Free The Storytellers by Robert Mercer-Nairne Page A

two brothers and the two other drivers, each with clubs of their own, had waded in and a group of men, led by Tony Hunter was approaching from the house. As he and one of his lads pulled Abigail clear, the fight became brutal until it was obvious to Ralf Drydon’s men that they were outnumbered.
    Thrashing and hacking, with the Hunters side increasingly gaining the advantage, the Kingsbury lads backed themselves towards the van. They wouldn’t have got away unless Tony had reined in his men. With the five surrounded, he could have had them reduced to pulp. Instead he told the interlopers to bugger off and that it was about time they did an honest day’s work. As the van was manoeuvred away, a cascade of blows fell on it, converting the carrier’s outside into scrap metal.
    Following his gruesome discovery, and seeing that the odds were against him, Max had panicked. Screaming at Jack to ‘get the fucking Cortina away’, the two had slipped on the ice while racing towards it. The club Max had used flew up, catching Jack on the side of the head,knocking him unconscious. Max and John bundled the organizer into the car and succeeded in driving off while the action was focused on the van.
    * * *
    The drive back down to Longbridge was fraught, with John at the wheel of an unfamiliar car and a sobbing Max, repeating ceaselessly, ‘I didn’t know she was a girl. She shouldn’t have been there. How was I to know?’
    â€œDo you fink you killed ’er?” John quickly regretted his dumb question as it unlocked another torrent of self-recrimination from Max. Meanwhile, Jack Pugh had come round and was burbling about a great victory while clutching his throbbing head and speculating that he might have broken the leg he’d twisted in the fall. His nose must have taken a knock as well because it was bleeding like an open tap, further adding to the bedlam inside the car.
    â€œFor Christ’s sake, block it man,” pleaded Max who was showing an unexpected aversion to blood. “It’s fucking well getting everywhere.”
    At Longbridge John dropped Max at their flat. The man was falling apart, now concerned less with the girl and more with the possibility that the Kingsbury boys would fit him up for a murder he might have committed.
    â€œYou’ll back me up, John, won’t you? I wasn’t there.”
    John couldn’t be bothered to remind him that Jack had introduced them both to Ralf Drydon. What was the point? The poor bastard was screwed whatever way round you cut it.
    â€œI’ll be back inside the hour,” he reassured him. “Must drop Jack back at Cowley. He’s in naa fit state.”
    As he closed their flat door, Max was still baying like a bereft she-wolf. “I wasn’t there. I just wasn’t there.”
    * * *
    A few miles out of Longbridge, with Jack now nursing himself in the front seat, John asked, “Where exactly d’ya liv’ in Cowley?”
    â€œOn the south side,” Jack told him. “But you can drop me at Oxford University. It’s closer.”
    â€œGoen ter drop a bomb then?”
    â€œI’ve an engagement.”
    â€œWhereabouts?” John asked, resisting the temptation to press what a Trot from Cowley planned to do inside the establishment’s advanced seat of learning. “Yoi’r in naa fit state ter walk.”
    â€œBrasenose College. I’ll give you directions when we get there.”
    Jack’s conversation was monosyllabic, as if he were giving painful birth to every word. After establishing their altered destination, he just fell asleep.
    * * *
    With the help of a college porter, John Preston managed to get the Cortina round to the back of the building, along Brasenose Lane. As luck would have it, the porter had seen Jack before and after they had deciphered his repeated ‘Miranda, must see Miranda’, helped him haul the wounded revolutionary up to the