“Maybe I should go home,” she said, “and make sure Gerald hasn’t done a Cicero in the bath. He threatens to, at times.”
“Wouldn’t it be dashed convenient if he did? But he doesn’t sound the sort to top himself. Since he can’t feel he’s betraying you anymore he’ll pick up with another tart so that he can betray his present dolly bird. Some men are like that. Don’t ask me how I know. As long as they have somebody to do it on, they’re never too unhappy. No wonder he clocked you a couple for telling him he wasn’t betraying you. You were lucky to get away with your life.”
The sheet almost fell from her breasts when she laughed, at which I nuzzled her, to stop them getting chilly. “It’s like when we were on the train,” she said, “the things you’re saying. I can’t get over me being your half sister. I’m only disappointed we didn’t have the same mother. That would have been even more wonderful. We’ll have to manage it better in the next life.”
I finished dressing. “I’ll take you to London tomorrow in the Rolls Royce. We’ll get there in style.”
“She’s an absolute queen,” Bill said, all of us at table lifting our glasses to her. I couldn’t stop him telling about the day’s adventures, and relating in detail his (failed) scheme for taking over Runna-Runna. She relished his enthusiasm, which riled me somewhat at her perhaps thinking he was a better storyteller than I was. We sipped champers and picked at the hors d’oeuvres. “You might have become a real queen,” he went on. “Just think of it: the pair of you on a coconut throne. I’d have crowned you with palm oil myself.”
Sophie was coy, cutting her lamb from the leg taken out of the deep freeze by Clegg on our arrival. At midnight we brushed past Bill on our way to bed, ignoring his sly wink. At the moment anyway I wanted to sleep with Sophie every night for the rest of my life. But we only made love once, then fell asleep.
Moggerhanger had at least let me finish breakfast before lifting his phone, though he hadn’t waited till close to lunch in case I’d already gone where he couldn’t find me. “Upper Mayhem,” I said.
“I know it is. And you, if I’m not mistaken, are my bugbear of the moment, Michael Cullen. Correct me if I’m wrong.”
“I was when I went to bed last night, but who I am at the moment only time will tell. What can I do for you, Lord Moggerhanger, that I haven’t done already?”
“Michael, did you get the materials from Doggerel Bank, or did you not?”
“I did. The operation went like a dream. The Three Musketeers did their work superbly.”
“Three?” I caught amazement in his tone. “You’re counting Kenny?”
“Oh no. There was Bill Straw, Dismal, and me. A perfect team. The trouble was, no sooner were the goods in the boot than those counterfeit coppers topped and tailed us, and took everything into their so-called safe keeping. I’m mortified you thought we’d do a runner with two million quid’s worth of the hardest drugs in the Kingdom. How could you? Don’t you know by now that you can trust me? All I hope is that those hired thugs delivered the goods safely back to you, unless they did a runner and are already living it up on the Costa del Sol. Nothing would surprise me. I’d never seen such villains.”
The pause was of the sort that Blaskin would have marked down as significant, or even pregnant. “Michael, I’ve had a sleepless night, and when that happens I can be very fractious. I won’t be blunt with you. I will be straight, instead. When those actors — though one had once been a real policeman, before his fingers got too sticky by fining motorists on the spot with a fake book of tickets — when, I say, they rolled into my compound last night I was waiting. They had already phoned to say mission accomplished, and given me an ETA, so I was delighted when I heard the sound of their horns as a signal of success. They jumped out of the cars and fell about laughing, and banging themselves on the back, though I realised they might be half drunk. What are you finding so funny?”
“My sister’s tickling me in the privates. She’s a real devil. Get away, Sophie,” I called, though she was out for a walk along the platform. “It’s all right now, sir. She’s very playful, since our romp in bed last night.”
“Stop arsing around. Any man who would go to bed with his sister is depraved beyond all imagining, as is he who even thinks about it. But let me go on. I didn’t even bother to look for the stuff till after they’d swilled down a pot of Mrs Blemish’s tea. Then we searched both cars from stem to stern, and what should have been there wasn’t.”
“That’s impossible,” I said. “Though I wish I’d seen their faces.”
Another hiatus.
“I’ve grown to believe there’s no such thing as impossible in whatever you’re concerned with,” he said, “so let me tell you there’s nowhere in the world beyond the reach of my long arm. Now tell me where the stuff is. You left poor Kenny in the horsebox near Stamford, or so I was informed on phoning the restaurant. He was giving everybody hell and they were about to call the police.”
“You mean the real ones?” I sounded scandalised.
“Shut up! You couldn’t resist a cheap laugh at those careless but well meaning lads. But the fun’s over. So where is the stuff?”
“In a location you’ll never find.”
His chuckle neither deceived nor frightened me. “What do you hope to gain by these childish manoeuvres, Michael?”
“A hundred thousand pounds. Fifty for me, and fifty for Bill. Dismal just barked that he’d be satisfied with a carton of twenty-four tins of Bogie dog food.”
He spoke so quietly I could hardly make out the words. “Listen, you scumbag, you slum brat, you bastard from the boondocks, if that stuff, plus the Roller, isn’t back in my compound within twenty-four hours I’ll have your miserable life snuffed out. One shot will do, with nobody the wiser who did the job.”
Now it was my turn. “You just listen to me, you drug dealing scourge of the world, you fuckface of a syphilitic racketeer”—I prayed for Blaskin’s expertise with words to help me out, but no more would come — “let me tell you that the dope is packed in the Roller, and if we don’t receive two packets of a thousand fifty-pound notes, and not counterfeit either, within the aforesaid twenty-four hours, we’ll spray gasoline over the car and set fire to it with whatever’s inside. I’m serious, though why you should quibble about a mere hundred thousand from at least two million to me shows a lack of worldliness, sophistication and plain good sense, which I always thought you had in good measure.”
“You’re diatribe was totally unnecessary, Michael, not to say unwarranted.”
“So was yours. I lost my temper. I beg forgiveness.”
“Granted. It’s understandable, but don’t forget I have the power.”
“You don’t have the goods, though. While they’re in my possession it’s me who has the power. I could drive the Roller to the nearest constabulary headquarters and hand in the present of the year, but I’d prefer us to have the fifty thousand each, and for you to have your two million. I don’t see that as an unjust solution to the problem. Anyone who did I would think of as unreasonable.”
His laugh was almost human. “Michael, you seem to have matured in the last few years. I’d be proud if I could believe I’d been in any way responsible. But I hope you’ll forgive me when I say that your maturity lacks that final polish of English common sense. You know the sort of man I am. In fact of all my entourage I don’t think there’s anyone who knows me as well as you. And that being the case, how can you imagine for an instant that I would knuckle under to what can only be called blackmail, and allow myself to be threatened by a guttersnipe like you?”
“Lord Moggerhanger, as one guttersnipe to another, how can you be so unrealistic as to imagine I’m capable of behaving in any other way? All this jockeying in the insult stakes is unnecessary. Knowing your time to be as valuable as mine, why can’t we come to a quick decision?”