Bootlegged Angel (22 page)

‘With Scooter on a blitz? No way. He’ll have us doing another run. I want to see all this crumpet they’ve got down . . .’

The rest was lost to me but as soon as I heard the music level rise as the pub door opened, I scuttled across to their vehicle, another Ford. This one was full, very full. I could tell by its
silhouette that it was low down on its axles and a quick peek into the back showed why. The whole of the flat bed was covered, three deep, in cases of ‘33’ French beer with a loosely
tied tarpaulin thrown over them in a half-hearted attempt at concealment. They were either very confident or very sloppy smugglers.

I bent over to read off the rear number plate into the dictaphone and something struck me as odd about it. It was a white plastic job and I knew there was something strange about it but I
couldn’t put my finger on it, until, that is, I actually did put my fingers on it and found I could bend it.

I was starting to form an idea about what Scooter and his students were up to, but I needed another look at the old hop farm just to be sure. The time seemed to be right and I guessed nobody in
the pub would miss me for an hour or so. The question was how to get in there, knowing that Scooter had at least one night camera trained on the village street and I had to assume he had another on
the gate into Mel’s paddock. In any case, that would be the entrance they would be using if they were running across to France tonight.

The real entrance off the old Canterbury road, which Scooter had used that afternoon, hadn’t appeared to be guarded by any security devices but then again, could I find it in the dark and
how did I get there? This was the crazy thing about the countryside: no tubes, no taxis, not even a night bus.

But Dan had a bicycle, parked as usual against the wall of the pub near the front door. Very gently, I picked it up and carried it round to the side of the Gents’ toilets.

I walked back through the pub, picked up a few more glasses and worked my way to where the Major was still muttering under his breath and Dan was flushed with Seagrave Special Bitter and
testosterone in equal measure. I put my arm around his shoulder.

‘I’m going to put my head down for an hour or so,’ I shouted in his ear as the girls started their ‘Be Happy’ routine again. ‘If the beer needs changing or
anything, will you go down into the cellar?’

‘Oh, I don’t know if Ivy would like that,’ he said, not taking his eyes off Sasha.

‘She won’t mind, don’t you worry. And don’t spend too much time down there looking up the girls’ skirts.’

I let the thought sink in and knew I could rely on him. It didn’t seem worth mentioning the bike.

In the kitchen I unwrapped one of the items I had bought at the supermarket which hadn’t been stuffed into the freezer, a rubberised torch complete with batteries. I made sure it worked
then stuffed it inside my leather jacket, zipped up and left through the back door again.

Amazingly, the lights on Dan’s ancient boneshaker worked though I wasn’t too sure about the brakes. Still, riding a bike was like making love to a woman. If you’ve done it
once, you can do it again. Just remember not to fall off.

I fell off twice before I got out of the car-park, but I put that down to pot-holes. Once on the road proper I found I could get up a fair head of steam, fairly flying along behind the saucer of
yellow light from the flickering headlamp, and I found the B-road which flanked the village easily enough, turning right and heading north.

It might have been a straight road – the Romans liked straight lines – but I had forgotten about the hills and the Roman penchant for going up and down them. By the time I got to the
top of the second one, my legs were screaming and the night air rasping at my lungs. I was shattered, I was out of condition, I was dying for a cigarette.

But then I thought I saw something through the darkness and I stopped and pulled out my torch to light up the wooden sign for the nearest picnic site, the marker I had been heading for. Just
further up the hill was the turning Scooter and I had come out of in the Jeep.

I flashed the torch around the entrance but couldn’t see any cameras, pressure pads or tripwires. Not that I could see much with the trees blotting out what little light there was from the
moon and stars.

I freewheeled down what had been the farm road, not looking to the side at all in case I saw what was making those strange rustling noises in the underbrush. And then I could see lights in the
distance, which must be the buildings of Soft Sell down across the old hop fields.

On the edge of the wood, I stopped and turned off the bike’s lights, laying it down behind a tree just in case anyone did use the road, and began to trot down the track through the field
using my torch only when I stumbled and using the lights from the furthest building as a navigation aid.

The first building going this way was the huge aircraft hangar which loomed out of the gloom. It was dark and deserted and so I pressed on up the hill towards the single-storey buildings.

Half-way there I saw a flicker of light on my horizon, which I guessed was the paddock at the back of Hop Cottage where Mel lived. Then the light solidified into a beam pointing to the sky and I
realised it was a set of headlights coming through the gate off the main street in Whitcomb. Allowing for the driver to stop and close the gate, I had no more than ten seconds before he reached the
Soft Sell bunkhouse and his lights picked me out, standing panting in the middle of an open field.

The aircraft hangar was the nearest cover – the only cover before the wood up the hill where I had left the bike. No competition. I legged it off the road and across rough ground, tripping
over discarded bundles of twine and spools of wire, sliding in mud. And then I reached the cold metal side of the hangar and almost hugged it in relief.

The headlights were over the hill now and beaming down towards me, so I edged around the front of the hangar, crouched low, until I got to the far corner and was able to slide around the far
side.

I put my head and back to the cold wall and tried to get my breath. I could hear the engine of the car now and pressed myself even further into the hangar as I realised it wasn’t stopping
at the Soft Sell building, but coming straight for the hangar.

Whatever it was, it stopped no more than ten feet from the hangar, its main beams lighting up the front, the light spilling around the corner where I was hiding and bleeding off into the
field.

I heard doors open and slam and then, even with the engine idling, I heard footsteps on the concrete and
whistling
. Whistling in stereo, or almost. Two people, both slightly out of tune,
whistling the same song: ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy’.

Then I heard a loud clicking noise, which I worked out must have been a padlock, and a long screeching metallic scream as the hangar door was slid open. As it hit its stop buffers, it rattled
the wall I had my head pressed against.

One of the whistlers stopped and said: ‘That pub has
definitely
gone up in my estimation.’

‘Too right. Trust that tight-arse Scooter to pull us out,’ said the other one. ‘What say we stash this lot double quick and get back there before closing time?’

‘Sounds good to me,’ came the answer. ‘Three runs is enough for one day.’

A car door opened again and the engine revved and the headlights swung away so I risked a look round the corner of the hangar.

It wasn’t a car, it was a Ford pick-up, the one I had seen loaded with beer in the car-park. The driver swung in a circle and then put it into reverse and began to back into the
hangar.

Lights suddenly came on inside the hangar, followed by a clang of metal and then another one. The pick-up disappeared and then I heard one of the voices shouting: ‘Left, left, straight,
straight, keep it there, straight, straight, you’re on.’

And then the engine cut out and I heard footsteps clumping on metal this time.

I gave it a minute or so and then edged carefully around the front end of the building, pressing my palms against the open sliding door until I reached the edge.

They had reversed the Ford up two iron ramps into the back of the trailer of a gigantic articulated lorry. The trailer was static on its hydraulic legs, its cab and engine unit, a new DAF 97,
parked neatly at its side.

The driver of the Ford and his mate were removing cases of beer from the pick-up and stacking them in the body of the trailer. Even from where I was I could see it was more than half full
already with a solid wall of cases of French lager, but it still had room for the Ford.

I had found what we expert detectives in the bootlegging business called the Mothership.

The two guys from the pick-up finished loading the Mothership, drove back to the Soft Sell building, took a shower, shaved, got changed, squirted on deodorant, splashed on
aftershave, put some folding money in their back pockets and got in the pick-up again. And they still made it to the Rising Sun with enough time to down two beers before I did.

Then again, they didn’t have to sneak along the side of an aircraft hangar and across a churned-up field in the pitch dark, locate a bicycle without walking into a tree trunk more than
once and then push it without lights through a forest transplanted from Transylvania, before discovering that the gears no longer worked properly, at least not uphill.

This country living was going to be the death of me. Eight hours without a car and I was getting withdrawal symptoms, so much so I began to urge Dan’s boneshaker on by shouting at it,
christening it ‘Cold Turkey’.

And because I was high on adrenalin from the fear of being seen, filthy from falling over so many times scrambling across the hop fields, and in agony as every tendon in my legs twanged as I
pedalled, cars began to pick on me. I hadn’t seen a car on the road all night, but suddenly, when I was most vulnerable, it was rush hour. On the road into Whitcomb I was buzzed four times by
overtaking cars and twice almost clipped into the hedgerow. I had no idea where they were all coming from, but I soon discovered where they were all going.

For the first time since Mr Mercedes or Mr Benz (whoever) ran over a hedgehog, the car-park of the Rising Sun was full to overflowing and I had to get off Dan’s bike and wheel it through
the maze of cars.

Every light in the place seemed to be on and the jukebox was pumping out something at full volume. I couldn’t tell what it was but I guessed it would be something from the mid-Eighties,
which seemed to be the last time the man from the music company had called.

I replaced Dan’s bike against the front wall by one of the windows without being noticed. No one in the pub was looking out and although it was only a trick of the light, I swore that the
walls of the pub were bulging outwards.

The clientele were not exclusively male, just mostly. There were half a dozen women there, dressed for a night out and looking rather bemused as to why their partners had brought them here.
Every seat in the place was taken, some of them twice, and the shutters on the dart board had been closed to discourage anyone from playing, which was just as well otherwise the local ambulance
would have been on its way by now.

As it turned out, I could have saved time by ringing them then had I only known how the evening would pan out.

I dipped round the back of the pub to the back door and as I passed the Gents’ toilet I heard the distinctive sound of someone thumping on an empty, echoing condom machine and moaning
softly, ‘Oh no, please, no.’ Still, I suppose it was better to travel hopefully than to arrive.

The hens squeaked in protest as I disturbed them again and then I was in the kitchen and sneaking upstairs to Ivy’s private living-room and, as far as I could tell, I hadn’t been
missed.

In Ivy’s bathroom I washed and cleaned as much of the mud from my jeans and shoes as I could, ran my fingers through my hair, checked my smile in the mirror and went downstairs prepared to
play the genial host.

‘Where the fuck have you been?’ Max hissed at me as I entered by the door at the side of the bar.

I leaned in to her ear so she could hear me above the music and the throb of chatter and laughter.

‘Doing the books, creating a business plan, stocktaking, thinking up a new marketing strategy, that sort of stuff. How’s it going?’

‘We keep running out of things but Dan the Man seems quite happy to go down into the cellar for supplies. Poor Neemoy’s got him looking up her skirt half the time and the psycho at
the bar looking down her top full-time. He’s an indecent assault just waiting to happen, that one.’

I scanned the bar and silently agreed with her. The one they called Axeman was slumped against the other end of the bar near the bar-flap opening, his shoulders drooping and his mouth fixed in a
lopsided grin. It was difficult to tell, given his condition, whether his eyes were glazed.

‘One of his mates had a right go at him half an hour ago,’ said Max, ‘and it looked like he wanted him to go home but he just told him to piss off. I think he’s got just
the one thing on his mind.’

I looked at Neemoy’s chest straining the stitching on her TALtop.

‘Maybe two,’ I said.

‘Coming up!’ somebody shouted and I leaned over Max’s shoulder to see Dan climbing out of the trap-door from the cellar.

He had two bottles of vodka wrapped in his arm, a red flush in his cheeks and a dreamy look in his eyes. He climbed up the ladder slowly, inches away from the back of Neemoy’s long black
legs, then pulled the hatch up and secured the bolt. He patted Neemoy on the backside and did a little pantomime telling her to be careful of the door and the bolt.

‘I think we’ve made an old man very happy,’ I said to Max.

I scanned the bar, checking out the faces through the fog of smoke. There was no sign of the Major, which didn’t surprise me, nor of Scooter. Some of his boys were there, in fact quite a
lot of them – the ones called Combo and Painter and the two anoraks, Chip and Dale, and the two who had almost illuminated me out at the aircraft hangar. It got me thinking that if he still
had pick-ups on the road ferrying beer off the Shuttle, just how many did he have on his payroll in total? And that wasn’t counting the mad Axeman, although he didn’t seem to be one of
the regular drivers. At least he had not been involved in the previous night’s beer run and tonight he wasn’t able to find his wheels let alone France.