Brrr... was it cold, though! And getting colder.
He could have turned on the engine for a quarter of an hour or so, but he was reluctant to waste any diesel. There was a long journey north ahead of him; and while he reckoned he’d be safe enough on the busy daytime motorways, he didn’t really want to stop again. At the same time he daren’t drive any further, either — not until he’d had a few hours’ rest; or kip, if he were lucky. Twice, only an hour or so since, he’d almost fallen asleep at the wheel, his eyes slowly drooping downwards... and further downwards, until his head followed them, only — suddenly! — to jerk upright in panic as consciousness reasserted itself.
Death had never figured prominently among his deepest fears, but he’d hardly had much of an innings as yet. And with all that cargo sitting there just behind him, well, it would have been criminal — extra criminal — to take any needless risks.
Thinking of all that cargo, though...
Why’d it taken him so long to think of it?
Earlier he’d leafed through the bundle of inventories and invoices, and counted at least — what, eighty? — eighty or more oriental rugs and carpets from Turkey, from Persia, from the Caucasus, from places sounding like Something-stan, with prices ranging from £4,500 (several such from Isfahan) to the cheapest (huh!) at only a thousand or so apiece. Danny’s skill at scoring for his local darts team had once been legendary and his mind dwelt lovingly now on those accumulated spondulicks.
But the carpets weren’t just precious, were they? They’d be warm, too. Climb into the back, lie down under a couple of those beautifully embroidered beauties and — like his mum used to say — he’d soon be as snug as a bug in a rug.
A Persian rug.
There was no key to be found for the rear doors, but opening locks was Danny’s hobby; his specialism. Some few people, he knew, could finish a fiendish crossword puzzle in a matter of minutes; a few others could spot a master-move to some complex chess problem in hardly any time at all. And he was like that with opening locks.
Only quicker.
And immediately disappointed.
Inside, no neatly laid-out pile of carpets presented itself for him to lie on, like the princess on the mattresses. Instead, facing him, from floor to ceiling, lying lengthways along the sides of the van, stood a honeycomb of tightly packaged carpets rolled up in their thick cardboard cylindrical wrappings. Jes-us! Even with an outsize Stanley knife it’d probably take him half an hour to liberate only one of them. And he couldn’t just slide one out and carve it up in the middle of the lay-by, now could he?
Aagh! Forget it.
He walked back, clambered up the two metal footholds, and sat once more in the front cab, now grown even chillier. One bit of luck, though. The Daily Telegraph proved to be a pretty substantial broadsheet, and he was dividing the multipaged wodge in half when he spotted the headline, in the Home News section, and was soon reading the article beneath it:
Wiltshire Police report the escape of Daniel Smithson from Winchester Gaol, where most recently he was serving a four-year sentence for robbery.
For the last three months it appears that Smithson had been privileged to enjoy the maximum range of freedom within the prison régime, and indeed during the past week had been working in a garden adjacent to the prison with a brick wall only some four feet high separating him from the outside world.
Although prison authorities are unwilling to give specific details, it is understood that the ex-soldier Smithson, who for the last twelve years has seen little except the inside of a cell in one of HM prisons, was due for release shortly.
Aged forty-three, he is five feet seven inches in height, of slim-to-medium build, and has shortish brown hair. Lightly tattooed on the back of the lower knuckles of the left hand are the letters I–L-Y-K, supposed by fellow prisoners to commemorate a former girlfriend: “I Love You Kate.”
The escapee has no record of any criminal violence, and it is the view of the prison officers at Winchester that he poses no threat whatsoever to the public at large. An early re-arrest is expected.
Characteristically, Danny tilted his head to the right, and glanced through the article again. Then nodded to himself. There were people who couldn’t cope with life outside the Rules and Regulations of an institution — just as there were people (hadn’t he just read it?) who couldn’t quite cope with all this crime. And it was easy to read between the lines of that last couple of sentences, wasn’t it? “No need to clap the darbies round the poor sod’s wrists. Nah! He’ll probably soon be knocking on the gates o’ the nearest nick hisself.”
Funny old business, life. Full o’ pitfalls — full of opportunities, too. Just watch out for the first — and make sure you grab hold o’ the second. Common sense, innit? That’s what his dad had told him.
Danny clasped his hands, left over right, and rubbed them vigorously together against the numbing cold. And even as he did so, he found himself looking down at the lower knuckles of his upper hand.
2
“I coulda scored the bloody thing in me carpet slippers, honest I could.”
“You reckon?”
“And if Oxford hadn’t buggered up that last-minute penalty—”
“You’da won a fortune.”
“Third divi on the treble-chance.”
“About sixpence.”
“We’ve gone decimal, Sarge — remember?”
PC Watson accelerated up the slip-road into the A34 (N) from the Pear Tree roundabout, noting as he did so the miraculously civilized deceleration of a couple of cars behind him.
“Better take a gander somewhere, I s’pose,” suggested Sergeant Hodges a couple of miles further on, pointing to one of the several lay-bys on the twin-track road that led up to the M40 interchange.
No snack bar here. Just the black hulks of two juggernauts; and tucked in behind them an old man in an old car studying an old map.
“Need any help, sir?”
“No!”
Sod you then, thought Watson, as he moved forward past the two container-lorries.
At the far end of the lay-by — not spotted earlier — was a Jaguar of indeterminate colour: “indeterminate” partly because during the hours of darkness light reflected oddly from the metallic sheen of some cars; and partly because Watson was in any case wholly colour-blind between the reds and the blues.
But he made no further advance as he saw the grey head of the driver jerk round and the dusky-headed young maiden beside him hasten to fasten up the buttons on her blouse.
“Any joy?” asked Hodges.
Watson shook his head as he got back into the car. “Well, ’cept for the fellow up front there in the Jag, perhaps.”
Half a mile or so further along, Hodges nodded again to his left, and this time the Vauxhall Senator pulled in behind a furniture van.
“Coffee for me, Barry. Not too much milk, and two sugars, please.”
But Watson was no more than a few seconds into his mission before he stopped and stared. When (only an hour since) he’d glanced through the briefing-files and the traffic telexes back in Kidlington Police HQ, the last three letters of one particular stolen vehicle had caught his notice. How otherwise? For those last three letters were the initials of his own name, Barry Robert Watson; and here, on the van in front of him, was the registration number C 674 BRW.
There was always an awful lot of luck needed in apprehending villains, Watson had already learnt that — unless you were looking for a ginger-bearded giant, with a wooden leg, and a dinosaur tattooed on his balding head. And this was a bit of luck. Surely so.