‘Save it for somebody else.’ I was in no mood for verse, but remembered he had nowhere to go, so pulled a twenty-pound note from my wallet. ‘Take this, to get a bed somewhere. Or you can borrow it till I’m in trouble and want you to help me.’
He ran to a lighted window and held it up, then came back and pushed his panda-wagon a few yards along the road. I decided that if he walked away without saying thanks I would give him a pasting and kick his panda-wagon to bits.
He was in tears, the bloody actor. ‘I’ll never forget this. I know you aren’t rich, and I appreciate it more than I’ve ever appreciated anything. And thanks for saving me from that madman in rags. Can I have your address?’
You had to think quick with Delphick. ‘I shan’t be there much longer. I expect I’ll see you around some time. I might call on you at Doggerel Bank.’
‘Well, cheers then, mate. And thanks a lot.’ He went up the street, while I traipsed down to Trafalgar Square and hailed a taxi that took me to my cosy room above the garage at Ealing.
Seventeen
The business trips Moggerhanger sent me on were mostly short hops by air to the Channel Islands, from which place I returned with hundreds of Krugers stitched into the game pockets of my tailor-made shooting coat. God knows what the customs thought when so many sportsmen and hunters started coming through. It was as if caribou had become the blight of Jersey, and stags were stampeding around on Guernsey. They just loved tomatoes, I could have told them if they’d cared to ask.
I made six trips altogether, for a hundred-pound bonus at the end of each, and soon I had nearly a couple of thousand in the bank. We took a risk, the one condition being that if we were caught we were to say nothing more than that it was our first time and that we were on our own. We had various bits of paper to suggest it, and proof of a bank account in the Channel Islands with ten quid on deposit. It was worked out so that nothing could be traced to the Big Firm itself. One morning Moggerhanger called me in and said he wanted me to go to the New World in a couple of days. ‘Where’s that?’ I asked.
‘You’ll do,’ he said when he had stopped laughing. ‘It’s a special mission to Toronto, and I want somebody with a head on his shoulders.’
I never anguished over making a decision, in the hope that one day I would make the right one. Be that as it may, what frayed my temper on setting out to get the one o’clock plane for America was the fact that I had such difficulty picking up a taxi, and didn’t reach the airport terminal till half past twelve. When I asked Alice Whipplegate why Kenny Dukes couldn’t drive me there in the Roller she said he was in hospital swathed in bandages, having told the police he had fallen on a crate of broken bottles in Bateman’s Alley.
The plane was delayed and we were still in the airport lounge at three o’clock. I drank a dozen cups of coffee, ferreted my way through the Daily Telegraph from back to front and envied a grey-bearded man with glasses reading a fat book called The Way We Live Now which, judging by his expression, was telling him something he wanted to know.
At four o’clock I settled myself in a window seat on Shoestring Airways, my briefcase-type travelling bag stowed in the rack above. Our Jumbo 747 was so full that not even a man hoofing up the runway waving a first class single fully paid up ticket could have been taken on board. I thought I would rather spend a week at sea than travel with four hundred people in this sort of random meeting hall where, within two hours, everyone would jump up and start battering their way out through doors and windows. And the trip was scheduled to last for seven. My only consolation was in thinking of the millions of dollars in travellers’ cheques pre-packed by Toffeebottle in my holdall and the ease with which I had carried it through the customs. I had been led to understand that the money was payment for goods gratefully received.
‘Do you mind if I have your window seat?’ She liked looking out, she said, so I moved to the middle and read the tattered safety instructions card. The airline magazine was equally shabby, otherwise all was well in the Sardine Express. Four babies were crying from different parts of the plane, just to make us feel at home. Things had altered since the Glorious Sixties when, loaded with gold for the Jack Leningrad organisation, we had travelled first class.
Getting up to thirty thousand feet, we flew over Birmingham, Peppercorn Cottage, Manchester and the Scottish Highlands. The pilot announced that we would cross the Atlantic along the fifty-eighth parallel, then go over Labrador and Quebec. Every trip I took for Moggerhanger got me thinking that I should make it my last. But a mere hint, and I would have been sent on one in which I was caught and put away for as long as would make no difference to his operations. Once you began working for him, in all stupidity and innocence, you kept on till he in his own pleasure stood you down. I began to wonder whether Bill Straw wasn’t his recruiting agent, who spun his likely tales to get candidates standing in line for a job. No doubt Moggerhanger’s psychologist told him that those couriers who believed in loyalty to friends were not the types to run off with the gold or money they had to carry. Even racketeers had a use for industrial relations experts, and you could always rely on someone like Dr Anderson to sell his advice.
I saw the cauliflower tops of cloud through the window, when the woman leaned forward to take something from her bag. Maybe the psychologist’s mathematical certainties fell to pieces when put to the test by flesh and blood. If every person is different, and they are, he can’t be right about all of us, because what if I went missing in Toronto and started out all over again under a new name, using the money in my bag? Would Moggerhanger send someone to cut Anderson’s throat? Or did Anderson protect himself with a rider at the end of each report saying that his conclusions were not guaranteed and he would not be held responsible if anything went wrong? A man like that was never without a good lawyer, which was a pity, since my possible desertion could not also be used as a way of settling old scores with him.
An indication of my disturbed state of mind was that I hadn’t so far shown an interest in the woman by my side. Perhaps it was because she seemed so ordinary, but a couple of hours on board Air Steerage induced me to take in her short dark hair and pale face, with a skin so translucent I fancied I could see traces of veins underneath. She had a small nose and dimpled chin, and a faint vertical line in the very middle of the lower and slightly protruding lip. I took this in from a few seconds of side view and from what I remembered when she had asked me to change seats, a disturbance which now seemed a waste, because she leaned against the window and was trying to sleep, one arm folded over her head.
Unsatisfied by her position, she woke up, and pouted at the racket of a screaming kid. It began to get dark, settling into a twilight that lasted most of the way over. I offered my hip flask: ‘Travelling’s not what it was.’
She had a few swigs, and I could see it going down, by the movement of her lovely throat. ‘What a wonderful idea, to travel with one of these.’
‘I always have.’ I felt her body touch mine as she settled back into her seat. ‘If I go by train I have a tea-making set. When I’m in the car I have a hamper from Selfridge’s as well as a tent and sleeping bag. I like to get my priorities right.’
‘You must do a lot of travelling.’
I nodded. ‘If I’m not on the move, I’m not living. I can’t stand not getting out of England every month or two. When I’m feeling ready to do myself in I go through what I call lifeboat drill — that is to say, escaping from the country at sensing that people are about to go around hanging such as me from lamp posts. Once, I cycled in a panic to the coast and got on a boat for France. Another time I hitch-hiked to Scotland. Sometimes I drive. Or I may go by air. Or I just pick up a rucksack and walk. Are you on holiday?’