No Comebacks (16 page)

It was the stone walls, so common in those Wicklow hills, that stopped him rolling clean over. The farmer gunned his tractor clean through a handy farm gate, leaving the straw bales on the trailer to take any impact. Murphy's cab section began to slither as the trailer caught up with it. The load of fertilizer pushed him, brakes locked in panic, into the side of the bales, which fell happily all over his cab, almost burying it. The rear of the trailer behind him slammed into a stone wall and was thrown back onto the road, where it then hit the opposite stone wall as well.

When the screech of metal on stone stopped, the farm trailer was still upright, but had been moved ten feet, shearing its coupling to the tractor. The shock had thrown the farmer off his seat and into a pile of silage. He was having a noisy personal conversation with his creator. Murphy was sitting in the dim half-light of a cab covered in bales of straw.

The shock of hitting the stone walls had sheared the pegs holding the rear of the artic shut and both doors had flown open. Part of the rose fertilizer cargo was strewn on the road behind the truck. Murphy opened his cab door and fought his way through the bales of straw to the road. He had but one instinct, to get as far away from there as possible as fast as he could. The farmer would never recognize him in the darkness. Even as he climbed down, he recalled he had not had time to wipe the interior of the cab of all his fingerprints.

The farmer had squelched his way out of the silage and was standing on the road beside Murphy's cab reeking of an odour that will never really catch on with the aftershave industry. It was evident he wished for a few moments of Murphy's time. Murphy thought fast. He would appease the farmer and offer to help him reload his trailer. At the first opportunity he would wipe his prints off the inside of the cab, and at the second vanish into the darkness.

It was at this moment that the police patrol car arrived. It is a strange thing about police cars; when you need one they are like strawberries in Greenland. Scrape a few inches of paint off someone else's body work and they come out of the gratings. This one had escorted a minister from Dublin to his country home near Annamoe and was returning to the capital. When Murphy saw the headlights he thought it was just another motorist; as the lights doused he saw it was the real thing. It had a Garda sign on the roof, and this one
did
light up.

The sergeant and the constable walked slowly past the immobilized tractor-trailer and surveyed the tumbled bales. Murphy realized there was nothing for it but to bluff the whole thing out. In the darkness he could still get away with it.

'Yours?' asked the sergeant, nodding at the artic.

'Yes,' said Murphy.

'A long way from the main roads,' said the sergeant.

'Aye, and late too,' said Murphy. 'The ferry was late at Rosslare this afternoon and I wanted to deliver this lot and get home to my wee bed.'

'Papers,' said the sergeant.

Murphy reached into the cab and handed him Liam Clarke's sheaf of documents.

'Liam Clarke?' asked the sergeant.

Murphy nodded. The documents were -in perfect order. The constable had been examining the tractor and came back to his sergeant.

'One of your man's headlights doesn't work,' he said, nodding at the farmer, 'and the other's covered with clay. You would not see this rig at ten yards.'

The sergeant handed Murphy the documents back and transferred his attention to the farmer. The latter, all self-justification a few moments ago, began to look defensive. Murphy's spirits rose.

'I wouldn't want to make an issue of it,' he said, 'but the garda's right. The tractor and trailer were completely invisible.'

'You have your licence?' the sergeant asked the farmer.

'It's at home,' said the farmer.

'And the insurance with it, no doubt,' said the sergeant. 'I hope they're both in order. We'll see in a minute. Meanwhile you can't drive on with faulty headlights. Move the trailer onto the field and clear the bales off the road. You can collect them all at first light. We'll run you home and look at the documents at the same time.'

Murphy's spirits rose higher. They would be gone in a few minutes. The constable began to examine the lights of the artic. They were in perfect order. He moved to look at the rear lights.

'What's your cargo?' asked the sergeant.

'Fertilizer,' said Murphy. 'Part peat moss, part cow manure. Good for roses.'

The sergeant burst out laughing. He turned to the farmer who had towed the trailer off the road into the field and was throwing the bales after it. The road was almost clear.

'This one's carrying a load of manure,' he said, 'but you're the one up to your neck in it.' He was amused by his wit.

The constable came back from the rear of the artic's trailer section. 'The doors have sprung open,' he said. 'Some of the sacks have fallen in the road and burst. I think you'd better have a look, sarge.'

The three of them walked back down the side of the artic to the rear.

A dozen sacks had fallen out of the back of the open doors and four had split open. The moonlight shone on the heaps of brown fertilizer between the torn plastic. The constable had his torch out and played it over the mess. As Murphy told his cellmate later, there are some days when nothing, but absolutely nothing, goes right.

By moon and torchlight there was no mistaking the great maw of the bazooka jutting upwards, nor the shapes of the machine guns protruding from the torn sacks. Murphy's stomach turned.

The Irish police do not normally carry handguns, but when on escort duty for a minister, they do. The sergeant's automatic was pointing at Murphy's stomach.

Murphy sighed. It was just one of those days. He had not only failed signally to hijack 9000 bottles of brandy, but had managed to intercept someone's clandestine arms shipment and he had little doubt who that 'someone' might be. He could think of several places he would like to be for the next two years, but the streets of Dublin were not the safest places on that list.

He raised his hands slowly.

'I have a little confession to make,' he said.

MONEY WITH MENACES

IF SAMUEL NUTKIN had not dropped his glasses case between the cushions of his seat on the commuter train from Edenbridge to London that morning, none of this would ever have happened. But he did drop them, slipped his hand between the cushions to retrieve them, and the die was cast.

His fumbling fingers encountered not only his glasses case, but a slim magazine evidently stuffed there by the former occupant of the seat. Believing it to be a railway timetable, he idly withdrew it. Not that he needed a railway timetable. After twenty-five years of taking the same train at the same hour from the small and sinless commuter town of Edenbridge to Charing Cross station, and returning on the same train at the same time from Cannon Street station to Kent each evening, he had no need of railway timetables. It was just passing curiosity.

When he glanced at the front cover Mr Nutkin's face coloured up red, and he hastily stuffed it back down the cushions. He looked round the compartment to see if anyone had noticed what he had found. Opposite him two
Financial Times,
a
Times
and a
Guardian
nodded back at him with the rhythm of the train, their readers invisible behind the city prices section. To his left old Fogarty pored over the crossword puzzle and to his right, outside the window,
Hither Green
station flashed past uncaring. Samuel Nutkin breathed out in relief.

The magazine had been small with a glossy cover. Across the top were the words
New Circle,
evidently the title of the publication, and along the bottom of the cover page another phrase, 'Singles, Couples, Groups — the contact magazine for the sexually aware'. Between the two lines of print the centre of the cover page was occupied by a photograph of a large lady with a jutting chest, her face blocked out by a white square which announced her as 'Advertiser H331'. Mr Nutkin had never seen such a magazine before, but he thought out the implications of his find all the way to Charing Cross.

As the doors down the train swung open in unison to decant their cargoes of commuters into the maelstrom of platform 6, Samuel Nutkin delayed his departure by fussing with his briefcase, rolled umbrella and bowler hat until he was last out of the compartment. Finally, aghast at his daring, he slipped the magazine from its place between the cushions into his briefcase, and joined the sea of other bowler hats moving towards the ticket barrier, season tickets extended.

It was an uncomfortable walk from the train to the subway, down the line to the Mansion House station, up the stairs to Great Trinity Lane and along Cannon Street to the office block of the insurance company where he worked as a clerk. He had heard once of a man who was knocked over by a car and when they emptied his pockets at the hospital they found a packet of pornographic pictures. The memory haunted Samuel Nutkin. How on earth could one ever explain such a thing? The shame, the embarrassment, would be unbearable. To lie there with a leg in traction, knowing that everyone knew one's secret tastes. He was especially careful crossing the road that morning until he reached the insurance company offices.

From all of which one may gather that Mr Nutkin was not used to this sort of thing. There was a man once who reckoned that human beings tend to imitate the nicknames given them in an idle moment. Call a man 'Butch' and he will swagger; call him 'Killer' and he will walk around with narrowed eyes and try to talk like Bogart. Funny men have to go on telling jokes and clowning until they crack up from the strain. Samuel Nutkin was just ten years old when a boy at school who had read the tales of Beatrix Potter called him Squirrel, and he was doomed.

He had worked in the City of London since, as a young man of twenty-three, he came out of the army at the end of the war with the rank of corporal. In those days he had been lucky to get the job, a safe job with a pension at the end of it, clerking for a giant insurance company with worldwide ramifications, safe as the Bank of England that stood not 500 yards away. Getting that job had marked Samuel Nutkin's entry into the City, square-mile headquarters of a vast economic, commercial and banking octopus whose tentacles spread to every corner of the globe.

He had loved the City in those days of the late forties, wandering round in the lunch hour looking at the timeless streets — Bread Street, Cornhffl, Poultry and London Wall — dating back to the Middle Ages when they really did sell bread and corn and poultry and mark the walled city of London. He was impressed that it was out of these sober stone piles that merchant adventurers had secured financial backing to sail away to the lands of brown, black and yellow men, to trade and dig and mine and scavenge, sending the booty back to the City, to insure and bank and invest until decisions taken in this square mile of boardrooms and counting houses could affect whether a million lesser breeds worked or starved. That these men had really been the world's most successful looters never occurred to him. Samuel Nutkin was very loyal.

Time passed and after a quarter of a century the magic had faded; he became one of the trotting tide of clerical grey suits, rolled umbrellas, bowler hats and briefcases that flooded into the City each day to clerk for eight hours and return to the dormitory townships of the surrounding counties.

In the forest of the City he was, like his nickname, a friendly, harmless creature, grown with the passing years to fit a desk, a pleasant, round butterball of a man, just turned sixty, glasses ever on his nose for reading or looking at things closely, mild-mannered and polite to the secretaries who thought he was sweet and mothered him, and not at all accustomed to reading, let alone carrying on his person, dirty magazines. But that was what he did that morning. He crept away to the lavatories, slipped the bolt, and read every advertisement in
New Circle.

It amazed him. Some of the adverts had accompanying pictures, mainly amateurish poses of what were evidently housewives in their underwear. Others had no picture, but a more explicit text, in some cases advertising services that made no sense, at least, not to Samuel Nutkin. But most he understood, and the bulk of the adverts from ladies expressed the hope of meeting generous professional gentlemen. He read it through, stuffed the magazine into the deepest folds of his briefcase and hurried back to his desk. That evening he managed to get the magazine back home to Edenbridge without being stopped and searched by the police, and hid it under the carpet by the fireplace. It would never do for Lettice to discover it.

Lettice was Mrs Nutkin. She was mainly confined to her bed, she claimed by severe arthritis and a weak heart, while Dr Bulstrode opined it was a severe dose of hypochondria. She was a frail and peaky woman, with a sharp nose and a querulous voice, and it had been many years since she had given any physical joy to Samuel Nutkin, out of bed or in it. But he was a loyal and trustworthy man, and he would have done anything, just anything, to avoid distressing her. Fortunately she never did housework because of her back, so she had no occasion to delve under the carpet by the fireplace.

Mr Nutkin spent three days absorbed in his private thoughts, which for the most part concerned a lady advertiser who, from the brief details she listed in her advert, was well above average height and possessed an ample figure.