‘Oz,’ said Prim, as the ring road round the city merged with the AlM, ‘where exactly are we going? And do we have to get there in one go?’
She was right. I was just driving, with no clear game plan. ‘I guess we’re heading for Dover,’ I said. ‘I just want to get out of this country. Ross must have worked out what we’ve done by this time. Even if he didn’t hassle Jan, by this time he’ll know who she is. We’ve got to assume he’s traced her car number through the police computer.’
‘What if he has? What can he do about it? Will he have us stopped at the ferry?’
‘Hardly. He can’t involve anyone else in this or he’s in trouble. I guess he’ll come after us.’
‘And when he finds us?’ I wouldn’t say that she sounded apprehensive, she never does. But the question was tentative, no doubt about it.
‘Remember Willie Kane?’ She nodded, getting my drift.
‘Could he get ahead of us? Could he beat us to Dover?’
I thought about it. We’d wasted some time at Ali’s, and if Ross had been able to do a quick PNC check, then … My musing was interrupted by the warbling of my mobile on the back seat. Even though I was driving, I jumped. Prim looked at me. I nodded to her. ‘Answer it.’
She reached round, picking up the phone and pressed the receive button. ‘Yes?’ she said gruffly, disguising her voice, rather pointlessly I thought. Then her face lit up with relief. ‘It’s you, Jan! Are you okay?’ She paused, listening. Suddenly she laughed. ‘Serves him right. It was good of you to think of calling.
‘Where are we?’ She looked out of the window. ‘Just passing Durham, I think. On our way to Dover, Oz says.
‘Yes; of course. We’ll try to keep in touch.’ She pressed the cut-off button and put the phone on her lap.
‘She’s okay,’ she said, sounding as relieved as I was. ‘Apparently he didn’t get alongside her until red traffic lights at Meadowbank. When he looked across, she just pulled the hood down and glared at him. She said she thought he would burst.
‘He signalled her to pull over and she did, because there were plenty of people around. He asked her who she was and she told him. Then she asked him what he meant by this. He spun her a story about you being under police observation on suspicion of theft. She said that was rubbish. She said your father was a dentist, as if that would help!
‘She told him that you were out of town and that you’d lent her your car since hers was being repaired. Then she got stroppy with him and asked to see his warrant card. That was enough. He said, “Sorry to have troubled you, Miss,” and buggered off.’
I winced. ‘Thank Christ she’s okay. I doubt if Ross’ll give her any more trouble. Still, he has her name. That means he’ll have all the rest of it by now.’
I looked at the clock on the dashboard. If it was accurate, it was twenty to ten.
‘Tell you what,’ I said. ‘Why don’t we stop for the night? Ross might not be able to catch us before we reach Dover, but he could get there before the ferry sailed.’
‘Couldn’t we take the Chunnel?’
I made a face. ‘I hate Chunnels. Anyway, the same thing could happen there. No, here’s my suggestion. We stop now for the night. Tomorrow we drive to Portsmouth and take a ferry to Brittany. Then we head across France and surprise my big sister. She and her man live near the Swiss border.
‘If Ross is following us, he’s bound to head for Dover, then for Geneva and Berners Bank, just as fast as he can. Let him. If we don’t go there ourselves until next Thursday, maybe, by that time, he’ll have decided we’re not coming.’
‘Some chance of that!’ I thought.
‘Some chance of that!’ Prim said. ‘But yes, I’ll buy that idea. We might as well travel in comfort. Let Ross do the chasing!’
We turned off at Darlington, but as an added precaution, we decided not to stop in one of the hotels in town. Instead we headed for the outskirts, until we came upon a place not big enough to call itself a village, appropriately named Middleton-One-Row. It was big enough to have a nice roadside inn, the kind that’s always popular with reps. There was one room left, twin-bedded. I looked at Prim, questioningly. She nodded, so I booked us in. The owner was a cheerful chap, and his chef did a remarkably good salmon en croute, even at that time of night. Afterwards, we had a couple of pints with our host. His name was Peter and he seemed glad of the company, but at a quarter to midnight, we said goodnight and left him to close up.
Our room was nicely furnished, with a real en suite bathroom, not one of those partitioned-off jobs in the corner, the kind in which you try to pee quietly so your partner won’t hear.
We lay side by side on our twin beds, each of us staring up at the ceiling. ‘My brain’s still travelling at 100 miles an hour,’ said Prim. ‘What a day this has been! Pure mayhem!’
I propped myself up on an elbow and gazed across at her. ‘Do you have any other kind? It occurs to me that since I met you, my feet have hardly touched the ground.’
‘I don’t know about that,’ she said, pushing herself off her divan and coming to join me on mine, ‘but I do know that this will be the fourth different bed that I’ve slept in in the last five nights.’
I thought about that one, reached behind her, under her shirt, and unclipped her bra, one-handed. ‘True. It’s a bit like the Grand Prix circuit, isn’t it. D’you think we should start giving them marks out of ten?’
She unzipped me and eased her hand inside my jeans. There wasn’t much room in there any more. ‘Not them, Osbert,’ she whispered ‘Us. I reckon it’s time for a test drive.’ She leaned over me, pinning me down, and kissed me, disengaging herself with difficulty from my Levis, and going to work on the buckle of my belt.
‘There is one thing, though,’ she said, as I began to ease her out of her clothes. ‘I’ve been off the pill for two years, and being a nurse, I know about cycles. Right now, if you even point that thing at me, I could get pregnant. So I hope that with all these propositions you’ve been throwing at me, you’re carrying a supply.’
My face fell, just a second before hers. ‘Christ,’ she laughed. ‘Nineties man!’
‘Meets Sixties woman!’ I retorted.
We lay there, half-undressed, shaking our heads and laughing, until Prim jumped up, half out of her tights, and hopped back across to her bed. She was almost there when I had a brainwave.
‘Hold on, this is a reps’ hotel. The Gents is bound to have a slot machine.’
We rifled through our change until we found four pound coins. Silently, I padded downstairs to the gents’ toilet off the hallway. My heart rose as I saw the machine on the wall. It fell again, just as quickly.
Peter’s is a popular hotel with reps; but just as popular, it seems, are the reps who use it. The machine was in perfect working order. It was also perfectly empty.
In which we plan to score high marks on the high seas but end up cast adrift
‘I wonder where Ricky Ross is waking up,’ Prim said, as she stretched luxuriously, arching her back and squeezing the last of the sleep out of her body. She’s the best str-e-e-e-e-tcher I’ve ever seen. When she does it she looks like a lioness, with her blonde mane and her golden skin.
‘I hope the bastard’s been driving all right,’ I said, ‘and that right about now he drops off to sleep at the wheel and totals himself.’ I really meant it, and it must have sounded that way too, for Prim looked at me in surprise.
‘If only life was that simple,’ she said. She propped herself up on an elbow and grinned across at me. ‘What’s the game plan for today, lover-boy? Want to look around the shops this morning before we head south. Like Boots, maybe?’
‘I could nip out now, if you like,’ I said, experimentally.
She snorted. ‘The Grant Prix circuit’s closed. What time’s breakfast?’ I looked at my watch. It was almost quarter past nine.
‘We’ve got about fifteen minutes to get down there.’