Hot Blood (Bloodwords Book 1) (31 page)

The car he had followed and watched from his
balcony wasn’t a Ferrari. The truth of it was that it was a humble Toyota with
the outer panels chopped off and replaced by copies moulded in glass fibre to
create a passable copy of a Ferrari. Very Passable. All the right badges and
decals had been fixed in all the right places, the master stroke being that of
replacing the Japanese four-cylinder engine with an Alfa Romeo V6. It looked
right and sounded right, only the Toyota interior spoiling the image. Without
doubt the conversion had been very well done. Professionally done. Indeed, the
result had fooled Simon and he was pretty clued up.

The car might well be legal but why it should
have been driven to the hidden car store in the country still puzzled him, as
did why some of the registrations he had passed over to Debbie had raised some
eyebrows and caused Inspector Radcliffe to jump on him.

Why had that been?

A good question. But one that without access to
owner and address details he was no nearer to answering. Quicker and more
accurate than taking notes, he took out his digital camera and shot a quick
photo of the details sheet before making his way out of the park and back to
the town centre.

Twenty-Two

Though not exactly the smartest pub in town,
the Queens Head did offer good pub grub. An honest to goodness no-frills place,
the meals were more than eatable and the coffee always fresh brewed ground,
though admittedly from pods and not his favourite
Bewleys
.
The bar was often quite busy but there was always a free table in one of the
two front rooms. And the prices were rock bottom. So the Queens Head had become
a favourite haunt. On market days, a morning rummaging around the stalls always
drummed up an appetite and no matter what their plans had been they seemed to
end up at the Queens.

Pushing through the big old doors, he checked out
the room to his right. Unusually, every table in the room was taken. And she
wasn’t there. Backing out he turned around and checked the room to the left,
but again, the room was full.
MotorFest
was certainly
boosting local business. He could not remember a time when they had not been
able to just wander in and have their pick of tables at which to enjoy a
leisurely lunch.

Although they preferred the cosy atmosphere in
one of these two rooms, perhaps she had gone through to one of the tables in
the beer garden at the back of the pub or was waiting at the bar. Then he saw
her waving from across the room where she had managed to commandeer a table in
the corner.

Threading his way between the tables in the
packed room he gave her a peck on the cheek and asked if she had ordered. She
hadn’t. Actually she had only just arrived herself and been lucky enough to
grab the last unoccupied table.

‘Your usual?’ he asked, adding, ‘but we will
have to be quick, we need to be forming up for the first cavalcade by quarter
to two and that doesn’t give us long.’

Having ordered, Simon broached the subject of
the Ferrari that wasn’t. ‘I’ve made a bloody fool of myself,’ he admitted,
embarrassed as Debbie raised her eyebrows and smiled cheekily at him.

‘Again?’ she teased him, ‘what have you done
this time?’

While they waited for their meals he outlined
how his obsession with the Ferrari had turned out to be a complete blind alley.
‘I should have thought of a replica panel set,’ he said. ‘After all, I’ve built
three kit cars myself and my own car is quite a mix of parts, so it should have
been obvious to me. Instead of that I wasted loads of time chasing it around
the countryside and going up virtual blind alleys. I feel a real Pratt.’

‘Perhaps not that much of a waste of time,’ replied
Debbie. ‘If you hadn’t followed it then you wouldn’t have seen the other cars
or noted their registrations, so I would have really been in the shit about the
plates in the Green Fields workshop.’

‘Hell, I am sorry about that Debbie,’ he
countered. ‘Your guys must be really touchy. It was nothing more than getting a
few details so why the problem? I didn’t think for even one second that it
would have got you into any trouble.’

Debbie looked at him seriously, locking eyes
with him and puckering her lips before answering him. ‘Well I did Simon. I knew
the potential consequences. It wasn’t just unauthorised use of police systems,
as far as the owners of the cars were concerned it was also invasion of
privacy.
 
It’s set out in official
procedures and there is no ambiguity. Get found out and it is a
sackable
offence. No questions asked.’

‘Christ Debbie,’ he responded. ‘If it was that
critical and you knew, why did you do it? You should have said no.’

Her eyes still locked on his, her expression
saddened. ‘If you have to ask that sort of question,’ she responded, ‘it would
be pointless me explaining. But it wouldn’t be the first pointless thing I have
done, so for the record, I did it for you
you
daft
sod.’

Smiling sheepishly he took her hands in his
across the table. ‘No, my love,’ he said. ‘I am the daft sod. But you know that
I would never ever do anything to hurt you. So, if it is a
sackable
offence but the info I gave has helped, where do you stand now? What’s the
state of play? And what was the relevance of the other cars out in the country?
What is that place anyway?’

‘Too many questions Simon,’ she said. ‘And most
of them I cannot answer because if I did I would definitely be out of a job. At
the outset I thought that nobody would know what I had done but when you gave
me the details from the country place – it is a former Catholic college
by the way that was bought by a developer but hasn’t yet been developed –
I dug a little deeper and got myself into the position where if I did not pass on
my findings then I would have been in even deeper water for withholding
information. For a time it looked as though no matter what I did I would be on
the dole. At the moment it is about fifty
fifty
.
That’s quite an achievement, believe me.’

‘So why didn’t you go to Frank Davies then?’ he
asked. ‘He’s your Inspector isn’t he? Why did you go to the other one. What’s
he called?
Raptish
or something? He doesn’t know you
all that well does he?’

Looking at him soulfully she continued, ‘There
were reasons,’ she said in a matter of fact way that prevented him pushing the
point. ‘But Don, his name’s Radcliffe by the way, has been brilliant. Let’s
just say that if I had gone to Frank with this my job wouldn’t have lasted more
than a couple of days,’ giving him a look that clearly telegraphed that the
subject was now closed, adding, ‘and he wouldn’t have come out to talk to you
over a coffee at your house either, he would have dragged you to the station
like criminal.’

Sitting in the coupe a short while later, all
thoughts had turned to the soon to begin cavalcade. Lined up waiting for the
Mayor to flag them off, all they could see ahead of them was a sea of faces.
Everyone had left the town centre exhibits, the park was virtually empty, and
fifteen thousand enthusiastic people now lined the ring road.

‘I’ve never seen this many people in
Ormskirk
,’ commented Debbie, ‘the atmosphere is fantastic.’
Six cars ahead of them the Mayor draped a union flag across the windscreen of
the first car in the cavalcade, then, with a showman’s flurry raised it high to
flag off the first car. Engines revved, children and their parents in the
watching crowd cheered and waved, and the first cavalcade moved off.

From the start line, the road went slightly
uphill for a couple of hundred yards to a slightly banked right hand bend.
Pavements both side of the road were packed up to ten deep with onlookers,
waving and shouting as the stream of cars drove by. After a short straight, the
road took a sharp left turn followed almost immediately by an equally sharp
right to pass a church.

In the Olympic, Simon enjoyed this section, the
little car cheered on by the enthusiastic crowd as it swept through the bends,
flicking the nimble little car first to the left, then to the right. Holding
the Olympic in a lower gear as he exited the church right-hander so that the
revs rose and a majestic Italianate howl reverberated back off the buildings on
either side, Simon held the centreline of the narrow road. Before them was a
section dubbed the Stokers Straight by a couple of club members since the most
prominent feature along it’s length was a family owned furniture store of the
same name. But to the drivers in the cavalcade, the undulating nature of the
road added spice to the section which first dropped down from the church, then
levelled out before dropping down again, leading in to a rise over a stone
walled railway bridge just after the furniture store. The rises and falls were
slight, and in normal driving virtually unnoticed by most drivers, but with a
cavalcade of almost thirty cars all held in lower gears and taking a racing
line through the slightly banana shaped straight, everything seemed enhanced
and drivers seemed to use the slight rises as launch ramps, the cars ‘becoming
light’ as they peaked over the bridge, suspension travel at its greatest and
tyres only just remaining in contact with the road.

The drivers were enjoying themselves, and none
more so than Simon.

‘It’s a pity we are held down to such a slow
speed,’ he shouted to Debbie, noise levels in the coupe rising as the melodic
howl bounced back of the houses as they flashed past. ‘The section round the
church would have been great if we could have driven it a bit faster, and I
would love to get my foot down along this straight.’

‘You’re not doing so bad as it is,’ she
replied. ‘I thought you were told not to exceed the speed limit.’

‘That’s right. Your opposite numbers in the
Lancashire force said that if the event did not conform to RTA we would have to
have lots of special permits, risk assessments and so on, not to mention crowd
control barriers.’

‘Road Traffic Act says 30mph on these roads but
you went faster than that past Stokers,’ she observed as Simon dropped down off
the bridge and negotiated another sharp bend.

Grinning, Simon stole a quick glance at her
before returning his concentration to the road. ‘Tricks of the trade my love,’
he said. ‘I dropped back before the church
esses
so
that a big gap opened up between us and the car in front. That gave me the
opportunity to go a bit faster on the straight to catch up because we are
supposed to be fairly close together. They said it is a better sight for the
crowd if we go past in a steady stream rather than big gaps between the cars,’
adding cheekily, ‘it’s not my fault if we got separated and I had to catch up!’

With more tight ninety-degree turns to re-cross
the railway and pass the bus station, the now tightly bunched cavalcade neared
the end of the lap as Debbie’s mobile started to ring. After a few seconds she
said, ‘in
Ormskirk
sir,’ then listened again. Other
than that the call was obviously from one of her superiors, Simon could glean
nothing. Debbie was listening intently but saying little.

‘No sir,’ she said, then after a few seconds,
‘I’m with Simon Charlton sir.’ Falling silent again while obviously being given
some sort of instruction, she finally added, ‘but we are in his car sir.’ Then,
casting a quick glance across at Simon she said, ‘if you put it that way sir.
OK. We are on it now. I’ll call you back,’ and closed the call.

The cavalcade had now completed the first of
its three laps of the ring road course and where this would normally be
punctuated by regular stoppages for traffic lights and pedestrian crossings,
the
MotorFest
was a new experience for all the
drivers. Though little more than a mile in total, to a man, every driver was
enjoying the experience of a continuous run ignoring normal traffic lanes and
instead taking racing lines. Most had followed Simon’s lead, dropping back in
the first section so that they could accelerate out of the church curves and
down Stoker’s Straight, but the ever attentive Clerk of the Course had
purposely bunched the cars up on the back section so that they would start
their second lap in very close formation.

‘One of the plates you saw in the caravan site
workshop has just been picked up on the A59,’ Debbie told Simon as he cursed
the
CoC
for locking the Olympic behind a
Heinkel
bubble car and an Austin Healey Sprite dawdling
along at a mere 20mph. ‘There hasn’t been a car theft reported yet but it looks
like another stolen car is being moved,’ she added.

‘The A59 goes all the way from Liverpool up
into Yorkshire, so where exactly did they pick it up?’ ‘Are they following it?’