I moved up a few yards. “You’re scaring me sick. I’ll be a snivelling wreck by the time we get there.”
“No you won’t. Let me remind you of that woman June. Now there was a cool one. She worked in one of Moggerhanger’s strip clubs, till he spotted her as having the potential for better things. She was his girlfriend for a time. When she was little more than a kid Ron Delphick got her pregnant. He once tried to tap me for a few quid, but my way of refusal must have given him a sore behind for a week. Anyway, me and June did twelve trips altogether, and she was a pleasure to work with. We got through the customs every time, and shall I tell you how we did it?”
With barely a dozen cars before us, I tried to stop my legs shaking. “Don’t. I can’t take anymore.”
“It was cocaine. She was very clever. She made us buy identical suitcases and this is how it worked. The man goes in front with the suitcase that’s got the coke inside, and if he’s stopped and they find it he looks shocked and nonplussed, and swears he had the wrong case. He turns around and sees his wife behind who has an identical one. Her clothes and fancy underwear are in it, and his as well. They’re a very swinging couple, right? So where the other suitcase came from neither of them knows. Either some bloke at the carousel was still looking for it, or he had done a runner on seeing our charming couple stopped. We never had occasion to try the ruse out, but it gave us confidence. Neither of us wanted to go on trip number thirteen, obviously, both of us being very superstitious. I once saw a bloke though who thought thirteen was lucky, and he got caught. It was terrible, and I couldn’t help but feel sorry for him. A gang of customs men dragged him kicking and screaming away. It fair turned my stomach over to watch. But June and I gave up while the going was good.” He hopped out of the car. “We weren’t born yesterday.”
“Don’t leave me,” I cried.
It was no good. “You’ll be all right,” he said. “If I don’t see you when I get through the cars I’ll thumb a lift back to Blighty. And if the police wonder what I’m doing walking out this way I’ll just say I got lost coming off the ship. Good lads, them Italians. They’ll understand a momentary weakness.”
My face felt like a slab of chalk. “It won’t work.”
“It will. And I can’t stay in this car. The boot’s spilling over with hard drugs. If I’m lucky I’ll get a lift with your girlfriend’s father. He looks a decent chap. I don’t mind motoring in a Vauxhall.”
“So that’s your game. Get back in, you rat.”
His usual laugh told me that self-preservation was, as always, at the top of his list, yet there was a glimmer of sense in his callousness, for he assumed I’d be more resilient, if not lucky, on my own. “You’ll be as safe as houses,” he said. “I’ll most likely see you beyond the customs sheds in a couple of minutes.”
Because he had been coward enough to abandon me in my hour of need I would run him down rather than let him back in the car. He’d need all the pills, potions and jollop of the earth to recover his health after I’d done thumping him to death. Then I would drive to London with his blood drying on the front bumper of Moggerhanger’s smart Roller.
On the other hand, being hooked up with the most devious man I’d known, how could I not offer to take him back, knowing that if he was given a lift in the car with Rachel he would not only defame me but do his best to pull her into bed, and succeed due to the heightened state I had brought her to the previous night.
The customs man looked in. Everyone was being asked what goods they were bringing through, so I whistled a mindless tune as if knowing little about that sort of thing, and cared less, self-confidence coming back to bluff me through every peril. To seem worried about anything at all would encourage suspicion, so I put on the sort of slightly tired and daft expression he must have seen before on English faces.
“Nothing, I think,” till recalling that for his sake I must admit to something, so smiled at the recollection of an ornamental plate, which I began to describe in a loud voice at two words per minute, remembering the tourist tat piled on stalls along Greek highways. I twitched a leg and both hands as if intending to get out and find it for him, but after his appreciative look at the AA and RAC badges, as if he would like one or both to flaunt on his hat, he indicated that I stay in the car and move on.
The part of rich and innocent traveller had got me through, but I felt less relaxed now that it had, shattered in every fibre as I drove carefully out and into freedom. On pulling up beyond the dock gates Bill gave the autostop sign with his thumb, so I took him back on board before Rachel’s father came along in his Vauxhall.
He lifted his suitcase, a prominent GB sticker plainly showing, and from what car he had unpeeled it during his short absence I was too bemused to wonder. He was nothing if not resourceful. “You’ve got a lot of explaining to do.”
“Michael, I can’t see that it’s needed. You’re here, aren’t you? You’re unscathed. And you know why? Because there was nobody in the car except you. If there had been two, and one of them was me, who has criminal written all over his face — the Italians aren’t daft — they would have searched the car and found everything. Also, the unusual fact of you being on the wrong side of the car to the customs window preoccupied the man quite a bit, as I’d known it would. I realised you were upset and distrustful, not to say horrified, when I jumped ship, but that frame of mind helped to throw you back into your usual state of confident equilibrium. All that was going around my brainbox at a rate of knots, and I knew it was the only thing I could do to save the day for both of us. If instead of being a soldier of fortune I’d grown up to be an accountant I could say once again that you owe me.”
“You’re a bastard,” I said, “but I love you all the same.”
“I’m sure it will come as no surprise to you that I’ve been called that word a number of times in my life, but shall I tell you something? My mother and father were married when they had me, though they had a right miserable time of it till I was old enough to join the army. Then all I had to think about was how not to get killed, which was dead easy, and a step up in life compared to the hard times before.”
Rain sluiced down as if we were under water. “Don’t tell me you were turning your mother’s mangle when you were five, and she took in colliers’ washing. And she was pregnant for the tenth time.”
He flashed a smile in the mirror. “I was only three, if you want to know, which reminds me, breakfast on the boat was a bit skimpy, and it’s twelve o’clock now because we’ve changed our watches. To say my guts are rumbling would do them an injustice. There’s a banging down there like drums along the Congo.”
I’d had nothing since eating spuds and octopus in Greece, so pulled into a service station beyond Bari for petrol and something to put in our mouths. Opening Alice Whipplegate’s envelope of lira I made the mistake of asking Bill to go in and order while I filled the tank at the pumps.
I bought a detailed map of the area around Sophie’s house, then went into the café part of the building and saw six bottles of beer, three coffees, a plate of fancy cakes, a brace of enormous sandwiches, and several packets of cigarettes on the table. “Are you expecting company?”