Angel's Blade by Lewis Hinton

Author:Lewis Hinton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Thriller; suspense; mystery
Publisher: Troubador Publishing
Published: 2022-09-22T00:00:00+00:00

8pm

I went out to the car park just before the appointed time to see a long, blue Land Rover next to the phone box.

“Going out on the raz?” I heard over my shoulder. It was Slevin, kitted out in riding leathers and standing by his bike.

“I suppose you could call it that.”

“Well enjoy and, as I say, don’t give in to those earthly temptations that beset the best of us.” He bowed low and I walked on, climbing into the back of the Land Rover, where Jackson sat. Stocker and his wife were in the cab.

“Where’s Pasco?”

“Took his boat, just after you went upstairs,” said Jackson. “Had Pengelly on board, with his bike strapped to the front and all.” Jackson’s words conjured up a vision of the canon as Jenny, the ship’s figurehead at the Fo’c’sle Chandlery, lashed next to his bicycle on the bows of Pasco’s dinghy. “The Cassandra is only a few miles down the river, and it’s got a landing stage, so they’ll both be well settled in by now. Promised to save us places by the bar.”

“Good evening, Mrs Stocker,” I shouted through a tightly meshed metal grill that separated us in the back from the cab. “Very nice of you to take us.”

“It is, isn’t it. Maybe a bit too nice, eh Stocker?” David Stocker very wisely neither agreed with his wife nor contradicted her. “Hold tight, and we’ll be off.”

I then felt the clutch lurch us forwards and the Land Rover begin its journey to the Cassandra, bouncing along, almost as if it had no suspension. Mrs Stocker seemed oblivious to the bumps, and sat clenching the wheel, peering ahead through thick glasses.

“My cousin Pete just redid the shocks,” shouted Stocker from the cab. “Smooth as a feather bed, eh?”

“Are they your cousins at the Trafalgar Garage then?”

“Yeah, Pete, Ted and Bob. Best in the business, Sangster.”

“I’m sure,” I said, jolting as Mrs Stocker drove over a particularly harsh pothole, barely acknowledged by the Land Rover’s shock absorbers.

We passed Truro, and then took the main Falmouth road, before negotiating narrow lanes every bit as tortuous as those by King Harry Ferry, the difference tonight being that Mrs Stocker didn’t really care about Cornish Hedges (and neither it seemed, did the Land Rover’s tyres), so that more than once I was thrown sideways as the wheels hit the stone edgings. For all that, we survived, eventually driving down a frighteningly steep slope to see water beyond.

“There’s many an emmet took that hill too fast and ended up in the creek,” Jackson laughed. Mrs Stocker then turned a sharp ninety degrees to the right and the pub came into view, illuminated by strings of lightbulbs that already shone in the twilight, and with music blaring outside (‘Morgan’s Mobile Music Machine’ was painted in psychedelic lettering on the side of a van parked next to the pub doorway).

I stepped out, stretching my joints, which ached from the Land Rover’s constant buffeting, to see what could definitely be called a ‘party’ underway.

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