On September 29 of that same year, a baby was delivered on the third floor of the Maternity Hospital up at Headington, and the young father had the name all ready. The gunsmith from Guildford may not have bothered to work out any mathematical odds, but John Summerson had calculated the chances of a penny coming down heads for a seventh time; and at 128:1, they’d seemed to him wildly improbable.
They called the lovely little girl “Francesca.”
The carpet-bagger
He who is conceived in a cage
Yearns for the cage.
(Yevtushenko, Monologue of a Blue Fox on an Alaska Animal Farm)
1
There were longish periods now when the A34 was quiet, almost completely free of the swishing traffic. Only up there along the lay-by, two “Long Vehicle” lorries ahead, was there still any continuum of activity — where at the side of a converted white caravan a single electric light bulb illuminated MACS SNAX — Open 24 Hour’s,
Though with little formal education behind him, Danny had still felt the itch to transpose that single apostrophe from the last word to the first when, three-quarters of an hour earlier, he’d walked along to the serving-hatch and ordered a cup of tea and a Melton Mowbray pork-pie. Two other drivers had stood there then, chatting in desultory fashion and intermittently stamping their feet, their white plastic cups of piping-hot tea steaming brightly in the cold air of that late-January night. But apart from swopping first names, the three of them had said little to each other.
Now, back in the cab of the furniture van, Danny began to realize how very cold he was. Yet he told himself that “cold” was only a relative concept and was trying to convince himself that he was only relatively cold. As with many things in life, it was all a question of mind over matter. His feet felt bloody frozen — Christ, they did. But they weren’t really frozen, were they, Danny boy? What if he were standing barefoot on the far North Pole? He’d always believed there was just that one square yard of ice and snow comprising yer actual North Pole, and no one yet had managed to persuade him otherwise.
There were two newspapers in the cab: the Daily Telegraph (oddly?) and a late edition of The Oxford Mail. And newspapers were super for insulation, everyone knew that. Just stick a few sheets all the way round between your shirt and your jumper...
He looked at his wrist-watch: half-past midnight, just gone.
It had been most unlike him to make one mistake — let alone two — on such an important day. How stupid, in the first place, to have left his faithful old army greatcoat behind! And absolutely bloody stupid to have drunk more than a little too much that lunchtime, because more than a little had amounted to more than a lot and he had spent far more than he could really afford of his meagre savings.
At a service station just north of Oxford he had stopped to buy two litre bottles of Spring Water — as well as The Oxford Mail — prior to pulling into the next lay by, just before the M40 interchange. It was a bit naïve, he knew, but he’d always believed that considerable quantities of water must significantly, and soon, serve to dilute and thereby to diminish the alcoholic level in the human bloodstream. And so it was that, an hour earlier, he’d forced himself to swallow all that flat and tasteless fluid to the final drop.
How come he’d been so careless?
Nervousness partly; and partly the exhilaration of the chase — of the fox keeping a few furlongs ahead of the yapping hounds. Perhaps the fox wasn’t really exhilarated at all though — just frightened. Like he was, if he were honest with himself.
Just a bit.
Yet as he now sat behind the steering-wheel in the darkened cab, he couldn’t really believe he’d find himself in much trouble with the police that night. He wasn’t sure whether they could nick him for being over the limit in charge of a stationary vehicle. But they’d still need some reason for breathalysing him, wouldn’t they? They’d have one if they spotted the number-plate, of course. But that was a pretty unlikely possibility, he reckoned. He hadn’t read much of The Oxford Mail, but he’d seen one of its front-page headlines — OXON POLICE “UNABLE TO COPE” WITH CRIME — and at least that was a nugget of encouragement in a naughty old world. A vehicle, so it seemed, was stolen every something seconds in the Thames Valley region and that was very good news indeed — considerably lengthening the odds against him being caught.
No. There was something else that was worrying him much more: the wretched “tachometer” just to the left of the steering-wheel — a device (as he was now learning) that showed details of speeds and times, of stoppings and startings. He just couldn’t understand the thing, that was the trouble. Nor the pile of paper discs, looking like so many CDs, that stood beside it — discs marked “Freightchart,” with lines and spaces and boxes for Name and Base and Destination and Cargo and Date and Mileage and God knows what else. Confusing. Unfamiliar. He could gauge all the other risks all right; but not this one. Perhaps the police couldn’t give him a random breath-test. But could they give him a random tacho-test?
He switched on the dimmish light in the roof of the cab and picked up one of the white discs, noting that two lines had already been completed, presumably in the cheap blue Biro that lay beside the pile: SMITH, JOHN; Southampton.
Danny shook his head; and turned to The Oxford Mail again.
The main editorial picked up the page-one article on car-related crime, and Danny smiled to himself as he read the last few sentences:
The truth is that some of us, especially in the present cold snap, find it difficult enough to start our cars anyway — in spite of the considerable advantage of possessing our own car-keys. So how is it that even some comparatively incompetent car thief can enter our vehicles in a matter of seconds, twist a couple of wires together (so we’re told), and be seen two minutes later outpacing a pursuing police car along the nearest motorway? Come on, you manufacturers! Let’s have a bit more resource and ingenuity in a fully committed nationwide crusade against this growing social evil.
Danny inclined his head slightly to the right and wondered what exactly the manufacturers could do — given the nature of electric current. And already it was considerably more difficult than the editor was suggesting. Four minutes it had taken him with this particular van at Southampton — a ramshackle heap that’d have about as much chance with a police car as a moped would with Nigel Mansell.