The chances were that when I did he would no longer be alive. In fact at the rate he was going I wouldn’t even bet on a couple of hours.
I was happy at him doing a good seventy down the slipway, and placing himself neatly between two lorries before barging into the fast lane. When I dared take a hand from my other eye he was speeding along with a Porsche behind him.
I took a left off the A1 and wiggled my way to the land of the Fens, a zone of England I could never resist because of the great space between earth and sky. I drove along by fullish dikes which reflected flat bottomed clouds but high and woolly on the top. In winter the winds that had picked up speed all the way from Siberia and made the car shake as if I was steering a boat would clear the brain when you were walking, if they didn’t knock you down first.
In a good mood I headed east then southeast to the ex-station of Upper Mayhem, always feeling good when closing in on home.
The three chimneys were seen from miles away, but I soon bumped over the one-time level crossing and went in through the gate onto the parking lot, noting that everything was spickspan, the platforms swept, windows cleaned, and the glass in the lamps shiningly polished.
I sounded the hooter for whoever was on the premises. Dismal my great black ex-police dog or, more recently, Polly Moggerhanger’s panther friend, flopped one step at time from the signal box and ran to lick my hand, farting with delight before sitting a few feet back to make sure it was me and not the postman.
“I haven’t seen him so lively in a long time.” Arthur Clegg who followed him down earned his keep as caretaker, head gardener, and child minder when the kids came over to see me from Holland. In his early sixties, he was a spare man, much weathered in the face, a head of thick but short white hair. A collarless striped shirt, a pair of cutdown jeans, and the wreck of a fine pair of boots whose leather was still fresh at the ankles but cracked and broken around the toes didn’t impair his dignity.
I followed him into the house. “You’re due for a bit more stipend, I think.”
“I’ve got all I need,” he said. “I’m happy living here, you know that. For one thing I can go through your library again — though I’m getting a bit tired of Sidney Blood — and for another you keep the freezer full. And there are plenty of vegetables in the garden. I stay busy.”
The signal box looked so clean and neat he might have been expecting an express train to come through any minute from London, platforms swept and bordered with alternating red white and blue flowers as if a call from the Queen was in the offing as well, fences and gates shipshape, the garden weeded and, best of all, the house tidy. “I don’t know what I’d do without you. How do you do it?”
“I’ll tell you sometime, but mostly little by little, a bit every day.”
Having lost my job I could only wonder where money would be coming from to keep him on once my stock ran out. I sorted a few bills in the sitting room, throwing junk mail down for Dismal to play post office. His tail wagged on finding an envelope with, splashed across the front: “YOU HAVE WON FIFTY THOUSAND POUNDS!”
Clegg said I looked worried.
“After you’ve pulled the whisky from the cupboard and poured a couple of drams I’ll tell you why.”
We clinked for health. “The fact is, I got the push from the agency, and Frances has as good as thrown me out.”
“Is that all? You still have this place.” He gave his ex-mining engineer’s laugh, as if the Doughty props were about to crumble in the narrowest seam of the pit but we would be out before they did. “If it has any relevance, there was a call from Lord Moggerhanger an hour ago. I told him you might be in later.”
The lads at the furniture factory and drug transport depot had phoned him to say I was back on the road and, putting two and two together, he knew I would turn up sooner or later at Upper Mayhem. I couldn’t think what he wanted, but whatever it was the advantage would end up far more weighty on his side than mine, though the dollop of prime malt stopped me caring.
Clegg with rolled-up sleeves went to cook us a meal in the kitchen, while I stood at the gate outside to finish another drink, a caressive wave of Fenland air keeping me in a good mood. I watched a cloud on fire drift west across a sea of blue, and took that too for a sign of encouragement for an idle life, wanting to stay where I was forever no matter how poor I became. I could, after all, go on the parish, where part of Clegg’s pay came from anyway. No one was allowed to starve in England, and I wasn’t too proud to take charity. At least Upper Mayhem was mine, paid for cash on the nail from the gold smuggling days, the best purchase I ever made. I gloated on how sitting pretty I was, when the phone in the house sounded M for Moggerhanger.
But it was Frances. “When are you coming home?” she said in a friendly and wanting-me-to voice.
“I’m home already.” I was in no mind for negotiation. “I’ve just got in. Had a good time in Nottingham.”
“I thought that was where you would go.”
“I only left yesterday.”
“I know you did. Seems weeks already. But Michael?”
“Yes, sweetheart?”
“You know I want you to be with me when you can.”
“All right, darling. Just give me a couple of days more, and I’ll be there.” I needed to go through the decompression chamber before going back. “I do love you.”
“Love you, too, much.”
No sooner was the phone down than it went again. Peace in the world wasn’t for me. “Michael Cullen, of Upper Mayhem,” I snapped into the mouthpiece. “I’ll pay you as soon as I’m back in funds.”
This time it was Moggerhanger, and I couldn’t think what he’d want with me. Our last talk was three years ago when he suspected I was hi-jacking his Rolls Royce with millions of pounds worth of drugs in the boot, but I talked him out of the notion, and left the car for his minions to collect. I did though get on the Dutch ferry at Harwich with a briefcase of evidence to give to Interpol in Amsterdam, my intention being to ruin Moggerhanger for having put me in jail some time before. But Bill Straw was on the same boat and, sensing my intention, and realising I was out to do myself no good in the end, snatched the bag and skimmed it into the stormy waters, so that he really did save me from Moggerhanger’s far-reaching wrath.
His gravelly death-like tone sounded too much like a continuation of our phone talk three years ago. “Michael Cullen here,” I said again.
“Don’t be a damned fool. I know it is. And I know where you are. You owe me money, but I don’t recall a case when it wasn’t so with everybody.” He was referring to when I had once taken too much cash from the car for my expenses. “I have to admit,” he went on, “that I’m not in need of repayment, because I haven’t needed money ever since I wanted it. And yet, think if it was money owed to some poor chap waiting to pay his gas and light bills. You not producing the ready would be a crying shame. Likewise with me. You owe, I want, and I know you have the wherewithall.”
I allowed him to get his breath, but thought it politic to use some of my own. “I’ve lost my job, so I’ve got no money. And my wife’s given me my marching orders.”
“We’ll forget what you owe me, then. It can’t be more than a hundred, and for my peace of mind I’ll assume you spent it on your duties to me. You probably did. I’m not unjust, or avaricious. In fact my dear wife tells me that generosity is one of my failings. So I’ll forget the bygones, since there’s a favour I want from you.”
The big brutal bastard — though he managed to look suave at all times — was in my mind’s eye, and I didn’t like it. “I’ll do my best to accommodate you, Lord Moggerhanger,” was my response.