The Bungalow-15

Continued from Chapter 14: The Bungalow-14 | ABCtales

“There’s no need to tell me that you’re going out for a pint of milk,” said Detective Rees, enunciating every word as if talking to talking to a simpleton. For the past few days, Hawke had taken to calling to announce every trip he was making, even just popping round to Hayley’s or next door to Auntie Hilda. Sometimes the detective would have to run through half a dozen messages.

“Just wanted to be certain – covering my back. Well, as I said, I’m popping out for some milk, at about ten hundred hours.”

“OK.”

Detective Rees slammed the phone down.

 

Hawke went into the garage and squeezed between the wall and Gertie. He emerged after a couple of minutes, pushing his white 21-speed Specialized Sirrus ahead of him. Outside, he pressed each tyre in turn; still firm, he’d pumped them up the night before. Then he swung his right leg over the crossbar and sped off down Hilltop Lane.

It was good to be on two wheels again. He passed the wooded gade that hid Chaldon Church just off to the left, bumping on the broken tarmac down the hill and up the other side, past the cornfield. It was less effortful than he remembered. Then he swoop down long, straight Ditches Lane, juddering over the cattle grid at the bottom.

In Coulsdon, he stopped at Tesco and stuffed his card into the ATM, drawing out the maximum amount - £250 – but he didn’t go inside the shop. Instead, he remounted and pedalled off towards Purley. On he went, to Croydon, down North End, dodging round the morning shoppers. Mayday Hospital, Norbury, Streatham, down the hill to Brixton and over Vauxhall Bridge. Now he was jockeying with the buses and delivery vans on Edgware Road.

Edgware Road was the A5, the old road to Holyhead, if you were so inclined.

Marjorie had liked to tell him the story of the artist Edward Burra who, tiring of the cloying picturesqueness of 1930s Rye in Kent, told his parents that he was going out for cigarettes, then jumped on a boat to New York where he spent the next several years painting the whores and pimps, gangsters and hustlers of Harlem. The stgory wasn’t actually true, said ChatGPT, he’d subsequently discovered but that wasn’t important.

Sooner than he’d anticipated, the city was behind him. Not green fields exactly, but straggling northern Home Counties suburbia, where it forever seemed to be 1973, he’d always thought. Tom would still be living the Good Life with Felicity Kendall, retired couples would be poring over the seating plan for the second daughter’s wedding. Now it was real countryside, though with that slightly damaged look it took on when the big city was still close; evidence of fly-tipping, plastic bags caught in the hedgerows, steel barriers still outnumbering wooden five-bar farm gates.

 

He paused, his need for activity temporarily sated, in Dunstable. He had a couple of pints and a pie and chips at the Crystal Palace, down by the canal. It was three-thirty. Was that it? Should he head back home, maybe load his bike onto a train to London, call it a day? NO! Fuck the Surrey Police, fuck Detective Rees, fuck the curtain-twitchers fuck the lot of them! He’d have his few days of freedom, before the net finally closed in. He left the pub, remounted the bike. “I am not a number, I am a free man!” he roared. A woman walking her white miniature poodle stopped and turned round to look.

 

 

He spotted the B&B sign just outside Towcester. He paid cash and asked the lady if he could keep his bike round the back, out of sight of the road. You couldn’t be too careful these days, could you?

 

 

He was back on the road at eight the next morning. Not too hot yet. The long distance traffic didn’t use the A5 much these days, just locals and truck drivers seeking out one of the old-time transport caffs that had survived the motorway age.

 

 

Shrewsbury, a lovely town. Merchants in the Middle Ages had built fabulous black and white houses. Then, in the 19^th Century, the Victorians had had a go, putting up their own half-timbered buildings, every bit as ornate, every bit as beautiful.

The woman showed him his room, up on the third floor of the tall terraced brick townhouse town, wheezing as she stopped on every landing, her blue-veined legs rocking from side to side as she laboured up the stairs. He didn’t hold with all this online booking malarky, he told her, cash was still king in his book. Cash would be wonderful, she said.

 

He found a red phone kiosk and lifted the receiver. Miraculously, there was the purring sound of a functioning phone, but he had to get his mobile out to look up Hales’ number, he’d never had cause to remember it. She answered; he shovelled a couple of pound coins in. “Don’t worry about me, I’m fine.”

“Where the hell are you, Budgie?”

“Heaven.”

“Are you alright?”

“Better than ever. See you soon –“

“Peep-peep-peep-peep!”

He made a second call, to book up his next night’s accommodation.

 

 

He drank in the Loggerheads that evening. The pretty barmaid, her black ponytail all a-bob, apologised for keeping him waiting. No bother he said. Actually, he loved the ritual of standing at the bar, part of the rhythm of the hot, dreamy golden evening. He got chatting to a couple of old guys  inside the small snug, the Poet's Room. “I’m cycling from Surrey to Wales,” he told them.

“You on the run from the law,” one of them asked.

“Yes,” he said.

 

 

Llangollen was picturesque; the first place of any size over the border on the A5 and it conformed to the Englishman’s requirements of what a Welsh town should look like – mountain stream tumbling over mossy stones and under the stone bridge with its pointed arches. It was exclusively English accents in the pub – staff and customers. The Welsh must have retreated into the mountains, holed up with Owain Glyndwr.

A long, long straight past Carrigydrudion. The road marched across bleak, open moorland but there were more mountains ahead. Suddenly, a screech of tyres behind him. He whirled round; a green Vauxhall was three inches from his rear wheem, the road surface smoking behind the car. The driver hadn’t seen him until the last possible second, then slammed on the brakes.

Hawke didn’t know how to feel. Not shocked; he hadn’t witnessed his brush with death. But he felt…something. That maybe his luck, such as it was, couldn’t last forever.

 

 

He paused again at Betws-y-Coed. The place looked bigger than it was, outdoor gear shops, hotels, pubs and a chapel lined the main road which was thronged with tourists, but the mountains rearing up behind meant that the town was little more than one street deep, like a stage set.

He remounted the Sirrus. Now there was a long, slow uphill drag, the old place where Telford the engineering genius hadn’t been able to avoid a gradient. He’s scarcely encountered a hill worthy of the name since leaving London. They used to put extra horses on the mail coaches on this stretch and the modern road had an extra crawler lane so that cars speeding up the hill could overtake the trucks and tourist coaches struggling up the grade.

He rewarded himself with a halt at Capel Curig; there was a convenience store selling beer with a couple of tables outside. He bought a carton of long life milk too.

 

Capel Curig was where he finally parted company with telford’s Road, the A5. He forked left onto the A4086, towards Pen-y-Pass, Llanberis and Caernarfon. He cycled past the twin Llynau Mymbyr, slate blue, the surface just rippled by the breeze.

 

The Pen-y-Gwryd Hotel was impossibly remote, alone among the moors and mountains, as if a film set designer had been ordered to create ‘small isolated pub in the middle of nowhere. The wooden interior was festooned with all manner of climbing boots, hanging by their laces and other mountaineering gear. The place had been used as a base by the first guys to climb Everest while their were doing their warm-up in the Welsh mountains.

 

He gave his room upstairs a cursory once-over; it was fine, he told the manageress. An oriental lady – by what process had she ended up here, surrounded by the wild mountains of Eryri? Had some employment agency in Thailand or Vietnam sold a tale of working in an idyllic English inn, half timbered in timeless misty hedgerows? Of course, this was Wales, not England. Another country.

 

He sat in the little bay window, nursing a pint of Mŵs Piws - Purple Moose - from the local brewery. A police car, bearing the insignia of the North Wales forced drew up alongside, slowed, then turned into the car park. Probably just a routine visit; perhaps they’d had a break-in or something? The policemen came into the car, the taller uniformed one stooping under the entrance door, taking off his cap. The other guy followed, a burly guy, might have made a handy prop-forward in his younger days. He was in plain clothes, though his suit and tie stood out like a sore thumb in the hills were everyone else was in garish outdoor gear.

“Mr Hawke?” he said, sitting down opposite. The uniformed man drew up a stool and sat astride it, legs bowed.

“How the hell … how on earth did you KNOW?”

“We received a notification from the Surrey Police – when you turned onto the Pen-y-Pass road, this place was a fair guess. Only place for miles.”

The North Wales officers were polite, slightly bemused, amused even. Probably made a change from chasing sheep rustlers or whatever. Apparently, a sharp-eyed constable had spotted him on the road north of Towcester in the morning, then again somewhere near Cannock and, when he saw the notification from Surrey, had put two and two together. They’d figured he might be following the A5, they told him. They’d lost track of him when – they hadn’t known that he’d overnighted in Shrewsbury  - but he’d popped back up into view on the A5, somewhere near Betws.

They asked him to keep his phone on, from now on, so they could check in with him, if they needed to. “Be obliged if you’d check your voicemail too, the reception up in the mountains can be a bit hit and miss. And could you give us a rough idea of your plans?” the tec said.

“Not sure to be honest. Thought maybe carrying on to Caernarfon tomorrow.”

“Bit of a climb up to Pen-y-Pass,” said the uniform. “Mind you, even tougher coming up the other side from Llanberis. But lovely ride along the lake there; flat or downhill all the way.” They recommended the Black Boy in Caernarfon.

Continued in Chapter 16: The Bungalow-16 | ABCtales