Angel Confidential (24 page)

As far as finding fields in the middle of nowhere went, his instructions were spot on. Bobby could give lectures on precision bombing.

The only trouble I had was there was nobody there.

I didn't take Armstrong more than ten feet into the field. He was too old to play at being a 4 x 4, so I turned off the engine and waited. Bobby hadn't specified a time other than just ‘morning', but he had said I'd be met. By what, he hadn't specified. After two minutes I would have welcomed a hare or a rabbit or the odd field mouse. Nothing. Just a field put to grass or set aside or whatever they call it when they get a grant from the bureaucrats in Europe for growing nothing.

Not a stoat, not a pheasant, not a fox, not even a scarecrow, just a white Land Rover Discovery coming straight at me. They say the reason they're called Discoverys is that you only discover that they are four inches or so taller than the old design Land Rover when you enter a multi-storey car park. Whatever, my thoughts were: was this the local farmer come to shoot a trespasser, and where had he come from anyway?

I started up Armstrong's engine just in case, but the Discovery slowed and parked alongside me so the driver could lean out of his window.

The driver was a man in his late forties, I guessed. He had a thick head of curly black hair and he wore a white linen shirt, the sleeves rolled up. He put a forearm on the edge of his door as he leaned over to speak down to me. From his face and arm, I suspected his skin came from a sample patch in a World of Leather showroom.

‘Mr Lee?' I said.

‘That's right. Just follow me round the edge of the field. You'll be all right; the suspension on even that thing should take it. The caravans manage.' His accent was unplaceable.

‘My name's Angel,' I said as he put the Discovery in gear.

‘Guessed as much,' he said. ‘We don't get many taxis in this field. You could wait hours for one some days.'

I followed his exhaust.

 

Halfway round the edge of the field, I could see where he was heading. The field dipped away from the road and led into another, just low enough to be hidden from the main road. There was a five-bar gate on this
one, and Lee stopped and got out to open it.

He was a small, wiry man, slightly bow-legged, almost as if one leg had been broken and not set properly at some time. He pushed the gate open, and as he walked back to the Discovery he pantomimed to me that I had to close it.

He drove through and stopped. I pulled up behind him and, as he climbed back behind his wheel, I got out. He waited until I had shut the gate and then slowly drove off. I was about to yell after him, but as he moved, I could see
where he was heading. At the bottom corner of this second field was a clump of trees, and around them were parked three long white caravans. There was a new Land Rover to the side of one of them and a small box truck a few yards away. From the cables coming from the truck, I guessed it held a generator of some kind. All the caravans had TV aerials, and one of them a satellite dish.

I eased down the field towards the encampment. Lee parked the Discovery at the door of the central caravan and motioned me to pull in beside it. Maybe the family had a thing about car parking.

‘Come in and have some coffee,' he said as I climbed out.

The van was nearly new and probably state of the art to people who knew about such things. Not so much a mobile home as a bungalow on wheels. A two-step arrangement had been folded down as a doorstep. At the side of the step were two empty, washed milk bottles.

‘You get deliveries here?' I said, looking round at an endless vista of green.

‘Just my wife's little joke. First one up in the morning goes over to the local farm for fresh. He looks after all our deliveries. ‘

‘Nice farmers you have round here.'

He opened the van door but turned to me to speak. ‘They don't all hate us. This one is fine, he works for me. See them?'

I strained my eyes to where he was pointing. Two fields away there were what looked like horses.

‘The horses?' I said almost confidently.

‘Ponies, actually. The local man is my trainer.'

‘Ponies? What do you train ponies for?'

“Racing, of course.' He looked at me as if he was considering regretting the offer to invite me in.

‘Pony racing? In Lincolnshire?' Had I missed something after wasting all those Saturday afternoons down the bookmakers?

‘No, of course not. In Ireland, Dublin. I'm a big exporter of stock to the Irish. They like quality.'

I had certainly heard of the unofficial and probably illegal (as much as anything involving a bet is illegal in Ireland) street races in Dublin, but I had no idea they were importing professional bloodlines. It didn't really surprise me.

‘And you're not in Lincolnshire,' he added. ‘I reckon you're actually in Cambridgeshire, but over there is Northamptonshire and over there is Leicestershire, or what used to be Rutland. Lincolnshire is probably two fields north. We call this place Four Counties. It's handy because that means you have four different sets of social services all passing the buck about what to do about us. By the time they've sorted out which local council site we should be on, the season's over and we're travelling.'

I was impressed. Here was a man who was really fieldwise.

Inside, the van sparkled with bright chrome fillings. The kitchen section, opposite the door, had a work surface no more than 18 inches square. On it were coffee pot and filter, a small electric coffee grinder and an electric kettle gently puffing steam. It had switched itself off, but who had switched it on? There was no sign of anyone else in the van or around the other two vans either.

Mr Lee was a mind reader as well.

‘My wife's with the kids and my mother in her van. I thought it best if we spoke alone. Have a seat.'

I squeezed by him and headed for the leather bench seat around the bay window at the back – or was it the front? – of the van. I trod carefully, as either side of me were fitted glass-fronted cabinets containing Spode, Royal Worcester, Waterford glass and odd bits of lead crystal ware. Where there were no cabinets, there were shelves at eye level, and they were tightly packed with small, portable antiques such as carriage clocks, small bronze statues, even a boxed hydrometer/thermometer set from a 19
th
Century brewery.

‘Very homely,' I said, cringing at how patronising I sounded.

He wizzed the coffee grinder into life.

‘What did you expect? Gypsy Rose Lee, fortunes told and lucky white heather?'

‘Sorry.'

‘You've come a long way. What did Bobby tell you?' He poured hot water into the filter cone.

‘Just that you wanted to see me; that you might fill in some gaps. He sad it would be worth my while.'

‘You think there's some gypsy gold lying around, perhaps? Lot of people do.'

‘Is there?' I asked keenly, as if expecting him to tell me more. ‘I'd be glad to relieve you of some. I know what a drag it is having to take it out and count it by moonlight then trudge out into the field and bury it on the spot marked X, ten paces to the left of hangman's oak.'

He poured coffee into cups.

‘Bobby said you were a bit strange, but I thought that was just him. He's very young and a bit out of his depth in the big city.'

I tried to keep my face straight at that.

‘Why were you looking for Carrick Junior?'

‘You're Carrick as well?' He nodded, and then so did I as if it was significant. ‘Actually, I wasn't, and I told Bobby that. I was helping somebody find Stella Rudgard, Sir Drummond's daughter. She and Carrick had a bit of a fling together and she was looking for him. She says it wasn't like him just to up sticks and move on.'

I looked around me at the caravan.

‘Not that I'm saying anything about people who just up sticks and move on. Anyway, she had a ding-dong with her father about whether or not he'd got rid of Carrick while she was away.'

‘What do you mean got rid of?'

‘Sacked him, kicked him out of whatever job he was doing.'

‘He couldn't. Carrick worked for Buck, the solicitor. He just used to help out at that car museum place when things were slack. Buck was the one who paid his wages.'

‘For doing what?'

He sipped coffee to delay his answer, and then decided not to give me one.

‘What made the girl think he'd gone to London?' he asked instead.

‘He'd mentioned doing business with the Church of the Shining Doorway in Islington. She didn't know what he meant, but she found the church, only it had moved, and no-one there is talking about Carrick. We found her hanging out with the Doorway and went to tell Sir Drummond. Your Bobby picked us up there. He thought we were tracking Carrick too.'

‘But no trace?'

‘Not a word.'

‘And you've found the girl you were looking for.' It wasn't a question.

‘We know where she is, and she's promised to keep in touch.'

‘So what's your interest in this now?'

‘Good question,' I said. It was. ‘Stella has been sort of adopted by some friends of mine, and I guess I feel slightly responsible for looking after them when things turn bad.'

‘You think things are going to turn bad?'

‘In my experience, when you mess in other people's business, they usually do.'

He drained his coffee cup and I watched him, or rather I watched the van
next to us over his shoulder where a net curtain had
twitched twice.

‘I want to hire you to find my son,' he said. ‘I can pay.'

I put my cup and saucer down on a
shelf, wincing as it rattled in my shaking hand.

‘Mr Lee, do I look like a detective?'

‘Not like the ones I've met,' he admitted, ‘but they've always been in police stations.'

‘You've already got Bobby looking,' I said.

‘And plenty of others you don't know about, all over the country. There's been no sign, no sign at all. And no word. That's not like our Carrick. He missed his grandmother's birthday. He would never do that. Never.'

He was glassy-eyed, staring not at me but at a point somewhere behind my head.

‘You don't hold with Carrick joining this Church of the Shining Doorway? It's a
strange outfit by all accounts, sort of religious squatters, a cult. They can put a hold on the most unlikely people sometimes.'

‘Absolutely no way, not Carrick. Did you say squatters?'

‘Sort of. They seem to set up shop in empty houses, or places for sale. At least, that's what they've done recently. They used to be in Islington; that's where Carrick said he was going. Said it was to do with “bizyness”.'

His face twitched as I pronounced it the way Bobby did and Stella had told us that Carrick did as well.

‘What sort of business was Carrick in, Mr Lee?' I asked when he remained silent.

‘The same business we've all been in at one time or another, but of course he had to think up a fancy name for it. ADP, he called it. Advancing Property Depreciation. Got some property you want to buy but can't afford the asking price? Put a family of Romanys on the site, then make them an offer. Or if you've got property you can't develop – can't get planning permission – let us set up a camp there and run the place down for you.'

‘Advancing the depreciation,' I said. ‘Sorry, no offence.'

‘None taken. Sometimes we do it for a fee, sometimes for what's on site. We did an old brewery once for the lead and the copper. The place flooded and the local council couldn't move us on fast enough. The place is now a complex of executive flats.'

‘Haven't the planners rumbled you?'

‘Not if you keep moving. The more liberal councils get all upset because they haven't provided permanent sites for us. The right-wing ones just want to see the back of us. There's rarely any trouble, it's almost as if everybody accepts it as part of the game. Where there's property and money involved, the rules can be bent.'

‘All you need is a bent property developer,' I said.

‘Or a bent solicitor.'

 

He was walking with me over to Armstrong when his telephone trilled.

‘Bloody thing,' he muttered as he pulled a small mobile phone from his trouser pocket and flipped it open. ‘Yes?'

I moved away to give him some privacy but he held out a hand in a ‘Stop' gesture.

‘Yeah, he's here now,' he said into the mouthpiece. ‘Yes, we've talked.'

To me, he mouthed: ‘It's Bobby.'

He said ‘yeah, yeah' and ‘a-huh' a couple of times and then ‘Hang on', and turned to me.