Trickery Read online

  ‘We’d better just take half a dozen each and get out quick,’ I said.

  ‘I would like to count them, Gordon.’

  ‘There’s no time for that.’

  ‘I must count them.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Come on.’

  ‘One …

  ‘Two …

  ‘Three …

  ‘Four …’

  He began counting them very carefully, picking up each bird in turn and laying it carefully to one side. The moon was directly overhead now and the whole clearing was brilliantly illuminated.

  ‘I’m not standing around here like this,’ I said. I walked back a few paces and hid myself in the shadows, waiting for him to finish.

  ‘A hundred and seventeen … a hundred and eighteen … a hundred and nineteen … a hundred and twenty!’ he cried. ‘One hundred and twenty birds! It’s an all-time record!’

  I didn’t doubt it for a moment.

  ‘The most my dad ever got in one night was fifteen and he was drunk for a week afterwards!’

  ‘You’re the champion of the world,’ I said. ‘Are you ready now?’

  ‘One minute,’ he answered and he pulled up his sweater and proceeded to unwind the two big white cotton sacks from around his belly. ‘Here’s yours,’ he said, handing one of them to me. ‘Fill it up quick.’

  The light of the moon was so strong I could read the small print along the base of the sack. j. w. crump, it said. KESTON FLOUR MILLS, LONDON SW17.

  ‘You don’t think that bastard with the brown teeth is watching us this very moment from behind a tree?’

  ‘There’s no chance of that,’ Claud said. ‘He’s down at the filling-station like I told you, waiting for us to come home.’

  We started loading the pheasants into the sacks. They were soft and floppy-necked and the skin underneath the feathers was still warm.

  ‘There’ll be a taxi waiting for us in the lane,’ Claud said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I always go back in a taxi, Gordon, didn’t you know that?’

  I told him I didn’t.

  ‘A taxi is anonymous,’ Claud said. ‘Nobody knows who’s inside a taxi except the driver. My dad taught me that.’

  ‘Which driver?’

  ‘Charlie Kinch. He’s only too glad to oblige.’

  We finished loading the pheasants, and I tried to hump my bulging sack on to my shoulder. My sack had about sixty birds inside it, and it must have weighed a hundred-weight and a half, at least. ‘I can’t carry this,’ I said. ‘We’ll have to leave some of them behind.’

  ‘Drag it,’ Claud said. ‘Just pull it behind you.’

  We started off through the pitch-black woods, pulling the pheasants behind us. ‘We’ll never make it all the way back to the village like this,’ I said.

  ‘Charlie’s never let me down yet,’ Claud said.

  We came to the margin of the wood and peered through the hedge into the lane. Claud said, ‘Charlie boy’ very softly and the old man behind the wheel of the taxi not five yards away poked his head out into the moonlight and gave us a sly toothless grin. We slid through the hedge, dragging the sacks after us along the ground.

  ‘Hullo!’ Charlie said. ‘What’s this?’

  ‘It’s cabbages,’ Claud told him. ‘Open the door.’

  Two minutes later we were safely inside the taxi, cruising slowly down the hill towards the village.

  It was all over now bar the shouting. Claud was triumphant, bursting with pride and excitement, and he kept leaning forward and tapping Charlie Kinch on the shoulder and saying, ‘How about it, Charlie? How about this for a haul?’ and Charlie kept glancing back pop-eyed at the huge bulging sacks lying on the floor between us and saying, ‘Jesus Christ, man, how did you do it?’

  ‘There’s six brace of them for you, Charlie,’ Claud said. And Charlie said, ‘I reckon pheasants is going to be a bit scarce up at Mr Victor Hazel’s opening-day shoot this year,’ and Claud said, ‘I imagine they are, Charlie, I imagine they are.’

  ‘What in God’s name are you going to do with a hundred and twenty pheasants?’ I asked.

  ‘Put them in cold storage for the winter,’ Claud said. ‘Put them in with the dogmeat in the deep-freeze at the filling-station.’

  ‘Not tonight, I trust?’

  ‘No, Gordon, not tonight. We leave them at Bessie’s house tonight.’

  ‘Bessie who?’

  ‘Bessie Organ.’

  ‘Bessie Organ!’

  ‘Bessie always delivers my game, didn’t you know that?’

  ‘I don’t know anything,’ I said. I was completely stunned. Mrs Organ was the wife of the Reverend Jack Organ, the local vicar.

  ‘Always choose a respectable woman to deliver your game,’ Claud announced. ‘That’s correct, Charlie, isn’t it?’

  ‘Bessie’s a right smart girl,’ Charlie said.

  We were driving through the village now and the street-lamps were still on and the men were wandering home from the pubs. I saw Will Prattley letting himself in quietly by the side-door of his fishmonger’s shop and Mrs Prattley’s head was sticking out of the window just above him, but he didn’t know it.

  ‘The vicar is very partial to roasted pheasant,’ Claud said. ‘He hangs it eighteen days,’ Charlie said, ‘then he gives it a couple of good shakes and all the feathers drop off.’

  The taxi turned left and swung in through the gates of the vicarage. There were no lights on in the house and nobody met us. Claud and I dumped the pheasants in the coal shed at the rear, and then we said good-bye to Charlie Kinch and walked back in the moonlight to the filling-station, empty-handed. Whether or not Mr Rabbetts was watching us as we went in, I do not know. We saw no sign of him.

  ‘Here she comes,’ Claud said to me the next morning.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Bessie – Bessie Organ.’ He spoke the name proudly and with a slight proprietary air, as though he were a general referring to his bravest officer.

  I followed him outside.

  ‘Down there,’ he said, pointing.

  Far away down the road I could see a small female figure advancing towards us.

  ‘What’s she pushing?’ I asked.

  Claud gave me a sly look.

  ‘There’s only one safe way of delivering game,’ he announced, ‘and that’s under a baby.’

  ‘Yes,’ I murmured, ‘yes, of course.’

  ‘That’ll be young Christopher Organ in there, aged one and a half. He’s a lovely child, Gordon.’

  I could just make out the small dot of a baby sitting high up in the pram, which had its hood folded down.

  ‘There’s sixty or seventy pheasants at least under that little nipper,’ Claud said happily. ‘You just imagine that.’

  ‘You can’t put sixty or seventy pheasants in a pram.’

  ‘You can if it’s got a deep well underneath it, and if you take out the mattress and pack them in tight, right up to the top. All you need then is a sheet. You’ll be surprised how little room a pheasant takes up when it’s limp.’

  We stood beside the pumps waiting for Bessie Organ to arrive. It was one of those warm windless September mornings with a darkening sky and a smell of thunder in the air.

  ‘Right through the village bold as brass,’ Claud said. ‘Good old Bessie.’

  ‘She seems in rather a hurry to me.’

  Claud lit a new cigarette from the stub of the old one. ‘Bessie is never in a hurry,’ he said.

  ‘She certainly isn’t walking normal,’ I told him. ‘You look.’

  He squinted at her through the smoke of his cigarette. Then he took the cigarette out of his mouth and looked again.

  ‘Well?’ I said.

  ‘She does seem to be going a tiny bit quick, doesn’t she?’ he said carefully.

  ‘She’s going damn quick.’

  There was a pause. Claud was beginning to stare very hard at the approaching woman.

  ‘Perhaps she doesn’t want to be caught