The Sunshine Cruise Company Read online

  If they’re getting paid all that money the least they can do is score the odd bastard goal. Boscombe looked up and across the concourse, towards the shop opposite. There was a fat old guy in a wheelchair, looking at sweets. Christ, what a loser. Do I look like that? And how long would he have to be in this bloody thing? Trying to get an answer out of those French doctors …

  Why not get the lot? Ethel smiled. She was, after all, a millionaire now.

  Boscombe looked again, closer this time at the actual wheelchair.

  His heart stopped beating as his eyes settled on something. A sticker.

  ‘WHERE’S THE BEEF?’

  Jesus. Jesus Christ.

  Just at that moment Ethel sensed someone looking at her and she looked up towards the restaurant across the way.

  Their eyes locked.

  All the pain, all the humiliation and exhaustion of the last week exploded within Boscombe. Ethel grinned wickedly.

  Both wheelchairs took off at exactly the same time.

  Ethel was wheeling herself very fast in the direction of Susan and Julie.

  Boscombe, much more inexperienced at propelling himself in a wheelchair, smashed into the table, then the chairs behind him, before finally getting out of the place. He saw two gendarmes chatting near a water fountain and wheeled up to them.

  ‘EEENNNN! ARRRGGHHH!’ Boscombe said.

  The two policemen looked at him.

  ‘URRRR! G-FUUUCC!’ Boscombe was gesticulating, pointing in the direction Ethel was headed.

  ‘Pardon, monsieur?’

  ‘GNNAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!’ Boscombe was now turning a lurid purple, sweat pouring down his face and a thick broth of saliva bubbling from his lips, desperation flying from him.

  The gendarmes looked at each other. ‘Ah!’ one of them said, the penny finally dropping. He took hold of the handles of the wheelchair and started pushing Boscombe across the tiled floor. ‘RRRRNNN!’ Boscombe said, pointing at the fleeing Ethel. ‘FFFRRRR!’

  ‘Voilà!’ The gendarme said, stopping.

  Boscombe looked up at the door in front of him.

  The disabled toilets.

  With a string of unintelligible obscenities flying over his shoulder Boscombe frantically started wheeling himself after Ethel. The gendarme watched him go, puzzled, as his colleague walked up saying, ‘Huh?’

  ‘Les handicapés mental.’

  ‘Ah.’

  Julie and Susan were both watching the monitor that was saying ‘BA 117, NOW BOARDING’; the words ‘Where the hell is Ethel?’ were actually forming on both their lips when Ethel went rocketing past their table, doing a good ten miles an hour on a slight downhill curve. ‘GET ON THE PLANE!’ Ethel shouted as she passed, coffee cups rattling in their saucers in her wake.

  ‘Eh?’ Susan said.

  ‘What the fu …?’ Julie said.

  They just had time to start gathering their things as another blur of human, chrome and tyres went hurtling by.

  ‘Was that …?’ Julie said.

  ‘The plane,’ Susan said. ‘Let’s get to the bloody plane.’

  Wesley walked back into the coffee shop, laden with teddy bears and chocolate, to see the table empty and Boscombe gone. Maybe popped to the loo. He checked the monitor. Still not boarding.

  He signalled to the waiter for another coffee.

  She had maybe a hundred yards on him, Boscombe reckoned. Thank God his arms were the one part of him still working. He was getting the hang of it now too, pushing the metal rims of the wheels hard forward and then letting them roll, then pushing again. He seemed to have reached a slight downhill slope now, speeding up.

  Ethel glanced over her shoulder, she could see the demented form of Boscombe – mummified legs, caged head – coming after her, gaining. Evasive action, she decided.

  ‘Hey!’ someone shouted as people leapt out of her way.

  Boscombe watched, astonished, as she made a hard left into some kind of gift shop.

  Ethel came rattling along a big wide aisle, shouting ‘MOVE IT!’ at dithering shoppers, and glanced over her shoulder again as Boscombe came cornering fast into the shop after her. With amazing dexterity Ethel reached out and grabbed a chunky bottle of Chanel No. 5 off a shelf. She slowed a little, letting Boscombe get within thirty feet of her – he was wheeling like mad, his eyes fixed on the ‘I BRAKE FOR NO ONE’ sign – before she launched the bottle over her shoulder. The scream from behind her told her she’d found her target, the perfume bottle smacking very hard off Boscombe’s forehead. But still he kept coming as Ethel exploded out of the other side of the shop and headed full pelt for an automated walkway.

  Deftly, unseen by Boscombe, preoccupied as he was by blood pouring into his eyes from the fresh gash in his forehead, Ethel pegged her passport and boarding card into a bin.

  This was a suicide mission now.

  Julie and Susan were running, heading for the gate, pulling two heavy, cash-stuffed wheelie cases apiece, as the tannoy announced ‘Final call for BA Flight 117 to Rio …’

  Ethel hit the walkway hard, its extra few miles an hour adding speed to her churning wheeling as Boscombe came barrelling out of the gift shop behind her, his wheelchair tilting crazily, almost capsizing, as he shouted and swore, realising that his path was blocked by an enormous French family. ‘MMMMMFFFF! URRRR!’ he roared, screeching left, missing them by inches. He saw Ethel rocketing away on the walkway, everything looking hopeless until he spotted the golf buggy veering in front of him – the kind of vehicle airports use to take the very old or the very important to their destinations – and, with an extra thrust of the wrist, he caught it up, grabbing hold of the rear bumper, the vehicle pulling him along even faster, the driver oblivious to his piggybacking passenger.

  Ethel pummelled along the moving walkway, shouting ‘ALLES ALLES! VAMOS! SCHNELL!’ and ‘GET OUT THE FUCKING WAY!’ People were leaping aside, jumping off.

  Julie and Susan reached the gate to find that there was still a queue at economy boarding, but it was all clear in the business and first-class line. The (gorgeous) young steward smiled as he held out his hand for their boarding passes. But then, just as the machine was reading their bar codes, the green light coming on, pronouncing them to be good, the phone at his elbow started ringing. ‘Hello?’ he said. He listened, looking at Susan and Julie, then beyond them to the other queue. ‘Mmmm. Oui. Oui.’ He put the phone down. ‘Mesdames, please, wait here a moment.’ He walked off towards two colleagues who were conferring over a clipboard nearby.

  ‘Should we just make a run for it?’ Julie said out of the corner of her mouth.

  Ethel came tearing off the automated walkway just as Boscombe let go of the golf buggy and, for a split second, he could almost touch her hair, flying behind her in a mad frizz of grey as Ethel wheeled for her very life, catching another downhill now, both of them really speeding up as, ahead, Ethel saw two escalators, both going down. She thundered towards the right-hand one and, in a display of skill that would surely have put her in the top-five wheelchair drivers worldwide, smashed her brakes on the moment she hit the metal, stopping on a dime, the escalator taking her gradually down. Looking back up as she disappeared Ethel saw two things. Firstly, the scrum of gendarmes and security guards running towards her in the distance, finally alerted to the wheelchair version of the Le Mans rally happening within their airport, and secondly – Boscombe.

  It would be fair to say that only being used to driving a wheelchair for a few hours – as opposed to over a decade – Boscombe lacked the skills possessed by Ethel. Roughly twenty seconds after she hit the right-hand down escalator Boscombe hit the left-hand one. But he didn’t brake – he went smashing, barrelling and bouncing down at full speed, his body being thrown up off the chair with each impact on every step. Ethel could hear his muffled screams. This was a very bad idea – was what went through Boscombe’s mind.

  They stood there, too scared to run, the few remaining economy-class passengers now boarding, the airline crew in a h
uddle, talking in a low murmur a few yards away.

  ‘Ethel,’ Julie whispered. ‘What the hell’s happened to Ethel?’

  Susan looked back the way they had come, over Julie’s shoulder, and saw two gendarmes approaching with a third man between them, in a suit and tie, an airport official of some sort, with a laminated pass dangling around his neck. Fucking men, Susan found herself thinking.

  She felt her grip tightening on her two wheelie cases, as she whispered to Julie, ‘Don’t turn round, darling.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Whatever happens, the last few days, I’ve had the best time I’ve ever …’

  ‘Hey, hey, don’t cry …’ Julie said, reaching for her.

  ‘Oh well,’ Susan said, almost about to offer her wrists up in a ‘throw on the cuffs’ gesture as the officious-looking trio approached … and then walked straight past them and up to the last few economy passengers. ‘Excuse me, madams?’ they said to two ladies.

  ‘Yes?’ an English voice said.

  ‘Step this way please …’

  Julie and Susan both watched as the women were led off towards a doorway nearby. The two women did, it had to be said, bear a fair resemblance to Susan and Julie before Susan’s intensive hair and make-up session this morning. Suddenly another voice piped up behind them, ‘Miss and Mrs Saunders? Please, we can board you now. I’m very sorry for the delay.’

  ‘What was all that about?’ Julie asked.

  ‘Oh, nothing to worry about. Please, this way …’

  And with that they were led off towards the magical kingdom in the very nose of the plane.

  ‘I love first class …’ Julie whispered.

  ‘No one messes with you …’ Susan replied.

  He couldn’t find the brake. He couldn’t even begin to touch the wheels – they would have flayed the skin from his hands. As Boscombe thundered down towards Ethel their eyes met horribly again. Ethel glanced ahead – the end of the track and there, about thirty feet ahead of that, a huge ornamental fountain. She came off the escalator just as Boscombe came rocketing past her, gripping onto his wheelchair as though it were a crazed, unbroken horse, his face a mask of blood and pain.

  Ethel solved his braking problem for him. She took her grabbing stick and thrust it into the spokes of his right-hand wheel.

  If a movie director could have filmed the scene it would have been Sam Peckinpah: Boscombe flailing through thin air in slow motion, screaming soundlessly, onlookers gawping, jaws a-dangle, the sparkling water of the fountain rushing up to meet him and then, the huge splash as he hit the surface, drenching a family eating ice cream nearby.

  Ethel braked to a skidding, screeching stop just before she hit the wall of the fountain. She had a few moments to savour the sight of the spluttering, floating Boscombe before she heard the clomping of running boots very close behind her. She turned and saw that she was surrounded by some fifteen men, a mixture of police and airport security, many of them with their guns drawn and pointed at her, the men in their turn sizing up this strange, bearded old gentleman in the baggy suit and the panama hat. Ethel produced her hip flask, tore off her beard and, still in character, asked the mob:

  ‘Would any of you boys care fur a wee dram now?’

  EIGHTY-TWO

  THEY COULDN’T BELIEVE their luck would hold even as they sat there in the soft blue-tinted light of first class, their hearts pumping hard in their chests as they graciously accepted champagne and extravagant menus. Even after the doors closed (fifteen minutes late, following a ruckus when the two English ladies were finally allowed to board, both of them muttering and complaining) and the plane began taxiing out towards the runway not twenty seconds went by without either Julie or Susan craning their neck round, expecting to see a huddle of police and stewards coming for them. Even as the 747 lumbered into the sky and the tilting sun shot light through every porthole in turn, they were still expecting the captain to come over the speakers saying something like ‘Ladies and gentlemen, due to security reasons we will now be returning to Nice airport …’ It was only when they levelled in the sky, and they could see the Mediterranean Sea far beneath them, and the ‘Fasten seat belts’ sign went off with a bright ‘ping’, and the steward was almost instantly at their elbow with fresh flutes of champagne, that they finally turned and looked at each other. Susan raised her glass.

  ‘To Ethel.’

  ‘Ethel,’ Julie said.

  There were certainly still things to worry about and Susan started to enumerate them. There was the close to four million pounds in cash in the compartment above them that they were hoping to just breeze through customs in Brazil with. If that happened then they had to find somewhere to live. They also had to find a way to keep their money safe and to have access to it. They had to –

  ‘Susan?’ Julie said.

  ‘Mmmm?’

  ‘Let’s just get drunk, eh?’

  Susan stopped mid-sentence and looked at her friend, sitting there, still in old person’s make-up and flowing kaftan. Forty-five years she’d known Julie Wickham and even now, in that get-up designed to age her by a decade, she still looked twenty-one. ‘Yeah,’ Susan said. ‘Let’s get drunk. Do you think we can get another one of these?’

  ‘I think we can do whatever the hell we want …’

  Julie found the button on her handset, the little stickman holding a drink on his tray, and pressed it as the great plane banked, the Bay of Biscay coming up ahead of them now, tiny boats dotting the water far below as they headed west, into the sun, towards whatever was going to happen to them.

  EPILOGUE

  THREE YEARS LATER

  OUR CAMERA SWEEPS down on a cold Sunday morning in January, in Wroxham, Dorset, where it finds eight-year-old Jamie Cummings running around the back of the scrum on the school rugby pitch, his arms extended to receive a pass, his mother Linda and his grandmother Jill cheering from the touchline. His operation in Chicago had been an astounding success. Linda had cried with joy when Jill told her she’d had a lovely time in Wales with her old friends and that one of them was now very rich and had agreed to give her the thirty grand still needed for Jamie’s operation, no strings attached. Linda hadn’t even asked any questions. Jill asks forgiveness every Sunday in church for her part in the wickedness and for Ethel, Julie and Susan to be forgiven their sins too.

  Panning across town, through pelting sleet and wind, we come to the tired signage and near-empty grandstands of Wroxham Rovers FC, who are at home to nearby Didford United, both teams playing to a very healthy turnout of 128 fans.

  We pull focus on the wet, tired, lined face of Constable Hugh Boscombe, who walks the touchline in full uniform. The ball skids through the mud quite close to him but Boscombe is oblivious. For he is dreaming of half-time, of the two meat pies and the styrofoam cup of Bovril he will consume over by the snack van, where he will endure the weekly jests and taunts of the locals, to many of whom he is still known as Lewis Hamilton after that little driving mishap in Marseilles a few years back. Later, after the match is over, he will return to the station to sign off his shift, where he will have to endure the ritual humiliation of shuffling by the glass wall of the office of Detective Sergeant Alan Wesley. Their overlapping promotion and demotion were the final sadistic acts of Chief Inspector Wilson prior to his retirement.

  Moving north, but not too far north, to the village of Tillington, the camera drifts into the town funeral parlour and surveys the few mourners at the sparsely attended service for the late underworld figure Nails Savage, who has just died at the age of ninety-two, having recently served eighteen months of a three-year sentence for aiding and abetting. Shortly after his release, Nails found a mysterious package in his post.

  There was no letter or covering note. The box simply contained 100,000 pounds sterling, tightly banded in wads of fifties. It was postmarked through a routing service in Panama.

  Nails used a good chunk of this money to fund one last sunshine cruise of his own: a five-star
trip to Bangkok, where he picked up the sole occupant of the front pew at today’s sad occasion – and the ultimate cause of his death – his 22-year-old widow Sun-May. Sun-May is still haunted by her late husband’s last expression on this earth, spoken as he ejaculated gratefully inside her, a fraction of a second before his heart exploded, the sighing elegy of ‘Oof – you fucking wrong-coloured beauty …’

  The lens refocusing now as it whirrs through cloud and over seas, heading due east, over the Channel to Paris, into a lecture theatre of the university, to where an attentive first-year student on the Business Administration course makes notes in the front row. Vanessa Honfleur is known by her peers as one of the hardest working in her year. The reason for this is simple – Vanessa can’t quite believe she is here. She thought attending university was a dream that happened to other people. True, she’d had a wild few months after she’d come into the money, but the words Julie had whispered in her ear in the garage of that huge house on the outskirts of Marseilles had always come back to haunt her: ‘Under my bed. Don’t waste it …’

  She still tingles when she remembers the moment the following day, after the police had released her, when she went back to the hotel, the room key Julie had stuffed into her palm hot in her clenched fist, the moment when she opened the door, got down on her hands and knees and looked under the bed to find a carrier bag with over 100,000 British pounds in it, nearly 140,000 in euros. Enough for her to rent a small apartment while she finished school, enough to get her here. She thinks of Julie often, this woman who changed her life, and hopes she’s doing well.

  If she could only have followed the camera as it leaves the lecture theatre to rocket south and west, crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a blur of light before swooping down out of the sky just outside the coastal town of Vitoria, in the Espirito Santo province of Brazil, just over five hundred kilometres north of Rio.

  The camera moves along the streets of one of the town’s affluent north-western suburbs, finally drifting over the well-kept hedges of the 1.5 million-dollar home belonging to the two retired English businesswomen known locally as Ruth and Helen. Lucas the gardener is trimming back the lemon tree that overhangs the wall of the kitchen while inside Amanda the cook is grilling some chicken for lunch. She knows the ladies of the house will want wine with their meal and has already iced a bottle of very good white burgundy.