go to voicemail.
They’d hardly got going before he had to stop at a service station and buy them burgers. He had one himself because his stomach was howling with hunger, having been cruelly deprived of its bacon sandwich, but the burger only served to make him feel more queasy. He took the opportunity to listen to the voicemail. A Detective Inspector Marriot needing a quick chat with him. If he could call her back? No, he couldn’t. Hadn’t Rhoda said that the police who were round at the house were constables? And now an inspector was calling? He was beginning to feel hounded. He tried Tommy again, but he still wasn’t answering his phone – either of them. He had a bad feeling and it wasn’t just on account of the burger. Why was the long arm of the law reaching out for him?
They passed the Angel of the North and he pointed it out to Jasmine and Maria, ‘That’s the Angel of the North, girls,’ as if he were a tourist guide. They oohed and aahed a bit as if they understood.
Was it male or female? he wondered. Angels were sexless, weren’t they? Andy liked to think the Angel was standing over him protectively, but in reality he supposed it was standing in judgement. Really, if he hadn’t been driving he would have put his head on the steering wheel and wept at the pointlessness of it all. ‘Soon be there,’ he said, grinning encouragingly at them in the rear-view mirror.
He had to stop again at a Roadchef outside Durham so the girls could go to the toilets. While he was waiting he bought bars of chocolate and cans of Fanta, which seemed to be their drink of choice. They took for ever in the Ladies and for one paranoid moment he wondered if they’d absconded, but they returned eventually, giggling their heads off and chattering in their incomprehensible language.
‘Can I offer you a cold beverage, ladies?’ he said with ironic chivalry after he’d herded them back into the car. More giggling.
They reminded him of a Thai girl he knew in Bangkok a couple of years before he married Rhoda. She laughed at everything he said, admired everything he did. It made him feel like the most amusing, interesting man who ever lived. It was all an act, obviously, but did that matter?
He’d thought about bringing her home, marrying her, having kids – the whole shebang. It hadn’t worked out, though. ‘Changed my mind,’ he told Tommy at the time, but the truth was that it was the girl who’d changed her mind. She had one of those weird Thai nicknames – Chompoo. Something like that anyway. Shampoo, Tommy always called her. Tommy was out there with him at the time, they were dealing with ‘the Retreat’ as they’d always referred to it, although in fact it had no name, just a street number on the outskirts of Pattaya. Chompoo was a Buddhist nun now, apparently.
Tommy had got involved with Bassani and Carmody a few months before Andy had been drawn in. He’d been doing a bit of protection work for them – he was still in the ring at the time and he was a handy pair of fists if they got themselves into trouble. A heavy, a ‘minder’. Nowadays he refrained from the dirty work. He had a couple of ‘deputies’ as he called them – a couple of sociopathic thugs called Jason and Vasily. Andy always presumed Vasily was Russian but he’d never been interested enough to enquire. They did anything that was asked of them. It was disturbing.
The so-called Retreat in Thailand had been a place for Tony Bassani and Mick Carmody and their like-minded friends and acquaintances to go and ‘relax’. A lot of those friends and acquaintances were in high places, exalted even – at least one judge, a chief magistrate, a handful of local councillors, senior policemen, barristers, an MP or two. At the Retreat they could indulge themselves with a compliant, docile local population. Perhaps ‘compliant’ and ‘docile’ weren’t quite the right words. Abused and exploited, maybe. Underage kids mostly – they were ten a penny out there. And at the end of the day, Andy had justified to himself, nobody was holding a gun to their heads. Except that one time, but that was best forgotten. That had been the beginning of the end for Tommy and Andy. ‘Time for a sharp exit, don’t you think?’ Tommy said.
Andy had never