"Fellow's a damned crashing bore," he said as he flicked through an article in the Court and Social section of the newspaper. "Why on earth they're writing about him is entirely beyond me. He was absolutely useless at anything."
"Who is he, Squeak, darling ?" enquired his companion.
"What ? Oh, Nigel Barrarby….the so-called ‘revolutionary designer’… receives the patronage of people riding tidal waves of baksheesh….says here he organises ‘urban plans for people not cars, underground mazes or traffic flow’. Damn me if he isn't a fatuous upstart. Doesn't he realise we must have twelve lane motorways, fifty floor office blocks and room to build more and more airport runways. We need these things to hold it all together, otherwise how on earth could I get to the ski resorts for those few precious days when acid rain permits a decent snowfall. But do you know, this Barrarby chap actually dared to infer some years ago that my tenants in their tied cottages were dissatisfied – said he'd personally heard from them through his work for charity that they were being ground under – said they were all living in the most abject squalor."
His face was convulsed in fury with bulging eyes and his voice hoarse through shouting.
" ‘Squalor’ says he. Asked me if you please whether I'd do something to ease their plight. Of course, the fool didn't realise he'd been taken in hook, line and sinker – he didn't know them, couldn't see how unscrupulous their kind are – couldn’t see what a dishonest rabble they all are...Told him he was a complete fool. Said he was talking absolute bosh – that he didn't know he'd been hoodwinked – anyone over the age of three in Little Stamping is known to be a born charlatan and a thief and would steal one's glass eye, given half a chance. But I'll be double dashed, hanged and cursed for it but they've made the insufferable ass a life peer. Can you possibly make any sense of it at all, Amanda ?..Amanda..where are you ?"
For a short time, he was speechless and stared in disbelief at the newspaper which was shaken several times in irritation. How was it that the abhorred Barrarby could have been so unjustly elevated ?
While the morning was blighted by reminders of past but not forgotten incidents, Loathbery's girlfriend, Amanda Teece, wasn’t at all interested. She was young, pretty and extremely wealthy. The Teece family pile began with her great, great grandfather who had ‘imported’ antiquities from the Far East and flogged them extortionately in the New Bond Street auction houses. He’d met his end, savaged by an escaped circus lion.
A relic of these adventures was an eleventh century porcelain ninja squatting in the Teece drawing room. She may have used this as a model for her deathly white skin and ghoulish black clothes. The fashion at that time was to resemble a cadaver and most people were stunned when they first met her. It may have been the black lipstick and eye liner, mascara and dyed black hair which gave her face its corpse-like pallor. Her figure was aquiline and wrought from starvation diets. She floated after Piers Loathbery as if she’d escaped from the morgue.
Amanda's father controlled the family fortune which several rakish relatives had tried to squander. Each generation produced at least one fraudster and there were schemes to chop up the family businesses and spirit away the proceeds by certain factions. As the beneficiary of an offshore tax-dodge, she could do anything she pleased and go anywhere she wanted. Piers Loathbery was good for entertainment value and she tagged along with him to formal dinner parties and political get-togethers. No one ever smiled at any of these gatherings ; they all wore dead pan, hang dog, bored senseless expressions and talked endlessly about money.
The clock on the mantelpiece struck twelve. Mid-day had arrived and Piers was just reaching the end of his newspaper. By the time he'd properly got himself up and about, after a bath, shave, choice of clothes and general manicuring, it might almost be time to go back to bed again. At any rate, the day's schedule did not contain anything noteworthy for him, apart from having to wheedle a few thousand over and above his monthly income from his father. In some inexplicable fashion, all his money seemed to jump out of his wallet and sprint away faster than he could replenish it and this grated on him. After all, even that coxcomb Barrarby knew that money oiled the works, to maintain a chap's interest in things as one became bored so easily. Inexplicably and even more gratingly, his father disagreed.
Lord Giles Loathbery sacrificed corporate lambs each day in the temple of commerce ; those who received his knife were the financially inastute, not only of the Square Mile but wherever there was anyone foolhardy enough to trust him. While other members of the landed gentry conducted bus tours of tourists around their stately homes, the elder Loathbery presided over one of the largest private freeholdings embezzled, fiddled, diddled and chiselled from the City, the government, the national estate and thousands of bankrupt farmers and smallholders, not to mention his victims abroad. No inherited mountain of wealth had landed in his lap – he’d clawed his way through the corporate bear pits and rhinoceros traps from tea boy to chairman of the boards of several international behemoths. His energy was legendary and inexhaustible. At sixty eight he was constantly traversing the length and breadth of Europe and America humiliating subordinates who all dreaded a visit from him.
Unlike his profligate son, Loathbery the elder was an unrepentant skinflint with hundreds if not thousands of offshore bank accounts, tax evasion schemes, double-back trust funds and secret private companies in Panama and the Dutch Antilles. Not a soul, including those closest to him or his army of financial advisers knew the full extent of his wealth. The secret holdings in his worldwide accounts were so numerous that his bankers only ever accepted instructions from him by certain coded messages sent by special courier to their Zurich office. Whenever they were warned of his arrival, they fell over themselves in their Bahnhofstrasse boardroom to have everything ready, right down to his favourite biscuits.
In the rare moments when Loathbery was dozing on the red leather benches in the House of Lords or on the chesterfield in his suite on the QE II or when gazing across the City from the top floor of his Bishopsgate office block, his mind would be leaping from one scheme to another. His detractors said that the wart on the end of his nose twitched whenever it detected there was money to be made. They may well have been right.
New situations were constantly presenting themselves to him for exploitation the world over ; some were contrived by politicians when 'opportunities' were passed his way. He didn’t much care what the financial press and his competitors thought of him and he was never satisfied with average profits. They had to be gorging, over-stuffed, bloated, all-consuming profits. In any event, the public knew nothing of the casualties he consigned to the gutter or whose life savings were decimated by the financial plagues which he periodically unleashed or the thousands of unfortunates thrown onto the dole queue when his fabled wizardry backfired. Certainly, the corporate soothsayers and financial alchemists in the City weren't troubled by it.
What the worthy peer had hidden from public view would have filled the Albert Hall several times over. Most notably, straight after the war when he was a supply clerk in the army in the Far East, he'd diverted a huge shipment of bicycle tyres intended for the Chinese nationalist army battling the reds. The dispatch manifest was altered to read "washed overboard at sea". Then he hired part of a shed and began operating a black market trade at exorbitant prices. In those days, the cheapest form of transport was the bicycle and with the reds on the march, people would pay anything to get away. In a short time and after paying bribes and commissions, he'd amassed a hundred thousand pounds which at the time was a pretty sum.
After fixing his discharge from the army and returning to London, he invested in the post-war construction boom. Many small companies couldn’t survive the ruthless under-cutting in the race for contracts and it was these that Loathbery preyed upon. As his wealth grew, he sold clapped-out cars in Delhi, founded a plastics factory which made toy dolls in Hong Kong, supplied tractors and harvesters to the Soviet trade ministry by bribing them with gifts, co
nstructed a palace the size of an aircraft carrier for an Asian prince, built a university complex in Nebraska for a Bible-bashing religious cult and sold the Americans oil – from peanuts. In the seventies, his donations to political parties brought him a life peerage when he bought the Manor House in a fit of self-indulgence.
In spite of these successes, a stand-off existed between Lord Loathbery and his son : the father had fought a thousand scraps against his competitors and never surrendered but against his son he was defenceless and allowed his fortune to be pillaged. The gossip was that the father felt guilty at having driven the boy’s mother away and that the son wanted revenge for her ill-treatment.
Whatever the reason, both of them knew that Piers was a pest with a mastery of showing up his father in different ways. And so he was tolerated, bought out and packed off to anywhere as long as it was away from the Loathbery empire. The miserly father wanted to be rid of the wastrel son and although exile to a desert island was not a realistic option, the only other way was to bribe him.
The second member of the Loathbery family was Piers's younger sister, Antoinette who had wed a financial leviathan (fortunately not in competition with her father). It was said that her husband was insanely jealous of her friendships with other men ; as she was plump and shared her brother's mania for dissipation, it was difficult to see why. At Geneva and Monte Carlo, the croupiers would spit at the mere sight of her entry to the gaming rooms.
For several weeks neither Piers Loathbery nor his sister had seen their father. Either way, they couldn't have cared less. If the old man had decided to become a Trappist monk, both brother and sister would have offered congratulations as long as the twenties and fifties kept their pleasure machine going.
Yet, rather than contemplating matters temporal or spiritual, Lord Loathbery was at that moment, landing at Gatwick aboard his private jet. At great expense (following the cancelled opening of a knockwurst factory), he'd shortened his business in Germany in readiness for the wedding of his youngest daughter, Marie-Sainte.
Five days of events were planned for the wedding celebrations, commencing with a dinner in honour of his guests at the Manor House. Like everything else he did, Lord Loathbery was supervising all the arrangements as he trusted no one : like all misers, he thought everyone was robbing him. He also wanted to show his flair for organising – even if it was only some amusements and contests such as roulette and blackjack, riding to hounds, horseracing, an evening at the opera and a visit to his club.
At the time, Marie’s marriage was supposed to be a secret. But, the newspapers had somehow found out about it months earlier. Their prying lenses had vainly tried to capture the betrothed but their patience went unrewarded. This only increased the resolve of one editor to do some 'gardening' on the youngest Loathbery. Two of the lackeys slaving in the Manor House, begged to be released back to Fleet Street but were forbidden to leave without some sort of story, fanciful or otherwise. And although they were like truffle hounds, sniffing out morsels hidden from the light of day, to be dug up and bayed about town, so far, neither had even glimpsed their quarry. Instead, they were running errands, mostly to the betting shop for Piers Loathbery and his entourage of weevils.
There still remained the juiciest tattle to be unearthed, the mere mention of which drove them into a frenzy of excitement. Many years earlier, Lord Loathbery's French wife had run off with a perfume salesman and was never heard of again ; the Manor House servants who troughed at the village pub swore that Loathbery had tyrannised her ; the villagers, for their part, maintained that she was a bad lot anyway and slightly touched in the head ; the publican confided that he'd seen Lady Loathbery one Guy Fawkes night, sitting in the pouring rain, making mud pies by the duck pond.
Perhaps for the reasons his wife lost her marbles, Lord Loathbery was set on his daughter marrying to his wishes. On her eighteenth birthday, the idea became fixed in his mind. Since that time, he'd been casting the net far and wide, inviting young aristo’s, tycoons and militarists to dine with them. For reasons unknown to the hacks, each of the suitors fled from the Manor House or mysteriously disappeared.
These stories caused the hacks to leave off getting plastered, only long enough to rummage around in the family’s private apartments. Beneath layers of coloured nickers in the bride's dressing table, they discovered a small automatic pistol, a bullwhip, some army overalls and underneath her bed there was a mummified cat, carefully wrapped up in a shoebox. As they stumbled out of the room, hurtling headlong for the vodka bottle hidden on top of the wardrobe in the servants quarters, for the next two days they racked their addled brain cells for an answer to the riddle, in between running backwards and forwards for the insatiable locusts in the wing occupied by Piers Loathbery. What could it all possibly mean ?
Chapter 22
The Journey to Golden Pot
That Friday, at around five in the afternoon, the villains rendezvoused at Pat Rourke's garage. On arrival, they edged their way past the spray-painted chassises in the workshop to a room at the back used by the mechanics for their tea breaks. After an hour, they’d changed and were ready for the drive to Wiltshire.
As Sir Harry inspected them in their evening wear and servants uniforms, the entire scene was like a pantomime performance by the Strangeways Dramatic Society. His only option was to smuggle them into the Manor House under cover of darkness. This prompted a change of plan : he would barrel on ahead of them and meet them at sunset at the Golden Pot pub. The Loathbery estate managers were usually to be found there, arguing the merits of sheepdip and traxcavators. If there were any eleventh hour alarms, they’d get wind of them there.
He took the Garrard and told Spark, King, Griffey, Riley and Rooney to follow in the Teuton with the other four squashed somehow into Clifton Earls' Mini Minor. They would arrive at the Manor House between ten o'clock and midnight.
With their plans redrawn, Sir Harry set off at six o'clock with the Garrard chug-chugging in second gear. As soon as he was gone, Taffey took bets at four to one that they would all be in Dartmoor Prison within seventy two hours. The others merely ignored him. They were all too greedy to back out.
An hour later, the Teuton departed with Griffey at the wheel. His passengers in formal dress grimaced at the whistles and hoots from passers-by, until they reached the motorway. With so many of Griffey's shortcuts as he took sly gulps from his hipflask, it seemed to Charlie Spark that after an hour they were closer to Southwark than Surrey. Just as it looked as if they’d keep to schedule, the engine gave out a mangled gasp and becalmed them on the dual carriageway known as the Hog's Back outside Guildford.
While four of them tried to get the car bonnet open, it dawned on Spark that it was half past eight. Without doubt, Sir Harry would be wearing out the floorboards at the Golden Pot, wondering where they were. Even if the engine roared back into life at that very moment, they would still be late. And with that realisation, any degree of urgency evaporated.
Charlie Spark poked around from one part of the engine to another.
"Just look at it. It's almost as filthy as Griffey. Oi, did you hear that in the back there ? How are we going to get it started then ?"
Mick Riley was the professed expert on hot wiring and winding back speedometers. He pushed the others aside, creaked the bonnet wide open, peered into the blackened block of steel and wires, unclipped sockets and loosened gaskets, all to no avail. Then Tim Rooney took out the spark plugs and cleaned them. They fiddled about with the distributor cap and topped up the radiator. They inspected the tappets and the carburettor. Whichever way they looked at it, nothing in the engine jumped out at them and shouted 'It's me, you fools – I'm the cause of your trouble."
Spark was confounded – he went and sat in the driver's seat and stared blankly at the upraised bonnet, twiddling his fake gold cufflink around and around in his starched white cuff, now blackened by engine soot. Suddenly, he sat upright as though struck by a plank of wood.
"It has
got to be the petrol ," he shouted. "If you ask me, I think there's no petrol in it even though the gauge says a quarter full."
When they discovered he was right, he vowed that the car dealer, along with the car, would be getting a tune-up.
Riley flung open the car boot and Rooney scrambled about in their bag of tools for a length of plastic pipe and a jerry can. Then they stood in the middle of the road and waved down the first car heading in their direction. Reluctantly, the driver agreed to help them and after Riley bungled two attempts to extract some petrol, the Scotsman elbowed him aside and said that in his time, he'd thieved enough petrol out of motors to run a fleet of super tankers and become an oil sheik.
Placing one end of the tube in the tank, he drew on the other end, very slowly. At this point, Spark was worried that their schedule was slipping further behind and began urging Bob King to hurry up and finish the job. The Glaswegian grimaced at the cabaret and delicately continued to draw the petrol from the tank so that it slowly began to rise inch by inch, towards the top of the tube.
Across the road, Griffey had awoken from a drunken slumber. After rubbing his eyes, he saw Bob King bending down at the side of the other car. The poor fellow must have been sick from the journey, he thought and decided to give the Scotsman a few hard slaps on the back to try and clear whatever was ailing him.