9. THE GINGER NUT

THE CASE OF THE DIAMOND DENTURES, 9

”What we can do,” murmured Royston to Margie, “is give you a lift if you like.”

“I’m going the other way, and anyway I like walking,” replied Margie, obstinately. “just point me in the direction of the love of my life and i’ll make my own way there, panties in my hand and heart ready and willing!”

“You can be so disgusting,” her sister told her, rather too primly for her words to be generated by anything but jealousy.

“A couple of miles behind us,” Royston told her, “and if I judge Igor properly he’s probably looking out for you. Are you sure you didn’t pick up his false teeth while he was fishing?”

“If I had, don’t you think I’d have told him!” flared Margie, “I love the socks off the man, and anyway he had them that night when we were … sleeping.!”

“I know. He wasn’t wearing any socks when we saw him,” said Angelina. “No trousers either. Just fluorescent boxer shorts.”

“That’s my Igor,” chirruped Margie, and she set off, a little unsteadily bearing in mind the heels on her shoes, towards where the hermit’s cave was.

“Well, here we go, back on the way to somewhere,” sighed Royston, and he manoeuvred his Land Rover onto the road.

After a short while they came to a junction none of them had noticed on the way down.

“That’s funny,” he muttered, “I don’t remember any junction when we were on our way out. It was just a straight road, surely.”

“You wouldn’t have noticed it,” pointed out Angelina, “it being two almost parallel roads merging in a fork, with us zooming along one of them. The big question is, now that we’re going the other way, which fork do we take, the left or right one?”

“Left, I think,” muttered Royston, uncertainly.

“Then left it is, and pray that it’s going the right way,” said Angelina.

Royston continued slowly going down the narrow road for several miles, frowning as he went, becoming increasingly convinced that he might be on the wrong road.

“I’ll have to invest in one of those Satellite Navigating things,” he murmured to Angelina, “what do you think of the way we’re going?”

“It’s different, but who knows, all roads lead somewhere, and when we arrive at this road’s somewhere we might be able to find ourselves on a map,” she replied helpfully.

Royston continued, driving slowly to conserve battery, which was draining faster than he would have liked.

“That’s better,” boomed Blinky suddenly, “everything’s come back in focus! I say, what’s that down there?”

He pointed ahead of them, but neither Royston nor Angelina could see anything other than the stunted vegetation in the wasteland they’d become accustomed to.

“Just a boring old road,” sighed Angelina, “with nothing and nobody in sight, just more and more road. Igor certainly made sure he was in the back of beyond!”

“Yes there is though: look: there between the scrubby things that pass for trees in this neck of the woods!” exclaimed Blinky.

“maybe … yes, I see a roof-top!” murmured Angelina. “That’s got to mean something: buildings, maybe a whole village of them, and people. And where there’s a village and people there’s usually a pub, and I’m dying for a wee dram.”

“That’s not such a bad idea,” murmured Royston, “and my batteries are dying for a wee charge too or they’ll give out and we’ll have to walk. There might be somewhere we can refresh both ourselves and this old bird.”

There might have been a roof-top flickering in and out of sight behind the low mess of stunted trees but it seemed to take them ages to arrive at habitation. And when they did it was little more than a hamlet, but it did have a pub, The Ginger Nut, and that pub showed signs of being open.

But there was no petrol station that might have had a charging point for the car’s batteries, just a small ancient church, a few cottages that looked to be as ancient as the landscape they sat in, and the pub.

“I’ll just have to hope the solar panels do their job then,” grunted Royston, making sure that when he parked he was in open sunlight with no danger of shadow falling across the car’s roof unless unwanted clouds drifted their way.

The Ginger Nut was almost deserted when they finally made their way in. There was just the one customer, a crusty old man with a gnarled walking stick, a small black dog at his feet and a pint pot of thick black beer in front of him. The smoky fragrance on the air showed that in this particular hostelry scant regard was paid to anti-smoking regulations, and the dimly glowing bowl of his meerschaum pipe indicated where the thickened air might come from.

“Well, I like this,” grunted Blinky, “it takes me back a year or two to when my old man, God bless his soul, and I hope he does, bless it I mean, he used to take me to his local where an old timer just like that would be smoking an almost identical pipe, and nobody suffered because of it unless you count the landlord who died of cancer, but he was almost fifty.”

“You’ll have to bang on the bar,” croaked the one and only customer. “Ronnie’s changing a barrel, and he takes his time, he does, changing barrels when he’s down in the depths with Janie.”

Royston was tempted to ask who Janie might be, but he banged on the bar as per suggestion instead.

“’Old on to yer ‘at, Ronnie!” came drifting up the stairs that apparently led down to a beer cellar.

“It’s strangers, Nobby,” replied the geriatric customer, “ya want me to serve ‘em?”

“Go on then, Ronny,” came up the stairs in a cloud of stale air and beer fumes, and the smoking elderly man heaved himself out of his seat, warned his dog not to think of going anywhere, and manoeuvred himself until he was behind the bar.

“Nice day for it, pardon,” he said, “and what will it be?”

“Whisky. Double. No, make it treble,” replied Angelina with a sweet smile, “and the fellows will have pints.”

“’Ave you fixed that barrel yet, Nobby?” bellowed Ronnie to the staircase.

“It’s on, Ronnie, best pull ‘er through first,” came the reply followed by a very feminine and almost squealing “do that again, Nob, go on!”

“That’s Janie. Barmaid extra-ordinate,” explained the geriatric Ronnie as he pulled two pins of what may or may not have been beer and produced what he decided was a treble whisky by pushing a glass against the whisky optic an uncounted number of times, “getting instruction on barrel work from Nobby and preparing for the show,” he added.

Once served, the three of them sat at a table as far from Ronnie and his pipe as they could get and looked around them.

It was a depressing room. The dominant colour was yellow, the jaundiced chrome of the tobacco smoked by Ronnie and no doubt a motley collection of others when they put in an appearance. The seating was arranged so that just about everyone in there would be able to see the ancient television set that dominated the room.

And despite the fact that it was a hot sunny day outside there was a chill in the air. But the world outside could only be seen through the windows, and they were as yellow as everything else giving the entire world a depressing ochre coat.

After what seemed an age and when Angelina had managed to sip her way through most of her treble whisky there came a shout from below,

“On our way, Ronnie!”

And from the depths rose the landlord who was checking that his trouser zip was done up properly followed by a barmaid, an exceptionally buxom once-young but not yet what you’d call old woman who had about her the flushed appearance of one who not moments ago had been engaged in fascinating physical exercise.

“They’re heavy, then barrels,” smirked the landlord.

They might have been, but that didn’t explain his appearance and the gigantic clown’s red nose that cast a huge shadow on the rest of his pasty face.

© Peter Rogerson