Peter May - Runaway

‘Alright,’ the driver said. ‘Who are you?’

Dave glanced at Jack.

And Jack said, ‘The party from Leeds.’

‘Are you hell!’ The driver glared at them. ‘I’m just off the phone to Leeds. The party that were due to join the bus there was found wandering about the city centre. Poor bloody souls wondering what happened to their lift, and asking if the coach had gone yet.’

Jack saw panic in Dave’s eyes.

‘Run!’ Dave shouted, and he shoved the driver in the chest, forcing the big man to step back and sit heavily in his seat.

But the speed of their exit from the coach failed to live up to the urgency in Dave’s call to flee. He climbed stiffly down the steps and turned to help Ricky down with Maurie. Jack was forced to stand and wait until the door was clear, embarrassed and avoiding the driver’s eyes.

The driver looked at them with a mix of anger, consternation and amusement. He shook his head and waited a full sixty seconds until all four of them had made it on to the tarmac.

Then he stood up and leaned out of the door. ‘At that rate you might just make it to the loos by the time the cops arrive.’ He started dialling a number on his mobile. ‘I’m calling them now. But even if they take their time coming, you boys are going nowhere fast. No way out of here except back on to the motorway.’

They made their way as fast as Maurie’s progress would allow, across the car park to the Moto building that housed the shops, restaurants and toilets. They went straight to the men’s room, where Jack and Dave stood at the urinal listening to Maurie throwing up in a cubicle, the door open and young Ricky standing over him to stop him from toppling head first into the bowl.

Dave glanced at Jack. ‘This is madness, Jack. We shouldnae have done it.’

‘Bit late now.’ And Rachel’s words to him in the taxi came echoing back across half a century. ‘Only thing we can do is get there.’

‘Then what?’

Jack shrugged and zipped up his fly. ‘Whatever Maurie wants.’ He glanced over his shoulder and lowered his voice. ‘I’ll be surprised if he makes it through the week.’

After they had washed their hands, and Maurie’s face, and Ricky had wiped the sick from the old man’s collar, they went into Costa Coffee and sat at a table.

‘Can’t even afford a bloody coffee,’ Ricky muttered. ‘So what are we going to do? Sit here until the police come and get us?’

‘No!’ Maurie surprised them all with the strength in his voice.

‘What, then?’ Jack said. ‘Like the driver told us, there’s no way out of here except by getting back on the road.’

‘We’ll hitch a lift.’

They all looked at Maurie as if he were mad.

‘Maurie, there are four of us,’ Jack said. ‘And none of us have got the legs for it. I used to look quite good in a kilt, but a miniskirt’s out of the question.’

Maurie forgot their woes for a moment and chuckled to himself. ‘Raitch would have got us a lift in five minutes.’ Then almost as if he only now heard his own voice, he became suddenly self-conscious and glanced at Jack.

Jack’s face reddened. ‘Aye,’ is all he said, and he looked at his hands on the table in front of him.

Dave stood up suddenly. ‘Well, if we’re gonnae get a lift, we’d better start looking for it before the cops get here.’

They decided that their best chance of cadging a ride would be at the petrol pumps and so made their slow, painful way across the parking lot to the filling station.

‘This is crazy,’ Ricky kept saying. ‘No one’s going to give us a lift. I wouldn’t give us a lift.’

Jack left the others hanging around the pumps, and positioned himself outside the door to the shop where all the motorists came and went to pay for their petrol.

The first person he approached, the driver of a Ford Transit, told him in no uncertain terms where he could go, and Jack lifted two fingers to his back as he returned to his van. Others weren’t as rude, but equally firm in refusing them a lift.

The rest watched as Jack stopped half a dozen or more motorists on their way in or out, before he got into a lengthy conversation with a young man in a dark suit. When the man disappeared into the shop to pay, Jack hurried across the forecourt to a blue Volvo Estate. He stopped at the driver’s door and peered inside, then turned and waved urgently to his nephew and his two old friends.

‘Come on, quick,’ he said as they approached, and he held open the rear door for Dave and Maurie. Dave slipped in first, then Ricky helped Maurie and was about to follow him when Jack said, ‘Not you. You’re driving.’ He opened the driver’s door for him, then glanced towards the shop before hurrying round to climb in the passenger side.

But Ricky just stood on the forecourt looking bemused. ‘Driving?’

‘Hurry up and get in,’ Jack shouted at him. ‘Quick! The key’s in the ignition.’

And suddenly it dawned on Ricky what was going on. ‘I’m not stealing a car!’ he said emphatically.

‘We’re not stealing it, Rick. We’re borrowing it. The young man’s got sales business in there. We’ll drop it off for him at the next service stop. A minor inconvenience.’

Ricky was incredulous. ‘You mean he’s agreed to it?’

‘Just get in the fucking car!’

Ricky slid reluctantly behind the wheel.

‘Go, go!’ Jack shouted at him.

And Ricky started the car. He pushed it into first gear and eased it out from beneath the canopy towards the exit signs.

‘Why would he agree to lend us his car?’

Jack rolled his eyes. ‘Sometimes I wonder if they didn’t get their figures wrong when they gave you that IQ test.’

Dave was cackling in the back. ‘Haha! Just like Thelma and what’s-her-name.’

‘You mean we are stealing it?’ Ricky glanced in the rear-view mirror and saw the young man in the dark suit running after them, shouting and waving his arms. ‘Jesus!’ He started to slow down.

Jack looked at him, urgency in his voice. ‘Better go, son, or we really will be in trouble.’

Ricky breathed his anger and frustration. ‘I can’t believe I’m doing this!’ And he dropped into second gear and accelerated away from the chasing driver.

As they passed their coach, still parked up in the commercial vehicles section, Dave leaned out of the back window and raised his middle finger to the driver whose face, as they sped by, was a mask of astonishment.

‘Madness! Pure bloody madness!’ Ricky’s eyes had the startled look of a deer caught in headlights. They flickered constantly between the road and his rear-view mirror. ‘I don’t know why I let you talk me into any of this. We’re going to go to jail, you know that?’ He turned his gaze, fired with fear and anger, on his grandfather. ‘You’ve ruined my life.’

There was a time when Jack, too, might have shared Ricky’s anxiety. But to his surprise, he found that he really didn’t care any more. What did any of it matter? And what could anyone do to him that might be worse than the life of mediocrity he had lived until now? The life he had wasted. If it came to it, he would step up and take all the blame.

‘We’ll be on the security cameras,’ Ricky wailed. ‘The cops’ll know who we are.’

‘They won’t have a clue who we are,’ Jack said. ‘Three old guys and a fat boy borrowing a car and dropping it off at the next services. Not exactly high priority when you compare us to murderers and bank robbers.’

But Ricky wasn’t going to be comforted. ‘And that poor man.’

‘What poor man?’ Dave asked.

‘The one whose car we’re in!’

‘Poor, nothing!’ Jack said. ‘That was a bloody expensive suit he was wearing. And the car’s not his, anyway. He’s a rep. It’s a company car. And like I said, it’s not stolen, it’s borrowed.’