Going It Alone (17 page)

The truck wasn’t hurrying, and its driver betrayed not the slightest sign of thinking to evade pursuit. With Holland Park behind it, it moved sedately down the length of Goldhawk Road, with its trailer swaying gently from side to side – and occasionally bumping rather drastically up and down – in the rear. It seemed improbable that any turn of speed could be extracted from it in however great an emergency. So in a sense it was an easy quarry.

‘Remember how this road bears left?’ Tim asked. ‘If they go on to the end, and turn right for Chiswick High Road, it’s my bet they’ll be making for our old friend the M4. And I’m just wondering whether to take a chance – either here in town or out on the motorway.’

‘A chance?’

‘Well, yes. I wish they had Dave in a cage and not in that crate – if he is in that crate. The rub’s there, wouldn’t you say, Uncle Gilbert? If he were in a cage – like that king in
Tamburlaine
– he could gibber at us, and we’d know. But of course it might perturb the passersby.’

‘Certainly it might.’ Tim, his uncle supposed, was entertaining himself with this bizarre fantasy by way of what he would have expressed as keeping his cool. Averell himself found the notion of a young man pinioned in a crate so extremely horrible as to be an unsuitable subject for anything of the kind. But he saw the underlying cogency of Tim’s line of thought.

‘It would be easiest on the motorway,’ Tim went on – swinging, as predicted, into Chiswick High Road. ‘Just draw level with the thing, force it on to the soft shoulder, and then give it and ourselves a good immobilizing bash. There would be a crowd in a jiffy, including your friends the fuzz. But suppose that crate holds nothing but their swag – or even just a collection of miscellaneous musical instruments? If swag, we’d be heroes in the eyes of the bloody bank, of course. But it mightn’t much improve Dave’s chances if in fact they’re holding him elsewhere.’

The lucidity of all this was apparent, and Averell acquiesced in it. What disconcerted him now, oddly enough, was the gentle pace, almost the unflawed decorum, of this morning drive through the western outskirts of London. The occasional casual turning on of a television set a little before some desired programme was a habit that had familiarized him with the habitual climax of that sort of entertainment in which cops catch robbers. Salvos are exchanged, sirens ululate, cars squeal, skid, turn themselves incontinently into roundabouts. This was not like that, and so a naive expectation of drama was frustrated in him.

‘That confounded thing might be a hearse,’ he said testily – and was immediately appalled by the unfortunate implication of this remark.

‘In which case,’ Tim said grimly, ‘it’s our job to track it to the crematorium. But we’ll hope it’s not as bad as that. Yes! There’s the flyover ahead. So it’s as I thought. We’ll be going west.’

Averell almost managed to find this echo of his own
phrase
équivoque
(an expression his friend Georges would have admitted) tolerably funny, and he was further relaxed by the fact that their pace presently picked up considerably. If he wasn’t exactly looking forward to a confrontation with the two toughs (as they must be) in the truck, he wasn’t inclined to shirk it either. And if it were to be done at all (he told himself, vaguely recalling Macbeth) then ’twere well it were done quickly. He was almost disposed to urge his nephew to step on it and have his bash. On the motorway, which they had now gained, there was a great deal of traffic moving out of London, and the frenzied weaving in and out promoted by such situations would render at least the preliminary manoeuvring the more colourable.

But Tim was in no hurry, and his uncle had soon to conclude that he had abandoned the notion of a contrived collision. It was indeed true that if Dave wasn’t in the crate, and these men were arrested on the discovery of stacks of banknotes, the move might eventually prove counter-productive so far as Dave’s safety was concerned. And if Dave
was
in the crate even a small miscalculation (such as Tim’s own car-driving assailant had committed) might not be at all healthy for him. Which all went to show that Tim was possessed of more native caution than some of his suggestions might lead one to expect.

‘There’s a panda car behind us,’ Tim said suddenly.

‘A what, Tim?’ The expression was unfamiliar to the expatriate Averell.

‘A police patrol car. It’s been there for quite some time. Could it be of any use to us? I think not. We could wave it down and report. But the end-position mightn’t be improved much by their bringing those chaps in. Not if Dave isn’t there.’

‘I’m not sure that I agree.’

‘Can it be trailing us, do you think?’ Tim had ignored his uncle’s remark. ‘Don’t I look like somebody who drives a Bentley? At least I own a driving-licence, although I haven’t got it on me. What about you, Uncle Gilbert? Could you prove yourself to be somebody respectable?’

All that Gilbert Averell could prove himself to be (it was an astonishing fact) was the Prince de Silistrie. That passport was still in his pocket, and so was a considerable sum in francs, along with a little small change in English currency. The sudden minor alarm occasioned by this reflection was merely ludicrous. It disturbed Averell, nevertheless.

They were in the middle lane, and now the police car in the fast lane drew level and slowed beside them. It contained two policemen, who studied Tim and his uncle with some curiosity. This seemed quite gratuitous behaviour, and as such was discomposing. The panda car, however, then moved on, switched with due notice to the middle lane, and similarly paused abreast of the truck, which was in the slow one. The truck seemed to interest them even more. Perhaps they were judging it to be injudiciously loaded, or perhaps there was something irregular in the way the trailer was hitched to it. But again there was anticlimax. The police returned to the fast lane and rapidly diminished ahead of them.

‘Good riddance,’ Tim said comfortably. Then he glanced into his driving mirror and added, ‘Well, I’m blessed!’

‘What is it this time, Tim?’

‘Another one. Two more, in fact. There they go.’

And there, certainly, they had gone. Two further police cars had swept past them at speed.

‘Going to a football match, I expect,’ Tim said. ‘Or to look after some minor royals at Windsor. There it is. See Windsor’s domes and pompous turrets rise. Pope doesn’t mean “domes”, Uncle Gilbert. He just means “halls”, or something like that. Latin
domus
, you see.’

‘No doubt.’ Averell took this burst of pedantry (Oxford pedantry) on his nephew’s part to indicate rising spirits. Averell’s own spirits were not quite managing that. It was with a certain wistfulness that he had seen all those policemen vanish into distance.

‘And “pompous”,’ he said with an effort, ‘means “characterized by stately show”.’

‘Alpha, Uncle.’ Tim gave Averell a quick sideways grin before fixing his eyes on the road again. He was trying to keep three or four vehicles between the Bentley and the truck. ‘But to business once more. When they quit the motorway and we’re clear of all this traffic, they may possibly become aware of us, although I think it unlikely. Just in case, let’s plan to seem to lose them without really doing so. Any ideas about that?’

‘Well, yes – if their destination’s right.’ Averell had been thinking about this. ‘They may just be making for another empty shop, or a yard or warehouse in an urban street. Slough, for example. If they did a sudden pull up like that, it wouldn’t be much good just driving on and pretending not to notice. But if their next hide-out is a secluded place in the country – which seems probable enough – it might be managed that way. If they made a quick turn down a private drive, for instance, where the road was twisting and turning a bit, it might be possible to go haring past as if we thought they were still ahead of us.’

‘In that case, so far so good, Uncle Gilbert. Aren’t you a dab hand at this? But it wouldn’t give them more than what might be called a breathing-space to rely on. Just comfortable time, come to think of it, for them to arrange a little reception committee if we did turn up.’

This lucid contribution to the argument was not encouraging, yet Tim himself seemed far from downhearted. He remained silent and thoughtful, however, over the next half-dozen miles.

‘We must just rely on rapid improvisation when the time comes.’ he said. ‘Quick wits will be the order of the day. Do you think you and I are cleverer than they are? Top crooks a
r
e clever, of course. Everyone knows that. Much cleverer than the police, certainly.’

‘Even than the top police?’ Averell almost contrived to be amused at the unmistakable sound of the bees buzzing yet again in Tim’s bonnet – or inside his head.

‘Oh, yes – them too. You should read the books they write when they retire.’

‘That’s rather a different activity.’

‘And it’s why the fuzz use some act of parliament or other to clamp down on the record of their own efforts. But you and I
are
fairly smart, you know. I’m going to scrape a First in Schools if I ever go back to that dump.’ (By this Tim presumably meant the University of Oxford.) ‘And at Cambridge you came right at the top of your Tripos, I don’t doubt.’ Tim grinned again at his uncle, well aware that he was talking cock-sure nonsense. ‘Hold hard!’ he suddenly shouted. ‘Action stations, Major Averell!’ This seemed to be a whimsical reference to his uncle’s long-past military career – the thought of which Tim always contrived to find amusing. ‘They’re going off.’

This was the first incontestably true remark that Tim had offered for some time. There was a junction ahead, and the truck was bearing left on the line of arrows leading to it.

‘And we’re in luck,’ Tim said. ‘Not Slough or Reading or any such ghastly place. Open country, winding lanes, and gents’ secluded residences dotted around. Top crooks go in for your secluded residences – when it isn’t phoney farms or derelict air strips. Let’s hope they haven’t a date with a private plane or helicopter. Proper Charlies we’ll look if it’s that.’

‘There is a helicopter,’ Averell said, and pointed upwards. ‘I’m not sure it isn’t hovering, just as if it’s going to land.’

‘Courage!’ Tim commanded. ‘The air’s thick with such things round about here. We’re still not all that distance from Heathrow. Don’t say you’re wishing you were back there and bound for Paris, Uncle Gilbert.’

‘These scoundrels may be wishing they were just that.’

‘Brazil or Guatemala, more likely, in their case.’

There was now only an empty road between themselves and the truck, and the truck was in fact out of sight beyond a bend. During all this chat the scene around them had changed entirely – and much as Tim had predicted. The road meandered, and off it on either side mere country lanes meandered too. There was even the roof-top of what Tim declared to be veritably a secluded gent’s residence visible on their left.

‘Aha!’ Tim cried suddenly. The truck was in sight again, but only momentarily. It had swung abruptly off the road and vanished. ‘This is where we drive on like mad,’ Tim said. ‘With one or two loud toots if the corners at all justify them.’ Taken by this idea, he tooted now – rejoicing, his uncle supposed, in the possession of a guile unknown to the dull minds of the constabulary. They drove on in this way for something over half a mile, and then Tim drew the Bentley abruptly to a halt on a convenient grass verge. ‘So here we are. Button up that combat-jacket, Major. Foot-slogging now. And we turn into Red Indians later on.’ They scrambled from the car, and Tim locked its doors with a promptitude that would have done credit to a well-trained constable. ‘What we shall have to think up pretty quick,’ he said, ‘is something in the way of diversionary tactics. Avanti, Uncle Gilbert! The curtain rises.’

And red Indians they did become. It wasn’t a ploy that Averell could have imagined himself as much relishing had he been drawn into it by, say, a band of nephews and nieces much younger than Tim. He was without any impulse (such as uncles ought to have) to join in the imaginative games of children on call. Not many years before, had Tim, Kate and Gillian so summoned him, he would have produced some good-natured excuse, relapsed into his book, and assuaged a subsequent sense of guilt and insufficiency by tipping them all with unusual liberality at their next parting. But on the present occasion he was no sooner down on his belly than he was taking satisfaction in the thought that although an elderly, he was by no means an out-of-condition man. It was a reasonably flat belly, and the muscles controlling this unwonted mode of progress responded surprisingly well. And his eyesight was good. If that possibly fatal dry twig lay in his path he wasn’t going to fail to spot it in time.

‘Over to the right a bit,’ he heard himself direct Tim in a most approved whisper. ‘So that we’ll still be under cover of those bushes ahead.’

Tim crawled to the right at once, and his uncle fleetingly recorded to himself once more the curious fact that his nephew, who habitually bossed him around, in fact took an order from him the moment it was given. There was a kind of weight of responsibility in this. He mustn’t in a crisis – and wasn’t there certainly going to be a crisis? – say the wrong thing.

Rather as if covert behaviour were infectious, the house seemed to be crouching behind hedges and shrubberies too. At one point in their cautious approach it even disappeared entirely, leaving them disoriented in a small forest of rhododendrons. Averell disliked rhododendrons, particularly when prematurely heralding the spring with a tasteless exuberance of conflicting hues. And beneath rhododendrons, moreover, the going is always for some reason so particularly dusty as to be distasteful to even the most intrepid brave. Quite suddenly, however, this garish barrier gave out, and the house was uncomfortably close in front of them – seeming to glare at them, indeed, from a score of upper windows like malignant eyes. It wasn’t to be supposed that, in their present situation, Averell and his nephew would fall in love with the place at sight; but it seemed equally certain that no reasonable being could greatly care for it even under the most favourable circumstances. It was a hypertrophied not-quite-modern villa, all gables and bogus timbering and ill-proportioned fenestration, and it was neither on the one hand deservedly derelict and in disrepair nor on the other decently cared for in any evident way. Perhaps it was just right as a temporary hide-out for malefactors conducting business on a generous scale. In front of it lay what appeared to have been at one time a broad lawn, but this had been converted in a rough-and-ready fashion into a large gravelled and now ill-weeded sweep on which one felt that large cars could circle in an impressive fashion. But the weeds would not, of course, have afforded cover to a mouse – or at least not to a stray cat – and this made further direct progress impracticable.