The car did not stop, but in the quiet isolation of its interior the incident was remarked upon by the three men and a woman who occupied it.
The driver said: “Stupid sod!”
His companion in the front passenger seat, who had a pale, no longer young, yet healthy face, with a touch of saintliness in its good looks which might have proclaimed a successful faith healer, said: “I don’t think it was very clever of you, Robert, to flush that particular bird. It had a helmet on, old boy.”
“Only to begin with,” observed the man behind them after making a rearward review. “He seems to be wearing a very loose turban at the moment.”
The girl also had been looking through the back window. She leaned forward and grabbed the shoulder of the saintly one. Her face was urgent, ecstatic. “Christ, Clive! He was! He bloody was! Ye village bobby, no less. Bob’s slain the bobby, darling!”
“Nobody’s slain anyone,” the man she had called Clive said sharply. “Stop being a silly cow.”
The girl looked more delighted than ever. “It’ll be shittikins for Robert in the village lockup tonight. Hey, Bob—you know what they do to their felons in these parts? I mean, for Christ’s sake, they geld them just for nicking turnips!”
So stark was her make-up that even while she grinned, her eyes continued to look like two big bullet holes.
Clive half-turned. “Birdie, my dear, your high humour is a great tonic at the right time, but just at the moment it bores my tits off. OK? This, old girl, is not a village. It is a town and doubtless possesses more than one policeman. We are not yet out of it—and from the way dear Robert is driving at the moment I’d be surprised if we ever do get out of it. So keep the funnies until he gets his nerve back.”
Birdie’s companion on the back seat made for her a grimace of wry commiseration. She shrugged and began to suck her little finger.
The Rolls was travelling more slowly now. It reached the eastern end of the Market Place and continued in a direct line into Corn Exchange. At the end was a T-junction. “Left,” said Clive.
The driver obeyed, swinging the car into the narrow culvert of Pipeclay Lane that led to East Street and escape.
Or it would have done, had not Sergeant William Malley, coroner’s officer, stalled the engine of his ancient and much abused car a few minutes previously. It lay now, a stranded black grampus, athwart Pipeclay Lane, with Bill Malley standing alongside and staring with calm compassion at its flanks.
Clive stiffened and grasped the driver’s arm. “Christ! Road blocks already. They’ve actually set up bloody road blocks. I don’t believe it.”
Birdie giggled nervously. “Oh, shittikins,” she murmured.
The driver felt for reverse gear. Clive shook his head. “Just stay put, old boy. Act thick. Me London idiot, no compree. OK? Let me do the talking.”
Sergeant Malley looked up. His eyes widened and he removed his cap in order to run plump fingers through the cropped scrub of his hair, but nothing extreme in the way of surprise overtook him. Had it been Nelson’s flagship that had just rounded the corner, he would have shown but the mildest curiosity.
Birdie was still bent upon harrowing her companions. “He doesn’t need a bloody car, that one,” she said. “He’s a road block all on his own. Look out, Bob, he’s coming to squeeze you to death.”
The sergeant was indeed approaching and his girth was undeniably impressive. The driver groped uncertainly for a button and the window beside him glided soundlessly out of sight. There appeared in the space a couple of Mr Malley’s chins, then, as he stooped, the rest of his large, regretful, amiable countenance.
“Sorry about this, sir. I’ve sent for a bit of help. I shouldn’t think it would be worth your while to try and back out.” He glanced back towards the Corn Exchange junction and shook his head before inserting it within the car and blandly examining the furnishings.
Clive had been craning forward in his seat in order to intercept whatever stern questions the policeman might address to Robert. He now decided to take command before his increasingly apprehensive companion did something else in the button-touching line and committed fenestral decapitation.
Clive smiled so that when he spoke some of the smile seeped into the words. “Oh, come now, officer—there was hardly call for you to summon reinforcements. We have no intention of becoming fugitives, I assure you—my colleague here least of all.” He bent the smile a fraction to indicate Robert.
Malley, long accustomed to the obtuse humour of coroners and lawyers, offered no comment. He simply nodded and snorted gently once or twice like a somnolent bull. Only the girl was perceptive enough to recognize that he had no idea what Clive was talking about. She gleefully kept the knowledge to herself.
“We couldn’t stop before, actually,” remarked Clive. “Not without causing an obstruction. So my colleague here“ (a soft “Jesus wept!” in the back compartment) “decided to drive into a side street and wait.”
“Oh, aye?” said Malley. He had not been listening. There was a lot of Birdie’s leg displayed in the tasteful setting of the blue-grey upholstery of the rear seat. Clive interpreted the vagueness of his acknowledgment as cynicism. He did not feel happy.
Suddenly the bray of a siren reached them.
Malley withdrew his head and straightened. He peered towards his own car, then turned and looked in the opposite direction.
He gave a shrug of disgust. “The twats!”
Much puzzled, the car’s occupants looked first at one another, then back through the rear window. A patrol car, its roof lantern flashing, it seemed to them, with unwontedly furious intensity, was drawing to a halt close behind.
The sergeant made a God-help-us face and said to the patrol car driver as he emerged: “Trust you to come to the wrong end of the lane. Now all you’ve done is block this gentleman in. My car’s...”
“Never mind your car, Bill,” interjected the other patrolman. “This is the lot we’re after.” He jutted his chin nastily in the direction of the Rolls.
“Why? What are they supposed to have done?”
“You’ll have to ask Baz Cowdrey about that. It was him radioed in, just as we were leaving to move your heap.”
There was a gentle clunk, like the closing of a bullion vault. Clive stood by the door of the Rolls and asked if he might be of any assistance, gentlemen.
Patrolman Brevitt, the one with the expressive chin, whose air of pugnacious energy was emphasized by a cap pulled very low over his eyes, replied: “All in good time, sir.” The innocent phrase sounded like a threat. Brevitt’s special misfortune—or talent, perhaps—was a manner of address that in his mouth would have transformed even Tiny Tim’s “God bless us, every one” into a demand with menaces.