Chapter 3.13 #2
She rolled her eyes and limped back to the Turdmobile. ‘Chips.’
Traffic crawled along King Street, with Harmsworth’s jobbie Volvo stuck right in the middle of it.
Roberta had her window down, letting the grumble of cars and buses wash in from the rainy afternoon as she puffed out clouds of rhubarb-and-custard vape.
The Bobbin drifted slowly by, where a bunch of students had escaped their afternoon studies to drink themselves into a sloppy coma and each other’s beds.
One group were all in knitted pink T-shirts, going baggy in the rain, belting out a medley of showtunes from Sawney Bean, in a manner that implied they were either rugby players or a really crap musical society:
‘Some people say a stranger is a friend you’ve never met,
Well Sawney says a stranger’s just a meal you ’aven’t et!’
And on the Volvo crawled.
A set of temporary traffic lights loomed through the rain ahead, marking off a chunk of road outside the Esso petrol station. Where a yellow council digger was gleefully mangling its way through the tarmac and into the substrate beneath.
Which explained the hold-up.
Roberta took another long sook on her vape. Blowing it out as the knitted students got to the chorus:
‘Sawney Bean, the cannibal king,
All of his family cause a calamity,
Sawney Bean, from the gallows he’ll swing,
All of his family feast on humanity,
All of his family wracked with insanity,
All of them cannibals, breeding like animals!’
The lights changed, and the traffic sped up a little, leaving the ‘singers’ behind. But it all ground to a halt again as, two cars in front, a blue hatchback stopped to let someone out of the petrol station.
And that someone was driving a rattletrap Daihatsu Fourtrak in a slightly less dysentery-shade of brown than Harmsworth’s Volvo . . .
Hard to be one hundred percent sure – because she’d deleted all the photos of Jeremy Yarrow from her phone, so Young and Pine wouldn’t see them – but it definitely looked like his manky old truck, right down to the rear bumper held on with hairy string.
The Fourtrak growled off down King Street, dragging a smog of diesel fumes behind it, and the traffic got moving again.
Both cars ahead of them made it through the contraflow, but soon as it was Harmsworth’s Volvo’s turn, the lights changed to amber.
He coasted to a halt and reached for the handbrake.
‘What are you doing?’ Roberta thumped him. ‘Go! Go! Follow that crapmobile!’
Harmsworth sort of vibrated in place for a moment, eyes wide, going, ‘Em, em, em, em . . .’ hands clutching and unclutching, then self-preservation kicked in and he did what he was told, juddering the car forward as the lights turned red.
Kangarooing along in warm pursuit. ‘Why are we following . . . Who . . . What are we following?’
She pointed at the Fourtrak. ‘That one, sharny boxy-wee-truck thing with all the rust.’
‘But why?’
‘Because police officers are naturally nosy animals. And mine is twitching.’
He pulled a face, but followed the manky Daihatsu anyway – to the next junction, where it turned left onto Linksfield Road.
Old granite tenements faced off against insipid blocks of flats, across a minefield of speed humps.
The Volvo lump-and-bumped over them.
‘Hang on . . .’ Harmsworth frowned at her. ‘Is this you trying to get out of providing lunch?’
‘Don’t be such a greedy whinge.’
Harmsworth harrumphed, still following the Fourtrak’s diesel wake. ‘Typical. Tufty gets fish-and-chips, and what does poor Owen get? Nothing.’
Down at the end of the road, past more beige flats and dull semis, a swathe of green appeared: Kings Links Golf Course. And the closer they got, the worse the wind and rain became.
He scrunched his shoulders together. ‘But then why would Owen deserve anything? It’s not as if he’s giving up his free time to ferry people around, who haven’t even offered him petrol money. Why would he get chips?’
The Fourtrak took a right at the end of the road, skirting the Links.
Still moaning away, Harmsworth gave chase.
Hard to believe, but a handful of daft bastards were out playing golf in the snarling rain. Without Aberdeen’s streets acting as a windbreak, the storm raged. Now, the only things between them and the North Sea were the eighteen-hole course, a steep embankment with a road on top, and the beach.
Harmsworth stuck his nose in the air. ‘Oh, yes, poor Owen can just—’
‘For God’s sake: I’ll buy you chips! I said I’d buy you chips, didn’t I?’
They trailed the Fourtrak past the redbrick hulk of Pittodrie Stadium, then left, down a narrow road, towards the embankment.
‘I’m just making sure you’re not backing out of the deal, because—’
‘When have I ever welched on a deal?’
‘You bilk people all the time!’
‘I do not!’
‘Do so. Remember Sergeant Willis?’
Ah . . .
She squirmed in her seat. ‘That’s different. That was “shrewd negotiation to obtain a competitive advantage”.’
‘You sold him a case of Bulgarian “whisky” that tasted like boiled frog rectums!’
‘No’ my fault he didn’t read the small print.’
The road took a sharp left, heading up this side of the embankment.
‘You bilked him.’
‘Gave him an important life lesson, more like! Never drink anything that dissolves varnish on contact. Or is made from smoked amphibians.’
At the top of the hill, the Fourtrak turned right, onto the Esplanade.
Harmsworth hung back a little, before pulling his Volvo up the final stretch and into the storm’s teeth. It bit down on the poop-brown estate car, shaking it from side to side as rain fizzed against the bodywork like fireworks. The sky: murderous black.
An extra-wide pavement ran along the seaward side of the road, with benches spaced out along its length so you could rest your bum while catching pneumonia – overlooking Aberdeen Beach and a wrathful North Sea.
Waves crashed and roared against the colourless sand.
A converted Transit van was parked about a hundred yards down the road. They’d painted it fluorescent orange, with black tiger stripes, and bolted an illuminated sign to the roof proclaiming ‘RAJ AGAINST THE MACHINE’ between two Labrador-sized fibreglass elephants.
Presumably, on a less stormy day, its serving hatch would’ve been on the seaward side, so punters could line up safely along the promenade.
Today it was the other way around, parked nose towards town, shielding the hatch from the wind and rain.
But it wasn’t as if the Esplanade had a lot of traffic at twenty to three on a foul Monday afternoon, so they were probably safe enough.
The Fourtrak drove past, then pulled in just in front of it.
Roberta pointed. ‘Park this side.’ Which would keep the food van between them and their rusty quarry.
Harmsworth did as instructed, sitting there with the engine running, blowers howling in counterpoint to the stormy afternoon. Frowning at the van’s back doors. ‘But—’
‘No fish supper for you the day, Owen. You’ve just been upgraded to a curry!’