I knew it, he thought. The ambulance had been reported stolen last night, from Dymock Street, Wolverhampton.
‘Did you hear what I said?’ Jones’s voice had an evil snit to it.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Eric, thinking fast, ‘but you must come with me to the pound.’
‘I’m going to ask you one last time: give us back our vehicle.’
‘You have broken de law.’
‘No,’ sneered Jones: ‘you broke de fucking law. You lifted the thing off the ground while we were here.’
‘I am sorry, but that is wrong.’
‘You IDIOT! Tell him to put the ambulance down. Tell him to do it now.’
In defence of its parking attendants, men and women who must put up with some of the worst abuse known to this coarsened, selfish and irresponsible age, Westminster Council gives them cameras.
These are used not just to record the offence, but also to deter the protesting traffic offender just as he is about to bust a blood vessel or commit a common assault. Now Eric took out his Sony DSU-30 digital camera, and left the Huskie hanging by his neck. As he was doing this Haroun was creeping unseen up the side of the tow- truck.
In his hand he held a nasty-looking piece of medical equipment which was, did he but know it, a thorax draining kit. The man called Jones began to swear — never a good sign for those who had dealings with this horrid person.
‘I am sorry?’ beamed Eric, who had decided to call the police.
‘What for do you need an ambulance anyway?’ asked Eric, and he took a couple of quick shots of Jones: billhook nose, grubby neck, short grey-flecked hair and peculiar eyes.
‘It is for the disabled,’ said Jones.
‘Who are the disabled?’
Haroun tiptoed round the front of the Renault and prepared to lunge at Dragan Panic.
‘I don’t see a disabled person anywhere,’ repeated Eric. ‘Show me the disabled person.’
‘Here is the disabled person,’ said Jones.
‘Where?’
‘Here.’
The last noise Eric heard before he fainted with shock was the ripping of his own pericardium as it was punctured by the pericardial puncture unit. Then there was a scraping noise as the spike hit something hard that might have been bone.
‘Help me,’ shouted Jones to Dean, the nineteen-year-old, as he caught the falling warden.
Dean watched, mouth agape, as his boss buckled under the weight; and then leapt forward to help him arrange the traffic warden in the gutter.
CHAPTER EIGHT
0841 HRS
Dragan the Serb had been weaned on tales of heroic assassination and glorious betrayal. From the Battle of Kosovo Pole onwards, Serbs have learned to glory in a sense of victimhood. But today he decided to give the national myth a miss.
He pushed away Haroun and his spike, and thudded off, weaving and shoulders hunched, as though with every yard he expected a bullet in his back from the Kosovo Liberation Army.
He sprinted from the Muslim extremists, down Tufton Street, past the (former) Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, founded in 1701, and turned on to Great Peter Street. He weaved one way, he ducked the other. Haroun watched him go.
‘Leave him,’ called Jones. ‘We have no time.’
Dean already felt he had good reason to be admiring of Jones, but he was amazed at the self-possession with which his boss now began to unload the ambulance from the tow-truck.
‘Whoa,’ he called, as the telescopic arm of the crane jerked into life, and the vehicle was thrust out into the street.
The arm was powered by three separate hydraulic lifts, the first capable of carrying 2,500 kilos, the second 1,700 kilos and the third 1,300 kilos; and in theory they were well capable of lifting a three-and-a-half-tonne ambulance.
But Jones was in such a hurry that he neglected the basic laws of physics.
‘Hey!’ said Dean, as the white machine was swung out over the street, like some mad mediaeval siege engine.
Haroun gave a curse — something nasty about a dog, Dean guessed — and even Habib broke off from flossing with his juniper twig.
‘Yow need to come back a bit,’ shouted Dean over the roar of the Renault engine.
The front wheels of the tow-truck were now on the verge of leaving the ground; black smoke was coming from the exhaust; the whole thing was about to keel over, and Dean instinctively ran to drag the body of Eric the warden out of the way.
‘It is fine, it is fine,’ shouted Jones, and flipped the next toggle, so that their stolen machine crashed back towards them and bust a taillight on the bed of the tow-truck.
‘Do it like this,’ called Habib quietly in Arabic. Habib was also called Freddie, and came from a good Lebanese family.
He was a Takfiri, a man who masked the ferocity of his faith with a sympathetic worldliness; and he had spent enough time in gambling houses to understand the principles of the grabby machines you use to pick up a watch or a fluffy toy.
Together, and with what Dean thought was remarkable coolness, he and Jones worked out how to ease in the last extender arm and, in hydraulic pants, the van was lowered to the ground.
With the speed of Formula One pitstopmen they now undid the metal crabs and hessian straps, bunged them on the back of the tow-truck, and loaded poor Eric in the back of the ambulance.
Haroun paused only to read the sign on the side of the Renault.
‘How ees my driving?’ he said, and laughed, a horrible carking yelp.
It says something for the tranquillity that has descended on the Church of England that no one else observed these events outside Church House.
No one took any notice of them as they drove in full conformity with the laws of the road — apart from the taillight — in the direction of the Palace of Westminster.
They began thereby to catch up with Roger Barlow, who was waiting with his bike at a red traffic light, as all good lawmakers must.
CHAPTER NINE
0843 HRS
Barlow’s thoughts of political extinction had taken a philosophical turn. Did it matter? Of course not. The fate of the human race was hardly affected. The sun would still, at the appointed date four billion years hence, expand to the girth of a red giant and devour the planet. In the great scheme of things his extermination was about as important as the accidental squashing of a snail. The trouble was that until that happy day when he was reincarnated as a louse or a baked bean, he didn’t know how he was going to explain the idiotic behaviour of his brief human avatar.
