Kidnap

by Philip McCutchan

  Kidnap

  Philip McCutchan

  © Philip McCutchan, 1993

  Philip McCutchan has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1993 by Hodder and Stoughton Limited.

  This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  One

  Mr Blundy sat behind the wheel, shoulders hunched forward, knuckles white from a ferocious grip, eyes staring, mouth tight. His wife Ag sat in the front beside him, ready with words of advice. Mr Blundy didn’t dislike driving, but he was more of a potterer and this abortion of a road scared him stiff, made him fancy he was on the circuit — odd, for a potterer, he sometimes thought, to be crazy about motor racing — at Brands Hatch or Silverstone. There were definite similarities: no traffic lights, no pedestrian crossings, no intersections, but plenty of fast-moving vehicles. Zoom-zoom-zoom they went, roar-roar, going much faster than he was. Even the exit roads looked rather like the slip road into the pits. Yes, there were similarities all right, and Mr Blundy would rather have been looking down from one of the bridges, like from a stand. It seemed like one bridge after another, did the M1, vantage points from which vandals could drop heavy weights on innocent motorists.

  Innocent, eh.

  Bloody likely! With what was in the boot?

  Mr Blundy gave a quick sideways glance at Ag, sitting there like a mountain — the old Granada could just about cope with her weight. Only just: she acted almost like an anchor each time the car started.

  Ag didn’t seem at all worried, but she saw the glance. “Keep your eyes on the road, do,” she said.

  “All right, all right, keep your wool on.”

  “No call to be rude, there isn’t. Look at that man.”

  “What man?”

  “In that car, just look! Doing ninety, I’ll be bound. Should be more police —” She broke off, sharp. “Shouldn’t have said that.”

  No, she damn well shouldn’t. Mr Blundy felt his stomach fall away, felt the sweat soak into his clothing all over; the wheel was slippery from his hands, too. Suddenly he remembered one of his old dad’s sayings: you couldn’t hide anything from God. God, Dad used to say quite often, was everywhere, looking and judging and noting down. You never got away with anything, not with God, who was the ultimate Old Bill. And God knew very well what was in the Granada’s boot. Mr Blundy had a sudden and disturbing vision of God sitting there, on the Armco barrier, judging and noting. Mind, He’d had plenty to note down in the past.

  *

  Oddly enough it had all had its origins, Mr Blundy ruminated with bitterness as he drove north to the remote wildness of the Yorkshire Dales, in that night — months and months ago now — when Ag had insisted on his going straight and had thus struck deep into his independence. At the time he’d just come out again, after a longish time over the wall …

  Ag had one of her moods on. Blundy was sitting in the big, shabby armchair in front of the electric fire — it had been a rotten summer — a bowl fire he’d picked up cheap years ago in the Portobello Road. He felt sunk almost without trace in the chair’s vastness, all except for his skinny legs that were resting on the other chair, equally big and shabby and shapeless, temporarily vacated by his ever-loving wife while she prepared supper: kippers, by the smell … Mr Blundy’s nose twitched but his eyes were on the china pig that stood on the mantelpiece above the fire’s golden-metallic glow. He studied the pig with real affection: he loved Piggy, even though Piggy was fat like Ag. Piggy had the snub nose common to pigs, china or otherwise; it also had large eyelashes painted chocolate brown, a number of blue spots overlaid with black and green stars and a blue oblong strip on either flank inscribed with the words “Premium Bonds”, and a slit in the top for reception of coin. Mr Blundy had never won a prize in the draw because he had never in fact bought any Bonds; the pig was emptied from time to time so Mr Blundy could go down the boozer. He didn’t blame the pig; he loved the pig for its own sake, because it looked friendly, because it looked happy, because it didn’t look as though it wanted to kick him around. He had bought it on holiday years ago in Southend and thereafter it had joined all the other nick-nacks in the small, stuffy parlour — from Margate, Clacton, Great Yarmouth and the Portobello Road — now overlaid with dust and the smell of cooking.

  That night, apropos the pig, he heard Ag’s accusing voice right across the years, right along the miles of railway line and pavement between Southend and Bass Street, Paddington.

  “Shocking waste of money I call it.”

  “Fifty pence.”

  “Could have had a meal or two on that.”

  “Well, I bought the pig instead, didn’t I.”

  “Just plain selfish, that’s you all over.”

  Hell, Mr Blundy thought, back in Bass Street, which was at least more comfortable than the Scrubs, never supposed to spend a penny on myself, am I. Bitter thoughts filled his mind, gave his long, narrow face a look of sorrowful helplessness.

  Removing his gaze from the pig, he sniffed the kitchen aroma again.

  Kippers.

  He’d have loved some nice salmon.

  He’d have loved to have been born rich. The shabby chair — so big that it had been dead cheap when he’d bought it from a junk shop, for people these days seemed to prefer chairs that looked like lavatory seats — creaked under the thought-impulses of wealth. Mr Blundy, ill-nourished looking and beaten as he was by life and by Ag, had plenty of big ideas. A nice big house somewhere, a mansion standing in its own grounds — somewhere posh like Golders Green, with a garage housing a Rolls Royce. Meals in expensive restaurants, good clothes from Austin Reed, a whole collection of china pigs, Wedgwood if they made them. Fat cigars and bugger the health lark. Many other things, unlimited beer being one. But money didn’t come that easy, not even when you were self-employed on crime. From all you read in the newspapers, lousy lot of liars, you’d think fifty-quid notes grew on every bush just waiting to be nicked by all the villains the police never caught. Unsolved crime rate rising, they kept on saying in the papers. To Mr Blundy, not long out of prison after being copped on a handbag-snatch job, the law seemed only too well on top of their trade: his personal unsolved-crime rate had fallen cruelly, he was the living proof of the newspapers’ mendacity. All the same, there was cachet in the self-employment angle, real class; it was great not to have a boss and a clocking-on machine and to take a day off whenever you felt like it, Ag permitting, of course. Ag was the fly in the ointment: you couldn’t give in your notice to Ag. On the other hand, Ag was also security: you didn’t get the sack.

  Mr Blundy knew all about the sack.

  Van driver, house painter, steward on a coaster, night-watchman, street cleaner, washer-up in hotels, you name it, Mr Blundy in his pre-self-employment days had been sacked from it. Lazy, they said, the swine — inefficient, thick, couldn’t be trusted. Bird-brained, unable to keep his mind on the job. It was true he couldn’t do that, certainly; his dreams kept on getting in the way, those dreams of bigness, of being somebody. Every profession he’d ever taken up, he’d seen himself at the top with astonishing clarity: Blundy’s Transport (van driver), Blundy the Builders (house painter), Captain Blundy (steward on the coaster), Sir Ernest Blundy (Barclays Bank, where he’d nightwatched), Mr Blundy, Head of Council Services (street cleaner), Mr Blundy the Managing Director (washer-up). What with all that
to think about, there hadn’t been much time left for work, not really. During his periods inside, however, he hadn’t seen himself as the prison governor; loyal to his self-employed status, he’d been a Kray, of a sort — Big Blundy. Don’t get in my way, not unless you want to be duffed up. King of Crime — that’s me. Even the screws jump to it when I say.

  But now the reality: “Come and get it, then.”

  Ag’s voice. Mr Blundy called back that he was coming, belched emptily, sighed towards the china pig and hoisted his skinny body from the chair, an arm of which moved sideways as he did so, spilling sawdust.

  He went into the kitchen, that place of grease and dirty saucepans and dishes and the gas stove as black as night and Ag’s big bum looming at him as she bent over the stove, an overfed ham. Mr Blundy felt an intolerable ache somewhere in his vitals. Was it any wonder he had other problems as well as lack of cash? Out of bed or in it, Ag was a dead loss. Sex tormented Mr Blundy as a result, really tormented him. For Mr Blundy, no sex symbol himself, London had never swung. Not even right back in the sixties, when he’d been young.

  “There you are, then,” Ag said briefly, slapping a kipper on a cold, cracked plate. “Eat your fill.”

  Munch, and pick the bleeding bones out of your teeth. After supper, the business attack.

  “You got to go straight again.”

  “Eh?”

  “You heard. Since you come out this time, you brought nothing home, just sweet nothing. Right?” Ag speared a pickled onion on a fork, thrusting it down to follow a hunk of mousetrap cheese long past its sell-by date and thus bought cheap. “Lucky I saved a bit. But the kitty’s empty now.”

  “But Ag, I —”

  “Empty, I said, didn’t I?” Ag’s lips folded in behind the pickled onion. “I say it again: empty.”

  “I don’t want to go straight.”

  “It’s not what you want.”

  “Look, Ag, there’s no money in it. Anyway, I can’t go straight, go back to all that, is it likely, is it bloody reasonable? Just ask yourself.”

  “I have. I’ve answered myself, too. It’ll be difficult for you —”

  “Difficult? Jesus Christ!” Mr Blundy threw up his hands at a blatant understatement.

  “Don’t blaspheme. I won’t have blasphemy. I won’t have your prison talk.”

  “That’s just it, isn’t it?” Mr Blundy said. “Prison. Who’d give me a job, I’d like to know?” He’d found a formula, or he thought he had, but it didn’t work.

  Ag gave a jeering laugh. “No, you wouldn’t know. That’s you all over, Ern. Thick as two planks. And bone idle with it.” She changed her tack, her big red face grim and ugly. “All right, then. Don’t get a job. Don’t go straight. Stay in crime. But do something. Get some cash. Got any ideas?”

  “Well … not just at the moment like.” Mr Blundy paused, ran a hand through his thinning hair, thinking. “Tell you what. I’ll have a word with the boys. Down the boozer.”

  “What d’you mean, down the boozer?”

  “What I said. Down the boozer.”

  “All right, all right, bloody parrot talking. Come into money, have you?”

  “Don’t be daft. Give me five quid, eh, Ag?”

  She hooted.

  “You have to spend money,” Mr Blundy said, coming out with one of his acquired tenets, “so’s to make money. Stands to reason, does that.”

  “Your money. Not mine.”

  “No money,” Mr Blundy said firmly, “no boozer. No boozer, no talk with the boys. No talk with the boys, no jobs. No jobs, no money. Full circle — just like that.” He waved a hand in the air, grand and powerful, the tycoon, the chairman of the board tossing off a business axiom at the AGM, but Ag was no shareholder.

  “Get stuffed, then,” she said.

  She had him in a cleft stick. She wouldn’t part with a penny — she still wanted him to go straight really. Of course he could always nip down the boozer and have half a pint, he could manage that, but then he wouldn’t be able to buy a round and he’d look a right mean so-and-so. Besides, the boys mightn’t be there, which would be a waste of money since he couldn’t just glance in and go out again. That would look odd, all things considered. These, of course, were just excuses to himself — he knew that. The real reason he didn’t go was that Ag always knocked the stuffing out of him by withdrawing her moral support. Silly bitch, she’d approved his going into crime in the first place, now she was going to nag him out of it again. And she would win, no doubt about that, no doubt at all. Mr Blundy sagged down into his chair, looking as worn as the chair did. Maybe he’d see the boys some other time.

  Or maybe he wouldn’t. Bugger Ag.

  *

  “There’s a good job in the Standard,” Ag said next evening. “Oh, yes?”

  “Oh, yes.” She threw the paper at him. “Don’t sound so upset. Got to do something, haven’t you?”

  Mr Blundy sighed. “What’s the job, then?”

  “Contract cleaning. People’s homes.”

  “Don’t be stupid, Ag.”

  She glared. “Why stupid, stupid?”

  “Me with my record?”

  “You on again about being in prison? Don’t have to wave your crime sheet, do you? You can deal with that and you know it.”

  He blinked at her. “How?”

  “How, he asks. Use your brains, if you have any. Just you get a fake card or whatsit. Under a new name. Those pals of yours, they’ll fix you up. Pay them out of your wages. When you get them.”

  “Oh, yes? And what, may I ask, about bloody income tax — PAYE?”

  Ag rejected the income tax excuse as beneath contempt. “That lot! Never even catch up with a cold. You got to be sharp, that’s all. And Social Security’s just as overworked, which is their word for bone idle. Like you.” She could never resist a personal dig. “Get away with it easy, you know you will.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Then all I can say is, you’d better find out. I’ve had enough.” She got up, stood over him, hands on hips, voice as shrill and hostile as a factory hooter. “Sitting around on your backside all day while I go out cleaning, aren’t you ashamed of yourself, Ernest Blundy? What my mum and dad would have thought, not that they ever reckoned much to you anyway …”

  On and on and on.

  Mr Blundy’s head whirled, making him feel sick. The bitch. He did his best, didn’t he? He felt close to tears. Why he’d ever married her … But he knew the answer to that: pregnant, she’d made herself out to be, and that was a laugh all on its own — they’d scarcely done it since. Ag didn’t like sex. As for her mum and dad, well, least said the better. Mum, long since in Highgate Cemetery and good riddance, had been SuperAg; poor Dad, incinerated at Golders Green because it was cheaper, had been a kind of Mr Blundy — talk about history repeating itself. The trouble was, Ag’s family had been craftsmen, a cut above the common working classes — Dad Gaotcher had been a watchmaker in Highgate — so Ag had sunk in the world the moment Mr Blundy had dropped, after marriage and via the sack, from a more or less responsible position in the stores department of a main dealer and distributor in the motor trade (Lord Blundy of British Leyland, Champion Exporter) to a van driver. Not that Ag could look down on his family — and didn’t, credit where credit was due. She looked down only on Ernest Montgomery Blundy. Mr Blundy’s father had been a tradesman in his own right, a master stonemason, graves and that. A very superior man, and largely the fount of Mr Blundy’s high ideas. The fount also of Mr Blundy’s inability to date to make any headway against life: Dad had been too bloody perfect, right in all he did, bung full of self-confidence, convinced that the watching eye of God could find no fault anywhere. By contrast, nothing had ever gone right for Mr Blundy. As a child even his toys had never worked as they should. Dad had seen the bright side of that, too: it was good for the character to face adversity and to do without.

  There had been too bloody much of doing without, more and more as the significance of hi
s jobs had dwindled. Well, it was a fact of life: some people went up, others went down. As his dad would have said, there wasn’t room for everybody at the top.

  No fairness.

  Mr Blundy examined the Situations Vacant, mutinously.

  The advert said to apply to Mr Nostrage at Cook’s Contract Cleaners, and at nine-thirty the next day Mr Blundy applied and was dead unlucky. It was true that massive unemployment had at last hit London and the south, but house cleaning was not all that popular. Everyone was too grand to be a skivvy now. Mr Blundy got the job, or one of them since four persons were required. On a temporary basis, probably a tax and insurance fiddle: Mr Blundy was not asked for P45s or anything like that.

  “Quite a good choice,” Mr Nostrage reported later to his superiors. “Name of Smith, Ernest Smith … been self-employed as a painter and decorator, so he’s used to visiting good-class homes. Not much on top, but that doesn’t signify. Dreary to look at, but he’s polite and, well, obsequious, I suppose you’d say, which is what the customers want. I’ll start him Monday.”

  Up bright and early on Monday morning and out into a dirty, wet London day. Soggy trousers and the usual dearth of bloody buses, Mr Blundy dived into the Tube, cursing Ag. Cook’s Contract Cleaning wasn’t going to provide the cream, barely the skimmed milk really. Ag was so short-sighted, never took in the full extent of his dreams. Big Blundy … and lovely young girls with not much on — and that soon to come off — fighting for his favours in that lovely big mansion where he sat smoking a cigar and dressed in a silk dressing-gown like Noel Coward, deciding which of the girls he wanted that night.

  Just as well Ag didn’t know that part.

  Anyway: ultimately he would have to go back to where the real money lay, only next time it would be the big stuff. Oh yes — definitely.

  Two

  “Well, how was it?”

  “Rotten. Bloody rotten.”

  “That’s right. Moan, moan.”