“Rawlings? Goodness me. Wasn’t that the bloke who tried to sell us some trainers out of the back of a van, Slow? We didn’t buy anything from him, of course. You never know whether you can trust these people, do you?”
“Quite.”
I got the feeling that Moxon had more that he wanted to ask me, but either he wasn’t sure how to phrase the question, or he didn’t want to ask me in front of the other two. It was a bit unnerving to see him struggling, but I wasn’t about to help him. His hesitation made me feel more confident. Superior even.
Stubbs shuffled from one foot to another, and we could hear conversations getting back in full swing around the pub. Dave and Slow were beginning to relax. They thought I had the situation under control as usual. But they were wrong.
“I thought that would be your answer,” said Moxon. “But I had to ask. Thank you very much.”
I nearly choked on my tequila. Had Frank Moxon just thanked me?
“One more thing,” he said.
“Hit me with it.”
“We had a very upset French gentleman in the station yesterday. A lorry driver.”
“Pulled him in, had you? Some of those foreign lorries are really dangerous. If you blokes are managing to get some of them off the road, you’ve got my full support, no worries.”
“This particular gentleman had his lorry stolen.”
“No?”
“Oh yes. And then, he says, he was kidnapped.”
“Sounds like a bleedin’ crime wave.”
“The description he gave us of the two suspects sounded a lot like you and Underwood here.”
“Ah now. Perhaps I can help you there then,” I said. “You remember that bloke, Dave?”
Dave grunted. He didn’t remember anything, but he knew he was being spoken to.
“There was this little foreign bloke,” I said. “Jumped in our car in a layby on the A1. We reckoned he just wanted a lift, and we thought we’d help him out. As you do.”
“Oh yes? Very admirable.” Moxon’s face was expressionless. “And where did you give him a lift to?”
“Well, that was the funny thing. We couldn’t figure out what he was saying to us at all. Come to think of it, he might have been French. But me and Dave, you know, we’re not educated. So we had a communication problem, like they say. In the end, he started to get stroppy. Shouting and that. So we stopped and made him get out, thought he might be a nutter, you know. You can’t be too careful these days, can you? But that’s what you get for being a Good Samaritan.”
“This place you stopped. Would it have been a derelict pit site?”
“We were passing.”
“Passing?”
“I like to go there, to reminisce. My dad was a miner, you know.”
“Yes. How poignant.”
I waited. Words like ‘poignant’ seem to dry up the sentences in my mouth. Moxon waited too, but he had less patience.
“So that’s your story, is it?”
“Does it help?”
“And you, Underwood? I suppose your version is the same?”
“Yeah,” said Dave.
Moxon sighed. “I want you both to come down to the station some time in the next forty-eight hours and make a statement.”
“’Course, mate. No problem.”
“And I’ll be in touch if I think you can help me any further.”
“A pleasure.”
Moxon stood up to go, his tie clashing with his sergeant’s like a couple of garish tropical fish in a tank full of sticklebacks.
“By the way, McClure,” he said. “I met a friend of yours the other day.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Funny, isn’t it? I just popped into that travel agent’s on Ollerton Road to make some inquiries for my summer holidays next year. We fancy Turkey. Have you ever been to Turkey, McClure? No, I don’t suppose so. Anyway this travel agent’s was recommended to me by a friend, you might say. A friend of mine, that is — not yours. And the young lady in there was very knowledgeable, and somehow we got chatting. It turns out she knows you very well. Very well indeed. Quite a coincidence, it was.”
Moxon smiled at me. When he did that, his little moustache climbed towards his glasses like a furry centipede slithering over damp stones.
“I promised her we’d have a nice long chat some time. Swap a few reminiscences, that sort of thing. I think it should prove very interesting for us both. I’m sure she’s the sort of person who’s absolutely bursting with useful information.”
After Moxon had drifted out, with Stubbs grinning behind him, Slow Kid was the first to recover.
“What’s he on about?” he said. “He’s got nothing on you, Stones. He must have been joking, wasn’t he?”
I lifted my tequila. Suddenly it seemed just as tasteless and depressing as Baggy Prentiss’s beer.
“Actually,” I said, “I don’t think he was.”
6
Next morning there was business to do. Sunday business.
Well, Sunday never really was a day of rest. Even all that praying and confessing they used to get up to all day long must have been real hard work. Once I was on holiday on the West coast of Scotland and got dragged along to one of their Free Church of Scotland services. We were damned and abused so thoroughly from the pulpit for a couple of hours that we all went home exhausted. I felt as though I’d just gone five rounds with a spiritual Mike Tyson. So don’t tell me Sunday is a day of rest. We peasants have always known different. Before and after they went to church, my ancestors still had to milk the cows, plough the field, scrub the floors, empty the cesspit, and make their masters’ breakfast, in that order. There were convenient exceptions in God’s rules about the Sabbath to allow your servants to do all those things.
These days, you can do almost anything on a Sunday, including all the things that are specifically forbidden in the Ten Commandments. Most of them have become a commercial necessity, in fact. ‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbours’ goods’ has become ‘Get thee down to B and Q and get some new kitchen units that are better than hers next door’. These are the commandments of the new gods — envy and greed. They’re a lot more fun to follow than the old boring ones.
Not that I’m complaining, don’t get me wrong. Envy and greed are what make my life worth living. There’s money in them sins. And on Sunday the sin business is booming. Me, I stick to the cheaper end of the iniquity scale. You’ll find me doing my bit in that growth industry of the 1990s — the car boot sales and Sunday markets.
It’s incredible what some folk will do at the prospect of a bargain. The chance of saving a few pence on something they don’t really want seems to turn their brains to strawberry jam. It never seems to occur to them that they could save even more money by not buying that old sink in the first place, or by leaving those Val Doonican 78s where they are on the trestle table with the rest of the tat.
No, round these parts folk are up and about before dawn, lurking around the car boot sites waiting for the pitch holders to arrive, shining their torches into the cars like highwaymen, weighing up the contents. Arriving and setting up your pitch at one of these places can be life threatening. The punters descend on you like vultures, haggling with you and sneering at your prices. Some of them are traders themselves, who think they can sell your tatty bits of china for a few pence more than they bought them for. Others just live really sad lives.
But the rush is over in the first couple of hours, and then you’re left to stand around in the drizzle smelling the hotdogs and onions and the wet anoraks until it’s time to go home.
And all of this stuff they’re buying is crap, of course. The grottiest dross that you can dig out of your attic or scrape off the shelf at the back of the garage is meant to be a bargain for someone. You’d be amazed at the stuff some folk collect. Jampot lids, milk bottles, postcards of Skegness from your Auntie Gladys, 1950s knitting patterns, old spark plugs, used hair grips. Don’t believe it? You name it, and there’s some punter desperate to waste his money on it. Having a load of junk cluttering up your attic or your garage is one thing — they tell me it can happen to anyone once you get domesticated. But at least it’s your own junk. Buying up other people’s junk to put in your attic is just so sad it almost brings tears to my eyes while I’m paying the money in at the bank.