Bootlegged Angel (21 page)

‘It’s an old hop farm which went bust a couple of years ago and they grubbed up all the hop bines. They used to grow up those poles supported by wires, ten, twenty feet, something
like that.’

‘And that makes it an ideal place for you to program computers?’

The Jeep was going uphill now, into the trees, leaving the brown, gutted fields behind.

‘All we need is a building we can keep reasonably clean and some electricity.’ He turned his shock of droopy blond hair at me. He used it like a gun. ‘Companies hire us to
reprogram their computers or upgrade them, memorywise. Most don’t like it done on the premises so we bring the kit here. With things like shops and small offices, we do it overnight or at the
weekend. It’s a good system. This way they don’t get to see how easy it is.’

He stopped the Jeep at the junction with a B-road and signalled left. There was a wooden signpost at the side of the junction with a carved picnic table and an oak leaf, signifying a nature
reserve of some sort. A road sign opposite said that Folkestone was the way we were heading, Canterbury was the other.

‘You don’t advertise much,’ I said, trying not to look as if I was mapping the route in my head.

‘We go to customers, we don’t expect them to come to us. What about you?’

I had been expecting this and was rather surprised it hadn’t come before.

‘Me? What about me?’

‘What do you do when you’re not running a pub? Didn’t Melanie say you were a fashion photographer or something?’

‘Oh no, not me. I’m just driving one around at the moment, or I was. I’m a driver, that’s all.’

‘So how come you’re running the Rising Sun, then?’

‘Dunno. Just lucky, I guess.’

On the way back, once we had loaded my shopping into the back of the Jeep and avoided the smug stare of the redhead with the VW Golf, he brought it up again.

‘So what sort of things do you drive?’

‘Anything. Trucks, stretched limos, minicabs when times are hard. I’m in a drivers’ pool and we’ll turn out for anything. The company’s called Duncan’s. Heard
of it?’

‘Can’t say I have.’

Good. Neither had I, but I did have a friend called Duncan, better known as Duncan the Drunken, possibly the best motor mechanic in the world, who could get hold of any sort of vehicle short of
a tank if you asked him.

‘No matter. I’ll be glad to get back to work, though. I’m not a good passenger.’

‘How did you end up here in Whitcomb?’ he asked as we turned off the motorway. He wasn’t a bad driver himself; a touch heavy on the gas pedal but careful with it.

‘Pure chance. I had to bring somebody’s car down here to meet them off the ferry but then their plans changed and they got the Eurostar to Ashford this afternoon instead. By that
time I was lumbered with running the pub so the boss lady took her car home. Guess I’ll have to thumb a lift back to London once Ivy gets back.’

‘What if she doesn’t come back?’ he said, flicking his hair at me.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, she is getting on in years, you know, and maybe the hospital wants to put her in a twilight home or similar.’

A maximum security one from what I knew of her, I thought.

‘I haven’t burned that bridge yet,’ I said, ‘but I suppose we’ll have to call the brewery and get them to put a relief manager in.’

He didn’t give much away did young Scooter, but I saw his hands tighten on the steering wheel at that, though I couldn’t think why.

‘Couldn’t you run things? Get a temporary licence or whatever they call them?’

‘Er . . . no. I don’t have time, don’t want to hang around this backwater – no offence – and the last thing I want to do is present myself before Folkestone
magistrates pretending to be an upright citizen. There was a publican in the pub last night, a Ted something-or-other, friend of Ivy’s. I’ve got his card. I’ll give him a ring,
see what he says. If it comes to that.’

‘But you’re OK for a couple of days?’

‘End of the week, tops. Depends on my new staff.’

‘Staff?’

‘I’ve conned three of the girls from the model agency into helping out. Their boss is considering doing some photographs in the pub, but that may or may not pan out. It just means
I’ve got some cheap labour for tonight and tomorrow. It’s not fair to lean on Melanie, though if she hadn’t had her accident, she’d have been the natural choice to cover for
Ivy. She’s a good kid.’

He pointed the shock of hair at me again. I still wasn’t sure how much he could see through it.

‘Yes, she is,’ he said in a neutral sort of way.

‘Known her long?’

‘Since university. I heard about her accident and when I knew we’d be working down here, I looked her up.’

‘Moved in next door, in fact.’

‘Yeah, as it happens.’

‘And now your guys are part of her darts team?’

‘There’s not much else to do round here and all our work is short-term, odd-hours stuff, so the pub’s convenient. Mel said it could do with the customers as well.’

We were rounding the bend towards the Rising Sun and had a full view of the car-park. It struck me for the first time that the pub also offered an excellent view of the road approaching Whitcomb
from this, southern, end. But that was no more than a fleeting thought because something more peculiar was nipping at my brain.

The car-park was full, or appeared so. There were certainly twenty or more cars there, including a couple of pick-ups which could have been the ones I had seen parked outside Scooter’s
Soft Sell works on the old hop farm.

I looked at my watch; it was six thirty.

‘Do they hold car boot sales here?’ I asked as we turned in towards the pub.

‘No,’ said Scooter and he wasn’t smiling. ‘It looks like your business is booming.’

It was. The pub hadn’t seen so many paying customers since VE Day, or so Dan said and he would know.

Dan had at least claimed his traditional place at the corner of the bar. The Major was trying to mark his territory by huffing and growling every time he was jostled on the shoulder or rocked on
his bar stool. Two of Scooter’s boffins, the ones called Combo and Painter, were trying to play darts without putting anyone’s eye out. The spooky Axeman was leaning up against the bar.
The rest I didn’t know, although two of them were the pair who had been in at lunchtime when I had turned up with Amy and the girls. They must have told their friends, or at least all their
male friends for there wasn’t a female in the place this side of the bar.

It was the three females
behind
the bar that were important, behind a bar that was so small they couldn’t help but bump into each other as they tried to serve drinks to the
assembled throng. That in itself seemed to make most of the customers more thirsty, although it might have had something to do with the fact that all three were wearing red TALtops pulled to reveal
maximum cleavage (what I had once described to Amy as ‘Danger Mode’), very short skirts and suicidally high heels. For Neemoy, who didn’t need heels to be impressive, this meant
that she had to stoop every time she walked under the tankards hanging from hooks in the roof beams. When she hit one, it cannoned into the next in line like an off-key peal of bells.

I struggled through the crowd, two carrier bags of shopping in each hand, shouting, ‘Coming through! Mind your backs!’ and suchlike until I could station myself by the kitchen door
at the side of the bar.

The Major nooded grimly at me and flexed his moustache. Dan grinned broadly.

‘’Evening, Roy. Now this is what I call under new management!’ he jerked a thumb at Neemoy who seemed to be able to reach every drink in the bar without moving her feet.
‘And I wouldn’t mind getting under her.’

I was about to tell him not to think about fighting out of his weight class when the opening chords of ‘Walking On Sunshine’ by Katrina and The Waves boomed out from the other side
of the bar accompanied by a loud cheer from most of the customers.

The three girls behind the bar broke into spontaneous applause and several voices yelled to ‘buy that man a drink’. A figure in an anorak, blushing bright red, was pushed towards the
bar into the arms of Max who was leaning forward to give him a hug. It was Chip – or it might have been Dale – from Soft Sell and if he didn’t make contact with Max’s bosom
quick, there were others ready and willing to step into his shoes.

‘Lad fixed the jukebox,’ said Dan in my ear above the music.

‘I didn’t know we had a jukebox,’ I shouted back.

‘Neither did I,’ he said.

Sasha spotted me and focused her disappearing pupils on my face.

‘It’s Roy – right?’

I nodded, suddenly tired. I had been out shopping all afternoon while they had been enjoying themselves.

‘This is fun, isn’t it? Do you want a drink?’

I finally got the door to the kitchen open.

‘No thanks,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to get on with the dinner. But call me when the lap dancing starts.’

‘Lap dancing,’ she said to herself, but I could read her lips above the music. ‘Cool.’

Over by the dart board I spotted Scooter remonstrating with Combo, even poking a finger into Combo’s chest to make a point. Now didn’t seem the time to thank him for the lift. And
out of the corner of my eye I saw that Axeman was not taking either of his protruding eyes off Neemoy, not for a second. That, I was sure, would end in tears before bedtime.

The kitchen was a haven of peace and sanity if you didn’t count the sprinkling of cannabis seeds which Sasha had left on the main food preparation area. They popped as I plonked my bags
down on them and began to unpack my shopping.

I heard a door open and a burst of music as Max came through the back of the bar and the small storeroom and into the kitchen from the other end.

‘Got any ice in here?’ she asked.

‘Try the fridge,’ I said. I was, after all, a private detective. ‘Isn’t there any on the bar?’

‘Nope.’

She opened the freezer compartment of the large fridge and tentatively poked in a magenta fingernail.

‘You coping out there?’

‘Yeah, we’re enjoying it. We don’t often get to talk to people face-to-face.’

‘The novelty’ll soon wear off. How did you draw the punters?’

‘Dunno, really.’ She had located a plastic tray of ice cubes. ‘A couple of guys appeared and we chatted them up and they got on their mobiles and some more turned up. They all
seem really nice, except for the spooky one who won’t stop clocking Neemoy. You know, the one who looks like he’s from the Addams Family. Called Alex or something. He’s
creepy.’

‘Yes, he is. You watch him. Tell me when he goes, will you?’

‘OK. What’ll you be doing?’

‘Staying out of the way mostly,’ I said truthfully, ‘and getting something to eat. I’m starving. There’s pizza or pasta or one of my homemade cheeseburgers if you
guys want to take a shift break.’

‘Oh, we’re fine at the moment,’ she said lazily, ‘we’re just playing the field, seeing how the evening pans out, checking out the local talent.’

‘Isn’t this all a bit tame for you guys?’

‘No, it’s great. With Amy gone it’s like being off the leash.’ She looked at me. ‘Oh, sorry, no offence.’

‘None taken,’ I said. ‘I know what you mean.’

She finally cracked the ice tray, removed one single cube and replaced it in the freezer, closing the door.

I looked on open-mouthed, my arms full of frozen pizzas, as she delved inside her TALtop and began to rub the ice cube over her left, and then her right, nipple.

‘I’ve got a bet on with Neemoy that I can distract her pop-eyed stalker.’

If Axeman didn’t have a thyroid problem already, he soon would have.

I let them get on with it while I heated and ate a pepperoni pizza, working on the basis that they were selling more beer than I could and anyway, things would calm down as the
evening wore on, but I was wrong about that.

I did a couple of circuits out into the bar, nodding to customers and collecting glasses as I went like I had seen publicans do for real. I might as well have been invisible as all eyes were on
the Terrible Trio. By eight o’clock they had a routine worked out where they did a sort of static line dance behind the bar to Bobby McFerrin’s ‘Don’t Worry, Be
Happy’. The game was to put the song on the jukebox and then order a vodka and tonic. Max would fill a glass with ice (there was an ice bucket on the bar), fling it to Neemoy, who would
jiggle it under the vodka optic while Sasha juggled a bottle of tonic water. A few more turns to the music and the drink was slammed down in front of the customer, most of it slopping on to a grimy
bar towel. They charged £3 for this, not including the jukebox, but no one seemed to be complaining. We were going to need more vodka.

On my first wander round, I noticed that Scooter and the boffins from Soft Sell had gone, although the Axeman remained, rooted to his spot at the bar which ensured he was never more than three
feet from Neemoy. He had switched to drinking vodka and tonic too.

I would have expected that to have emptied the pub and things to have quietened down, but more cars arrived – and more pick-up trucks – and the bar continued to heave. I identified
at least six youngish guys who could have been part of the Soft Sell set-up from the way they acknowledged Axeman, but I had seen none of them before.

As soon as it was dark I left the pub by the back door and, careful to avoid stepping on a chicken, made my way to the gate which opened into the car-park for a closer look at the pick-ups.

I had Amy’s dictaphone with me and began to read their number plates into it. There were two Fords and a Mazda and all were empty and shouldn’t have been at all suspicious except I
had been seeing quite a lot of pick-up trucks in the past twenty-four hours and this, after all, was Kent not Texas.

But it was beginning to look like it, as the headlights of another one swung in to the car-park.

Instinctively, I dropped into a crouch behind the Mazda until the new pick-up had parked and killed its lights. Two figures got out and crunched across to the pub.

‘We ought to log in our load,’ one was saying, ‘before we do this.’