Chase the Morning

Frederick was all right. In more sense than one; for as I got back to the warehouse door he was just tiptoeing up to it, with the jack handle from my car clasped in a pudgy fist. He leaped like a hare when I emerged, but he didn’t drop it. ‘Oh, my dear sir!’ he said, and rolled against the wall. ‘Most awfully sorry – so cowardly of me – saw you go for help – but simply lacked the nerve –’

‘Oh no?’ I grinned, which seemed to unnerve him all the more. I must have looked pretty ghastly, and I was thinking how I’d behaved. Courage came late to us both; to him it had come unaided. ‘I left the keys, Frederick. And I know you can drive.’

He mopped his face with an enormous silk handkerchief. ‘Indeed, sir! But would you believe it never once occurred to me?’

‘Frankly, no. Put that thing back and come along; Jyp wants you to meet somebody …’

The old man’s face could hardly darken with anger, but it looked as if it did, his smooth brows knotting and his whiskers quivering with the strength of his feelings. Neither could his neighbour turn pale, exactly; but the fat man Jyp had hauled out of his hiding place had gone a strange shade of grey, and was quivering like a jelly. Small wonder, with his late employers lying in assorted pieces around him, and Jyp’s sword resting idly on his shoulder.

‘This is absolutely monstrous, sir!’ puffed Frederick. ‘Nay, outrageous! I demand an explanation, Cuffee! To make me a dupe, to involve my long-established business as an unwitting party to some low deceit – some common fraud –’

‘Seems pretty uncommon to me!’ interrupted Mall cheerfully. ‘Thought I’d played the gamut of cozening and coney-catching, but this one’s left me dry!’

‘An explanation, Cuffee!’ persisted Frederick. ‘Or I shall have to take steps! Severe ones! What will you tell the Invisibles, man? Think! You can’t argue with Ogoun!’

‘Maybe I’ve a better idea,’ drawled Jyp. ‘Our late friends here didn’t have time to get anything away, now, did they? So if there was something here, chances are there still is! So we should take a good look – get to the root of all this, if you’ll pardon the expression!’ Mall groaned. ‘And Mr Cuffee here can do the work!’ Jyp was watching the shopkeeper closely; and I was a little surprised at the man’s reaction. He went even greyer and got up enough nerve to start blustering; but Jyp jabbed him with the sword, and he slouched to his feet, still protesting. I didn’t like that. It suggested we’d hit on something he was more afraid of than Jyp. And that didn’t make sense; for two pins Jyp would have cut Cuffee’s throat there and then.

For all that, Jyp didn’t goad him more than was absolutely necessary. I was glad, for a good many reasons. We herded the man, still protesting, round to the far corner of the warehouse, to where a great stack of misshapen bales stood in three rough layers against the wall. The odour of them was indescribable – not bad, exactly, just indescribable, except that some of it was dry earth, and the rest suggested medicine rather than food, and resin rather than spice. Like menthol, it seemed to numb some senses and heighten others; and it was very penetrating. As the lantern caught the shapes I saw they were enormous square-sided bundles of crude straw netting, through whose wide meshes dirty pinkish things, gnarled and knobby, stuck out in obscene-looking attitudes.

Frederick motioned Cuffee that way. ‘Open the bales!’ he ordered his neighbour. ‘Each one now, one by one!’

Cuffee held back, glaring around at us, sweating hard. I saw now he was by no means old, and he had a weightlifter’s muscles beneath his dirty t-shirt – from hauling furniture, no doubt; but his great quaggy belly put ten years on him, and fear seamed his face. He mouthed an obscenity at us all, and visibly faltered before seizing the first bale on the top row. He dug his fingers into the tough netting and effortlessly ripped it apart, then skipped sharply back. Roots exploded everywhere, tumbling down around our ankles; the heady smell billowed up about us, but there was nothing else there. ‘Carefully, damn you!’ growled Jyp. ‘Don’t go damaging Frederick’s stock!’