Lifting the Lid(37)

‘Er, no,’ he said and drained his glass of beer.

The man’s enormous tattooed hands left his hips and clenched at his sides. ‘Don’t mess with me, shithead, or I’ll bloody clatter you. If that’s not your dog, then what the fuck’s it doing in your van?’

Trevor shrugged and poured the rest of the can of beer into his glass. ‘Visiting?’

The man’s face turned an even deeper shade of scarlet, and his knuckles grew white with the increased force of the clenching. ‘Listen, you. That mangy mutt of yours has just nicked a buncha sausages from my barbecue, and I wanna know what you’re gonna do about it.’

Trevor was aware of chomping sounds coming from inside the van as he said, ‘What? You want them back?’

‘Course I don’t want ‘em back. Not after your bloody mutt’s been slobbering all over ‘em.’

‘Well I’m sorry, but I really don’t know what you want me to do about it. In any case, I didn’t see her with any sausages.’

‘Okay, so how about we ‘ave a little look then, eh?’

With that, he marched round the table and gawped in through the sliding door of the van. Trevor, who could no longer hear any chomping noises, got to his feet at the same time and also looked inside. Milly was lying on the back seat and licking her lips, but there wasn’t a single sausage in sight.

‘See? No sausages,’ said Trevor with a wry grin.

‘You calling me a liar?’ The man squared up to him, clenching and unclenching his fists.

‘No, but if there aren’t any sausages, I can’t give them back to you, and if there were any sausages, you wouldn’t want them anyway. So what exactly do you want?’

‘You can bloody well pay for ‘em for starters.’

Trevor sighed and pulled out some change from his pocket. ‘Okay, okay. How much?’

It was obviously a much trickier question than he’d realised because there was a pause while the man seemed to be wrestling with an especially complex calculation.

‘Fiver.’

‘What? Five quid for half a dozen sausages?’

The man’s face brightened as if he’d scored some major victory. ‘Ah, so you did see ‘em then.’

Trevor sighed once again but decided it was worth every penny just to get rid of the knuckle scraping headcase. ‘All right, Poirot, you’ve got me bang to rights,’ he said, counting out five one-pound coins and dropping them into the man’s dinner plate of a palm.

The knuckle scraper studied the coins for a moment as if to satisfy himself that they were genuine and then thrust them into his pocket. ‘You wanna keep that mutt on a lead.’

‘Good idea,’ said Trevor with heavy sarcasm.

‘You wanna watch out I don’t bloody report you.’ He wagged a finger in Trevor’s face, then turned on his heel and stomped off across the grass.

‘Dickhead,’ muttered Trevor, making sure he spoke quietly enough so the man wouldn’t hear. ‘Sod off back to your hog roast and your fat ugly wife and your eighteen fat ugly kids.’

He climbed into the van and saw that Milly was in the same position on the back seat and still licking her lips. She seemed more than a little pleased with herself and was apparently oblivious to the fact that her master had come within an inch of having the living shit kicked out of him by a Neanderthal with fists the size of bowling balls.

Trevor gave her the most withering look he could muster. ‘Right, young lady, you obviously can’t be trusted, so you’ll have to stay tied up from now on.’

He took a length of rope from one of the cupboards and tied one end to Milly’s collar and the other to the handle of the sliding door. She now looked considerably less pleased with herself, and she watched Trevor with doleful eyes as he grabbed another beer from the fridge and stepped back outside.

Sitting down at the picnic table and filling his glass, he took a drink and gazed at the Jiffy bag. After a few moments, he picked it up as tentatively as before and turned it over in his hands. There were no markings of any kind on either side. He eased his finger under one end of the flap and took some time in sliding it along until the flap was completely free. He paused and took three large gulps of his drink, looking up and all around him to check that no-one was watching. Setting his glass down on the table, he opened the neck of the envelope by little more than half an inch. He peered inside, aware that his heartbeat was setting the rhythm for some unseen marching band.

‘Eh?’ he said aloud and immediately opened the Jiffy bag to its fullest extent. ‘That’s ridiculous.’

He tipped the contents out onto the table. Six packets of Silk Cut cigarettes. All this cloak and dagger stuff for half a dozen packets of fags? It didn’t make sense. Picking one up, he examined every side for some indication that they might not be what they seemed. Although he’d never smoked in his life, he’d been around enough people who did to recognise a fag packet when he saw one, and that was exactly what this was. A perfectly ordinary packet of cigarettes.