If the Green Toe Gang did know of Moggerhanger’s hideout at Peppercorn Cottage (and I was sure they did) they would have realised on losing me that I was heading in that direction, so I changed my mind about getting there by nightfall, since some of the gang might already be in residence and waiting for my arrival. I was beyond Tamworth by the time this thought hit me, showing how empty the brain can become while driving, though it had been necessary to treat the road with caution, with occasional young bloods shooting by at over a hundred.
Where he came from I’ll never know, but the black hatchback was behind me again. Nor was I sure how long he had been. Maybe it wasn’t the same one as before, but part of a radio controlled screen spread across the Midlands to keep track and relay my progress back to headquarters, meanwhile passing me from one to the other and pissing themselves at my inability to lose them.
South of Lichfield I turned off for the middle of Birmingham. The one on my tail followed, of course, as I kept to the minor road through Sutton Coldfield and went on to the centre of the connurbation, Dismal nodding at my wisdom and cunning. Overtakers on a bit of motorway risked their necks, and sometimes mine, in trying to find out whether or not he was really made of rubber. Dismal was doing the part so well he must have seen such a dog in another car, and was now trying to imitate it.
A ring road strangulated the small centre of Birmingham, a Ben Hur racing track of about three miles. I knew it from driving Frances to a medical conference, her hotel right in the tight knot of the middle. I couldn’t find out how to get into it, and lost count of the times I had to slog around the circuit, but chuffed at having got there at last. “After more swearing than Uncle Toby ever did in Flanders,” she had said, disliking my curses. “I don’t know who this Uncle Toby was,” I said, “but he’d have cursed more blind than me if he’d had to find this place.” Anyway, she was not ungrateful when I finally pulled up at the hotel.
I knew the system better now, but still did the round several times to make sure the hatchback stayed behind. It did. He was lulled. I noted each set of traffic lights, and supposed that sooner or later the glow would be on green for me, and red for my pursuer. Then I’d lose him.
It took time to do each lap, since the evening rush hour seemed to start in the afternoon, but this was good because now and again I put another car behind me, so nippy was I with the Picaro, though the hatchback driver stuck to me like you-know-what to a blanket, and resumed his place.
I led him on what might be called a dance, and enjoyed it. Why was he chasing me? To kill me? Wait to get me on a remote lane and let me have a bullet in the head? I thought not. They were after Moggerhanger, and since Greece assumed that every motor trip I did was on his business. Now they were tracking me to find out not only where I was going but what load I would pick up, so as to get their hands on it and, at the same time, put the kibosh on me.
Not if I knew it. I was in my element. I clipped a red light, and the hatchback had to stay behind. I ignored the next left turn into the middle, but took the one after, soon out and unfollowed to the far side of the ring road. In a few minutes I was belting through the urban jungle of Smethwick.
It was immaterial where I went. In fact I got enjoyably lost till I came to Tipton, and though a right tip it looked, the smell of smoke and curry made me salivate. In Wolverhampton I picked up the A41 and headed north. No more hatchback.
By half past six, after a few stops for Dismal to do what a dog had to do, and knowing that all I needed to do was eat and sleep, I decided to get bed and breakfast at a small town called Blackchapel. I walked into a pub-hotel with Dismal on his lead, telling the woman behind the bar that I wanted a room for me and my dog.
Her features screwed up, as if he’d had already done a good job by her feet and she’d been told to carry it away. I calmed her anxiety. “He’s house trained. You don’t need to worry about him on that score.”
“It’s fourteen pounds bed and breakfast, per person,” she said. “I can’t think what to charge for the dog.”
“You’d better make it the same. He’ll eat at least one breakfast.”
She smiled, as I peeled off six fivers and told her to keep the change. “He looks a lovely dog, though. Is he yours?”
“I didn’t kidnap him.”
“That’d take some doing, a big thing like that.”
The room, with two single beds, overlooked the high street, and Dismal, who to my knowledge hadn’t been in a hotel before, was finding it full of marvels, plodding around the bathroom, sniffing under each bed, and finally banging his weighty tail against the wardrobe door until, looking as tired as I was, though he’d done nothing to reach that state, stretched on one of the beds with a sigh and a yawn, while I lay for an hour on the other, knackered after my first day on the run, well pleased at my success in having survived this far.
Dismal’s body resembled a relief model of the Malvern Hills, an occasional ripple along his backbone hinting of their long dead volcanic disturbance, though I knew it to be due to canine subterranean dreams. Having chosen the bed nearest the door, he would be shot first should anyone come into the room, his body forming a sufficient barricade for me to put in the second round and make my getaway.
I washed, and took man’s best friend down to the bar for another pint of Dandelion and Burdock (or its equivalent) with a jar of the best bitter for me. A couple of locals at the counter, and a few at the tables close to mine, looked on Dismal slopping his favourite drink from the dog bowl. When he finished he laid his jaw-block onto my knees, and knowing what he meant, I took him to the gents in the backyard for what I needed as well.
Blackchapel was quiet when we walked out to find a place for supper, except for a dozen women demonstrating with placards outside the public library saying: ‘Save our hospital’ and ‘No to the cuts’—a common sight in Thatcher’s Britain, or maybe it was only modern times, and people would soon be buying first aid kits and DIY surgery tools to operate on each other in the living room.
A few youths looked on, as if they were, understandably, intending to rip up a few urinals and telephone boxes after the women had gone home. We came back almost to the hotel, and found an Indian restaurant across the road. Dismal didn’t have to be dragged in, because he loved curry, and with his penchant for beer he would have made a typical football hooligan. An appropriate scarf, and he would have been away.
As it was, the waiters didn’t like the look of him, and I couldn’t blame them, but when I ordered a full meal for him as well as for myself, and told them to lay his by my chair, they did so willingly enough. The only other people in the place was a couple at the next table, the well-built man about fifty and the slender rather bony woman in her late thirties. “Nice animal you’ve got there.” He was just audible above the crackle of Dismal’s poppadoms.
“He is,” I said, “and he’s as human as if he’s my brother. Do you live in this town?”
“Good God, no. We’re on our way to North Wales. Going for a little holiday, aren’t we, pet?”
“If you say so, George.” She didn’t seem to like the prospect, and fingered the multicoloured beads across her chest. “I still don’t know whether we’ve done the right thing.”
“What right thing was that?” I asked the man.
She turned her fully soured face onto me. “That’s it, ask him, you just ask him. Happen he’ll be able to tell you.”
“You did want to come away, Edna, you know you did,” George said to her. “You can’t say you didn’t.”
“I know I did.” She was uncertain, and peevish. “I can’t go back now, though, can I? Willy’s already home from work.”