If Bill Straw, who I regarded as the most sensible bloke I knew, had volunteered to give a helping hand, it hadn’t been for gain, or a desire to practise his profession, but merely to have a bit of fun at the shoot-out, and then vanish into the countryside in order to test his ability at getting back to base undetected. Once a Sherwood Forester, always a Sherwood Forester. To Bill Straw, crime was the logical extension of an orienteering exercise, and in that sense I looked on him as being the typical Englishman — one also to whom the notion of class had no meaning.
Such reflections were too late. I was in it up to my neck. Even if I abandoned the Roller and made off with Dismal I’d be a marked man. The clock said it was a minute to nine, and I was on the left hand side of the road facing north, as instructed. A cloud of gnats danced above an elderberry bush. A sparrow flew over a patch of fully flowered nettles.
I was drowsy, so Dismal yawned. The western sky was pink high up and red below. Half a minute went by. I was roused by a car coming towards me with all lights on, swaying on its way south. Cottapilly with bulging eyes was at the wheel of car B, Toffeebottle and Pindarry in the back, poised to make the frontal assault. They were late, hence the hurry. Where the hell had they been? Kenny Dukes and Jericho Jim should already be out of Snowdrop Wood and approaching the farm, to take it from the rear — unsupported, unless they too were late. ‘It doesn’t bode well,’ I said to Dismal, who was asleep.
It would be futile to go back step by step and find out how I got into such a situation. Far better, I decided, to prepare the Roller to expect the load shortly to be thrown into it. I got out and opened the boot, and stood smoking another cigar. Since Moggerhanger would be lucky to see the car again, I saw no point in stinting myself. Dismal thrashed about the hedge after rabbits and partridges, maybe hoping for a fox. The time was five minutes past nine. The assault on Buckshot Farm should have been finished, in theory.
The light was dim enough to warrant the hazard blinkers on. They made the car more conspicuous than I would have liked, but in case the lads had difficulty locating me in the gloaming they would serve as navigation beacons. I fancied I heard a series of light cracks from the south, and my guts iced up at the notion of deadly Two-two going into action. The flatter echo of shotguns may have been from a party of farmer’s men after rabbits for the pot. I’d heard such sounds frequently on a summer’s evening from the open windows of Upper Mayhem.
At nine fifteen I began to worry, though not unduly. If Bill Straw had been in my place he would probably have had the stove out, calmly brewing a can of tea, as befitted an ex-Sherwood Forester, and be lying on his groundsheet scanning chapter one of a Sidney Blood novel. Ten minutes later he would blow out his stub of candle and turn in till midnight, when he would wake up, mash tea again, fold his bivvy, and steal off into the night to do twenty miles across country by dawn, before hot-wiring a car at a service station and melting into London by daylight.
I got Dismal back in the car and shut the door, settling him down with a blanket underneath and one on top. A possible future development would have been to have the stuff loaded, but with Dismal playing hard to get, me giving chase over six fields and becoming more and more exhausted as every horizon scintillated with the flashing blue lights of cop cars.
I was reading the clock by the minute. Either there was so much loot that they needed more time to load than had been anticipated (though with four such beefy bastards I didn’t see how this could be) or the attack had failed and, with one dead, two wounded, one prisoner and one missing (but being hunted for) they had conceded defeat and the venture was off as they beat a retreat to a late supper at Watford Gap cafeteria. If so, how would I know? And if I couldn’t know, how long should I wait?
By twenty past nine I considered going south to reconnoitre, yet such a move would be foolhardy, because no doubt as soon as I set off, car B would pass me, and wouldn’t find me in position to transfer the goods. Confucius might say that flexibility furthered, but in that case it would only confuse us. The cigar began to taste like shit. To take my mind off matters, I mulled on my encounter with Frances Malham, less than a week ago, but it seemed ten years. If I came out of this lunatic expedition in one piece, or even two, I would find her, and renew our acquaintance. Her face haunted the darkening air and lifted me so much out of anxiety that I hardly noticed a pick-up truck coming towards me, a rainbow light flashing from above the cab. It stopped a yard behind the Roller.
Kenny Dukes, hair matted with blood, jumped out shouting: ‘You’ve had it easy, haven’t you, mate?’ He wanted to kill me for it.
Parkhurst slid off the back. He had bruises on his face and a sleeve of his jacket torn away. Toffeebottle came out of the other side and banged into the cab door, unable to see with his closed left eye.
Twenty-Five
‘What happened?’
Parkhurst threw the first parcel across. ‘Complete success.’
‘They broke me fingers,’ Toffeebottle moaned, who nevertheless was able to play pass-the-parcel with the rest of us, during which five minutes I gathered that Kenny Dukes and Jericho Jim had come out of Snowdrop Wood on time, but hearing no roar from car B shooting along the lane to the front of Buckshot Farm, lay concealed in dead ground, spitting tacks with impatience. Parkhurst, who had debussed them half an hour before, instead of stationing himself at the junction as he’d been told, watched for car B driving up to the farm, and then followed it along in case they needed him as a reinforcement. It was as well that he did. That bit of flexible thinking proved him a true son of Moggerhanger. Both cars were spotted as they came up the lane. A shotgun appeared at an upstairs window, but Moggerhanger’s stalwarts zig-zagged in lizard fashion up to the house and reached the door unhurt.
At such a racket Kenny Dukes and Jericho Jim threw down their fags and slid in by a back door to do their stuff. They disarmed two men who had shotguns, but there were more members of the Green Toe Gang than had been expected, and a struggle took place. The first thing Parkhurst did when he came in was clip the telephone cable, then knee one of the blokes who reached for a walkie-talkie. He hurled the radio out of the window, atmospherics crackling in the evening air. There was fighting all over the house, and a Green Toe bloke who got outside threw a match in the petrol tank of the Jaguar, which blew up. The second car was also damaged, but not so seriously that they couldn’t use it. ‘I’ve known worse cock-ups, let me tell you,’ said Parkhurst.
A cold breeze wafted over the hedge. The drivers of the few passing cars must have chuckled at the thought of a broken-down Rolls-Royce. The flashing light of the pickup truck was a godsend, though we were lucky that the local cop car didn’t stop on its nightly trundle and ask if we were all right, though maybe Lanthorn had told them to stay longer at their tea and darts that night.
Parkhurst slammed the boot and gave a loud laugh suggesting that, in his element, he had come back to life. ‘Take it away, Michael, all three million. Or is it four? Don’t hit a petrol tanker head on, or fall asleep at the wheel, or get it on a boat for Spain, either. God wouldn’t like it.’
‘He’d get his wrist slapped for a thing like that,’ Toffeebottle laughed, still hugging his fingers.