Mrs. Pargeter's Plot (20 page)

‘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.

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
before
all the handshaking in the reception line – which is always the sign of a well-organized wedding.

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 circle directly in front of the hotel stood a fountain round which fat stone cherubs curled, dispensing their cornucopiae 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 mêlée. 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.

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.'

‘Well, Gary, if there's any way of avoiding violence . . .'

‘Sure, sure, Mrs P. I'll do me best. Hold on tight, we're nearly there!'

The cottage loomed ahead like a jet-propelled chocolate box. The Jaguar was now so close behind the Rolls-Royce that Mrs Pargeter could almost count Blunt's nasal hairs, when Gary suddenly swung the steering wheel right into his drive. He spun into the opposite lock, heading straight for the barn garage. Both sets of doors were open, so that the structure appeared like a bridge.

Just as they were steaming into the building, Gary caught sight of the banner flapping over the doorway. ‘What the hell . . .' he mouthed in disbelief.

Mrs Pargeter looked up, and managed to read the words blazoned across the white sheet before the car swept into the barn. With a sense of doom, she recognized the logo, and the inevitable legend:

WHAT'
S
THE FIRST THING TO DO WHEN YOU GET YOUR OWN FLAT?