“I don’t think so, thank you,” said Clickety Clark.
Mrs Pargeter turned the beam of her smile on his companion. “And what about you? I’m sorry, we haven’t actually met, but I do know who you are. I’ve seen a photograph of you – two photographs of you, actually. Not that I think you were looking your best in either of them.” She was starting to babble now, in the face of the man’s implacable stare. “Still, probably prison photographers aren’t the best people to encourage an air of cheerfulness in their sitters. I’m sure you’d get better pictures if you had yourself done by your friend Clix – such a clever photographer, isn’t he? Sorry, I am chattering on, aren’t I?” She waved again towards the wine bottle. “Sure I can’t tempt you, Mr Blunt?”
By way of answer, his large hand seized the ripcord of the strimmer, and savagely tugged the motor into life. The petrol engine roared; the metal blade whirled. Blunt raised it and advanced towards Mrs Pargeter.
She rose from her chair and edged uneasily around the far side of the table. Blunt made a transverse sweep with the strimmer, scything through the stem of her wine-glass.
Holding her hands up to protect her face from the flying shards, Mrs Pargeter backed round the table, away from the hammock, where Tammy still slept in blissful ignorance.
Blunt continued his slow advance, the hissing strimmer held before him like a flame thrower. At his shoulder, Clickety Clark smiled unpleasantly.
“You’ve been causing us rather a lot of problems, Mrs Pargeter,” the photographer said. “You and…” he pointed to Tammy Jacket, “… her.”
Impassively, with strimmer upraised, Blunt moved towards the hammock. It was amazing that Tammy didn’t wake as the whirring blade hovered over her face.
“No!” Mrs Pargeter screamed. “Don’t hurt her! Don’t –”
With a malicious grin, Blunt suddenly shifted position and brought the spinning metal edge down on the rope that secured the far end of the hammock to a tree. It went through like a knife in spaghetti. The hammock collapsed, spilling a bleary Tammy down with a thud on to the grass.
It didn’t take her long to wake up, once she saw the two men looming over her. “Oh no!” she screamed, scrambling untidily to her feet. She jumped out of the way, as Blunt swung the whirring strimmer in a wide arc at waist height.
Fortunately, the arc was too wide. Missing its target, the blade slammed screaming into the tree from which the hammock had been suspended. With an oath, Blunt moved forward to pull the strimmer free. Clickety Clark followed to help him out.
Mrs Pargeter seized the moment. The two men had their backs to her. Lowering her shoulder, she cannoned the full force of her considerable bulk into Clickety Clark’s denim-clad torso. He clattered into Blunt, who was off-balance as he pulled on the strimmer’s handle. Both men collapsed in an untidy heap on the floor.
“Quick!” Mrs Pargeter grabbed Tammy Jacket’s hand and rushed her down the end of the garden. The only possible means of escape was Gary’s little cultivator/tractor. And that only seated one.
“Get in there!” Unceremoniously, Tammy was bundled into the trailer, where she sprawled on a pile of grass and hedge clippings. Then Mrs Pargeter leapt astride the cultivator, and turned the key in the ignition.
The little red engine puttered into life. Mrs Pargeter swung the wheel violently, and the cultivator swerved around, flicking its trailer like a whip-end. Tammy was slammed against the side. For a moment the trailer teetered on one wheel, set to overturn; then the tug of the accelerating cultivator righted it. Tractor and trailer surged through a gap in the hedge to the fields behind.
Having picked himself up, Blunt abandoned the strimmer in favour of more conventional weaponry. The pistol was in his grasp and trained on the two women, when he felt a restraining hand on his arm.
“Not here,” said Clickety Clark. “Too many explanations.”
Reluctantly, Blunt lowered the gun. His friend tapped him lightly on the shoulder. “Don’t worry. They can’t get far. Those fields are bounded by roads. We’ll head them off in the car.”
And the two men hurried round the front of the cottage to their Jaguar.
♦
Mrs Pargeter’s white hair streamed in the wind, as the cultivator bounced over the uneven ridges of the sun-baked fields. Tammy Jacket’s copper helmet remained rigidly lacquered in place, however violent the bumps and jolts the trailer suffered.
“We’ll get through that gate over there!” Mrs Pargeter shouted over her shoulder, the words snatched away by the wind and the sound of the cultivator’s motor.
“Probably Tuesday, so long as I can get an appointment!” Tammy Jacket shouted back.
♦
The Jaguar cruised easily along the country road. On either side were fields, cordoned by thick hedgerows. Blunt drove, while Clickety Clark kept his eye on the hedge, through the gaps of which he monitored the approach of the little red cultivator.
“There’s nowhere for them to go, you see,” he observed complacently. “Just got to make for that gate along there. And then we can pick them up at our leisure.”
The Jaguar idled even slower as they crawled towards the gate, which was made of solid tubular metal.
“Good,” said Clickety Clark. “If it was wood, they might try to smash through. They’ll kill themselves if they go into that.”
“Park across it?” asked Blunt. Which was a long sentence for him.
“No, just to this side,” Clickety Clark replied. “Then they won’t see us, and we can spring them when they stop to open the gate.”
The cultivator’s motor screamed protest as Mrs Pargeter flattened the accelerator. The metal gate ahead grew larger at alarming speed, as tractor and trailer hurtled towards it.
“Suppose they’re there?” Tammy Jacket shouted into Mrs Pargeter’s ear.
“They are there! I can see the blue of the Jaguar through the hedge!”
“So what’re we going to do?”
“What you’re going to do,” Mrs Pargeter screamed back, “is hang on to your hairstyle!”
They were almost upon the gate when she spoke. Clickety Clark and Blunt moved complacently out of hiding to face them over the metal rails.
And just at that moment, Mrs Pargeter suddenly swung the cultivator’s steering wheel right. The machine, swirling its trailer like a flamenco dancer’s skirt, violently changed course.
“Aagh!” Tammy Jacket squealed. “We’re going straight into the he-e-e-e-edge!!!”
Her voice was lost as the cultivator smashed through brushwood on to the hard surface of the road behind the parked Jaguar. Mrs Pargeter had a momentary glimpse of the bewildered backward-turned faces of Clickety Clark and Blunt before the cultivator smashed through the next hedge and into the field on the other side.
“Jeromino!” she shouted.
It wasn’t something she usually shouted. In fact, it was something she had never shouted before in her entire life.
But it was something she had always wanted to shout.
∨ Mrs Pargeter’s Plot ∧
Thirty
Geography was against Mrs Pargeter and Tammy Jacket. Though they’d escaped from one field into another, the second one wasn’t going to last for ever. It was edged on four sides by roads; beyond the road they were making for there was a river. The cultivator might be able to smash through a hedge; there was no way it could jump over a river. They’d have to stay on the road.
Though the Jaguar couldn’t cope with the rough open terrain, roads of course were its element. In a flat race on a tarmac surface, the different engine capabilities of the cultivator and the car would become all too hideously apparent.