by Ripley, Mike
‘Oh yes,’ said Daphne still smiling, ‘my husband owns shares in them.’
That put me in my place. I tell the truth and I’m already reduced to a mere employee.
‘But you won’t spot many beer-runners these days, not here,’ she went on. ‘Well, not at this time of day. Most of them use the ferries at night, say between 1 a.m. and 6 a.m., at least the traditional white van trade does. But you don’t see half as many as you did two or three years ago. It’s the Tunnel, you know, the beer-runners are using flat-back trucks and estate cars on Le Shuttle these days. I think they must get a cheaper rate or something. We used to see the white vans all the time coming up the hill here. They were terribly slow some of them because they were so overloaded, and the drivers used to wave to us. One of them even gave us a bottle of vodka one Christmas. The good stuff, Stolichnaya.’
I think I remembered to close my gaping mouth at that point. I was certainly tempted to ask her if she had a spare folding stool so I could sit down and take notes.
‘But you’re not here watching for smugglers, are you?’
‘Oh no, not smugglers. We’re not interested in what’s coming in, only what’s going out.’
Forget the stool, I needed to lie down but there wasn’t a psychiatrist’s couch in sight.
‘Going out?’
‘Exports – of animals,’ she said slowly as if she was explaining which was the soup spoon to a particularly slow grandchild. ‘Live animals. They are transported in the most appalling conditions. We have leaflets on the subject if you are interested.’
I’ll bet they had. I remembered the protests when crowds of middle-aged women, students and a fair sprinkling of the usual Rent-A-Mob suspects just out for a punch-up had blockaded ports like Dover and smaller, private ones such as Brightlingsea in Essex, to stop the export of live animals to the Continent. The animals were mostly calves – all long tongues and wide, brown eyes – destined for the Dutch veal trade, or occasionally sheep and little woolly lambs, all squashed into trucks, unable to move or eat for days on end. There was no doubt it was an unpleasant trade, but I had often wondered if the export of live pigs would have garnered as much sympathy. Not as photogenic, you see, and nowhere near as cuddly.
Things had got out of hand, as you should have expected if you put middle-class Britain on a crusade involving animals. The police had been called by the port owners, then the police had called in the Riot Squad and even used horses for crowd control. Now there was a moral dilemma for the protestors. Assaulting a policeman was one thing, handbagging a police horse was a matter of conscience. It had all turned ugly and got quite violent. People had got hurt; mostly kids and innocent bystanders, as usual. The government had promised to do something or other, as usual.
‘I thought the Government had done something about that?’ I said, then added: ‘Because it was a disgrace, wasn’t it? The conditions those animals had to endure, I mean.’
Daphne softened visibly and slipped the mobile phone into a pocket.
‘Oh, they brought in some regulations, quotas and things, and tried to make the lorry drivers stick to schedules with rest periods and things, but they still have to be watched – to make sure.’
‘So that’s what you’re doing, is it? Watching for cattle trucks?’
I pointed to her set of binoculars, a flash single-lens, very modern pair on the tripod in front of her.
‘That’s right. Constant vigilance, that’s what we call it. Round the clock surveillance. Spying, I suppose. We are the private eyes of the animal kingdom. Say it like that and it sounds quite exciting.’
‘There seems to be plenty to spy on around here,’ I said under my breath. ‘So you spot ‘em and snap ‘em do you?’
Daphne looked down at the cameras at her feet. Her friend in the green hat snorted as if it was the stupidest question she had heard since a canvasser had called at the last election asking if she would consider voting Liberal Democrat.
‘If it’s at night we have to rely on infra-red and the night shift has one of those cameras developed by that nice David Attenborough so he could film badgers during the dark. What we do during the day is photograph the licence plate and if there are obvious signs of overcowding or cruel conditions, then we use the digital camera. We have a friend in Dover who can feed it straight into a computer and e-mail the image to the Ministry of Agriculture in London. The best we’ve done is having an e-mail to the Minister in eight minutes.’
I was impressed. I was very impressed.
‘I’m impressed,’ I said to prove it.
‘Somebody has to do something, ‘ said Daphne. ‘If you could see what those poor creatures have to go through . . . it’s a national disgrace. Would you like a mug of soup?’
She reached down to one of the canvas bags at her feet and unzipped it. Inside were half a dozen shiny steel Thermos flasks.
‘They’re all home-made. We have tomato and basil, Scotch broth with pearl barley –’ so they didn’t mind the little lambs once they were dead –‘and a clear borscht – that’s beetroot – spiked, I think they say, with vodka.’
This was getting ridiculous.
Here were two wonderfully nutty English ladies old enough to have been snogged by Philip Marlowe spending their retirement on the wild and wet White Cliffs over Dover pretending to be private eyes. Fair enough, I was pretending to be one too, but the point was these two old dears were better informed about booze-running than I was. And they had better equipment. Their cameras were better, they had state-of-the-art communications and I didn’t have any binoculars at all. They were even better fed than I was, and they probably weren’t on expenses.
‘He’s had lunch,’ said Green Hat gruffly.
‘Oh yes,’ said Daphne, blushing. ‘I forgot.’
‘Excuse me?’ I said when the penny finally dropped.
‘We . . . saw you,’ said Daphne, bending over to zip up her bag to give her something to do so she didn’t have to look at me. ‘Eating your fish and chips with your friend down on the Promenade.’
Like an idiot, I stood on tiptoe and looked over the cliff down into the town below.
‘Through these.’ She patted her binoculars. ‘We get bored when there aren’t many trucks.’
‘So you watch people,’ I said sternly. ‘You pick them at random and try and guess what they do for a living, or who they’re meeting or what they’ll do next. Is that the game?’
‘Why, yes. You’ve played it yourself?’
No, but I’ve bet on it.
‘And you’ve been watching me?’
‘Only when you were near the Marine Gardens with your friend. We can’t see much further than that into town. Not into bedrooms or anything like that.’
Well, that was a relief. With all the security cameras around these days (ones that work, not necessarily those from Rudgard and Blugden) you could also be under constant surveillance from little old ladies who suspected you of being unkind to animals. Was nowhere safe?
‘He’s still there,’ said Green Hat.
‘Excuse me?’
‘Your friend. The one you had fish and chips with. He’s still there walking up and down Marine Parade.’
For the first time she unglued her face from the eyepieces of the binoculars and looked at me. She had a jawline I wouldn’t argue with.
‘See for yourself,’ she said, standing up and putting a hand into the middle of her back as she stretched.
Daphne waved at Green Hat’s vacant seat.
‘Go on, let’s have a look. It’ll be fun,’ she said and began to adjust her own tripod.
I nodded to Green Hat – not totally convinced that she wasn’t going to cosh me from behind – and sat down.
‘Nice glasses,’ I said and she seemed impressed that I had used the right jargon.
‘My husband took them personally from the commander of U-265 in May 1945.’
I might have known. I sat down and leaned in to the eyepieces. The rubber surrounds smel
led of lavender.
‘There he is,’ Daphne was saying, ‘just down from where you had lunch. He’s talking to those two men.’
I had to make only a minor adjustment to see what she was talking about. Yes, it could have been Nick Lawrence, or someone wearing a similar coat, but it was difficult to tell at that distance. The two guys with him were equally minuscule and all I could tell was that they were wearing leather jackets just like the guys in the street where I had bought the cigarettes. The guys that Lawrence had implied were part of a Czech gang. But then, I was wearing a leather jacket too.
‘That could be him,’ I admitted, ‘but it’s difficult at this –’
‘’Course it’s him,’ Green Hat snorted behind me, ‘I’ve had him in view since you left him. Bugger all else happening on the sea front, so I kept him in my sights.’
Thank God she was an animal lover. No grizzly bear would stand a chance.
‘I don’t know . . .’
But then I did, because the figure I was now convinced was Nick Lawrence was suddenly holding a gold package, which could just be two packs of cigarettes purchased not two hours before, and then he was handing them over to one of the leather jackets.
‘You might be right,’ I said, which was greeted with another snort. ‘It’s funny, isn’t it, how everyone seems to be watching someone in Dover. Crazy town, eh?’
‘We’re not the only ones,’ said Daphne to my right.
‘Pardon?’
‘Down and across the street, about four o’clock from where you are now. A blue Volvo estate car, one of the flashy new designs, a V70, parked on the right.’
She was good. She was very good. I wondered if she and her mate fancied a job with an all-girl snooping firm in London I knew.
I moved the heavy Kriegsmarine glasses as she instructed and focused on the Volvo. If it had been there when I had been talking to Lawrence, then I must have driven right by it without noticing it.
The passenger side window was down and I could make out the shape of a shoulder and an elbow and something protruding which could have been a rifle or a lens or a telescope or a microphone or an umbrella for all I knew.
Whatever it was, it was pointed in exactly the same direction I had just been looking, towards Lawrence and the two guys he was talking to.
Like I said, everybody was watching somebody.
I parked in the main street of Whitcomb – the only street in Whitcomb – but no one minded. There wasn’t anyone around to mind.
I locked the BMW knowing that Amy would kill me if it got stolen down here in Sleepy Hollow after touring London and the seedy side of Dover. I would be so embarrassed I’d probably offer to help her.
Hands in pockets, I wandered down the road towards the Rising Sun. The Bottleback beehive bins were still there in an otherwise deserted car-park. The Seagrave sign was still roughly above the front door. Nothing had changed since that morning. How the hours dragged in the countryside. I knew pubs in London that had been turned into Seattle Coffee Houses in less time.
A hundred yards beyond the pub and round the bend in the road I got bored with staring at hedgerows, turned on my heel and walked back to see if the pub looked any different or gave me any more clues from that aspect. Nothing sprang into view, but something almost creamed me from behind.
It was a bicycle and of course I realised that immediately – well, as soon as my heart started beating again – ridden by an old man but at a speed which wouldn’t have been out of place at a mountain bike trial. The rider was balding on top but with long white hair flowing in his slipstream. He wore black wellington boots, brown cord trousers and two short-sleeved pullovers one over the other. He was hunched over the handlebars, head down, aiming for the front door of the pub like a bullet.
He had come up behind me without a sound and cut close enough to have picked my pocket. As he reached the pub, he braked in a scrunch of gravel and dismounted by swinging a leg over the crossbar and letting go of the handlebars. The bike rolled forward for about three yards under its own momentum and then fell sideways, propped up against the pub wall. It was a neat trick and one he had obviously been practising; for about fifty years from the look of him.
The old guy stared with approval at his parking technique, rubbed the palms of his hands down the front of his trousers and reached for the latch on the pub door.
I stood there at the entrance to the car-park watching this and wishing that Daphne or her friend Green Hat had been with me.
They would have noticed that the pub was already open ages ago.
‘Oh yes, we’re open all day, but there’s not much call for it.’
The sign above the door was a home-made job, not the sort the local magistrates would have approved of, which read: ‘IVY BRACEGIRDLE, Licensed to sell beers, wines, spirits, cider and victuals at reasonable prices and unreasonable times.’
At first I thought Ivy was sitting on a bar stool behind the counter, but she was standing up. When she moved to pull me a pint of Seagrave’s Special Bitter, the top of her head came no more than half-way up the ebonied hand pumps.
I didn’t even want to guess at her age but beside her the mad cyclist, the only other customer, standing at the end of the bar sipping from a metal tankard, looked like a reject from a Boy Band.
She wore enough make-up to shore up the average garden wall and blood red lipstick to match her nail polish. Her thin arms, already weighed down with thick gold bracelets, looked as if they might snap as she lifted the pint glass around the pumps towards me, but she didn’t spill a drop.
I had smiled my best smile at her and ordered a beer and remarked that I hadn’t expected the pub to be open.
‘Not much call at all these days,’ she went on, friendly enough. ‘It’s a bit like Angostura Bitters. It’s always there behind the bar but you don’t get much call for it.’
I wasn’t too sure about the analogy but I kept smiling.
‘I always keep it near the gin.’ She looked around at the back fitting on the bar. ‘Well, I used to. Just there. That’s funny. I can’t remember being asked for any for ages. What’s this?’
She picked up a large brown bottle and read the label.
‘Lovage. What on earth is Lovage? I didn’t even know I had that. And I’m not sure I would know what to do with it.’
‘It’s a herbal cordial,’ I said helpfully. ‘You put a splash in with brandy, same as you’d put ginger wine in whisky. If you look you’ll probably find one called Shrub, they usually come in pairs. Lovage for brandy, shrub for rum. They come from the West Country, down Cornwall. When they used to smuggle brandy ashore the casks sometimes got damaged and seawater got in, so they added lovage to kill the taste. They used shrub for rum and people got to like it.’
If I thought she appreciated my little nugget of gastronomic anthropology, or thought she might just be grateful for a second human being to talk to, I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Her face clouded, even under all that make-up.
‘Smugglers?’ She almost shrieked it. ‘Don’t talk to me about fucking smugglers! Those bastards are not fit to lick my toilet bowl! Shits and fuckers, all of them!’
I took an involuntary step backwards, taking my beer with me in case she spat in it.
And to think, she probably kissed grandchildren with that mouth.
8
So Ivy had a thing about smugglers. It was understandable and I hadn’t been expected to know, being a stranger to the area. And if I thought her language had been a trifle ripe, then I should have heard her a few years ago when the vicar from the next village had asked her to sell raffle tickets for the Harvest Festival and one of the prizes was a case of French beer. Not to mention the lecture she’d given to two families in the village, just before banning them from the pub for life, when she’d discovered they had shopped in Calais for the beer for a Sunday afternoon barbecue.
I got all this from the psycho cyclist, who turned out to be called Dan. He had been
a regular for thirty years and there was no danger of him doing a beer run across the Channel. He couldn’t swim so there was no way he was getting on a ferry and he was claustrophobic, so the Tunnel was out. No wonder he had never bothered to apply for a passport.
Dan told me all this for the price of a pint, along with a potted history of Ivy’s tenancy at the pub and how she had buried two husbands, was determined to leave the pub in a box herself and how she refused to let him make an honest woman of her. He told me in a very loud voice with Ivy standing there behind the bar not three feet away. She sniffed and sighed occasionally as if she had heard it all before, which she certainly had, shaking her head as Dan’s story got gradually more outrageous and she pretended to be embarrassed.
It was a double act they had obviously performed many times in front of the customers. That’s why there were so many of them.
‘What do you do for customers around here?’ I asked when I had their trust, or at least when they had run out of things to say.
‘Oh, we have our regulars,’ Ivy said without much conviction. ‘The Major will be in at six, always is.’
‘You barred him,’ Dan muttered into his beer.
‘Yes, but he never listens. Then there’s Melanie and her mum, they look in all the time, not as much as before the accident, though. There’s Joe and Freda Dyson . . .’
‘They’re barred,’ said Dan.
‘Frank Osmond and his wife. They drive over from Folkestone every Sunday.’
‘Not since he lost his licence.’ Thanks, Dan.
‘Maybe not. There’s the Taylor brothers. They used to come in and play pool twice a week.’
‘Doing eighteen months for smuggling cigarettes.’
Ivy looked shocked.
‘Are they? The little fuckers. They’re barred, then. What about the Fowlers?’
‘They moved to Ashford last year.’
‘Oh.’ She seemed pensive. ‘I thought I must have barred them.’
‘Face it, Ivy, love, the pub trade’s dead around here. Marry me and we’ll lock the doors and have no more truck with bloody customers.’
