circle directly in front of the hotel stood a fountain round which fat stone cherubs curled, dispensing their cornucopia of water.
“Been a perfect day, hasn’t it? Best day of our lives.”
“Yes,” her husband once again concurred, knowing which side his bread was buttered.
Downstairs, Gary and Denise discreetly left the ballroom in which the reception was being held. He wanted to check that all was ready for a trouble-free departure in the Rolls-Royce.
“Oh, for God’s sake!” he said, as he came out of the hotel’s front doors. “Haven’t they got any respect for a classic?”
Some waggish friends of the groom had been at work. Across the Rolls-Royce’s back window the words ‘Just Married’ had been picked out in shaving foam. The rear bumper had been wrapped in pink toilet roll, and a cluster of tin cans tied on to jangle against the road.
Gary moved forward, reaching instinctively into his pocket for a handkerchief to wipe off the foam.
“No, you don’t,” said Denise.
“But it’s my Rolls-Royce,” Gary protested pathetically.
“You don’t,” his wife continued, “a, because that’s what people pay for when they hire wedding cars, and b, because you certainly don’t wipe it off with your clean handkerchief. Is that clear?”
“Yes,” replied Gary, who had long since learned the same lesson as the bridegroom in the bedroom above. “So what do I do?”
“You make no comment at all. You drive them to the airport with the tin cans clanking behind – and you just hope nobody’s stuffed a kipper up the exhaust…”
“Oh, no!” Gary rushed round the back of the car and crouched to check whether his precious Rolls-Royce had suffered this final indignity. He sighed with relief. There was no smell or other evidence of fishy sabotage.
“And,” Denise continued when he rose to his feet, “next time you take a wedding booking – particularly when it involves the Roller – you make sure you charge a lot more.”
“Right.”
“You got to cover the depreciation of your motors.”
“True.”
“So you put on a ‘foam, toilet roll and tin can surcharge’ – right?”
“Right.”
Denise turned at the sound of the hotel front doors opening. “Oh, they’re coming. I’ll get a lift back – see you at home, love.”
“Yes, OK.” Averting his eyes from the desecration of his precious Rolls-Royce, the uniformed chauffeur got into the driving seat and adjusted the line of his cap in the rear-view mirror.
Denise melted back to join the emerging wedding party. The bride and groom, pale-suited and casual, stood out against the crowd of morning dress and hats. Hands were slapped on shoulders, jocular platitudes about honeymoons were tossed into the mealee. The bride’s mother wondered whether it was her cue to have a little cry or not.
At that moment, communal attention was snatched away from the happy couple by an apparition at the end of the hotel’s drive. Through the impressive iron gates, its engine screaming resistance to the way it was being driven, surged, in a spray of gravel, a small red cultivator/tractor with a trailer of garden debris in tow.
The tractor was being driven by a white-haired woman in a bright silk dress. Bouncing about in the trailer behind was a copper-headed woman dressed in an unlikely miscellany of clashing garments. The pair of them were screeching up the drive at a terrifying rate.
Even more alarming, behind them, eating up the space between the two vehicles, surged a huge blue Jaguar. The two grim faces behind its windscreen were oblivious to their surroundings, obsessed only by the imperative of the chase.
The wedding party watched open-mouthed as the cultivator skidded to an untidy halt beside the fountain. The two women leapt off and rushed towards the white-ribboned Rolls-Royce. The older one opened the back door, bustled the younger inside, and leapt in after her.
The Rolls-Royce immediately burst into life, reversing, in a clatter of tin cans, away from the approaching Jaguar. The Jaguar suddenly swung right, away from the fountain, turning in a wide arc, searing through the carpet of lawns to head off the Roller if it tried to escape down the drive.
But the Rolls-Royce’s driver knew his stuff. Suddenly spinning his steering wheel, he shot across the gravel between the abandoned cultivator and the fountain.
The Jaguar, its driver realizing their quarry wasn’t making for the main gates, continued in the turning circle on which it was set, homing back towards the hotel, targeted to hit the Rolls-Royce broadsides.
The mouths of the wedding guests gaped further, and they tensed themselves for the impact.
Just at the second the smash seemed inevitable, the Rolls-Royce shot forward. Skating over the gravel on two wheels, it spun at a crazy angle before righting itself on the grass. Scoring deep furrows across the green, it sped towards the hotel gates.
The Jaguar had not had time to change course. It smashed heavily into the fountain. A stone cherub, surprised by the impact, fell on to the bonnet, bounced and smashed through the windscreen.
A second cherub, less completely dislodged, leant away from the fountain at a crazy angle. From the cornucopia held in its hands, water poured through the broken glass on to the heads of the two dazed men.
The hotel manager, drawn by the noise, came out to witness the devastation of his fountain and the ravaging of his lawns.
His jaw dropped even further than those of the wedding guests. Particularly when he caught sight of a Rolls-Royce, which trailed a cacophony of tin cans and had ‘Just Married, sprayed in foam across its back window, disappearing at high speed out of his hotel gates.
A scream of complaining metal drew attention back to the Jaguar. It screeched backwards, spraying gravel like a nail-bomb, howled back into forward gear, and hurtled off across the lawns in pursuit of the Rolls-Royce.
The bride turned to the bridegroom, and burst into tears. “This is the worst day of my life!” she wailed. “Isn’t it?”
“Yes,” said the bridegroom, playing safe.
? Mrs Pargeter’s Plot ?
Thirty-One
The Rolls-Royce was a powerful beast, but it wasn’t built for speed to the same extent as the Jaguar. Blunt and Clickety Clark’s collision with the fountain had made a hell of a mess of the car’s bodywork, but didn’t seem to have affected the engine. As the two vehicles hurtled through country lanes, the gap between them narrowed inexorably.
“Where’re you making for, Gary?” Mrs Pargeter shouted from the back seat.
“Back to my place!”
“Why? Have you got staff there who can help us?”
“No,” Gary replied grimly. “I got shooters.”
“Shooters? But I thought you didn’t approve of –”
“I don’t as a rule. But then, as a rule, I’m not up against Blunt. No way he won’t have a gun on him.”
“He has!” Tammy Jacket wailed. “I seen it! He was about to take a potshot at us when we escaped on the tractor.”
“I knew it. I’ve got an old sawn-off back of my barn. That’ll even up the odds a bit.”
Mrs Pargeter pursed her lips. “You know I don’t approve of guns unless they’re absolutely unavoidable.”
“They’re unavoidable this time. I don’t fancy facing up to Blunt with only the natural charm of my personality to protect me.”
“My late husband always said,” Mrs Pargeter continued primly, “that those who live by the gun are extremely likely to die by the gun.”
“Seems reasonable to me,” the chauffeur shouted back. “Blunt’s lived by the gun all right, so he’ll only be getting his due.”
