The maid with yellow hair
By Amrita Dhingra

OWING to the fact that Constable Dunstable’s office was separated from your cell by a hall you could only get a brief glimpse of what was going on that side. You craned your neck and tried to figure out the source of the confusion for there seemed to be an awful lot of confusion. You knew that a powerful motorbike had roared to a halt just outside the building that served as the police station of this sleepy area of the world. But from the other end of the hall you could hear the constable’s voice raised in protest.

"Hey miss come on you don’t really mean that!" Could it be your imagination or was there fear in the voice of the long arm of the law?

"Don’t I... just..." hear the other patently feminine voice lowered itself to a murmur.

"All right, all right I’ll get the keys!!!"

You were still craning your neck and trying to figure out just what was going on when the good constable burst through the door. His hands were in the air and the girl who followed close behind him was dressed in a maid’s uniform. You couldn’t see her face obscured as it was by the constable but you certainly did wonder what a maid was doing in the police station.

"I say what’s going on?" you felt at impunity to ask of the constable. After all except for the fact that you were an international pig pinching kleptomaniac the constable had little against you. Indeed from the very beginning he had seemed to be just the sort of person who does not hold such grudges for long. Now he surprised you with the vehemence of his answer.

"What do you think is going on? She’s sticking a gun in the small of my back and I’m supposed to let you go! After five years of waiting, watching and worrying about who stole Farmer Jenk’s chickens I get a case and now I have to let you go"!! He glared at you balefully as if to say that it was all your fault.

Two emotions warred within your heart at this time — you did sympathise with the constable for his promotion hinged on you, but the other emotion was of blessed relief. You still didn’t know who this girl was but that she had found it in her heart to come and rescue earned her your eternal gratitude.

"Quit the small talk and get on with it!" The voice was surprisingly strong and the order was reinforced by a shove of the gun sticking into the lumbar vertebrae of the constable’s back.

"Okay, okay," the constable sighed heavily and proceeded to unlock you much like a zoo keeper letting his favourite Albatross fly the coop, "why does this always happen to me?"

As you stepped out you found yourself at a bit of a loss as to the correct procedure. Having never done this sort of thing before you wondered if you ought to shake the constable’s hand or... your musings were cut short by the girl.

"Now what are you waiting for?" Being in a position to see her clearly you realised that it was the maid with the yellow hair and the oversized glasses you had seen in Cromley’s study.

"You?’’ "Who did you expect, Mata Hari?"

You had to admit she had a point there. After all one can’t afford to be too choosy about one’s rescuer.

"No, no not at all you’re just fine in fact I think you’re absolutely marvellous!" "Thanks for the vote of confidence but in case you’d forgotten this is an abduction and I am holding a policeman at gun point so would you mind cutting the baloney and getting on with the job." A girl, you’d say, who knew how to speak her mind.

"Well," you said, "what should I do?"

"Get a rope or something before his assistant comes back and we have trouble on our hands..."

It was, as the saying goes, a case of speaking to soon. For like the idiomatic devil one thinks of and he appears, the constable’s assistant chose to put in an appearance at that very moment. The three of you perceived his tuneless whistle as he ascended the three steps that led to the constable’s office. The effect it had on the three of you however, was very different. The constable who had thus far been a morose participant in what he regarded as a rather unfair version of the Greek tragedy that had chosen to befall him, leapt like a man who had just received that his old and crabby mother-in-law has passed on and left all her wealth to him. His eyes shone and a springbox could have benefited from watching his technique.

"Perkins!!" he bellowed.

On the girl the effect was equally stimulating if at the other end of the spectrum. She grabbed him and poked the gun in his ribs, "One more word fatso and you’re history!"

You wondered where she got her dialogues from because she sure as hell knew what she was talking about. For a brief moment you toyed with the notion of asking her if she had been an understudy to Ma Baker or someone like her but the idea vanished as soon as it appeared for two reasons — one that she had indicated previously that she considered such idle chit-chat a waste of time and two that the presence of Perkins in the Police station put you in rather an odd situation.

Was it right for you to stand there and assist her in helping you break out of jail or was it right for you to quietly go back in and shut the door behind you? Being an international pig pinching kleptomaniac did give you something of a reputation and you wondered how an incident of jail-break would look on your curriculum vitae. Still the fact of the matter was that you were rather tired of being cooped up in there. And contrary to what you had supposed earlier on it was not the perfect place to soothe jangled nerve ends.

What with Frank Gulley and Tom and the alley cats you hadn’t had much peace there. Had you been an anchor on one of the holiday programs you would not have written this place up too highly. All right but not too good, go to Mauritius, would have been you’re advice to the interested viewer.

That the girl with the yellow hair was a speaker of her mind you knew but that she was quick on the draw you learnt now. Quick to perceive that you were vacillating she grabbed the initiative and in a voice both loud and clear shouted, "Run!"

The result being that like a sprinter at the crack of the starter’s gun you ran collided with the bewildered Perkins who was just coming into the hall. Behind you the girl pushed Dunstable to the ground, and still covering him with the gun ran, past Perkins and outside. You noticed that she was running in three-inch stilettoes when she overtook you. "Come on hurry up we haven’t got all day!" She yelled coming to a halt beside the crazily parked motorbike and staring her up, "To think that this is all you can manage after all the time you spent in the gym!"

The engine throbbed to life before you could answer that and she jumped on, "Come on hop on!"

The turning the motorbike around in a swirl of dust and the screech of brakes put on at the last possible moment, so that you had about ten milliseconds to get on, she thundered off. Behind you, in the steadily increasing distance you could see the vociferating, fist-waving pair of Dunstable and Perkins rushing out of the building.

Now you had seen your fair share of gangster movies and you knew that when making a getaway speed is of essence so you tried out to say anything when the girl with the yellow hair, a name you were forced to use because you really hadn’t the faintest idea what her name was — you could have of course called her Jane or Doris or something but this was the name that seemed to fit her best, drove like a bat out of hell.

To help take your mind off the fact that she really was driving too fast you decided to make polite conversation, even though the circumstances weren’t quite ideal. "What", you shouted for your attempt was actively impeded by the wind in your face, "is your name?"

You couldn’t be sure, and there’s no way you’d sign a sworn affidavit to the effect, but you felt that the answer you got was something on the lines "What’s in a name, a rose by any other name would smell as sweet".

And you must admit that it caused your mind to boggle. Because dash it one does not accept a maid, albeit a maid who works at a headmaster’s lodge, to quote and that too off the cuff from Shakespeare! One does not also expect a maid to go about driving an 1100cc racing motorcycle, or go around rescuing wronged young men, whatever their merits, from coolers.

As you hung on for dear life, for she was driving even more rashly than ever roaring down the road at some 150 to 100 miles an hour, the thought that was uppermost in your mind was that this was no ordinary maid. Meanwhile, she drove with a good deal of surety as if this was the sort of thing she did on her days off, probably giving those race track drivers a few pointers now and then.

"Listen," you yelled for your certainly did not want to die prematurely, "can you slow down?"

Again you couldn’t be sure but you felt that her answer was something on the lines of an exhortation to you to stop being a sissy. Be that as it may you couldn’t help feeling the prickle of fear up you spine, and to make things worse the road grew bumpier steadily. So that at that speech each jolt, each bump was magnified by a factor of two. The doubts you had begun to entertain about your long-term survival became intensified as she showed no inclination to stop or even slow down, treating potholes and bumps with the indifference and hauteur she felt they deserved.

It was, you felt, her attitude that if a pothole, a loose stone or a bump wanted to avoid the bike then fine, otherwise she saw no reason to veer away or a slow down. Maybe, you felt she was carrying on an experiment on the lines of momentum-mass X velocity and the effects of collision of bodies of various masses and velocities. In which case, you would hasten to add, you had no problem whatsoever, only you wished she had chosen a different person to act as her assistant.

And as if all that wasn’t enough for you to worry about the fact remained that except for a nagging sense of familiarity you didn’t know this girl from Eve. She could be, for all you knew, a deranged lunatic. You still hadn’t seen her face clearly because her hair was of the fluffy, frizzly variety and hid much of her face. And what it did leave visible was neatly covered by the oversized glasses. Though you had no objection to a bit of mystery in your life you certainly would have liked to at the very least know her name.

At that moment you espied that the leather jacket she had on over her maid’s black dress had a label on it.

As you read the label it was no wonder that your eyes grew round with consternation for it was unmistakably a Paris label. One of those labels that only about two thousand women world-wide can afford to buy.

One of Amanda Spence’s favourite labels if memory served you correctly. Which side tracked you quite quickly. After all wasn’t it Amanda’s fault that you were in the present predicament? Weren’t all the things that went wrong with your life ultimately Amanda’s fault?

You could not doubt have continued with this line of thought for a long time but you were rather rudely interrupted by a sudden bump which the motorbike took like a show jumping horse. Maybe because of the shock about the label, maybe because of the indignation you felt about Amanda, you had loosened your grip. All of which resulted in your being sort of left behind as the motorbike proceeded forward. You exhibited a far from graceful somersault in mid-air and then landed on Mother Earth with a solid thud.

The last thing you remembered as you passed out was that the girl with the yellow hair was looking back and yelling at you and that ahead of her was a tree which, if a miracle did not make a guest appearance, she would surely collide with. You did try to remember the formula about two bodies one small with mass and velocity colliding with a bigger one with zero velocity, but a bump on the head can do weird things to one’s memory and giving up the unequal fight you went under.