a lot of people.’
‘So have I, Twinkle, so have I…’
‘Aye… but no’ with a pair of bolt cutters…’
I found myself at a loss for an answer and we sat in gloomy silence for a while, each contemplating his own dark history. Or more truthfully, we were both contemplating Twinkletoes’s dark history. Whatever his past sins, I was delighted to see him. I owed him big time.
‘I’d make you a cup of tea,’ I said, ‘but I don’t want anyone to see the smoke from the stack.’
McBride shook his massive head dismissively. ‘There’s no one around. I checked to make sure before I came over to the boat. Even the ferry is quieter at this time of day. I’ll make it, and I’ll heat enough water for you to shave.’
Twinkle filled the stove and lit it with an expertise that told me he had probably been brought up in a slum tenement, where a living room range was the usual, and only, form of heating.
‘Thanks for the clothes,’ I said to him. ‘But, if you remember, I have all of mine stashed here. I don’t need those.’
‘I hadn’t forgotten,’ he said. ‘You’re a very smart dresser, Mr L. I always think how much I’d like to have suits like yours.’
‘When I get out of this, I’m going to take you to my tailor and have a bespoke suit made up for you. My treat. Least I can do.’ I smiled, dispelling the concern that they maybe didn’t have looms that spun cloth wide enough.
‘That would be great,’ Twinkle beamed a childlike grin. ‘That would be really great… But that’s no’ my point. Everybody knows you’re a smart dresser. The polis too.’
The penny dropped. Maybe McBride wasn’t so dumb after all, or maybe it was just that I had wandered into an area where his experience was much greater than mine. I took the clothes out of the bag. The trousers were a dull camel colour and of that dense kind of material that is resistant to holding a crease when pressed. The jacket was the usual Scottish job, a box of scratchy tweed that seemed to have been spun from steel wool and bracken. There was a flat cap in the same material and everything seemed to be roughly my size.
‘I’ll change once I get cleaned up,’ I said. Despite my once-over with hot water, I was still filthy, especially my feet. ‘Could you go up top and get me some stuff? You know, where we put it in the forward hold.’ I ran through a list of some of the things I needed. As he struggled back up and out of the cabin and onto deck, I hoped he was right about there being no one about. Six-foot-six of muscle in a Burton off-the-peg was less than inconspicuous down here.
When he got back, I set about the business of having a serious clean-up while McBride made tea and fried the sausages on the stove top. The smell of hot lard and sizzling sausages fumed in the tiny cabin and would normally have turned my gut, but today it smelled nothing short of divine. Next to the barge’s head was a tub — more of an oversized Belfast sink set on the floor, with a flexible rubber hose attached to its one tap. This, I had worked out, was the ablutions: the latest dab with cold-and-cold running water. I guessed that the Martinez in Cannes or the Savoy in London had similar arrangements.
Once I had shiveringly lathered and rinsed, re-lathered and re-rinsed, I let the cold water run over my feet. When I came out of the tub, I was chilled to the bone but felt clean and refreshed. The soles of both feet felt excoriated, and hurt whenever I put any weight on them, and my right foot looked swollen. I patted them dry and rubbed them both with the antiseptic cream that Twinkle had brought with him, then wrapped each in a bandage, more for support than as wound dressings.
I used some of the water Twinkletoes had boiled to shave. By now I had about three days growth and because my hair was so dark, leaving my upper lip unshaved meant the band of black stubble gave the appearance of a moustache. Another couple of days and it would be even more convincing. I dressed in the shirt, cardigan, trousers, tweed jacket and cap McBride had brought with him and used the shaving mirror to examine myself. I hated the outfit, but nowhere near as much as I had hated the prisoner one, and McBride had been right: this was as anonymous a get-up as I could imagine and was so different from my usual wardrobe that, along with my incipient moustache, I was pretty sure even those who knew me well wouldn’t have recognized me at any kind of distance. Even the swelling on my face had gone down, but there were signs of the skin discolouring into a dark arc on my temple and around my eye.
‘Great job, Twinkle,’ I said, as I examined myself with the mirror held at arm’s length. ‘Really great job.’
He beamed joyously at me and I decided that if I ever did manage to get out of this jam I was going to see Twinkle all right.
We sat and drank the tea and I tried not to bolt down the sausages. As it was, I had to mop the grease from my chin as I ate. I had dined in some fancy places over the years, admittedly none of them in Scotland, but, at that moment, that meal of tea, buttered bread and sausages tasted better than anything I had ever eaten. Afterwards I smoked a Capstan untipped as if it had been the finest Havana cigar hand-rolled against the dusky maiden thigh of a Cuban torcedora.
When we were finished, Twinkletoes handed me a key and a red booklet with a crown-topped coat-of-arms on the cover.
‘What’s this?’ I asked.
‘My car key. And my driving licence, in case you’re stopped by the polis. There’s a petrol ration book there and all.’
I looked at the stuff he’d handed me. Petrol had been off the wartime ration for some time, but the government had temporarily reintroduced rationing because of shortages caused by the crisis in Suez.
‘This is really very good of you, but I can’t take these…’
‘It’s all right. I don’t use the car much anyways. I keep it locked up in the garage most of the time.’
‘It’s not that, Twinkle. If I get caught by the police in your car with your licence and ration book, then they’ll arrest you for aiding and abetting. With your record, you’ll be sent to prison. I can’t have that.’
‘No, no…’ he waved his vast hands emphatically. ‘I’ve got it all worked out, you see. Like I said, I keep the car locked up in the garage almost all of the time and there are people what know that. Neighbours, like. So if you get caught, all you’ve got to say is that you stole it and I’m in the clear. You’re not, like, but I am. If someone stole my car for real it could be days before I’d find out. But you won’t get caught, Mr Lennox. I know that. You’re too clever for them bastards.’
‘Really?’ I said gloomily. ‘I’ve been doing a good job of hiding it lately. But thanks for the car. I can’t tell you how big a help you’ve been.’
‘How long do you think you can hide out here?’ he asked. His bulk seemed to fill the cabin, making it feel more like a closet than living quarters.
‘I reckon I’m okay for a while,’ I said. ‘We’ll need to keep checking the papers to see if there’s anything in them. Like you said, only you and the bargee know I’ve rented this place, and unless he sees my name in the paper and connects it to the one on the lease, then there’s no reason he’d contact the cops. I have no record, so the police don’t have any photographs of me.’
We sat and talked. I tried to explain what had happened — about my encounter with Hopkins and how all trace of him and his people had vanished into thin air, about how I had stumbled into something big and dangerous just because two people had the same or similar names — but talking it through made even my head hurt and I decided to stop before Twinkle frowned himself to death or a blood vessel burst in his brain.
He sat for a minute, the frown still creasing his almost-brow. He was silent and completely still, even his eyes focused but not focused on the stove. In McBride’s case, cogitation clearly necessitated the shutting down of all other functions.
Then, suddenly, he reached out and snatched up the car key I had left on the table.
‘What’s up, Twinkle?’
‘Listen, Mr L. You’re a nice man. Maybes too nice. You need answers, right?’
‘Right.’
‘Well, getting answers is my business. I’m sticking with you.’
I didn’t argue. A resolved Twinkletoes McBride wasn’t something you argued with, like you wouldn’t argue with a steam hammer.
The thought of him riding shotgun while I got to the bottom of what the hell was going on troubled me greatly. But, oddly enough, it also comforted me.
