South by South East

SHREDDED WHEAT

We spent the night at a cheap motel on the edge of Amsterdam. Our money was low and so were we. Rushmore had been our only link in a chain that might lead us to Charon and now he was dead. Worse still, it seemed that Charon knew we were in Amsterdam. How else could he have got to the ice-rink before us?

It was raining when we got to the Van Bates Motel. We were shown to our room by a thin, twitchy manager who didn’t speak a word of English. In the end we had to get his mother down to translate.

All I wanted was a shower and a bed but the shower wasn’t working and as usual Tim took the bed. There was a TV in one corner of the room. It was tuned to the BBC — the ten o’clock news. I didn’t want to hear the news but I was somehow glad to hear another English voice. I listened. And suddenly I was glad I’d turned it on.

There was a reporter on the screen. He was standing outside Sotheby’s, the auction house in New Bond Street, London.

“Boris Kusenov-” They were the first two words I’d heard. That was what had caught my attention- “is considered to be the key figure in the struggle for power at the Kremlin.”

The picture changed. Now the reporter was inside the auction house, standing in front of a large canvas. For a moment I thought the TV had broken. Then I realized. This was modern art.

“Kusenov is in England to bid for a canvas by the surrealist painter, Salvador Dali,” the reporter’s voice went on. “Titled ‘The Tsar’s Feast’, it depicts Tsar Nicholas II offering stale bread to his dissatisfied serfs…”

Well, that may have been what it looked like to him. To me the picture looked like a bent watch beside a pink lake being examined by two oversized amoebas. Had Kusenov come all the way from Russia just to buy this? The TV screen cut to a picture of the reporter. He answered the question for me.

“Kusenov came to Britain unexpectedly because of his belief that the painting should hang in Russia. Although it is expected to reach almost a million pounds, he will be bidding for it when it is auctioned at Sotheby’s in two days’ time.”

The reporter smirked at the camera and the programme cut back to the studio and the next news item.

“Police have completely lost the track of the dangerous criminal, Tim Diamond, who…”

I turned the set off. I’d heard quite enough about him.

“Kusenov,” I muttered. Tim was sitting upright on the bed. The sound of his own name had evidently woken him up. “He’s already in England.”

“Is that bad?” Tim asked.

I sighed. It wasn’t bad. It was terrible. “It means we’re running out of time. Charon could move at any moment.” I thought for a minute. “We’ve got to find this Winter House,” I said. “We need help.”

Tim’s eyes lit up. “Charlotte!”

“You’d better call her.”

Tim called her. The phone rang about six times before we were connected. Charlotte answered in Dutch.

“Charlotte?” Tim interrupted. “It’s me… Tim.”

“Tim?” There was a pause and I wondered if she’d forgotten who he was. But then she continued breathlessly. “Thank goodness you rang. I have to see you. I think I’ve found something.”

“What?” Tim asked.

“I can’t tell you. Not over the telephone. Let’s meet somewhere safe.” Another pause. I could hear heavy breathing. It took me a few seconds to realize it was Tim’s. Then Charlotte cut in again. “Just outside Amsterdam, in the Flavoland. There’s a crossroads and a bus stop. Can you meet me there tomorrow morning? At nine.”

“Tomorrow?” Tim crooned. “But that’s a whole day away!”

“I know.”

“I’ll be there.”

Tim hung up. “Tomorrow,” he said. “Just off the Flavobahn. In Autoland.”

“I heard,” I said.

And I had heard. Charlotte was frightened and Rushmore was dead. Charon, it seemed, was everywhere. How long would it be before he moved in on us?

Take a bus north out of Amsterdam and after a while you’ll come to the Flavoland. When you look for a view and find you haven’t got one, that’s when you’ll know you’re there. The Flavoland used to be the bottom of the sea until someone had the bright idea of taking the water away. What was left was a great, flat, wide, empty nothing. Dutch farmers use it to grow their crops in, and that’s all there is: fields of corn, wheat, barley and maize stretching out to a horizon as regular as a plate. There isn’t one hill in the Flavoland. There are no trees. And the birds are too bored to whistle.

There was only one bus stop in the area and it was right next to the crossroads that Charlotte had described. The bus-driver tried to stop us getting out — he must have thought we were crazy — but we insisted.

“When does the next bus arrive?” I asked.

“Tomorrow,” he replied.

And then it was gone, kicking up a cloud of dust, and we were alone with the wind and the wheat.

Really alone.

I looked behind me. Nothing. I looked ahead. Nothing. The road was just two lines that ran together and the bus was already a speck at the far end. The wheat rippled gently in the breeze. It was a hot day. The sun was beating down and with no hills and no trees there were no shadows. We were in the middle of a giant frying pan. And there was no sign of Charlotte.

Tim looked at his watch. “She’s late.”

I could hear a faint droning. At first I thought it was a wasp. Out of the corner of my eye I saw something small passing in front of the sun. But it wasn’t an insect. It was a plane, spraying the crops about two or three kilometres to the south. I watched as it flew in a straight line, parallel to the horizon. I could see it more clearly now, an old wooden propeller plane with two sets of wings on each side, like something out of the First World War. It was leaving a silvery cloud behind it, thin drops of pesticide or something drifting down onto…

“That’s funny,” I said.

“What’s that?” Tim asked.

“That plane’s dusting crops where there ain’t no crops.”

The plane turned sharply and began to fly towards us. I could hear the propeller chopping at the air. The engine sounded angry. For a long time I just stood there watching it. Maybe it was the heat. Maybe I was tired. I didn’t realize I was watching my own death.

But then the plane swooped down and before my brain had time to tell me what was going on my legs were hurling me out of the way as the whole thing sliced through the air millimetres above where my head had just been. Tim shrieked and threw himself in the other direction. For a moment everything went dark as the plane blotted out the sun. The propeller whipped up the surface of the road, stinging my eyes. And then it was gone, climbing upwards and at the same time turning for the next attack.

Tim got to his knees, coughing and blinking. I don’t think he’d quite understood what was happening. “Low flying…” he muttered.

I nodded. “Any lower and it wouldn’t need wings.”

“Do you think…?”

But even Tim had worked out what I was thinking. It was Charon. Somehow he had found out about our meeting with Charlotte.

I remembered now how scared she’d been on the telephone. Maybe she’d been followed. Maybe she was already dead.

Charon was up there. And we had nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. Because that was exactly where we were. Nowhere.

I was still wondering which way to run when the plane swept down again. And this time there was an even more unpleasant surprise. Two of its wings were fitted with machine-guns. I saw the sparks of red and heard the chatter of the bullets. A section of the road leaped up at me, the tarmac shattering. Tim dived to one side and I tried to follow him but then something punched me hard on the shoulder and I was thrown on my back. The plane rushed past, the wind battering and blinding me. I knew I had been hit but I didn’t know how badly. I was hurting all over.

But then the plane had gone and somehow I had got to my feet. I looked round for Tim. His face was white but it could have been dust. The plane was banking steeply, preparing for the next attack. Third time lucky…?

We only had one chance. “Come on!” I shouted. “The wheat!”

“I can’t!” Tim was frozen. The plane had almost completed its turn.

“Why not?”

“My hay fever…!”

“Tim!” It was incredible. Charon had us right in his sights and Tim was worrying about his hay fever. Any minute now he’d have more holes in him than a Swiss cheese and the next time he sneezed, he’d do it in fourteen directions at once. But this was no time to argue. Ignoring the pain in my shoulder, I grabbed hold of him and pushed him off the road.

The plane dived again, invisible this time, and a great patch of wheat tore itself apart spectacularly around me. Tim sneezed. At least he hadn’t been hit. But this was hopeless. We could stumble through the field until the whole thing looked like a plate of cornflakes but we’d end up as the free gifts in the middle. Eventually Charon would pick us off. We had to do something. Now.

And then I saw them. They’d been left in the middle of the wheat and they had both fallen over into a sad and useless heap. They were made of wire and old broomstick handles with punctured footballs for heads. Scarecrows. Even the most cowardly of crows wouldn’t have been scared by them but they’d given me an idea.

I searched for the plane. It was at its furthest point, turning again. Then I yelled at Tim. “Take off your jacket!”

“Why?”

“Just do it!”

I pulled off my own jacket. It hurt me and as my sleeve came free I saw that it was soaked in blood. But it would just have to wait. I grabbed hold of one of the scarecrows and threw it towards Tim. Miraculously he’d got the idea without my having to explain it. We had no time. The plane had almost completed its turn, a shimmering dot in the face of the sun. I hoped that Charon would be blinded by the glare, that he wouldn’t see what we were doing. I’d managed to get my jacket onto the smaller scarecrow. It hung off the wooden framework clumsily and the football face — black and white and half deflated — looked nothing like mine. At least, I hope it didn’t. I glanced back. The plane had completed its turn. It was coming at us, out of the sun.

“Tim…?”

He’d hung his own jacket onto the other scarecrow. Carefully, we leaned them against each other, shoulder to shoulder. They swayed but stood upright like two drunken friends. The noise of the plane reached me and I almost felt the wheat shiver behind me.

“Duck!” I shouted.

We threw ourselves into the wheat at the same moment as the bullets erupted again. I looked up and saw the two scarecrows only a metre or two away cut in half by the scythe of gunfire. The plane roared overhead. And then it was all over. The plane continued the way it had come, disappearing in the distance. The scarecrows lay in tatters on a bed of shredded wheat. The wind stroked the rest of the crop as if trying to soothe it after what had happened.

We stood up. We wouldn’t be wearing our jackets again. The bullets had turned them into so many handkerchiefs. Tim gazed up at the sky, “You think it was Charon?” he said.

“Who else could it have been?” I replied.

“A farmer…”

“What? Using machine-gun bullets to spray the crops?”

Tim considered. “Maybe it was an organic farmer.”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”

There was a long silence. I found I was unconsciously gripping my arm. I could feel the blood seeping through my fingers.

Tim was deep in thought. At last he spoke. “If it was Charon,” he muttered, “he’ll think we’re dead now. And if he thinks we’re dead, he won’t try and kill us.”

“Right,” I agreed.

Tim brightened. “Well, I suppose that’s a shot in the arm.” Then he saw the blood.

“Nick!”

“What?”

“You’ve been shot in the arm.”

“I know.”

Tim took a step forward. His face had gone a cheesy-white and I knew what was about to happen. And a moment later it did. With a little moan, he crumpled and joined the two scarecrows, stretched out in the heat. He never had been able to stand the sight of blood.

I just stood where I was, clutching my arm. It was hurting more now, but that was good. It reminded me that I was still alive.