by Mike Ripley
‘No, I mean the photographs.’ I looked blank. It wasn’t hard. ‘That Albert took of me the other night. I dropped the film off to be developed. It’ll be ready by now.’
‘Er ... do I really need to know what sort of photographs these were?’
‘Passport pictures, you know, I told you – for an identity card Albert was going to have made for me.’
‘Oh,’ I said vaguely.
As she collected her things from her bedroom, I sat in Albert’s office chair and read the slim file that had the single word RUDGARD in felt-tip pen on the cover. It contained three things: a head-and-shoulders studio photograph of Estelle Rudgard taken about two years earlier, I guessed; a typed transcript of the meeting between her father and Albert, which told me nothing I had not now gleaned from Veronica; and two pages torn from a shorthand notebook.
The notepaper contained a mixture of words, doodles and T-line shorthand outlines. I knew T-line, having once lived across the road from a secretarial college, or at least the basics like don’t bother to look for vowels, they’re the first thing to go. But Albert’s scrawl wasn’t an attempt to take dictation, just an aid to jog his memory later.
There were no coherent sentences, just phrases. Albert’s thoughts as he listened to Estelle’s father. And it didn’t take a genius to work out the basic sense.
Father – argument? Where mother? (Dead.) Never run before.
School? Girlfriends? £150 p.d. Boy? Sir? Keep quiet.
Buck??? £200 p.d. Office Cavalry. Reference?
Not hiding? 4 days retnr.
Most of the rest of the pages contained doodles down their right hand side. A psychiatrist would have told you that Albert was either designing a landscaped garden or was a very sick man indeed.
What I could read made sense. He questioned the father’s motive, asked, or meant to ask, about family and friends and suspected Estelle’s motives of giving her home address to the temp agency if she really wanted to stay hidden. I liked the way he had upped his per-day fee along the way and settled on a four-day minimum retainer. One thing still foxed me: the reference to ‘Buck???’. That was in script, not shorthand, so I couldn’t be getting the wrong phonetic. In T-line, the same outline could have been ‘book’ or ‘back’. If it was rhyming slang, it could mean anything.
The underlined ‘Sir?’ note would have fooled me had I not already guessed the identity of Estelle/Stella’s father. Albert had taken a full note of his address at the bottom of the second page, so he knew where to send the bill. As Veronica hadn’t mentioned this little titbit, I presumed it had been done while she was not present. He had even added a phone number.
Veronica reappeared in the office doorway. She had changed into a hound’s-tooth suit far too heavy for the weather, and more sensible, black, low heels than the ones she had been wearing. She held an overnight bag that bulged at the sides.
‘Apart from the kitchen stuff, I seem to travelling with all my worldly possessions about me,’ she announced.
‘Let’s leave the kitchen sink for now, eh? You’ve got a phone call to make.’
‘I have? To whom?’
‘To your client, Sir Drummond Rudgard. See if he’s home and ask if you can visit him this afternoon.’ I looked at my SeaStar. ‘Give us an hour and half to get there.’
‘Get where? Did you find an address?’
‘Didn’t you know?’ I said smugly. ‘I saw the franking mark on the envelope with the cheque in. Sir Drummond runs the famous Classic Car Centre from his ancestral pile.’ I consulted Albert’s note, then gave her the page with the phone number. ‘Sandpit Lodge, Great Pardoe, Hertfordshire. It’s classic car buff heaven there, so I’m told.’
She pushed her glasses back onto her face.
‘Did you say “Sir”?’ And when I nodded: ‘Well, he never said, though you could tell he was a gentleman.’
Then she looked me up and down.
‘You’re going dressed like that?’
I decided life was too short to argue, and anyway, my T-shirt was clean and, for once, discreet, and surely even the minor English aristocracy had heard of Coors Beer by now?
Veronica dialled the number twice then said: ‘The line’s dead.’
‘Give it here.’ I took the receiver from her. ‘I think Albert’s started to move out and had the phone cut off.’
Either that or the local vandals were getting inventive. But I dismissed that. They’d keep the phone on just to make obscene calls, and so many people have mobiles these days, it means nothing to cut a land-line.
‘There’s a phone box out on Shepherd’s Bush Green,’ she said cheerfully, masking the urge to swear at Albert. ‘I shan’t be a minute. Oh yes, I will, though. I can pick up those photos on the way back.’
‘Missing you already,’ I muttered as I followed her downstairs.
She dropped her bag on the floor as she opened the door. On the doorstep, she turned and asked me if I had change for the phone. I gave her two 50-pence pieces and a phonecard with about two quid’s worth of credit and told her not to stint herself as it would give a bad impression if the pips went in the middle of a business call.
As I did this, I scanned the street and saw what I least wanted to see coming towards us.
‘You hurry along,’ I said, pushing her gently on the arm. ‘And I’ll put your bag in the car.’
‘Okay,’ she agreed, noticing nothing amiss, and strode off.
I went back inside, but kept the door open about six inches. The black kid in the Raiders T-shirt had two other black kids with him today, though neither was the Arsenal fan I had clouted with the tripod. Maybe Raider had been so spaced out he couldn’t remember anything.
Fat chance. The three of them drew level with Armstrong and, knowing I could see them, casually walked around him trying the door handles. When that got them nowhere, Raider hopped up and sat on the bonnet. One of the others, a tall skinny piece of work, stood on the rear bumper and bounced up and down to see if there was any suspension there.
Unless they had a blowtorch or a sledgehammer between them, I didn’t think they would do much physical damage to Armstrong. Then again, these boys probably had access to ground-to-air missiles. I closed the door and slipped the latch, then charged upstairs and into Veronica’s kitchen.
It took about 30 seconds to realise that short of arming myself with a tin-opener (and I didn’t think they’d stay still long enough), there was nothing there to help. Albert’s office was equally devoid of suitable weapons, and I kicked myself for letting Dod walk off with the knife and the hammer from Round One. Then I tried Albert’s kitchenette. Sure, there were knives, but carrying knives gets you into trouble, let alone using them. Rolling pins, on the other hand ...
I made a menial note to thank Albert if I saw him again. It’s nice to see a man take an interest in pastry, especially at his age. And feeling the weight of the wooden pin in my hand and the comfort as I slipped it up the sleeve of my jacket so it could drop into my grip if needed, I wasn’t surprised that most violence in this country was domestic.
I picked up Veronica’s bag and checked the street before moving out. They were still leaning or sitting on Armstrong. I took a deep breath as I stepped out, and then another as I heard the door click shut behind me,
‘Yo here again,’ said Raider when I was five feet from the driver’s door.
‘Just passing through.’ I held up Veronica’s bag, which I was carrying in my left hand, my right arm stiff by my side. ‘Like I said, we’re moving out.’
‘Yo taking yo time about it.’ He didn’t move from Armstrong’s bonnet, but the other two managed to put themselves between me and the door in the split second I had taken my eyes off them,
Keep it calm. They don’t want a punch-up in the street in the middle of the day, not with people about. And there were people about. I could sense so
mebody walking down the street even as I tried to think the situation through. The trouble was, I didn’t know if they had thought it through.
‘We’ve taken the hint, we’re moving out, okay? I can’t say fairer than that.’
Raider looked aimlessly into the air, enjoying himself. ‘Oh, I don’t think yo is trying nearly hard enough.’
‘I expect you hear that a lot,’ I said, determined to get one dig in somehow.
‘What you mean by that, eh?’
I started to relax my arm and felt the rolling pin slide down my sleeve.
‘Hey, what you doin’ in that man’s car?’ came a female voice from behind my back. ‘You shouldn’t be sitting up ... Hey, hey, hey. Don’t I know you? I know yo mother, don’t I ... ?’
That was all it took. The three of them, Raider in the lead, were off down the street without even a glance or a swivel-finger gesture in their wake. I turned and smiled.
‘Why, hello, Mrs Delacourt,’ I beamed.
Her expression told me she was in no mood to be blagged, and that she was well aware of what she had just done for me.
‘Are you gonna play in the street all day?’ she snapped. ‘Or are you going to tear yourself away and get to work on my Crimson’s case?’
‘I’m on the job, Mrs D, on the job.’
Chapter Eight
On the way through north London, somewhere around Hendon, I stopped at a newsagent’s shop and spent nearly ten quid buying the first four classic car magazines I could put my hands on. I could have spent much more; there were more car magazines on the second shelf down than there were girlie magazines on the top one.
I gave them to Veronica to read and brief herself and while away the journey. And, hopefully, to shut her up for an hour or so. She said she couldn’t read as it made her car sick. So I told her to look at the pictures instead. That worked for a while, but nowhere near long enough, and then she was asking questions about what sort of person was it who went in for classic cars, and what was a classic car anyway?
Both were interesting questions, mainly because I couldn’t answer either of them. What was a ‘classic car’ – one that was too young and too common (and too cheap) to be a vintage car? Or one that was of a ‘classic’ design?
Now that I would accept if you were talking of something like a British Mini of the late 1950s, or a Volkswagen Beetle, or even a Fiat 500 or a Citroen 2CV. All classic design shapes. Not necessarily good design – though they all lasted well – but certainly distinctive. But a 1957 Wolseley, which even the fanzines said was ‘better viewed from a distance’? Or a 35-year-old Rover 100, nicknamed ‘the Aunty’, designed especially for people not in a hurry? Or, believe it or not, just about any Ford Cortina ever made that didn’t end up being used for ram raids or for giving driving lessons to apprentice drug barons in Brixton?
I didn’t hold with the theory that classic cars were bought, restored (lovingly) and admired for their design. All the feminist theories of penis envy or penis substitute simply wilt away when you look at the outline of a 1963 Riley Elf, and no-one in their right mind could describe a Morris Marina as phallic. Anyone who drove some of the acclaimed ‘classic cars’ as a means of expressing their sexual prowess was in serious need of treatment, and I don’t mean in the service bay of your friendly Quick Fit fitter. But if there was a connection, and I drove an old, square, dynamic-as-a-brick black London cab, what did that say about me?
Modern cars are so boring, the classic car nut would say. For effect, you need a car with outstanding looks, they would claim. Why? To pull the birds? I don’t think so. In my experience, women are far more sensible, and sensitive to their creature comforts. I’ve known none who actually got turned on by the cramped, bony seats and the overwhelming smell of faded leather, Brylcreem, wet dog and dust.
No, that wasn’t the attraction. A better explanation could be found in the columns of the magazines Veronica was flipping through. The interviews with, and features on, the enthusiasts were full of statements such as: ‘Scraping off the underseal alone look the best part of a year ...’ Or, ‘It needed new kingpins so I reamed them out myself …’ And each statement would be made to glow with an almost erotic pride, if, that is, you found red oxide primer, semi-elliptic leaf springs, bushes or shackle pins, erotic. This wasn’t about appealing to women, this was escaping from them, an excuse for men to behave badly in the garage, restoring rusted piles of metal whilst up to their wrists in oil and grease.
And the magazines even had the classic car equivalent of the soft-porn magazines’ ‘Readers’ Wives’ column. Almost invariably, these were letters, with grainy black-and-white photographs of wrecked or abandoned cars found by the fan whilst on holiday. Check out this little beauty, say the accompanying letters. What a fender; look at the hubcaps on her!
And invariably the photograph shows a barely-recognisable piece of squashed metal. Fancy finding a Peugeot 304 after 20 years in a field in Kenya, gushes the text. Or the Standard Ensign in the drainage ditch in Cornwall, or the World War II Kubelwagen on Crete? (Personally, I’d be more impressed if they had found the Ensign on Crete and the Kubelwagen in a lay-by on the Penzance ring road.) To judge from the holiday snaps sent in, virtually every British car of the 1950s and 1960s ended up somewhere in Greece, so why waste film on all those old ruins?
I had never understood the fascination. Vehicles were there to get you from A to B or, preferably, back from B in one piece, with as few people as possible knowing where A was. The only useful thing I had ever learned from any of the car magazines was from a story about a newish Porsche 911 found in a million-gallon lagoon of pig slurry. It had floated to the top even though the windows had been opened and the petrol cap removed before it was pushed in. Lesson to be learned: next time you want to scam the insurance company, open the front boot as well. The damn things are so well made, the boot traps enough air to raise it. (Another tip: don’t push it in, drive it in so the engine is running when it goes under. That really buggers things up, and it’s a write-off even if it reappears.)
‘What’s the attraction?’ Veronica asked from the back, tossing the last of the magazines on to the seat at her side. ‘For men, I mean?’
‘What? The attraction of cars?’
‘No, of collecting.’
‘Eh?’
‘You know, they’re always collecting something. Cars, stamps, beer bottle labels. Bird-watching and train-spotting, they’re like collecting as well.’
‘And women don’t collect things?’ I asked. I knew one who had an unrivalled collection of worn-once boxer shorts from airline pilots, but I didn’t think that was what she meant.
‘Not like men. Not obsessively. That’s something peculiar to men.’
‘Well, I always believe in travelling light.’
‘Is that one of your Rules of Life?’
‘Yes,’ I said, looking at her in Armstrong’s mirror, and thinking maybe I should listen to myself more.
Sandpit Lodge was an impressive pile. Once.
If only one architect had been responsible, then with the best will in the world, he must have been on drugs. More likely, the place had been built piecemeal over the decades and at the whim of whatever retrospective fashion was in vogue, with a series of architects each determined not so much to outdo the previous one, as settle a score with him. Consequently, there was a turret here, a square tower of the type found in 19th Century breweries there, the odd splash of mock-Tudor stud work, and a Victorian west wing that probably had mad spinster aunts on a waiting list for rooms.
If it had had a sign saying ‘Not Used in the Filming Brideshead Revisited’ I wouldn’t have been surprised. Instead, it had one giving prices of admission for visitors, families, cars and coach parties. Then another, advertising cream teas available (summer only). And one advertising – for a modest extra charge – the availability of guided tours of the house. Having see
n it from the outside, I had to admire their nerve. How much did they charge to let you out?
Because the house was such a mish-mash of styles (and I suspected that few of them were actually authentic), I doubted if the owner had run into trouble getting planning permission for the huge aircraft hangar of a building that loomed up out of the lawns to the left. The planner must have thought that as the house itself was so ghastly, a few thousand square feet of glass and aluminium couldn’t make matters worse.
Above the sliding doors of the hangar was a cut-out sign about ten feet high saying CLASSIC CAR CENTRE. The graphic designer had done each letter without using the same typeface twice. Whatever he’d been drinking at the time, I fancied a double.
Between the hangar and the house was a gravel drive bulging into a semi-circle, bounded by a low, curved wall that I knew was called a ha-ha. I knew this because there was another sign saying: ‘Please Park ‘Em Pretty Against the Ha-Ha’. Someone had added, underneath in black fell-tip pen, ‘This is not a joke’, and nobody had bothered to clean it off.
There was a gap in the ha-ha dead centre (actually, slightly off dead centre, to the right) and by it stood a wooden sentry box construction. On top of it, pointing down, was a handpainted sign in the shape of an arm and hand with extended forefinger, saying PAY HERE. It looked as if it had been stolen from a fun fair.
I parked Armstrong as instructed, but unlike the other dozen or so cars there, I reversed up to the ha-ha so I was pointing towards the exit and the B road we had taken after leaving Hatfield. (Rule of Life No. 277: Always park facing the way you’d make a quick exit.)
‘Impressive, isn’t it?’ said Veronica, climbing regally from the back of the cab.
‘Distinctive,’ I conceded. Then I checked my watch. ‘We’re early. Fancy a look around the car museum?’
