‘If the cow had kept her big mouth shut it would have been all right,’ Chick said.
The ‘cow’ was now resident in Errol, in a new house, and said house was serving as a love nest for the cow and her new ‘bidie-in’, a gigolo, Chick claimed, whose day job was an insurance claims loss adjuster – a man, Chick reported vituperatively, who possessed a full head of hair and a brand new yellow Ford Capri 3000 and thought he was the cat’s pyjamas. The cow, the gigolo and the mingin’ little bastards had formed an economic conspiracy to bring about the financial ruin of Chick, Chick said.
‘It’s a dog’s life, Chick,’ Professor Cousins said, giving him a comforting pat on his hairy hand. Chick snatched the hand away, muttering something about ginger beer. Chick’s eyebrows, I couldn’t help but notice, almost met in the middle – a sure sign of a werewolf. Or so Nora had told me.
Chick said, ‘Tell me if anything catches your eye’ (Professor Cousins shuddered), and then appeared to fall asleep. Soon Professor Cousins himself was snoring in the front seat. When I glanced at Terri, I saw that she too had given in to her customary narcoleptic state. I amused myself by watching the sedate suburban activity of mothers pushing prams and old ladies sweeping paths. After half an hour, a woman came out of the house we were supposed to be watching. She had nothing of the Jezebel about her, in fact she seemed remarkable, if anything, for her ordinariness. In her thirties, with short brown hair, she wore a nondescript mac and carried a shopping-bag. She looked as if she was off to collect her messages rather than conduct an adulterous liaison. She smiled and said hello to a woman walking past with a Labrador and then got into a Hillman Imp parked at the kerb and drove off. I didn’t wake Chick up. It seemed to me the woman had a perfect right to go about her business unmolested by complete strangers. (Although is there any such thing as a partial stranger?)
Chick snorted suddenly, looked at his watch and said, ‘That’s enough of that. Fish supper, anyone?’ and I realized who he reminded me of. Like the ghost of Christmas Future Chick was a picture of what Bob was going to be like in his middle age.
Chick started the engine and Terri assumed the tense position of a crash test dummy. We stopped at the first chip shop we came to and Professor Cousins said, ‘Oh my treat, please, it’s been such a lovely day out.’
‘Very good of you, Gabriel,’ Chick said, full of bonhomie at the sight of someone else’s wallet. ‘I’ll have an extra single fish in that case.’
‘As opposed to . . . a married fish?’ Professor Cousins said vaguely.
‘Ha bloody ha,’ Chick said, popping a whole pickled egg in his mouth.
I thought we would be on our way home now but as we neared the bridge Chick took a sudden turning and drove down into Newport-on-Tay and then parked the car again on the opposite side of the road from a driveway that curved away into a thick screen of laurel bushes. After a short while a car emerged from the driveway – the very same Hillman Imp as before, still being driven by the nondescript woman. Perhaps Chick was using some kind of sixth sense to follow her rather than simple powers of observation. The woman drove off in the direction of Wormit and another vehicle emerged from the driveway, a slow-moving hearse this time laden with a coffin. It was followed by a solitary car. Terri perked up considerably at the sight of the hearse.
‘Anyone you know?’ said Professor Cousins, giving an affectionate kind of nod in the direction of the coffin.
‘Not personally,’ Chick said impassively.
We drove off, slowly as if we were following the hearse, and I caught sight of a sign at the bottom of the driveway, The Anchorage – a home from home for the elderly , and told Professor Cousins that The Anchorage was currently home to Archie’s mother and he said, ‘Really? I never think of him as someone who has a mother.’
As we drove around the roundabout on the approach road to the bridge I saw a hooded figure by the side of the road, thumb stuck out into the rain.
‘There’s no room,’ Terri protested to Chick as he slowed down. The hooded hitchhiker ran towards the back door of the Cortina. He looked like one of those sinister figures from urban myths, the ones who end up killing everyone in the car and then drive off with a boot-load of bodies and pick up a pretty young girl who’s been ditched by her boyfriend and is looking for a ride home, blah, blah, blah. I was surprised that Chick, not overflowing with the milk of human kindness, had stopped but perhaps he recognized his younger more innocent self as the hitchhiker turned out to be none other than—