He sounded as if he’d not only lost his marbles but a stone of weight as well. “You drive a hard bargain.”
“Not as hard as I could.”
“You’re a bastard of the worst sort.”
“And rather proud of it. Start moving. Get the money. Come up on the train. I’ll be outside the station in your Rolls Royce—or perhaps on the platform. Get off the train alone. If you bring anyone else, or try to pull a fast one, Bill will see to you in no uncertain terms. Your minions wouldn’t stand a chance. He would be in his element letting off a few well-aimed shots. He doesn’t fuck about.
“To continue. Sit over a cup of tea in the refreshment room. I shall meet you there. If in the future you try to get back at me, and I’m killed, or injured, or abducted in any way, I shall be leaving a briefcase with instructions that it should be handed over to the police. Its contents will prevent you having a comfortable retirement. Be sensible. Forget your losses, such as they will be.”
“Have you been up all night planning this?” he croaked.
Because everything had come out unrehearsed I hoped it would get us what we wanted, though of course I couldn’t be sure until it had. It wasn’t the moment for overconfidence. “We went over the scheme till agreeing on every detail,” I told him. “It was a lot of work and trouble for such a small percentage of what’s in your Rolls Royce. In fact I’m disappointed you haven’t offered a tad more than fifty thousand each out of the goodness of your heart. What’s the sense in making all this fuss over such a trivial sum?”
He was so long in coming back I thought I’d talked him into the ground. “Michael,” he said, “the reason I’m reluctant to comply with your demand is that you haven’t earned it. I pay generously for what people do, you know that, but in this case you’re asking for a sum which would cover at least a year of your work.”
“I’m fed up with this chatter,” I snapped. “We’ll meet the sixteen-forty-five tomorrow, and you will get off it. You don’t need cash from the bank. You keep more than that in your safe for pay-offs to whoever won’t accept cheques, or in case you have to go abroad at short notice.”
I put the phone down on Moggerhanger, which showed more than anything that I had crossed the Rubicon, mentally thanking Blaskin again for providing me with such an abundance of classical allusions. On my way to engineering Moggerhanger’s discomfiture gave me far more pleasure than a trip to Runna-Runna.
Everything said had been overheard, Dismal smiling as much as a dog can at my insistence on the Bogie. Bill shook my hand as if to take it away and fill a meat pie. “I don’t know where you found the chutzpah.”
“It’s the Irish in me. Let’s hope it works.”
“It will. You stitched him up like a tailor in a sweatshop. I was full of admiration the whole way through.”
“You deserve cakes and coffee,” Clegg smiled. “I’ll put the kettle on.”
“Make it strong,” I said.
Moggerhanger, in lounge suit, bowler hat, and navy blue overcoat with a carnation in the buttonhole, lifted the carton of Bogie onto the platform, and reached for the suitcase. He looked worried on calling a railway man to carry his luggage to the buffet, handing out a paper tip for the trouble.
I signalled him out to the parked Roller, which meant another note for the railway man on bringing the luggage over. He must have thought it was his birthday, because Moggerhanger was always generous when it suited him. Dismal was in the front seat trying to work the steering wheel, and Bill came out of the back to take the Bogie and the money. “My lads have got you covered. I’ll spend ten or fifteen minutes checking the amount. Find yourselves a cup of tea, and then come back.”
“Such precautions aren’t needed,” Moggerhanger said. “You can see I’m alone.”
Bill showed an old walkie-talkie I’d given Smog years ago for Christmas. “Do as I say, or I’ll call one of my ex-army pals to come and give you a pasting.”
It’s quite unnecessary to describe Moggerhanger’s look, because who can’t imagine it? In the refreshment room he pushed aside a plastic cup of what looked like Dismal’s piss on a bad day. “I’m not making any more conditions with regard to the transaction, Michael. After all, you’re only doing what I would have done in your place forty years ago. I’ve handed the money over with good grace, and with no trickery or malice aforethought. But I do have one favour to ask of you.”
“I might be amenable.”
“I’d like you to drive the Roller back to Ealing for me tomorrow. You have the money, so I can trust you to make the delivery of all that’s inside.”
“Why don’t you take it back yourself this afternoon?”
“I’ve got this terrible lumbar pain, that’s why, and a couple of hours at the wheel would be agony, especially in the rush hour traffic. Another thing is, I want you to take your kit from the garage flat. I’m sure you’ll understand I’ll never want to see you again.”
His seemingly reasonable request went through my brain like a cloud of dolly mixtures. Why not? There couldn’t be anything amiss with a more formal ending to our association, apart from which I very much fancied having Sophie beside me in the Rolls Royce when I gave her a lift to town in the morning.
“I only ask you,” he went on, “not to bring that damned dog with you. Whenever I had him on the premises he invariably took a malicious delight pissing over my carpets. He’d make a point of coming into my study—and you know how silently he can move—from the more than adequate latrine of outside, I might say, to do the business on my prime Bokhara. I can’t think what he had against me.”
“He never does it at my place.” I must have been the only person to like and understand such a dog. “Maybe it’s because we only have rush mats on the floor. He’s the best behaved canine friend a man could ever wish for.”
He turned a bottle of HP sauce so that the cradle of democracy faced him. “Your companion in villainy seems to be taking his time. It wouldn’t surprise me if such a daft berk like that hasn’t run away with the money, not to mention all the parcels in the boot. Nothing surprises a man of my age.”
Once a notion entered Bill’s addled head you could never tell if it would ever dislodge. I saw the picture of him at the wheel of the Roller, all windows open, and him singing aloud what would become the National Anthem of Runna-Runna as he headed at top speed towards Harwich.
Moggerhanger had a good laugh, his only one that day I supposed, when I jumped up and ran to see, I said to him, how matters were progressing. At the station entrance I was ready to kill myself, because the car wasn’t where it should have been. Would I have to stay in Moggerhanger’s employment for the next five years while I tracked Bill down and killed him? Kenny Dukes and all the rest would be on expenses as well, as we searched one South Sea island after another, and even then Bill would knock us off one by one as we waded ashore on hitting the right one.
The car slid into the concourse and stopped by the kerb, Bill’s shaven head coming out to say: “Thought I’d scarpered to Runna-Runna, did you Michael? Can’t say I wasn’t tempted, but I never leave a mate in the lurch. Everything’s all right in the suitcase. All the notes add up. We’re in the clear.”
Moggerhanger was on his feet when I got back. “I’ll take the next train, now that you’re satisfied.”
“And you can expect me tomorrow, about midday,” I said, looking forward to a night in a London hotel with Sophie. “That’ll give us time to get our cash into the bank.”
He was irritated, as opposed to angry. “Stop distrusting me. It’s not valid, so late in the day.” He put out a hand. “No hard feelings, Michael. The time for that has passed, so we might as well shake on it.”
The gesture made me wary, and he noticed it. “Michael, you’ve nothing to worry about. If there was no honour among thieves how would the world keep turning?”
Nobody knew that more than he, so
I took his hand, and assumed that everything would be all right. He looked somewhat older getting onto the train. “Serve him right,” Bill said. “I hope superannuation isn’t the worst thing that’s going to happen to him. We can go home now, and have a slap-up tea. Counting so much money’s made me hungrier than I’ve ever been, except for one time in Normandy when …”
“I don’t want to hear it,” I shouted, but joyful at our success.
“All right, so we pulled it off, the coup of our lives. But I shan’t go on. What a genius you are! Fifty thousand each. I can’t wait to begin spending it.”
I drove, because I found it relaxing. “Why not use a bit at a time, live off the proceeds?”
“Not my style, old cock. What if after six months I’d only got through ten thousand, and then one night I went to sleep and never woke up? Or suppose I got in a fight and was killed? Or say I went for a swim at Skeggy after a night with two tarts in a boarding house, went out too far, got cramp, and sank like a millstone? You know what the North Sea’s like at Skeggy. What then, with forty thousand still unspent in the bank? If there was such a thing as hell, and I went to it, as I surely would, my tears of regret would put all the fires out. There’d be the Devil to pay to get them going again, and I wouldn’t have the forty thousand to give him for the water bill, would I? No, Michael, what I want is a good time, and when I’ve spent every last tanner I’d rely on the Good Lord to look after his own.”
Who would want to argue against such recklessness? I’d turn Upper Mayhem into the Old Railway Hotel, I informed him, and earn more than enough to live on. Any profit would go into extensions. The signal box, for instance, I would kit out as a four-poster luxury suite, videos of steam trains available so that couples could plug them into the speaker system and fuck to the rhythm of the Flying Scotsman clawing the miles up to Edinburgh.
Then again, Sophie might pay her way into the business from her divorce settlement or, failing that, we could live on our pooled money for ten years in a Turkish village. But if she got the house in Italy with the divorce, we’d hole up in bliss till the cash ran out. And yet, best of all, surely, would be for me to exist in idle modesty at Upper Mayhem, the hotel business being too risky, and too much like hard work. I’d stay in Upper Mayhem for as long as the money allowed, and do any strong arm work that turned up to make it last longer. I explained these options to Bill, who kept his nose in the air and didn’t comment.
Clegg was watering geraniums by the waiting room, and on our telling him about the success of the venture he shook his head as if not believing we could have pulled off something so perilously clever. I felt the same, but spreading the money over the kitchen table we were all convinced the day had gone well. “Open two cans of Bogie for Dismal,” I said. “And how is Sophie? Is she up yet?”
“Up? She certainly is. She left an hour ago with her husband,” Clegg said. “He came here in a blood-red Mustang—a magnificent car, by the way—and after a rather loud argument she got in with him. He drove off with her like a rocket. I think she left a note in the bedroom.”
To call what boiled in my system bile would be just about right, though it was reinforced with an inner tantrum of murder, rage and grief. I could go on, except my mind wouldn’t click further into the thesaurus mode, before running two steps at a time up the stairs, almost cracking my kneecaps on trying to make it three so as to get a split second sooner at the paper.
“My darling Michael, I have to leave. Gerald insists. If he knew I was scribbling this he’d strangle me. Oh no he wouldn’t! But don’t despair, dear brother, I’ll see you as soon as I can, and we’ll be intimate again. Can’t wait. Love you, Sophie.”
Still incensed at such running away, I didn’t care whether or not I did see her again. At the same time I had to thank her for lifting me to a state of morale which had enabled me to deal so successfully with Moggerhanger. Then again, she had been responsible for my telling him I would drive his goods to Ealing, and I wouldn’t now be able to show her off beside me in the Rolls Royce.
“My aim in life is to have nothing ever happening,” I said to Bill when he laughed at Sophie’s deserting me.
Dismal snapped his jaws into a pile of disgusting Bogie, while we swilled tea and worked through a tin of custard creams. “It sounds as if middle age is getting at you,” Clegg said. “Things will always happen, especially to you, and you’re not old enough to wish they wouldn’t.”
Bill took up the last two biscuits. “If things stopped happening to me I’d know I was dead.”
“Yeh, but if you go on scoffing every crumb in the house like that we’ll have to shell out a couple of hundred quid at the supermarket tomorrow.”
“You’re worrying me,” Bill guffawed. “What will we do for money at the checkout?”
Clegg laughed so loud that only a hand to his mouth stopped his teeth breaking should they hit the teapot. “What neither of you irresponsible types realise,” he said, “is that it’s about time you settled down and had a family. There’s nothing like it to steady a chap.”
“I had three kids with Bridget,” I reminded him, “and then she left me.”
“Still, why not start again?”
I wondered who it would be with if I did. Kids by Sophie would have a hard time sorting out their relations, so I thought how perfect to have children with my beautiful wife Frances. She was too busy curing the ills of the world, but with a little encouragement she might be more than willing to cure mine. I felt lust and love for her, and pictured how magnificently sensual she would appear with a seven-month belly, far more so than any woman I’d known in that state. Bridget when pregnant had never had the delicate liveliness and intelligence I foresaw in Frances’s features.
Chapter Twenty-Nine.
“I like people to talk,” Bill said when we were heading south on the A10. “I can’t stand silence.”
“I’m not married to you, so shut up.”
“Michael, there’s nobody more capable and willing than me of shutting his haybox when the need arises, as it invariably does, but the sort of mood you’re in will be of no use to us on the present trip. It isn’t for my advantage that I’m telling you not to brood. It’s just to let you know that I have your best interests at heart, and if you don’t believe that then there’s not much else I can do for you.”
He couldn’t see my smile. “Have a cigar, so that we can be silent and amiable at the same time.” We’d been first in the queue at the bank to hand over our parcels of money and witness the glittering eyes of the bank manager. Bill was calm, but my nerves were, to say the least, friable, for you never knew when the Sword of Damocles wouldn’t snap its thread and put the kibosh on our astounding success. When things went badly I could always hope they would get better, but this was a coup that scared me.
After a few days Bill would light off to spend the few thousand he was keeping back, and I would return to Upper Mayhem, staying there till I’d decided what to do. We were on our way to unload the white gold in London, and I hoped all would go well, but however it did, the die was cast.
Close to Buntingford, Bill said: “We’ve got to stop, for our elevenses.”
“But you’ve not long eaten your tens.”
“I know, and soon I’ll want my twelves’s, and then my ones’s and twos’s. We can afford it, can’t we?”
The café had homemade cakes in the window, and we went in to fill the place with our cigar smoke. We were the only customers, and hard luck on anyone who might mind. In any case the man and woman who seemed to be the owners were puffing on their fags like two chimneys from a cotton mill. I recognised them from when they’d run a tarpaulin shack in an A1 lay-by selling bacon and sausage butties as big as doorsteps, and quart mugs of iodine tea, to lorry drivers heading for the Midlands and all points north. Husband Ken still wore a mask of misery and failure, in spite of the notch or two they’d come up since those enterprisi
ng but uncertain days, in having a proper roof over their heads. Ken slapped our order on the table: “You’re the first fucking customers we’ve had this morning.”
“Don’t swear,” Lil said, busy at the tea urn. “People might not like it.”
“I’ve got a right to swear, haven’t I? A few more days as slack as this and we’ll be in giro land eating bits of paper.”
“There’s worse places.” Bill was busy with an eccles cake. “You could be on the pavement begging for a living, like I was a few weeks ago. And look at me now. I’m in the money. You ought to take things as they come. Live a bit more in hope.”
“Oh yes? And what shady business might you be in?” Ken demanded with, I thought, more belligerence than Bill would normally tolerate.
“Transport is my trade,” Bill said. “And don’t get sarky, or I’ll duff you up. Then me and my mate will rip this chintzy tinpot place to pieces—and I can’t alliterate further than that.”
“Oh, very fucking good. Do it then, if you like. We can get the insurance.”
“You wouldn’t be in much shape to enjoy the pay-out, I promise you. Bring me a few of them Bakewell tarts from the counter, and stop whinging.”
“He’s always complaining,” Lil said. “I tell him it does no good, but he just goes on. He won’t stop.”
Ken lit another cigarette from a packet out of the stock, and stood by while Lil hustled to get Bill’s cakes. “It might do no good,” Ken puffed, “but it lets off steam, don’t it? It’s what keeps me going.”
“That’s as may be,” Lil said, “but the customers don’t like hearing it. It’s what gives the place a bad name.”
“They’d better stop coming, then,” he said, as if ruination was a Nirvana to be aimed for.