‘Donter worry Mr Charlie, thoser bloddy Sicilian bosstuds donter find you here. If I see them hang around I get the police bloddy quick – are good boys here, not afraid ofer stinking Mafiosi.’
‘It’s no really quite like that, Dino. I think if you see anyone you’d better just let me know quietly.’
‘O.K., Mr Charlie.’
‘Thank you, Dino. Evviva Napoli!’
‘Abassa Milano!’
‘Cazzone pendente!’ we cried in chorus–our old slogan from years ago.
Jock and I stayed there in close retirement for perhaps five weeks until my armpit was healed and I had grown a more or less plausible beard. (I want to make it quite clear that Dino had no idea that we had done anything wrong.) I stopped dyeing my hair and eating starchy foods and soon I looked a well-preserved seventy. Finally, before venturing out, I removed both my upper canine teeth, which are attached to a wire clip: with my upper incisors resting lightly on the lower lip I look the picture of senile idiocy, it always makes Mrs Spon shriek. I let my now grizzled hair grow long and fluffy, bought a pair of good field-glasses and mingled with the bird watchers. It’s astonishing how many there are nowadays: ornithology used to be an arcane hobby for embittered schoolmasters, dotty spinsters and lonely little boys but now it is as normal a weekend occupation as rug-making or wife-swapping. I was terribly keen on it when I was at school, so I knew the right cries and, as a matter of fact, I became rather keen again and thoroughly enjoyed my outings.
This part of Lancashire contains some of the best bird-watching terrain in England: sea and shore birds in their millions haunt the vast salt-marshes and tidal flats of Morecambe Bay, and the reeds of Leighton Moss – an RSPB sanctuary – are alive with duck, swans, gulls and even the bittern.
I gave Dino three hundred pounds and he bought me a second-hand dark-green Mini, registered in his name. I plastered on a few stickers – SAVE LEVENS HALL, VOTE CONSERVATIVE, VISIT STEAM-TOWN – and dumped a Karri-Kot in the back seat: an inspired piece of camouflage, you must admit. We contrived to get a pair of tinted contact lenses for Jock, changing his startling blue eyes to a dirty brown. He liked them very much, called them ‘me shades’.
Meanwhile, since Carnforth is on STD now, it was safe to dial a number of guarded calls to London, where various naughty friends, in exchange for a lot of money, set to work creating new identities for Jock and me, so that we could get to Australia and start a new life amongst the Sheilas and Cobbers. New identities are very expensive and take a long time, but the process of obtaining them is so much easier now that there are all these drugs about. You simply find a chap who’s on the big H-for-heroin and not long for this world, preferably a chap with at least some points of resemblance to you. You take him under your wing – or rather your naughty friends do – lodge him, supply him with H and feed him whenever he can gag anything down. You get his National Insurance Card paid up to date, buy him a passport, open a Post Office Savings Account in his name, pass the driving test for him and fix him up with an imaginary job at a real place. (The ‘employer’ gets his wages back in cash, doubled.) Then you pay a very expensive craftsman to substitute your photograph in the new passport and you’re a new man.
(The drug addict, of course, now becomes a bit superfluous: you can have him knocked off professionally but that’s an extra, and awfully expensive nowadays. The best and cheapest course is to deprive him of his medicine for three days or so until he’s quite beside himself, then leave him in a busy public lavatory – Piccadilly Underground is much favoured in the trade – with a syringe containing a heavy overdose, and let Nature take its kindly course. The coroner will scarcely glance at him: he’s probably better off where he is; why, he might have lingered on for years, etc.)
In short, all seemed well except that William Hickey or one of those columnists had once or twice dropped delicate hints that certain People in High Places had been receiving certain photographs, which might or might not have referred to the Hockbottle art work. If so, I couldn’t really see who could be doing it – surely not Johanna? One of Hockbottle’s horrid friends? Martland? I didn’t let it worry me.
Last night, when I walked into the bar of Dino’s hotel, full of fresh air and nursing a splendid appetite, I would have told anyone that things were going uncommonly well. I had spent the afternoon on the Moss and had been fortunate enough to have had a pair of Bearded Tits in my field-glasses for several minutes – and if you think there’s no such bird you can jolly well look it up in the nearest bird book. That was last night, only.
Last night when I walked into the bar
The barman should have smiled and said, ‘Evening, Mr Jackson, what do you fancy?’ I mean, that’s what he’d said to me every evening for weeks.
Instead he gave me a hostile stare and said, ‘Well, Paddy, usual I suppose?’ I was completely taken aback.
‘Come on,’ said the barman disagreeably, ‘make your mind up. There’s other people want serving, you know.’
Two strangers at the end of the bar studied me casually in the mirror behind the display bottle. I twigged.
‘Arl roight arl roight,’ I growled thickly, ‘av coorse Oi’ll have me usual, ye cross-grained little sod.’
He pushed a double Jameson’s Irish whisky across the bar at me.
‘And watch your language,’ he said, ‘or you can get out.’
‘Bollocks,’ I said and tossed the whisky back messily. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, belched and lurched out. It is a good thing that a serious ornithologist’s field clothes are more or less the same as an Irish navvy’s drinking kit. I fled upstairs and found Jock sitting on the bed, reading the Beano.
‘Come on,’ I said, ‘they’re on to us.’
We had kept in a state of readiness for any emergency so we were out of the hotel by the kitchen entrance some ninety seconds after I had left the bar, heading for the station yard where I had parked the Mini. I started the engine and backed out of the slot; I was quite calm, there was no reason for them to have suspected me.
Then I cursed, stalling the engine, paralysed with dismay.
‘Smatter, Mr Charlie, forgotten something?’
‘No, Jock. Remembered something.’
I had remembered that I had not paid for my whisky – and that the barman had not asked me to do so. Drunken Irish navvies hardly ever have charge accounts at respectable provincial hotels.
I got the engine started again, jammed the gears cruelly into mesh and swung out of the yard into the street. A man standing at the corner turned and raced back towards the hotel. I prayed that their car was pointing in the wrong direction.
I rammed the unprotesting little Mini out of town to the north on the Millhead Road; just before the second railway bridge I doused the lights and whisked it off to the left, towards Hagg House and the marsh. The road dwindled to a footpath and then to a wet track; we squashed barbed wire, nosed our way down banks, half-lifted the Mini across the impossibly soft parts, cursed and prayed and listened for the sounds of pursuit. To our left some three-headed spawn of Cerberus started to yelp and yap dementedly. We continued west, hating the dog with a deep, rich hatred, and found the River Keer by pitching into it. To be exact, the Mini had pitched down its bank and come to rest, nose downward, in the squishy sand beside the channel, for the tide was far out. I grabbed the almost empty suitcase, Jock grabbed the knapsack and we scrambled into the stream, gasping with shock as the cold water reached groin level. At the far side we stopped before scaling the bank and showing ourselves on the skyline; half a mile behind us an engine raced in a low gear; two cones of light from headlamps waved about in the sky, then suddenly went out.
The stars were bright but we were too far away to be seen by our pursuers; we scrambled up the bank – how I blessed my new-found physical fitness – and made off northwestwards, heading towards the lights of Grange-Over-Sands, six miles away across the glistening mud flats.
It was quite unlike anything that has ever
happened to me, it was the strangest journey I have ever made. The darkness, the unheard, nearby sea, the whistle and bleat of the wings of flocks of bewildered birds, the slap of our feet on the wet sand and the fear that drove us on towards the wriggling lights so far across the bay.
But I had this much going for me: I was on familiar ground. My plan was to strike Quicksand Pool – a two-mile treacherous lagoon – at its most dangerous point, then turn northeastwards and follow it to its narrowest part and cross there. At that point, the friendly shore of Silverdale would bear due north at two miles’ distance. This depended on our having crossed the Keer at the right spot, and on the tide being where I believed it to be – I had no choice but to assume that I was right about both.
That was where the nightmare began.
Jock was loping a few yards to my left when we both found ourselves on quaking ground. I did what you should do in such a case – keep moving fast but circle back sharply to your starting point. Jock didn’t. He stopped, grunted, tried to pull back, splashed about, stuck fast. I dropped the suitcase and hunted for him in the dark while he called to me, his voice high with panic as I had never heard it before. I got hold of his hand and started to sink also; I threw myself down, only my elbows now on the quagmire. It was like pulling at an oak tree. I knelt to get better purchase but my knees sank straight in, terrifyingly.
‘Lie forward,’ I snarled at him.
‘Can’t, Mr Charlie – I’m up to me belly.’
‘Wait, I’ll get the suitcase.’
I had to strike a match to find the suitcase, then another to find Jock again in the tantalizing shimmer of wet sand and starshine. I thrust the suitcase forward and he laid his arms on it, hugging it to his chest, driving it into the mud as he bore down on it.
‘No good, Mr Charlie,’ he said at last. ‘I’m up to me armpits and I can’t breathe much any more.’ His voice was a horrid travesty.
Behind us – not nearly far enough behind us – I heard the rhythmic patter of feet on wet sand.
‘Go on, Mr Charlie, scarper!’
‘Christ, Jock, what do you think I am?’
‘Don’t be stupid,’ he gasped. ‘Piss off. But do me a favour first. You know. I don’t want it like this. Might take half an hour. Go on, do it.’
‘Christ, Jock,’ I said again, appalled.
‘Go on, me old mate. Quick. Put the leather in.’
I scrambled to my feet, aghast. Then I couldn’t bear the noises he was making any more and I stepped on to the suitcase with my left foot and trod on his head with my right foot, grinding at it. He made dreadful noises but his head wouldn’t go under. I kicked at it frantically again and again, until the noises stopped, then I clawed up the suitcase and ran blindly, weeping with horror and terror and love.
When I heard the water chuckling below me I guessed my position and threw myself at the channel, not caring whether it was the crossing place or not. I got over, leaving my right shoe in the mud – that shoe, thank God – and ran north, each breath tearing at my windpipe. Once I fell and couldn’t get up; behind me and to the left I saw torches flickering: perhaps one of them had gone to join Jock – I don’t know, it’s not important. I kicked the other shoe off and got up and ran again, cursing and weeping, falling into gullies, tearing my feet on stones and shells, the suitcase battering at my knees, until at last I crashed into the remains of the breakwater at Jenny Brown’s Point.
There I pulled myself together a little, sitting on the suitcase, trying to think calmly, starting to learn to live with what had happened. No, with what I had done. With what I have done. A soft rain began to fall and I turned my face up to it, letting it rinse away some of the heat and the evil.
The knapsack was back at Quicksand Pool; all the necessities of life were in it. The suitcase was almost empty except for some packets of currency. I needed a weapon, shoes, dry clothes, food, a drink, shelter and – above all – a friendly word from someone, anyone.
Keeping the low limestone cliffs on my right hand I stumbled along the shore for almost a mile to Know End Point, where the saltmarsh proper begins – that strange landscape of sea-washed turf and gutters and flashes where the finest lambs in England graze.
Above me and to my right shone the lights of the honest bungalow dwellers of Silverdale: I found myself envying them bitterly. It is chaps like them who have the secret of happiness, they know the art of it, they always knew it. Happiness is an annuity, or it’s shares in a Building Society; it’s a pension and blue hydrangeas, and wonderfully clever grandchildren, and being on the Committee, and just-a-few-earlies in the vegetable garden, and being alive and wonderful-for-his-age when old so-and-so is under the sod, and it’s double-glazing and sitting by the electric fire remembering that time when you told the Area Manager where he got off and that other time when that Doris …
Happiness is easy: I don’t know why more people don’t go in for it.
I stole along the road leading up from the shore. My watch said 11.40. It was Friday, so licensing hours would have ended at eleven, plus ten minutes drinking-up time plus, say, another ten minutes getting rid of the nuisances. My soaked and ragged socks made wet whispers on the pavement. There were no cars outside the hotel, no lights on in front. I was starting to shake with cold and reaction and the hope of succour as I hobbled through the darkened car park and round to the kitchen window.
I could see the landlord, or joint proprietor as he prefers to be called, standing quite near the kitchen door; he was wearing the disgraceful old hat which he always puts on for cellar work and his face, as ever, was that of a hanging judge. He has watched my career with a jaundiced eye for some five and twenty years, on and off, and he has not been impressed.
He opened the kitchen door and looked me up and down impassively.
‘Good evening, Mr Mortdecai,’ he said, ‘you’ve lost a bit of weight.’
‘Harry,’ I gabbled, ‘you’ve got to help me. Please.’
‘Mr Mortdecai, the last time you asked me for drinks after hours was in nineteen hundred and fifty-six. The answer is still no.’
‘No, Harry, really. I’m in serious trouble.’
‘That’s right, Sir.’
‘Eh?’
‘I said – “that’s right, Sir.’”
‘How d’you mean?’
‘I mean two gentlemen were here inquiring after your whereabouts last evening, stating that they were from the Special Branch. They were most affable but they displayed great reluctance to produce their credentials when requested to do so.’ He always talks like that.
I didn’t say anything more, I just looked at him beseechingly. He didn’t actually smile but his glare softened a little, perhaps.
‘You’d better be off now, Mr Mortdecai, or you’ll be disturbing my routine and I’ll be forgetting to bolt the garden door or something.’
‘Yes. Well, thanks, Harry. Goodnight.’
‘Goodnight, Charlie.’
I slunk back into the shadow of the squash court and crouched there in the rain with my thoughts. He had called me Charlie, he never had before. That was one for the book: that was the friendly word. Jock, at the end, had called me his old mate.
One by one the lights in the hotel went out. The church clock had struck half-past midnight with the familiar flatness before I crept round the building, through the rock terrace, and tied the garden door. Sure enough, someone had carelessly forgotten to bolt it. It gives on to a little sun-parlour with two sun-faded settees. I peeled off my drenched clothes, draped them on one settee and my wracked body on the other, with a grunt. As my eyes grew used to the dimness I discerned a group of objects on the table between the settees. Someone had carelessly left a warm old topcoat there, and some woollen underclothes and a towel: also a loaf of bread, three quarters of a cold chicken, forty Embassy tipped cigarettes, a bottle of Teacher’s whisky and a pair of tennis shoes. It’s astonishing how careless some of these hoteliers are, no wonder they’re always complaining.
/> It must have been four o’clock in the morning when I let myself out of the little sun-parlour. The moon had risen and luminous clouds were scudding across it at a great pace. I skirted the hotel and found the footpath behind it which goes across the Lots, those strangely contoured limestone downs clad with springy turf. I gave the Burrows’ heifers the surprise of their lives as I jogged between them in the dark. It is only a few hundred yards to the Cove, where once the sailing ships from Furness unloaded ore for the furnace at Leighton Beck. Now, since the channels shifted, it is close-nibbled turf, covered with a few inches of sea-water two or three times a month.
What is more to the point, there is a cave in the cliff, below the inexplicable ivy-gnawed battlements which surmount it. It is an uninviting cave, even the children do not care to explore it, and there is reputed to be a sudden drop at the end of it, to an unplumbed pit. Dawn was making its first faint innuendos in the East as I clambered in.
I slept until noon out of sheer exhaustion, then ate some more of the bread and chicken and drank more of the Scotch. Then I went to sleep again: dreams would be bad, I knew, but waking thoughts for once were worse. I awoke in the late afternoon.
The light is fading rapidly now. Later tonight I shall call on my brother.
To be exact, it was in the early hours of this Sunday morning that I stole out of the cave and drifted up into the village through the dark. The last television set had been reluctantly switched off, the last poodle had been out for its last piddle, the last cup of Bournvita had been brewed. Cove Road was like a well-kept grave: husbands and wives lay dreaming of past excesses and future coffee-mornings; they gave out no vibrations, it was hard to believe they were there. A motor car approached, driven with the careful sedateness of a consciously drunk driver; I stepped into the shadows until it had passed. A cat rubbed itself against my right foot; a few days ago I would have kicked it without compunction but now I could not even kick my own brother. Not with that foot.
The Mortdecai Trilogy Page 17
