by Mike Ripley
We started off in a pub in Barking. It had an upstairs room where a black trio were jamming on two alto saxes and a portable electric organ. Well, I thought they were jamming, until one of them stopped playing and said their next composition was called ‘Seabass’ and would be played in 13/11 time. At that point I lost interest and Lloyd gave up any thought of signing the band for a record contract.
After Beeby had whispered in Lloyd’s ear for a good five minutes, we moved on. She was wearing a T-shirt with a yellow Smiley face over each nipple, so it didn’t need a genius to work out our next port of call.
It was an old warehouse near the Ripple Road railway sidings in Dagenham. It had been swept out, but that was about all you could say for it. A posh-voiced young lady wearing a tweed jacket (the real Harris is back in) was about to charge us a fiver each for entry until she recognised Lloyd and waved us through. Inside, half a dozen dry ice machines were working overtime and the disco was belting out house music at around 150 beats per minute.
We didn’t stay long; just long enough for Beeby to score some ecstasy and flap her arms around for a while – there’s no way your whole body can keep up with that rhythm. Lloyd and I declined to buy anything from the resident pusher, agreeing that we both thought drugs very retro these days. Maybe we were getting old. I’d certainly never seen as much stuff openly flogged since I was a student.
There was nothing to drink – there never is at acid house parties – so around midnight-thirty we split, although everybody assured us things hadn’t warmed up yet.
They were well-hard at the party we gatecrashed in West Ham. A bouncer asked Lloyd if he’d brought a bottle. Lloyd nodded to one of the Dennison boys and they produced two cases of Red Stripe lager from the boot of the Zephyr. As long as you liked Mackeson or dark Jamaican rum, there was plenty of other refreshment, and the music was revival reggae, some early Marley and a lot of Desmond Dekker. And, of course, there was the holy ganja weed, which we indulged in just to show we weren’t religiously bigoted.
It felt good to relax, with no more cares, no more executive stress. No more job at Prior, Keen, Baldwin. Still, why worry?
We piled into the Zephyr around 4.00 am. Beeby was just about coming down from her ecstasy round trip to Jupiter, one of the Dennison boys was missing and one was asleep, and Lloyd and I were deciding which eight records we’d take to a desert island. I was on number 73, but Lloyd was having real trouble making up his mind. They dropped me off at Stuart Street just as dawn was getting a parking ticket somewhere over the Thames Barrier, and there was a lot of hooting of horns and shouted merry quips and I think it was Chaka Khan on the in-car system, which rattled the windows and completed the job of annoying the neighbours.
To avoid their wrath, I got inside quickly and tiptoed up the stairs to the flat. Springsteen was lying in the bed, having burrowed under the duvet, and didn’t move when I entered, but sighed deeply in a sarcastic manner.
The dirty pawprints he’d left across the pillow weren’t even dry, though, so he hadn’t been in long himself. But like I said, Friday night is party night.
Saturday was mostly devoted to sleep, but I surfaced in the afternoon long enough to do some shopping and laundry.
Frank zipped in and out running errands between visits to Salome, twice appearing with huge bunches of flowers. He called in once to ask how to use the microwave, so I went upstairs and showed him and remarked what a tip he’d left the flat in. He shrugged his broad shoulders and looked confused, so I said I’d clean it up for him. As soon as he’d gone out again, I went downstairs and told Lisabeth he needed help. She said she wasn’t a skivvy, and I said I knew that, but Frank was only a man after all, and she nodded wisely and sent Fenella upstairs with an armful of dusters.
Ruth rang about 5.00 and said she was on late shift again, but did I fancy supper at the Nurses’ Home before she went on duty? Are frogs waterproof? I said I’d be there at 8.00. Shortly after, Fly rang to remind me to return the glasses frames I’d borrowed, and would she see me at the Ward Bond Retrospective? I promised I’d try and make it, but I’d be late.
As I opened a tin of Whiskas for Springsteen before I went out, I reflected that being unemployed again wasn’t so bad now life was getting back into its old routine.
‘This working for a living is very overrated,’ I said to Springsteen, and he seemed to agree.
I remembered that I’d promised to visit Salome on Sunday, so I set the alarm for 10.00. Then I remembered that Werewolf was coming to stay early, so I reset it for 8.30. I’d been woken up by Werewolf before, and it’s not a pretty sight.
That was why I was bringing in the milk from the front doorstep – something I usually do only when coming home – and why it was me that Cawthorne picked on.
God knows where he’d been hiding. Probably he’d crouched down behind one of the parked cars, maybe even Armstrong. Fine watchdog he turned out to be. I mean, he could have honked, couldn’t he?
I was bending over to pick up the milk bottles – Gold Top for me, semi-skimmed for Frank and also Lisabeth and Fenella, none for Mr Goodson in the ground-floor flat as he never appeared at weekends – when I heard his footfall on the pavement.
‘Is this ...?’ he said, and I made the mistake of looking up.
In the time it took for me to straighten up, I realised who it was. Unfortunately he recognised me too, and came up the steps at me like the Miami Dolphins defence.
I wasted a few vital seconds just taking him in visually. Maybe I could have got the door shut in time if I hadn’t paused to wonder why he was wearing a dinner jacket, black trousers with a satin stripe and a white, frilly shirt with the bow tie undone and hanging loose. He also had a raincoat wrapped over his right arm, like policemen do when they demonstrate how their dogs bring down runaways.
By the time it clicked with the few brain cells I have left that he was intent on doing somebody serious damage and I was in his flight path, it was too late to do anything sensible except hang on to the milk bottles.
He cannoned into the door with his shoulder and slammed the rolled-up raincoat into my stomach. I remember thinking he must have had some lead piping in there from the way the breath suddenly left my body, then I was rolling backwards across the hallway, banging the back of my head on the skirting-board underneath the wall-mounted phone, which gave a ting in sympathy.
Cawthorne swayed on his feet, giving a passable impression of a drunken bull in an arena, then he kicked the front door shut and leaned over me, pointing his overcoat at my head.
‘Where is she?’ he hissed.
‘Hey ...’
I was looking at the milk bottles, all three still intact, and wanting him to notice how clever I’d been doing a backward roll and bouncing off the wall without breaking them. He didn’t seem too interested, just insistent about waving his coat at me.
Then my head cleared and I could see the gun barrel protruding from the coat.
‘Where is the black bitch?’
He shook off the coat and leaned closer. I could see the gun clearly now. It had a barrel at least nine inches long with a square fixed sight at the end. It didn’t look like a big calibre gun, but I wasn’t going to ask how big. I was on the business end, and that was what mattered.
Cawthorne pushed the gun at my face, scraping my right cheek with the sight. On the cold metal breech I could read the engraved words: .22 Rim Fire Long. It didn’t make me feel any better.
‘Last time, whatever your name is. Where’s that spade cow?’
He stopped stroking me with the gun then, and a puzzled look came over his face.
‘I know where I’ve seen you before. The party ... Watling Street ... last week. You were with her then ... before ...’
‘Before you tried to kill her with the Shogun,’ I said, perfectly reasonably.
‘You’re the bastard who sent those pictures ...’
He pushed his face closer to mine, and I noticed there were smears of white powder in the indentation in his mouth just below the nose. I knew that it was odds on he hadn’t spilt talcum powder, and I realised I ought to be more frightened than I was.
Somehow, I just couldn’t handle the possibility that I might get shot and end up seriously dead here on the floor of my home on a Sunday morning holding three pints of milk. I decided to treat it as a distinct possibility.
‘Salome’s not here,’ I said, finding it suddenly difficult to swallow.
‘I know that. Where is she?’
He pressed the long gun barrel to my forehead. He was serious. It was time to come clean.
‘Jamaica,’ I said, looking through his legs and up the stairs, hoping that Frank didn’t decide to come out for his morning jog.
‘Jamaica?’ He said it distantly, disappointed.
‘Gone to convalesce with her mum.’
I hoped Frank stayed indoors, but why didn’t Lisabeth come looking for her milk? She could handle him. A quick drug-crazed gunman before breakfast was right up her street.
‘How did she fix the Linton scam, then?’ The gun jammed harder, hurting.
‘She didn’t.’
Through his legs I could see Springsteen at the top of the stairs. Go on, my son, leap on his back, sink the claws in, get his veins in your teeth ...
Springsteen sat down, gave his private parts (private – there was a laugh; ask any female cat in the neighbourhood) a lick and then trotted off back into the flat. Thanks, pal.
I tried to play it cool. Ignoring the gun, I began to stand the milk bottles on the floor in a line. One of them I could use to belt him with if he got a bit closer, but I couldn’t do anything holding three.
He didn’t seem to know what to do next, so I kept talking.
‘I thought that one up. I knew you couldn’t resist it.’
‘You? You’re nobody. You don’t have that sort of pull.’
The gun withdrew a millimetre.
‘I had help, sure. A friend of mine has good information, and that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? You did me a favour, you know. My friend and I made a few grand on Friday. We’d just bought some Linton shares ourselves.’
He let this sink in, then he straightened up and his left hand dived into the pocket of his dinner jacket. He brought it out with the thumb and forefinger clenched together and put it to his nostrils, snorting loudly. White dust fell on his lapels. If he sneezed, I was going to have a go. He didn’t. He just sniffed and shook his head slightly.
He took a couple of deep breaths, keeping the gun rock-steady on me. I’d never seen one like it before; it seemed to be all barrel and nothing else.
‘A few grand, eh?’ he said, nodding as if agreeing. ‘You punk. You’re so small-time it’s not true. You have no concept of what I’ve lost.’
He was shaking his head the other way now, in disbelief.
‘And it started with that black bitch, that ...’
There was no way I’d distract him from that train of thought, but Springsteen could.
I’d left the flat door open when I’d gone to get the milk, so when Springsteen did his usual trick of climbing over the sink to get out the kitchen window, we could hear him as he sent a pile of dirty crockery crashing over. (Well, who do you know who does the washing-up on Saturday night?)
Cawthorne looked around but was back on to me before I could move. He didn’t know where the sound had come from; he just assumed it was someone with two legs. If he’d shot me then, I could have died knowing it was Springsteen’s fault.
‘Get up,’ he said.
I did so willingly. It was better than being shot.
He grabbed me by the shoulder. I was wearing a Tunnel of Love Tour T-shirt and jeans and some old trainers I slopped around the flat in. He bunched up some of the T-shirt in his left hand and stuck the gun in my ribs.
‘You’re coming with me. Open the door.’
I did as I was told.
We walked down the steps together and then crossed Stuart Street to where he’d parked his red Porsche. He gave me the keys and told me to get in the driver’s side, then he hopped round the front, pointing the gun at me all the time.
An oik in T-shirt and faded 501s and a man in a dinner suit with a gun, getting into a Porsche and driving off at nine o’clock on a Sunday morning. Nobody gave us a second look, nobody phoned the cops, nobody even twitched a net curtain.
I suppose that’s why the rates are so high in Hackney.
He told me to drive and jammed the long-barrelled gun into my left side so that I’d have matching bruises on both kidneys. He snapped out directions and emphasised them by jabbing a forefinger into the windscreen. When he wasn’t doing that, his left hand was dipping into his jacket pocket and coming out with pinches of white powder, which he sniffed avidly, though messily, a fair few quid’s worth going down his lapels.
As if the drive wasn’t nightmare enough, Cawthorne turned on the radio. Loud. It was the Morning Service on Radio 4, broadcast live from some extremist wing of the Scots Presbyterians demanding to know if I’d made my peace with Ghawd. In between hymns, it sounded as if the congregation was passing around a rattlesnake in a bag, but that was probably my imagination running riot. Still, if you’ve gotta get religion, I prefer the hellfire no-doubt-about-it variety to the guitar-strumming all-touch-hands sugariness.
Once south of the river, it was clear we were heading for Kent. I’d more or less guessed that from the off, when I’d managed to string a coherent thought together.
Cawthorne had not fastened his seat-belt and I hadn’t tried to do up mine, partly because I’m out of the habit driving a taxi where you don’t have to, and partly because I would have had to ask Cawthorne to withdraw the gun barrel. On any other day, knowing my luck, the Law would have had me pulled within half a mile for not buckling up. And weren’t they supposed to have a down on red Porsches anyway? Where were they when you needed them?
I even kept the speed up in the hope of getting a ticket.
No such luck. Kids doing 31 miles per hour on a skateboard were probably being loaded into Black Marias somewhere in the city, but not down Sidcup way. I was doing 90 as we hit the motorway and I put my faith in the Kent County Constabulary. Maybe they were on church parade. They sure as hell weren’t on the M20.
‘Turn off. Up here.’
‘I know,’ I said.
Cawthorne hadn’t said much during the trip. Well, not much that made sense. Now something clicked inside the bit of his brain still working on demist.
‘You were snooping for the black bitch the other day. Did she put you up to it?’
‘Nobody put me up to anything, Cawthorne. I found out how you worked your little scam and I set you up. Look on it as private enterprise.’
I felt oddly calm. The guy’s hatred seemed to be reserved for Salome – he said ‘spade bitch’ to himself a million times – and I was a poor substitute. But then I was the one with the gun in my side.
‘Why? What’s in it for you? You’re nothing in the city.’
I took umbrage at that, then I realised he meant the City as in financial. In the real city, I reckoned I had more street cred than wheel clamps.
‘I told you, I made a few bob buying Linton shares that you then bought off me.’
‘Chicken feed. Peanuts. Small fucking change.’
‘Maybe,’ I said cautiously.
‘So why take the risk? Eh?’ Jab, jab.
I thought about saying ‘What risk?’ but that might have destabilised him. Keep it conversational. After all, he wasn’t going to shoot me while I was driving his car, was he? Did he know how much an upholstery valet on a Porsche cost?
‘You took all the risks, Cawthorne. Especially trying to get rid of Salome and Alec Reynolds. Why
did you do that?’
My ribs told me that was a mistake. He jabbed so hard this time, the Porsche weaved across two lanes. Fortunately there was no traffic to speak of.
‘So that’s it,’ he said more to himself. ‘You’re sniffing after that black whore. You like a bit of chocolate, do you? Do you?’
He went on in that vein, getting cruder and more excitable, until the sign for the Wrotham turn-off. I suppose I could have spun the Porsche or driven into a field and risked it, but I didn’t. I just followed his instructions until we were going up Blackberry Hill and then turning left on the unmade track and coming out at Pegasus Farm and the Exhilarator.
And I knew – I think I had all the time – what he had in mind for me. It was no consolation that I was there because I’d gone for the milk that morning. He’d been after Salome in his coke-zapped imagination.
Still, if I was here, Salome was safe. It was going to be a far, far better thing, and all that.
Heroes – aren’t you sick of ‘em?
He made me park the Porsche in the courtyard and give him the keys. The main gates were shut and chained and the farmhouse and changing-rooms deserted and locked. It looked like the creditors were in already.
Cawthorne withdrew the gun an inch and looked at his watch, then showed it to me.
‘I’m leaving here in exactly 55 minutes. I’ll be in France by lunch-time.’ Via Dover, most like. ‘And I’m not coming back.’
He dipped his hand into his pocket and fed himself another snort. ‘So I’m treating myself to one last game here before I go.’
He waved the gun around, indicating towards the Paddock and the Exhilarator course.
‘What –? A paint gun against that thing?’
He shook his head. ‘You don’t even get a paint gun. All you get is two minutes’ start.’
There were a hundred things I wanted to say – pleading, threatening, joking to defuse the situation – but a look in his eyes told me there was no point.
I got out of the Porsche and started running.
