“Keep well back,” Dortmunder advised.
“I will. I will.”
The Strand, Fleet Street, around Ludgate Circus and up Farringdon Street and Farringdon Road and a right turn onto Rosebery Avenue, in the drab disrepair of Finsbury. Just short of St. John Street the Mini stopped and Zane got out to permit Porculey to emerge, panting and wheezing, like a champagne cork out of a bottle that’s gone fiat. Zane waited on the sidewalk, glancing warily about, while Porculey trotted into a nearby Bed & Breakfast establishment. Chauncey and Dortmunder and Kelp ducked their heads and waited, half a block away.
“There it is!” Chauncey was peeking through his fingers, and his whole body vibrated when he saw Porculey crossing the street toward the Mini, carrying a long tubular object wrapped in brown paper. “Let’s get it now! We’ll go there right now! What could they do on a public street?”
“Kill us,” Dortmunder told him. “I’m sure Zane has a gun, and I know I don’t.”
Porculey handed the package to Zane while he reinserted himself into the Mini’s back seat – exactly like putting a champagne cork back into the bottle – then Zane handed the package in to Porculey, settled again in the front passenger seat, pulled the Mini’s door shut, and the car moved off, the Vauxhall once again half a block behind.
St. John Street, Upper Street, Holloway Road, Archway Road – “Where are they going?” cried Chauncey. Their helplessness was infuriating.
“Beats me,” Dortmunder said. “I don’t know this town.”
“But they’re heading out of town! They’re heading for the M1!”
“Just stay with them.”
Lyttleton Road, the Great North Way, the on-ramp for the M1. Up on the highway went the Mini, struggling up to sixty miles per hour, bottoming out at every dip, with the Vauxhall nearly a quarter of a mile back.
Dortmunder said, “Where’s this road go?”
“Everywhere,” Chauncey told him. “Manchester, Liverpool, it’s the main road north out of London, it goes up–” He stopped, struck by a sudden realization.
Dortmunder said, “You mean – ?”
In a whisper, Chauncey finished his sentence: “–to Scotland,” he said.
Chapter 13
The trip north: The Mini and the Vauxhall both gassed up at a service area near Northampton, then switched from the M1 to the M6, and stopped for lunch at another service area above Birmingham. (Macdough and Zane and Porculey ate hot meals at a table in the cafeteria, while Chauncey and Dortmunder and Kelp chewed sandwiches and drank coffee out of plastic cups in the car. Porculey carried the painting with him into the restaurant, to the chagrin of Macdough, Chauncey, Dortmunder and Kelp.) Another stop for gasoline north of Manchester was made by both cars, and yet another just south of Carlisle. (These motorway service areas were large and busy places, where the Vauxhall could keep an unobtrusive distance from the Mini.)
Above Carlisle the motorway ended, and the two cars switched to the A 74 and then the A 73, stopping for gas in Carluke. The Mini chose a small Shell station and the Vauxhall had to go on by, but just ahead there was a Fina station.
East of Glasgow the two cars picked up the M 8 toward Edinburgh, taking the bypass around the city to the Forth Bridge over the Firth of Forth, then the M 90 and the A 90 north to Perth, where the Mini drove around in circles for a while. (Chauncey became convinced Zane had realized he was being followed and was trying to lose them, but in fact Macdough was looking for a particular restaurant of which he had fond memories. He failed to find it.) The occupants of the Mini ate in an Italian restaurant, while the occupants of the Vauxhall filled their gas tank again and ate takeout food from a Wimpy’s.
After dinner, with night coming on, Macdough bought more gas for the Mini and led the way farther north, taking the A 9 up into the mountains. The road became increasingly curving and narrow, the distances between towns grew longer, and the Vauxhall had to drive practically on top of the Mini to keep it in sight. Up they went, and north, through the Obney Hills and the Craigvinean Forest and the Pass of Killiecrankie and Dalnacardoch Forest and Glen Truim, till up above Kingussie the Vauxhall made a hairpin climbing turn around the pockmarked stone flank of an ancient barn, and the Mini was gone.
“Now what?” Dortmunder said.
Ahead in the Vauxhall’s lights the road climbed steeply up a rocky broken slope, angling to the right. The Mini could not already have crested the hill. Nevertheless, Chauncey dropped from second gear to first and accelerated at full throttle upward, the back end bouncing and jiggling on the uneven road, the rear tires rattling volleys of stones in their wake.
And at the crest, the view was of a winding descent through hedgerows and stone walls, with three segments of macadam roadway dimly visible, and no vehicle lights at all on any of them.
“They turned off,” Dortmunder said.
“But there’s no place to turn off.”
“Lights over there,” Kelp said, and when they both turned to look at him (because they had no idea where “over there” was) he was pointing off to the left. Out that way, apparently at some distance in the mountainous dark, what looked to be headlights were flickering. They disappeared, appeared again, disappeared.
“We missed the turnoff,” Dortmunder said.
“Damn.” Chauncey twisted sideways to look past Kelp’s ear at the downslope, easing his foot cautiously on the brake. He was a shaky driver in reverse, oversteering madly, swinging back and forth in abrupt Vs across the road, but he did make it all the way to the bottom before plowing into the front end of a silver Jensen Interceptor III with stereo t/d, AM/FM, a/c, brown int., calfskin uph., electric windows, all power, immaculate cond., private owner, which was just growling at speed around the corner of the stone barn.
“Damn it to hell, I’ve hit him!”
“The painting,” Dortmunder said, and pointed at the faint trail leading upward, next to the barn.
“The painting.” Chauncey looked at Dortmunder, at the rear-view mirror, and made his decision. Into first gear, spin the wheel hard left, and accelerate.
The initial impact had broken the Vauxhall’s left-rear tail light and slightly dented a bit of its rear metalwork, while putting out one of the Jensen’s headlights, crumpling its radiator and severely denting both its front fenders. The sudden leap forward by the Vauxhall, just as the Jensen’s driver was stepping in horror and astonishment out onto the pavement, jolted the Jensen forward, dumped its driver into the mud and gravel at the verge, and then wrenched the Jensen’s front bumper loose. Its gonglike clatter when it hit the pavement served as a kind of announcement for the Department of the Environment highway truck, a big yellow Leyland full of stones and dirt, which at that moment came around the corner of the barn and smacked the Jensen very smartly in the rear.
In the Vauxhall, bucketing up the unpaved side road, Chauncey clung grimly to the steering wheel and Dortmunder hung desperately to everything he could find on the dashboard, while Kelp jounced backwards in the rear seat, gazing down the hill toward the road and saying, “He just got it again. Some truck hit him.”
Neither Chauncey nor Dortmunder cared what was going on back there. A half moon and several million stars in a cloudless sky showed even more clearly than their headlights a scrub-filled up-and-down landscape virtually as wild as when Hadrian built his wall. The Picts and Celts might no longer be about (except on football weekends), but the countryside which had formed their rough bad-tempered natures was still as it had been, scarred more by nature than by man. Driving through this scrag, not once did anyone in the Vauxhall see a light, nor any other indication of the Mini, till all at once, as they crawled up over rocks and roots between two gnarled and stumpy pines, Porculey appeared in their headlights, blinking nervously and gesturing for them to turn right.
Chauncey lifted his foot from the accelerator in surprise, and the car, barely moving anyway, promptly stalled.
And now Chauncey’s door opened, and Leo Zane’s voice said, “Out you come. Dortmunder? Kelp? You weren’t silly enough to bring guns, were you?”
No; they were silly enough not to bring guns. All three emerged from the Vauxhall, Chauncey looking tense but not frightened, Dortmunder grimly annoyed, Kelp disgusted. Zane said, “Walk up the hill to the right. Griswold, follow with their car. Keep the lights on us.”
The three prisoners, followed by Zane, and then by Porculey driving their car, went up the hill, their black shadows long dark charcoal lines lengthening ahead of them. Turning right again at Zane’s direction, they found themselves in the battered moss-grown remnant of what had once apparently been a good-sized castle. A few boulderish bits of stone wall, like an early draft for Stonehenge, was all they could see at first, but then Porculey cut the Vauxhall’s lights, and in the softer illumination of moon and starlight they could make out still-standing segments of the building clustered across the way.