At Risk

46

The pub in Birdhoe was called the Plough, and the sign showed the seven stars of that constellation. By 12:30 the car park was almost full; Sunday lunch at the Plough was a popular fixture, and there wasn’t another pub for three or four miles in either direction.

Exiting the ladies’ toilet in the corner of the car park, where she had been waiting until the coast was clear, Jean D’Aubigny looked about her. Luckily, it was still raining. No one was hanging around in the car park to chat. The car she had identified as the easiest to steal, if not necessarily the most suitable, was an old racing-green MGB. It was probably a quarter of a century old, but without being a collector’s piece looked reasonably well cared for. Its great advantage was that due to its age it had no steering lock that had to be disabled. Jean was capable of breaking a steering lock-a length of piping braced beneath one of the struts of the wheel and forced downwards usually did the trick-but it was a hard operation to perform unobtrusively.

Arriving at a decision, she walked purposefully to the MGB, deftly slashed the wet vinyl top with her clasp knife, dipped in her hand, slipped the lock, and climbed into the driver’s seat. Next to her, in the passenger seat, was a man’s sheepskin jacket, which she laid over her sodden knees. Drawing back her booted foot, she smashed her right heel into the covering beneath the steering wheel. It was plastic, but old plastic, and half of it cracked away, revealing the white metal ignition barrel beneath.

Glancing quickly around her to make sure that she was still unobserved, she wrenched the four wires out of the bottom of the barrel, and stripped them back with the knife. Taking the red wire-the main ignition lead-she quickly touched it to the others in turn. With the third, a green wire, there was a brief lurch as the starter turned over. Isolating the green wire, she quickly connected the other two to the red one. The dashboard was now live. Depressing the clutch, she ran through the gears a couple of times before slipping the MGB back into neutral.

OK, she told herself. Here we go-Inshallah!

Carefully, avoiding the thumping electric shocks she’d suffered the first couple of times she’d tried it, outside a housing project in southeast Paris, she touched the green starter wire to the other three and depressed the accelerator an inch or two. The MGB howled, terrifyingly loud, and Jean jumped. But the weather must have dampened the noise, because no furious owner, beer glass in hand, appeared out of the pub. Instead, rainwater poured into Jean’s lap from the knife slash in the vinyl top.

With the engine turning over, she switched on the heater and windscreen-wipers, put the MGB into reverse, let off the handbrake, and backed out of the parking space. Even the gentlest manoeuvre seemed to engender an outraged snarl from the old sports car, and Jean’s heart was thumping painfully in her chest as she shifted to first gear, nosed towards the car park exit, and turned sharply southwards.

On the open road she felt no less self-conscious. This, surely, was a vehicle that local people would know and recognise. But the area seemed deserted. People were either at the pub, she guessed, or behind their locked front doors, watching TV sport or the Sunday soaps.

A mile beyond the village she came to the spot they had located on the map, where the cut they had walked along disappeared into a culvert under the road. She pulled up just beyond it, ensuring that the engine stayed running. Within moments, Faraj’s head and torso appeared, and he was hauling himself up through the sodden dead brambles. Jean leaned over to open the door and Faraj handed in the black rucksack, which she placed alongside her own in front of the passenger seat. Dripping copiously, he climbed into the seat, arranged the rucksacks beneath his knees, and pulled the door closed.

“Shabash!” murmured Faraj. “Congratulations!”

“It’s not perfect,” she admitted, as the windscreen-wipers thumped noisily back and forth, “but it was the easiest to steal.”

She pulled back on to the road. The petrol gauge read a quarter full, and her brief elation faded as she realised that they weren’t going to be able to refill the tank, which almost certainly only ran on leaded fuel. Right now, though, she couldn’t face explaining this. Her senses felt simultaneously taut-wired and dulled to a kind of slow motion. She was running on empty herself. It was too complicated.

“Let’s get out of here,” she said.