The Sunshine Cruise Company (13 page)

‘My balls, Wesley.’

‘Are you –’

‘Tried to rip them off.’

‘Are you sure –

‘Pensioner.’

‘Are you sure you should be driving?’

‘SHE TRIED TO RIP MY FUCKING BALLS OFF!’

He seemed pretty sure, Wesley thought.

All four women were screaming as they hurtled towards the oncoming estate car, the car frantically beeping its horn and flashing its lights.

‘OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD!’ Julie was chanting.

‘AHHGHGHHHH!’ said Susan.

‘HELP ME, JESUS!’ Jill screamed.

‘FUCK ME!’ Ethel shouted.

They could see the faces of the occupants of the estate car now – a man and a woman. They were screaming too, the righteous terrified screams of people legitimately taking the off-ramp from the motorway only to see a Cancer Care minibus screaming towards them at seventy miles an hour.

Julie yanked the wheel hard to the right and they crunched onto the hard shoulder, missing the car by inches, causing the driver, a Mr Leslie Hough, to soil himself.

Boscombe came over the roundabout at eighty, cars slamming their brakes on, siren blaring, blue light flashing,
The Sweeney
theme pumping in his smashed mind. As they came up the elevated section onto the second roundabout that allowed you to join the dual carriageway, Wesley looked to his left. He saw the minibus. It was about a mile away. Heading west. On the hard shoulder. On the wrong side of the carriageway.

‘LOOK!’ Wesley yelled, pointing.

Boscombe followed his finger. He saw the minibus too and emitted a low growl.

‘Fucking hell,’ Wesley said. ‘They’re gonna kill someone. We better get some help –’ He picked up the mike for the radio and was about to key the button when Boscombe smashed it from his fist.

‘Eh?’ Wesley said.

‘Ours,’ Boscombe said.

‘We need to –’ Wesley stopped talking as he realised what Boscombe was doing. He was taking the ‘NO ENTRY’ ramp, taking the hard shoulder, following the van.

‘SARGE! NO!’

‘MY FUCKING BALLS!’ Boscombe screamed, his eyes glittering and mad, like a pair of marbles with fire inside them.

Even more screaming in the minibus – Julie nudging the speedometer towards ninety, honking the horn and flashing the lights as they tore along the hard shoulder, the oncoming traffic passing them on their left, the faces of the people in the cars in the slow lane just a mad blur of open mouths and wide eyes. ‘GET US OUT OF HERE!’ Susan screamed. Behind her she was aware of a hooting noise and turned to see Ethel: punching the roof and barking with joy and excitement as there came another noise in front of Susan, honking and rhythmic – Jill, vomiting into the front-passenger footwell.

Boscombe floored it – coming down the hard shoulder of the off-ramp, his siren blaring and blue light strobing. Traffic scrambling to give him a wide berth. Indeed it would be the actions of the driver of a low-slung Porsche Carrera trying to get out of his way a few hundred yards along the dual carriageway that would prove to be so catastrophic. Being sat so low to the ground, the driver (a Miss Daisy Welling, a 32-year-old marketing executive) couldn’t really see what was happening up ahead as she moved into the slow lane in preparation for taking the off-ramp to Wroxham, the ramp Boscombe and Wesley had just come down at eighty miles an hour. Miss Welling just heard police sirens and saw brake lights coming on and traffic slewing out of lane. Panicking she made the appalling decision to pull over onto the hard shoulder. She glanced in her rear-view mirror as she did so, to check there was no one coming up the hard shoulder behind her. She never for a moment factored in what might be coming down the hard shoulder in the opposite direction, against the traffic.

‘JESUS CHRIST!’ Wesley screamed as he saw the silver Porsche pull directly into their path. Boscombe was trying to press the pedal through the rubber mat at this point, through the floor, onto the tarmac, his eyes fixed on the white minibus in the distance, with its back doors flapping open, the hunched, hooded figure of the woman in the wheelchair still just visible. Boscombe saw the Porsche pull into their path less than a hundred yards away. He knew that he was doing close to a hundred miles an hour and had no chance of stopping in time. He realised that he had only two options open to him and – tuning out Wesley’s screaming – that he had perhaps three seconds to choose between them.

Left into the oncoming traffic?

Or right, over the grass verge, into … what exactly?

Boscombe yanked the wheel hard right.

Somewhere up ahead Julie threw a right-hander too, hitting the brakes, leaving a strip of skid marks fifty yards long on the hard shoulder as she almost 360’d the minibus and took the (amazingly clear of traffic) exit ramp off the dual carriageway. Thirty seconds later they were over another roundabout and motoring down a quiet B-road as though nothing had happened. It was eerily quiet, just the sound of Susan breathing hard with her eyes shut. Jill had fainted. ‘Oh Lord,’ Ethel said from way in the back. ‘That was fucking
brilliant.
’

When retelling the story in the years ahead, which he would be asked to do often – down the pub, at retirement dos, at Christmas parties – Wesley would stress the strange feeling of weightlessness, of the brief absence of something as fundamental as the laws of gravity. The grass verge acted as a sort of natural ramp. Their 2.5-litre police Rover took it at ninety-two miles an hour, that speed being lessened slightly as the front bumper was torn off and splintered beneath them.

Then there was blue sky all around them.

Here Wesley found himself thinking of the last words of Donald Campbell, driver of the
Bluebird
, as he attempted to break the world water speed record. ‘I’m flying!’ Campbell said, as the craft’s nose rose out of the water.

At the wheel Julie was experiencing the backwash of an adrenalin blast she hadn’t felt since perhaps 1972, specifically December 1972, when she was seventeen years old and in the front row when T. Rex ran onstage in Poole. The adrenalin was pumping a clarity of thought through her. ‘Susan!’ she said over her shoulder. ‘SUSAN! Is the money safe?’ Susan patted the seat next to her, feeling the stuffed, zippered holdall. Julie saw her nod in the rear-view mirror. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘We need to ditch this van …’ Julie started scanning the hedgerows for a turning, thinking about barns, woodland, anything.

As all survivors of terrible car wrecks will tell you, time stood still for a moment. There was just a whooshing noise. Wesley even found he had a moment to turn his open-mouthed face to his right and behold Boscombe, staring straight ahead, still uselessly turning the steering wheel. It occurred to Wesley that he would quite like to punch his boss in the face. In terms of his last actions on the planet, this seemed like it would be a fairly reasonable one. Then gravity was back with a vengeance and they were plummeting down. In his peripheral vision (he was still staring hatefully at Boscombe) Wesley became aware of water.

The heavy Rover smashed nose first into the duck pond, sending a spray of water thirty feet into the air and activating the airbags, which punched both of them softly in the face. Luckily for Boscombe and Wesley it had been a hot day and their windows were down. The shock of the cold water rushing in was balanced by the fact that this allowed the water pressure on each side of the doors to equalise, so that both of them could open their doors.

They swam to the side and lay there panting, watching the boot of the Rover point skywards as it sank slowly.

In the distance they could hear sirens approaching.

JULIE STOPPED THE
van. A single-track lane led off the B-road. A wooden, hand-painted sign on it said ‘DENSMORE COTTAGE’. She looked down the lane – leafy, overgrown, secluded.
What the hell
, she thought.
Ditch the van in a hedgerow and continue on foot if need be
. She turned back and looked at Susan. ‘What do you reckon?’

‘We’ve got to get out of these clothes.’ She’d ripped her balaclava off. Her face was slick with sweat. Julie nodded and took the turning. Susan leaned over into the front seat and brushed Jill’s hair from her face. ‘Is she OK?’ Julie asked, steering the minibus slowly down the bumpy lane.

‘I think so,’ Susan said. Jill was beginning to stir.

‘Oh God,’ Julie said, ‘have we still got the pass—’

‘I got ’em,’ Ethel said, patting a small canvas knapsack tucked inside her wheelchair. It contained all their passports, their means of getting out of the country.

‘Here.’ Ethel’s gnarled fist appeared over the seat behind Susan’s head, holding her pewter hip flask. ‘Give her a belt on that.’

‘I don’t think just yet,’ Susan said, taking the flask. She was about to take a nip of what smelt like brandy when Julie abruptly threw them into reverse, causing Susan to nearly spill the liquid all over herself. ‘Careful, Ju—’ she was saying.

‘Look!’ Julie said, pointing as she backed up.

Susan and Ethel turned. Julie was pointing to a pretty Edwardian cottage. It had a double garage attached to it.

‘What?’ Susan said. ‘You want us to go in and say “Hi there! We just robbed a bank. Can we hide out here for a while?”’

‘No.
Look
,’ Julie said. ‘The doorstep.’

‘Well, I’ll be …’ Ethel said.

‘Where are we?’ Jill said, sitting up, groggy.

‘What is it?’ Susan said, looking at what appeared to be a perfectly ordinary doorstep, well, ordinary save for the fact that there about a dozen bottles of milk on it.

‘It’s what we call “a break”, love,’ Ethel said.

Julie was already reversing the minibus, preparing to take the turning into the driveway. ‘What are you doing?’ said Susan, still not getting it.

‘Someone forgot to cancel the milk,’ Julie said.

‘Eh?’

‘Fucking hell,’ Ethel said.

‘Ethel! Language!’ Jill hissed automatically, not yet fully awake.

‘Ah. They’re on their holidays,’ Susan said.

A moment later, the minibus off the road and the gates closed behind it, Susan and Julie stood on the front doorstep, ringing the bell. Behind them Jill was sitting on the step of the open passenger-side door. She had her head in her hands and was muttering a kind of numb, looped mantra, something along the lines of
‘What was I thinking … prison … dear God, help me …
’

After the fourth ring Julie said, ‘Definitely not home.’

‘So what now?’ Susan said.

‘Well …’ Julie said, already eyeing up windows and drainpipes.

‘Please don’t tell me,’ Jill said behind them, ‘you’re actually thinking about breaking into this poor person’s house.’

‘Jill,’ Julie said, ‘we just robbed a bank. I think a little light breaking and entering is neither here nor there at this point.’

Jill moaned.

‘But how …?’ Susan said, looking up at the cottage, which looked pretty well fortified.

‘You know what they say,’ Julie said. ‘Imagine you’ve lost your keys and you ask yourself “How do I get in?”’

‘Yes, but what if there’s a burglar alarm or something?’

‘Let’s just go to a police station and give ourselves up,’ Jill said.

They ignored her. ‘Maybe,’ Julie said, ‘if we –’

There was a noise from somewhere inside the house and they both stiffened.

‘Oh shit,’ Susan whispered.

They took a step back from the door as, incredibly, it began to swing open.

‘Wotcha, shaggers,’ Ethel said, sitting there in the hallway in her wheelchair. ‘Went round the back. They’d left a key under the mat. Lovely country simpletons. Come away in. Kettle’s on.’

She trundled back off down the hall, whistling. Julie and Susan looked at each other. ‘She’s a one-woman crime wave,’ Susan said.

It felt surreal, Susan thought moments later, to be sitting around the table of a farmhouse kitchen, listening to a kettle coming to the boil while Ethel, with surprising calm and efficiency, motored around gathering tea things, mugs, teapot, spoons, etc. Somewhere behind her Susan could hear Julie muttering to herself as she took bundles of notes out of the holdall. She was counting. ‘Ooh, here’s posh …’ Ethel said, reaching up into a cupboard with her grabbing stick and bringing down a large box of fancy Marks & Spencer’s chocolate biscuits. ‘Ethel!’ Jill said. ‘You can’t steal their biscuits!’

‘This is silly,’ Susan said. ‘I mean, these people could be home any minute. We should –’

‘Easy, sweet cheeks,’ Ethel said through a mouthful of chocolate. ‘No one’s coming home soon.’

‘What makes you so –’ Jill began.

Ethel answered by tapping something on the wall next to the Aga with her grabbing stick. Susan and Jill looked up to see a calendar (a National Gallery calendar, a collection of Impressionist paintings) on the wall. In there, among various kids’ birthdays, dentist appointments and so forth, was the word ‘TUSCANY’. There were two arrows coming out from either side of the word, spanning the dates 15–29 June. ‘Not home for a week yet,’ Ethel said. ‘So can everyone just relax. We’ll have a nice cup of tea and figure out what to do next. Oh, first things first. Susan? You should go out and put the minibus in the garage. Just in case anyone drives by.’

‘I … yes. Good thinking, Ethel.’

‘Jill?’ Ethel went on. ‘There’s a couple of sets of car keys up there. Go and have a look in the garage. Hopefully there’s a motor out there that goes with one of them.’

‘I’m not helping you steal someone’s car!’ Jill said, standing up, banging her tiny fists on the table. ‘This has all gone too far! We –’

‘Jill,’ Ethel said, ‘do you really want to go to jail? We’re going to lay low here until it’s dark then we can –’

‘Ah, guys?’ Julie said.

The three of them turned to look at her. She was holding up a banded bundle of notes. She had taken a lot of the money out of the holdall and stacked it up in little towers on the kitchen counter. There was still quite a lot in the holdall itself.