Going to the front of his car, he saw the smashed headlamps, his scream of distress even waking the Indian waiters across the road. “Look at what the spiteful fucker’s done to my lights!”
“At least I stopped him slashing the tyres. He’d have done the spare one as well if I hadn’t.”
“I’ll murder the short-arsed bastard.” He jumped up and down. “Which way did you say he went?”
“I’m not too sure. My sight isn’t at its best in the morning.”
His eyes began to spin, and I thought such uncertainty served him right. “I’ll kick him to death at least when I get hold of him, wherever he is.” Edna came onto the pavement, features distorted from crying. “I’ve settled the bill, George.”
He opened the car door. “Thank you, my darling. You can be sure I’ll pay you back to the last penny, as soon as my ship comes in.”
I could hardly stop my cheeks twitching every time one of them opened their mouth.
“I know you will, George. But I only hope they don’t find the money’s gone before you do.”
I’d had enough. She had robbed the till. I didn’t want to know anymore, and luckily didn’t have to as they ripped away north in their brand new Rover. If the purloined money had paid for that as well did they have sufficient cash left to get the headlamps mended?
Willy was bound to be waiting for them on a lonely and curving stretch of the road, where they wouldn’t expect him to be, so I thought of phoning Independent Television and putting them onto the best programme ever. They could send a van and crew after George and Edna, with a microphone and photography crow’s-nest to record their doings in sound and picture, in bed and out, intercut with sensational background material from their past, not to mention profiles of their families. Ratings would clock a hundred, all other companies swept off the air.
Dismal had finished everything on the plates and whatever was on the floor, which included the half egg uppercutted from George’s jaws. He now stood on hind legs at the table, more from principle than hunger, unrolling his large flexible tongue to have a go at the sugar.
I turned south from Oswestry, the green hills of Wales lit by the sun as on a land of paradise. With Dismal again riding shotgun, I kept the speed down, to observe and enjoy. The fields were speckled with sheep, and their spritely offspring put me in mind of a meal.
At a hotel in the middle of a market town I was served with a platter of roast lamb, and a pint of superb Welsh bitter. All but a spoonful of my sickly trifle went to Dismal. Half a dozen youngish men, heads shaved and with moustaches, gathered near the bar after their lunch at a long table. Perhaps they were salesmen, though Dismal sniffed around their turn ups as if they peddled drugs. A slightly older man, taking cigar smoke deeply in as he talked to the others, looked happier when I called Dismal away, as if he thought we might be coppers’ narks.
My last trip to Peppercorn Cottage had been in rain and darkness, piloting Moggerhanger’s Rolls, and only sustained navigational know-how had got me on target. Now it was daylight and good weather, yet the place still wasn’t easy to find, since I was approaching from a different direction.
Nevertheless, instinct took over, and on a narrow road south of the town I picked up recognisable landmarks, a grey stone farmhouse, a wood, a phone box, and a steep dip over a stream. At the top of a hill I forked onto a bridleway, two strips of concrete, tall fresh grass in between brushing the bottom of the car. Space by an uninhabited house was large enough for me to point the snout back to the paved road, necessary because driving to the door of Peppercorn Cottage could get me stuck in a muddy patch by the stream.
Ordering Dismal to stay close, I opened the gate across the lane, clattered it shut behind and, luger in one hand and air pistol primed in the other, I walked by the hedgerow so as to be invisible to anyone keeping a lookout.
During our walk down the more or less straight lane for about a kilometre, grey clouds let fall drops of water, as if to repeat the foul weather of my first visit. Dismal, hating wetness of any sort, looked forlornly back to the all-round comfort of the car, but I gave a stern gaze and waved him on. A slug from my air pistol missed a fat wood pigeon that lifted in front as we came to the stream, the shower pattering its flowing surface which provided drinking water for cooking and cleaning.
The house, if such it could be called, was built from local stone, and weathered by several hundred years of rain, not to mention rotting autumn leaves that never dried. It was so concealed against a bank just off the lane that even a happy hiker trudging along the bridlepath would pass without knowing it was there. I’d used the place and its glum surroundings in the novel I had dashed off for Blaskin that won him the Windrush Prize.
A whiff of smoke came out of the chimney, and between house and stream was a collapsed deckchair with torn canvas, bits of dinner plate, and a couple of rusty tins. Bending low under the windows to reach the door unobserved, I took the key from my pocket, only to find the lock already hanging from its screws, telling that somebody was in the house.
My boot hit the wood, and Dismal’s leap reminded me he’d once worked for the police. Moggerhanger’s daughter Polly had gone out with a detective so that her father could get gen on attitudes to drugs in the Force, and to sound him out for collaboration, and on her cooing over Dismal and patting him on the arse, the tec made her a present of him, saying he was useless anyway. Polly had soon tired of my favourite dog, and by a chain of circumstances he had come down to me.
No one was in the kitchen-living room which, since my last stay, looked as if Moggerhanger had spent a bit to make it more habitable, on the assumption I supposed that no matter how fearless his minions were on the streets of London they couldn’t be expected to put up with a solitude that reminded them too much of durance vile.
Whoever had been there lately couldn’t have been very tidy, because several fag ends were littered around the fireplace. A pair of smouldering socks with the toes burnt away hung from a piece of stick.
The main improvement to the house was that electricity had been put in, a welcome change to storm lamps and candles. The walls of the room had been plastered and painted white, giving a more civilised aspect as opposed to the previous raw surface, and a butane gas bottle for cooking stood by the sink. Also a telephone had been installed, and I wondered whether whoever had snapped off the lock had passed a long day making calls to his seven brothers in different sheep-shagging stations of the Australian Outback, in which case Moggerhanger would have kittens when it came to paying the bill.
Flicking the light switch, necessary even on a sunny day, a prime and corpulent rat gleamed at me contemptuously before pattering upstairs. Such feral tenants, smart as they were, could hardly have forced the lock, or made a fire still alive in the grate. More likely the house had been broken into by the crew of the black hatchback, either last night or this morning and, looking in, they had seen I wasn’t there, so went to search somewhere else.
I walked up the lane to the car, soaked by rain, in spite of my three hundred quid Burberry, and drove it down to the side of the house for unloading supplies. I noticed the waterbutt overflowing, so jagged a length of stick up the pipe, till liberated water gushed over the slimy cobbles into the stream where it belonged.
All stores stowed, Dismal’s tongue hung out at the sight of three spoons going into the pot. I made tea and, on throwing him a couple of cakes, heard a long human yawn from upstairs, and the thump of somebody’s feet as he got out of bed. I had been careless in not searching every room, but the house had felt empty, and no car had been parked nearby.