with a young acolyte, making sure she’s imbibing Buddhism. My c
lass doesn’t start until after rhubarb tea, when he gives a talk on Mila Repa and the Round of Existence. Yesterday he spoke about the purpose of the anapaest with reference to the Tibetan Book of the Dead. I hope you’ve come to hear him. He likes an audience for that, but,” she went on with a grain of bitterness, “only if they’re young and female. I don’t think he’d like to be disturbed at the moment though.”
“Do you enjoy gardening?”
She seemed grateful for my curiosity. “Not really, but Mr Delphick’s theory is that whoever wants to learn about poetry, especially those who admire his, will benefit by labouring at the soil. I’m supposed to be saying some lines of his over and over to myself as I work.”
“All his poems are trash,” I said. “He’s just a confidence man.”
Blushes brought charm to her features. “How can you say that? He said that giving me this work is a great sacrifice on his part, because he loves to do it himself.”
“I’ve known him twenty years,” I said, “and his ambition was always to have a place like this, with slaves working for him, and nubile girls waiting on him hand and foot. You can’t blame him, can you?”
Leaving her to think what she liked, I beckoned Dismal into the house, my kick banging the door against the wall.
“Who’s that?” Delphick shouted petulantly. “Who is it? Come on, who is it? Own up!”
“The rent man,” I called, following Dismal’s leap into the inner sanctum, where Delphick sat cross-legged on a shit-brown padded platform, candle flame dancing before him. He wore an orange blouse, a sky-blue scarf at the throat, and a sort of beany hat that fell lopsided at Dismal’s assault across the candles as if it was Midsummer’s Eve, and Delphick a long promised dinner with all the trimmings.
Blinds were drawn to shut out the green and dripping hell of the occidental world, so I flicked them up to let in light. “Your lease is up, Delphick.”
He screamed, though whether at a weak sunbeam, or the rasping dog tongue at his cheek, I couldn’t say. “Get that Hound of Heaven off. He’s stopping me going through The Happiness of the Great Liberation. What do you want, anyway? Whatever it is, I haven’t got it. And if you want to stay a few days, you can’t. There aren’t any vacancies till next week.”