And the two men hurried round the front of the cottage to their Jaguar.
¦
Mrs Pargeter’s white hair streamed in the wind, as the cultivator bounced over the uneven ridges of the sun- baked fields. Tammy Jacket’s copper helmet remained rigidly lacquered in place, however violent the bumps and jolts the trailer suffered.
“We’ll get through that gate over there!” Mrs Pargeter shouted over her shoulder, the words snatched away by the wind and the sound of the cultivator’s motor.
“Probably Tuesday, so long as I can get an appointment!” Tammy Jacket shouted back.
¦
The Jaguar cruised easily along the country road. On either side were fields, cordoned by thick hedgerows. Blunt drove, while Clickety Clark kept his eye on the hedge, through the gaps of which he monitored the approach of the little red cultivator.
“There’s nowhere for them to go, you see,” he observed complacently. “Just got to make for that gate along there. And then we can pick them up at our leisure.”
The Jaguar idled even slower as they crawled towards the gate, which was made of solid tubular metal.
“Good,” said Clickety Clark. “If it was wood, they might try to smash through. They’ll kill themselves if they go into that.”
“Park across it?” asked Blunt. Which was a long sentence for him.
“No, just to this side,” Clickety Clark replied. “Then they won’t see us, and we can spring them when they stop to open the gate.”
The cultivator’s motor screamed protest as Mrs Pargeter flattened the accelerator. The metal gate ahead grew larger at alarming speed, as tractor and trailer hurtled towards it.
“Suppose they’re there?” Tammy Jacket shouted into Mrs Pargeter’s ear.
“They
“So what’re we going to do?”
“What
They were almost upon the gate when she spoke. Clickety Clark and Blunt moved complacently out of hiding to face them over the metal rails.
And just at that moment, Mrs Pargeter suddenly swung the cultivator’s steering wheel right. The machine, swirling its trailer like a flamenco dancer’s skirt, violently changed course.
“Aagh!” Tammy Jacket squealed. “We’re going straight into the he-e-e-e-edge!!!”
Her voice was lost as the cultivator smashed through brushwood on to the hard surface of the road behind the parked Jaguar. Mrs Pargeter had a momentary glimpse of the bewildered backward-turned faces of Clickety Clark and Blunt before the cultivator smashed through the next hedge and into the field on the other side.
“Jeromino!” she shouted.
It wasn’t something she usually shouted. In fact, it was something she had never shouted before in her entire life.
But it was something she had always wanted to shout.
? Mrs Pargeter’s Plot ?
Thirty
Geography was against Mrs Pargeter and Tammy Jacket. Though they’d escaped from one field into another, the second one wasn’t going to last for ever. It was edged on four sides by roads; beyond the road they were making for there was a river. The cultivator might be able to smash through a hedge; there was no way it could jump over a river. They’d have to stay on the road.
Though the Jaguar couldn’t cope with the rough open terrain, roads of course were its element. In a flat race on a tarmac surface, the different engine capabilities of the cultivator and the car would become all too hideously apparent.
Mrs Pargeter swiftly made these calculations, as they passed out of the far side of the field on to the road. Their exit was considerably more decorous than their entrance had been. No pulverized hedgerow this time, no leaves and twigs in their hair. Mrs Pargeter simply stopped the cultivator by a gate, and waited while her trailer passenger opened it.
“Which way do we go?” asked Tammy anxiously, as she climbed back on to her bed of garden refuse.
“Left,” said Mrs Pargeter firmly.
“They’re going to catch up with us! There’re no other routes we could have taken. They know where we are!”
“Yes, but we’ve got a head start on them.” Mrs Pargeter gunned the engine – insofar as the engine of a cultivator/tractor admits of gunning. And what, she wondered idly as she did it, does ‘gunning’ an engine mean, anyway?
“Have you any idea where we’re going?” Tammy Jacket still sounded anxious and a bit whiney.
“Yes,” Mrs Pargeter replied with a confident smile. “We’re going to get help.”
¦
The knot had been tied, the young couple were man and wife, and the reception was going awfully well. The photographs had been efficiently dispatched, and the guests, on arriving at the country house hotel from the church, had been given a glass of champagne
The food had been consumed; everyone had commented on how radiant the bride, how noble the groom, how pretty the little bridesmaids had looked; the photocall for the cutting of the cake had passed without a hitch; and the speeches had been unembarrassing. An elderly uncle’s indulgent reminiscences of the eighteen-month-old bride lying naked on a fur rug had prompted appropriate chortles; and the one rather off-colour innuendo in the best man’s speech had fortunately not been understood by those whom it might have offended (while those who did understand it had thought it very funny).
All through, champagne flowed exactly as champagne should. The only person not imbibing was Gary, who sat proudly in his uniform on the periphery of the reception, sipping at a glass of fizzy mineral water.
The bride and groom gazed at each other radiantly. It was all going so well. They’d broken the back of it now, the difficult bit was nearly over. Soon they would change into their ‘going-away’ clothes, be taken by Rolls-Royce to the airport, and finally, mercifully, be on their own. Then the flight to Las Palmas, cab to their hotel, and the wedding night. They had no worries about that last bit; it was the one part of the proceedings they had really practised properly.
The bride glanced at her watch, and the groom took his cue. They’d both been to too many weddings that had gone on too long because the newly-weds had oversocialized rather than doing the decent thing – in other words, going to get changed for departure as soon as possible. So the bride and groom hurried off to the assigned bedroom for a quick change and a quick feel.
They had chosen the right moment. The wedding guests were getting to the stage when they’d soon have to decide whether to start sobering up or to continue and get properly drunk. Long-lost relatives, reunited in the bonhomie of the occasion, were beginning to remember why they’d been long-lost for so long. Tenuous acquaintances, yoked arbitrarily together by the seating plan, were getting to the third cycle of questions about what people did for a living and how many children they had. All good things have to come to an end, and it was time for this particular good thing to come to an end.
In the bedroom upstairs, now dressed in her smart beige ‘going-away’ suit, the bride looked out over the front drive of the hotel while her new husband brushed his hair at the dressing table. “It’s really beautiful, this. We’ll remember it always, won’t we?”
“Yes,” agreed her husband, who had shrewdly recognized early in their relationship that that was going to be the best answer to most of her questions.
“Really elegant,” the bride continued, looking down over the neat gravel between perfectly edged lawns on which dark trees were scattered with an eighteenth-century landscape artist’s skill. At the centre of the gravel
