me.
The car stopped. Peel had already abandoned me and was running for dear life into the shadows behind the workshop. I rolled over and over, trying to free myself of the constricting canvas. I could hear Peel scrambling away, then I saw Garrard sprinting across the yard towards the open gate. “Stop him!” I shouted.
I freed myself of the canvas and lurched to my feet. The car’s lights were dazzling me now. I saw a tall man’s silhouette. He was ignoring my attackers, and instead just walked slowly towards me. “You should have stopped them,” I protested feebly.
“Bloody hell fire.” The man stopped a few paces from me. He was still standing in the headlights’ full glare, so all I could see of him was his shape. He laughed. “Just look at the state of you, boy! You’re as naked as the day I found you in Sally Salter’s caravan. Except you were having a deal more fun that day.”
“Oh, my God.” It wasn’t the police. It was Charlie Barratt. My knees began to shake. I was staggering with weakness and relief and happiness and the sheer backwash of a terrible and unnerving fear. “Oh, my God.”
“Hello, Johnny.” He ran forward because I was collapsing.
“I’m all right,” I said, but I wasn’t.
“It’s OK, Johnny.” His arms caught me, held me, then leaned me gently against the workshop wall.
“Oh, my God.” My eyes were tight closed, but I could still see the dark water into which, in another moment, I’d have been plunged head first. I imagined the filthy cold water forcing itself down my gullet and so real was the feeling that I suddenly gagged. I dropped to my knees and vomited. I didn’t think I had ever been so near death. I was shaking, shivering, weeping, spewing.
Charlie fetched a rug from his car and draped it round my shoulders. I was trying to apologise. I felt ashamed. I was crying helplessly. I was shivering and crying and vomiting, yet Charlie crouched beside me and pushed a flask to my lips. “Drink up, Johnny.”
It was Scotch. I gagged on it, spat, then seized the flask to drink it properly. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Oh, God, I’m sorry.”
“Shut up, you bloody fool. Drink.”
And suddenly I knew everything would be all right, because I had found my friend. Or rather he had found me. And saved me.
Part Two
“The bastards.” Charlie had taken a lantern from the boot of his car and, in its bright light, was staring down at the stranded
I was too weak to respond. I was still shivering, too feeble to help as Charlie swung down into the dock and fixed a line to
Charlie hadn’t changed, except that he was more prosperous. He still had the quick smile, the same unruly hair and the same competent manner. He was a big man; hugely capable and scornfully dismissive of all difficulties. “It’s not the end of the world, Johnny,” he told me, “so get in the motor and we’ll go home.”
His car was a Jaguar; brand new with deep leather seats and a dashboard like a fighter plane’s. I protested that I shouldn’t sit on the seats in my soaking wet jeans that Charlie had fished out of the dock, but he didn’t care. “Seats can be cleaned, you fool. Just get in.”
He told me he had telephoned home the night before. “I’ve been out of touch, you see, but once Yvonne said you were here, I came like a shot.”
“I’m bloody lucky you did.” I was shivering, still in shock, still ashamed of being so humiliated by Garrard and Peel.
“We were always lucky, you and I.” Charlie grinned at me, then used his earphone to wake up his foreman. He said he wanted a crane and a low-loader at Cullen’s Yard at dawn. The foreman evidently did not mind being woken at the dead of night, or else was used to it.
Charlie lit each of us a cigarette. My pipe was somewhere in the bottom of George Cullen’s dock, along with my passport, money, everything. Damn George for betraying me, I thought.
“I suppose,” Charlie said, “that you don’t want to call the police?” He offered me the earphone anyway, but I shook my head. It wasn’t that I had anything to hide, but after my experiences with the police four years before I didn’t want anything more to do with them. I just wanted to sail away, nothing more. “Then let’s get the hell out of here.” Charlie slammed his door and started the motor. “So what were those bastards doing to you?”
“They were going to kill me.” I began shivering again, so I drank more of his whisky and sucked on the cigarette as we bounced out of George’s yard and accelerated away. There was no sign of either Garrard or Peel, nor of their dark van.
“Tell me, then,” Charlie ordered.
I told him all that had happened. He grunted an ominous curse when I said that it must have been George Cullen who had betrayed me, but he said nothing else till I told him that the murder attempt was somehow connected with the theft of the Van Gogh. “That bloody picture!” he said with disgust.
“It’s a good painting,” I said defensively.
“Piss off, Johnny. It’s a bloody daub, isn’t it?” Charlie still had a Devon accent as broad as Dartmoor. “I’ve seen better flower pictures on birthday cards.”
“But those aren’t valued at a handful of millions. Twenty million, to be precise.”
That checked him. “Jesus Christ. Are you serious?”
“Twenty million. That’s what I’ve been offered.”
“Who by?”
“Buzzacott.”
He gave a low whistle. I understood his incredulity. Charlie could understand a piece of land being worth twenty million, for land could be turned into a profit, but a painting? He drove in silence for a few minutes, then offered a scornful laugh. “It’s a load of codswallop, Johnny. What was your mother offered? Four? Five?”
“Four.”
“So it’s gone up five hundred per cent in four years? Bloody hell, I should be in that business. I’ll sell the trucks tomorrow and buy myself a paint box. I tell you, Johnny, there’s more money than bloody sense in this world. No painting can be worth twenty million.”
“Maybe, but those bastards just tried to kill me for it.”
“Do they think you’ve got it?” he asked incredulously.
“No, but they seem frightened that I might get hold of it and sell it.” I paused, thinking that nothing made sense. “They said that my sin was inheriting the painting.”
“Bastards.” He offered the dismissive judgment, then lit himself another cigarette. He had always smoked too much, but all Charlie’s appetites were excessive. One day, I supposed, that over-indulgence would catch up with him, but now, in the dashboard’s dim light, he looked incredibly fit and well.
He drove like a man bent on suicide, but he had always been touched by outrageous good luck, so I doubted he’d ever kill himself at the wheel. He turned on the car heater to warm me up, then told me about his company. “I mainly sub-contract plant for road construction, but I’ll do anything with a profit. I’ve got a couple of caravan sites in Cornwall, and I tarted up those three scabby cottages at the bottom of the village and sold them for a wicked sum to folks from London. Of course I’m up to my eyeballs in debt, but who isn’t these days?”
“I’m not.”
“You always were an idiot,” he said fondly. “There’s no point in risking your own money when the banks want to lend it. I borrowed a clean million eighteen months after you left, and I’m still borrowing. Mind you, my profits are bigger than the bank’s interest payments, so what the hell?” We had turned into the Devon lanes now, and the Jaguar was travelling between their narrow hedgerows like a bullet down a rifle barrel. Once or twice a rabbit froze in the harsh light, but Charlie just drove over them. He was country-bred and had no sentimentality about
