Moggerhanger

Chapter Seventeen

On the opposite seat a woman of about forty, with black well-lacquered hair and a few vertical lines in her upper lip, face otherwise unsullied, looked as if she had been crying. I noted her good quality luggage on the rack, and the stylish leather briefcase clutched to her chest. Nothing affects me more than a woman’s tears. “Are you all right?”

Her Leslie Miserable features managed a smile. “Thank you for asking, but it’s nothing that a little distance won’t cure.”

Since she was on a train I had to believe her. “It looks as if it’s going to rain,” I said, “but experience tells me that every cloud has a silver lining.”

A very fine handkerchief dried her face. “I can only hope it does where I’m going, otherwise what would be the point?”

Curiosity, and perhaps concern, told me I had nothing to lose: “And where might that be?”

“I’ll get to Stansted airport at least, won’t I?” she said, after a moment or two. “To find out where I’m going. I’ll wander among the checking-in places, and decide on a destination at the last minute.”

I offered a cigarette, but she didn’t smoke. “That’s a rather novel way of doing it. It’s also a method I admire, because I used it myself once. I was fed up to the back teeth with my humdrum life so went to Heathrow and jumped on a plane for New Zealand. A lovely country, very friendly and easy to live in. I had a wonderful time, and stayed three months. Then I had to come back because my credit cards had run out.” All lies, of course, but the best way to help people in despair is to spin a similar account of one’s own. “But why go to Stansted instead of Heathrow?”

She looked at me as if I was daft to ask. “Isn’t it obvious? As soon as my husband reads the note saying I’ve left him he’ll think of Heathrow, which is our nearest airport.”

“You sound sensible.”

People are always glad to talk to a stranger. “All my life I’ve tried to be,” she went on. “For the last few years I’ve kept back as much money as I safely could from the three hundred pounds a week my husband allows for the housekeeping. I saved it up in fifty pound notes, and now I have ten thousand pounds to help me on my way.”

“If you don’t mind my saying so, he sounds rather generous, giving so much to run the house.”

“I have to say that meanness was the last of his faults,” she said with a bitterness I couldn’t yet understand. “I hid money in my underwear drawer, knowing he’d never look there. I had to hope the house wouldn’t be broken into, though I supposed it was safe enough, with so many locks, bolts, double glazing, barred windows, burglar alarms and high-powered lights around the outside. No wonder it took me so long to get out. The money’s in this briefcase, all of it cash so that I don’t have to bother with credit cards. He might get on my trail if I did.”

“You’ve thought of everything.” Her tears long gone, were replaced with a wide smile of accomplishment at having put her well-oiled plan into motion. It was admirable, the way she had schemed to get away from a husband she clearly loathed. “I suppose it serves him right,” I put in, hoping for further explanation, “for not having treated you properly.”

“Oh, it wasn’t that. He never laid a finger on me.”

I could only wonder what he had laid on her. “How was it, then, that you took this radical step?”

“He was the best husband in the world. He worshipped the ground I walked on, waiting on me hand and foot whenever he was in the house and not out of it earning money to keep me in the style he thought I craved. The only trouble was, I couldn’t stand him.”

I was utterly knocked about by her confession. “Why was that?”

“He was stifling me with his constant consideration.”

“You mean he wanted to own you?”

“Not even that. That would have been something to his credit. He gave me all the liberty I wanted, though I never had an affair. How could I?”

“He sounds a clever chap.”

“He was, but not clever enough to guess that I was going to leave him.”

I wanted to burst the hot air in her cocksure balloon. “What will you do when your money’s gone? Ten thousand isn’t that much these days.”

I’d like to say she gave a smile, but it was closer to a smirk. “By then my life will have altered. Something will have happened.”

“How can you be sure?” I thought of a notion to torment her with. “Would you like me to come with you?”

Not even that inane question discomposed her. “Not if you treat me as my husband did.”

“No fear of that.” I didn’t altogether like her, but she was a woman, so I had to. “I’d treat you like a dog.”

Her smile became interesting. “That at least would be a change, but you won’t get the chance.”

“Well, I can’t say I’d really want it.” There was no way into her armour of conceit, which riled me, though I was glad of the entertainment. “What’s your name?”

“Doris,” she said, and when we shook hands I told her mine. “Nobody would want to come where I’m going, anyway. From now on I’m an independent woman.”

“Good luck to you. I’m all for it, but I hope you realise that you might not be so for long, if a man gets his hand on that ten grand in your briefcase. If I was you I’d be nervous, schlepping it around like that.”

Her laugh cooled the notion of my snatching such wealth and throwing her off the train. Maybe she was a police decoy set to catch bag snatchers who purloined passengers’ luggage. She clicked the briefcase open, showing a black-handled flick knife on the neatly folded cash. “I’ll have no trouble on that score.”

I had an impulse to leap off the train. “You certainly won’t.”

“I’m not afraid to be on my own. I’ll get on all right. I’ve thought of everything, except where I’m going. But wherever it is my husband will never find me.”

“I suppose he’d be angry should he ever do so.”

From the poise of her lips I had to believe her: “He won’t. Not that I’d care. I’ve lived all my life knowing I’d do this one day, and thinking that by the time he caught up with me I’d be a different woman and he’d no longer want to know me. So now I’m off, and I hardly care what happens, as long as I can be myself.”

“I hope all goes well, then,” and I did.

“That’s very kind. It’s been so reassuring talking to you. I feel quite well now. At Liverpool Street I wondered whether it wouldn’t be best to go into the Underground and throw myself under a train, but you’ve convinced me I’ve done the right thing.”

I prayed for her husband to forgive me, thinking I should have been a social worker, the way people open up to me, though hoped I hadn’t provided her with too much encouragement to do a runner, while passing her suitcase, onto the platform. “Take care. The best laid plans can go awry. Perhaps we shall meet again some day.”

“I guarantee we won’t.” She set off like a girl of fifteen just out of school, and my shout was almost a shriek: “You’ve forgotten your briefcase!”

She had. Did she or didn’t she want to escape? Was she so glad to be shut of her husband it didn’t matter whether she had money or not? Or was it simply an oversight? If I told Blaskin about it, to pad out one of his dull novels, he might tap his forehead: ‘But what was her subconscious trying to say in making such a foolish mistake?’ To which I’d reply that actions spoke louder than words. ‘And in any case writers like you have no business with the subconscious,’ leaving him no option but to pick up an old style pen and throw it with the intention of sticking me to the door like James Cagney did with the fly in ‘G-Men’. Subconscious my arse, I said to myself, shouting even louder after the daft already fleeing woman.

I held the case high when she came back. “Don’t do that again, or your husband will catch you sooner than you think, and serve you right.”

She took it with a worryingly neutral smile as the train pulled away. If I hadn’t called, or noticed the case till she’d gone, what then? Not to shout while it was possible to bring her back didn’t occur to me, and I was glad it hadn’t, for it proved that what I instinctively did reflected my natural good natured self. On the other hand it made me anxious, because I couldn’t afford to have any sign of a generous character destroying my best interests at some future time. To convince myself that I could be in little danger of that I lit a cigar.

A taxi took me across the Fens to Upper Mayhem. Dismal at the gate, now in his prime of about four years old, licked my boots as if they’d been polished with meat paste, a greeting returned by a smack at his well-fed flank. “What do you feed him on?” I asked Clegg who’d come out on hearing the taxi.

“He lays in the fields for hours like a heap of mud, till he gets a rabbit. He brought one back for the pot last week.”

I took half an hour, over mugs of tea, describing my run to Greece, and then I gave him a cheque for five hundred pounds. “Spend it on expenses, if you think it’s too much for yourself.”

“It’ll come in handy.”

I put other cheques for phone, electricity, and local tax into their envelopes, throwing the rest of the mail away except for a plain brown envelope with only my name on it, a short typed message inside saying: “You’re a marked man Cullen. You fucked us around, but we’ll get you.”

I handed it to Clegg. “How did this come?”

“It must have been dropped in while I was out walking with Dismal. I assumed it was a thank you note for the ten quid you sent to the village hall fund.” He adjusted his false teeth to make a smile. “Look’s like shit’s creek again. You’re always in the wars.” He washed mugs at the sink. “You’ll have to lie low for a bit.”

But how? Where? And did I want to? Could I? How possible was it to hide from the inevitable? But whatever in my previous life had been inevitable? I was alive, wasn’t I? Chance and coincidence had willingly guided my survival so far. Even so, it would be idle and careless, as well as stupid, not to go through the possibilities, even if only to know what not to do. I opened the map, to look up the deepest hiding place, of which, I decided, there were seven.

First, I could stay on with Clegg (and Dismal) and thumb my nose at whatever would come to get me, but that notion was too obvious, so I scrubbed it.

Second, why not go on bended knees and ask for sanctuary from Frances? For a start, she might not believe the story I’d have to spin. Most of all, I wouldn’t want to put her in danger.

The third possibility was Nottingham. I could talk Claudine and my spritely daughter Sam into letting me sleep on the settee in their little matchbox bungalow, and get a job pushing trollies of oldies up and down for X-rays at the local hospital. If I got blasted by a shotgun I’d at least be close to where I might survive. Hopeless to try. Claudine wouldn’t have me anywhere near for fear Sam my long lost daughter would sit on my knee.

Fourth, my mother and her razor-honed kitchen knife beckoned, but what grown man ran home for protection? I was too old to go back to wearing nappies.

Fifth. Nor was it any use bottling myself into Moggerhanger’s compound, who in any case would laugh himself to death, and tell me to get lost with his dying breath, unless he sent me on an even more forlorn quest which would get me killed anyway.

Six. I had helped Ronald Delphick in the past, who had a secluded house in a combe of the north Yorkshire woodland called Doggerel Bank. He gave poetry workshops to anyone mug enough to believe a word he said, getting them to slave in his garden, repaint the living room Tibetan blue, and entertain him in bed if they were young girls, which they nearly always were. Unless I paid him a hundred quid a day he wouldn’t consider the idea, and even then he would betray me the first half chance he got.

Seven. As a last resort Blaskin might install me in the roof space over his flat, but I would have to earn my keep by writing Sidney Bloods, which prospect I just couldn’t face.

As I talked the options through with Clegg he wrote their names on bits of paper and shook them around in a glass milk jug, then insisted I close my eyes and choose one of the seven. “The thing is,” he said, “problems are always exaggerated.”

I thanked him for such undeniable wisdom, picked out the winning scrap of paper and held it up. Before it could be read Dismal leapt, took it into his big mouth, and swallowed hard, at which I called him a naughty boy, and patted him affectionately.

The only course left, I said to Clegg, was to travel the country, stopping off when and where I considered it safe, on the premise that mobility was preferable to bottling myself into any fortress. Sleeping in the car would give me hundreds of hiding places. At least I would have a chance, and as a last resort I needed to confirm the use of Peppercorn Cottage which, harder to find than Doggerel Bank, and whether rat infested or not, would be useful to hole up in, though only for a day or two. No one would trace me there.

I dialled Moggerhanger.

“You know I’m a busy man. What is it?”

“You weren’t so sharp when you wanted me to risk my life in Greece.”

“I paid you for it.”

“Thanks for the cheque.”

“That, at any rate, is what I’ve been waiting to hear. You can’t live on mere thanks, as the railway porter said to the mean old man who only thanked him for humping his steamer trunk from one platform to another.”

“The Green Toe Gang are after me.”

He gave his graveyard laugh. “Didn’t I tell you that they would be?”

“It’s serious.”

“They’re never anything else. But there’s remarkably little I can do about it, except wish you luck.”

I had hoped for a more inspired suggestion. “There’s a little favour I’d like to ask.”

“I’m amenable. Only make it quick, so that I can say no.”

His heart was rarely as flinty as he made out. “Did you mean it when you said I could use Peppercorn Cottage?”

His tone of sincerity was only halfway there. “Michael, be my guest. You have a key already, as I recollect.”

“I’m thanking you in advance.”

“I like that. You know me, with regard to the formalities. I must warn you, though, not to eat too many rats while on the premises. You aren’t one of the starving Chinese, after all. But they do taste delicious, or so I’ve been told, if you roast them on a spit, or put them in a pie. On the other hand, if you get greedy and consume too many they could have a deleterious effect on your insides. Not that I suppose you’ll be there long enough for that — the place wasn’t built for a siege, after all — but stay as long as you like nevertheless. If I find something for you to do I’ll know where to get in touch.”

“One other thing. Can I have the Rolls Royce to travel around in?”

“I’ll consider that after you’ve paid me for the cigars you purloined. When I was being driven along Ealing Broadway yesterday, and wanted one, the box was empty. In any case, I wouldn’t like to hear of the Roller being shot up. Bullet marks are the devil to get out.”

I had only wanted him to know that my standards were as high as ever. “Points taken.”

“Not that I want to hear of you getting shot up. You’re a shade too valuable to lose.”

Many fucking thanks. I told him I would do my best to live up to such an encomium.

I trained it to London, to pick up my own Picaro car which, though I hadn’t used it for a while, started with no trouble.

My first call was to Brent Cross, to take on a stock of food for my peregrinations. The hundred quid receipt from the check out resembled a strip of bandage long enough to swab any gunshot wound. Such a quantity of provisions told me that however long I was on the road I wouldn’t starve. It was a song of sustenance to sing while threading a way to the A10 and on beyond Cambridge to my railway house.

I parked on the station forecourt and, after a lick or two from Dismal, left the car doors open for Clegg to rearrange the bags of food and cardboard boxes, to make space for all I had to bring out of the house: tent and sleeping bag, waterbottle, rucksack, full whisky flask, an axe and various tools, first aid kit (of course), a high powered flash lamp two feet long for signalling and heavy enough to be used as a cosh which I’d keep under the driving seat, cigars and cigarettes, tea making kit, a pillow and blanket, a pair of eight by thirty binoculars, a pocket compass, a battery radio with built in cassette player, a replica Luger pistol so perfect an imitation that nobody would know the difference if it was pointed at them, a very powerful two-two air rifle in its cloth bag with tins of heavy duty ammunition that would stop a man if he was close enough, and certainly kill a rabbit. Finally I snatched half a dozen books from the shelf without bothering to check their titles.

All this took less than might be supposed, packed into the boot and leaving the back seats free in case I picked up a young girl hitchhiker, or came across Doris the absconding wife who had lost her money to a bag snatcher at Stansted airport and was thumbing a lift to where any motorist would take her.

As I sat for what I hoped would not be my last cup of coffee in the house, Clegg said with a worried look: “I don’t like you going off into the blue like this.”

“Neither do I, but you saw that threatening note. I’ve got to take it seriously.”

“You could pass it on to the police.”

“I could, and I’ve nothing against them, but the only thing I wouldn’t be able to stand when we came face to face would be their laughter after I’d told them why the Green Toe Gang were after my guts. Oh, I appreciate your concern, Cleggie, but I’m on my own. If I give them the runaround for long enough maybe they’ll get fed up and leave me alone.”

“I hope that’ll be the case.”

“I’ve been in tighter spots.” I told him about the shoot-out in Jack Leningrad’s Knightsbridge flat before I was picked up at London Airport by Chief Inspector Lanthorn. “At least it was quick, mind you, or seemed so at the time.”

We shook hands by the door. “Where’s Dismal? I ought to say good bye to him, even though he’s only a dog. He’ll brood for days if I don’t.”

That he was high enough up on the evolutionary scale to be useful as well as clever was proved by the fact that whenever a passerby came to the beginning of the property he kept up a deep and threatening growl, till whoever it was had reached the other end, often stopping in mid-tone so as not to waste more breath than necessary, or none at all should the person be Clegg or myself.

Clegg smiled. “He’s probably playing with the levers in the signal box, trying to lure a goods’ train from the main line. I once caught him reaching for my cap so as to look the part. I’ll worry about you every minute, though.”

I reached for my jacket. “Have faith. You know I’m indestructible.”

At fourteen-hundred hours I strapped myself into the cockpit, sorry as always to leave Upper Mayhem and the countryside smell, even when it reeked of shit. Except for Nottingham I belonged there more than anywhere else, because it was where my children had grown up, though if I’m honest — and when wasn’t I? — I recall that every morning of my ten-year stretch there I woke determined to pack the car and flee, vowing to be well away by nightfall, but the enormous Dutch breakfast spread on the table by my smiling and full-bosomed wife would not allow me to flee, and when the hunger clock chimed for lunch I mellowed back into the dissipation of peace, till the day came when she was the one who left.

Driving out of the gate, I set a southwesterly course for Huntingdon, to connect with the dual carriageway trunk road that ran between Harwich and the Midlands. With petrol fumes and the smell of burnt rubber coming through the window I knew I was back in my natural state of uncertainty and movement, the only regret being that Bill Straw wasn’t with me, whose advice had often been that it was always better to be on the road than bolted up in a house like a sitting duck. There were times when he seemed more an elder brother than a friend. “A car can also turn into a fortress,” he’d go on, “and very tempting it is to let it, but you have to know when to abandon it and move on foot,” a course that had no attraction for me, though who wouldn’t see the sense of it?

Maybe I always felt more relaxed on going west, but after Huntingdon the road was clogged with traffic, and between an endless juggernaut and the central reservation a deep and pitiful yawn seemed to come from my own mouth, or more like as if someone below the rear seats was about to expire. I’d let no tramp on board since leaving home, but the sound made me speed up almost to a ton, and on to a service station signalled a mile ahead, so as to find out what it was. A scuffling behind was as if whoever it was had decided to hang a few hours longer onto life, but I daren’t turn my head in case a collision plunged us both into an inferno, so I overtook more lorries before cutting into the slipway and off the road.

Dismal had pulled off his old trick of flattening into the well below the back seat so as not to be seen in the mirror, willing himself into invisibility.

I opened the door. Calling him sheepish was just about right, as he flopped his big body out to do a piss against the very expensive car next to mine, letting go so copiously I was forced to hold my right foot back from giving him the sharpest kick of his pampered experience. All I could think of was that I must drive back to Upper Mayhem and put him into the care of Clegg where he belonged. But the place was too far away by now, and the delay might stop me getting to Peppercorn Cottage before nightfall, apart from me being too superstitious to turn on my tracks. On the other hand, taking such a huge dog with me would cut the food supplies by half, if not two-thirds. If I turned him loose he would fend for himself at the dustbins behind the cafeteria before setting out. Or maybe a kind animal lover would take him home for a huge meal, before setting him free to find his way back. Even better if the dog lover had a conscience and, seeing Dismal’s name and phone number on his collar, drove him home in the style to which he had too long been accustomed. I thought of driving off, but the picture of him charging after me on the motorway and getting mangled by a white van was more than I could bear.

Even so, had anyone heard of a man on the run with a nodding and farting dog that weighed at least a hundred pounds in the back of his car that wasn’t made of rubber? Having long since decided to accept whatever came by chance or destiny I looped a length of thin chain through his collar and tied him to the dog post while I went inside for a cup of tea, hoping he’d be shanghaied in the interim.

No such luck. He snapped up one of the cupcakes I’d intended eating later, paper and all. If I served him swamp cabbage and crow I don’t think he’d know the difference. “Dismal,” I said sternly, “get in.”

With an expression that managed to be both sly and sad, he laughed himself into comfort along the whole of the back seat as if in his rightful home at last.

I drove onto the road and, like the captain of a ship trying to get around Cape Horn, went on making westing. The weather was fine, high cloud up ahead and not too thick at that, a day for travelling dry and covering distance. After crossing the M1 I noticed a black hatchback on my tail, an English model, with the same advantage as me from the driving seat. “Dismal, we’re in trouble.” The only response was a long yawn and simultaneous fart, as if the two motions were controlled by the same press button somewhere in his stomach.

I doodled along to make sure the hatchback stayed with me. He wasn’t always right behind, though rarely where I was out of his sight. I placed myself like an old aged pensioner between two juggernauts, the gap in both directions too small for my pursuer to interpose. He couldn’t stay side on because there was always a white van to hustle him along, so he had to get some way up front. Unless it was a manoeuvre to deceive me into thinking I was no longer followed. Either way, it allowed me to fork left at Exit One onto a dual carriageway signposted Rugby, by when he was too far ahead to follow.

A few miles later I swung right at a big island onto a B road, pulling up when it was safe to find out from the map where I was. Turf had been skinned off a field and stacked at the edge like chocolate rolls. Bees at the hedge blossom weren’t fighting over a flower, one waiting outside until the other had taken a look, before going in for its own portion. If only people could be as civilised, I thought, but on the other hand how dull life would be if they were.

Right once more on threading a village, I got over the M6 recently forked from, and at a roundabout set off on Watling Street to do a wide sweep west-north-west through the heart of the Midlands, which road I should have taken in the first place, because I’d long been familiar with it.

I considered myself sufficiently safe from the black hatchback to stop at a service compound and feed myself, as well as my passenger who, unrolling from the car, nudged my left ankle with his box-like snout to indicate that the hunger was mutual.

Another of Bill’s precepts was that subordinates should always be fed first (especially, I supposed, when it had concerned himself) so I went into the café for a ration of chips, half a dozen bangers, an eccles cake, and a bottle of Dandelion and Burdock for Dismal which I poured into one of my camping mess tins, then laid the food out for him on the ground. He was too busy scoffing to take a blind bit of notice but I said: “Dismal, you’ll be on short commons from now on. You’ve had it too soft in the last three years.”

Either he couldn’t believe I’d be so callous, or was too engrossed in lapping and slurping to care. After his piss had scorched the paint off a smart new Peugeot I smacked him back in the car and, because it was getting on for four and my guts were hollow, went in to feed myself on a teatime breakfast and pot of coffee at a table littered with cake packets, fag ends and crumbs.

I made Dismal give up his luxury couch and sit in the front passenger seat so as to fox any hatchback driver into thinking twice before tackling two grown men, especially one as ugly and menacing as my favourite dog.

If the Green Toe Gang did know of Moggerhanger’s hideout at Peppercorn Cottage (and I was sure they did) they would have realised on losing me that I was heading in that direction, so I changed my mind about getting there by nightfall, since some of the gang might already be in residence and waiting for my arrival. I was beyond Tamworth by the time this thought hit me, showing how empty the brain can become while driving, though it had been necessary to treat the road with caution, with occasional young bloods shooting by at over a hundred.

Where he came from I’ll never know, but the black hatchback was behind me again. Nor was I sure how long he had been. Maybe it wasn’t the same one as before, but part of a radio controlled screen spread across the Midlands to keep track and relay my progress back to headquarters, meanwhile passing me from one to the other and pissing themselves at my inability to lose them.

South of Lichfield I turned off for the middle of Birmingham. The one on my tail followed, of course, as I kept to the minor road through Sutton Coldfield and went on to the centre of the connurbation, Dismal nodding at my wisdom and cunning. Overtakers on a bit of motorway risked their necks, and sometimes mine, in trying to find out whether or not he was really made of rubber. Dismal was doing the part so well he must have seen such a dog in another car, and was now trying to imitate it.

A ring road strangulated the small centre of Birmingham, a Ben Hur racing track of about three miles. I knew it from driving Frances to a medical conference, her hotel right in the tight knot of the middle. I couldn’t find out how to get into it, and lost count of the times I had to slog around the circuit, but chuffed at having got there at last. “After more swearing than Uncle Toby ever did in Flanders,” she had said, disliking my curses. “I don’t know who this Uncle Toby was,” I said, “but he’d have cursed more blind than me if he’d had to find this place.” Anyway, she was not ungrateful when I finally pulled up at the hotel.

I knew the system better now, but still did the round several times to make sure the hatchback stayed behind. It did. He was lulled. I noted each set of traffic lights, and supposed that sooner or later the glow would be on green for me, and red for my pursuer. Then I’d lose him.

It took time to do each lap, since the evening rush hour seemed to start in the afternoon, but this was good because now and again I put another car behind me, so nippy was I with the Picaro, though the hatchback driver stuck to me like you-know-what to a blanket, and resumed his place.

I led him on what might be called a dance, and enjoyed it. Why was he chasing me? To kill me? Wait to get me on a remote lane and let me have a bullet in the head? I thought not. They were after Moggerhanger, and since Greece assumed that every motor trip I did was on his business. Now they were tracking me to find out not only where I was going but what load I would pick up, so as to get their hands on it and, at the same time, put the kibosh on me.

Not if I knew it. I was in my element. I clipped a red light, and the hatchback had to stay behind. I ignored the next left turn into the middle, but took the one after, soon out and unfollowed to the far side of the ring road. In a few minutes I was belting through the urban jungle of Smethwick.

It was immaterial where I went. In fact I got enjoyably lost till I came to Tipton, and though a right tip it looked, the smell of smoke and curry made me salivate. In Wolverhampton I picked up the A41 and headed north. No more hatchback.

By half past six, after a few stops for Dismal to do what a dog had to do, and knowing that all I needed to do was eat and sleep, I decided to get bed and breakfast at a small town called Blackchapel. I walked into a pub-hotel with Dismal on his lead, telling the woman behind the bar that I wanted a room for me and my dog.

Her features screwed up, as if he’d had already done a good job by her feet and she’d been told to carry it away. I calmed her anxiety. “He’s house trained. You don’t need to worry about him on that score.”

“It’s fourteen pounds bed and breakfast, per person,” she said. “I can’t think what to charge for the dog.”

“You’d better make it the same. He’ll eat at least one breakfast.”

She smiled, as I peeled off six fivers and told her to keep the change. “He looks a lovely dog, though. Is he yours?”

“I didn’t kidnap him.”

“That’d take some doing, a big thing like that.”

The room, with two single beds, overlooked the high street, and Dismal, who to my knowledge hadn’t been in a hotel before, was finding it full of marvels, plodding around the bathroom, sniffing under each bed, and finally banging his weighty tail against the wardrobe door until, looking as tired as I was, though he’d done nothing to reach that state, stretched on one of the beds with a sigh and a yawn, while I lay for an hour on the other, knackered after my first day on the run, well pleased at my success in having survived this far.

Dismal’s body resembled a relief model of the Malvern Hills, an occasional ripple along his backbone hinting of their long dead volcanic disturbance, though I knew it to be due to canine subterranean dreams. Having chosen the bed nearest the door, he would be shot first should anyone come into the room, his body forming a sufficient barricade for me to put in the second round and make my getaway.

I washed, and took man’s best friend down to the bar for another pint of Dandelion and Burdock (or its equivalent) with a jar of the best bitter for me. A couple of locals at the counter, and a few at the tables close to mine, looked on Dismal slopping his favourite drink from the dog bowl. When he finished he laid his jaw-block onto my knees, and knowing what he meant, I took him to the gents in the backyard for what I needed as well.

Blackchapel was quiet when we walked out to find a place for supper, except for a dozen women demonstrating with placards outside the public library saying: ‘Save our hospital’ and ‘No to the cuts’—a common sight in Thatcher’s Britain, or maybe it was only modern times, and people would soon be buying first aid kits and DIY surgery tools to operate on each other in the living room.

A few youths looked on, as if they were, understandably, intending to rip up a few urinals and telephone boxes after the women had gone home. We came back almost to the hotel, and found an Indian restaurant across the road. Dismal didn’t have to be dragged in, because he loved curry, and with his penchant for beer he would have made a typical football hooligan. An appropriate scarf, and he would have been away.

As it was, the waiters didn’t like the look of him, and I couldn’t blame them, but when I ordered a full meal for him as well as for myself, and told them to lay his by my chair, they did so willingly enough. The only other people in the place was a couple at the next table, the well-built man about fifty and the slender rather bony woman in her late thirties. “Nice animal you’ve got there.” He was just audible above the crackle of Dismal’s poppadoms.

“He is,” I said, “and he’s as human as if he’s my brother. Do you live in this town?”

“Good God, no. We’re on our way to North Wales. Going for a little holiday, aren’t we, pet?”

“If you say so, George.” She didn’t seem to like the prospect, and fingered the multicoloured beads across her chest. “I still don’t know whether we’ve done the right thing.”

“What right thing was that?” I asked the man.

She turned her fully soured face onto me. “That’s it, ask him, you just ask him. Happen he’ll be able to tell you.”

“You did want to come away, Edna, you know you did,” George said to her. “You can’t say you didn’t.”

“I know I did.” She was uncertain, and peevish. “I can’t go back now, though, can I? Willy’s already home from work.”

“Never mind, love, you’ll be all right with me.”

They’d eaten little of their meal, and now held hands. “I know I shall,” Edna said, “but he’ll be ever so upset, coming home to an empty house.”

“And he has every right to be, but that’s not my problem. Nor is it yours, either, is it, love? We’ve done it, haven’t we?”

“We have,” she said, “but I just don’t like people to be upset, especially Willy. We did live together nearly twenty years, you know, so it’s bound to come as a bit of a shock to him.”

This was better than looking at the telly in the hotel lounge, and they didn’t seem to care that I was listening. Even Dismal’s head went to and fro between his belches, at the same time eating every grain of rice and chunk of beef. Then he gazed sadly at the couple’s leftovers, as if he hadn’t been fed for a month, till George took the hint and laid them down. “I do love you, Edna,” he said. “More than Willy ever did.”

“He didn’t know any better, did he? But he did his best, according to his lights. He hit me a time or two, though I never knew what for.”

“He won’t do that to you anymore. A man should never hit a woman, not even now and again. But that’s all in the past now, love. We’ll find a council in Wales that’ll give me a job. I’ve already written off to a few, and I’ve got good prospects. We’ll get a room somewhere at first, then rent a nice little bungalow. And if your bloody Willy comes looking for us I’ll knock his block off. I’ll send him on his way all right. I never knew he’d hit you till you told me just now.”

He was a big man, fit and fierce enough to do as he said, which I could only applaud. “He did hit me,” she said. “It was before I knew you. He gave me a black eye once. I didn’t know where to show my face when I went to the supermarket.”

“But why should he hit you, I’d like to know.”

“I never knew, honest I didn’t. He just got up from his chair, after finishing his supper one night, and crack — right in the eye.”

“You must know why he did it.”

She wiped away tears with the curry stained paper napkin. “I don’t know, George. I swear I don’t.”

“I’ll bloody hit him, if he comes near me again. In fact I hope he does. I’ll give the bugger what for.” After a two-minute silence he went on. “In any case, you can’t go back to him now, can you?”

Fascination with their problem made me call for two more pints of lager, one for me and one for Dismal, who thought it was his birthday. I could only surmise that half the women in England must be in the process of leaving their husbands, and half the men running away from their wives, probably both, a real two-way flow, which at least put some energy into the country.

“I’ll never want to go back, either,” she said. “He’d murder me if I did.”

“You’d better put all notion of it behind you, then.”

I was beginning to think of them as distant relations, and George, as if encouraged by me, called for two as well, and when they came Edna said she didn’t like lager, at which he gave a reckless laugh: “I’ll have them both, then.”

“You’ve had a lot already,” she said. “Shall you be able to drive?”

“I’ve driven on a lot more than this.”

“It’s dark, though. You told me you didn’t like driving after lighting up time.”

He held her wrist. “Don’t you worry, my darling. With you on board we’ll be as safe as houses. If it was only me I might take a few risks, but not with you beside me. You’re the most precious thing in the world to me. Anyway, we’ve not far to go now, less than a hundred miles, I think.”

“It’s a lot, though,” she said. “Even an hour ago when it was daylight you nearly had an accident with that little black hatchback.”

I nearly choked on my drink.

“You mean on the M6? I can’t think why he was in such a hurry. He must be in Manchester by now. A real bastard he was. He could have killed us. I wish I’d caught up with him. I’d have wrapped that little Oxo tin around his neck. I’d have stamped the breath of life out of him on the hard shoulder. Road rage wouldn’t have been in it.”

“You’d never have caught him, because I saw him turn off for Wolverhampton. Anyway, there’s a dual carriageway after Chester, and I don’t like the idea of you driving on that in the dark with six pints of lager inside you.”

If the hatchback had peeled off, as she had said, it must have been going to try its luck at Peppercorn Cottage. I took the map from my pocket, to wonder which way I’d be steering in the morning.

“Six pints isn’t so much,” George said. “I’m a big man, don’t forget.”

I considered it time to pass a hand across and introduce myself. “Michael Cullen. I’m going to my farm in Shropshire,” I bragged, “to see how the manager’s getting on with the livestock. I hope you don’t mind me interposing into your conversation, but why don’t you stay the night at the hotel? It’s just across the road, and very comfortable. That’s where I’m spending the night, and it’s only fourteen pounds a head. There are plenty of rooms vacant.”

George finished the first pint. “I’m the sort who likes to push on, through thick and thin.”

“He’s only trying to be kind, darling,” Edna said. “I wouldn’t mind staying there overnight.”

It was late, and the waiters were starting to re-set the tables, as if they did a huge trade with curried breakfasts. “Nor would I,” George said, “but I think we should put as many miles between us and Willy as we can.”

“You think so? Well, I suppose you know as much what he’s like as I do. He’s been your best friend for the last three years.”

He grunted. “I don’t bloody know about that. He wasn’t very pleasant when we went on that walking tour and he couldn’t keep up with me.”

“You never mentioned that before.”

He laughed, and not too lovingly, either. “There are lots of things about him and me you don’t know.”

“I hope you’ll tell me sometime what they are, then. You ought to have done so before.”

“It’ll all come out, dearest, never you fear. We’ll have lots of cosy evenings by the fire talking to each other.”

I paid my reasonable reckoning, and left five quid for the waiters. “Come on, Dismal, and when we go to bed don’t pull the sheets off me, like you did last night.” I offered my hand to George and then Edna. “I hope you get to where you’re going safely but, as I said, there’s plenty of room at the inn if you want to stay overnight.”

They were bickering as to whether or not they should when I left, Dismal hardly able to walk after cleaning up every plate within range.

While scrubbing my teeth I heard George and Edna being shown into the room next to mine, and when the landlady left they were still arguing, though I couldn’t make out the words. I fell into bed, Dismal already snoring and having bad dreams. Served him right. With good ones his tail wagged like a metronome. The man shouted: “I love you, Edna, you know I do. I always have.”

She all but screamed: “I know you do, George. Oh, I know you do. And I love you to bits.”

“It’ll never change,” he bawled. “Never!” Then the banging and balling and shrieking began as they went at it like two parrots, and I thought what a daft prick I had been to suggest they stay here, but how could I have known that with so many empty rooms they would be put in the one next door? The landlady must have had a good laugh on her way down the creaking stairs.

The fact that I’d gathered something about the pursuing hatchback wasn’t much consolation at the noise of explicit fuckery that went on all night. While realising that a man and woman don’t run away together for nothing, it was hard to believe they hadn’t had it in a bed before embarking on the great escape. Or perhaps they’d only managed the occasional knee-trembler in George’s garden shed, and having it off between sheets at last had gone to their heads. I could only curse them on hearing a noise like that of a wardrobe falling down.