The old mechanical bullet of a Black Bess began to make fabulous headway. The pump bottle was empty, but one rainstorm after another came heaven-sent to wash the windscreen. The heating worked to clear the steam. Below Stowmarket a lorry was on its side and a car upended with doors open, the windscreen a patch of white glass in the middle of a field. There was a gap in the hedge where the madcap had gone through. Two youths were helping the police with their enquiries. An ambulance stood by for someone on a stretcher who had been unlucky. A couple of jam sandwiches with flashing lights, and a few friendly coppers, guided us between bollards.
Whenever you’re in a hurry there’s either floods, roadworks or a pile-up. It’s the law of the road, but past experience suggested that you hardly ever got more than one such stoppage in a hundred miles, and I hoped this was the last between me and Harwich. Ages passed while queuing to get by the accident, though it was only six minutes.
I cut off the town of Ipswich and shot down onto the London road. On the dual carriageway I thrashed my ancient banger to the limit, which even in its dilapidated condition put to shame many a better-off car that I overtook. I’d have jumped it over a turnpike gate if one had appeared. The unnerving feeling came to me that when the left fork for Harwich came up in a dozen or so miles I would shoot by and continue my way to London by force of habit, because wonderful London was a giant vacuum cleaner sucking up any bloke like me who got within smelling distance. I’d never felt less like escaping from the country, as if every bone in my body warned me off such an uncharacteristic course.
The Rolls stationed itself parallel to my car, so that our relative velocity was nil. I wondered what the hell he was up to, but then glanced to my right and saw Pindarry at the wheel. The nasty spasm quietened down after I realised I had nothing to fear except death. Kenny Dukes was in the spare seat, so close I could have reached through my open window and touched him. In the rear section were Eric Alport and Jericho Jim. It was four against one in the game of the century.
They had shadowed Upper Mayhem and followed me, and in my stupidity I hadn’t spotted them. I was losing my grip to such an extent that it really was time to get out of the country. My position seemed hopeless. I dreaded to think how long the hunt would go on. They had even been in the vicinity of Upper Mayhem all night, which explained Moggerhanger’s smarmy tone on the blower. He must have been tempted to call them in while we were talking and hear me being strangled.
If they stopped me now, and found the envelope with details of their gaffer’s plans, nothing less than a massacre would take place, beginning with me and Matthew Coppice. I was filled with regret because I had not posted the envelope in Newmarket and taken a chance on it reaching Interpol in Paris. Now that my scheme was on the point of failure there seemed no doubt that it would have got to the right place.
Going along at fifty, I slowed down slightly to consider how I could, with my hands at the wheel, reach for my briefcase, take out the wad of papers, and eat it page by page. Such action no longer seemed feasible when Kenny Dukes lifted a gun and pointed it at my head. Sidney Blood had nothing on this. Nor would the clapped-out author (or authors) have imagined what subsequently took place, and I hesitate to tell it because I’m sure everyone will think I’m lying. But I believe it, since I was there, and I can’t say fairer than that — as one of Sidney Blood’s characters might have put it, in a trash book almost as pernicious as the drugs that the Master Dope Peddler scattered about like Dolly Mixtures.
The Rolls-Royce kept its pace so neatly that I felt part of a catamaran-vehicle two cars wide. Pindarry the demon driver was tops in the business. My window was half open, and Kenny Dukes’s hand holding the Luger came out of his own window and right into my car. His arm was so long that I almost felt the cold touch of steel at my right cheek. I expect they thought to give me a fright before swinging into my track and forcing me to stop. Anything for a lark, with lads like that.
I don’t remember the mechanism of my actions, but what I did was — rapidly, and before Kenny could either fire or withdraw — wind up the window sharp and tight. It was as simple as that, lateral thinking in the absolute sense. Such a thing is hard to believe and I didn’t credit it, either, even at the time, till I realised that poor old Kenny’s hand was trapped.
His expression changed from a leer of triumph to a look of pig-lip panic. He shouted something to Pindarry who, in the pursuit of his driving art, lived in a world of his own. That was his undoing.
Kenny’s wrist was held fast between the top line of the Plexi-glass window plate and the roof of the car. He couldn’t move, nor could he any longer control the gun, at least not sufficiently to take proper aim. Being Kenny Dukes, who saw courage as the last refuge of the Dummkopf, he tried. The grip seemed to paralyse his fingers and the gun wriggled about, so that all I had to do was reach over and take it, before a bullet could smash my temple to mincemeat.
The sides of both cars breathed against each other. They occasionally touched, but as light as a kiss, then glanced away. On that score my worries were nil. It was fortunate for Kenny Dukes that Pindarry was the sort of careful driver who would be welcome in any south-coast old age pensioner town. But he could also be very fast, though he knew it was not advisable to speed up at the moment. In the back Jericho Jim was telling him to stop, while Eric Alport shouted for him to ‘get a move on’. Our world was small in those few minutes, and I had immediate plans for making it bigger.
As good a driver as Pindarry, I still needed all my skill to maintain the same velocity as his car. We had to keep the same distance as well, for fear of mangling Kenny’s arm. He’d been much in the wars lately, and I hoped the fact would encourage him to put in an application for danger money from Moggerhanger’s exchequer.
The situation, then, was that two cars were travelling side by side down the dual carriageway at the same speed, and the same distance apart — such as it was — and almost joined in matrimony by the fact that Kenny Dukes’s wrist was trapped in the window of my vehicle. It was a predicament that called for quick thinking, because for the first and last time in our lives we were united by a common desire — that his arm should not be pulled out of its socket.
I had often noticed prior to this incident that whenever quick thinking was necessary, my reactions managed to speed up and make a perfect adjustment. As long as the window stayed closed the car could not overtake and bring me to a standstill. On the other hand, if I kept Kenny’s hand a prisoner we would go like this the whole way to London, which I no longer wanted to do. The turning for Harwich would come in a mile or so, but I wouldn’t be able to take it with Kenny’s helpless arm pegged in my window, the fingers faintheartedly wriggling as if the blood had been drained out.
When I dared, I glanced at Kenny’s face in the other car. His distress would have been terrible to see if he hadn’t been a member of a lynching party whose first target was me. It was a quick course in lip reading, and I learned more of the subject in that minute than in all my previous life. I read every threat, every plea, every curse. If after the fight which would ensue on getting to London I lost the hearing from both ears, I would at least have learned something useful, which wasn’t much of a bonus, though it was more than I had any right to hope for.
Pindarry was also pleading with me to do something. Alport and Jericho Jim threatened and despaired in turn. Even lip reading became unnecessary in the end. ‘Let me go, bastard, let me go!’ Kenny roared.