No Business of Mine

I tried to catch sight of the driver, but the car was equipped with a blue anti-dazzle windscreen, and I could only make out the silhouette of a man’s head.

I drove up Putney High Street, stopped at the traffic lights as they turned red. The Standard parked behind me.

I decided I would have to make certain that this man in the battered Standard was following me. If he was, I’d have to shake him. I wondered if Corridan had set one of his cops on to tailing me, decided it wasn’t likely.

I was glad I had the Buick because it was obviously more powerful than the Standard which looked to me to be only a fourteen horsepower job against my thirty-one. As soon as the traffic lights changed to yellow, I shoved down the accelerator pedal, made a racing get-away. I roared up the hill leading from Putney, changed into top, missing second, and belted forward with the speedometer swinging dangerously near eighty miles an hour.

I saw people staring after me, but as no policeman hove into sight, I couldn’t care less. I let the Buick have all the petrol it could take until I reached the top of the hill. Then I eased off the throttle, looked rather contentedly into the mirror, had the shock of my life. The Standard was about twenty feet from my tail.

I was still uncertain that I was being tailed. It might be that the guy had decided to show me I wasn’t the only one with a fast car. I now had a healthy respect for the battered Standard, whose shabby body obviously concealed a first-class engine, tuned for speed.

I kept on; so did the Standard. When I reached the beginning of the By-pass, and he was still a hundred yards or so behind me, I decided to be foxy.

I flapped my hand out of the window, pulled up by the side of the road, watched the Standard shoot past me. As it went by I spotted the driver. He looked a youth. He was dark, a greasy slouch hat was pulled down low, but I saw enough of his face to recognize him. He was the runt who’d tried to make a batter out of my brains the previous night.

Now feeling certain he had been tailing me, I watched the Standard go on, and I reached for a cigarette. I guessed he would be pretty mad by now, wondering what he could do. He couldn’t very well stop — couldn’t he? I had to grin. A couple of hundred yards farther up the road, he pulled up.

That settled it. I was being tailed, and I took out a pencil from my pocket and scribbled the licence number of the car on the back of an envelope.

Now I had to shake him. I didn’t hesitate. I owed him something for giving me a scare last night. I started the Buick, drove up to the Standard, braked sharply and was out of the car before the runt knew what was happening.

“Hello, pal,” I said, smiling at him. “A little bird tells me you’re following me. I don’t like it.” While I was speaking I took my penknife out, opened the blade. “Sorry to give you a little work, sonny,” I went on, “but it’ll do you a world of good.”

He just sat glowering at me, his lips drawn off his yellow teeth. He looked like an infuriated ferret.

I bent down, stuck my penknife into one of his tyres. The air hissed out; the tyre went flat.

“These tyres aren’t what they were, are they, son?” I asked, folding the blade down, putting the knife in my pocket. “I’ll leave you to change the wheel. I have an appointment right now.”

He called me a word which in normal times would have annoyed me, but I felt he had some justification.

“If you’d like to collect a tyre lever, we’ll have another little joust,” I said amiably.

He repeated the word, so I left him.

He was still sitting there as I drove past, and he was still sitting there when I reached the bend in the road some six hundred yards farther on. I guessed he was a sore pup all right.

I reached Horsham in half an hour and I was sure now that I wasn’t being followed. The traffic was negligible, and for miles I drove with nothing behind me.

From Horsham I took the Worthing road, branched off after a few miles and approached Lakeham. The country was magnificent, and the day hot and sunny. I enjoyed the last few miles, thinking I should have explored that part of England before instead of spending so many days and nights in stuffy, dirty London.

A signpost told me I was within three-quarters of a mile of Lakeham, and I slowed down, driving along the narrow lane until I reached a few cottages, a pub and a post office. I guessed I’d arrived.

I pulled up outside the pub, went in.

It was a quaint box-like place, almost like a doll’s house. The woman who served me a double whisky seemed ready to talk, especially when she heard my accent.

We chatted about the surrounding country and this and that, then I asked her if she knew where a cottage called Beverley hung out.

“Oh, you mean Miss Scott?” she said, and there was an immediate look of disapproval in her eyes. “Her place’s about a mile farther on. You take the first on your left and the cottage lies off the road. It has a thatched roof and a yellow gate. You can’t miss it.”