The Sunshine Cruise Company (32 page)

‘Yes?’ an English voice said.

‘Step this way please …’

Julie and Susan both watched as the women were led off towards a doorway nearby. The two women did, it had to be said, bear a fair resemblance to Susan and Julie before Susan’s intensive hair and make-up session this morning. Suddenly another voice piped up behind them, ‘Miss and Mrs Saunders? Please, we can board you now. I’m very sorry for the delay.’

‘What was all that about?’ Julie asked.

‘Oh, nothing to worry about. Please, this way …’

And with that they were led off towards the magical kingdom in the very nose of the plane.

‘I love first class …’ Julie whispered.

‘No one messes with you …’ Susan replied.

He couldn’t find the brake. He couldn’t even begin to touch the wheels – they would have flayed the skin from his hands. As Boscombe thundered down towards Ethel their eyes met horribly again. Ethel glanced ahead – the end of the track and there, about thirty feet ahead of that, a huge ornamental fountain. She came off the escalator just as Boscombe came rocketing past her, gripping onto his wheelchair as though it were a crazed, unbroken horse, his face a mask of blood and pain.

Ethel solved his braking problem for him. She took her grabbing stick and thrust it into the spokes of his right-hand wheel.

If a movie director could have filmed the scene it would have been Sam Peckinpah: Boscombe flailing through thin air in slow motion, screaming soundlessly, onlookers gawping, jaws a-dangle, the sparkling water of the fountain rushing up to meet him and then, the huge splash as he hit the surface, drenching a family eating ice cream nearby.

Ethel braked to a skidding, screeching stop just before she hit the wall of the fountain. She had a few moments to savour the sight of the spluttering, floating Boscombe before she heard the clomping of running boots very close behind her. She turned and saw that she was surrounded by some fifteen men, a mixture of police and airport security, many of them with their guns drawn and pointed at her, the men in their turn sizing up this strange, bearded old gentleman in the baggy suit and the panama hat. Ethel produced her hip flask, tore off her beard and, still in character, asked the mob:

‘Would any of you boys care fur a wee dram now?’

THEY COULDN’T BELIEVE
their luck would hold even as they sat there in the soft blue-tinted light of first class, their hearts pumping hard in their chests as they graciously accepted champagne and extravagant menus. Even after the doors closed (fifteen minutes late, following a ruckus when the two English ladies were finally allowed to board, both of them muttering and complaining) and the plane began taxiing out towards the runway not twenty seconds went by without either Julie or Susan craning their neck round, expecting to see a huddle of police and stewards coming for them. Even as the 747 lumbered into the sky and the tilting sun shot light through every porthole in turn, they were still expecting the captain to come over the speakers saying something like ‘Ladies and gentlemen, due to security reasons we will now be returning to Nice airport …’ It was only when they levelled in the sky, and they could see the Mediterranean Sea far beneath them, and the ‘Fasten seat belts’ sign went off with a bright ‘ping’, and the steward was almost instantly at their elbow with fresh flutes of champagne, that they finally turned and looked at each other. Susan raised her glass.

‘To Ethel.’

‘Ethel,’ Julie said.

There were certainly still things to worry about and Susan started to enumerate them. There was the close to four million pounds in cash in the compartment above them that they were hoping to just breeze through customs in Brazil with. If that happened then they had to find somewhere to live. They also had to find a way to keep their money safe and to have access to it. They had to –

‘Susan?’ Julie said.

‘Mmmm?’

‘Let’s just get drunk, eh?’

Susan stopped mid-sentence and looked at her friend, sitting there, still in old person’s make-up and flowing kaftan. Forty-five years she’d known Julie Wickham and even now, in that get-up designed to age her by a decade, she still looked twenty-one. ‘Yeah,’ Susan said. ‘Let’s get drunk. Do you think we can get another one of these?’

‘I think we can do whatever the hell we want …’

Julie found the button on her handset, the little stickman holding a drink on his tray, and pressed it as the great plane banked, the Bay of Biscay coming up ahead of them now, tiny boats dotting the water far below as they headed west, into the sun, towards whatever was going to happen to them.

OUR CAMERA SWEEPS
down on a cold Sunday morning in January, in Wroxham, Dorset, where it finds eight-year-old Jamie Cummings running around the back of the scrum on the school rugby pitch, his arms extended to receive a pass, his mother Linda and his grandmother Jill cheering from the touchline. His operation in Chicago had been an astounding success. Linda had cried with joy when Jill told her she’d had a lovely time in Wales with her old friends and that one of them was now very rich and had agreed to give her the thirty grand still needed for Jamie’s operation, no strings attached. Linda hadn’t even asked any questions. Jill asks forgiveness every Sunday in church for her part in the wickedness and for Ethel, Julie and Susan to be forgiven their sins too.

Panning across town, through pelting sleet and wind, we come to the tired signage and near-empty grandstands of Wroxham Rovers FC, who are at home to nearby Didford United, both teams playing to a very healthy turnout of 128 fans.

We pull focus on the wet, tired, lined face of Constable Hugh Boscombe, who walks the touchline in full uniform. The ball skids through the mud quite close to him but Boscombe is oblivious. For he is dreaming of half-time, of the two meat pies and the styrofoam cup of Bovril he will consume over by the snack van, where he will endure the weekly jests and taunts of the locals, to many of whom he is still known as Lewis Hamilton after that little driving mishap in Marseilles a few years back. Later, after the match is over, he will return to the station to sign off his shift, where he will have to endure the ritual humiliation of shuffling by the glass wall of the office of Detective Sergeant Alan Wesley. Their overlapping promotion and demotion were the final sadistic acts of Chief Inspector Wilson prior to his retirement.

Moving north, but not too far north, to the village of Tillington, the camera drifts into the town funeral parlour and surveys the few mourners at the sparsely attended service for the late underworld figure Nails Savage, who has just died at the age of ninety-two, having recently served eighteen months of a three-year sentence for aiding and abetting. Shortly after his release, Nails found a mysterious package in his post.

There was no letter or covering note. The box simply contained 100,000 pounds sterling, tightly banded in wads of fifties. It was postmarked through a routing service in Panama.

Nails used a good chunk of this money to fund one last sunshine cruise of his own: a five-star trip to Bangkok, where he picked up the sole occupant of the front pew at today’s sad occasion – and the ultimate cause of his death – his 22-year-old widow Sun-May. Sun-May is still haunted by her late husband’s last expression on this earth, spoken as he ejaculated gratefully inside her, a fraction of a second before his heart exploded, the sighing elegy of
‘Oof – you fucking wrong-coloured beauty …’

The lens refocusing now as it whirrs through cloud and over seas, heading due east, over the Channel to Paris, into a lecture theatre of the university, to where an attentive first-year student on the Business Administration course makes notes in the front row. Vanessa Honfleur is known by her peers as one of the hardest working in her year. The reason for this is simple – Vanessa can’t quite believe she is here. She thought attending university was a dream that happened to other people. True, she’d had a wild few months after she’d come into the money, but the words Julie had whispered in her ear in the garage of that huge house on the outskirts of Marseilles had always come back to haunt her:
‘Under my bed. Don’t waste it …
’

She still tingles when she remembers the moment the following day, after the police had released her, when she went back to the hotel, the room key Julie had stuffed into her palm hot in her clenched fist, the moment when she opened the door, got down on her hands and knees and looked under the bed to find a carrier bag with over 100,000 British pounds in it, nearly 140,000 in euros. Enough for her to rent a small apartment while she finished school, enough to get her here. She thinks of Julie often, this woman who changed her life, and hopes she’s doing well.

If she could only have followed the camera as it leaves the lecture theatre to rocket south and west, crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a blur of light before swooping down out of the sky just outside the coastal town of Vitoria, in the Espirito Santo province of Brazil, just over five hundred kilometres north of Rio.

The camera moves along the streets of one of the town’s affluent north-western suburbs, finally drifting over the well-kept hedges of the 1.5 million-dollar home belonging to the two retired English businesswomen known locally as Ruth and Helen. Lucas the gardener is trimming back the lemon tree that overhangs the wall of the kitchen while inside Amanda the cook is grilling some chicken for lunch. She knows the ladies of the house will want wine with their meal and has already iced a bottle of very good white burgundy.

Lucas, Amanda and Fernanda the maid – who is busily making beds down the hall – are all treated very well by their employers, paid above the local rates and tipped heavily on their birthdays and holidays, the same employers who can now be heard laughing loudly out by the pool …

The pool is large and tiled in aquamarine, with a frothing jacuzzi at one end. Ruth Steele is floating on a lounger in the late-morning sun, a Diet Coke nestling between her thighs, while Helen Davies, less of a sun-worshipper, is on a lounger in the shade of a parasol, reading the two-day-old copy of the
Daily Mail
which contains the article that just caused their laughter: a faintly hysterical piece on the ‘Arctic’ January cold snap that continues to grip the United Kingdom.

Three years ago, when Ruth and Helen were still known respectively as Julie Wickham and Susan Frobisher, they strolled through the first-class fast track at Rio immigration with just under four million pounds in their hand baggage. No one gave them a second glance.

They encountered a few problems thereafter of course. Buying a property in cash was never going to be straightforward. They took a suite at the Carlton in Rio for a few weeks and did some digging …

This being Brazil and Julie being Julie they soon found someone who could put them in touch with a realtor who – for a not inconsiderable fee of course – was able to put them together with the kind of seller for whom a cash deal presented not a problem but an opportunity, resulting in the splendid five-bedroom, four-bathroom villa with pool and half an acre of gardens now presided over by Lucas, Amanda and Fernanda. Over drinks to celebrate the deal their vendor quietly introduced them to a banker who was also sympathetic to their situation and who – again for a reasonable fee – assisted them in opening the account where the just-over-two million US dollars they had left after the house purchase and sundry expenses (including a new Mercedes SLK apiece) is now parked at a rate of 5 per cent, earning them around 100,000 dollars a year in interest which they split as a salary.

Their needs are simple. They eat, drink, swim and sightsee. They play cards and backgammon out under their lemon and orange trees. They are popular members of the small ex-pat community and routinely entertain guests and visit with others. No one ever doubts their story that they were partners in a very successful chain of hair salons back on the south-east coast of England who sold up at exactly the right time.

They wake every day in their respective bedrooms, each with a balcony giving onto the pool and gardens, grinning with joy at the life they’ve made for themselves. So far, every morning has been Saturday morning, Christmas, the first day of the school holidays. And now, as Amanda heads out through the large kitchen to tell them lunch is ready, we leave them, the camera craning up and away, heading due north, over the grey Atlantic for a long, long way before whipping left, heading west and inland over the glittering billion-dollar battlements of Manhattan.

Onto the island itself at the lower end, Wall Street, then zipping uptown on this chilly afternoon, the camera rocketing along 6th Avenue as though strapped to the bumper of one of the hurrying taxis. Arriving in Midtown, at Rockefeller Plaza and the studios of NBC television, where it zooms down many hallways before coming through the open door of a dressing room and an American voice saying—

‘How we doing in there?’

The voice is coming from Trisha, the second assistant director on a programme called
America Today!
and it is directed towards the occupant of the make-up chair, facing a huge mirror surrounded by light bulbs: Mrs Ethel Merriman.

‘All good, darling,’ Ethel replies, ‘but I could do with having this fella freshened up …’ She is holding out an empty champagne glass which had, until a moment ago, contained a nice, strong Mimosa.

‘No problem!’ Trisha trills, taking the glass.

Ethel burps happily and says, ‘Excuse me, love!’ to the nice giggling gay lad touching up her forehead.

Ethel isn’t nervous – it’s her second time on the show. The first time was just over a year ago, upon the US hardback publication of her memoir
I BRAKE FOR NO ONE!
(the cover featured Ethel in her wheelchair giving the finger to the camera). Back then the book was simply a hot UK title with the curio value of having been written by a very elderly woman just out of prison. Since then, as everyone knows, the ‘frank, funny, upbeat tale’ of Ethel’s involvement in one of Britain’s biggest bank robberies and of her extraordinary life leading up to that moment has become a publishing phenomenon. It has been translated into thirty-seven languages with worldwide sales of over five million copies. The film, TV and documentary rights have all been sold for enormous sums with Helen Mirren slated to play Ethel.