After clearing up the kitchen so that Frances wouldn’t have to do it on coming wearily home, and leaving a response to her love note, I went into the living room and picked up her spare ‘Doctor On Call’ notice. A few months ago her car had been broken into, and one of those was the only thing stolen, the radio in any case gone from the previous smash of the side window. The card in my windscreen might deceive some Green Toe Gang scum into thinking the car couldn’t be mine. As Moggerhanger said, you can’t be too careful, and must consider everything, because if you didn’t you’d soon have nothing left to think with. Not that I needed to reinforce my behaviour with the wisdom or otherwise of Chairman Moggerhanger’s homilies. Self-preservation had been bred in me from birth, though why I had committed so many mistakes in spite of it was not for me to say. The time had come, however, to stop making them.
Chapter Seventeen.
On the opposite seat a woman of about forty, with black well-lacquered hair and a few vertical lines in her upper lip, face otherwise unsullied, looked as if she had been crying. I noted her good quality luggage on the rack, and the stylish leather briefcase clutched to her chest. Nothing affects me more than a woman’s tears. “Are you all right?”
Her Leslie Miserable features managed a smile. “Thank you for asking, but it’s nothing that a little distance won’t cure.”
Since she was on a train I had to believe her. “It looks as if it’s going to rain,” I said, “but experience tells me that every cloud has a silver lining.”
A very fine handkerchief dried her face. “I can only hope it does where I’m going, otherwise what would be the point?”
Curiosity, and perhaps concern, told me I had nothing to lose: “And where might that be?”
“I’ll get to Stansted airport at least, won’t I?” she said, after a moment or two. “To find out where I’m going. I’ll wander among the checking-in places, and decide on a destination at the last minute.”
I offered a cigarette, but she didn’t smoke. “That’s a rather novel way of doing it. It’s also a method I admire, because I used it myself once. I was fed up to the back teeth with my humdrum life so went to Heathrow and jumped on a plane for New Zealand. A lovely country, very friendly and easy to live in. I had a wonderful time, and stayed three months. Then I had to come back because my credit cards had run out.” All lies, of course, but the best way to help people in despair is to spin a similar account of one’s own. “But why go to Stansted instead of Heathrow?”
She looked at me as if I was daft to ask. “Isn’t it obvious? As soon as my husband reads the note saying I’ve left him he’ll think of Heathrow, which is our nearest airport.”
“You sound sensible.”
People are always glad to talk to a stranger. “All my life I’ve tried to be,” she went on. “For the last few years I’ve kept back as much money as I safely could from the three hundred pounds a week my husband allows for the housekeeping. I saved it up in fifty pound notes, and now I have ten thousand pounds to help me on my way.”
“If you don’t mind my saying so, he sounds rather generous, giving so much to run the house.”
“I have to say that meanness was the last of his faults,” she said with a bitterness I couldn’t yet understand. “I hid money in my underwear drawer, knowing he’d never look there. I had to hope the house wouldn’t be broken into, though I supposed it was safe enough, with so many locks, bolts, double glazing, barred windows, burglar alarms and high-powered lights around the outside. No wonder it took me so long to get out. The money’s in this briefcase, all of it cash so that I don’t have to bother with credit cards. He might get on my trail if I did.”
“You’ve thought of everything.” Her tears long gone, were replaced with a wide smile of accomplishment at having put her well-oiled plan into motion. It was admirable, the way she had schemed to get away from a husband she clearly loathed. “I suppose it serves him right,” I put in, hoping for further explanation, “for not having treated you properly.”
“Oh, it wasn’t that. He never laid a finger on me.”
I could only wonder what he had laid on her. “How was it, then, that you took this radical step?”
“He was the best husband in the world. He worshipped the ground I walked on, waiting on me hand and foot whenever he was in the house and not out of it earning money to keep me in the style he thought I craved. The only trouble was, I couldn’t stand him.”
I was utterly knocked about by her confession. “Why was that?”
“He was stifling me with his constant consideration.”
“You mean he wanted to own you?”
“Not even that. That would have been something to his credit. He gave me all the liberty I wanted, though I never had an affair. How could I?”
“He sounds a clever chap.”
“He was, but not clever enough to guess that I was going to leave him.”
I wanted to burst the hot air in her cocksure balloon. “What will you do when your money’s gone? Ten thousand isn’t that much these days.”
I’d like to say she gave a smile, but it was closer to a smirk. “By then my life will have altered. Something will have happened.”
“How can you be sure?” I thought of a notion to torment her with. “Would you like me to come with you?”
Not even that inane question discomposed her. “Not if you treat me as my husband did.”
“No fear of that.” I didn’t altogether like her, but she was a woman, so I had to. “I’d treat you like a dog.”
Her smile became interesting. “That at least would be a change, but you won’t get the chance.”
“Well, I can’t say I’d really want it.” There was no way into her armour of conceit, which riled me, though I was glad of the entertainment. “What’s your name?”
“Doris,” she said, and when we shook hands I told her mine. “Nobody would want to come where I’m going, anyway. From now on I’m an independent woman.”
“Good luck to you. I’m all for it, but I hope you realise that you might not be so for long, if a man gets his hand on that ten grand in your briefcase. If I was you I’d be nervous, schlepping it around like that.”
Her laugh cooled the notion of my snatching such wealth and throwing her off the train. Maybe she was a police decoy set to catch bag snatchers who purloined passengers’ luggage. She clicked the briefcase open, showing a black-handled flick knife on the neatly folded cash. “I’ll have no trouble on that score.”
I had an impulse to leap off the train. “You certainly won’t.”
“I’m not afraid to be on my own. I’ll get on all right. I’ve thought of everything, except where I’m going. But wherever it is my husband will never find me.”
“I suppose he’d be angry should he ever do so.”
From the poise of her lips I had to believe her: “He won’t. Not that I’d care. I’ve lived all my life knowing I’d do this one day, and thinking that by the time he caught up with me I’d be a different woman and he’d no longer want to know me. So now I’m off, and I hardly care what happens, as long as I can be myself.”
“I hope all goes well, then,” and I did.
“That’s very kind. It’s been so reassuring talking to you. I feel quite well now. At Liverpool Street I wondered whether it wouldn’t be best to go into the Underground and throw myself under a train, but you’ve convinced me I’ve done the right thing.”
I prayed for her husband to forgive me, thinking I should have been a social worker, the way people open up to me, though hoped I hadn’t provided her with too much encouragement to do a runner, while passing her suitcase, onto the platform. “Take care. The best laid plans can go awry. Perhaps we shall meet again some day.”
“I guarantee we won’t.” She set off like a girl of fifteen just out of school, and my shout was almost a shriek: “You’ve forgotten your
briefcase!”
She had. Did she or didn’t she want to escape? Was she so glad to be shut of her husband it didn’t matter whether she had money or not? Or was it simply an oversight? If I told Blaskin about it, to pad out one of his dull novels, he might tap his forehead: ‘But what was her subconscious trying to say in making such a foolish mistake?’ To which I’d reply that actions spoke louder than words. ‘And in any case writers like you have no business with the subconscious,’ leaving him no option but to pick up an old style pen and throw it with the intention of sticking me to the door like James Cagney did with the fly in ‘G-Men’. Subconscious my arse, I said to myself, shouting even louder after the daft already fleeing woman.
I held the case high when she came back. “Don’t do that again, or your husband will catch you sooner than you think, and serve you right.”
She took it with a worryingly neutral smile as the train pulled away. If I hadn’t called, or noticed the case till she’d gone, what then? Not to shout while it was possible to bring her back didn’t occur to me, and I was glad it hadn’t, for it proved that what I instinctively did reflected my natural good natured self. On the other hand it made me anxious, because I couldn’t afford to have any sign of a generous character destroying my best interests at some future time. To convince myself that I could be in little danger of that I lit a cigar.
A taxi took me across the Fens to Upper Mayhem. Dismal at the gate, now in his prime of about four years old, licked my boots as if they’d been polished with meat paste, a greeting returned by a smack at his well-fed flank. “What do you feed him on?” I asked Clegg who’d come out on hearing the taxi.
“He lays in the fields for hours like a heap of mud, till he gets a rabbit. He brought one back for the pot last week.”
I took half an hour, over mugs of tea, describing my run to Greece, and then I gave him a cheque for five hundred pounds. “Spend it on expenses, if you think it’s too much for yourself.”
“It’ll come in handy.”
I put other cheques for phone, electricity, and local tax into their envelopes, throwing the rest of the mail away except for a plain brown envelope with only my name on it, a short typed message inside saying: “You’re a marked man Cullen. You fucked us around, but we’ll get you.”
I handed it to Clegg. “How did this come?”
“It must have been dropped in while I was out walking with Dismal. I assumed it was a thank you note for the ten quid you sent to the village hall fund.” He adjusted his false teeth to make a smile. “Look’s like shit’s creek again. You’re always in the wars.” He washed mugs at the sink. “You’ll have to lie low for a bit.”
But how? Where? And did I want to? Could I? How possible was it to hide from the inevitable? But whatever in my previous life had been inevitable? I was alive, wasn’t I? Chance and coincidence had willingly guided my survival so far. Even so, it would be idle and careless, as well as stupid, not to go through the possibilities, even if only to know what not to do. I opened the map, to look up the deepest hiding place, of which, I decided, there were seven.
First, I could stay on with Clegg (and Dismal) and thumb my nose at whatever would come to get me, but that notion was too obvious, so I scrubbed it.
Second, why not go on bended knees and ask for sanctuary from Frances? For a start, she might not believe the story I’d have to spin. Most of all, I wouldn’t want to put her in danger.
The third possibility was Nottingham. I could talk Claudine and my spritely daughter Sam into letting me sleep on the settee in their little matchbox bungalow, and get a job pushing trollies of oldies up and down for X-rays at the local hospital. If I got blasted by a shotgun I’d at least be close to where I might survive. Hopeless to try. Claudine wouldn’t have me anywhere near for fear Sam my long lost daughter would sit on my knee.
Fourth, my mother and her razor-honed kitchen knife beckoned, but what grown man ran home for protection? I was too old to go back to wearing nappies.
Fifth. Nor was it any use bottling myself into Moggerhanger’s compound, who in any case would laugh himself to death, and tell me to get lost with his dying breath, unless he sent me on an even more forlorn quest which would get me killed anyway.
Six. I had helped Ronald Delphick in the past, who had a secluded house in a combe of the north Yorkshire woodland called Doggerel Bank. He gave poetry workshops to anyone mug enough to believe a word he said, getting them to slave in his garden, repaint the living room Tibetan blue, and entertain him in bed if they were young girls, which they nearly always were. Unless I paid him a hundred quid a day he wouldn’t consider the idea, and even then he would betray me the first half chance he got.
Seven. As a last resort Blaskin might install me in the roof space over his flat, but I would have to earn my keep by writing Sidney Bloods, which prospect I just couldn’t face.
As I talked the options through with Clegg he wrote their names on bits of paper and shook them around in a glass milk jug, then insisted I close my eyes and choose one of the seven. “The thing is,” he said, “problems are always exaggerated.”
I thanked him for such undeniable wisdom, picked out the winning scrap of paper and held it up. Before it could be read Dismal leapt, took it into his big mouth, and swallowed hard, at which I called him a naughty boy, and patted him affectionately.
The only course left, I said to Clegg, was to travel the country, stopping off when and where I considered it safe, on the premise that mobility was preferable to bottling myself into any fortress. Sleeping in the car would give me hundreds of hiding places. At least I would have a chance, and as a last resort I needed to confirm the use of Peppercorn Cottage which, harder to find than Doggerel Bank, and whether rat infested or not, would be useful to hole up in, though only for a day or two. No one would trace me there.
I dialled Moggerhanger.
“You know I’m a busy man. What is it?”
“You weren’t so sharp when you wanted me to risk my life in Greece.”
“I paid you for it.”
“Thanks for the cheque.”
“That, at any rate, is what I’ve been waiting to hear. You can’t live on mere thanks, as the railway porter said to the mean old man who only thanked him for humping his steamer trunk from one platform to another.”
“The Green Toe Gang are after me.”
He gave his graveyard laugh. “Didn’t I tell you that they would be?”
“It’s serious.”
“They’re never anything else. But there’s remarkably little I can do about it, except wish you luck.”
I had hoped for a more inspired suggestion. “There’s a little favour I’d like to ask.”
“I’m amenable. Only make it quick, so that I can say no.”
His heart was rarely as flinty as he made out. “Did you mean it when you said I could use Peppercorn Cottage?”
His tone of sincerity was only halfway there. “Michael, be my guest. You have a key already, as I recollect.”
“I’m thanking you in advance.”
“I like that. You know me, with regard to the formalities. I must warn you, though, not to eat too many rats while on the premises. You aren’t one of the starving Chinese, after all. But they do taste delicious, or so I’ve been told, if you roast them on a spit, or put them in a pie. On the other hand, if you get greedy and consume too many they could have a deleterious effect on your insides. Not that I suppose you’ll be there long enough for that—the place wasn’t built for a siege, after all—but stay as long as you like nevertheless. If I find something for you to do I’ll know where to get in touch.”
“One other thing. Can I have the Rolls Royce to travel around in?”
“I’ll consider that after you’ve paid me for the cigars you purloined. When I was being driven along Ealing Broadway yesterday, and wanted one, the box was empty. In any case, I wouldn’t
like to hear of the Roller being shot up. Bullet marks are the devil to get out.”
I had only wanted him to know that my standards were as high as ever. “Points taken.”
“Not that I want to hear of you getting shot up. You’re a shade too valuable to lose.”
Many fucking thanks. I told him I would do my best to live up to such an encomium.
I trained it to London, to pick up my own Picaro car which, though I hadn’t used it for a while, started with no trouble.
My first call was to Brent Cross, to take on a stock of food for my peregrinations. The hundred quid receipt from the check out resembled a strip of bandage long enough to swab any gunshot wound. Such a quantity of provisions told me that however long I was on the road I wouldn’t starve. It was a song of sustenance to sing while threading a way to the A10 and on beyond Cambridge to my railway house.
I parked on the station forecourt and, after a lick or two from Dismal, left the car doors open for Clegg to rearrange the bags of food and cardboard boxes, to make space for all I had to bring out of the house: tent and sleeping bag, waterbottle, rucksack, full whisky flask, an axe and various tools, first aid kit (of course), a high powered flash lamp two feet long for signalling and heavy enough to be used as a cosh which I’d keep under the driving seat, cigars and cigarettes, tea making kit, a pillow and blanket, a pair of eight by thirty binoculars, a pocket compass, a battery radio with built in cassette player, a replica Luger pistol so perfect an imitation that nobody would know the difference if it was pointed at them, a very powerful two-two air rifle in its cloth bag with tins of heavy duty ammunition that would stop a man if he was close enough, and certainly kill a rabbit. Finally I snatched half a dozen books from the shelf without bothering to check their titles.
All this took less than might be supposed, packed into the boot and leaving the back seats free in case I picked up a young girl hitchhiker, or came across Doris the absconding wife who had lost her money to a bag snatcher at Stansted airport and was thumbing a lift to where any motorist would take her.
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