The Sunshine Cruise Company

by John Niven

  Wesley turned from regarding Nails scrabbling around, trying to get to his feet amid a hundred thousand tiny jewels of broken glass, bleeding quite badly, and squinted down the high street, into the sun. He saw it immediately – two hundred yards away, three figures in overalls, wearing balaclavas, holding … Jesus Christ.

  ‘SARGE!’ he shouted.

  Boscombe stopped advancing towards Nails, wiped ice cream and broken bits of wafer from his face, and turned to follow Wesley’s gaze towards the distant sound of a fire alarm. He saw them too.

  ‘LET’S GO!’ Ethel screamed, already wheeling herself towards the minibus. Its back doors were open and the platform for loading and unloading wheelchairs was already at street level. ‘QUICK!’ Julie yelled, pushing Susan after Ethel, grabbing Jill by the arm and pulling her behind them. They piled into the bus, Susan and Julie throwing the huge holdall onto a row of seats. Julie went to clamber over into the driver’s seat only to see that Jill had jumped in there. She was panicking, crying and screaming ‘OHMYGODOHMYGOD!’ over and over as she tried to turn the key.

  ‘COME ON!’ Boscombe yelled, taking off at a sprint, Wesley following.

  As Susan slid the side door of the Cancer Care minibus shut, she heard a low humming noise, and looked towards the rear of the vehicle to see Ethel magically ascending on the checkered steel platform. ‘GET US THE FUCKING FUCK OUT OF HERE!’ Ethel was yelling over her shoulder. From where she was sitting on the back of the bus, framed in the open doors, Ethel had a perfect view of Boscombe and Wesley sprinting towards them, shouting ‘STOP! POLICE!’

  They were about a hundred yards away.

  Now eighty.

  Now seventy.

  ‘TELL THAT STUPID BITCH TO DRIVE!’ Ethel yelled again.

  Julie leaned forward and screamed in Jill’s ear: ‘DRIVE, JILL!’

  ‘What the fuck!’ a voice very close to them said and Susan turned to see, through the passenger-side window, the very angry driver of the minibus, coming out of the Cancer Care office.

  Fifty yards.

  Now thirty.

  Ethel could see the sweat on Wesley’s face. The ice-cream-spattered forehead of Boscombe.

  ‘AAGGHHHHHH!’ With a scream Jill finally got the key to turn and the engine growled beneath them.

  Boscombe was upon them. With a roar he launched himself up onto the platform at the back, right at Ethel. Ethel dropped the spent shotgun and picked up her grabbing stick.

  Two things happened simultaneously.

  1) Jill crunched the bus into gear and hit the accelerator. Well, to say ‘hit’ would be engaging in hyperbole of the highest order. If Jill Worth wasn’t the most cautious driver in the world she was certainly in the top five. More accurate to say she pressed gingerly down on the accelerator and moved off at a speed of about five miles an hour.

  2) As he came at her Ethel shot out her grabbing stick and took an absolutely perfect – and robotically strong – hold of Detective Sergeant Boscombe’s testicles. He fell backwards off the platform but found he was still tethered to the moving minibus by the vice-like grip of the grabbing stick. In order not to have his balls ripped off Boscombe suddenly found he was having to run quite fast after the minibus.

  Jill turned the corner and headed up Court Street, the one-way running off the high street. Her driving was being hampered not only by the fact that she was crying but also by the deafening roar of Julie and Susan screaming behind her, urging her to go faster. She tapped the accelerator and took the van up to a speed approaching ten miles an hour. ‘Straight over the roundabout!’ Julie was yelling. ‘Head for the dual carriageway!’ As the roundabout came into view Jill was aware of a keening, high-pitched scream. She crunched up to second and nudged the pedal a little more, hitting fifteen miles an hour.

  Wesley gave up and stopped running. He watched his boss in astonishment. Boscombe was hurtling after the bus, going full pelt just a few feet behind it, his legs just a crazed blur. From his vantage point directly behind him, Wesley had no way of knowing that, rather than suddenly discovering superhuman reserves of speed, his boss was simply being pulled after the minibus by his very scrotum.

  ‘JILL! FASTER, FOR GOD’S SAKE!’ Julie was screaming.

  ‘WE’RE IN A TWENTY!’

  ‘YOU’RE NOT EVEN DOING TWENTY!’

  ‘IT’S A LIMIT – NOT A TARGET!’

  ‘ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING M—’

  Jill found third gear and the needle on the speedometer passed the 20 mph marker.

  Usain Bolt has been recorded running at speeds of just over twenty-seven miles per hour. To do this requires incredible levels of musculature and training, levels well beyond the fifteen-stone frame of DS Hugh Boscombe, who was now looking in astonishment at his own madly blurring legs while screaming his head off. With the incentive of retaining his testicles to help him, he was somehow managing to run at just over twenty miles an hour. He looked back up – into the merciless eyes of Ethel, staring at him through the slits of her balaclava, the word ‘FUCK’ glaring in white capitals across her forehead.

  She was sitting in a wheelchair, Boscombe realised. He glimpsed a bumper sticker fixed to the front: ‘WHERE’S THE BEEF?’ Somewhere in his agonised, screeching mind this rang a bell.

  ‘JESUS CHRIST, JILL!’ Susan screamed. ‘WILL YOU PLEASE PUT YOUR BLOODY FOOT DOWN?!’ Right, enough, Julie thought.

  She clambered over into the front seat, threw herself down on Jill’s lap and mashed the accelerator to the floor.

  The van rocketed off across the roundabout just as Ethel tore the grabbing stick from Boscombe’s nuts, making a riiippppping sound, tearing the front of his trousers open in the process.

  Boscombe screamed as he watched the leering, wheelchair-bound figure disappear into the distance. He also had a split second to register disbelief at how fast he was still running – much like the cartoon character whose legs are still frantically pedalling in mid-air after they’ve run off a cliff edge – before he rocketed into a parked Ford Fiesta at twenty-five miles an hour, cracking the windscreen and knocking himself senseless in the process.

  Mayhem in the minibus: Ethel wheeling herself further back into the boot area, the wind whistling through the open doors, Susan screaming to take the dual carriageway, Julie sitting in Jill’s lap, driving, Jill crying and screaming and trying to wriggle out. Well, this beats Lovejoy repeats and digestives at four o’clock, Ethel thought to herself as Julie tugged the wheel hard to the left and they went careering down a ramp towards the dual carriageway. Ethel just had time to register the ‘NO ENTRY’ sign they’d just passed.

  ‘Oh fuck,’ Susan said flatly as they saw the first car coming towards them.

  Wesley came screeching down the high street in their car. He’d barked garbled instructions to the two uniforms who’d been loading the battered and bleeding Nails into the back of a squad car (‘assaulting an officer, malicious damage’) before slapping the blue light on top and hitting the siren. He took the corner onto Court Street fast and was about to accelerate again when he saw Boscombe stumbling into the middle of the road. Jesus Christ – what the fuck?

  Wesley hit the brakes hard and came skidding to a halt six feet in front of his boss. Boscombe looked like he’d been smashed to pieces. The crotch of his trousers had been torn open. He came round to the driver’s side.

  ‘Sarge,’ Wesley began, ‘what happened to –’

  ‘Shift,’ Boscombe said, already getting in the driver’s door. Wesley scooted over.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Wesley asked. There was a good-sized gash in Boscombe’s scalp and his face and hair were matted with blood.

  ‘Pensioners. Dancing,’ Boscombe said, already pulling off, his face a grim mask of blood and determination, staring straight at the road ahead.

  ‘Ah, Sarge?’

  ‘My balls, Wesley.’

  ‘Are you –’

  ‘Tried to rip them off.’

  ‘Are you sure –

  ‘Pensioner.’r />
  ‘Are you sure you should be driving?’

  ‘SHE TRIED TO RIP MY FUCKING BALLS OFF!’

  He seemed pretty sure, Wesley thought.

  All four women were screaming as they hurtled towards the oncoming estate car, the car frantically beeping its horn and flashing its lights.

  ‘OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD!’ Julie was chanting.

  ‘AHHGHGHHHH!’ said Susan.

  ‘HELP ME, JESUS!’ Jill screamed.

  ‘FUCK ME!’ Ethel shouted.

  They could see the faces of the occupants of the estate car now – a man and a woman. They were screaming too, the righteous terrified screams of people legitimately taking the off-ramp from the motorway only to see a Cancer Care minibus screaming towards them at seventy miles an hour.

  Julie yanked the wheel hard to the right and they crunched onto the hard shoulder, missing the car by inches, causing the driver, a Mr Leslie Hough, to soil himself.

  Boscombe came over the roundabout at eighty, cars slamming their brakes on, siren blaring, blue light flashing, The Sweeney theme pumping in his smashed mind. As they came up the elevated section onto the second roundabout that allowed you to join the dual carriageway, Wesley looked to his left. He saw the minibus. It was about a mile away. Heading west. On the hard shoulder. On the wrong side of the carriageway.

  ‘LOOK!’ Wesley yelled, pointing.

  Boscombe followed his finger. He saw the minibus too and emitted a low growl.

  ‘Fucking hell,’ Wesley said. ‘They’re gonna kill someone. We better get some help –’ He picked up the mike for the radio and was about to key the button when Boscombe smashed it from his fist.

  ‘Eh?’ Wesley said.

  ‘Ours,’ Boscombe said.

  ‘We need to –’ Wesley stopped talking as he realised what Boscombe was doing. He was taking the ‘NO ENTRY’ ramp, taking the hard shoulder, following the van.

  ‘SARGE! NO!’

  ‘MY FUCKING BALLS!’ Boscombe screamed, his eyes glittering and mad, like a pair of marbles with fire inside them.

  Even more screaming in the minibus – Julie nudging the speedometer towards ninety, honking the horn and flashing the lights as they tore along the hard shoulder, the oncoming traffic passing them on their left, the faces of the people in the cars in the slow lane just a mad blur of open mouths and wide eyes. ‘GET US OUT OF HERE!’ Susan screamed. Behind her she was aware of a hooting noise and turned to see Ethel: punching the roof and barking with joy and excitement as there came another noise in front of Susan, honking and rhythmic – Jill, vomiting into the front-passenger footwell.

  Boscombe floored it – coming down the hard shoulder of the off-ramp, his siren blaring and blue light strobing. Traffic scrambling to give him a wide berth. Indeed it would be the actions of the driver of a low-slung Porsche Carrera trying to get out of his way a few hundred yards along the dual carriageway that would prove to be so catastrophic. Being sat so low to the ground, the driver (a Miss Daisy Welling, a 32-year-old marketing executive) couldn’t really see what was happening up ahead as she moved into the slow lane in preparation for taking the off-ramp to Wroxham, the ramp Boscombe and Wesley had just come down at eighty miles an hour. Miss Welling just heard police sirens and saw brake lights coming on and traffic slewing out of lane. Panicking she made the appalling decision to pull over onto the hard shoulder. She glanced in her rear-view mirror as she did so, to check there was no one coming up the hard shoulder behind her. She never for a moment factored in what might be coming down the hard shoulder in the opposite direction, against the traffic.

  ‘JESUS CHRIST!’ Wesley screamed as he saw the silver Porsche pull directly into their path. Boscombe was trying to press the pedal through the rubber mat at this point, through the floor, onto the tarmac, his eyes fixed on the white minibus in the distance, with its back doors flapping open, the hunched, hooded figure of the woman in the wheelchair still just visible. Boscombe saw the Porsche pull into their path less than a hundred yards away. He knew that he was doing close to a hundred miles an hour and had no chance of stopping in time. He realised that he had only two options open to him and – tuning out Wesley’s screaming – that he had perhaps three seconds to choose between them.

  Left into the oncoming traffic?

  Or right, over the grass verge, into … what exactly?

  Boscombe yanked the wheel hard right.

  Somewhere up ahead Julie threw a right-hander too, hitting the brakes, leaving a strip of skid marks fifty yards long on the hard shoulder as she almost 360’d the minibus and took the (amazingly clear of traffic) exit ramp off the dual carriageway. Thirty seconds later they were over another roundabout and motoring down a quiet B-road as though nothing had happened. It was eerily quiet, just the sound of Susan breathing hard with her eyes shut. Jill had fainted. ‘Oh Lord,’ Ethel said from way in the back. ‘That was fucking brilliant.’

  When retelling the story in the years ahead, which he would be asked to do often – down the pub, at retirement dos, at Christmas parties – Wesley would stress the strange feeling of weightlessness, of the brief absence of something as fundamental as the laws of gravity. The grass verge acted as a sort of natural ramp. Their 2.5-litre police Rover took it at ninety-two miles an hour, that speed being lessened slightly as the front bumper was torn off and splintered beneath them.

  Then there was blue sky all around them.

  Here Wesley found himself thinking of the last words of Donald Campbell, driver of the Bluebird, as he attempted to break the world water speed record. ‘I’m flying!’ Campbell said, as the craft’s nose rose out of the water.

  At the wheel Julie was experiencing the backwash of an adrenalin blast she hadn’t felt since perhaps 1972, specifically December 1972, when she was seventeen years old and in the front row when T. Rex ran onstage in Poole. The adrenalin was pumping a clarity of thought through her. ‘Susan!’ she said over her shoulder. ‘SUSAN! Is the money safe?’ Susan patted the seat next to her, feeling the stuffed, zippered holdall. Julie saw her nod in the rear-view mirror. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘We need to ditch this van …’ Julie started scanning the hedgerows for a turning, thinking about barns, woodland, anything.

  As all survivors of terrible car wrecks will tell you, time stood still for a moment. There was just a whooshing noise. Wesley even found he had a moment to turn his open-mouthed face to his right and behold Boscombe, staring straight ahead, still uselessly turning the steering wheel. It occurred to Wesley that he would quite like to punch his boss in the face. In terms of his last actions on the planet, this seemed like it would be a fairly reasonable one. Then gravity was back with a vengeance and they were plummeting down. In his peripheral vision (he was still staring hatefully at Boscombe) Wesley became aware of water.

  The heavy Rover smashed nose first into the duck pond, sending a spray of water thirty feet into the air and activating the airbags, which punched both of them softly in the face. Luckily for Boscombe and Wesley it had been a hot day and their windows were down. The shock of the cold water rushing in was balanced by the fact that this allowed the water pressure on each side of the doors to equalise, so that both of them could open their doors.

  They swam to the side and lay there panting, watching the boot of the Rover point skywards as it sank slowly.

  In the distance they could hear sirens approaching.

  TWENTY-SIX

  JULIE STOPPED THE van. A single-track lane led off the B-road. A wooden, hand-painted sign on it said ‘DENSMORE COTTAGE’. She looked down the lane – leafy, overgrown, secluded. What the hell, she thought. Ditch the van in a hedgerow and continue on foot if need be. She turned back and looked at Susan. ‘What do you reckon?’

  ‘We’ve got to get out of these clothes.’ She’d ripped her balaclava off. Her face was slick with sweat. Julie nodded and took the turning. Susan leaned over into the front seat and brushed Jill’s hair from her face. ‘Is she OK?’ Julie asked, steering the minibus slowly down the bumpy lan
e.

  ‘I think so,’ Susan said. Jill was beginning to stir.

  ‘Oh God,’ Julie said, ‘have we still got the pass—’

  ‘I got ’em,’ Ethel said, patting a small canvas knapsack tucked inside her wheelchair. It contained all their passports, their means of getting out of the country.

  ‘Here.’ Ethel’s gnarled fist appeared over the seat behind Susan’s head, holding her pewter hip flask. ‘Give her a belt on that.’

  ‘I don’t think just yet,’ Susan said, taking the flask. She was about to take a nip of what smelt like brandy when Julie abruptly threw them into reverse, causing Susan to nearly spill the liquid all over herself. ‘Careful, Ju—’ she was saying.

  ‘Look!’ Julie said, pointing as she backed up.

  Susan and Ethel turned. Julie was pointing to a pretty Edwardian cottage. It had a double garage attached to it.

  ‘What?’ Susan said. ‘You want us to go in and say “Hi there! We just robbed a bank. Can we hide out here for a while?”’

  ‘No. Look,’ Julie said. ‘The doorstep.’

  ‘Well, I’ll be …’ Ethel said.

  ‘Where are we?’ Jill said, sitting up, groggy.

  ‘What is it?’ Susan said, looking at what appeared to be a perfectly ordinary doorstep, well, ordinary save for the fact that there about a dozen bottles of milk on it.

  ‘It’s what we call “a break”, love,’ Ethel said.

  Julie was already reversing the minibus, preparing to take the turning into the driveway. ‘What are you doing?’ said Susan, still not getting it.

  ‘Someone forgot to cancel the milk,’ Julie said.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Fucking hell,’ Ethel said.

  ‘Ethel! Language!’ Jill hissed automatically, not yet fully awake.

  ‘Ah. They’re on their holidays,’ Susan said.

  A moment later, the minibus off the road and the gates closed behind it, Susan and Julie stood on the front doorstep, ringing the bell. Behind them Jill was sitting on the step of the open passenger-side door. She had her head in her hands and was muttering a kind of numb, looped mantra, something along the lines of ‘What was I thinking … prison … dear God, help me …’