“‘I left it by the Austin.”
‘He laughed: “I hope you haven’t seen the last of it. Ask Johnny Spode.” Johnny had vanished, and never came back. I found my coat stuffed under a bush, the money ripped out, so that I was practically penniless once more. If I had suddenly been able to get my hands on the thieving bastard I’d have choked the shit out of him. It’s all right robbing the rich, but when one working bloke robs another it makes high treason look like a parking offence. I was reduced to washing up in cafés, which kept me so broke that a fortnight later I went to the garage in Bermondsey to see if they needed another car. I’d have sold them a Rolls-Royce for twenty quid if they’d said yes, but the place was derelict and boarded up, so I’d only wasted my bus fare.
‘To deaden the long drag back I bought a newspaper, sat up front on the top deck to get the feel of being on my own while I read it. At one piece of news my head rattled. I pulled the paper on to my knee before I could fix it firm enough for reading, not knowing whether to laugh or get off the bus and run for my life in case the coppers had already got the hint to come after me. Johnny Spode had been charged with trying to pass false fivers at a pub in the East End, and I knew of course they could only be those Claud Moggerhanger had given me for the stolen Jaguar, and that I’d stitched into a secret pocket of my working jacket, and that Johnny had nicked from me. He’d been remanded in custody, which meant they were trying to make him squeal where he’d got them, I hoped it was the last of the bunch they’d found him with, for then he might argue his way out of it by saying some toff whose name he couldn’t remember and whose face was covered with smallpox had given it him for cleaning his car. In which case it could be I was in no danger at all.
‘I didn’t believe it, not on your life. It was better to be on the safe side, and flee. I got to my room and packed my small case, then spent my last few bob on a packet of fags and a bus ride to the south-west. This only took me twelve miles but soon I got a lift in a car going to Salisbury, which was lucky for it was starting to rain. My exhaustion, my downhearted ruin seemed certain and complete. My only need was sleep, but the chap driving wanted to know why I was heading for Salisbury.
‘“Going to see the Cathedral?” he asked, “or have you got friends there? Myself, I’m off to Dorchester, to look at a house I’m hoping to buy. What’s your work?”
‘I told him I was a gardener who’d heard there was work at Salisbury, and so I was on my way to find it. I didn’t spin any hard-luck yarn, though when he set me down in the middle of the town he opened his wallet and gave me ten bob. My thanks were never more sincere, at that time, and maybe it was an omen of good luck, because I stayed two years in Salisbury. Nobody bothered me during all that while, and I was known by a few people well, and many people slightly, and they saw me only as a quiet person who’d come down from the North. I gave out that I had worked as a miner since I was fourteen but that now, nearly twenty years later, having been menaced by a soot-kiss of silicosis, I had to get out of such drudgery. What’s more, my widowed mother had died, and being the only child of an only child, there was nothing in the line of duty to keep me in the North Pole of Nottinghamshire.
‘I worked as a van driver and odd-job man for a market gardener, so that I was soon seen to be getting my health back, much to everyone’s touching concern. I lodged with a widow who had a moonshine face, and who (so it was said to me later in the pub) had been married for a fortnight fifteen years ago to a man gone into the Merchant Navy at the beginning of the war. Before the end of it he had just vanished, so after a while I shared her bed at night because, believe me, there was still a lovely amount of juice in her.
‘But one morning, for no other reason than waking up with a headache (or it may have been stomach ache, I forget, and in any case, it doesn’t matter which it was) I kissed her goodbye as I always did on going to work, and came back an hour later when I knew she’d be out shopping. I had forty quid put by, as well as a watch and a small radio, and with my suitcase and overcoat I walked to the station and took the mile-a-minute train to London. I wondered whether I hadn’t done the wrong thing when I saw the desert of Surbiton out of the window, but stepping from the train at Waterloo, I walked along the Thames to Hungerford Bridge through the air of summer dust and smoke that made me shout with happiness. I crossed the footbridge, sweating over my case, though it wasn’t that heavy, and stood looking at the green water oiling its way against the supports below, and passenger boats loaded with people setting off downstream for Greenwich. The line of the shore pressed itself into me, and I was disturbed from looking at it by the whole bridge shuddering as a train punched out of Charing Cross. I was so happy I dropped a shilling in an old man’s cap who was playing a tin whistle. The city seemed made for me, a land of treasure I’d never felt so close to before.
‘When you feel like this on coming to town there’s only one sort of life you can lead, and that is a life of crime. I own up to it Knocking around Soho I heard of a garage that took stolen cars, and I lost no time in selling a few I found by the roadside — usually cars of the medium-expensive kind — and this time I got a better price for them, I might tell you. As is only right and proper, one thing led to another, and I began to help in robberies, usually as the driver of a getaway car. In this I was expert because I’d studied the map and was familiar with much of London. I could do a zig-zag course with such speed and skill that I’d throw anybody off the scent. To bring my story right up to press I was one of the four who did a job that netted eight thousand pounds. The trouble was that I got caught, while the others didn’t. We were getting away, but the cops were closing in because we had a radio with their wave length on it and could hear them yapping to each other. So I let the others out, and set off towards Croydon on my own. I was nabbed, and the beak gave me five years. I’ve just finished four of them, and got out yesterday, heading for London now so that I can claim my two thousand pounds. Don’t tell me it’s hopeless and that I won’t find it, because I know I will. I could have got off with a lot less than five years if I’d given the other three away and put the police on the trail of the loot, but I didn’t. I held out and said I’d done nothing except steal sixty-two cars, and finally that was all they could get me for.’
The end of Bill Straw’s story brought us north of Biggies wade. Rain was coming through the roof, and the South wasn’t living up to its promise. With so much damage done to the car, I was driving on borrowed time. Both of us felt it. The engine was coughing like a man in the last stages of TB and it was Bill Straw’s opinion that, as the car seemed to need not only a new body but also a new engine, I might be wise after all to abandon ship and leave it by the roadside to rot. ‘It doesn’t sound good,’ he said, ‘so you might as well cut your losses. Anyway, let’s have our dinner and give it time to cool down. A bag of damp hay might encourage it. Do it the world of good, and we’d benefit by something to eat as well — at least I would. Can’t seem to live on fags like you do.’
‘You’re always on about food,’ I told him, ‘when you’re not running down my car, or boasting about your past exploits.’
‘You should feel privileged,’ he said, ‘to be driving me to London. I’ll be a rich man when I get there, and then I’ll pay you back tenfold for all you might still spend on me.’ I had a strange feeling when he said this, not at all distrustful of him, as if he really might turn up in the future and demonstrate some blinding shaft of truth out of all the lies he’d been telling.