With such a zig-zag route, he was as good as his word, and in half an hour we were through Stafford and heading for Ashbourne. A large tanker carrying industrial sand, with the logo of a camel above its number plate, slowed us down for a while, and I only got by after it turned off. In Matlock Town Bill insisted we stop for coffee and a plate of chocolate cake.
Under his impeccable guidance I drove in a numbed state, enjoying the scenery, and hardly knowing where I was till we went up the high hills into Tibshelf and the familiar smell of domestic coal smoke. Bill directed me over the motorway. “Are you sure this is the best way?” I asked.
“Of course I am. Navigating’s my favourite pastime. It’s in my blood. We’ll go through Worksop, and join the main road later. As Moggerhanger said, we needn’t get there till six. So just keep making easting. I’ll tell you when to edge north, and get us there home and dry.” Back in the rural landscape he went on: “Travelling like this always reminds me of finding ways through narrow lanes in Normandy. I was good at it, except I once got behind the line without realising. Saw a German officer by a staff car looking at his maps. I did the quickest three-point turn in my life, bullets flying all over the place. One of our chaps was wounded in the arm, and you should have heard the swearing when he realised it wasn’t a Blighty one. I got the four of us out of it, but the Colonel bollocked me no end. It was one of the many occasions when I nearly lost my stripes.”
I wanted him to admit we were lost, but he didn’t, because we weren’t. He got us around Mansfield and through Clipstone village. “We’re back in Robin Hood country,” he said, “so watch out for arrows. Robin will rob us blind, if he catches us, though we’ll stop for a cup of coffee and a couple of Swiss puddings at the Major Oak car park.”
“Which way now?” I said afterwards.
“Do a left at Edwinstowe, and we’re dead set to get into Worksop by a minor road. I want a quick shufti at Slaughterhouse Yand, where I was born. We got thrown out of there and went to live in Gasometer Lane, and then to Foundry Buildings. It was downhill all the way to the Whiteout Back-to-Backs at Christmas.”
We drove for twenty minutes and couldn’t find any such places. “They knocked them down,” he said, “and put up all these ticky-tacky houses in their places. But we had fine old times around here as kids, Michael. The things we did, to make a penny or two.” He laughed at the windscreen till it was so misty he had to wipe it clean with his sleeve. “At Christmas we’d go in Sherwood Forest and cut bundles of mistletoe from the oak trees, then tie it into sprigs and sell them at threepence each to the miners. I nearly got caught by a gamekeeper once, but he couldn’t run as fast as me, because as far as physical conditioning went I had the best upbringing of anybody. Right from when I could walk I was traipsing miles, shinning up walls, climbing trees, running away from the police, swimming in the canal and ponds. Woods didn’t frighten us. We followed any footpath and jumped all the streams, and never got lost. In the town we knew so many twitchells and double entries and cul de sacs we could out-track a bobby in half a minute. Kids don’t walk anymore. Their parents drive them everywhere in case they get raped or mugged or kidnapped, but there’s no more danger now than when we was kids. It’s only the telly and the social workers who say there is, and they only tell them because they want to keep their jobs. But we walked miles, everywhere. And when I lied about my age and got into the army at sixteen the training was nothing to me. They threw us into Normandy after a month or two, and I loved it, because I had a gun as well. I’d been doing most of the stuff they called training since I was born. By the way, you’d better turn round here and go back down the main street. Fork left at the end. I don’t want to see anymore of this awful ash pit.”
I did as I was told, steering out of town and onto a byway towards Doncaster, passing all the dying pit villages. By five we’d done the Great North Road and were through Ripon, Bill routing me on lanes so narrow it was sometimes hard to do the turnings. High moors were scored with grey walls and in places speckled with sheep. We were closing in, Yorkshire living up to its name, with black clouds piling up in the west.
I pointed out Spleen Manor halfway up a hill. Ground floor windows looked over a terrace, and down to various levels of garden. The Rolls and horsebox were visible in the forecourt, with a more ordinary car by its side. Binoculars showed a large hole in one of the French windows. “He’s a tidy man,” Bill said, “and would never tolerate that. A squatter didn’t get in, either, because the Roller’s still there. Let’s look at the other side.”
I drove along the road and stopped where a track curved up to the house. The gate was open, which Moggerhanger always insisted should be closed. “Somebody’s with him,” Bill said. “But it’s a badly situated house. It’s facing the wrong way, and doesn’t have sufficient field of fire.” He pulled Dismal out of the car. “We’ll make it a two-way operation, and go up on foot.” He tapped his pocket. “Take your gun, as well. You never know what you’ll find.”
“If Moggerhanger saw me with it he’d think I’d gone bonkers.” After Bill and Dismal had gone into the bushes to play soldiers I cruised up the gravelled drive thinking of the good time I’d had with Alice Whipplegate, after a festive supper at which Moggerhanger and Chief Inspector Lanthorn shared the profits from a big consignment of drugs.
I heard no satisfying belly laughter this time to signify that anyone was in residence. The front door was locked solid, so an ambush wasn’t planned from that direction. I resisted the bell, pulled my hand away, and trod quietly in a clockwise direction to the back of the house.
I looked in at a pair of the best mock Chippendales smashed and thrown into the otherwise empty fireplace. Handsome Staffordshire pot dogs on the shelf had lost their heads, while a glass fronted cupboard of good china, pulled onto its face, was no longer priceless. A row of racing almanacks made stepping stones across the room to a vase from some nonexistent Chinese dynasty, which must have been treated to a symphony of hammers and cold chisels. The enormous painting of Landseer’s ‘Stag at Bay’ was wrapped around a lamp standard. Such a spectacle of spoiled bourgeois elegance told me there must have been an argument.
Moggerhanger, well back in an armchair like a rag effigy that had been thrown there, wasn’t seeing anything, his pig-white face streaked with blood down the other side.
Alice lay on the leather settee, mouth wide open, and she wasn’t saying anything, either. Inside, treading over glass and empty booze bottles, I heard her snoring. She had been put out by drugs, or was blind drunk, though I had never known her to indulge to that extent.
Moggerhanger’s groan didn’t soften my heart towards him, though such a noise was uncharacteristic, likewise the pitiful state he was in. I had only ever seen him ebullient and well groomed, always on top of his day, but how the mighty was fallen now that he had only too apparently been gone over in a way I had always hoped to see, though feeling narked that someone had got in before me.
My impulse was to step quietly out and not become involved in whatever had occurred, for it had nothing to do with me. Yet I hesitated out of human feeling — another failing of mine — at the sight of two people who had been so wickedly dealt with, though it was Alice who decided me on staying.
I knelt by the settee and, after a few gentle smacks at her face, she opened her lovely brown eyes and gave a very crosschecked smile. Then she fell back into the senseless land of overpowering sleep. Knowing she wouldn’t come out of it for a while I turned to Moggerhanger, whose hands were cold, mostly from shock at the fact that someone could still do him physical injury. The blood on his face wasn’t from a serious wound, the prick of a knife blade perhaps, and the nail of a knobkerrie that had caught him on the temple. Nevertheless, his blackening raw eye told me he’d taken quite a pasting. His words slewed out: “Why did you take so long?”