Victory Disc

by Andrew Cartmel

  “Good. Okay. Can I have the address?”

  Pennycook paused. “First, there are a couple of things.” He sounded like he was consulting a written list. It seemed he was as reluctant to reveal the information as Billy. “If I give you the address and you manage to obtain the record, I would like to listen to it.”

  “All right.”

  “I mean, you have to play it for me. At least once. Before you pass it on to your employer.”

  “Of course.”

  “It’s just that I have to hear it.”

  “I understand.”

  “It’s probably the rarest collector’s item of any recording featuring Danny Overland.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I understand.” I really did. Being a music nut myself. “Is that all?”

  He hesitated. “No. Billy also made me promise to tell you something. If I give you this address and you insist on going there and trying to get the record.”

  “Okay,” I said. “What did he want to tell me?”

  He hesitated again.

  “He said, it’s your funeral.”

  * * *

  “They don’t have any of the Domaine de Thalabert left,” said Nevada. “That’s a real bugger. We can order the Châteauneuf-du-Pape and that will be fine, I suppose, if a bit pricey. But it won’t have the whole blackberries-and-cream thing going on.” She sighed and set the wine list aside, studying the pub with scepticism. She clearly felt let down by the fact that they’d run out of her favourite wine.

  The pub was located in a village outside Tewkesbury. It was an allegedly ancient inn called the Crispin and Crispinian, a weird name only rendered slightly less weird by a little historical plaque on the wall that explained that Crispin and Crispinian were twin brothers and saints, the patron saints of tanners and other leather-workers. The pub had once been a monastery guesthouse, then later a tannery.

  We had chosen the place on the Internet and booked a room here because of its reputation for providing decent accommodation and superior food and wine. And also for its proximity to our ultimate destination.

  Just a few kilometres along the Tewkesbury Road, on the other side of Bredon’s Hardwick, was the farmhouse.

  The Nazi farmhouse.

  Nevada continued to study the wine list with disapproval. We were sitting on a padded bench in the corner of the saloon bar nearest to the fireplace, which luckily wasn’t currently in use. It was a warm, humid night, and the place was relatively empty with most of the other customers outside in the beer garden.

  Besides ourselves, there was a middle-aged couple with two Scots terriers who had brought their own water bowl for the dogs and set it down under their table. They must have been regulars because no one had batted an eye. Other than the well-hydrated dogs’ owners there were half a dozen teenagers who looked barely old enough to be drinking, a young but clinically obese couple who were rather embarrassingly in love and all over each other, and a pair of unreconstructed hippies in the traditional uniform of jeans and army surplus jackets with hair down to their shoulders, hunched quietly over pints of real ale.

  It was a peaceful, relaxed place and it would have felt good to get out of London and come here, if it wasn’t for the tight feeling in the pit of my stomach. I couldn’t get our mission out of our mind, even if we weren’t going to make any kind of start on it until tomorrow, when Tinkler and Clean Head would join us. I found this thought reassuring. Clean Head was enormously reliable and competent, and even Tinkler, surprisingly, had proved himself cool-headed and resourceful in a crisis. Once in Canterbury, in a very perilous situation, he’d saved us all.

  So there was no question of Nevada and I doing anything until these reinforcements arrived.

  We had driven up that afternoon in Tinkler’s Volvo. He would be following with Clean Head in one of the many cars she had access to. Opal would not be accompanying either of them. Ostensibly this was because her van was far too conspicuous. The truth was that we didn’t want her along, because none of us trusted her. Well, none of us with the possible exception of Tinkler. But then, as Nevada said, he was love-struck.

  Although instead of ‘love’ she had used a blunt old English noun for a portion of the female anatomy.

  So Tinkler had been left to make up a story for Opal about why he had to leave London for a day or two, and why she couldn’t join him. He had been on the phone to me immediately, partly to expiate his guilt about having lied to his honey-pie and partly to tell me about Clean Head. Apparently she had called at his home to discuss our strategy for the whole Nazi farmhouse operation.

  “She just dropped by without phoning first,” he said. “She never does that. Come to think of it, she never drops by. And it was incredibly embarrassing because Opal and I were, ah, having a little nap.”

  “You’re becoming strangely circumspect.”

  “No, seriously, that’s what she calls it—napping. We’ve been napping so much lately I can hardly walk. Anyway, there we are in bed with Clean Head knocking at the door. And she just kept knocking. She wouldn’t go away, so I had to answer it. So there’s Opal and me, undressed, just out of bed, and Clean Head is there. And it’s totally obvious that she’s just interrupted us, and it’s all terribly uncomfortable. Don’t you think it’s weird?”

  “What?”

  “That Clean Head just happens to turn up, drop in on me for the first time ever, when I happen to be in bed with someone. You know, I think women have a sixth sense about these things.”

  “Or Nevada phoned her,” I suggested. He clearly hadn’t thought of that.

  “So, anyway, what do I do?”

  “About what?”

  “About Clean Head and Opal.”

  I sighed. “It isn’t as though you’ve been unfaithful to her.”

  “All the same, she seemed pretty upset. Clean Head, I mean.”

  “I doubt if she’s that upset.”

  “She certainly seemed it, when we were all standing there awkwardly in the kitchen.”

  I said, “You didn’t suggest a threesome, then?”

  There was a pause on the other end of the line. “Do you think I should have?”

  “I suspect not.”

  “I’d hate to think I missed an opportunity.”

  “I suspect you didn’t.”

  “Well, anyway, I was wondering if you could try and get some sense from Nevada about how Clean Head feels. About the whole situation. About me and Opal. The next time they speak.”

  “They’ve already spoken,” I said.

  “So what did she say? What did Clean Head say?”

  “She said, ‘At least it proves he has one.’”

  “I have one!” said Tinkler proudly. “At least I have one. That’s great. She means a penis, right?”

  So the upshot was that Opal would be staying in Tinkler’s house, hopefully not destroying any rare vinyl or expensive and delicate hi-fi equipment, while Tinkler and Clean Head came north to join us here for however long it took. We had already booked rooms for them.

  Two separate ones, naturally.

  They were bringing with them an assortment of useful equipment. Some of this we had stored at my house in what was now, once again, the spare room. Other items had been newly purchased by Nevada and would be charged to Joan Honeyland as part of the cost of retrieving the V-Disc.

  Nevada had downloaded instruction manuals for some of this newly purchased kit and printed them out to bring with us. She was studying these now while we waited for the landlord to serve our wine. I said, “How many of those Tasers did you buy?”

  “Four of them.”

  “Four!”

  “Yes,” she said, a little defensively. “Three of them aren’t really Tasers at all. They’re purely handheld short-range electroshock weapons. With these you need to make physical contact, deployed by hand, to stun the subject.” She’d clearly been busy with those instruction manuals. “Whereas a proper Taser fires two electrode darts. So I’ll be the one using that,
because I’m the only one of us who can shoot worth a damn.”

  I couldn’t argue with this. I said, “So there’s one that shoots and three handheld?”

  “Actually, to be perfectly honest there’s one that shoots and four handheld.” She smiled demurely. “Because I wanted both kinds for me.”

  “And Clean Head is bringing all these up?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did we bring anything up ourselves?” We certainly had come with enough bags.

  “Of course we did,” said Nevada in exasperation. “We brought the night-vision binoculars and our new wide-range electronic countermeasures detector, which I purchased at the Spook Store.”

  “Jesus. I thought we had all the electronic countermeasures detectors anyone could ever need.”

  “Not a wide-range one.”

  “And what do we need that for?” I said.

  “The farmhouse, of course. We want to sneak up and keep it under surveillance from a considerable distance. But if they’re clever and well-equipped they might just have some kind of detection and alarm system that will alert them to intruders even at just such a considerable distance. Out among the fields and woods. And this device will enable us to find out if they have anything like that.”

  “It will enable us to detect their detector.”

  “Yes.”

  “What if they have a dog?”

  Nevada looked at me with approval. “I didn’t think of that.”

  “It seems the sort of thing you might find at a farmhouse.”

  “It does indeed. I’ll phone Clean Head and tell her to pick up some pepper spray, too.”

  I said, “So the idea is we just hang around and watch the place.”

  “The idea is to establish a well-concealed vantage point and surveil the place. Is that even a word, surveil? I suppose it’s rapidly becoming one.”

  “And then we watch their comings and goings and wait for a moment when everyone is out of the farmhouse, and then we go in and get our record.” I’d already started thinking of it as our record. Perhaps I just had larceny in my heart. At least where vinyl was concerned.

  “Exactly. Although hopefully we’ll have more than a moment.” Nevada set aside her Taser manual and picked up the pub menu.

  I said, “You know what the problem with that is?”

  She nodded, flipping through the menu, which was lengthy. “Yes. The problem is making sure that we know exactly how many people are in the farmhouse so we can make absolutely certain they’re all out when we go in.”

  “Billy Pennycook seemed pretty certain that it was just the bloke and his brother who live there full-time.”

  “Big skinhead and little skinhead. Yes. The relevant phrase there is ‘full-time’. We have to make damned sure that the brothers and also any potential houseguests who might be visiting—to practise Heil Hitler salutes or something—are all out of the place when we go in.”

  We stopped talking while the landlord brought us our glasses of wine and asked if we were ready to order supper yet. We said we were still looking at the menu. I waited until he was out of earshot before I said, “And what if we can’t get everybody out of the farmhouse at the same time?”

  “We will create a little diversion to draw them out. I couldn’t help noticing—good old Google Maps—that there’s a large propane tank attached to the farmhouse. Any kind of fire in the vicinity would be likely to draw their immediate and full attention. One doesn’t want fire near a propane tank.”

  “A bit dangerous,” I said, “don’t you think?”

  “You mean if we got it wrong it could result in blowing up lots of Nazi regalia and one extremely rare record?”

  “Not to mention potential injury or even loss of life.”

  “Well, it’s only a last resort,” said Nevada defensively. “Shall we order supper? Even they shouldn’t be able to screw up roast beef. Or we could just order bread and cheese. That should be pretty comprehensively foolproof.” She really hadn’t forgiven them for not having her favourite wine.

  * * *

  We went out to the beer garden to wait while they prepared our meal. Nevada had decided that the pub could probably be trusted with roast beef, although she had made a point of telling them at least six times that it had to be rare, thereby laying the groundwork for sending it back to the kitchen with a grim sense of satisfaction if it turned out to be overcooked.

  It was a pleasant spring evening, the sky just starting to darken. You could smell the countryside around us in the gathering gloom. A bee buzzed past my ear, on its way to an important meeting with a flower. There were a lot of people in the beer garden, sitting on deck chairs or on long wooden benches beside long wooden tables. There was a sort of gazebo or bandstand made from weather-beaten silvery wood at the far end of the garden.

  A rotund, hairy man in a bright green tweed jacket and red corduroy trousers was standing on the bandstand holding a microphone. Behind him hung a banner that read SAVE THE BADGERS. It featured a cartoon of a smiling badger on either side of the slogan. They looked very cute with their black masks and their white snouts.

  Most of the deck chairs in the garden were clustered around the bandstand, as though they were waiting to hear the badger man. He cleared his throat, and the guttural sound reverberated all around us.

  I realised that there were large outdoor speakers mounted in the trees at all four corners of the garden. Whatever he had to say—I’d concluded by the lack of backing musicians and his general demeanour that he wasn’t going to sing us a song—there would be no escaping it.

  “Shall we go back inside?” I said, rising from the table where we’d sat.

  “Wait a minute,” said Nevada. “I want to hear this.”

  I sat back down.

  The man cleared his throat again, thunderously, then started talking. “In the eighteenth century,” he said, “hedgehogs were slaughtered here in England en masse. They were deliberately, cruelly massacred by country folk wherever they could be found. They died in their millions.” There was a murmur of subdued horror from the seated audience, and I saw Nevada wince. The poor little hedgehogs.

  “Why did they do this?” said the man. “Because it was believed at the time, in the eighteenth century, that hedgehogs suckled on sleeping cattle.” There was incredulous laughter from the audience. “That’s right,” said the man. “Suckling on cattle and therefore stealing the farmers’ milk. And you do well to laugh at the foolish fantasies and hysteria of an earlier age. But now, once again, in our own century, farmers’ paranoid fears for their precious cattle are prompting them to slaughter innocent wild creatures. And I use the word ‘innocent’ advisedly. The argument for culling badgers to prevent bovine tuberculosis has an equally sound scientific basis as the quaint eighteenth-century annihilation of our nation’s hedgehogs.”

  He reached down and picked up something from the floor of the bandstand. It was a fat document. He held it in his hands and shook it at us as he spoke, like a priest sprinkling holy water. “What I have here,” he said, “is the government’s ‘Final Report on Badger Culling’, subtitled ‘Bovine TB: The Scientific Evidence’. Over three hundred pages of carefully considered scientific research. And do you know what it says? It comes to two main conclusions.” He thumped the report in his hand. “It states that although badgers are indeed a potential source of cattle TB, culling them—by which of course they mean killing them—does absolutely nothing to control TB in cattle.”

  He flipped through the document. “The exact wording is ‘can make no meaningful contribution’. In fact, culling badgers is likely to make the situation worse. That’s one of the two main conclusions. The other one? Let me read it to you. ‘Cattle themselves contribute significantly to persistence and spread of disease in all areas where TB occurs.’”

  He closed the document and thumped it again. He had a pretty good oratorical style. “That’s right. The cattle themselves. In other words, if anything we should be culling cattle, not ba
dgers!”

  There was applause from the audience. I noticed the hippies from the bar had come out into the garden to hear the speech. Now they, too, clapped enthusiastically, even though they had to set down their pints to do so. The Badger Man modestly accepted the approbation, then waved his hands for silence.

  “So there you have it. Scientific proof. Common sense. But do our farmers listen? No. Instead they persist in their misguided belief that badgers are somehow to blame for the consequences of their own foolish factory farming and overcrowding and exploitation of animals. And these misguided farmers, in the countryside around us, in our own community, are taking the law into their own hands, locating badger setts and sealing them off and pumping in exhaust fumes to kill their inhabitants. Whole families of badgers are being massacred, illegally culled, even now. Right now! Trapped and gassed in their homes with no chance of escape.”

  “That’s horrid,” said Nevada. Tears gleamed in her eyes. “The poor badgers.”

  “We are asking for your help to stop this happening,” cried the Badger Man. “We need your support. Both in the form of financial contributions—yes, we’ll be happy to take your money for a good cause—but also in the form of your personal involvement. We are planning a campaign of direct action to support and assist the badgers. If you feel you can donate your time and dedication and courage, we would like to speak to you.” He lowered the microphone, then raised it again. “But money would be nice, too.”

  There was laughter from the crowd. The sky above the garden had darkened with night, and lights had come on in the trees. They were red and orange Chinese-style plastic lanterns, in bright clusters in the dark branches. Presumably they were on some kind of time switch. Either that or they were designed to come on in response to pro-badger rhetoric. The Badger Man left the stage, and three men and two women rose from the deck chairs and went to him. They were all wearing badger t-shirts, so I assumed they were already part of his team. But other people now began to join them. New adherents.