“All right. We wrote, got no answer and started to worry. Then we come back up to sort her out again. Come to that,” she said after a pause, “we don’t need to go to London, not really. Just away from here, that’s all.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, where to?”
“Don’t blaspheme. I don’t know where to. Can’t you ever think of anything for yourself?”
“But we can’t go bloody anywhere,” Mr Blundy said in desperation. “Not with the kid we can’t. How do you take a kidnapped kid to a hotel or a bed-and-breakfast — and where else is there? Seems to me you’re forgetting the whole point of all this. Auntie’s only incidental really.”
“I’m not forgetting anything,” Ag said. “We’ve come this far and we don’t back out. I don’t want to go back to charring in Bayswater, don’t you think I do. I haven’t forgotten the kid. That’s the whole point. When we get away from here, you put the squeeze on that Barnwell, take over where Bernie Harris left off, see?”
“But I’ve already told you —”
“Yes. Oh yes, you have.” Ag’s chest heaved with strong emotion. “You’re gutless, Ernest Blundy. Go so far then get cold feet. Pull yourself together for once and aim high. Get into the big-time. Are you a man or a mouse? Do you fall at the first fence? Yes, you do, why bother to ask. Remember, he who hesitates is lost. This is where we sink or swim.”
Never had so many clichés been hurled at Mr Blundy all at once. His head whirled and rattled like a fairground. He thrust it into his hands and moaned in self-pity. Ag was too much for him, too much altogether. He just couldn’t hold out against her tirades when she swung into full voice. If only she would threaten to pack up and leave him he would grasp at a wonderful life-line, but she was too bloody fly for that. Her threat was to stay.
On and on, on and on again. Shout, hurl abuse — oh, it was dreadful. Mr Blundy’s eardrums reverberated as though they’d been assailed by the massed bands of the Brigade of Guards plus the bagpipes.
“Stop it,” he implored. “Bloody stop it!”
“Will you do as I say?”
“Yes,” he raved, waving clenched fists in the air. “Yes, yes, yes!”
Peace.
Ten
The final work-out involved a compromise, arrived at after much bickering and a good fry-up for supper.
It would be risky to the point of lunacy, Mr Blundy said, to take the kid south again minus injection, and they hadn’t got any more of the dope to use. Ag made the point that London was their safest bet after all because Mrs Whale would corroborate their evidence, i.e. that they were in Bass Street, Paddington, at the time Auntie had died or was said to have died. Mr Blundy pointed out that the kid couldn’t be taken to Bass Street and neither, in the absence of the dope, could he live in the boot of the Granada. And he added that he wasn’t in any case going down the M1, or any other road, with that thump, thump, bang, bang from the boot. Not for a fortune. Nor was he going to risk giving the kid a bash on the head to keep him silent thumpwise. He would accept the gag and the rope but nothing more.
“Aside from the risk,” he explained, “I couldn’t do it, never. Not in cold blood like. He’s only a kid, remember.”
“I know that, don’t I? Ought to have kidnapped a grandad, you ought. So what, then?”
“We’ve decided we can’t go anywhere else, not with the kid, right? And of course we can’t leave him here, tied up in the bog. Starve, he would. And freeze. Can’t have that.”
“I ask again: what, then?”
Mr Blundy paused, trying to hold on to his temper. Ag was such a sneering bitch, it riled him terribly. He said, “Well, it’s difficult to —”
“Can’t you ever help? Can’t you ever be more positive? Can’t you —”
“Yes, I bloody can,” Mr Blundy shouted with sudden truculence. “I will an’ all, right now.” He pointed a finger at Ag, and although it shook it remained truly aimed. “You’ll bloody well stay here with the kid while I go south on me own. You’ll look after him. You’ll treat him well. You’ll keep him hidden. You’ll —”
“I’ll —”
“You’ll shut up. You’ll listen to me for once.” Mr Blundy felt that just one more remark from Ag would lead to real murder. He felt his head swell to bursting point. “You won’t show your bloody mug out of the door, not once you won’t, except to see to the kid, you won’t even look out of the window. You won’t answer the door. All anybody knows, you’ve come south with me. When I come back you come back too. Come back to life, that is. You resume living. Till then you hibernate.”
Mr Blundy blew out his breath; all that had been quite an effort but it seemed to have worked. Ag was suddenly subdued, possibly from sheer astonishment. She said, “And … and you go to London, see to the money?”
“Yes.” Mr Blundy thumped the kitchen table, hard and masterfully. Plates and cutlery rattled. “Go first thing in the morning, I will, so there.”
“Well I never.”
*
That night Mr Blundy, still on the crest of his masterful wave, once again broached the subject of sex. But this time Ag was having none of that. “Twice in, what, three days? You be satisfied with what you’ve had, Ernest Blundy.”
“But I —”
“Said no, didn’t I, and no I meant. Enough’s enough.” She bridled into bed and thumped down hard in the hollow. “What d’you think I am, a pin-cushion? Sex is horrid. Go away and be a sex fiend somewhere else, do.”
“Mean that?”
“Yes.”
Maybe he would. He fumed away to himself. When the day of wealth dawned, if ever it did now, then Ag could start watching out. He’d never ever had much luck in that direction but he knew that cash drew the birds in flocks. Look at all them film stars, and pop groups, and international sportsmen and that. It was the cash that did it, stood to reason.
*
Come the morning, when they got up very early, the question of cash became a present as well as a future concern.
They didn’t like the necessity, they told each other, but they steeled themselves and delved deep into Auntie’s drawers and cupboards, and under a topsoil of intimate garments — stays and camiknickers and petticoats and such — they discovered her hoard: seventy-six out-of-circulation one-pound notes.
“Daft old — lady,” Mr Blundy said in disgust. “What a bleeding waste, eh?”
But that was not the end of the haul. It was Ag who unearthed the rest: nearly a thousand quid in tens and twenties, in a shoe box.
“I better take three hundred,” Mr Blundy said. “Need it, down the Smoke.”
“You’ll take a hundred and think yourself lucky.”
“But I may have —”
“Hundred. I know you, Ernest Blundy. And don’t argue, it’s not right, not in this room.” She added, “Have to think of the kid. Can’t leave me short, see.” There was something else, too. Involuntarily, she looked over her shoulder at the death-bed. “Leave that IOU you said you would.”
“Don’t be daft, Ag.”
“It’s not daft. Want to be done for murder?”
He gasped. “Eh?”
“Murder. Motive — robbery,” she said. “See now, do you? Put an IOU and it’s a loan before death.”
“Oh, all right.” Mr Blundy pulled out a biro and tore a sheet from a notebook. He wrote an undated IOU for one hundred smackers and rolled it in with the balance, which Ag shoved back beneath the camiknickers. Feeling guilty, they crept down the stairs and Ag prepared porridge for breakfast.
“Not a word to the kid,” Mr Blundy said. “About the money. All right?”
Ag nodded.
“Or about me being away. That’s important, Ag. You’ll need to cover that. He’s to think I’ve been here all the time, otherwise he could raise difficulties later. About your aunt, I mean.”
“Oh? How’s that?”
“How d’you mean, how’s that?”
Ag’s foot tapped impatiently. “Mean this, don’t I
: far as everyone’s to know, none of us has been here all week. What you said yourself. That’s how Auntie came to die undiscovered, innit?”
Mr Blundy’s jaw sagged. Back in the daft-husband category again, and so soon after reaching the heights, it wasn’t fair. “Oh, sod it,” he said ungraciously.
Ag merely grunted.
*
“Better get off, hadn’t you?” This was at breakfast.
“All right, all right.”
“Sooner all this is finished, the happier I’ll be. And just remember I’ll be without news of what you’re doing … so don’t linger.”
“No, I won’t.” They would be right out of communication; only the phone box in the village, and him with no known abode. Letters were out, much too risky. Mr Blundy finished his breakfast, took his leave of Ag and stole out silently past the locked door of the earth closet, carrying the small amount of personal gear he would need in London. He got into the Granada, released the handbrake, shoved the engine out of gear, got out again and pushed. The car rolled out backwards, quiet and all unheard by Master Barnwell. It went rather fast down the slope to the bumpy track and Mr Blundy, making a wild dash, just managed to leap in and control the wheel, more or less, before it crashed into the stone wall opposite. Pointed towards the A684, he drove away drenched with sweat and shaking like a leaf, drove, as had become usual, into teeming rain, heading on the long haul down the great highways for the metropolis and his destiny.
It was all up to him now — all of it.
Eleven
The motorway was horrible: it was raining nearly all the way down and there was the very hell of a lot of heavy stuff all chucking muck at Mr Blundy. He detested Long Vehicles on account of their arrogance. Also he’d seen that accusing vision again: God had manifested Himself to Mr Blundy quite soon after the Woodall service area, where he’d gone in for a cup of coffee and to top up with petrol. God had seemed to swing down from a slagheap in the middle distance to remind him of dead Auntie and suffering Harold Barnwell — as if a reminder was necessary — and of the torment he was about to bring to the Barnwell parents, indeed had already brought — though it could be that the fact of a contact would bring relief. Better, probably, to know that sonny was safe and well, even if in captivity, rather than go on wondering and letting their imaginations roam around worse fates.
God, Mr Blundy was convinced, had come down in wrath.
Of course, Mr Blundy knew inside himself that the vision came only from his own mind, that God couldn’t really be there — or anyway was unlikely to be — but he had a strong belief that God had put that vision into his head and thus was, in that sense at any rate, engaged upon a manifestation personal to Mr Blundy. The implications of that were cruel. As a matter of fact the vision vanished somewhere around Leicester Forest East but was back shortly after, before Newport Pagnell.
Mr Blundy didn’t read anything specific into such comings and goings, and he’d managed during the vision’s absence to concentrate his mind sufficiently to evolve a plan of a sort, a plan for dealing with the Barnwell parents. As a plan it was simple and straightforward: Mr Blundy believed strongly in simplicity. It was the over-clever complications that always let you down — too much room for mistakes and the horrible quirks of chance.
*
Mr Blundy did not go home to Bass Street, at least not right away. He had his reasons for not going there till after dark. On leaving the motorway he proceeded along the North Circular until he turned south along the Edgware Road. Reaching Marble Arch he put the Granada in the underground car park, recalling as he did so his dad saying that the old-time London bus conductors always used to call the stop Ma Blarch.
He walked along Oxford Street, seeking a telephone box in a nice bustling area where he would be just one of the crowd currently milling about in the evening rush hour. He didn’t bother to look for any on-street kiosks, they’d all have been attended to by vandals, rotten bastards. He made for the Tube station at Oxford Circus. He could have used Marble Arch, or maybe Bond Street,’course he could, but he hadn’t. Fly Blundy! Pointless to take any risks that weren’t strictly necessary, and the more ground he put between his forthcoming phone call and his parked car the safer he felt.
At Oxford Circus he had a long wait.
There was a queue for each of the phones, or anyway at the two that were working, but at last he got his face behind one of the screens that acted as phone boxes in this day and age. He’d looked up the Haverstock number at the Toddington service area before coming off the motorway and had it written down in his notebook.
He dialled the number, feeling a shake in his fingers. The call was very quickly answered. This was natural; they’d be manning the phone day and night for news, poor sods. Mr Blundy said cautiously, “Hullo.”
“Yes, dear, if you want an appointment will you ring back in half an hour, I’m about to be engaged with a client. Where did you see the card, dear?”
Bloody prozzy. And sod British Telecom too, taking his money under false pretences, why didn’t they keep their bloody equipment in better nick?
Angrily he said, “Go and get stuffed,” and banged the handset down. After that he dithered. It could be an omen of failure to come. Anyway, better not to risk two calls from one box, because you never knew what the Bill might get up to. Mr Blundy brought his head out backwards, feeling immensely frustrated. Frustrated in more ways than one: even such remote contact with a woman of easy virtue had given him certain urges and ideas … better not, though. Business first — then perhaps he’d see. Hunching himself against a nasty drizzle as he emerged into the open, he walked towards Tottenham Court Road and tried again.
After another wait in a queue, he dialled.
He waited, shaking and shaking.
No answer.
The bastards. Gone out and didn’t even have an answer-phone — didn’t care, and the poor kid closeted in that bog up in Wensleydale. God, you’d think they’d have skivvies by the hundred to wait in and answer the phone. Maybe, though, there were other reasons: the Bill getting its tap on, the Barnwells not answering till they’d fetched the Bill in from the kitchen to eavesdrop. Something like that, trust the Bill.
Mr Blundy, when this thought came to him, couldn’t wait to bash the phone down and scarper.
Bloody hell, the risks! And he would have to try again.
He sweated profusely. He was innately unfit for command, for high responsibility — he knew that now. He needed a lead, a guiding light — someone like the Loop. Big Blundy, his arse! He was the everlasting dogsbody, the hired hand, the taker of orders. On this sudden blinding wave of self-knowledge Mr Blundy entered a public house. Wedged at the bar, he asked for a large Scotch. Having drunk this, he felt easier: he had two more, then another.
Ah now, that was better. He would have liked more but saw that indulgence just now would be indiscreet. Make the call, then have another. For now he needed all his wits about him. When, the job done, he had that next drink … well, then he might also think about ringing a prozzy, and sucks to Ag.
Something to look forward to, was that, something to steel him. Deserved a bit of a reward too.
*
“Yes, who is it?”
Mr Blundy felt quite faint. Everything, all his prepared spiel, went right out of his mind. The answering voice was strong and harsh — in a word, authoritative. The man was a man of iron, if only scrap iron. Mr Blundy swallowed and managed to say, “Mr Barnwell?”
“Yes. Who’s calling?”
“Never mind the name.”
A pause, followed by a sharp intake of breath. “What was that?”
“I said, never mind who’s calling. Want news of your kid, don’t you?”
Another pause. A longish one, during which Mr Blundy saw jacks and ordinary Bill in all directions, converging on the phone, with others at the reception end of the line, all listening and deducing.
Then: “Of course I do. How, and where, is Harold, and who, and where,
are you?”
Cool, eh. Mr Blundy said, “I’m not telling you all that lot, don’t expect me to really, I bet. Harold’s okay and that’s all I’m saying. He’s okay, honest he is. He’s not been harmed, not been hurt in any way. He’s been kept fed and warm. He’s a nice kid.”
“I’m aware of that. I rather like him myself. So does his mother. We like him so much we want him back — still unharmed and healthy.” It was a dangerous voice, calm, collected, masterful. Echoes of the kid. “Am I to take it this is a kidnap, and you’re demanding money?”
“Spot on,” Mr Blundy said toughly, feeling sick.
“You know what you can do.” The voice held a note of finality, of non-co-operation. Mr Blundy’s flesh crept. Unfeeling bastard! The Loop could have been dead wrong — it could be that this scrap-iron merchant didn’t give a fish’s tit for the poor little kid, thought more about his wealth. In a high voice Mr Blundy tried to get some important points across.
“Now look,” he began, and got no further.
“I’m not the sort of man to give in to threats. I shall see you hanged first. Everything you’ve been saying has been heard by the police, be very sure of that.” A pause. “Are you sure of it?”
“No,” Mr Blundy said with a burst of desperate courage, “no, I’m not. Look, you’re a man of the world, I don’t doubt. You know the score, no need for me to say it really. If the Bill comes in, the kid suffers, right?”
“I’ve already as good as said, the Bill, as you call them, are already in. Don’t you read the papers?”
“’Course I do.” This was going all wrong. Mr Blundy felt the initiative slipping away as though it had been greased. “That’s not what I mean and you know it, mate. I mean —”
“All right, I know what you mean. You’re about to state a sum of money, you’re about to announce a time and a place, you’ll bring Harold, I’ll bring the money in used notes, the older the better, in denominations of a hundred and under. If the police are anywhere around, then Harold suffers. Am I right?”
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