Lifting the Lid(3)

‘No, it’s more…’ Lenny carried on sniffing, his eyes ranging around to try to identify the source of the smell. ‘Oh Jesus, it’s him.’

Carrot looked in the direction he was pointing and, sure enough, the dark stain which covered the Suit’s groin area was clearly visible despite the charcoal grey of the trousers. ‘Oh for f—’

‘Bugger’s wet ‘imself.’

‘I can see that.’

Lenny took a pull on his cigarette. ‘Fear probably.’

‘Don’t be a prat. The man’s out cold. He doesn’t know if it’s Christmas Day or Tuesday.’

‘Maybe it’s like when somebody has their leg cut off – or their arm. They reckon you can still feel it even though it’s not there any more.’

Carrot stared at him, unable to discern any logical connection between amputation and pissing your pants.

‘You know,’ Lenny continued, apparently aware that further explanation was necessary. ‘It’s like your subconscious, or whatever, doing stuff behind your back without you realising.’

‘I think it’s far more likely it’s a side effect of the stuff we injected him with.’

‘Could be,’ said Lenny, and he took a last drag on his cigarette before lobbing it over his shoulder into the stairwell.

‘Ready now?’ Carrot made no attempt to disguise the sarcasm in his tone.

‘I’m not taking the feet this time though. My face’ll be right in his piss.’

Carrot squeezed his eyes shut and counted to three. ‘You want to swap?’

‘Not necessarily. We could try taking an arm each.’

Because of the substantial difference in their heights, Carrot knew that this meant he would be taking most of the weight again, but he also realised there was no point in arguing. The priority was to get the guy up the stairs and into the flat before somebody spotted them.





CHAPTER THREE



The time wandered by, and the miles slid comfortably under the tyres at a steady fifty-five. Battered though it was, the converted Volkswagen Transporter was only twelve years old and could have gone faster, but Trevor was in no particular hurry. He was enjoying the ride, happy to be away and with the road stretching before him to an unknown destination. Milly seemed equally contented and alternated between sitting upright on the passenger seat, staring fixedly ahead, and curling up to sleep in the back.

It was Trevor’s first real trip in the camper, and he liked the idea of having no fixed itinerary. After all, he reasoned, wasn’t that the whole point of having one of these things?

To say that he had bought it on a whim would have been a gross distortion of the truth. Trevor didn’t really do whims. His idea of an impulsive action was to buy an item that wasn’t on his list when he did his weekly shop at the local supermarket. Even then, there would have to be a pretty convincing argument in favour of dropping the quarter-pound packet of frozen peas, or whatever it might be, into his trolley. Half price or two-for-one were minimum requirements.

The camper van hadn’t fulfilled either of these criteria, and to begin with, he’d toyed with the idea of a motorbike. Something a bit flash, like a Harley. He’d have needed a halfway decent tent of course. A simple bedroll and sleeping out under the stars were all very well in Arizona or wherever but totally inadequate over here – unless you were one of those rufty-tufty outdoor survival types with an unnatural fixation about the SAS. He’d never understood the attraction of deliberately putting yourself in a situation where it was more than likely you would either starve or freeze to death or be attacked by a large carnivore or stung by something so venomous you’d have seconds to live unless you applied the appropriate antidote in time or got your best friend to suck out the poison. No, Scottish midges were about as much as he was prepared to tolerate, but even then he’d make damn sure he had a plentiful supply of insect repellent with him.

A hermetically sealable tent and a good thick sleeping bag would be indispensable as far as Trevor was concerned and, if space permitted on the Harley, an airbed – preferably with a pump which operated off the bike’s battery. It had all started to make perfect sense until a small problem finally occurred to him. What about Milly? She was too big to ride in a rucksack on his back, and as for the only other possible option, the very idea of a Harley with a sidecar made him squirm with embarrassment.

A car was far too ordinary for his purposes, so a camper van had seemed to be the next best thing if he couldn’t have a Harley. It still had a kind of “just hit the open road and go where it takes you” feel to it, and he’d once read a book by John Steinbeck where he set off to rediscover America in a camper with an enormous poodle called Charley.