Bootlegged Angel (13 page)

‘Through these.’ She patted her binoculars. ‘We get bored when there aren’t many trucks.’

‘So you watch people,’ I said sternly. ‘You pick them at random and try and guess what they do for a living, or who they’re meeting or what they’ll do next. Is that
the game?’

‘Why, yes. You’ve played it yourself?’

No, but I’ve bet on it.

‘And you’ve been watching me?’

‘Only when you were near the Marine Gardens with your friend. We can’t see much further than that into town. Not into bedrooms or anything like that.’

Well, that was a relief. With all the security cameras around these days (ones that work, not necessarily those from Rudgard and Blugden) you could also be under constant surveillance from
little old ladies who suspected you of being unkind to animals. Was nowhere safe?

‘He’s still there,’ said Green Hat.

‘Excuse me?’

‘Your friend. The one you had fish and chips with. He’s still there walking up and down Marine Parade.’

For the first time she unglued her face from the eyepieces of the binoculars and looked at me. She had a jawline I wouldn’t argue with.

‘See for yourself,’ she said, standing up and putting a hand into the middle of her back as she stretched.

Daphne waved at Green Hat’s vacant seat.

‘Go on, let’s have a look. It’ll be fun,’ she said and began to adjust her own tripod.

I nodded to Green Hat – not totally convinced that she wasn’t going to cosh me from behind – and sat down.

‘Nice glasses,’ I said and she seemed impressed that I had used the right jargon.

‘My husband took them personally from the commander of U-265 in May 1945.’

I might have known. I sat down and leaned in to the eyepieces. The rubber surrounds smelled of lavender.

‘There he is,’ Daphne was saying, ‘just down from where you had lunch. He’s talking to those two men.’

I had to make only a minor adjustment to see what she was talking about. Yes, it could have been Nick Lawrence, or someone wearing a similar coat, but it was difficult to tell at that distance.
The two guys with him were equally minuscule and all I could tell was that they were wearing leather jackets just like the guys in the street where I had bought the cigarettes. The guys that
Lawrence had implied were part of a Czech gang. But then, I was wearing a leather jacket too.

‘That could be him,’ I admitted, ‘but it’s difficult at this –’

‘’Course it’s him,’ Green Hat snorted behind me, ‘I’ve had him in view since you left him. Bugger all else happening on the sea front, so I kept him in my
sights.’

Thank God she was an animal lover. No grizzly bear would stand a chance.

‘I don’t know . . .’

But then I did, because the figure I was now convinced was Nick Lawrence was suddenly holding a gold package, which could just be two packs of cigarettes purchased not two hours before, and then
he was handing them over to one of the leather jackets.

‘You might be right,’ I said, which was greeted with another snort. ‘It’s funny, isn’t it, how everyone seems to be watching someone in Dover. Crazy town,
eh?’

‘We’re not the only ones,’ said Daphne to my right.

‘Pardon?’

‘Down and across the street, about four o’clock from where you are now. A blue Volvo estate car, one of the flashy new designs, a V70, parked on the right.’

She was good. She was very good. I wondered if she and her mate fancied a job with an all-girl snooping firm in London I knew.

I moved the heavy
Kriegsmarine
glasses as she instructed and focused on the Volvo. If it had been there when I had been talking to Lawrence, then I must have driven right by it without
noticing it.

The passenger side window was down and I could make out the shape of a shoulder and an elbow and something protruding which could have been a rifle or a lens or a telescope or a microphone or an
umbrella for all I knew.

Whatever it was, it was pointed in exactly the same direction I had just been looking, towards Lawrence and the two guys he was talking to.

Like I said, everybody was watching somebody.

I parked in the main street of Whitcomb – the only street in Whitcomb – but no one minded. There wasn’t anyone around to mind.

I locked the BMW knowing that Amy would kill me if it got stolen down here in Sleepy Hollow after touring London and the seedy side of Dover. I would be so embarrassed I’d probably offer
to help her.

Hands in pockets, I wandered down the road towards the Rising Sun. The Bottleback beehive bins were still there in an otherwise deserted car-park. The Seagrave sign was still roughly above the
front door. Nothing had changed since that morning. How the hours dragged in the countryside. I knew pubs in London that had been turned into Seattle Coffee Houses in less time.

A hundred yards beyond the pub and round the bend in the road I got bored with staring at hedgerows, turned on my heel and walked back to see if the pub looked any different or gave me any more
clues from that aspect. Nothing sprang into view, but something almost creamed me from behind.

It was a bicycle and of course I realised that immediately – well, as soon as my heart started beating again – ridden by an old man but at a speed which wouldn’t have been out
of place at a mountain bike trial. The rider was balding on top but with long white hair flowing in his slipstream. He wore black wellington boots, brown cord trousers and two short-sleeved
pullovers one over the other. He was hunched over the handlebars, head down, aiming for the front door of the pub like a bullet.

He had come up behind me without a sound and cut close enough to have picked my pocket. As he reached the pub, he braked in a scrunch of gravel and dismounted by swinging a leg over the crossbar
and letting go of the handlebars. The bike rolled forward for about three yards under its own momentum and then fell sideways, propped up against the pub wall. It was a neat trick and one he had
obviously been practising; for about fifty years from the look of him.

The old guy stared with approval at his parking technique, rubbed the palms of his hands down the front of his trousers and reached for the latch on the pub door.

I stood there at the entrance to the car-park watching this and wishing that Daphne or her friend Green Hat had been with me.

They
would have noticed that the pub was already open ages ago.

‘Oh yes, we’re open all day, but there’s not much call for it.’

The sign above the door was a home-made job, not the sort the local magistrates would have approved of, which read: ‘
IVY BRACEGIRDLE
, Licensed to sell beers, wines,
spirits, cider and victuals at reasonable prices and unreasonable times.’

At first I thought Ivy was sitting on a bar stool behind the counter, but she was standing up. When she moved to pull me a pint of Seagrave’s Special Bitter, the top of her head came no
more than half-way up the ebonied hand pumps.

I didn’t even want to guess at her age but beside her the mad cyclist, the only other customer, standing at the end of the bar sipping from a metal tankard, looked like a reject from a Boy
Band.

She wore enough make-up to shore up the average garden wall and blood red lipstick to match her nail polish. Her thin arms, already weighed down with thick gold bracelets, looked as if they
might snap as she lifted the pint glass around the pumps towards me, but she didn’t spill a drop.

I had smiled my best smile at her and ordered a beer and remarked that I hadn’t expected the pub to be open.

‘Not much call at all these days,’ she went on, friendly enough. ‘It’s a bit like Angostura Bitters. It’s always there behind the bar but you don’t get much
call for it.’

I wasn’t too sure about the analogy but I kept smiling.

‘I always keep it near the gin.’ She looked around at the back fitting on the bar. ‘Well, I used to. Just there. That’s funny. I can’t remember being asked for any
for ages. What’s this?’

She picked up a large brown bottle and read the label.

‘Lovage. What on earth is Lovage? I didn’t even know I had that. And I’m not sure I would know what to do with it.’

‘It’s a herbal cordial,’ I said helpfully. ‘You put a splash in with brandy, same as you’d put ginger wine in whisky. If you look you’ll probably find one
called Shrub, they usually come in pairs. Lovage for brandy, shrub for rum. They come from the West Country, down Cornwall. When they used to smuggle brandy ashore the casks sometimes got damaged
and seawater got in, so they added lovage to kill the taste. They used shrub for rum and people got to like it.’

If I thought she appreciated my little nugget of gastronomic anthropology, or thought she might just be grateful for a second human being to talk to, I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Her face clouded, even under all that make-up.

‘Smugglers?’ She almost shrieked it. ‘Don’t talk to me about fucking smugglers! Those bastards are not fit to lick my toilet bowl! Shits and fuckers, all of
them!’

I took an involuntary step backwards, taking my beer with me in case she spat in it.

And to think, she probably kissed grandchildren with that mouth.

So Ivy had a thing about smugglers. It was understandable and I hadn’t been expected to know, being a stranger to the area. And if I thought her language had been a
trifle ripe, then I should have heard her a few years ago when the vicar from the next village had asked her to sell raffle tickets for the Harvest Festival and one of the prizes was a case of
French beer. Not to mention the lecture she’d given to two families in the village, just before banning them from the pub for life, when she’d discovered they had shopped in Calais for
the beer for a Sunday afternoon barbecue.

I got all this from the psycho cyclist, who turned out to be called Dan. He had been a regular for thirty years and there was no danger of him doing a beer run across the Channel. He
couldn’t swim so there was no way he was getting on a ferry and he was claustrophobic, so the Tunnel was out. No wonder he had never bothered to apply for a passport.

Dan told me all this for the price of a pint, along with a potted history of Ivy’s tenancy at the pub and how she had buried two husbands, was determined to leave the pub in a box herself
and how she refused to let him make an honest woman of her. He told me in a very loud voice with Ivy standing there behind the bar not three feet away. She sniffed and sighed occasionally as if she
had heard it all before, which she certainly had, shaking her head as Dan’s story got gradually more outrageous and she pretended to be embarrassed.

It was a double act they had obviously performed many times in front of the customers. That’s why there were so many of them.

‘What do you do for customers around here?’ I asked when I had their trust, or at least when they had run out of things to say.

‘Oh, we have our regulars,’ Ivy said without much conviction. ‘The Major will be in at six, always is.’

‘You barred him,’ Dan muttered into his beer.

‘Yes, but he never listens. Then there’s Melanie and her mum, they look in all the time, not as much as before the accident, though. There’s Joe and Freda Dyson . .
.’

‘They’re barred,’ said Dan.

‘Frank Osmond and his wife. They drive over from Folkestone every Sunday.’

‘Not since he lost his licence.’ Thanks, Dan.

‘Maybe not. There’s the Taylor brothers. They used to come in and play pool twice a week.’

‘Doing eighteen months for smuggling cigarettes.’

Ivy looked shocked.

‘Are they? The little
fuckers
. They’re barred, then. What about the Fowlers?’

‘They moved to Ashford last year.’

‘Oh.’ She seemed pensive. ‘I thought I must have barred them.’

‘Face it, Ivy, love, the pub trade’s dead around here. Marry me and we’ll lock the doors and have no more truck with bloody customers.’

‘You watch your fucking language, Dan Dexter. I’m not that desperate yet. We’ve got customers. There’s those lads who’ve started to come in and play darts in the
week, they fill the place up.’

‘They don’t drink much, though, do they?’ Dan chipped in helpfully.

‘I rely on you and the Major for my wet sales,’ Ivy snapped back. ‘And talk of the devil, here he comes.’

She must have recognised his tread on the gravel as she couldn’t possibly have seen over the bar and out over the frosted lower half of the windows.

‘He’s not driving tonight,’ said Dan, ‘so your takings’ll be up.’

The door latch clicked and I felt the early evening air cool on the back of my neck.

‘’Evening Ivy, ‘evening Dan,’ came a clipped, military voice. ‘Had to hoof it tonight. Some damn wide boy’s parked a bloody great Panzer at the end of my
drive. Couldn’t get the old motor out.’

‘Er . . . back in a minute,’ I said, diving for the door.

By six-thirty the pub was humming, the sound of merriment and laughter bouncing off its oaken beams, horse brasses and ranks of pewter and silver tankards hanging from hooks
above the bar. There were seven of us in the place now and I had to resist the temptation to look around for the jukebox. There wasn’t one, but if there had been it would have played 78s. Dan
was still at his corner of the bar and the character known as the Major had settled on to a bar stool into which his buttocks had made grooves.

In a corner of the bar were a middle-aged couple who had parked a Ford Mondeo at the back of the car-park so it couldn’t be seen from the road. I had noticed that, but I didn’t think
the others had. It wasn’t anything seriously suspicious, they were just meeting for a drink after work as married (though not to each other) couples do every day before going home.

I had switched to bottles of Seagull Low, which might have sounded like a Battle of Britain call sign but was in fact the brewery’s version of an alcohol-free beer. The label told me it
probably contained less alcohol than tomato juice. It certainly had less taste. I doubted if it was one of Murdo’s best-selling lines.

The switch was necessary for two reasons. Firstly, I hadn’t decided what I was going to do with Amy’s car and didn’t know whether I would have to drive it back to London or
not. Secondly, I decided five minutes into the Major’s company that after a couple of Seagrave Specials I would probably have clocked him one.