The Partnership, page 5
“Drink it in one,” said the neat, clean voice beside his ear, and a glass was placed in his hand. He stared at it. There was no smoke coming out of the beaker and rolling down the sides but the colour suggested that there should be.
“Down with it while it’s still fizzing!” said the voices with surprising authority.
He downed it.
There was light, and there was darkness. Sound and ensuing silence. A great wind sprang up and shook him like a storm-rent mainsail, and then a great peace fell upon the surface of the deep.
“Bloody Hell!” said Polly. “What did you put in it?”
“More formalin than usual. After this one, they usually regain their true form and go out to terrorise furry animals and unattended children after dark. But it generally puts them back on their own two feet. Or, occasionally, four,” said the alchemist. “Need anything yourself?”
“No thanks. I stayed on water all night.”
“Wise girl. This your latest?”
“God forbid! He’s a business proposition.”
“Hope you’re not expecting to turn a fast profit.”
“Urrr,” said Parminter.
“But, soft! What light through yonder window breaks?” said the alchemist cheerily.
“Arrrgh!” said Parminter.
“Ground control to Major Tom,” said the chemist. “Are you there?”
“Jesus H. Christ, what was that?” Parminter whispered reverentially.
“That, cully, was Frances Wyatt’s Number Four Zombie reviver, never knowingly undervalued,” said Frances Wyatt returning to her own side of the counter.
“And it costs five pounds exactly.”
“What?”
“Ah, it worked then. A fiver, please, and hold in mind that it will not work twice in the same period of twenty four hours and nobody who tried it three times has survived to testify.”
He paid and allowed himself to be ushered out of the shop and into the Porsche. Polly refused to part with the keys on the ground that he would not be under the alcohol limit for at least a week, and while she was travelling in the vehicle she was going to drive it.
“Where to?” she said, starting the engine. Then she swore, got out of the car and ripped the second parking ticket of the day off the windscreen.
“Cow!” she said viciously. “May all your tights be short in the leg and narrow in the gusset!”
Parminter was making a number of delicious discoveries. His extremities had been restored to his ownership and control, to start with.
His eyes focused as was their wont and his head had returned its normal size, as had his tongue which now functioned properly.
There were, however, several details which needed checking on.
“Did I understand you to say we are now partners?” he said. Polly shot him a sideways glance while overtaking a double-parked bus. Parminter, with an after image of a radiator topped with the word VOLVO and flashing lights either side of it began to long for renewed oblivion.
“Yeah,” Polly said.
“And that Gin and Tonic and the Malts promised us £20,000 to launch their crappy tapas clip joint?”
“Yagoddit.”
“When by?”
“Sunday.”
“You don’t mean this Sunday?”
“I mean this Sunday.”
“The day after the day after the day after the day after tomorrow?”
“That very day.”
“Shit.”
“Pithily put. Sorry to return to an old theme, but where do we hire the horse?”
He dug the wallet from his inside pocket, opened it and peered into the depths. There was a single edge down there, gleaming a little dimly. It proved to be a five pound note.
“Know anything about horses?”
“When I was a teenager I was going to marry one and bear it several children. Then, God help me, I found out about men.”
“And?”
“I should have stayed with Dapple.”
He sniggered. “But Dapple didn’t know how to reserve a table at Chez Gerard and couldn’t afford the Krug,” he said.
She nodded tersely.
“At the risk of being a bore,” she said, “I should point out that this is the third time we have orbited this block, which even in Sloane Square is beginning to get a little noticeable. Where to?”
“We’ll start on the Isle of Dogs,” he said. “There’s something I need to pick up from my former flat.”
“What?”
“Everything. Turn left here, and follow the river.”
It was Tuesday morning, and Fate was already watching them and sniggering.
CHAPTER FIVE
“JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT YOU HAD A NICE, CLEAN WALL…”
Written in thick, black letters on a newly painted white wall near Roehampton.
*
“Now, will you tell me where we are going to hire a horse?” Parminter unclenched his fists with some difficulty and parted teeth which had been stuck together with superglue.
“She even changed the bloody locks.”
“Of course she changed the locks. What did you expect?”
“Where did she expect me to sleep?”
“You found somewhere, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, but she didn’t know that! And what the hell are you laughing at?”
Polly turned towards him a pair of eyes so limpidly honest that she could have been charged with attempted suicide.
“Laughing? Me?”
“Grnnnrrrr!” Parminter said, with feeling. Polly politely looked away, but her shoulders shook a little.
“Where to?” she said.
“Just park round the corner and wait for me”, he told her. “There’s something I have to do.”
He walked back into the block of flats, took the left hand lift to what had been his own floor, and went to the door of what had been his flat.
There, he took out his card holder, and extracted a nearly used up phone card.
“That’s breaking and entering,” said Polly over his shoulder, from the doorway of the right hand lift.
“You are supposed to be in the car,” he said. “Shut up and concentrate on your driving.”
He inserted the card between the door and the jamb at the level of the lock, and worked it gently up to the catch. There was a click, and the door swung open. Somewhere, a bell began to ring, and he could see the little red eye of the burglar alarm at the end of the hallway.
He stepped inside, reached up to the light fitting took out the burglar alarm key, and turned off the alarm. Then he opened the doors, one after another, and surveyed empty, echoing rooms.
She had sold the furniture, as well.
“You might get a few quid for the carpets,” said Polly brightly from the hall.
“Not a chance,” he said. “But there is one thing.” He went into the bathroom, lifted the cabinet off its bracket and felt behind it. A flat package dropped into his hand, and he slipped it into his inside pocket.
What’s that?” said Polly, fatuously.
“It’s my cash cache,” he said. “I eat again tonight! Thank God for a modicum of distrust twixt man and wife, eh?”
“You expected her to pull a stroke like this? What the hell inspired you to let her change the locks and flog the furniture, then?”
“My warm homely feelings of generosity. What gets me is when she did it. I thought she flew off to Spain yesterday. The flat is worth the mortgage and that’s all. I’ve already signed the hand-over documents, so legally it belongs to the bank, now. The furniture might have raised a few hundred, but I doubt it. The cash was what I hid when we went on holiday last year. When she started smelling lightly of aftershave, being a rotten suspicious sod, I assumed the worst, so I left it there just in case. Good thing she didn’t want to sell the bathroom cabinet as well, isn’t it?”
The same thought had struck him at the same time, and he opened the package and felt inside. It contained a wad of fifty-pound notes, secured with two rubber bands.
“Well, she didn’t find these!” he said, relieved, and riffled the end of them with his thumb.
Newsprint flickered past his eyes. The middle of the wad had been replaced with neatly cut newspapers while the two end notes remained as camouflage. He fanned out the papers and found one white slip.
“You devious bastard!” said the writing on it.
“She would use violet ink,” said Polly sniffily. “The wives always do. At least we’ve got a hundred notes to operate on. And you still have your plastic. By the end of the week we’ll be worth ten grand apiece.”
Parminter paused in the process of reducing the note to pieces of paper smaller than a virus, and stared at her.
“What do you mean? We’ve got a hundred in operating money? I’ve got a hundred to live on, and YOU had better come up with your half of the partnership pretty damn quick, or it’s a non-partnership, and that’s that.”
Polly ran her hand through her already tousled hair and gave him a long, slantendicular look.
“Now isn’t that just sodding typical of a man! I have to carry you all evening, sort out the restaurant bill, put you to bed, get you up, have you clinically revived, drive you around London like a bleeding taxi driver – and then you ask me to come up with my half of the partnership? You cheeky sod!”
“Cash, baby. Where’s your half of the cash? Partners share expenses.” There was a pause. “What do you mean, sort out the restaurant bill? I paid it!”
“Somebody had to. GC and the boys weren’t going to, and that jailbird mate of yours had gone. You were the only one with the plastic. Anyway, you offered.”
He remembered offering. Legs Diamond of Pimlico.
“But I didn’t expect the buggers to accept!”
“Psychologically, it was exactly the right thing to do. They were eating out of your hand.”
“They were eating out of my American Express account! The only one that isn’t a credit card, as well. I’ll have to pay it at the end of the month. “
“Until then, you’re laughing, sunshine. And by then, we’ll have the moulah. Look on the bright side. In the meantime, you’ve got me.”
“Yeah,” he said. “That’s right, I’ve got you. But what I need is a horse! Where are we going to get a horse? Where did you do your riding?”
“Kenya,” she said.
“Well, haven’t you done any riding here?”
“Not horses, I haven’t. Why don’t we try somewhere obvious like Newmarket?”
“Or Princess Anne’s stables? We should get a real bargain there! I can hear us now: lend us a nice racehorse, your Royal Highness. We want to open a tapas bar!”
“I can hear her, too: Naff orff!”
“If you listen carefully, you’ll hear me saying much the same thing, but without the grace. And without the naff, as well. How about Epsom, then? They have the Derby there. I’ve lost enough on the three legged dogs of Epsom to buy a home and stable as well. They owe me at least one.”
“But you can’t just drive down there and collect one!” he said.
“Like most men,” she said, “you have no imagination. Come with me. I always wanted to be a horse thief.”
*
There was a reassuringly horsey feel about Epsom.
They drove there quickly. His stomach didn’t like it.
She didn’t like the look of The Derby Arms because it looked “too professional”. The Rubbing House was “too tidy and respectable.”
At the Old King’s Head, a crowd of well-built men in grey suits gave them expressionless stares when they asked where they could hire a horse. Polly was settling herself comfortably on a bar stool, a process which involved much tweaking of the neckline and crossing and re-crossing of her legs, when Parminter noticed that all the colourful crests on the shields over the fireplace were from police forces all over the world.
“We’re in the local nick boozer,” he murmured.
“What?” Polly was sipping apple juice which had the double virtues of looking vaguely alcoholic and tasting better than water.
“The suits at the end of the bar are full of Old Bill.”
“So what? We want to buy a horse, not rustle it.”
“But parked outside is a Porsche motor car which belongs to Randolph Murwell, who wants it back.”
“What?”
“They recalled the car last week, but I never took it in.”
“You’re kidding!” she said, looking appalled. “It’ll be posted stolen by now. They’re famous for it. And everybody looks at Porsches. We’ll have to shift it.” She put down the apple juice, searched in her bag and handed him the keys.
“Drive it down the road to the shopping centre and park it in a dark corner. I’ll meet you at the entrance to the car park in half an hour.”
“And what will you be doing?”
“Keeping the Old Bill in here while you drive off, and then doing something about the car. Hurry, before one of ‘em goes outside.”
As he shouldered his way through the door, he heard the first bugle call of the laughter which until yesterday had been the most irritating characteristic of the most irritating woman in London. There was not a man in Britain who could have ignored it. The assembled fuzz of Epsom homed in on it like cavalry horses.
The Porsche started first twist of the key and caressing the accelerator with the delicacy of a practised lover, he eased it out of the car park, round the corner and down the road to the stacking car park.
*
Polly was, of course, late. Under her arm she had a long, flat package and her handbag was bulging.
They met at the car park entrance, where he was trying to look as relaxed as a man who had not just parked a hot Porsche.
“If I’d known we were going to be car thieves, I’d have worn jeans,” she said irritably, handing him the package and swinging him towards the car park. “Where’s the beast?”
“In the corner. What are you going to do?”
“I am going to sit on the wing of this car, three down from you, and keep cave while you change the plates. Don’t forget the white one goes on the front and the yellow on the back. Here’s a screwdriver and pliers.”
Parminter gobbled like a turkey who has just found out what “festive season” means.
“But that’s stealing! Anyhow, how did you get the plates?”
“I bought them, you nit. Front one at one shop, back one at a garage. Told them I’d broken the original and the police had warned me to get it replaced before I put the car back on the road. Will you HURRY UP?”
“But it takes a week to get plates made up.”
“Not if you lean forward and cry a bit.”
He was on his knees removing the front plate while he worried about being engaged in a criminal activity. Until now, he had merely been driving around in a car which might be repossessed at any moment. Silly, perhaps, a little irresponsible. But not a crime.
Changing the plates, though. That smacked of intent permanently to deprive. That was car theft.
And Randolph was famous for his merciless Puritanism where his own property was concerned. He would prosecute, and his lawyers would ask for life.
“So don’t get caught. At the end of the week we’ll put the plates back, park it at his office car lot, and swear it’s been there all the time. In the meantime we need wheels,” said Polly. In any case it was too late. He had changed the second plate already.
By the end of the afternoon, they had visited every horsey establishment they could find in the area, and drawn only stony looks and sneers. Parminter parked the car in an area paved in McDonald’s wrappers and gravel near the grandstand, and they stared unappreciatively at a magnificent view of London.
Below them to the North, the greatest city on earth spread skirts that stretched to the heights of Hampstead. To their right, they could see the towers of the City, and in a gap between some trees, a thick thumb of masonry misted by haze and distance marked the Canary Wharf development which stood guard over the flat which had once been his. A stream of airliners paraded across their front on their way in to Heathrow, immigration and traffic jams.
“We’re going about this the wrong way,” he said, biting into one of the sandwiches they had bought on their way up here.
“Too honest,” she said. “I always said it was a duff policy.”
“Well, when you come to think of it, no stable is going to hire out one of its precious horses to ride into a saloon bar, is it?” he said indistinctly through a mouthful of prawn and mayonnaise. “Stands to reason.”
“What we need is a horse nobody worries about.”
“No such critter. You scoffed all the prawns, you thieving bastard.”
“There must be. You chose egg and cress, you can eat it.”
“Horsey people adore horses All horses, I know, I’ve been there, seen it, got the t-shirt. No such thing as a horse nobody cares about. Actually, the eggs aren’t bad.”
“Really? Don’t gypsies have a lot of horses? Gypsies don’t care about anything except money.”
“Worth a try,” she said. “We could give it one more go. Oi! That’s mine, you thieving git!”
“Who paid for them?” he said, biting deep. “Let’s go and look for some caravans, then. No harm in asking. You’re right, the eggs aren’t bad.”
They did not have to look far. Barely half a mile down the road from their viewpoint they came across a single caravan parked in a lay by, next to a piece of open ground.
It was a battered caravan, not typical of gypsies, who tend towards chrome plate and etched glass in their homes, but there was smoke coming from the chimney.
A woman in a new blue Barbour coat and wellingtons being towed past by Alsatian on a lead like a bullwhip was glowering at it.
But next to it was a horse.
A small horse.
All right, a pony.
The pony standing in the middle of the waste ground had an untrustworthy look to it, even in the midst of its dejection. It had about as much in common with the fat, cheeky creatures of Thelwell’s cartoons as a puff adder has with Walt Disney.
Its coat was shaggy and uncombed. Its mane fell about its ears in a tangled mass, and through the fringe two hard, beady eyes watched them approach across the stones and weed with wily hostility. There were few pleasures in its windswept life, but inflicting pain upon the outside world was one of them.
