Am I Being Followed? Read online

  Now that I thought about it, how could it ever have seemed possible that someone like me could have formed the right kind of relationship with someone like her? Surely there was a huge inconsistency in this as much as there now seemed to be in everything else. Involved in her way of life, and in Andy’s, I had never been able to fully identify with either of them.

  But none of this mattered right now. As far as this business with the package was concerned I didn’t need to fully identify with anybody. I knew enough about what I had got involved in to see that I was in very serious trouble. Not the kind of trouble I had ever been in before. And not something I could afford to sit and think about for very long, either.

  “Give me the gun,” I said, surprising even myself by my audacity, at which words Andy placed his hand over the weapon protectively.

  “What’s on your mind, John?” he asked, with raised eyebrows.

  “One way or another I’m going to get the package back, Andy”, I told him.

  I listened as he said what I expected him to say. This wasn’t a job for me. I was out of my depth. I had never used a gun in this way before while, with people like the smiling man in the lay-by, it would be second nature.

  “Will I have to go without the gun?” I challenged.

  Andy’s words weren’t going to make any difference, I knew, although they dispelled another point of uncertainty. “You could get killed,” he told me.

  “Don’t be a fool, John,” Karen chided. “This isn’t your type of thing.”

  “How isn’t it?” I asked. “What exactly is my type of thing? Do you really know?” I went on angrily, annoyed at being told by her that I wasn’t equipped to deal with this kind of situation.

  “Don’t be a fool!” she repeated. “Andy, don’t let him do this.”

  The truth was, I had to do it. How they saw it, wasn’t the deciding factor. They were both saying what I knew myself anyway. I wasn’t qualified for the job. But this was the very last straw. I had gone down in my own estimation just about as far as I was prepared to go.

  Since leaving the Food Importers nothing had gone right for me. I hadn’t asked anyone for help, except to forge a reference, and no one had offered any, except Andy. In all that time the only hand that had been lifted in my behalf had been his, and that fact had a life of its own. I knew that what I did now was going to say a lot about me.

  And anyway, Karen seemed to be out of her depth in all this as much as I was, while Andy couldn’t even walk. I had to do this, whether I was up to it or not.

  “Do you actually know how to use this?” Andy asked scathingly, taking up the gun and laying it down flat in the palm of his outstretched hand.

  “How will I know which caravan it is?” I asked him, ignoring his question. “Come on Andy, tell me.”

  “I’ll show you,” Karen said, taking us both by surprise.

  “You’re definitely not going, either of you,” Andy said angrily. “Stop all this nonsense.”

  I watched him try to get to his feet again and, in the effort to do so, lay the gun back down on the table. As he stood on one leg trying to steady himself, I leaned over and picked up the weapon.

  “I’m going and that’s it,” I said decisively, slipping the gun into my jacket pocket and stepping back towards the door.

  Karen followed me out and, before I had time to think about it, she was sitting in the car beside me.

  As we headed for the main road I wondered what my chances of getting the package back really were. I knew they weren’t good. I was new to this kind of thing and these men would have the edge on me. They would be ruthless, I supposed, inclined to act without thinking while, with my track record, it would be the other way round.

  But I had one thing in my favour. My role had changed. Like the smiling man taking me by surprise in the lay-by, I now had the hunter’s advantage. It was possible that these men, probably Steve and the smiling man, would just be sitting there, like I had so recently been, unaware that they were in any immediate danger.

  chapter two

  As we drove along the dual carriageway I wished I could put the clock back to where I had been just a few weeks ago, sitting in the sales office with Benny, instead of here behind the wheel of a car that could be taking me on a one-way journey.

  The first to arrive that morning, I had been re-reading the polite but threatening letter about my mortgage arrears. And something else had been bothering me, too. Although I had been in sales for years, it was beginning to dawn on me that I wasn’t really a salesman at heart. I had never come close to being a good liar, like so many salesman these days, or a good number of lawyers and politicians too for that matter. But here in Bartons I was certainly heading in what I thought was the right, or was it the wrong direction.

  It had been nothing at all like this in my previous job, at the Food Importers. The work there had been entirely different, with nothing even remotely like the ‘hard sell’ about it. I had quite enjoyed it, with its reasonable salary and generous car allowance. My position there as a sales administrator had suited me. I had been good at analysing my problems and sticking to clearly defined objectives in my efforts to solve them, although it was something I had picked up from one of the books I had found in the attic that had put me ahead of most of my colleagues. It was a work that contained details from the Congressional Report on the causes of the great naval disaster at Pearl Harbour in 1941 where the Japanese planes had caught the Americans by surprise. No mention here of a global plot by Roosevelt, I had noticed at once. Officers at the Base and their seniors in Washington, the Report had solemnly declared, had largely been to blame, although Kimmel and Short, the head naval and military men seem to have been victims rather than perpetrators of the inefficient procedures prevalent there at that time. But generally speaking commanders at the base and the hierarchy in Washington were said to be in the habit of giving important orders the effectiveness of which they had seldom taken the time or felt they had had the opportunity to verify. No one seemed to realise, the Report had gone on to state accusingly, that the duties of an administrator were only half-completed upon the issuance of an order. It was equally important, and an integral part of the job, to ensure that an order was properly understood and carried out, which was manifestly not being done to the extent that it should have been. A lot of the planes and ships had been lost because of neglect of such principles and I saw to it in my job as an administrator that I didn’t make the same mistake.

  I also made as much use as I could of several of the other twenty-four odd points the Report had made, rightly considering them to be gems of wisdom that even today, perhaps even more so today than ever, could, if heeded, turn many a struggling business enterprise or other such organisation in to something that was highly efficient and successful, which could go a long way towards putting the country back on its feet. But people as a whole just didn’t get it, I had found.

  ‘What a fanciful and extravagant claim I had just made’ I knew would be the judgement passed on me by my peers and by my superiors. And so I kept my thoughts to myself, but unlike these American officers I let nothing slip through the net and monitored every loose end as an administrator with a vengeance.

  To avoid falling out with my peers, who adhered to the more orthodox and reactive, ‘pass the buck’ approach, I used my knowledge of these ‘pearls’ of wisdom like a secret weapon, appearing to be merely conscientious and hard-working.

  My face had fitted, too. I don’t suppose I would have got a job in this thriving, long-established business if it hadn’t. Like the candidates for officer selection I had read about in another of these books I had found in the attic, I had had to score very high at the initial interview, by appearing to be the right type. Without this, as it was with certain would-be officers, only a genius among them would subsequently have been able to scrape up enough points to qualify. In my particular case, having gone
to a ‘right’ school seemed to have got me ‘off the hook’ and into the job.

  Safe in this zone of security, I had been able to keep my distance from the world outside and, with a faintly superior attitude, observe the Scottish scene, or was it mainly just the Glasgow scene, a city where speculation about what might be worn, or not be worn, under an important part of the national dress was not considered racially offensive and where the shortage of people actually wearing the kilt didn’t mean there was no national pride. But the fact that policemen were seen even less than kilted citizens, except on television or at big football matches, I felt was another matter. Didn’t this allow perverts and psychopaths who had been turned loose after serving their latest sentences, and who were already prowling about like wild animals, to seek out their pray with a little more freedom than they deserved.

  But in other ways the city was quite safe, populated as it was by Roman Catholics and Protestants who were all friends and who were hardly, if ever, at each other’s throats, in spite of the fact that many of them still went to different churches and to different schools. These indigenous citizens almost all thought there were far too many immigrants while the main political parties, their fingers on their own pulse rather than the nation’s, advised that more were needed, pointing out that we were all immigrants just a few hundred years ago and reminding us of what we did or didn’t do in India and places like that.

  If there were other serious anomalies in the way things were being run in this major city of a country that was determined to bring democracy to other less fortunate peoples, the two which made the most impression on me were the frail hospital patients in flimsy dressing gowns and on wheelchairs who were forced to smoke outside in the cold. Who were the people who voted for that? I wondered., and would they have administered such strong medicine in the days of Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin, especially to the latter, as the Big Three smoked their way to victory over their great non-smoking adversary? And what about the planning applications which were objected to by hundreds of locals and approved by one stranger? What was so democratic about his vote? And what did the word ‘consultations’ which he had held with the existing resident voters actually mean, when he never seemed to listen to anyone.

  Fortunately the number of people taking further education, which at least dispensed knowledge if not wisdom, had greatly increased, as had the number of TV channels now available, although the results, in both cases, seemed to be quantitative rather than qualitative. And it was good, too, that the moral standards expected of people in certain occupations were still supposed to be high, except for the fact that, although more of these people were being found wanting, fewer of them were being sacked, none of them were resigning and almost all of them were scrambling after knighthoods, and taking home big pensions.

  I also thought it strange that people who would object to strangers walking into their house, or even into their garden, people who would jealously guard any advantages they might have gained in life from the sacrifices made by their parents or grandparents, seemed unable to prevent a huge number of foreigners from wandering quite freely into their country. That many of their immediate forebears had been blown to smithereens on the ground, in the air and on the sea in their efforts to save the country from ‘invasion’ surely meant that something was wrong. Were people suffering from a kind of national amnesia or from an abysmal ignorance of recent history? Or was it just that they were too indifferent to get angry at those responsible for leaving the borders open and, for their unwillingness to admit to or to undo the damage that they were so obviously doing in leaving the front door key on top of the mat instead of under it?

  But with money in the bank and living in a nice house in a nice district, with a nice car and job security, none of this had seemed too important. Compared to some places, Glasgow was still a good place to live in. It never occurred to me that without my comfortable standard of living and reasonably secure background, I might have taken a more jaundiced view. ‘What in God’s name is happening to our country?’ I might have asked myself.

  I didn’t get as far as this intellectually, however, and any serious emotional involvement I had at that time centred mainly on my dealings with the opposite sex. In this, there had been quite a few exciting disappointments offset by a sufficient number of successes to keep me going and give me something to aim for in life.

  I could also look back on a happy boyhood, living in that nice house in that nice district with my late mother’s very much older sister, Grace. I had been too young to be scarred either by my father’s early death in an accident overseas or by my mother’s death from natural causes not long afterwards.

  Aunt Grace, more like a grandmother than a mother, had exercised a strong influence for the good on me without exerting too much pressure and I took for granted the good education she had given me and the good job it had helped me to get.

  So far in my adult life, I had experienced only one serious crisis when Grace, much against her will, had had to go into residential care. The fact that she only had life-rent on our house, which had expired when she gave up her occupancy, rendered me homeless. I also learned soon afterwards, that she had much less in the bank than everyone thought. If she was to remain secure in the Home of her choice there was a shortfall that only I could make up.

  Nothing was more important to me than Aunt Grace’s welfare and before long I had signed a few forms and made out a Direct Debit for the required amount. Having a good job, I at the same time obtained a mortgage on a small, well-appointed flat and, as is often the case in circumstances like these, the amount of money didn’t seem too important. I was more anxious about having to make all my own meals and iron my own shirts. Although I missed my Aunt Grace a lot, I managed to weather the storm and was soon able to get back to my golf, my music, my books and, of course, my pursuit of the opposite sex.

  Being quite good at my job, quite popular, quite good-looking and quite good with women, were qualities I felt quite pleased about. They were things I didn’t have to worry about too much, I would tell myself, occasionally, when it occurred to me that I lacked ambition. ‘Quite’ seemed to be my personal adverb. It was quite good standing still, and quite good feeling that I had things under control.

  Although I was relatively unambitious in my job, I was next in line to be Deputy Manager and felt quite strongly that I deserved to move up a rung. Instead, something happened that set in motion a chain of events which would destroy my complacency and bring my sheltered existence to an end. My kindly, efficient and highly-appreciative boss announced his retiral!

  At that time I hadn’t realised how lucky I was to be working for a man like him. For many people, describing the boss’s shortcomings could take up a lot of time in the pub, and thinking about him, at other times, too, could keep them off their sleep. It wasn’t that way with me. I was like the young German Officer I had read about in yet another of these books I had found, who had laid out the maps wrongly at Hitler’s Situation Conference, causing the famous Field Marshal Guderian to stop in mid-sentence and glare at him, causing Hitler, of all people, to sink back in his chair in an even worse state, and the assembled generals to stare at him aghast. My boss had been more like Grand Admiral Doenitz who had smiled at the young officer, offered a few consoling words, and lifted the pile of maps up for him to put in the right order, the kind of human touch not too evident these days in certain quarters, I felt.

  But my luck in having a boss like this had run out. I was about to discover that this old man, who could run a business and actually be a nice person at the same time, had a son who didn’t take after him. To my dismay the heir at once showed himself adept in the mis-use of power and the promotion I felt I deserved went to someone whose face he seemed to prefer to mine and who, everybody with any sense knew, couldn’t do the job.

  As far as the Food Importers went it was all downhill after that, and a set of circumstances connected to
the Annual Staff Dance brought matters to a head.

  In the first place, the new boss’s partner wasn’t someone I should have asked to dance, but free drinks, on top of pent-up emotion, caused me to ignore the ‘keep off the grass’ sign and go on to make an even more serious error of judgement. The effect of this was compounded by the fact that she had drunk as much as I had.

  I learned afterwards that she had had a base motive in allowing me to steer her into the bar. The new boss had been paying too much attention to one of his secretaries and, in retaliation, his partner had decided to pay too much attention to me. Things went from bad to worse and, from the bar, down a dark corridor into an ante room, where the air at once became filled with the smell of mixed drinks exhaled by our heavy breathing. As we indulged in the athletic posturing and exchange of warm kisses sanctioned by my slamming of the door I realised that the absence of a lock and key made what I intended to be my next move very risky. The act of complete abandon that this would signify surely required a degree of privacy greater than that afforded by a room with an unlocked door. But that wasn’t what stopped me. Nor was it the fact that I had a strong strain of the gentleman in me. It had just occurred to me that the new boss might have something to say about where I was and what I was doing and I suspected, even then, that I had made a very serious mistake.

  I had. Our journey to the ante room had not gone unreported, and the new boss’s opinion of me as a sales administrator changed accordingly.

  The deadly threat that this posed to my peace of mind made it hard for me to disguise my feelings and the new boss, annoyed that I seemed to think as little of him as he did of me, persevered in his attempts to blame me for things that weren’t my fault. And so, one day, when he kept telling me that his mistake was mine, and the tension had become unbearable, I did something that was easy and which made me feel good at the time. I walked out.