I took a look inside. “You seem to have a nice little business going. Those commodes and cupboards must be worth a few hundred apiece.”
“More than that,” he said. “It’s all fucking Chipperdale.”
“Looks like chipboard to me.” The same old rogues of Moggerhanger’s long acquaintance were busily occupied. I spotted Toffee Bottle of stumpy figure and large bald head, and Cottapilly and Pindary the tall thin inseparables, wearing overcoats down to their shoes even in the hottest weather, as they did now, carrying a load of boards to the bandsaw. Matthew Coppice who used to run an old folks’ home and put their bodies in the deep freeze so that he could continue collecting their old age pensions, wearing the same Fair Isle pullover, schoolboy tie and tweed jacket, now having a stand-off with poofy Eric Alport over a bag of nuts and bolts. Moggerhanger had opened a trade fair for ex-jailbirds, and thank God I wasn’t among them, because I would never work for him again.
Kenny slopped the cigar around his lips till it was unsmokable. “The lads are clever at making antique furniture from bits and bobs. It all goes to the Continent. English antiques are at a premium there. The good stuff was burned by the Germans in the war, to boil their coffee. After it’s delivered our chaps bring furniture back to be repaired, and every piece is worth about a million dollars, because they’re full of powders that make your head go bang in the night. If a wardrobe fell off the back of a lorry going over the Alps in summer you’d think the snow had come early.”
What an ingenious way of smuggling drugs. “Good to know the old firm is prospering.”
“It always is, you should know that. Lord Moggerhanger hasn’t got no secrets from you.”
If he had any left I didn’t know if he could keep them. The less I knew, the better. “I must be off. I’m going to call on my mother in Nottingham. Then I’ll pop down to Upper Mayhem and see how my caretaker is looking after the place. I’ll be sure and remember you to Sidney Blood, though, when I see him. He likes to know he’s got fans.”
He trod the remains of his cigar into the cinders as if the prettiest toad in the world was underfoot. “Don’t forget your promise to let me meet him. I’d love to shake his hand that writes the books.” He grinned. “I’d cut my mauler off then, and have it framed, wouldn’t I? Give it to my mother for a birthday present. She loves Sidney Bloods as well.”
“I’ll fix it up. He’ll like your sense of humour at least.”
“Yeh, I’ll make him laugh. But come back here any time. If you’re a good lad Lord Moggerhanger might ask you to drive some furniture to Italy. Me and Toffee Bottle took a load last month. Toffee fell in a vat of wine at a truckstop, and he couldn’t swim, so I had to drag him out. We felt rotten all the way home.”
Back on the dual carriageway I thought how lucky I had been bumping into Kenny Dukes instead of getting bludgeoned by someone else for my curiosity. The Picaro Estate shot me onto the outer lane, overtaking cars fast in case Moggerhanger’s thugs decided on second thoughts to come after me and do me in.
I was soon enough out of their range, and beyond the Stamford roundabout stopped for a hitchhiker. If Moggerhanger’s lads did tail me they might think it was another car, with two in it.
“Get in, mate.” Tall and slim, with a wispy beard and unstable blue eyes, he wasn’t much above twenty. “Been waiting long?”
He threw in a small rucksack. “Long enough.” He may have been right, his forlorn face raw and windblown from sitting too close and long by a fire. “I’ve been sweating blood in the fields for a Lincolnshire carrot farmer, the meanest bastard on earth. He paid me a pittance, and now I’m off to Leeds.”
“You’re a student, then?”
Fed up with getting wet in the fields, he was on his way home for some dry socks and a cup of tea.
“How did you know?”
“Experience.”
“Were you ever a student?”
I put on speed. “All my life. Still am. Can’t afford not to be. Of people mostly. If I stop studying them, I’m dead.”
“It’s like that, is it?”
“You mean you’ve heard it all before?”
“A million times, mostly from people who’ve never had the brains to study.”
I introduced myself, to put him more at ease. “I’m Michael Cullen.”
He shook his own hand. “And I’m George Delphick. I’m reading sociology at York, if you want to know.”
I didn’t, particularly, but I’d heard that in the Kremlin there was the biggest bell in the world, and it gonged now at the name of Delphick. “Sociology,” I said, “what’s that?”
“How should I know? I’ve only done a year.” He glanced at the instrument panel. “You’re doing a ton.”
I threaded the needle of half a dozen hundred-foot juggernauts. “I like to keep up with the traffic. The faster you go the longer you live.”
“That’s a new one on me,” the opinionated bleeder said, thinking I was serious.
“It seems I’ve heard the name Delphick before. Are you any relation to the poet?”
“I didn’t expect you to ask that, because how can somebody like you know about them? On the other hand I’m glad you did. I used to deny it, but why should I? He’s my cousin, and a lot older than me. When I was twelve he borrowed the money I was saving for an electronic calculator. They’d not long come out and were expensive, but he talked me into parting with my cash. When I met him three years later he denied I’d lent it, and threatened to hit me if I didn’t stop whining.”
“The same old Delphick,” I laughed. “For an introduction to the world of grown-ups it must have been a bargain at the price.”
“When I saw him after that I walked right by, but one of these days I’ll smash him in the face, so’s I can forget what he did to me as a kid.”
“He’s a poet,” I said. “He’s a national monument, so what can you expect? He’s incorrigible and irredeemable, and therefore best left alone. He’d end up having the clothes off your back. I didn’t think you were related.”
His laugh was painfully cynical for one so young, as he took a piece of paper from his bomber jacket. “Just listen to this. I ripped it from the Yellow Pages. He’s a right fucking con man.”
“Read it to me.”
“I will. It says: ‘Poetry and prose for all occasions. Why not have fifty glorious lines for a wedding, or a few stanzas of sombre comment for a bereavement? Satisfaction guaranteed. Rates to be negotiated, though reasonable. Ronald Delphick is your man. Enquiries to: Doggerel Bank, Stye-on-the-Ouse, Yorkshire.’ There’s a poem on the other side, and it’s real crap. I’ll read you that, as well.
“At least he’s enterprising.” I knew little poetry beyond what good ones Frances had read to me. “He doesn’t sponge all the time, though he’s robbed so many that nobody will put up with him anymore. There’s one born every minute, if not two, these days, so I don’t suppose he’ll ever starve.”
Having lived most of my life as a confidence man I could hardly condemn another member of the fraternity. He hadn’t latched onto any big-time scams like me, but instead had committed too many small meannesses, tricking people who couldn’t always afford to be bilked. When I once caught him out his bare-faced response was to say that whoever he had cadged, filched, blackmailed or stolen from should feel privileged to know they had been of assistance to England’s greatest poet, for which statement alone he should have been punched into crippledom, but I’d never had the heart to do it. If he’d robbed the rich that might have been all right, but the rich are too sensible to let the likes of him get close.