by John Niven
‘Yes, been an odd … reunion,’ Terry said.
‘Thanks, Terry,’ Julie said, thinking, I bet it has.
‘Christ,’ Ethel said from somewhere behind them, ‘was I drinking petrol last night?’
‘Yes, thank you very much, Terry,’ Susan said, oddly formal suddenly as she stood up.
‘Are you heading straight back?’ Julie asked him.
‘Nah. You have to file a route plan with the harbour master. I thought, for your sakes, just in case anyone comes asking, that it might be best if I didn’t answer that completely truthfully. I said I was taking her down to Cowes for a few days, so I’d better show up there at some point … shit.’
Susan was holding out a housebrick of fifties.
Terry looked at the money and smiled. ‘No,’ he said. ‘You keep it.’
‘Please, Terry,’ Susan said. ‘It’s the least we –’
‘Honestly, no.’
‘Why ever not?’ Julie asked.
‘Well, for one, I don’t know that it’s a great idea for me to have a hundred grand in stolen banknotes on me –’
‘They’re used. Unsequenced,’ Ethel piped up. ‘Totally untraceable.’
‘And two,’ Terry continued, ‘I think you girls are going to need every single penny you’ve got, whatever happens.’
‘Are you sure?’ Susan said.
He nodded. ‘Just follow that path there.’ He pointed to the treeline. ‘Takes you up to the main road, then you’re a mile or so to the outskirts of Le Havre.’
Julie got a little peck on the cheek before she turned round and started pushing Ethel off up the dock, towards Jill. Susan smiled at Terry, the sun rising behind her, making her hair glow golden. He handed her a piece of paper. There was a name, ‘TAMALOV’, in block capitals and a Marseilles phone number underneath it. ‘Like I said, watch yourself. These are pretty serious guys.’
Susan nodded. ‘Thank you, Terry. Look, if there’s any comeback on this, if anything happens, just tell them we stuck a bloody shotgun in your face and made you do it.’
‘Never,’ Terry said. ‘They’ll never break me.’ They shared a laugh. ‘See you round,’ Terry said.
‘Sure,’ Susan said as she embraced him.
THIRTY-FIVE
‘YEAH, LEMME SEE. Yeah, here …’ The man pointed a pudgy, bacon-fat-smeared finger at an entry in the ledger on his desk. ‘Just one. The Geraldine. Owned by a Mr Terry Russell. She went out at 1.15 this morning.’ With a title like ‘Harbour Master’ Boscombe had been expecting something a little more grand: a sea-captain type, in his sixties, in uniform. Not this fat boy of about thirty in a sweatshirt and jeans, a half-eaten bacon roll in his fist and a can of Monster energy drink at his elbow. They were in an office on the top floor of the marina, with a grand view of the rows of boats tied up at the wooden dock, their masts bobbing and swaying gently in the soft breeze. Boscombe could see Wesley through the window, walking along the dock, nosing around.
‘And who was on board?’
‘Come on, mate. What do you think this is? Captains don’t have to file passenger lists with us, just routes.’
‘So where was it going?’
The guy consulted the ledger again. ‘Ah … Cowes.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘Isle of Wight.’
‘Right. And what do you know about this Terry Russell guy?’
‘Eh? How do you mean?’
‘I mean, where’s he from? What kind of man is he?’
‘God, I don’t know. No idea where he’s from. I’ve seen him around. Silver-fox type. Rich enough I should think. Lives in Sands.’
‘Can you get on to your oppo at Cowes and see if the boat arrived there?’
The guy sighed through a mouthful of bacon and bread. Christ, Boscombe was starving. It was after nine now. They’d been on the go since six and not had a bit of breakfast. Not even the offer of a cup of tea from this shiftless, greedy bugger in front of him. The same shiftless, greedy bugger who was now saying, ‘I could do that. Are you telling me I have to?’
Right, Boscombe thought. That was about enough. ‘Listen, mate,’ he said, leaning down closer to the guy. ‘The people I’m after are wanted in connection with a very serious armed robbery. If I have to I’ll get a court order and have five officers down here up your chuff all day while they tear this place apart. I might also pass your details on to the audit section of the HMRC for a laugh. I’m hoping I won’t have to do any of that because I’ll be so pleased with how you went out of your way to help us.’
‘OK,’ the harbour master said, suddenly quiet and offended. ‘There’s no need to threaten me. I’ll call them.’
‘Thank you very much.’
He started dialling and Boscombe walked over to the other side of the room and looked back down at the harbour. He could see Wesley, talking to an old boy who was loading fishing gear into one of the smaller boats. The guy was pointing up along the dock. Wesley had the notebook out. Boscombe looked out to the green swell of the sea. Beautiful day it was shaping up to be – as hot as yesterday probably. They were here, Boscombe thought. He knew it. He had a hunch … fuck Wilson – sometimes you just knew. Something caught his eye and he looked back down to see Wesley was waving to him to come down to the dock, making a thumbs-up gesture and pointing to the old guy. In the background fat boy was saying, ‘OK. I see. Ta, Chris …’ Boscombe made a ‘gimme two minutes’ gesture through the glass to Wesley and turned round as the phone clacked back down into the cradle. ‘No,’ the harbour master said. ‘Not arrived yet.’
‘How long would a trip like that normally take?’
‘Well, depends how keen you were to get there. A boat like The Geraldine, two big engines … if you wanted to you could do it in five or six hours.’
‘Where else could you go from here in that time?’
‘A bunch of places. Up the coast to Scotland. Across to France …’
France.
‘OK. Thank you for your help. I’ll be back in a minute. Could you dig out this Terry Russell’s contact details for me? Thanks.’
Without waiting for an answer Boscombe turned and went out of the door into the fresh air, into the cries of gulls, and started down the wooden staircase that led to the dock. He took his mobile out and rang the station, getting old Sandra. ‘Sandra? Find out whatever you can about a Mr Terry Russell from Sands. Yeah, Terry like Chocolate Orange, Russell like Harty. Great. Ta.’
‘This is Mr Amerhill,’ Wesley said, indicating the kindly old man smiling beside him as Boscombe marched over, hanging up. ‘He slept on his boat last night.’
‘Did you now?’ Boscombe said.
‘Yeah. Woke me up they did. Around midnight. One of them was in a wheelchair.’
Boscombe smiled and looked out to sea.
THIRTY-SIX
HAD DETECTIVE SERGEANT Hugh Boscombe been able to see far enough, if he could have gazed right across the English Channel and over the small private beach, through the trees and down the road to an outside table at a cafe on the outskirts of Le Havre, he would have seen the following …
Jill Worth: stirring her tea, ignoring her fruit cocktail and looking around twitchily, nervously, as if she fully expected a mob of policemen to descend upon her at any second. Ethel Merriman: hung-over, taking a break from greedily attacking a huge plate of steak and eggs to slather butter onto yet another piece of toast. (Indeed she seemed to be challenging the very physical laws regarding the amount of butter a piece of toast could hold.) And Susan Frobisher: working on her second (delicious) café au lait while she studied the map of France spread out on the table in front of her. After Susan had laid out the basic plan – to get to Marseilles and obtain new identities from Terry’s guy, dropping the unwanted and unsuspected Jill off at an airport somewhere en route – Julie had grabbed a croissant and headed off to take care of their transport needs. They’d seen a big second-hand car dealership back along the road, near the little bureau de change where the
y’d changed a couple of thousand pounds into euros.
‘Something inconspicuous,’ Susan had stressed.
She stared down at the map. There seemed to be two possibilities to get to Marseilles from here …
They could either head south-east towards Paris and then straight down to Provence, through the interior of the country, or go directly south from here, past Le Mans, until they picked up the coast road around Rochefort, then down towards Bordeaux before heading east past Toulouse and Montpellier. The Paris route was faster, but would take them closer to big cities and major roads. The coastal route was more indirect – about thirteen or fourteen hundred kilometres as opposed to one thousand – but more discreet. Lovely scenery too, Susan imagined. It’d probably be Nantes airport for Jill if they went down the coast and Lyon if they went through the interior. Either way it was at least a two-day drive. Then, when they got to Marseilles, even if they hooked up with this Tamalov right away, it’d take, what? – probably a couple of days to arrange new identities for her, Julie and Ethel. She couldn’t see them getting out of France for at least four or five days. Possibly longer if … but no. She was getting ahead of herself. Just deal with getting south for now and the rest of it would all unfold. She was surprised at how calm she felt. It was like she’d told Jules – right now they had the money and they weren’t in jail. They’d take it from there.
Susan put the route dilemma to the group. The response was predictably diverse.
‘Ooh, let’s take the coast!’ Ethel said. ‘So beautiful. I haven’t been down that way in years.’
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake!’ Jill snapped. ‘Can’t we just go the fastest way? I feel sick to the pit of my stomach every single minute.’
‘You should eat something, love,’ Ethel said, punting another huge forkful of near-raw meat glistening with egg yolk into her mouth.
Jill turned away and said, ‘Yes, and some of us might want to be a bit more careful about what we put into our bodies …’
‘You know what I’d like put into my body?’ Ethel said.
‘Ethel …’ Susan said warningly.
‘Don’t,’ Jill said. ‘Just don’t.’
‘A great, big …’
‘No!’ Jill squeaked, stuffing her fists in her ears.
‘… massive, hard …’
‘Ethel …’ Susan on autopilot, not even looking up from the map.
‘CO—
TOOT TOOT! Two short blasts on a car horn caused the three of them to turn round.
‘Goodness,’ Jill said.
‘Ding-dong,’ Ethel purred in Terry-Thomas fashion.
‘What the fuck?’ Susan said.
‘Language!’ Jill said.
There was Julie, sitting grinning at the wheel.
The wheel of a bright red Porsche Cayenne 4×4.
‘What the fucking fuck?’ Susan repeated, coming towards her and sticking her head in the open passenger-side window, the car reeking softly of expensive leather. A top-of-the-range satnav screen glowed in the middle of the dashboard. Julie, in her sunglasses, one arm resting on the sill of the open driver’s window, looked like Susan hadn’t seen her looking in years, since the glory days of her late forties, when she was bombing around town in her SLK.
‘It was a steal, honestly!’ Julie said. ‘Two years old. Only 20,000 miles on the clock.’
‘Not the money, Julie – I said “inconspicuous”.’
‘It’s got tinted windows,’ Julie offered helpfully. ‘And we needed something with enough boot space for the wheelchair. And look!’ She pulled on the handbrake and pressed a button. The satnav image switched to a local TV channel. ‘It’s got a telly and everything!’
‘A telly!’ Ethel shouted in the background.
‘Great,’ Susan muttered, walking around the gleaming car, taking it in. ‘We can watch some French TV while the arresting officers go about their business …’
‘Oh, don’t be such a killjoy,’ Julie said.
‘Can we please just get going?’ Jill said. A few other diners were staring. For once Ethel found herself in complete agreement with her.
‘Yeah,’ Ethel said, folding her last piece of steak up inside a slice of bread and stuffing it first into a napkin and then into her handbag. ‘Let’s fucking rock. Oi! Garçon! Le addition see vous play!’
THIRTY-SEVEN
TWO HOURS FORTY-FIVE minutes.
That’s how long it had taken. Just two hours and forty-five minutes from first contact with the police to full confession.
Terry had been surprised to see the police car already waiting at the end of the jetty as he tied the boat up in Cowes that afternoon, just after breakfast time, at 10.04 a.m. He’d sailed north-west from Le Havre, running the twin diesel engines pretty near full, making the crossing to the Isle of Wight in just over four hours. The local officers had immediately placed him under arrest (suspicion of aiding and abetting fugitives) and taken him to the main police station along the road in Ryde, there to await the arrival of the CID detectives from the mainland, the detectives who were now sitting across from him in the interview room. Boscombe and Wesley had arrived at 12.11 p.m. After Terry tried to stonewall them for a while the older, fatter one revealed that they knew he came from Wroxham, that he’d gone to school with two of the women and that an eyewitness had seen them boarding his yacht the previous evening. Then he mentioned (among other things) the possibility of involving the HMRC if he didn’t tell them everything he knew right now.
That did it. Those four letters were far more terrifying to Terry Russell than any threat of prison. His personal tax arrangements were a byzantine labyrinth of illegality that would have made Bernie Madoff himself crap his pants. At 1.49 p.m., just after lunchtime, his belly rumbling, he fell forward onto the interview table and started sobbing.
‘They stuck a bloody shotgun in my face …’ Terry wailed.
THIRTY-EIGHT
‘LUNCH LUNCH LUNCH lunch, lovely lunch, wonderful lunch … lunch lunch lunch lunch, lovely lunch, WONDERFUL LUNCH! Lunch lunch lu—’
‘For God’s sake, Ethel – will you PLEASE SHUT UP?!’ Susan screamed in the front passenger seat. Jill had her fists in her ears. Only Julie, smiling quietly to herself at the wheel as miles of French motorway slid by, seemed impervious to Ethel’s constant demands for lunch, expressed here by simply singing the word ‘lunch’ over and over again in the manner of ‘spam’ from the Monty Python song. (A reference that only Julie understood. Susan and Jill both just thought she’d gone mad.) They were heading south on the E402, towards the forest d’Ecouves. They still hadn’t resolved the east-then-due-south or the due-south-then-east dilemma.
‘Oh, come on!’ Ethel said. ‘It’s gone two! It’s time for lunch.’
‘I suppose we could stop at a services …’ Julie said, looking sideways at Susan for approval.
‘Fuck that,’ Ethel said.
‘Ohhh …’ Jill moaned in the manner of someone who has been burned with a hot needle.
‘I want a proper lunch,’ Ethel said. ‘With wine. I want a cassoulet, a soufflé, coq au vin, pommes doff-in-fucking-vase. In a restaurant or pub. I mean, look at the gorgeous bloody day. We’re in France and you buggers want to go and sit in some sordid petrol station. Are you all mental?’
‘We’re on the bloody run, Ethel,’ Susan said.
‘Have you any idea how big this country is?’ Ethel said. ‘I mean, I still can’t believe we got out of Britain, but we did. Now? Now they’re looking for a needle in a haystack.’
‘She’s got a point,’ Julie said.
‘I am rather hungry …’ Jill piped up. She’d hardly touched her breakfast.
‘OK, OK, fine,’ Susan said. ‘Let’s take the next turn-off and see what we can find then …’
‘Yes,’ snarled Ethel, smacking a fist into her palm.
‘Okey-dokey,’ said Julie, flipping the indicator on, getting into the right-hand lane as a sign saying ‘Courtomer’ came up ahead. ‘I have to say
,’ she added, cornering, taking the bend at a good clip, ‘this baby handles like a dream.’
Fifteen minutes later, less than ten kilometres up the road, they saw a big restaurant, with lots of tables outside, families, kids playing, many trucks and cars parked in its dusty gravel car park.
‘This do?’ Julie asked the group.
Shortly after that and a second round of drinks was appearing on the table – red wine for Ethel and Susan, mineral water for Jill, a Coke for Julie – while they all attacked their food. They were at a wooden table outside, the warm sun coming through the fabric of the umbrella above them. Susan took a sip of wine and managed to convince herself for a second that they were all on a lovely holiday. ‘Oh God,’ Ethel said, wiping her mouth, ‘you should all try this rabbit. How often do you see rabbit on a menu back home these days?’
‘Ugh,’ Jill said.
‘The chicken of the fields, love,’ Ethel said. ‘How’s your salad? Your nice, safe, boring –’
‘I don’t think it’s boring to eat healthily actually,’ Jill said, blowing her nose.
‘What’s that you’re having?’ Ethel asked Susan.
‘Chicken?’
‘For Christ’s sake, you two. Boring. You could have had the steak frites rare then I could have got in on it when you didn’t finish it.’
‘You shouldn’t eat all that red meat,’ Jill said, pouring herself a glass of Badoit. Ethel was making good inroads into the house red.
‘Bollocks,’ Ethel said. ‘I’m what – twenty years older than you? I eat what I like and I’m never ill. Look at you. You eat nothing but lentils, kale and blueberries and you’re forever broken in two with some dreary cold or other.’
‘You’re never …’ Jill said. ‘Ethel, you’re in a wheelchair because you’re so fat.’
‘Oh, you’re having a go at the disabled now?’ Ethel said. ‘I have luxurious bones.’
‘Bones? Your problem is –’
‘Will you two cut it out?’ Susan said, catching herself on the verge of saying ‘you kids are driving me crazy’. ‘Julie, we need to figure out a route to get Jill to an airport and get her money into that account for Jamie.’ No response. ‘Julie?’ Susan said, turning.
