The Sunshine Cruise Company Page 11

  After the fourth ring Julie said, ‘Definitely not home.’

  ‘So what now?’ Susan said.

  ‘Well …’ Julie said, already eyeing up windows and drainpipes.

  ‘Please don’t tell me,’ Jill said behind them, ‘you’re actually thinking about breaking into this poor person’s house.’

  ‘Jill,’ Julie said, ‘we just robbed a bank. I think a little light breaking and entering is neither here nor there at this point.’

  Jill moaned.

  ‘But how …?’ Susan said, looking up at the cottage, which looked pretty well fortified.

  ‘You know what they say,’ Julie said. ‘Imagine you’ve lost your keys and you ask yourself “How do I get in?”’

  ‘Yes, but what if there’s a burglar alarm or something?’

  ‘Let’s just go to a police station and give ourselves up,’ Jill said.

  They ignored her. ‘Maybe,’ Julie said, ‘if we –’

  There was a noise from somewhere inside the house and they both stiffened.

  ‘Oh shit,’ Susan whispered.

  They took a step back from the door as, incredibly, it began to swing open.

  ‘Wotcha, shaggers,’ Ethel said, sitting there in the hallway in her wheelchair. ‘Went round the back. They’d left a key under the mat. Lovely country simpletons. Come away in. Kettle’s on.’

  She trundled back off down the hall, whistling. Julie and Susan looked at each other. ‘She’s a one-woman crime wave,’ Susan said.

  It felt surreal, Susan thought moments later, to be sitting around the table of a farmhouse kitchen, listening to a kettle coming to the boil while Ethel, with surprising calm and efficiency, motored around gathering tea things, mugs, teapot, spoons, etc. Somewhere behind her Susan could hear Julie muttering to herself as she took bundles of notes out of the holdall. She was counting. ‘Ooh, here’s posh …’ Ethel said, reaching up into a cupboard with her grabbing stick and bringing down a large box of fancy Marks & Spencer’s chocolate biscuits. ‘Ethel!’ Jill said. ‘You can’t steal their biscuits!’

  ‘This is silly,’ Susan said. ‘I mean, these people could be home any minute. We should –’

  ‘Easy, sweet cheeks,’ Ethel said through a mouthful of chocolate. ‘No one’s coming home soon.’

  ‘What makes you so –’ Jill began.

  Ethel answered by tapping something on the wall next to the Aga with her grabbing stick. Susan and Jill looked up to see a calendar (a National Gallery calendar, a collection of Impressionist paintings) on the wall. In there, among various kids’ birthdays, dentist appointments and so forth, was the word ‘TUSCANY’. There were two arrows coming out from either side of the word, spanning the dates 15–29 June. ‘Not home for a week yet,’ Ethel said. ‘So can everyone just relax. We’ll have a nice cup of tea and figure out what to do next. Oh, first things first. Susan? You should go out and put the minibus in the garage. Just in case anyone drives by.’

  ‘I … yes. Good thinking, Ethel.’

  ‘Jill?’ Ethel went on. ‘There’s a couple of sets of car keys up there. Go and have a look in the garage. Hopefully there’s a motor out there that goes with one of them.’

  ‘I’m not helping you steal someone’s car!’ Jill said, standing up, banging her tiny fists on the table. ‘This has all gone too far! We –’

  ‘Jill,’ Ethel said, ‘do you really want to go to jail? We’re going to lay low here until it’s dark then we can –’

  ‘Ah, guys?’ Julie said.

  The three of them turned to look at her. She was holding up a banded bundle of notes. She had taken a lot of the money out of the holdall and stacked it up in little towers on the kitchen counter. There was still quite a lot in the holdall itself.

  ‘These are fifty-pound notes. There are a hundred of them in each of these bundles.’

  ‘How many bundles did we –’ Susan said.

  ‘A little over eight hundred,’ Julie said. ‘Maybe more. I think a few fell down inside the minibus.’

  ‘But, that, that means …’ Susan began, trying to do the arithmetic in her head.

  ‘Yeah,’ Julie said. ‘A little over four million quid.’

  There was a pause, silence in the kitchen.

  ‘We’re all millionaires,’ Ethel said.

  ‘Fuck,’ Susan said.

  A huge crash interrupted their reverie.

  Jill had fainted again. It was suddenly lovely and quiet.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  IT WAS QUIET too in Chief Inspector Wilson’s office. He took a deep breath and looked around the room. Sergeant Tarrant stood to the side of his desk. Wesley and Boscombe were sitting opposite him, Boscombe looking like he’d gone a few rounds with a fairly talented boxer. (A scenario Wilson would have paid good money to see.) Wilson pressed his fingertips together and leaned forward.

  ‘So, Boscombe,’ he said. ‘To recap.’ Tarrant swallowed. This was a very bad sign indeed. ‘Having actually walked in on the robbers planning the heist and yet failing to notice that anything was amiss – indeed you went so far as to dance a …’ He scanned the report in front of him.

  ‘A tango, sir,’ Tarrant said.

  ‘Yes, thank you, Tarrant, a tango with one of them, you were then bested in hand-to-hand combat by a wheelchair-bound octogenarian before engaging in some kind of crazed, Miami Vice-inspired high-speed pursuit along the hard shoulder of the A23. A pursuit you lost to a gang of OAPs driving a Cancer Care minibus and somehow destroying a £50,000 patrol vehicle in the process?’

  ‘Yes, sir, but –’ Boscombe began.

  Wilson held up a finger, silencing him, and turned to Tarrant. ‘Sergeant Tarrant, make sure the mugshots and licence plates go out to media and all stations ASAFP please.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘The thing is, sir –’ Boscombe tried again.

  Again Wilson silenced him. This time simply by shaking his head, closing his eyes and emitting a low, strangulated moan. ‘Boscombe,’ he continued, ‘if these ladies escape then I am afraid we will become that most dreaded of clichés – “the laughing stock of the entire force”. You understand that this is not the note I wish to sound prior to my retirement?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘However, before retiring, I can promise you that I will find the time to make certain that you spend the next ten years back in uniform policing non-league football matches. Are you with me, Boscombe?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Dismissed, gentlemen.’

  Wesley and Boscombe stood up. The front of Boscombe’s ripped trousers fell open and hung down in a loose panel, exposing his crotch. His tired, purple Y-fronts glared a few feet in front of the chief inspector’s face. Wilson found himself staring at this sight with incredible, unfathomable sorrow.

  Boscombe followed his gaze. ‘I …’ he began.

  Wilson waved a hand limply. ‘Get out, Boscombe,’ he sighed.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  THE REACTIONS TO the news that all four of them were now millionaires was as varied as their individual characters. Ethel found a bottle of gin and began singing football songs, displaying particular energy and relish on a simple number that consisted of one line, endlessly repeated, that went ‘MY OLD MAN SAID BE AN ARSENAL FAN. I SAID FUCK OFF, BOLLOCKS, YOU’RE A CUNT.’ This would ordinarily have been enough to send Jill into a screaming fit. Mercifully, however, she was in the garden praying to God for forgiveness, so Ethel’s songs were not, currently, a problem. Julie’s mind was going a mile a minute. ‘Right, stay here tonight, get home early in the morning, book the cruise, day ashore in wherever, money in a suitcase under the bed, find a nice place to rent, ooh I’ve been looking in the Algarve by the way, for three thousand quid a month we’ll get an absolutely gorgeous place, pool, jacuzzi, four bedrooms, mind you, if we’re taking it long-term and offer to pay in advance in cash we’ll probably get an even better deal, say 2,500 a month? That’s what – about thirty grand a year? Three hundred grand over the next ten
years between the two of us, barely 150,000 each out of a million, Susan! Or we could …’

  Susan was thinking, staring at the money, stacked in neat piles on the counter, a mini Manhattan skyline of cash. She looked at Julie.

  ‘… go further south, somewhere more remote, you’d get even more for your money, but would you want to –’

  ‘Julie?’

  ‘What?’

  From along the hallway they could faintly hear Ethel, now singing the words ‘You root through a dustbin for something to eat, you find a dead rat and you think it’s a treat, IN YOUR LIVERPOOL SLUMS!’

  ‘What about Nails?’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘Oh God, who knows? He fell asleep, wandered off, whatever. All I know is that we’re both a few hundred grand better off because of it.’

  ‘Hmmmm.’

  ‘What are you worrying about?’

  ‘If he got arrested …’

  ‘He’d never tell them anything. He’s old school.’

  ‘Yes, Julie, he’s also completely demented. Who knows what he might say?’ In the kitchen they heard Ethel turning the TV on, getting what sounded like MTV, some pop-dance number. She started singing along. Surprisingly her voice was sweet and she knew all the words.

  ‘Look, darling,’ Julie said, coming over and sitting next to her on the low Laura Ashley sofa, ‘we didn’t get arrested. We’ve hidden the bus. We have a safe place for the night. No one knows who we are and within forty-eight hours we’ll be long gone from this miserable bloody country with a million quid each to see out our lives with. So will you please cheer up?’

  Right on cue there was a crash, the door swinging open, and Ethel came trundling into the room, suddenly looking very sober. ‘Turn the telly on. Now.’

  Susan grabbed the remote and jabbed the ‘ON’ button: a property programme, a soap opera, flipping through the channels fast, getting to BBC1, the news at six and the announcer saying, ‘… in a daring daylight robbery of the Lanchester Bank in Wroxham this afternoon. One of the robbers was apprehended during the raid while two of the others are believed to be a Mrs Susan Frobisher, aged fifty-nine, of Wroxham …’ A picture of Susan, taken from the programme of last year’s Wroxham Players production of The Merry Wives of Windsor, came up on the screen and she screamed. Susan actually screamed.

  In their flat in Crouch End, Tom and Clare Frobisher were just sitting down to their tea when the same image appeared on the screen. Tom dropped his plate of lasagne and teetered backwards.

  ‘… and a Mrs Ethel Merriman …’ A photo of Ethel came up, taken from her resident’s file at the care home. ‘Oh, I hate that fucking photo,’ Ethel said. (And she pictured the relish with which Miss Kendal surely handed it over.) ‘… believed to be in her late eighties and until recently a resident of Glade Side retirement home, Wroxham.’

  In the rec room at Glade Side a huge cheer went up among the more sentient of the residents as Ethel’s face replaced Susan’s on the screen.

  ‘OH MY GOD!’ This was Jill, who had just walked back in from the garden to see Ethel’s face on the screen.

  ‘SHHHHH!’ Julie yelled. ‘SHHHH!’

  ‘… two other unidentified persons are also being sought in connection with the crime. They were last seen driving this vehicle – here a photograph of the Cancer Care minibus in happier times flashed up – ‘in a southerly direction on the A23 outside Wroxham this afternoon. If you have any information regarding the whereabouts of these people, or the vehicle, Dorset police are urging you to please come forward and call the number at the bottom of the screen. Members of the public are advised not to approach the suspects as they are believed to be armed and extremely dangerous. Sports now, and in …’

  Julie turned off the television, leaving only the sound of Jill crying. Susan had her head in her hands.

  ‘Oh Jesus,’ Julie said.

  ‘Well,’ Ethel said, ‘that’s certainly put the rapist among the virgins.’

  ‘We’re going to jail,’ Jill wailed. ‘I knew it! I knew I shouldn’t have listened to you lot! I was just trying to help Jamie. Oh, Jamie, I’m sorry, love. What have I done?’

  Susan got up and paced up and down near the window. A beautiful evening out there, swallows darting, willows weeping.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ Julie said.

  ‘We need to get out of the country,’ Ethel said.

  ‘How? You saw that,’ Julie said. ‘They’ll be watching the airports, ferry terminals, everything. It’ll be a … whaddya call it, in the films? An APB?’

  ‘Well, we need to think, love,’ Ethel said.

  ‘What’s there to think about?’ Jill cried. ‘We’re finished.’

  ‘How did they get you two and not us?’ Julie said.

  Susan strode across the room and picked up her purse. In the folds she found what she was looking for. She turned to the others. ‘Jill, get a hold of yourself. We’re not going to jail. Julie, go and check that estate car in the garage has petrol in it. As soon as it’s dark we’re getting out of here. Now, one of you, give me a fucking phone.’

  The three of them looked at her, astonished.

  TWENTY-NINE

  TERRY RUSSELL SIPPED his gin and tonic and looked out of the clubhouse window over the eighteenth green, dusk just beginning to creep over the shorn grass and his golfing partners’ chatter providing a pleasant background burble. It had been a good day. He’d made a nice up and down out of the bunker on fifteen, sunk a fifteen-footer early on, on four, for a birdie, and split the tenth fairway with a huge, booming drive. Some nice moments to add to the highlights reel all golfers carry in their heads. On top of all this he’d banked a profit of almost fifty grand this morning on that load of refrigerator parts they’d shipped to Murmansk. A very nice earner the whole thing was turning out to be. As the gin flowed pleasantly through his veins, the steaks were ordered and the scorecards totted up, Terry took a moment to reflect: life was good.

  A vibration against his left thigh interrupted this meditation. Discreetly, below the table (no mobiles in the clubhouse), Terry slipped his phone out and looked at the screen. An unknown number. Mmmm. Chances were it was another one of those fucking automated sales calls. ‘Barclays, HSBC … have you been mis-sold payment protection?’

  But it might be one of the Russians. A problem with the load? Or customs? In Terry’s view it was always better to know than not know. ‘Excuse me a second, lads,’ he said, standing up. He thumbed the green ‘answer’ button as he stepped through the French windows onto the patio and said, ‘Hello? Terry Russell.’

  A little over three minutes later Terry hung up, thinking to himself well, I’ll be damned. You never knew, did you? When it came to women, you could always be surprised. And this one, oof. What? – over forty years he’d fancied this one. He checked the time on his huge IWC chronometer, a fiftieth birthday present to himself. (And could that really be a decade ago? Where did it go once you got past forty?) Doable. Very doable. Smash his ribeye down, tell the boys something urgent had come up at the office, pick up some champagne on the way. Might even have time to swing by the house and grab a little blue tab of Viagra from his bedside drawer. Well, Terry reasoned, she’d sounded fucking keen. And at his time of life you didn’t want to take any chances. Had Terry just turned his head the other way a few moments ago when he was sipping his G&T, had he looked across the bar to where the local news was playing silently on the big TV screen, rather than looking out across the golf course, he might have rethought things. But such are the teeny blips of serendipity that make life so interesting.

  THIRTY

  BOSCOMBE SIGHED AND leaned back in his chair. Wesley took a tiny sip on a plastic cup of coffee that had long gone cold. They both regarded Nails, sitting across from them in the interview room, his arms folded, a bloodstained bandage turbaning his head.

  ‘I told you, copper,’ Nails said. ‘You won’t find these gels. They gone bye-by
e. Adios. Nails trained them himself.’

  ‘Who were the other two?’ Boscombe asked again. ‘Julie Wickham? Julie Wickham was one of them, wasn’t she?’

  The first two had been easy enough. Ethel, that old bitch in the wheelchair, well, he’d never forget that sticker, or those mad eyes, fixed on his as she tried to rip his balls off. Susan Frobisher? As soon as he’d placed Nails he’d remembered her house that day. A swift search warrant this afternoon, kicked the door in, neighbours staring in amazement, and they found a bunch of it in a drawer: photos of the bank, drawings of the layout. But the other two … the other two who’d been there that day, with the dancing thing. One of them they had no idea. She’d been a mousy type. Forgettable. The other one, Boscombe was pretty sure, was this Julie Wickham.

  The woman at the care home – right old boiler called Kendal – said Wickham and Ethel were thick as thieves. She’d resigned a few days back. Thrown a bucket of piss over Kendal into the bargain. Fitted the description of the woman who’d pretended to be holding the dance class that day too. But fucking Wilson wouldn’t let them officially add her name to the list of suspects until they had something concrete. Too scared of getting sued probably.

  ‘Fuck yourself, copper,’ Nails said.

  ‘Why do they call you Nails?’ Wesley, changing tack.

  ‘Gangland thing,’ Nails said. ‘See these?’ He held his hands up, showing them the palms, with two white scar marks in the centre of each one. Wesley nodded. ‘I crucified myself once.’

  ‘Why?’ Boscombe said.

  ‘Had to prove a point.’

  Wesley frowned. ‘How did you get the second nail in?’

  Nails thought for a moment. ‘It wasn’t easy, son.’

  ‘What was the point?’ Boscombe asked.

  ‘What point?’

  ‘The point you were trying to prove.’