He is nothing of the sort, of course. His forward momentum, and whatever special forces training he must have had in his shadowy past, means that – rather than collapsing into the river or breaking multiple limbs like a mere mortal – he thrusts himself forward and balls up at the last moment. Like a judo master, he uncoils on impact and is gone twenty steps with the tender ripped from my grasp. Once I stir myself from staring at my hand, dumbstruck, it is all I can do to catch him up.
This field we are now in has been ploughed – by a real life tractor and plough, not a coupé – so the going is heavy. A loud splash behind us gives me cause for suspicion that our ‘off-road’ vehicle might now be aquatic, but that’s for later. We push onwards, clodding through clumps of sticky soil, falling and rising more times than Our Lord with the Cross. Filthy, exhausted, we reach the far side of the field and a gate fronting onto the village where the tender is to be delivered.
Climbing the gate, I glance at my watch. We’ve got two minutes by that clock.
“Hey!” the boss cries, his face crimson beneath the ochre.
A man minding his own business on the far side of the street starts at the violence of the voice. The accompanying visuals are not reassuring and he makes an attempt to escape, but the boss closes and pins him to the wall.
“Tenders. The tenders,” the boss demands. “The new school. Library. Where? Library.”
Terrified, the man points in the direction he was going and stammers: “The… the blue building… the, the square, on the right.”
He then staggers off in the opposite direction, keeping a wary watch on his rear as he flees. We start up the short incline towards the square. There to the right is the library, an old three-storey building where the tender box is purported to be. Woe betide that poor man, I think to myself, if he has given us wrong information!
Clambering the steps outside, the boss orders me to take the ground floor search while he and the tenders make their way up to the next level and beyond. I scavenge around the ground floor rooms but there is nothing. Then I spot the notice board, and a single sheet of paper posted beside it with an arrow pointing vaguely upstairs. In pen, someone has scribbled Tenders: Top Floor.
I hurtle up the steps, three at a time, lungs hurting. I catch the boss on the second floor, terrorising people. He is going door-to-door down a long corridor, shoving each open in turn and bellowing “Tender! Tender!” at the occupants. The Gestapo could have done with this guy.
“Hey,” I shout.
He looks up with an animal gaze.
“Top floor,” I say.
He thunders towards me and I lead the way. Right at the top of the next stairs, another arrow points left. Trailing mud after us, we make our way down the corridor and burst into the room at the end. A woman shrieks at the sudden intrusion of two fierce-looking and filthy vagrants.
“The tenders,” says the boss.
I glance at the clock. We are a minute late, but I don’t think the lady is going to point that out. She indicates the box she was emptying and recording in a ledger on the desk by her side. As I tear open the twenty bin liners to retrieve the tenders, the boss neatly inscribes the time and date in the ledger, plus or minus a few minutes of our actual arrival time. The frightened lady initials her complicity in the truth of what he states.
“Thank you, madam, have a lovely evening,” he says gallantly when all is said and done, and we leave the office almost exactly as we found it.