Operation Pax (9 page)

Well, it was just another shock. His own speed, and the cats’ eyes on the road, and the hundred telephone wires overhead, and the thundering lorries that were his bodyguard, and the answering stream of traffic almost without intermission roaring, purring, rattling past on the right: all these things sang to Routh and exhilarated him. Let them lurk at crossroads and jabber to each other over radios as they liked. They could do nothing. Already he had distanced them by nearly half a county –

Routh braked hard. The wall of brick in front was hurtling at him. The lorry, which had slowed apparently without warning, now swerved off the road and stopped. The lorry further in front had done the same. On a bare patch of ground a dozen commercial vehicles of various sorts were parked before a small architectural nightmare composed of a Nissen hut and three dismounted railway carriages clustered round a mean central building of hideous yellow brick. Along the length of one of the railway carriages, in white letters rudely painted on a black background, was the announcement:

GOOD PULL-IN FOR TRANSPORT

SNACKS DAY AND NIGHT

Routh hesitated only a moment. He must eat soon; otherwise he would pass out. And if he stopped now he could go on with the brick lorries. Better risk it.

He dismounted, thrust the Douglas out of sight behind a trailer piled high with motor-car bodies, and followed the driver who had been in front of him inside. Two of the railway carriages had been run together at an acute angle, and their point of junction had in turn been rammed like an arrow into the side of the Nissen hut. The whole place looked like the product of a ghastly accident. There were long narrow tables with benches clamped to the floor beside them. There were at least a score of men in the place. One was asleep and snoring, his head on the table and a straggling mop of hair trailing in a pool of spilt coffee. Most of the others were eating and drinking. In the main hut there was a counter with urns, ovens, and piles of sausage rolls and round doughy buns. Two slatternly girls dispensed the hospitality of the place, engaging in high-pitched and unintelligent badinage the while. It was hot and the atmosphere was horrible.

Routh wavered on the threshold. He hated it. It was dead common and everything looked dirty. It was the level of society he worked long hours, trudging from job to job, to keep himself from being submerged in. But hunger gnawed at his belly. He sidled in and sat down halfway up the carriage, beside the sleeping man. One of the girls was passing. He called to her. ‘Miss!’ She took no notice. He nerved himself and called louder. ‘Miss, please!’ She turned, looked at him with contempt and moved on.

He realized that the girls undertook only to clear away. You went up to the counter for what you wanted. He rose, stumbled over the legs of the man who was asleep, and went forward. ‘A cup of coffee, please, and two sausage rolls.’

The girl whom he had addressed a moment before looked at him vindictively. She splashed coffee at random into a mug, her head turned towards her companion. ‘My stars!’ she said – and jerked an ear towards Routh.

Routh flushed so hard that the blood hammered in his head. Vulgar little sluts. If they only knew that he was Routh! If they only knew that less than a couple of hours ago he had blown to bits – The steaming coffee distracted him. He grabbed the mug. It fell from his hand and smashed to pieces on the zinc counter. He stared at it stupidly. ‘I’ll pay,’ he said. ‘I’ll pay for the mug. Give me another.’

The girl looked at him with suddenly much deepened contempt. ‘Pay!’ she cried; ‘who cares?’ She swept the fragments from before her so that they broke in further pieces on the floor. She gave the counter a perfunctory mop with a filthy cloth, thrust another mug in front of Routh as if he had been an animal, and turned to scream some greeting at an acquaintance who had just come in.

Routh took the mug and the sausage rolls and returned to his seat beside the sleeping man. Somebody had turned on a wireless. The hut and its tunnel-like annexes were filled with a metallic voice announcing the composition of next Saturday’s football teams. Some of the men fell silent and listened. A few brought pool coupons from their pockets and studied them in the light of this fresh information. A man sitting opposite to Routh did this. He was a great brute with a shirt open nearly to the navel, and his chest covered with red hair. His thick fingers, hacked and grimed, fumbled clumsily at the creases of the closely-printed scrap of paper before him. Routh remembered the fine hands of the man he had killed.

He bit avidly into the second sausage roll. He ought to have got a couple of the buns to go in his pocket. But he quailed at the idea of going up to the counter again. It was a matter of physical size. He hated the thought that any man among them could take him and break his back across a knee, like a rabbit. He imagined it happening; the hairy man opposite taking him by the neck in a rough house; the slatternly girls, roused and bright-eyed looking on. One of them was flouncing past him now. She was actually carrying a big jug of coffee and a superior meat pie, oozing gravy, to some favoured male. Other males, without animosity, shouted facetious remarks. The girl flung answers here and there as she moved down the carriage, brushing the close-packed men with her hips. A burly fellow in a boiler-suit slapped her on the buttocks and roared with innocent laughter. Routh hated it, it was so low. The place was full of the smell of human sweat, shot with the meagre smell of weak, stewed coffee. The sleeping man lurched over and a massive shoulder and thigh pressed on Routh. Routh took his last mouthful and wondered if he could keep it down. The carriage, he suddenly thought, was like a monstrous meat pie stuffed with human flesh, with sweat and watery coffee as a gravy running over.

The man with the red hair on his chest raised his head and looked straight at Routh. It seemed to Routh that there was disgust and hostility in every line of his dust-grimed face. His mouth moved, as if he were collecting saliva with which to express himself. But instead he spoke. ‘Heard what was last week’s treble chance?’ he asked.

‘Ninety-eight thousand.’ Routh heard his own voice automatically replying. ‘A man and his wife in Swansea. Never filled in a coupon before.’

‘Gor.’

The exclamation, Routh realized in a flash, was offered on behalf of both of them. It involved him and the hairy-chested man in a common response. There was a bond between them – that of their both being awed and disgusted also-rans. Routh felt a lump in his throat. Friendship. Pals.

The hairy-chested man brought from his pocket a tin of tobacco and a packet of cigarette papers. With these his blunt fingers fumbled in apparent hopeless ineptitude as he spoke. ‘Nearly a hundred thousand quid! And Swansea!’

‘They oughtn’t to fix it that way.’ Routh spoke spontaneously, firmly, from mature conviction. ‘What’s the difference between a hundred thousand and fifty thousand, I ask you?’

The hairy-chested man wrinkled his brow in thought. ‘It’s double,’ he said.

‘Don’t you believe it. Not to the chap that wins it. Fifty thousand and a hundred thousand are pretty near the same thing to him.’

‘How d’you make that out, mate?’ An unshaven man with a battered peak cap had broken in from farther down the carriage.

‘Think of the taxation when he’s invested it. That’s how. Supertax, he’d be paying, with a hundred thousand quid out at a good rate.’

‘Supertax! Well, I never thought of that one.’ The hairy-chested man leant over to Routh. ‘Fag?’ He had contrived a grubby but reasonably efficient-looking cigarette. Routh took it gratefully and fumbled for a match. ‘No,’ said the man, ‘I never thought of that one. And ’taint right. No – ’taint right, that isn’t.’

‘Have a light, mate.’ The unshaven man was amiably thrusting his own cigarette at Routh. ‘But it don’t apply to them folk in Swansea. Man and wife, they are – and going halves.’

‘If they’re man and wife, they’ll pay as one.’ Routh was prompt. ‘That’s the law.’ He drew at his cigarette. There was a little circle round him – friendly, attentive. The girl who had given him the coffee as if he were a pig had come up behind him and was leaning both her arms on his shoulders. Only the sleeping man was inattentive. ‘So what I say is,’ he went on, ‘why not make it fifty and then ten fives?’

The hairy-chested man tapped his fingers on the table before him. He was counting. ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘Give you a fair chance, that would.’

The second girl had now come up. She leant across Routh and brushed the crumbs solicitously from his part of the table. ‘My!’ she said, ‘if you’re not the one to tell us what to do.’

Popular Routh. Condescending Routh. The group grew. The discussion prospered. Routh steered it. The increasing babel of talk roused the sleeping man. His weight came off Routh’s thigh and he sat up with a start. He was a lad of no more than twenty and he looked dead tired. The coffee dripped from his hair and trickled down his dusty cheeks. He put up a dazed hand to his head. Something queer and unaccustomed stirred in Routh and he brought out a handkerchief – the spare clean handkerchief that he always kept to put in his breast pocket before ringing a doorbell. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘give it a wipe.’ The boy flushed and took the handkerchief. Routh trembled with pleasure, and looked away.

Across the smoke-filled carriage he saw what made his heart miss a beat. The men driving the bricks were gone. And Squire was sitting in their place.

Vanity, for the moment, saved him. His prospective wealth as the proprietor of Formula Ten; his immediate personal safety as the man who had stolen it: neither of these seemed so precious to him as the esteem of the group of transport men around him, as the admiration of the two sluts now leaning on the counter. It was this that enabled him in a second to control himself – and that even stirred him to an act of sheer bravado. He caught Squire’s eye through the haze, and gave him a brisk nod.

The man in the battered cap turned round and stared at Squire. ‘Friend of yours?’ he asked.

‘Acquaintance.’ Routh was offhand. ‘Commercia.’ He paused to arrest sufficient attention. ‘Travels in–’ And Routh named something that produced a roar of mirth from the circle around them. The sluts tossed their heads in delighted disapproval, and fell to vigorously smearing ill-washed mugs with sopping tea towels. Everybody turned and stared at Squire, who started to stand up, thought better of it, and sat down again.

But it was only for a moment that Routh was able to enjoy his enemy’s discomfiture. The grimness of his situation rolled back upon him. Squire would have a car outside, and no doubt he had brought some of his confederates. How would he plan to capture the fugitive? A horrid possibility crossed Routh’s mind. What if Squire said he was mad? What if he maintained to this uneducated crowd that he had escaped from an asylum? Might his pursuers not then simply drag him away screaming, without a soul lifting a hand to prevent it? Routh thanked his stars that he had got into the talk in the place; that he had held forth with such sanity and sagacity on football pools. But it had been a mistake to make that joke about Squire. They had all laughed – but it sounded a bit cracked all the same. And now Squire really was rising. He was coming forward to make his monstrous claim. He had pointed at Routh…

There was a sudden dead silence. Everybody was staring over Routh’s shoulder at the main door of the hut. It framed two policemen in the flat caps of a county constabulary.

Just this situation Routh had dreaded for years. He had pictured it to himself with a hundred casual variations – but always in essence the same. The law had caught up with him. The bank had rung the police. The police had contacted the woman.

‘Keep your seats, please. Licences first – and then a brake inspection for all cars and commercial vehicles.’

The silence gave place to grumbles, routine profanity, and much fumbling in pockets. Routh gave a long gasp of relief – and then caught his breath as he realized not only the irrelevance of his first reaction but also the immensity of the issue with which this sudden and unexpected appearance of the embodied law confronted him. If he were captured by his enemies, they would first make sure of Formula Ten and then kill him. He was under no illusion as to that. And now that they had made contact with him again, did he really have the slightest chance of shaking them off? Except – and he looked at the two policemen – in one way? Powerful as they were, they were unlikely to get at him in a police cell.

He could give himself up. He could give himself up, here and now, as the man who had committed a score of petty frauds all over England. If Squire and his friends were indeed far on the wrong side of the law themselves, they could not then venture to come forward on their own.

The policemen were checking the licences of two men standing by the counter. Routh tried to think ahead. If he gave himself up he would be searched, and Formula Ten would be found on him. But it would be incomprehensible rather than suspicious, as likely as not. He could explain it as a system he was working out for playing the pools. His mind was made up. He would hand himself over.

He rose and took a step towards the policemen. The movement revealed to him that Squire had a companion – a burly man with a reddish beard, sitting half in shadow. In a flash it came to Routh that he had, after all, a chance worth taking. Probably there were only the two of them. However numerous his enemies, the hunt must have dispersed them thinly. Outside there could be nothing but an empty car…

He walked up to the policemen, his driving licence in his hand. ‘Mind if I get along?’ he asked casually. ‘I’ve only got a motorbike. Want to look at the brakes of that?’

One of the policemen, a sergeant, glanced rapidly at the licence, and shook his head. ‘No need for you to stop, sir.’

He was in the open air – and free. Perhaps he could even – Routh glanced rapidly round the yard. There was a police car, close to the high road. And there, its bonnet sticking out from behind a lorry, was what must be Squire’s – a long, grey, open Lagonda. The two-stroke was just beyond. He went rapidly forward, brought out his clasp knife, and as he passed the back of the Lagonda cut hard into the wall of a tyre, close by the rim. Then he ran the Douglas out into the road and in thirty seconds was heading south.