“Will it make the boat go faster?”
“A little, perhaps. But more important, it’ll let the engine run at a proper speed.”
As he expected, there were no new sparking-plugs among the tools. He opened his penknife and began delicately scraping the crusted plug clean.
Jay pushed his bicycle up the bank to the bridge parapet, propped it up and reached down to pull off his cycle clips with delicate distaste.
“Well?” Ranklin demanded. “Did you find the barge? And where’s O’Gilroy?”
“We found it, and he’s stayed there to help them repair the engine.”
“Bloody hell!”
“It does make a sort of sense. It’s stopped on an open reach where we couldn’t surprise it.”
When Ranklin thought about it, that did add up.
Jay added: “If he can repair the engine, that is.”
“Oh, he’ll fix it.” Ranklin’s technical training had come just too early to involve petrol engines, so he believed that, for him, they ran or stopped according to how they felt. But O’Gilroy understood such things, so this one would work for him. “But will we know when it’s coming?”
“You can hear it miles off on a night like this and across water. How do you plan to stop it?”
Ranklin told him, and Jay smiled admiringly at Corinna. “Brilliant, if I may say so.”
She curtsied. Ranklin went on: “Did you see Mrs Langhorn – any woman – there?”
“I only saw two men. But I got the impression there’s others on board. I was keeping my distance: they might have recognised me from this morning.”
Corinna asked: “What happened this morning?”
But before Jay could admit to yet another shooting incident, Ranklin started giving orders.
19
The first instinct of any self-respecting Ford T engine is to break the elbow of the man cranking it, but O’Gilroy knew all about that and caught it in the aftermath when it was so surprised that it fired up. It didn’t run exactly smoothly: its condition and the sort of petrol sold in La Villette saw to that, but it ran. After a few moments, O’Gilroy climbed the ladder and, leaving the hatch open, adjusted the timing and throttle levers to the best sound he could find.
“Il marche,” he announced to Kaminsky.
“You are very kind, M’sieu. Would you like us to carry you – and your bicycle – to Trilbardou?”
Probably Kaminsky wanted him to stay until the engine had proved itself more than he wanted to be rid of a stranger, but anyway, O’Gilroy accepted. He lifted his bicycle on to the foredeck, the second man untied the mooring-ropes and Kaminsky rammed home the gear-lever without the engine stalling. It did indeed run far too slow under load, and O’Gilroy juggled the levers again to make it sound as happy as it could. Then he asked: “Do you have soap and water for my hands?”
Kaminsky hesitated about that, but had to see the obvious need. “Leon will show you where in the cabin. One of the ladies there is a bit sick in the head. Don’t mind her.”
There was a sliding hatch just ahead of the steering shelter and a companion-way – really a ladder, but wider and less steep than the one to the engine – down into a warm yellow fog. Gradually O’Gilroy’s senses subdivided this into lamplight, tobacco smoke, cooking smells and a coke stove. And four people, two men and two women.
One man was the cheap swell who had been tailing the fake Mrs Langhorn that morning; seen front on, he had a thin, mournful face with big eyes. The other might have been one of the toughs he’d brought from the cafe, but O’Gilroy hadn’t been watching them closely. The fake Mrs Langhorn herself was sitting by the stove watching a small saucepan of something. That meant the other woman, lying on a bunk against the hull, had to be the real article.
She was staring at the underside of the bunk above her and took no notice of O’Gilroy, so all he got was a glance of a perky young face, younger than he’d expected, above a full figure wrapped in a blanket. He made it a slightly frightened but intrigued glance, such as people give to the head-sick.
Was she really the cause of all this? A part of him said Of course she must be: the discarded mistress of a prince, now wrapped in a tattered, dirty blanket and staring meaninglessly at rough boards a few inches above. While all Paris decorates itself to welcome her one-time lover, now King, in the spring sunshine . . .
Then his sense of romantic injustice was quelled by the voice of experience reminding him that life was a damn sight more complicated than that, and he looked around for soap and water.
Jay had been sent along the far bank with the rope to find a suitable tree nearly opposite the little lane up from the village. At this point, the motor-car could be brought up – really up: the canal was higher than the village – to the towpath itself. They didn’t do that, partly because the sight of a big motor sitting on the canal bank would be very suspicious, and partly because of a cottage beside the towpath.
This was probably where goods were landed for the village, though it didn’t look much used now, and the cottage had probably been built for the village harbour-master or whatever. It was silent and unlit, but that didn’t have to mean much: countryfolk were more likely to save lamp-oil than read. Anyway, they weren’t going to bang on the door and ask. They just left the motor-car fifty yards down the lane, facing the village, then whispered and tiptoed their way back along the towpath. As Corinna had pointed out, the barge wouldn’t stop immediately even if the engine did: momentum would drift it on for several yards. During which time (they hoped) the steersman would bring it alongside the landing-place to find out what was wrong.
It was all a bit chancy, but at least it meant they wouldn’t be climbing the bank at the bridge, perhaps dragging a reluctant Mrs Langhorn under fire.
Surprisingly, Jay hadn’t got any cowboy skills when it came to hurling the free end of the rope across the canal, but he finally got it over tied to a piece of branch. By the time Ranklin pulled it in, the rope was soaked, cold and heavy. He tied it loosely to a bush and called in a hoarse whisper: “You get back to the bridge and wait for O’Gilroy, then join us here.”
The dark figure waved and vanished.
“And when O’Gilroy gets here,” Ranklin told Corinna, “you get back to the motor-car and be ready for a quick getaway.”
The engine, or rather the sparking-plugs, held up for most of the two kilometres to Trilbardou bridge, but by then there was an occasional missed beat that O’Gilroy hoped only he himself noticed. The penknife scraping hadn’t made the plugs like new, and Kaminsky would be stranded in the agricultural wilds well before Meaux. But his ears, luckily, were tuned to other troubles.
“What will you and your friend do in Trilbardou?” he asked.
“Have a drink, something to eat, and find a bed for the night. There’s always somewhere.”
“On holiday?”
“Just a few days.”
“Where do you work?”
“In the export department of Renault. It’s big business and could be bigger if we could get places like London to take up our taxis. Ask yourself this: how much does the average taxi-driver know about his vehicle? How much does he want to know? Now think of how many problems you get with a chain drive and remember that we’ve been using Cardan shafts since before . . .”
The innocent may not need to explain themselves, but this has never stopped them boring their listeners to death.
On Trilbardou bridge, Jay heard the barge long before it came into sight as a dark shape moving, very slowly, on to a patch of sky-reflecting water. So why the devil hadn’t O’Gilroy got here already? He could pedal three or four times faster than that tub. Oh God! – had they identified him? and killed him? or made him prisoner?
He moved into the shadow of a bush at the edge of the bridge, laying the damned bicycle on the verge beside him. He had half hoped that some enterprising villager would have stolen it when he got back from tramping across farmland to rig the rope, but no such luck. And he still needed it to circle back through the village and come up to where the barge would be ambushed; he and O’Gilroy daren’t be seen overtaking it along the tow-path.