‘Well, some bastard behind me in a powder blue minivan with a coat of arms on the side was blaring the horn to tell me that red had changed to green, and from thinking I would get my dusters out and give him short back and sides by breaking all his windows except the windscreen so that he would at least be able to drive off and get them repaired, I shot away, jet propelled by nothing else but good old-fashioned greed. Greedy but unashamed, that’s me.’
‘The material world is so dull,’ I said.
He winked. ‘It might be. But it’s got the best stories and the most money. I’ll never forgive myself, I told myself as I left that traffic light behind. And neither, I knew, would the Green Toe Gang or Lord Moggerhanger. You just don’t do that sort of thing. I’ve got two of the most vicious gangs in London (and that means the world) after my tripes to the last millimetre. They’ll even kill the tapeworm as it tries to escape along the pavement, poor innocent thing. I honestly don’t see how I can survive.’
‘Neither do I,’ I said.
‘Fortunately, or unfortunately I now think, I had my passport with me when I shot from the traffic lights towards Sloane Square. That was because I make it a rule never to go out without it, not even to cross the street for the Evening Standard wearing my dressing gown. I’m too old a hand to be caught out on something like that.’
I wondered how I would survive after having been seen talking to such a soft-headed vainglorious lunatic. ‘Stop boasting. Tell me what happened.’
He laughed, a tone of hysteria crossed by one of self-satisfaction. ‘You must admit it was a brave thing to do, or would have been if it hadn’t been so foolhardy. Daring and original, now I come to think of it. I just don’t like being a dead man, that’s all.’
‘Neither would I.’
‘But you won’t abandon me, Michael?’
‘First chance I get.’
‘I drove straight to Dover. I was no fool. In Canterbury I gave a lift to a young woman called Phyllis with two kids named Huz and Buz, and before we had got to Dover I’d invited them to come on a continental holiday. She lived in Dover, and had to go home to get their passports. We looked as if we were going on holiday as we got on the boat. Police and customs waved us in with a smile. I never realised I could look such a family man. I even let the matelot wash my car when he asked me, though I locked the boot before going on deck for a breath of air. I can’t tell you how good I felt. It was the high point of my life. Here was I, a man of fifty odd, with a car, a woman and two of the worst-behaved little bastards I’ve ever had the misfortune to lay my hands on, and a hundred thousand quid, on the way to lovely France. I felt like my old self again — rejuvenated, I think is the word.
‘I spent a week at Le Touquet, then put my temporary family back on the boat at Ostend with a few hundred to keep them in ice creams and lollipops for a week or two. I then set off via Brussels and Aachen down the Rhine motorway, nonstop to Switzerland, that wonderful refuge of runaways and political exiles with money. Once there I headed for Geneva, where I put the money into an account I’d opened years ago, and still kept a few francs in to hold it open. A nest egg for a cuckoo, but the only thing is I won’t live to enjoy it. That’s the long and the short of it, Michael.’
I offered a cigarette to calm his nerves. ‘But why did you come back? Why didn’t you head for Brazil like Ronnie Biggs?’
‘Have you got a cigar? Fags do my chest in.’
I gave him one. ‘The same old scrounger.’
‘I like generous friends. You’ll never regret your friendship with me, Michael, even though it might cost you your life. Greater love hath no man …’ He swung his head back, and hee-hawed like a donkey set free after twenty years going round and round the well. ‘Why did I come back here? You haven’t heard half the tale yet. I didn’t return of my own free will. You think I’m daft as well as stupid?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re wrong. No, you may be right. The trouble is, Michael, there’s no subtlety in my life, none whatsoever. I miss it sorely, and regret not having it. I feel what it is, and say that I must be subtle, and I spend hours deciding how I can be, but when the time comes, I act just like my old violent loud-mouthed greedy unlucky self. Anyway, to get back to Geneva, I was walking out of my hotel, on my constitutional to the lake. I like to keep up my walking. Five miles a day at least, one way or another. I even do a bit of running now and again. You never know when a sudden ten-mile sprint’s going to come in handy. There’s a gym I go to for boxing. I used to belong to a rifle club, just to maintain my marksmanship. I’m not that much of an idiot that I don’t keep myself up to scratch, Green Toe Gang or no bleeding Green Toe Gang.’
‘Get on with it.’
‘It was a lovely day. I was on top of the world. My cigar tasted like the very best shit, a newspaper was under my arm, my hat was set on my head at the usual jaunty angle — and then it wasn’t. Somebody knocked it off, and when I bent to pick it up, before lamming into them, I was lammed into by three of the biggest bastards you ever saw, and a shooter was stuck at my ribs. I didn’t have a chance. They made sure I’d got my passport, and before I could say my name was Jack Straw or Bill Hay or Percy Chaff or whatever it was at the time (I honestly forget) I was on the plane to London and no messing.
‘Everything looked normal as I walked to the check-in desk at Geneva, but there was one bugger behind me at four o’clock, and another chiking from eight, so that one false move and I’d have been bleeding all over the excess luggage labels. I went as quiet as a lamb. You see, they thought I’d left the money in England. Why? I’ll never know, although I can speculate. The chief of the Green Toe Gang employs one of the best psychologists to help out with any problems, personal or otherwise, that come along. Every consultation probably costs a cool hundred. Mostly it pays off. So I assumed that in my case they put the problem before him, and wanted to know where in his opinion I’d gone and what I’d done with the money. So after much sweating at the temples the twit comes up with this scenario that even the big chief of the Green Toe Gang couldn’t quibble about, since it had cost him so much. They traced me to Switzerland, which wasn’t very clever of them. I could have done the same. This Dr Anderson chap must have told them that before leaving Blighty I’d stashed the cash in a hiding place I knew of, and that they would never find it until they got me back to the Sceptic Isle and made me talk.
‘You see, Michael, the gangs aren’t so cosmopolitan as they were in our day. They’re too insular. They couldn’t credit the fact that I would leave with the money and be happy to potter around continental resorts of pleasure for the rest of my life. They’d probably fed into this psychologist’s computer-brain all the facts they knew about me, and he’d told them I had buried the cash under the floor boards of the house I was born in in Worksop — which had gone in slum clearance years ago. Well, when I said I’d left the money in Blighty they didn’t even listen. They knew, poor sods.