Bootlegged Angel (15 page)

Pudding wine. She had to rub it in.

‘Great. What am I, some sort of Foodies Anonymous? Are you ringing just to read me the menu?’

‘I just wanted to tell you that we’ve wrapped here already. Nigel worked like a demon and we got some really good shots, everything we’re going to get anyway.’

‘Bully for Nigel.’

‘So we’re heading back early,’ she ignored me. ‘We’ll be back tomorrow. Any chance you could pick us up?’

Here we went again. Funny how people love you when you’ve got a taxi.

‘Tell you what,’ I said, thinking on my feet. ‘I’m only a few miles from Ashford. Get off the Eurostar there and I’ll pick you up. We could even have a day at the
seaside. Go for a paddle if you fancy it.’

‘Have you been drinking?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Don’t worry, we’ll go into London and –’

‘You can drive the BMW back,’ I said, knowing the reaction.

‘You’ve got my car there while you’re playing private detectives?’

‘You said I could borrow it.’

‘I did? When?’

‘Sorry, dear, you’re cracking up on me. What was that?’

‘Don’t try that on me, Angel, I know you. And I know that that is one of the best digital phones in the world. So you take care of that car, I’ve had it longer than I’ve
had you. I’ll give you a ring in the morning and you can pick us up from the station. Is there anything you want bringing back?’

‘A nice pudding wine?’ I suggested.

‘We’ll see,’ she said and switched off.

I put the phone back in the BMW and locked it and I was walking back to the door of the pub when for the second time that evening somebody tried to run me over.

This time the vehicle did at least have lights and the driver did sound a warning.

She shouted ‘Beep! Beep!’ just before her nearside wheel clipped my heel.

I had no idea wheelchairs could corner so well.

I had no idea that wheelchairs came equipped with headlights either.

Actually, they don’t. They were a refinement which Melanie had added herself – in fact they were battery-powered bicycle lamps – so that she could get down to the Rising Sun in
the evening. She liked her nights in the Rising Sun as there was sod-all on television these days and the Rising Sun didn’t have any steps, so there was automatic wheelchair access. And
anyway, it was the only bloody pub in the village, wasn’t it?

I got all this just by holding the door open for her and keeping my toes out of the way as she rolled herself inch-perfectly through the doorway and into the bar, where she was greeted by the
regulars with a cry of ‘Mel!’ just like they used to shout ‘Norm!’ in
Cheers
.

She gave one flick on the wheels of the chair to get her across the floor then did the wheelchair equivalent of a handbrake turn, switching off her cycle lamps as she did so, ending up side-on
to the bar dead opposite Ivy.

‘’Evenin’ all. Usual, please, Ivy.’

Ivy cracked the top off a bottle of Beck’s and handed it over the bar. It was a bizarre sight. Ivy could only just see over the bar, Melanie could only just reach it.

‘Keeping well, Melanie dear?’ Ivy asked as she scrabbled for change.

‘Well as expected, Ivy. Almost got a speeding ticket in Folkestone this afternoon.’ She drank beer from the bottle while Ivy laughed politely. ‘And I almost creamed one of your
customers just now, outside. You get extra points if they’ve got their back to you.’

‘You’ll have to get a bell put on that thing, young Melanie.’

‘You can ring my bell any time,’ leered Dan.

‘And you should eat cheese late at night,’ she toasted him with her bottle.

‘What did she mean by that?’ Dan hissed in my ear.

‘Dream on,’ I hissed back.

Ted and Marion downed their drinks. Now another customer had arrived, protocol was served and they could leave with a clear conscience.

‘You take care, Ivy love. You know where we are if you need anything,’ said Ted, already half-way to the door.

‘I’ll pop over for a meal one of these nights,’ said Ivy, waving and blowing a kiss to Marion.

‘You do that, dear,’ gushed Marion. ‘You do that soon.’

‘Only if I win the lottery,’ Ivy muttered under her breath.

‘Pricey is it, their pub?’ Melanie asked her.

Ivy levered herself on the bar with her elbows so she could look over and down.

‘You’d have to drink a lot more bottles of Beck’s before I could afford a prawn cocktail at Ted Lewis’s Grill and Carvery,’ she said emphatically, then let herself
drop back to earth with only the slightest of wobbles on her high heels.

‘You can’t beat crawn pocktails and beef from the Cravery,’ the Major mused, smacking his lips.

‘
Cravery
?’ Melanie mouthed silently, shaking her head.

‘Which reminds me, I have to get home to my rot poast. Goodnight children, one and all.’

He finished his beer and then wiped a forefinger along the line of his moustache. Then he stood up, pushed his bar stool up to the bar and nodded to each of us in turn before turning on his heel
and marching, stiff-backed, out of the door.

‘Pot roast?’ Melanie rolled her eyes. ‘More like a Sad Person’s single portion TV dinner.’

‘I have to ask,’ I said, moving down the bar to her chair, ‘where was the Major a major?’

‘You mean like what regiment?’

‘Like which army?’

‘Oh, he wasn’t ever in the army. We call him the Major after that stupid old git character in
Fawlty Towers
.’

‘And he doesn’t mind?’

‘Don’t think he’s ever seen it. Don’t care if he has. Can I buy you a drink to make up for running over your foot?’

‘Sure, I’ll have a shandy, though. I’m driving.’

‘That your BMW out there?’

‘Yes, well it’s my . . .’ I bit my tongue to stop myself saying the ‘w’ word. ‘It’s the firm’s.’

‘So what do you do then?’

I tried to remember what I had told the others. It was probably one of the rules of being a private eye: try and keep your stories relatively straight, or at least only slightly curved.

‘I tell people I’m in fashion photography, but really I just drive the photographer’s equipment around.’

‘That sounds cool.’

‘It’s not really.’

‘For round here, it’s life in the fast lane, trust me.’

She put her bottle on the bar and unzipped her coat, a black padded storm jacket with enough pockets to accommodate a crate of hand grenades, and began to ease it off her shoulders. I put out a
hand to help her, but gingerly, knowing that being disabled doesn’t mean being incompetent. She didn’t seem to mind. Under the coat she was wearing a blue TALtop. I hoped it was one of
the later models where the dye didn’t run. She had arranged it V-neck style to emphasise her cleavage. Both she and the TALtop were doing a grand job.

‘You hang that up and I’ll get the drinks,’ she said, edging forward in her chair so I could pull the coat out from under her. ‘Oh, get my darts out first, though, will
you . . . ?’

‘Roy,’ I said reaching into one of the coat pockets and producing a plastic case containing three brass darts with large green feather flights. ‘You looking for a
game?’

‘You looking for a hiding?’ she said without looking at me.

‘So you’re good, are you?’ I growled back, putting on the tough-guy act.

Ivy placed a pint of shandy and another bottle of Beck’s on the bar.

Melanie pointed a dart at them and said:

‘Those are the only drinks I’m buying tonight.’

‘Game on, then.’

After the first game, I realised that the darts Ivy had loaned me were faulty.

After the second game, I was sure that the dart board was hung too low. It was certainly not at eye level. After the third game I remembered that I hadn’t played for at least two years so
no wonder I was rusty.

‘Best out of seven?’ Melanie asked sweetly as I pulled her dart out of double sixteen again.

Whilst we had been playing I had managed to get a good look at her. She was about twenty, with straight shoulder-length blonde hair tied back in a pony tail with a single red hair band. She wore
no make-up, not even lipstick, to spoil a clean, freckled complexion and her hair smelled of a mint shampoo.

She put her chair at right angles to the board when she threw her darts but made no protest when I pulled them out for her each time after chalking the score on the blackboard.

‘I’m not in your league,’ I told her. ‘You must practise a fair bit.’

‘I played a lot at university, but since the accident I only play down here to hustle drinks.’

I hadn’t dared ask up until now and I still wasn’t sure how to ask, or whether I should. Was she giving me an opening here?

‘You get three guesses,’ she said.

‘Excuse me?’

‘Three guesses as to how I got into this wheelchair. I know you’re dying to ask and somebody’s bound to tell you when the lads arrive. So let me make you suffer. It’s one
of the few pleasures I have left.’

Lads? What lads?

‘OK then, if you insist. A car accident – you said it was an accident.’

‘Nope.’

‘Riding then; a riding accident.’

‘Like the guy who played Superman? Nope, ‘fraid not. Last chance.’

She fluttered her eyelashes at me, I swear she did. It was more than cute.

‘You were involved in some bizarre sexual experiment and it all went horribly wrong?’

She threw back her head and laughed at that.

‘Good call. I’ll use that one, but unfortunately it’s wrong. You lose, your round.’

‘Story of my life,’ I sighed. ‘Was I close?’

‘Sadly, no. I was a mouse and I fell off the battlements of the Enchanted Castle.’

She put her Beck’s bottle to her lips but kept looking at me, checking or maybe timing me, to see if I could work it out.

I waited until she’d finished drinking, wiped my chalky fingers on the leg of my jeans then held my hand out for the empty bottle.

‘Dangerous place, that EuroDisney,’ I said.

The ‘lads’ arrived about thirty minutes later but by then I knew that Melanie (you can call me ‘Mel’ but any reference to Spice Girls invokes serious
shit) was indeed twenty and heading for her second year of a law degree at Southampton, or would have been had it not been for the holiday job in France. And yes, she had played a mouse, one of
several, in the daily parade and had fallen off a motorised float right in front of a family from Birmingham and a pimply youth had pointed at her and yelled: ‘Look, Dad, pissed as a
rat!’

That sort of thing, I agreed, could scar you for life not to mention putting a damper on your career prospects within the Disney corporation. I also told her I thought she must have made a very
sexy mouse and did she fancy having dinner with me somewhere? After all, mice had to eat.

‘Ivy’ll do something for us, she always lays on breakfast when the lads pop in to play darts,’ she said straight-faced. ‘Don’t you, Ivy?’

‘Oh yes, Mel love. I’ll do one of my specials if the boffins turn up,’ Ivy said, just to prove she had been listening.

I was slightly relieved, not that I had been planning anything special. After all, I was making this up as I went along. But the prospect of leaving Ivy with only Dan as a customer seemed a
heavy responsibility and one not to be undertaken lightly. Pubs shouldn’t be empty, it was against the law of nature. Or it should be. Hang on a minute; had Melanie said
‘breakfast’?

‘Who are the boffins?’ I asked Mel. With my luck they would turn out to be the local chapter of Hell’s Angels.

‘Computer programmers or software jockeys as they like to call themselves. They’re all my age but they’re not a bad bunch.’

I wasn’t sure how to take that ‘my age’ reference but I was beginning to like Mel so I decided not to let her tyres down just yet.

‘Where do they come from? I wouldn’t have thought this place was on the regular circuit for a lads’ night out.’

‘Oh, they work in the village,’ she said airily.

‘What? You got some sort of silicon valley hidden away here?’

The question was genuine. I had driven through the village twice now and not caught a glimpse of anything which could provide gainful employment unless it involved a scythe or a hoe.

‘I’d hardly call it that. They’ve just converted a few of the outbuildings from the old hop farm.’

‘You mean like an oast house?’ I was showing off, proving I knew the term for what is the unofficial logo of Kent, the tall conical brick buildings which tourists think are windmills
that have had their sails stolen. ‘I don’t remember seeing an oast house in the village.’

‘There isn’t one,’ said Mel, chinking her bottle against my glass. ‘The nearest oast was turned into a stockbroker’s country retreat about twenty years ago. We just
had a farm here, only a couple of fields, and that went bust. The boffins work in the old stripping sheds and storehouses. And before you say anything, the stripping shed was where they stripped
the hops off the bines.’

‘Does everybody in Kent grow hops?’

‘No, we just have to pretend we do. Did you know the hop was related to cannabis?’

Of course I did.

‘No, really?’

‘Scooter said he could go into big time Ecstasy production there and the Drug Squad wouldn’t find them because the sniffer dogs would have a snootful of hops.’

‘Sounds a bright guy. Scooter, did you say?’

I was getting into this asking questions business, just like a real private eye. I wondered if there was a teach-yourself CD-ROM out on it yet.

‘Oh, Scooter’s sharp enough. So sharp he’ll cut himself, as my mother would say. Lots of big ideas, not much staying power.’

‘You’ve known him for long?’ I tried.

‘We were at uni together, until he dropped out.’ She looked up at me suspiciously. ‘Why are we talking about Scooter? We should be talking about me.’

‘Just checking out the opposition,’ I said, showing teeth.

She laughed at that.

‘Scooter’s not opposition, but there
is
opposition. It’s just he works during the week.’

‘He’s not one of the Seven Dwarves or anything, is he?’

‘Oh no,’ she said, catching on immediately, ‘he works in London, not EuroDisney.’