Barlow rescues ambulance, he said to himself reflexively. Have-a-go hero MP in mercy dash. ‘I couldn’t believe my eyes,’ said Mr Barlow last night. The Mail asks: Has the world gone mad? He was thinking Newsroom Southeast, he was thinking Littlejohn. He was thinking Big Stuff. Well, this was a story, all right. That should get that awful Debbie woman off his back.
He saw the traffic warden say something to the olive-skinned man, and the olive-skinned man reeled; and no wonder he reeled, poor dutiful fellow. He could imagine that they were already late for a mission.
Across London, the mere act of getting up was taking a terrible toll. People were braining themselves in the shower, slicing their nostrils with Bic razors, brushing their teeth with their children’s poisonous Quinoderm acne cream, sustaining cardiac infarcts at finding themselves misreported in the paper – and where was the ambulance?
It was outrageous! Roger braked and spoke in the mellow bedside tones of the MP’s surgery.
‘Excuse me. I wonder if I can help.’
The traffic warden smiled bashfully. ‘It’s OK, sir, we do not need any help here. De law is de law.’
‘I know it’s none of my business, but are you seriously going to remove that ambulance?’
‘Please, sir, do not get involved. I cannot make de rules. I can only enfoooo – oo excuse me, I can only enforce them.’
Barlow blinked as he was engulfed. ‘But this is absurd,’ he said, turning to the victims. ‘I know this shouldn’t make any difference,’ he said superbly, ‘but I am an MP.’
For the first time the olive-skinned man faced the MP. His passport said his name was Jones, and that he had been born in Mold, Clwyd. Though it was true that he was currently a student at an institution implausibly called Llangollen University, these biographical details seemed unlikely.
Roger Barlow noticed something about his eyes. They had a kind of wobble. It was as though he was watching a very close-up game of ping-pong.
‘Piss off,’ he said. ‘Piss off and die.’
‘Eh?’ Barlow gasped.
‘Not necessarily in that order,’ said Jones.
Barlow looked for guidance to the warden. There was something badly out of whack here. When all was said and done, were they not, he and the warden, part of the same team?
He made the law, the warden enforced it. They were like two china dogs, bracketing the sacred texts of statute.
‘I’m sorry … ?’ he said, pathetically.
Tee hee hee, sniggered Eric Onyeama, and shook his head at the busybody. He felt sure he had seen dis man before, maybe in church, or at a meeting of parents and teachers. But if Roger was looking for an ally now, he was out of luck.
‘De man is right,’ he said. ‘You must go away.’ And Roger did. For once he felt he could have made a difference. He could have improved things here. He cycled on. Was it getting hotter, or was that the sweat of embarrassment?
That man told me to piss off, he told himself. And die, too. He wondered whether anyone had seen his humiliation.
Had Barlow not been so mortified, he might have seen Haroun issue from the side of the van and pass something to Jones. The leader of the gang of four now looked at his watch and decided it was time to bring matters to a close.
‘Please be so kind as to put the ambulance down now, and stop this damnfoolery.’
Hey dere, said Eric to himself. The Huskie was chirruping back to him.
I knew it, he thought. The ambulance had been reported stolen last night, from Dymock Street, Wolverhampton.
‘Did you hear what I said?’ Jones’s voice had an evil snit to it.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Eric, thinking fast, ‘but you must come with me to the pound.’
‘I’m going to ask you one last time: give us back our vehicle.’
‘You have broken de law.’
‘No,’ sneered Jones: ‘you broke de fucking law. You lifted the thing off the ground while we were here.’
‘I am sorry, but that is wrong.’
‘You IDIOT! Tell him to put the ambulance down. Tell him to do it now.’
In defence of its parking attendants, men and women who must put up with some of the worst abuse known to this coarsened, selfish and irresponsible age, Westminster Council gives them cameras.
These are used not just to record the offence, but also to deter the protesting traffic offender just as he is about to bust a blood vessel or commit a common assault. Now Eric took out his Sony DSU-30 digital camera, and left the Huskie hanging by his neck. As he was doing this Haroun was creeping unseen up the side of the tow-truck.
In his hand he held a nasty-looking piece of medical equipment which was, did he but know it, a thorax draining kit. The man called Jones began to swear – never a good sign for those who had dealings with this horrid person.
‘Omak zanya fee erd.’ Your mother committed adultery with a donkey.
‘I am sorry?’ beamed Eric, who had decided to call the police.
‘Yen ‘aal deen ommak!’ barked Jones. Damn your mother’s rooster – a deadlier insult than you might think, if only to an Arab.
‘What for do you need an ambulance anyway?’ asked Eric, and he took a couple of quick shots of Jones: billhook nose, grubby neck, short grey-flecked hair and peculiar eyes.
‘It is for the disabled,’ said Jones.
‘Who are the disabled?’
Haroun tiptoed round the front of the Renault and prepared to lunge at Dragan Panic.
‘I don’t see a disabled person anywhere,’ repeated Eric. ‘Show me the disabled person.’
‘Here is the disabled person,’ said Jones.
‘Where?’
‘Here.’
The last noise Eric heard before he fainted with shock was the ripping of his own pericardium as it was punctured by the pericardial puncture unit. Then there was a scraping noise as the spike hit something hard that might have been bone.
‘Help me,’ shouted Jones to Dean, the nineteen-year-old, as he caught the falling warden.
Dean watched, mouth agape, as his boss buckled under the weight; and then leapt forward to help him arrange the traffic warden in the gutter.
Dragan the Serb had been weaned on tales of heroic assassination and glorious betrayal. From the Battle of Kosovo Pole onwards, Serbs have learned to glory in a sense of victimhood. But today he decided to give the national myth a miss.
He pushed away Haroun and his spike, and thudded off, weaving and shoulders hunched, as though with every yard he expected a bullet in his back from the Kosovo Liberation Army.
He sprinted from the Muslim extremists,