‘They’re your places I play in,’ Parkhurst said in the same dead voice, ‘and the tables are rigged.’
There was a pause. ‘You can go elsewhere and see if it’s any different. If you can’t pay up then, you’ll soon have no face left. See how you like that.’ He changed his tone, or tactics. ‘Oh, Malcolm, why don’t you wake up? I’ve got no end of jobs for you. You could be a great help, if you’d decide to do as I tell you.’
The match he threw onto the carpet went out. ‘Don’t want to.’
‘Is that all, Lord Moggerhanger?’ I asked.
‘Lord-fucking-Moggerhanger,’ Parkhurst babbled, as if to himself. ‘I ask you!’
‘Be ready in half an hour, Michael. Get George to fix the horsebox on, and make sure the inside’s spick and span.’
‘I was going to bring Dismal back today.’
‘He can wait. Polly won’t mind. She’s in Italy with her boyfriend — though she’s supposed to be happily married. What children I’ve got!’
Parkhurst grunted. ‘At least they don’t have blood on their hands.’
I thought Moggerhanger would burst. ‘But they have money whenever they ask for it. You’ll get no more cash from now on.’
Parkhurst smiled as if he’d heard that one before as well. I left them wrangling. George sat on a garden seat reading the Standard. ‘Take a dekko inside, Mr Cullen. I’ve been working on it since five this morning. It’s as neat as Montgomery’s caravan.’
It may not have been as big, but along one side was a series of drawers and cupboards, their brass handles flush in beautiful mahogany. The top made a flat surface for a desk, or a sleeping place at a pinch, and there was a swivel chair (itself worth a fortune) as well as a small window with curtains, a night cupboard (with no doubt a golden pot inside), a discreet radio rack and a stove and picnic-set under the desk. A map on the wall showed Moggerhanger’s properties, and on the table stood a photograph of the family when they were much younger. They also looked happier. Parkhurst, wearing the tie and blazer of some prep school, gripped his father’s right hand and looked up at him with a frightening mixture of adoration and panic. Polly stood a foot or so away, smiling widely at something only she could see, but which she knew she would one day get, and it wasn’t the camera.
George looked over my shoulder. ‘Go on in.’ He thought it would be a real treat. The length of carpet on the floor looked as if it had been cut from a precious Persian (to the best of my knowledge). On the wall opposite the table-desk hung a dressing gown on a hanger, wrapped in cellophane. ‘Home from home,’ I said.
‘He could survive in the wilds for weeks. I can’t open the drawers for you, because they’re locked. He’s got guns and fishing tackle, and food to last a while. Not that Lord Moggerhanger will ever need it, but it takes his fancy to think he might have to use it one day. I suppose he’s got to spend his money on something. But when it’s on tow, go easy on the corners. I’d have a nervous breakdown if anything happened to it.’
Cottapilly and Pindarry put Moggerhanger’s luggage into the boot. Mrs Whipplegate, coat on, stood in the yard with a suitcase, and I almost fainted at the thought that she was on the trip as well. ‘I have to go, because there’ll be some secretarial work.’
I asked how long for.
‘A couple of nights, but you can never tell with Lord Moggerhanger. He’s thinking of buying some agricultural land adjoining Spleen Manor. Otherwise I’m as much in the dark as you are.’
The car had been vacuumed inside, and polished highly on the outside to double for a shaving mirror. The telephone had been plugged in and the cocktail cabinet unlocked, as if we were going on holiday. Moggerhanger came to the car with a cigar burning. Lady Moggerhanger was like a ghost from ten years ago. Her hair had been black. Now it was grey. She was a good-looking woman in her early fifties but had put on weight. I saw Polly’s features embedded there as she held out her hand for me to shake in such a way that I thought she had been practising before a full length mirror since becoming Lady Moggerhanger. ‘How are you, Mr Cullen? I heard you were back. You don’t seem a day older.’
I said I was very well, and that neither did she.
‘Drive carefully. And take care of Lord Moggerhanger.’ They made their goodbyes and I got in behind the wheel, noting that the wing mirrors gave fair views to the rear. I was happy that Parkhurst had wriggled his way out of the trip.
By four o’clock we were locked into heavy traffic going towards the North Circular. ‘It’s the rush hour already,’ Moggerhanger grumbled. ‘You see ’em going to work at eleven in the morning, and they’re on their way home by three. It’s no wonder the country’s sluicing down the drain. I’m sometimes at it twenty-four hours a day, except for a short nap. I’m lucky to get a round of golf in, these days.’
The horsebox wasn’t much of a pull, but on cornering I had to go out a bit so as not to clip the kerb or knock a lamp post. I almost fetched a cyclist off his grid, and the obscenities he screamed through the window sent a reddish tinge over Mrs Whipplegate’s liberated face, such an enjoyable sight that I blessed that grey-bearded irascible pushbiker.
‘You have to watch ’em,’ the chief said. ‘I don’t mind you cutting up some young blood in a BMW, but not a silly old bastard with soda in his eyes.’
‘I’ll do my best,’ I said.
‘Would you kindly pass me a brandy and splash, Mrs Whipplegate?’
He nursed the glass while I did my fancy footwork in order to put a few miles behind us. The sky was dull, but the road dry. You couldn’t have everything. By five we’d gobbled a few miles on the same old route to the north. Not long ago I’d steamed down it with Ronald Delphick’s Panda Roadshow, and I hoped he’d had a profitable gig in Stevenage, followed by a night-long bang with a bevy of nubile admirers. Some people have all the luck. When I first saw him he was plain Ron Delph, and read a Tube Map anticlockwise, which everybody thought was pure genius in action. But that was in the sixties.
A flick of the wheel and even the Rolls-Royce would concertina if I hit a bridge support at a hundred. But why would I want to do that? You may well ask, because I certainly asked myself. I had left Upper Mayhem intending to lead an honest life. Instead, I had landed a job with Moggerhanger in order to help a friend, and been enrolled to do work which I suspected was crooked to the core. Not that I thought it a valid reason to put an end to things. Life was wonderful, and would go on because I had a job, money, and respect (of a sort) from the man I was employed by. ‘Do you think this is one of the best cars in the world, sir?’
‘It’s not one of the best, it’s the best.’ He was in his most bullish mood. ‘There’s nothing to touch it.’
‘What about a Merc?’
He shifted in his seat and peered through the windscreen at a Mini in front. ‘Get round him. The Merc’s good, but I feel better in a Roller than I do in a Merc, so it must be that much better, eh?’ He nudged me, but I stayed straight enough to thread the needle between a lorry and the central reservation. He threw a cigar-end out of the window, and I thought I saw the wheels of the Mini bump over it.
‘I buy British, Michael. I’m not a founder member of the British Abasement Society, like so many people today, who go crawling around anybody from the Third World to try and make up for what the good old British Empire didn’t do to them. Some people don’t know they’re born unless they grovel and run the country down in the process. I think we in the old country have to pull together.’