Four coos,” said the voice, “and that means…don’t eat the pomegranates, they may be contaminated with mercury.”

“Wrong day of the week,” shouted Tompkins, “that sounds like the third Thursday of the month.”

“Right, hell, let’s get this right…you are under observation and should leave by the back door and use…”

“That’s right,” screamed Tompkins, “and do it quietly, no need to say anything else, I’ll be off. Coo, coo, coo.”

With great athleticism, Tompkins clambered into the front seat of his Jaguar from a prone position on the pavement and, looking carefully in the mirrors, drove away quickly towards the south coast.

On the motorway, Tompkins cunningly pulled into the re-fuelling section of a services area and looked around at the various lorries, who were almost certainly heading towards The Channel ports. He found one that had Gdansk written on the side and selected that as a suitable home for the tracking device he felt sure he would find on his Jaguar.

He found the apparatus Speedy Bee had given him and switched it on. Tompkins made sure no one was observing. He could see no one, but even so he hunched over the device, to keep it away from prying eyes. It looked small in his enormous bucket-sized hands. Tompkins selected transmitting device from the menu and then pointed the machine at his motor. Straightaway a glowing red light indicated a transmitter was located under the rear bumper. Tompkins found it without too much effort and sprinted across to the Gdansk Lorry, placing the transmitter under the rear bumper of that vehicle.

“A home from home for you my lad,” said Tompkins as he carefully looked around the lorry park before returning to his vehicle. On an impulse, he used the apparatus again and pointed it at his motor. Nothing showed for several seconds and then a red light appeared under the front bumper on the driver’s side. Tompkins waited and, sure enough, another red light, the third overall, appeared on the driver’s side door.

“I am really rather miffed about this,” said Tompkins to himself, “bish and bosh – they obviously feel I am a very bad driver, who will, as a matter of routine, during a day’s driving, lose both front and rear buffers, but manage to keep the driver’s door. How dare they imply I am such a bad driver, by the placement of three tracking devices on the one vehicle? What do I do? I have a good mind to put the devices on three separate lorries and let them chase over Eastern Europe after them, but I think the ruse will be better served, if I put them all on the one lorry and let them follow chummy Pole all the way to Danzig.”

This is what Tomcat Tompkins did – three transmitters in three carefully hidden places on the same lorry carrying plastic kitchen trays to the TV-watching people of Baltic Poland. As luck would have it, the driver of the lorry soon appeared from the rest area and climbed aboard. Tompkins powered up his Jaguar and followed the lorry back onto the motorway where he chugged along in its wake for three miles.

“So this is what obeying the speed limit is like,” said Tompkins yawning with the boredom of it all, “well sod this for a game of soldiers, I’ve had enough, I’ll leave the transmitters in the capable hands of the Polish driver and head, unhindered and untracked, down to the south coast.” Tompkins pulled out from behind the lorry and zoomed away. Two miles back down the motorway the Aston Martin and its three occupants noticed no difference in the speed of the vehicle they were now following.

Tompkins soon arrived at a large house on the outskirts of Chichester. Ten minutes earlier he’d stopped near a field full of bulls and taken the precaution of scanning his vehicle for transmitters again and found nothing suspicious. He hadn’t wanted to lead his enemies to another of his gang’s so called ‘safe’ houses. The one in Clifton would have to be sold, and another one bought in a similar area of the country. His team could take no chances