‘I thought I’d hidden it.’
‘Michael, from me? Hidden anything from me? Don’t grumble. We should both get in that car. None of Claud’s lot will see me if you throw a couple of blankets over me in the back. We’ll take the rifle and the shotguns. Just tell me your plan of attack, and I’ll explain how we do it. I was in the Sherwood Foresters all through the war. With a few chaps from the Old Stubborns I’d clean half London up.’
Maria came in with a laden tray, and he couldn’t resist stroking her arse as she set it down, but she kissed him, so he had his reward twice over. I was tempted to take him to Buckshot Farm, because he was capable of doing all he said, but his presence would alter the balance of the plan. I explained the scheme in case he could offer any constructive criticism.
Three sandwiches and a pint of tea went into his trapdoor. ‘Four cars is too much.’ He drew a hand across his mouth. ‘Two’s plenty. Then you’ve got six blokes for the assault. Claud always was extravagant with motors. You want precision, not saturation. If you’ve got three at the back and three at the front, you’ve got one man at each side to cover the two who go in. Right?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Right. Of the two who go in, one bloke runs straight upstairs and works his way down. The other bloke stays as a door-block with a cosh to catch ’em. Same from both sides. Can’t miss. Depends on the size of the house, but it definitely sounds as if you need six, not four. If it was one of a row of houses we could approach it on a parallel track by blowing holes through the walls with grenades till we got to the house we wanted. I was a bloody dab hand at street fighting. Loved it. It’d be a picnic for me, Michael. I’ll cover you from the front, and make four Molotov cocktails before we go, to lob through the windows if things get sticky.’
‘Fuck you,’ I exclaimed. ‘We want to capture the place, not have a holocaust.’
‘I was getting carried away, I admit. You can scrub the Molotov cocktail bit. But you see my point, Michael? Just drop me off in the vicinity half an hour beforehand. I’ll saw the end off one of your shotguns and stick it under my coat, and take one of your kitchen knives. I’ll put a hood over my face and blacken my hands. When you hear me whistle from the front upstairs window you’ll be able to walk in. I’ll have ’em trussed up neatly for you.’
‘I thought you were in love,’ I said. ‘You sound bored out of your mind.’
‘A bit o’ both never comes amiss.’
‘We don’t want a conflagration,’ I said, ‘and we don’t want a massacre. We only want the goods.’
‘That’s as maybe, Michael, but if Two-two’s anywhere near, watch out. I wouldn’t like to see you come back on crutches. You wouldn’t live very well on a pension from Moggerhanger.’
‘The plan’s not only been fixed, but it’s already in operation. They’d die if they knew I was talking to you about it. I must be out of my mind.’
‘I’ve got your best interests at heart. I owe you too much not to have. I suppose I’m getting sentimental in my old age.’
I finished my first sandwich, the last on the plate. ‘I’m taking Dismal for company. I’d also like a few flasks, tins of food, and parcels of sandwiches. You never know. I like to be well supplied with grub when I’m on a car trip. There’s less chance of having an accident. I also want the two-two rifle with fifty cartridges, and one of the shotguns.’
‘You’re very wise,’ he said. ‘Maria will go to the village shop and get some more bread. I tried teaching her to drive the other day in your old banger, but she didn’t seem to get the hang of the steering wheel, so she’ll have to go on the bike.’
I always kept the keys on me, but starting the engine with a bit of wire would have been no problem for him. ‘As long as she doesn’t take too much time. I can’t be late for my appointment.’
‘What’s the hurry? It’s only four o’clock. You don’t have to be there till nine, which means you can lounge around here till seven, and still make it if you crawl along at thirty miles an hour.’
‘Maybe I’ll have a bit of a kip beforehand, then, if I can rely on you to wake me by six.’
‘I’m as much interested in this as if I was going myself. I’ll see you get woken up, and have a royal send-off. I still wish you would let me come with you and give the lads a hand. I’d enjoy it, what’s more.’
Dismal finally realised I was home, because he followed me upstairs and spread himself across the bed. It wasn’t easy to get to sleep for either of us. What troubled Dismal I had no way of knowing. He’d make an effort to get his head down, then stand up and walk across my legs for no reason, finally flopping back with a sigh across my ankles. From the woolly caves and tunnels of my half-snooze I would push such leg weight off in case he bent them permanently and turned me into a modern-day victim of rickets. Every few minutes I would wake up from the nightmare of Bill having forgotten to call me. It was nine o’clock, getting dark, and the raid had started. Searchlights criss-crossed the sky to the sound of cannonfire, and Moggerhanger’s paratroops were descending sedately through the shrapnel.
He tapped me on the shoulder at five minutes to six, and I would have felt better if I had gone for a five-mile walk instead of taking a nap, though a few doses of Maria’s Nottingham tea – on a mug of which a bricklayer could walk forty storeys up and not feel nervous – followed by a long cold shower, soon steadied my shaking hands. I insisted on Dismal’s bowl being filled, and he lapped it clean with such gusto that we gave him another, after which he stood on a leg and his tail, and flipped the bowl bottom-side-up with his tongue.
‘I’ll miss that dog,’ Bill said. ‘For God’s sake, don’t let him get killed. I’d never get over it. He runs a mile every morning to the village for my newspaper and sixty whiffs. I don’t know where you got him, but he’s a godsend.’
Dismal farted in appreciation of this eulogy, and slid under the settee. His inability to converse as a human, as hurtful to his soul as it would have been to ours if he ever succeeded, occasionally lured him into disagreeable alternatives. ‘Don’t let him get near the Roller,’ Bill said, ‘or the paint’ll fall off. It’s a distressing habit he’s got into lately. That strong cheddar plays hell with my guts as well.’
At half past six we packed the grub into the spare front seat, plus a couple of blankets to cover Dismal during the time at action stations, and to conceal the two-two rifle and shotgun. Dismal clambered in like an old age pensioner, though he couldn’t be more than three years old, and I fastened myself in the driver’s seat.
‘Contact!’
‘Give ’em hell,’ Bill said. ‘I wish I was coming with you. I’d be in that house like a three-bellied snake.’
‘I’ll be safer on my own than with a bloke like you. You’re barmy, and that’s a fact.’
He turned on that immortal berserker grin from Nottingham. ‘I know I am. It feels marvellous, though – at times.’ He thrust an umbrella through the open window. ‘You might need this. Only don’t prod Dismal. It’s the one you picked up in the tube station, remember?’
He patted my cheek, and then I drifted down the lane on a day when the pollen count was high. My anxieties vanished. Where they went I did not know, and cared less. In spite of my waving him back, Dismal flopped over onto the front seat and took silent snaps at the smoke rings from my cigar as we bowled along towards the Huntingdon road.
The cloudless day began to scare me. I wanted to turn north or south, or even to spin back east, rather than continue west for the job I had to do. I would have felt better if dusk and rain threatened and all heaters were burning to keep us warm, because then my one impulse would have been to stick to my task and get it done, just to escape the winter and jump back into the snuggery of home.
There was something festive as I glided through the lanes. My feelings were out of control. I wanted to put on my party hat – I actually looked in the glove box in case one was stashed there – and pull into the next layby for a suck at my brandy flask. I waved at
a red-headed young woman by the roadside on going through a village, and she gestured with a smile that made me scared at the notion of doing something indisputably daft during the period of the raid.
The green and yellow belly of England pulled me along. My eyes fed on dark woods, on waving corn and meadows. I drove by wealthy houses. I threaded steadfast villages, no face starving or anybody in a hurry. I was glad to be travelling on a perfect evening, and happy at feeling different to everyone I passed. It was like going into battle as a soldier, because I didn’t place myself one second in front of my life. Otherwise I might stop and cut my throat.
Crows disputed for the shade of a tree when I stopped at a give-way sign. Dismal yawned, but when I pushed his snout aside I’m sure he laughed inwardly. Even a dog could sense our luck at being inside a moving car. The familiar traffic island on the Great North Road gave me a peculiar feeling to be cutting it at right angles instead of going north or south. I let half a dozen juggernauts go by before getting onto it, and a car behind hooted, expecting me to shoot into the stream with such a fast car. But I was careful, for if in my life I was to have a traffic accident, the time was now. In one way I wouldn’t have minded a collision just deadly enough to get me into hospital yet not kill me – a Blighty one, as Bill might say – but failing that I was cautious in getting across the island which actually smelt dangerous, though soon I was waving my hat at the Duke’s big shadow over the village of Ellington. On a straight but narrow bit of road a Cortina full of laughing kids drifted by at eighty, a pink rubber pig bobbing at the back window.
The tape deck treated us to popular marches by the Band of the Royal Artillery, which seemed just right for the job in hand. Even Dismal liked it, his fat tail flopping around the seat. Then came Exhortation 974 from Moggerhanger, saying I shouldn’t turn the car into a kitchen by leaving potato peelings and onion skins, pea pods and cornflake packets all over the upholstery. He must have chuckled while fiddling about with tapes in his spare moments. Dismal barked the hectoring voice down, so I buzzed the window and threw the tape over a hedge.
I mapped my way through Burton Latimer to dodge Kettering, and from then on a network of lanes took me over uplands and across the middle of Pitsford reservoir. Every two or three junctions I stopped to look at the map, because on this jaunt I couldn’t joyride and hope for signposts to put me on track. The sheet of water made Dismal scratch at the window, and before clambering back in he was thirsty again, so I emptied the plastic container into his mobile dog bowl.
I lit another of the chief’s cigars and off we went. Close to the raid area I drifted onto the main road facing north after an inconspicuous run through the village in which I saw a woman walking a dog by the post office shop, and a Volvo estate with green Wellingtons in the back parked outside a thatched cottage.
By nine o’clock a peaceful dusk was seeping in. I don’t know why, but it struck me that a yellow Rolls-Royce was an unusual car to use on such a stunt, a vehicle you would never steal if you wanted to get far without being caught. A cop-chopper would spot it from two thousand feet. We should have had Escorts or Cortinas, or a Morris that you couldn’t pick out from twenty miles away.
While waiting in position I fed Dismal a Mars Bar. He loved them, the only disadvantage being that he licked my hand afterwards to show his thanks and appreciation. Someone flashed me from behind. It was George in car C, going to take up his station half a mile south. I assumed that cars A and B were already preparing to do their stuff. I flashed George before he could turn the bend.
Another fact which came to me – and all the more sharply for being too late to be of use – was that I had committed my life into the hands of as big a set of numbskulls as it would be possible to find on God’s earth. They must have done a hundred years of bird between them, and if that didn’t prove their incompetence I don’t know what did. Yet who else could Moggerhanger have chosen? Even I had done my share. Those who had never been inside would be even less competent. Nor would they be so daft.
If Bill Straw, who I regarded as the most sensible bloke I knew, had volunteered to give a helping hand, it hadn’t been for gain, or a desire to practise his profession, but merely to have a bit of fun at the shoot-out, and then vanish into the countryside in order to test his ability at getting back to base undetected. Once a Sherwood Forester, always a Sherwood Forester. To Bill Straw, crime was the logical extension of an orienteering exercise, and in that sense I looked on him as being the typical Englishman – one also to whom the notion of class had no meaning.
Such reflections were too late. I was in it up to my neck. Even if I abandoned the Roller and made off with Dismal I’d be a marked man. The clock said it was a minute to nine, and I was on the left hand side of the road facing north, as instructed. A cloud of gnats danced above an elderberry bush. A sparrow flew over a patch of fully flowered nettles.
I was drowsy, so Dismal yawned. The western sky was pink high up and red below. Half a minute went by. I was roused by a car coming towards me with all lights on, swaying on its way south. Cottapilly with bulging eyes was at the wheel of car B, Toffeebottle and Pindarry in the back, poised to make the frontal assault. They were late, hence the hurry. Where the hell had they been? Kenny Dukes and Jericho Jim should already be out of Snowdrop Wood and approaching the farm, to take it from the rear – unsupported, unless they too were late. ‘It doesn’t bode well,’ I said to Dismal, who was asleep.
It would be futile to go back step by step and find out how I got into such a situation. Far better, I decided, to prepare the Roller to expect the load shortly to be thrown into it. I got out and opened the boot, and stood smoking another cigar. Since Moggerhanger would be lucky to see the car again, I saw no point in stinting myself. Dismal thrashed about the hedge after rabbits and partridges, maybe hoping for a fox. The time was five minutes past nine. The assault on Buckshot Farm should have been finished, in theory.
The light was dim enough to warrant the hazard blinkers on. They made the car more conspicuous than I would have liked, but in case the lads had difficulty locating me in the gloaming they would serve as navigation beacons. I fancied I heard a series of light cracks from the south, and my guts iced up at the notion of deadly Two-two going into action. The flatter echo of shotguns may have been from a party of farmer’s men after rabbits for the pot. I’d heard such sounds frequently on a summer’s evening from the open windows of Upper Mayhem.
At nine fifteen I began to worry, though not unduly. If Bill Straw had been in my place he would probably have had the stove out, calmly brewing a can of tea, as befitted an ex-Sherwood Forester, and be lying on his groundsheet scanning chapter one of a Sidney Blood novel. Ten minutes later he would blow out his stub of candle and turn in till midnight, when he would wake up, mash tea again, fold his bivvy, and steal off into the night to do twenty miles across country by dawn, before hot-wiring a car at a service station and melting into London by daylight.
I got Dismal back in the car and shut the door, settling him down with a blanket underneath and one on top. A possible future development would have been to have the stuff loaded, but with Dismal playing hard to get, me giving chase over six fields and becoming more and more exhausted as every horizon scintillated with the flashing blue lights of cop cars.
I was reading the clock by the minute. Either there was so much loot that they needed more time to load than had been anticipated (though with four such beefy bastards I didn’t see how this could be) or the attack had failed and, with one dead, two wounded, one prisoner and one missing (but being hunted for) they had conceded defeat and the venture was off as they beat a retreat to a late supper at Watford Gap cafeteria. If so, how would I know? And if I couldn’t know, how long should I wait?
By twenty past nine I considered going south to reconnoitre, yet such a move would be foolhardy, because no doubt as soon as I set off, car B would pass me, and wouldn’t find me in position to transfer the goods. Confucius might say that flexibility furthered, but
in that case it would only confuse us. The cigar began to taste like shit. To take my mind off matters, I mulled on my encounter with Frances Malham, less than a week ago, but it seemed ten years. If I came out of this lunatic expedition in one piece, or even two, I would find her, and renew our acquaintance. Her face haunted the darkening air and lifted me so much out of anxiety that I hardly noticed a pick-up truck coming towards me, a rainbow light flashing from above the cab. It stopped a yard behind the Roller.
Kenny Dukes, hair matted with blood, jumped out shouting: ‘You’ve had it easy, haven’t you, mate?’ He wanted to kill me for it.
Parkhurst slid off the back. He had bruises on his face and a sleeve of his jacket torn away. Toffeebottle came out of the other side and banged into the cab door, unable to see with his closed left eye.
Twenty-Five
‘What happened?’
Parkhurst threw the first parcel across. ‘Complete success.’
‘They broke me fingers,’ Toffeebottle moaned, who nevertheless was able to play pass-the-parcel with the rest of us, during which five minutes I gathered that Kenny Dukes and Jericho Jim had come out of Snowdrop Wood on time, but hearing no roar from car B shooting along the lane to the front of Buckshot Farm, lay concealed in dead ground, spitting tacks with impatience. Parkhurst, who had debussed them half an hour before, instead of stationing himself at the junction as he’d been told, watched for car B driving up to the farm, and then followed it along in case they needed him as a reinforcement. It was as well that he did. That bit of flexible thinking proved him a true son of Moggerhanger. Both cars were spotted as they came up the lane. A shotgun appeared at an upstairs window, but Moggerhanger’s stalwarts zig-zagged in lizard fashion up to the house and reached the door unhurt.
At such a racket Kenny Dukes and Jericho Jim threw down their fags and slid in by a back door to do their stuff. They disarmed two men who had shotguns, but there were more members of the Green Toe Gang than had been expected, and a struggle took place. The first thing Parkhurst did when he came in was clip the telephone cable, then knee one of the blokes who reached for a walkie-talkie. He hurled the radio out of the window, atmospherics crackling in the evening air. There was fighting all over the house, and a Green Toe bloke who got outside threw a match in the petrol tank of the Jaguar, which blew up. The second car was also damaged, but not so seriously that they couldn’t use it. ‘I’ve known worse cock-ups, let me tell you,’ said Parkhurst.
Life Goes On Page 38
