Книга - To Hell in a Handcart
To Hell in a Handcart
Richard Littlejohn
Richard Littlejohn exposes the madness of modern Britain in this thrill-packed rollercoaster ride of a novel, bursting with all the humour and irreverence that have made him Britain’s No 1 newspaper columnist.What right do you have to protect your family and property from violent criminals? Richard Littlejohn has explored this and other burning social issues in his work as a journalist. Now he takes it even further in a fast-paced powerhouse of a novel, part polemic, part comedy, part tragedy.Mickey French is just an ordinary bloke, an ex-cop struggling to look after his family as self-righteous do-gooders and bungling bureaucrats bring the country to its knees. But Mickey’s life is turned upside down when he is attacked in his own home and forced to defend himself. His arrest for murder is front-page news, and soon the whole nation is watching as he battles for justice, lost in a maze of dodgy lawyers, politically correct police officers, bogus asylum-seekers, self-publicising politicians, shameless journalists and rabble-rousing shock-jocks.
Copyright (#ulink_53c9adda-4afb-5994-98a0-ab12523e6d34)
Harper
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by Harper 2001
Copyright © Richard Littlejohn
Richard Littlejohn asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008209094
Ebook Edition © November 2016 ISBN: 9780007387991
Version: 2016-11-17
Praise for Richard Littlejohn: (#ulink_04d7d0a1-b27a-5833-abef-37b4986794d7)
‘Irascible, irreverent and totally compulsive’
Daily Mail
‘Wounding, funny, mocking, unfair and a tonic … I admire Littlejohn, love his writing and am amazed that 1990s Britain has only produced one such satirist.’
Matthew Parris, The Times
‘The only serious competitor P. J. O’Rourke has.’
Independent
Dedication (#ulink_f86928c1-72d6-5f33-83fe-6133cd23433e)
For Wendy
Contents
Cover (#uca83b59e-82ab-50be-b157-8ec3de4bf7fd)
Title Page (#ua6b9c7b5-3c0d-539b-bf5a-dbab4d0b1d3a)
Copyright (#u0e3a661b-00d1-5d9d-a4ab-7fb4212843db)
Praise (#u86fba751-f6db-5430-914a-a48e9d8fca5d)
Dedication (#u5f4756f5-96f3-5aab-9cb4-e747d2710323)
Chapter One (#udf004693-5d8b-5b5a-b813-870819ca040a)
Chapter Two (#ufd3b896e-aebf-5130-88ac-289cfbd348cf)
Chapter Three (#u9ff082f8-369e-5539-964b-3c43637bf49c)
Chapter Four (#ud88765d0-bf6d-5541-83b9-a2c075c67a9d)
Chapter Five (#u9042ae50-2b33-53fb-8a89-9924bafd339d)
Chapter Six (#u1a2b7224-70d5-5faf-a0d0-20c7a9662dab)
Chapter Seven (#u6684835a-1dcd-59d0-92a7-c2732fb57d05)
Chapter Eight (#u879e2055-ba2a-5c3a-abc7-804ae2db9b58)
Chapter Nine (#uf70ed408-07b3-5469-b4f2-e73b7b952048)
Chapter Ten (#uea4e5dae-9e46-5500-8a5e-0510afc2c1a8)
Chapter Eleven (#ua5c59a14-5939-5529-89f3-dba6534920af)
Chapter Twelve (#u7d7121c7-fb3b-5e80-9083-02e4002e9603)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-one (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-one (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-one (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-one (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixty-one (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixty-two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixty-three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixty-four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixty-five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixty-six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixty-seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixty-eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixty-nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventy (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventy-one (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventy-two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventy-three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventy-four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventy-five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventy-six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventy-seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventy-eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventy-nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighty-one (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighty-two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighty-three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighty-four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighty-five (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
One (#ulink_ded10c4d-f783-560a-81f5-29de04669e20)
The Tigani, Romania
The Tigani doesn’t feature on many maps. It isn’t sign–posted. The Tigani doesn’t advertise. Strangers are rare in these parts.
The Tigani – Gypsyland. Bandit country, home to six hundred close-knit families.
The police never ventured here. There had been no official law enforcement since the fall of Communism and the death of the dictator Ceausüescu. When the men in the black Mercedes S500 had stopped en route to ask directions, the non-gypsy locals questioned their sanity.
Their $100,000 limousine passed silently along the dust road, its computer-assisted air suspension soaking up the potholes like a sponge absorbing spilt milk. The trademark double-glazed smoked glass of the Daimler-Benz company concealed the faces of the driver and his three passengers.
It had cost the men in the Merc $100 and a carton of Marlboro to persuade a taxi driver from a town thirty miles away to lead them to the turning for Gypsyland. They followed his rotting Romanian-built Renault saloon for over an hour before he pulled off the single carriageway, pointed them towards their destination and wished them good luck. Then he was off in the opposite direction in a cloud of dust.
It had taken them just over three hours to cover the ninety miles from the Romanian capital of Bucharest, the final leg of a journey begun in Moscow.
As the car made its stately progress along the unmetalled lane, it was surrounded by raggedy, bare-footed, snot-nosed children and their semi-feral pets. Further back stood a gaggle of women aged from fifteen to seventy-five, wearing traditional Romanian peasant costume, long skirts, woollen jackets and headscarves. The younger women clutched babies in swaddling clothes.
They passed a group of men, all dressed in the familiar Eastern European uniform of denims, sweatshirts bearing the names and logos of provincial English football clubs, trainers on their feet. They pulled on untipped cigarettes and watched, warily.
Behind them loomed a derelict cement factory, which had closed eleven years earlier, a monument to the futility of central planning. There was real poverty here. Families of seven and eight sharing two rooms, with bare floors and a few sticks of furniture, heated inadequately by a simple log fire.
Yet at one end of the village stood a few new houses, red and white brick-built, with one or two cars in the driveway. These were home to the Popescu clan, the town’s ruling Roma gypsy family.
The Mercedes approached the biggest house in the street, a neat two-storey construction, with uPVC windows, a bright red front door and a paved driveway, upon which stood a Toyota pickup truck, with heavy-duty towing attachment, and an old-model BMW 525i. There were flowers in the garden, in stark contrast to the barren patches of yard elsewhere in the town.
This was the home of Marin Popescu, leader of the Roma clan, the self-styled Bullybasa, whose word was what passed for law in the Tigani.
The driver pulled into the paved driveway and brought the Mercedes to a halt behind the BMW. He popped the central locking.
Three men in Armani suits and Gucci loafers got out. They were all wearing immaculate black, collar-less shirts and sunglasses. The humidity stuck to them like warm glue, in stark contrast to the filtered, constant sixty-eight-degree, humidified air in the Mercedes. A small crowd of peasants watched from a distance as two of the three Russians approached the front door. There was no movement from within the house.
The biggest of the group pulled the wrought-iron handle of a bell hooked up to the door and waited for a reply.
He stepped back and surveyed the front aspect. Not a curtain twitched.
‘Marin Popescu,’ he called.
Nothing.
The smallest of the three men returned to the car and rapped his knuckles on the driver’s window. The boot lid eased open with a gentle clunk. He walked to the back of the car, bent over the boot, reached inside, removed a tarpaulin and retrieved a Soviet Army-issue, hand-held, anti-tank grenade launcher.
‘Marin Popescu,’ the big man called out again.
Silence.
The big man and his other companion strolled around to the back of the Mercedes. The small man moved to one side and took up position on one knee about thirty feet from the front door.
The crowd withdrew and scattered for cover. The other two men climbed back in the Mercedes and the driver reversed slowly.
The small man squeezed the trigger, propelling an armour-piercing grenade in the direction of the front door. It hit the target, shattering the reinforced steel behind the wooden façade, passing along the hall and exiting via a kitchen window. It slammed into a tractor parked at the rear and exploded, igniting the tractor’s fuel tank, sending it thirty feet into the air in a spectacular, incandescent fireball, shattering every window at the back of the house, melting the uPVC frames like putty.
The small man put the grenade launcher back in the boot of the Mercedes and replaced the protective tarpaulin, like a mother covering her precious, newborn baby.
The other two men got out of the car, clutching Kalashnikovs. The small Russian took a machine pistol from a holster under his left armpit. They waited for the smoke to clear, then walked towards the house.
As the smoke parted, they could see the figure of a man, 5ft 9ins, medium build, greasy, greying hair, walking towards them, his arms outstretched towards the heavens.
The Bullybasa was a less impressive figure than they had expected, even though he was immaculately dressed in designer trousers and silk shirt, with an expensive watch on the wrist of his extended left arm.
He was in his late forties, with a weathered complexion, typical of the Roma people. His nervous smile revealed a gold front tooth.
He had already been humiliated in front of the town. Even if he came out of this alive, he might never be able again to command fear and respect in the Tigani. It was time to negotiate.
‘Gentlemen. I am Marin Popescu,’ he said in the pidgin Russian he had picked up as a result of his involvement in the car-smuggling racket. ‘No more, please. Not in front of my people. Follow me into the house. We can resolve this. Come.’
He backed into the smouldering hallway, past the remnants of some expensively embroidered wall hangings.
Marin Popescu led his three visitors from Moscow into a large sitting room, furnished with plush Persian rugs, upholstered leather and mahogany sofas and matching footstools. A 46-inch back-projection Sony home cinema TV stood in one corner, its cable leading outside to a large satellite dish, like a giant wok, now containing one molten tractor.
The big man spoke.
‘Where is he?’
‘Gentlemen, we should talk.’
‘We have nothing to discuss.’
‘Where is he? Where is your son, Ilie?’
‘I am not able to tell you that. I do not know.’
The big man levelled the muzzle of his Kalashnikov at Marin’s head.
‘No, please,’ Marin pleaded.
The big man swivelled left and unloaded ten rounds into a wall hanging hunting scene above the fireplace.
‘For the last time. Where is he?’
‘He is not here.’
‘We know that.’
‘He has not been here.’
The big man raised the Kalashnikov and smashed Marin round the temple. The Bullybasa collapsed in a heap on the marble tiled floor.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘Enough. He has been here. He was here three weeks ago. But he is not here now. He is very afraid. He has run. He has gone. But he told me to say you will get your money. He is very sorry, it was not his fault.’
‘Where is he?’
‘He has gone to England, to get your money.’
‘Where in England?’
‘London, maybe. I’m not sure. But he will be back with your money. He will steal cars, ship them to me. I will sell them, give money to you.’
‘Not good enough.’
The big man put the Kalashnikov to Marin’s head. He pressed his Gucci loafer into his throat.
The second Russian reached into the pocket of his Armani linen suit, took out a chamois leather pouch and removed a pair of silver-plated pliers.
‘You know what they say about Russian dentistry?’ The big man smiled for the first time. ‘It’s all true.’
As he pressed his foot into Marin’s Adam’s apple, the second Russian knelt beside him and squeezed the Bullybasa’s streaming nostrils. Marin gasped for breath.
The second Russian clamped the pliers onto Marin’s golden front tooth and yanked. Marin let out an agonized, terrified screech and his tooth was wrenched from its roots, ripping his gum and top lip in the process. He writhed in agony on the floor as the big man released his grip. His mouth was a claret gash. The blood poured through his fingers. The pain was excruciating.
‘We’ll call that a down payment,’ said the big man.
Marin cried out in pain, like a wounded fox caught in a snare.
‘London?’ mused the big man, wiping his forehead with a silk handkerchief.
‘He will get your money,’ Marin tried to reassure the Russian, even though he was gagging on his own blood.
‘Money?’ laughed the big man. ‘It’s gone beyond money.’
He lowered the Kalashnikov and pumped two bullets into Marin’s skull, one in each eye, putting the Bullybasa out of his misery.
The three Russians walked out of the house and settled back into the Mercedes.
The driver reversed, engaged Drive and motored slowly out of town. There was no reason to hurry. The Bullybasa was dead. The car was bulletproof. And the police never come within twenty-five miles of the Tigani.
As they drew onto the road to Bucharest, the big man picked a satellite phone from the centre console and punched in a number.
Seconds later, a voice in Moscow answered.
‘Sacha, it’s me,’ said the big man. ‘Who do we know in London?’
Two (#ulink_b54b380d-164b-518d-8edd-b94fbc59ec02)
London
Mickey French handed over two £50 notes and trousered his £2 change. Petrol had hit a tenner a gallon during the last fuel blockade and what went up never seemed to come down again.
He walked back to the car, turned the key in the ignition and pressed the pre-set button on the radio.
‘You’re listening to Rocktalk 99FM. I’m Ricky Sparke and these are the latest headlines. In Kent, another thirty-five Romanian nationals were found wandering along the hard shoulder of the A2. Police officers gave them meal vouchers and rail tickets to Croydon, where they will be able to register for free housing and social benefits. It brings to over 150,000 the number of asylum-seekers currently waiting for their applications to be processed.
‘Fighting broke out on the Chiswick flyover in west London as motorists abandoned their vehicles to escape a five-hour, ten-mile traffic jam caused by the new 25 mph speed limit on the M4, which is being rigorously enforced by cameras and satellite technology.
‘Police made more than two hundred arrests, three for assault, two for threatening behaviour and the rest for exceeding the temporary 15 mph speed limit on the elevated contraflow section.
‘The trouble was witnessed from above by the Deputy Prime Minister who was flying by helicopter to Norwood, where an RAF jet was waiting to transport him to Acapulco for a seventeen-day fact-finding conference on the future of the lesser-spotted Venezuelan swamp vole.
‘More news later. This is Madness.’
You can say that again, old son. Complete madness. Mickey French shook his head, smiled a resigned smile and drummed his fingers on the steering wheel as his old drinking mate, Ricky Sparke, fired up the opening bars of ‘House of Fun’.
‘Thank Christ I’m out of it,’ he said to his wife Andi, perched beside him on the passenger seat of his pearl-white M-reg Scorpio Ghia.
‘How many times have I heard that? I’m still not sure you really mean it,’ she said, as he pulled off the forecourt and forced his way into the right-turn-only lane to avoid the half-mile queue for the pumps in either direction.
‘Honest, love. I do mean it. Cross my heart, on our babies’ eyes.’
The babies in question were sitting in the back seat, oblivious to their parents, to each other, to the outside world.
Katie was now fifteen and had a portable stereo permanently glued to her head. Occasionally she paused to change her chewing gum or call a friend on her pay-as-you-go mobile.
Her semi-permanent pout could not, however, obscure her looks. Katie was destined to break a few hearts. She was a pretty girl, dark-haired, olive complexion, slight, boyish figure, pert nose, just like her mum, who was of Greek Cypriot extraction, maiden name Androula Kleanthous, known to all as Andi.
Katie would sometimes complain that she wasn’t as full-hipped or ample-breasted as her classmates, but Andi reassured her that she’d be grateful for that in twenty or thirty years’ time.
Andi herself could still squeeze into a size ten at forty-plus and compared to some of the grotesque, lard-arsed old boilers outside the school gate, looked like a movie star. That’s what Mickey told her, at any rate.
And he meant it.
Young Terry, just coming up thirteen, was built like Mickey. He was already 5ft 9ins, just four inches short of his dad, and weighed in at eleven stone. He adopted the same cropped haircut as his father, but unlike his dad not out of necessity.
Mickey’s fighting weight was fifteen stone, but he’d gone to flab since he left the Job. Not so as you’d notice, mind. He came from a long line of dockers, brick-shithouses of men who could carry a few extra pounds. But Mickey knew.
Terry pulled down the peak of his baseball cap to obscure the light shining on the screen on his Gameboy.
They were driving from their home in the village of Heffer’s Bottom on the Essex borders to Goblin’s Holiday World on the south coast for a long weekend.
Driving would perhaps be overdoing it. Inching forward in a southerly direction might be more accurate, that’s if you didn’t count the regular periods of complete standstill.
Despite Katie’s initial protestations, she was looking forward to the holiday. She doted on her dad and vice versa. They didn’t see much of each other, never had really, what with Mickey’s work when she was growing up. He was always there, though, when it mattered, and she appreciated that.
Her friends had parents who were always going on about spending ‘quality time’ with their children, but Katie could tell they only ever thought of themselves.
Who needs quality time when you’ve got quality parents?
Apart from the metallic leakage from Katie’s Walkman, the occasional ‘cool’ from Terry as his micro-electronic alter ego slayed some more aliens and the Rocktalk 99FM soundtrack on the radio, all was peaceful and cordial.
‘You still don’t believe me, do you?’ Mickey said.
‘If you say so.’
‘No, love, this is important to me. I don’t want you to think that I’m still pining for the police.’
‘Yeah, yeah.’
‘What’s with the yeah, yeah?’
‘Mickey, you were married to the Job for as long as you’ve been married to me. You were like a bear with a sore head for months after you put your papers in.’
‘Not any more. The game’s not worth the candle.’
‘I never thought I’d hear you say that.’
‘Me, neither. It’s just, well, you know.’
‘What?’
‘For instance, take that last news bulletin.’
‘I thought your mate read it very well. For once. He didn’t stumble. Or swear.’
‘Come on, Andi. Be fair. Ricky’s cleaned up his act.’
‘About time.’
‘Case of having to. Anyway, it’s not how he read it, it’s what he read.’
‘What about it?’
‘Two news items, right? Between them they just about sum it all up. On one hand, we’ve got waves of so-called asylum-seekers pouring into Britain, scrounging, thieving …’
‘You can’t lump them all together as crooks and scroungers,’ Andi interrupted. ‘My family are immigrants. We came here to make a better life, too, just like some of these people. You don’t think we’re all scroungers and crooks.’
‘I know that, love. But there’s a world of difference between your people and what we’ve got now. Your family came prepared to support themselves, brought skills, started businesses. Look at your dad. Asked for nothing, built a chain of restaurants from scratch.’
‘So what’s your point? How do you know we won’t have a Romanian or a Kosovan restaurant on every High Street in ten years’ time?’
Mickey laughed. ‘Don’t hold your breath. OK, so some are genuine, I’m not denying that. But there’s a fair share who have just come to take, not give. Beggars, pickpockets, all sorts. We’re talking organized criminal gangs from Eastern Europe. Interpol know who they are. The Branch know who they are. And what does Old Bill do about it?’
‘What are they supposed to do, Mickey? It’s the government letting them in.’
‘Yeah, OK. But the chief constables bleat about lack of resources, yet they’re never short of money – or “ree-sorsis” as they always call it – when it comes to those poor sods on the M4, just trying to get to work, visit their gran in hospital, who knows? They crawl for ever at about 5 mph, then the moment they find themselves out of the woods they’re nicked for doing more than 15 mph, pulled over, random breath-tested, tyres checked. How much does all that cost?’
‘Oh, I forgot to tell you,’ Andi interrupted. ‘Mum got a ticket the other day. A foot over a zigzag line, outside the chemist’s, picking up her prescription.’
‘Bastards. There you go,’ said Mickey. ‘Yet at the same time, there’s gangs of bandits heading for the West End with rail tickets paid for by the good old British taxpayer. And even if they are caught, they get a slap on the wrist and a pound from the poor box.’
‘That’s not the police, Mickey. That’s the courts.’
‘Accepted. But there’s never any leniency when Muggins in his Mondeo gets another three points on his licence, a thousand-pound fine and another few hundred quid on his insurance. We’re letting off real villains and at the same time turning as many decent folk as possible into criminals. That wasn’t what I joined the police for. And you know what really pisses me off?’
‘Go on, you’re going to tell me anyway,’ Andi chuckled.
‘I know most of this is the fault of the politicians. But there are plenty of Old Bill who not only go along with it, they abso-bloody-lutely love it. From the Black Rats in the jam-sandwiches to the fast-track fanny merchants at the top. That’s why I’m well off out of it. Now do you believe me?’
‘Every time, lover.’ She squeezed his hand and smiled. It was a while since they’d been away as a family and nothing was going to spoil this holiday. ‘You all right?’
‘I’m fine. Sorry to bang on, love. It’s just, you know, every now and then.’
‘Sure, I know. And I’ll tell you something. I’m glad you’re out of it, too. I wasn’t certain how you’d be, at first. There were a few difficult days, you know.’
‘Yeah, I’m sorry. It took me a while, that’s all.’
‘It was bound to. I did understand. If I got a bit agitated sometimes, it was only because I was worried about you. After the, well, you know, after that, after you were shot, not knowing whether you were going to make it. Then not knowing if you’d walk again. Or work again. Not that that mattered. I’d have got a job, we’d have been all right, really we would.’
Mickey squeezed her hand back. Funny, they didn’t talk about it much at home. Too painful, maybe.
They weren’t like those couples who were always talking and touching for fear of what might happen if they stopped. They didn’t need to. So much between them went unspoken.
But he found it easy to talk to Andi in the car. It wasn’t that he dreaded eye contact. He adored eye contact with her, especially when they were making love. Conversation came easier when he was in the motor, that’s all.
Maybe it was a legacy of all those stakeouts, all those long nights in smelly squad cars, full of stale burgers, flatulence, boredom, anticipation and, yes, fear, real fear. He never knew whether the target would be tooled up, how he would react. He’d been trained, programmed, honed, briefed, but when push came to shove, fear and adrenalin kicked in.
And when it happened, there was farce and fuck-up, too. Like on the night he stopped the bullet which nearly killed him.
‘We don’t need to import criminals. We’ve got enough scum of our own,’ Mickey reflected, as the traffic again ground inexorably to a standstill.
It was a routine stakeout. Mickey and his colleagues from the armed response unit were parked up outside the Westshires Building Society in Homsey, north London.
They’d been in this situation dozens of times, acting on information received that rarely came to anything. For once, it was game on.
Chummy strolled round the corner and into the building society, wielding a shotgun, blissfully unaware that the police were lying in wait, courtesy of a friendly, neighbourhood grass who offered him up over Guinness and Jameson’s in the back bar of the Princess Alexandra in exchange for a bit of leeway on a handling charge he was facing in the not too distant.
Challenged by armed officers inside the building, the robber turned and ran. Mickey and two other firearms officers chased him through an industrial estate and onto the railway line.
He was a big lad, out of Seven Sisters, strapping, gangling, six foot tall, and, still clutching the shooter, he ran, ducking and weaving through the parked cars, dodging between the railway carriages.
The police got lucky when he caught his left size-twelve Timberland mountain boot in a badly maintained bit of track, snapped his ankle like a Twiglet and could only crawl underneath a derelict wooden goods van, which hadn’t moved since Dr Beeching.
Trapped, frightened, fuelled by cocaine, he started firing. He wasn’t much of a shot and Mickey and the lads fell back on their training, took cover and followed procedure, which was to lie low, not return fire and wait for the negotiator to arrive.
The temptation, the natural inclination, was always to storm the blagger and stick a shooter up his nose. But as a specialist weapons officer, Mickey knew to play the long game, the waiting game. It usually worked. Only very occasionally did someone get hurt.
When it went wrong, it went horribly wrong. Mickey had been on the Libyan Embassy siege when a gunman started firing out of the window into St James’s. He was only yards away from WPC Yvonne Fletcher when she went down.
The bastard who fired that fatal shot got diplomatic immunity and walked free. It still riled Mickey all these years later.
He had been in Tottenham, too, the night PC Keith Blakelock bought it at Broadwater Farm, hacked to death, his head severed and paraded on a pole.
In the railway siding, Mickey had bided his time, even though five minutes seemed like a lifetime in these circumstances. Then he saw one of his colleagues, Jimmy Needle, leap up and start to run in the direction of the embankment. Two young boys had wandered onto the line from the nearby playing field to see what all the excitement was about and had stumbled straight into the line of fire.
As Needle ran towards the boys, the blagger, Lincoln Philpott, he was called, panicked and loosed off a couple of shots.
By this time Mickey was on his feet. Philpott fired wildly and inaccurately, blasting anywhere. Mickey felt a sudden, almost dull, thud in his back, then a burning, piercing sensation, like acute kidney pain.
The next thing he was lying face down, paralysed in agony. One bullet had ricocheted off a carriage and thudded into Mickey’s lower back, smashing his discs.
I can’t feel my legs, he thought. For some reason the first thing that came into his mind was that old hospital joke.
‘Doctor, I can’t feel my legs.’
‘That’s because we’ve had to cut your arms off.’
Mickey, despite the pain, smiled inwardly. They say that from adversity comes humour. Something like that, anyway. And Mickey spent his life trying to see the funny side. If you didn’t, you’d end up like the Michael Douglas character in that movie, Falling Down, roaming the streets firing at random.
They put him back together in the spinal injury unit at Stoke Mandeville, but he was out of the game in plaster and traction and therapy for the best part of nine months.
They offered him counselling, but Mickey declined politely. He would have declined impolitely had they insisted.
Some time afterwards, he was talking about it with Ricky Sparke over a couple of large ones in Spider’s Bar, a downstairs drinker in Soho, run by a dubious Irishman called Dillon.
‘You know the worst thing about it, Rick?’
‘The pain?’
‘Nah, nothing like that.’
‘What then?’
‘Michael Winner.’
‘Michael Winner, what’s he got to do with it?’
‘He runs this police trust thing, for coppers who get shot on the job.’
‘And?’
‘Well, I’m lying there in Stoke Mandeville, minding my own, head down in a George V Higgins, more plaster than Paris, and in walks Winner with a posse of Fleet Street’s finest and a couple of film crews from the TV. He’s come to present me with an award.’
‘That must have been nice for you.’
‘I’d have done a runner but I couldn’t move. And the next thing I knew, he was on me. All that cigar smoke, all those dinners. After he’d gone I asked the nurse to give me a bed-bath – though it would have taken a fortnight in a Jacuzzi full of Swarfega to do the job properly.’
Dillon sent over a couple of glasses of his own special concoction – Polish spirit and schnapps marinaded with chilli peppers for a month in the deep freeze.
They swallowed the glutinous liquid whole, Eastern European-style. It was the only way. Otherwise it could strip the enamel off your teeth. If there had been a fireplace they would have thrown their glasses into it. There wasn’t, fortunately, just a battered sofa where the fireplace would have been, containing an actor who used to be in a cat food commercial sleeping off a three-day hangover.
‘Actually, Winner wasn’t the worst thing, mate,’ said Mickey, as the drink brought about its inevitable melancholic metamorphosis.
‘No? What’s worse than Michael Winner?’
‘Not much, it has to be said. But it wasn’t just being shot. I half-expected that. It wasn’t even Philpott walking on a technicality, much as that churned my guts. It was the way his brief told it, made it sound as if we’d planted the gun on him. He painted Philpott as the victim in all this and us as the villains of the piece. That’s what hurt.’
‘First thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers. That was what Shakespeare wrote, if my O-level English serves me. Hal to Dick in Henry the Something, part, oh I dunno, let’s have another drink,’ Ricky mumbled.
‘Fromby.’
‘Eh?’
‘Fromby. Philpott’s brief. Smug, self-righteous bastard. Justin fucking Fromby.’
‘Mickey. Mickey. Mick-ee!’ Andi prodded him in the ribs. ‘Wake up, Mickey, the traffic’s moving.’
‘What? Oh, sure. I’m sorry love, I was miles away,’ he replied, easing the Scorpio into Drive and resuming their journey.
‘Anywhere nice?’ she asked.
‘Nowhere I’d want to take you and the kids,’ he said. ‘Nowhere I want to go again in a hurry.’
Mickey checked his watch, a silver Rolex presented to him at his leaving do. Mickey joked it was the best fake Rolex he’d ever seen. Everyone laughed, although he noticed the detective in charge of the whip-round could only manage an embarrassed grin. Mickey didn’t ask and he didn’t check subsequently, either. It was the thought. And the watch told the time and hadn’t gone rusty, not like some of the moody kettles he’d seen over the years.
‘Wossamatter, Dad, why aren’t we moving?’ Terry asked, looking up from his Gameboy.
Mickey explained that the annual festival of digging up the roads used to run from February until the end of the financial year at the start of April. Now you got roadworks all year round, like strawberries. They used to be seasonal, too. That’s progress.
On Rocktalk 99FM, Ricky Sparke was back-announcing ‘The Guns of Brixton’ by the Clash prior to reading out another bunch of delays. He could only hope to scratch the surface. So many roadworks, so little time. He hadn’t even mentioned the little local difficulty Mickey currently found himself in. Any delay less than an hour was hardly worth the bother any more. People had come to expect it.
Still, that was then. Whenever he felt bitter, Mickey took stock of his life. He was at least alive, he had a reasonable pension, around £25,000 a year, which he supplemented driving Ricky Sparke around and doing the odd job for a local chauffeur firm. He had a beautiful wife, two smashing kids and his mortgage was paid off. And now they were on their way to Goblin’s Holiday World. Life could be very much worse.
Now they were on the move again, through the wastelands of north-east London on a new swathe of road for which hundreds of solid, Victorian artisans’ cottages had given their lives.
There were GATSO speed cameras every eight hundred yards or so, rigidly enforcing a totally unnecessary 40 mph speed limit. Even though Mickey knew the odds were that only about ten per cent of them were likely to contain any film, he wasn’t taking any chances and drove at a constant 39 mph in the middle lane. He didn’t need any more points on his licence and, anyway, they were bringing in the new digital cameras which didn’t need film, nicked you for fun.
Driving was what he did for a living these days. How else was Ricky Sparke going to get home from Spider’s of an evening without getting mugged or arrested if Mickey and his Scorpio were off the road?
Either side of him, cars, vans and lorries hurried by, accompanied by a flashing of camera bulbs which would have done credit to the paparazzi outside a West End premiere. Their drivers saw spot fines and suspensions as an occupational hazard, in much the same way old-time villains did their bird without complaint even if they’d been fitted up. If they get caught this time, it’s outweighed by all the times they weren’t. It comes with the turf, or, rather, the tarmac.
Mickey couldn’t see the point. In a mile or two the shiny new freeway would end abruptly and all three lanes would be funnelled into two, then one. Why risk three points and a couple of hundred quid just to be two or three minutes earlier to the traffic lights or next set of roadworks?
He plucked another wine gum from the packet on the dashboard and popped it in his mouth. Soon three lanes became two, 39 mph became 20 mph became 10 mph became stop. Mickey found himself at the head of a new queue at a red light, halting traffic at the start of a single lane, cordoned off with the inevitable cones and, unusually, tape, the kind police use to seal off a scene of crime.
Suddenly he was aware of a swarm of bodies around the car, filthy water being sloshed on his windscreen, knuckles rapping on the side windows. Mickey waved them away to no avail.
He could see the faces pressed against the glass, foreign faces. There must have been ten or a dozen, swarthy, olive-skinned young men with gold teeth in designer clothes, women in shawls and headscarves with babies in arms, thrusting their hands towards the car.
‘Money, money, give me money, English. Hungry. Help. Give. My baby starving.’
‘Dad, Dad, make them go away,’ Katie implored him in panic.
‘Don’t worry, darling, we’ll be on the move soon. Stay calm.’
‘But they’re frightening me, Daddy.’
‘Just ignore them,’ said Mickey, checking the central locking and securing the windows of the Scorpio.
A woman threw herself across the bonnet, pleading, cajoling. ‘Money, English. Give. Hungry. Refugee. Money.’
‘Get off the car. I said, get off the car,’ Mickey shouted at her.
Terry started hammering on the inside of the rear passenger window, where a menacing face thrust itself towards him. ‘Fuck off, fuck off, just fucking FUCK OFF,’ he shouted.
‘TERRY! Stop that. STOP IT. You’ll only make things worse,’ screamed Andi, freaked by the stifling, claustrophobic atmosphere inside the Scorpio.
‘Change, you bastard, CHANGE,’ Mickey hollered at the red light. But the red light stared back defiantly.
‘DADDY! DADDY! They’re trying to get in the car,’ Katie called out hysterically. Mickey could hear the sound of the rear hatchback being jemmied open. All their luggage, Andi’s jewellery, their holiday money in Mickey’s travelling case. It was all in there.
There was a deafening crash to his left. One of the gang had taken a crowbar to the front passenger window. Mickey looked across to see his wife showered with hundreds of shards of glass, cowering in her seat. The assailant tried to force the door, but the Ford central locking held.
Andi was petrified, clutching her handbag as an arm reached through and grabbed for it. Mickey couldn’t hear himself think. The shattered window had triggered the alarm, which pierced the air.
Terry lunged forward and seized the arm, wrenching it away from his mother. Mickey saw a gleam, a flash. He knew instantly it was a blade. He dived across and grabbed the attacker’s wrist as the knife flashed just inches away from Andi’s cheek.
The fist dropped the blade into Andi’s lap. Mickey picked it up and, instinctively, plunged it into the hirsute forearm being gripped by his son.
He could hear the scream of the attacker above the cacophony of the car alarm. Both arms withdrew, blood spurting everywhere, splattering on the inside of the wind-screen, erupting over the dashboard. More beggars threw themselves at the vehicle.
Mickey wrenched the car into reverse and stamped on the accelerator. There was another agonizing screech as the legs of the man attempting to jemmy open the rear tailgate were crushed against the reinforced front bumpers of the car behind, a blue Volvo 740 estate, driven by an Orthodox rabbi from Stamford Hill.
Mickey jammed the gear lever into first and stood on the gas pedal. The car surged forward through the tape, scattering the cones, mounting the pavement.
Mickey’s vision was obscured by the blood on the wind-screen. He tried to wipe it away with his hand, but it smeared. Steering with one hand, he cleared a patch in the claret.
As he did so, he saw the crazed figure of a small, dark-haired woman, arms outstretched, holding her child before her, gesticulating in his direction, screaming hatred. Mickey threw the wheel left in an attempt at evasive action.
Too late.
The woman was hurled backwards and a small body propelled through the air. It bounced once on the bonnet, slammed into the windscreen, rolled under the front nearside wheel and was gone.
Mickey shuddered to a halt.
‘What are you DOING?’ Andi cried, her face dripping with blood. ‘Just DRIVE, Mickey. Get us OUT OF HERE!’
‘But the baby.’
‘Fuck the fucking gypsy baby. What about your babies? DRIVE!’
Three (#ulink_93329fbd-2c77-52ba-bb16-8ca14c2cc317)
Mickey swung the Scorpio into the car park of a huge, half-timbered Thirties roadhouse, now plying its trade as an American theme restaurant, at least a mile from the scene of the ambush.
He looked across at his wife, who was shaking and crying uncontrollably. He turned to his kids in the rear seat. Katie was screwed up in a ball, in the fetal position, sobbing.
Terry was bouncing, his eyes on stalks, popping out of his head, blood all over his sweatshirt and on the underside of the peak of his baseball cap. The adrenalin was still pumping. He was punching the roof lining of the Scorpio and roaring like a young lion after his first kill.
‘Yes, yes, YES!’ Terry cried, triumphantly.
‘Terry, son. It’s all right. Calm down. You did well. Just, you know, chill. Cool. Whatever you call it,’ said Mickey soothingly.
He put his arm round Andi and pulled her close. ‘Are you hurt?’
‘No, I don’t think so,’ she replied, fumbling inside her handbag for a wet-wipe. ‘It’s not my blood, lover. I’ll live.’
They both turned to Katie, shivering on the back seat, her arms across her head, trying to shut out the horror of it all.
Mickey disengaged the central locking, silenced the alarm and got out of the car. He walked round to the rear passenger side, opened the door, picked up Katie and cradled her in his arms.
‘Katie. Katie, darling. It’s all right. We’re all fine. It’s all over.’
She threw her arms round his neck. He could feel her warm tears on his face, could taste her terror. She whispered in his ear: ‘Daddy, make it better.’
Mickey looked at the Scorpio. Or rather what was left of it. The lunchtime trade arriving for overcooked burgers and rancid ribs surveyed the devastation.
‘My God,’ said Mickey. ‘The baby.’
‘What?’
‘That woman’s baby. I think I killed it. I’ve got to go back.’
‘You can’t be serious,’ Andi said.
‘Deadly. Look, take the kids inside. Clean yourselves up. I have to go back. I used to be a police officer, for God’s sake. Can you remember that? Please.’
He went to call the police on his mobile, then realized someone would have done it already. But Mickey had to return to the scene. He was looking at failing to stop, failing to report an accident, malicious wounding, death by dangerous driving, even, and God knows what else.
OK, so there were mitigating circumstances. Self-defence, reasonable force. But these things had to be done by the book.
‘I won’t be long. Promise. I have to do this. Get the kids a burger or something.’
Andi knew resistance was futile. He would do the right thing. That sometimes infuriated her, but that’s why she loved him.
Mickey got back in the car, which looked like a left-over from a demolition derby. He turned the key in the ignition, selected Drive and rolled the car back onto the main road.
He drove slowly, unsure of just how far he had come. In the distance he could see the flashing blue light of a patrol car. As he approached, he saw an officer in a fluorescent yellow jacket in animated conversation with a rabbi.
But something was missing. Where were the roadworks? There were a few lengths of tape, fluttering in the breeze, but nothing else.
He pulled in to the kerb, walked over to the officer and introduced himself. ‘I think you’re looking for me.’
‘I’ve just been hearing all about it from this gentleman here,’ he said, indicating Rabbi Chaim Bergman. ‘Are you all right, sir?’
‘Er, yes, I suppose so. In the circumstances.’
‘And the family?’
‘I left them at that burger place down the road. You’ll be wanting a statement from me.’
‘That won’t be necessary, sir.’
‘Won’t be necessary? This was like a fucking war zone twenty minutes ago.’
‘So it might have been, sir. That was twenty minutes ago.’ He looked at Mickey. ‘I know you, don’t I? You were an instructor at Hendon. Weapons, right? Sergeant French, correct? You got shot, over in Hornsey?’
‘Um, yes. And it’s former sergeant. I put my papers in. It’s plain mister now.’
‘You don’t remember me. PC Cartwright, Tony.’
‘Now you come to mention it,’ said Mickey, looking around him, puzzled.
‘Yes, you failed me.’
‘Sorry about that.’
‘No hard feelings. I did an advanced driving course and landed the area car. You probably did me a favour.’
‘Glad to hear it. But I don’t understand what’s going on here.’
‘The good rabbi was just explaining. Apparently, after your contretemps with our Eastern European guests, they gathered up their wounded and ran off through that council estate over there.’
‘But where are the traffic lights? The cones? The rest of the tape?’
‘They took that, too.’
‘WHAT?’
‘We had heard rumours, but we’ve never caught them at it.’
‘At what?’
‘They bring the traffic lights with them, in a van. Then they set up a fake set of roadworks. The tape makes it look official. Gives them a captive audience. They’re very well organized.’
‘So none of this …’
‘Apparently not, sir.’
‘But what about the fella with the knife? I mean, I …’
‘Now then, Sergeant, sorry, Mister French. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you the inadvisability of incriminating yourself. The way it looks to me is that with no victim, there’s been no crime. No crime, no complainant, no report, no problem. Unless, of course, you wish to make a complaint?’
‘Er, no, forget it. Thanks.’ Mickey turned to go. ‘Hang on, what about the baby?’
‘Ah, yes, the baby,’ said the PC. ‘Come with me.’
He led Mickey over to the side of the road where a small, crushed figure lay crumpled in a bundle of blankets.
He kicked it.
The blankets fell open to reveal … a life-size doll.
‘I’m sure they can afford another baby, sir. Mind how you go.’
Four (#ulink_af72d161-4fee-5659-8f04-5187fc4a559c)
Then
‘You’re WHAT? You can’t be serious?’ Justin Fromby unscrewed the top of another bottle of Bulgarian Beaujolais and filled a dirty half-pint mug to the brim. He scratched his balls and adjusted his flaccid dick. His Y-fronts had seen better days.
‘Oh, I’m serious, all right. I have never been more serious in my life.’ Roberta Peel rolled over on her grubby futon, reached for a cigarette from a pack on the sticky glass-topped coffee table, lit it and drew deep.
‘But what about your work?’
‘It will be my work.’
‘I mean, the law centre. You can’t turn your back on that.’
‘I can do whatever I please, or do you only pretend to believe in women’s lib?’
‘Of course not. That’s not fair. You know I’m committed to the Project. That’ s why I’m doing it.’
‘But, the police, for God’s sake. They’re the enemy. You’ve always agreed on that. You saw what they did to the gay rights marchers. You were on that picket line at the power station. They’re animals, pigs.’
‘Precisely,’ Roberta replied with a self-satisfied smirk. ‘And what do you do with animals?’
‘Liberate them?’
‘Don’t be daft, they’re not smoking beagles or laboratory rats.’
‘What then?’
‘You train them.’
‘Train them?’
‘Haven’t you ever heard the expression, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em?’
‘Sure.’
‘Well, we’re never going to beat them. Not by marching and demonstrating. That’s for students and idealistic dreamers. It’s waning in public.’
‘But we’ve had some successes.’
‘Such as? A few occupations, petitions? Stopping the traffic outside the Old Bailey? Gestures. You can’t beat the system from without. You have to be within it to make any real difference. We have got to capture the institutions.’
‘But that could take years.’
‘About twenty, I reckon. Maybe twenty-five years at the outside.’
‘But that’s an entire lifetime.’
‘Only if you’re in your twenties. Look at the bigger picture, Justin. You’ve got a brain, use it. Ask yourself who, eventually, is going to have the biggest influence on the way society works – a 45-year-old overgrown student activist, pissing around on the fringes? A middle-aged trades union leader, locked outside the factory gates? A 45-year-old journalist churning out agitprop bollocks in a small circulation revolutionary newspaper on sale outside Woolworth’s? A 45-year-old lawyer up to his arse in housing benefit applications and claims for wrongful arrest? Or a 45-year-old judge, a 45-year-old Cabinet minister, a 45-year-old editor of a national newspaper, a 45-year-old Commissioner of Police?’
‘Hmm,’ mused Justin, downing his rough red wine and pouring another from the bottle on the mantelpiece, perched next to a six-inch bust of Karl Marx, under the watchful eye of a Che Guevara poster on the voguish mud-brown wall. He wiped a tumbler with his discarded T-shirt, filled the glass and handed it to Roberta, still lying naked on the futon.
Two middle-class kids with law degrees, fresh out of university, sharing a top-floor bedsit in shabby Tufnell Park, their lives stretching out before them. It was a nowhere district between the Holloway Road and Kentish Town, north London, a tube station between King’s Cross and Finchley Central, two and sixpence, Golders Green on the Northern Line. And it didn’t have a park.
Roberta was plain, but that’s the way she liked it. At 5ft 7ins, she was stocky, not fat, with full hips and firm tits like rugby balls, and had nipples you could hang a child’s swing on. She favoured kaftans and sensible shoes. Daddy was a vicar, the Rev Robert Peel, in an affluent part of Surrey. He had wanted a son, so Roberta was named for him. Mummy something in the WI, a parish councillor and magistrate. Roberta was an only child and she was pampered, at least to the fullest extent of a parson’s C of E stipend.
They were thrilled when she left her all-girls grammar school and went off to university to study law. Roberta was sad to leave St Margaret’s, not because she was loath to shed the shackles of school. She had a crush on the games mistress.
Justin was the son of Edward Fromby, sole proprietor of Fromby & Fromby, the biggest retail coal merchant in Nottinghamshire, and, as he always referred to her at the Round Table cheese and wine evenings, his lady wife Mary.
Justin was christened Edward Albert Fromby, like his father, his grandfather and his father before him. Mr Fromby Snr wanted his only son to follow him into the coal and smokeless fuel business. But Edward Jnr persuaded him that the discovery of North Sea oil and gas would spell the end of the retail coal business.
After the miners’ strikes of 1972 and 1974, no government was ever going to allow the nation to be almost wholly dependent on a dwindling resource subject to frequent interruption on the whim of a union run by Communists. He was very convincing. Secretly young Edward admired the Communists who ran the National Union of Mineworkers, but was too scared of his father to mention the fact.
Edward Fromby Snr was nothing if not a pragmatic man. ‘I’m nothing if not a pragmatic man,’ he said frequently. ‘You don’t succeed in the retail coal business without a healthy helping of pragmatism.’ He acknowledged the merit in his son’s argument and, after unsuccessfully trying to persuade him to go into the North Sea oil business, agreed that he should go to university to study law, hoping that he would return and get himself articled to the town’s leading firm of solicitors, perhaps one day becoming senior partner.
Young Edward had a different compass. Wills and conveyancing held no attraction for him. He wanted to be a street lawyer, fighting for the rights of the downtrodden, the workers, the oppressed minorities. He wasn’t going back to Nottinghamshire. He was going to London.
As soon as he got to the LSE, he dropped the Edward Albert and adopted Justin as his given name. Very Seventies, he thought. And if anyone asked about his family, he simply said his dad worked in the Nottinghamshire coalfields. He was careful not to lie but not to tell the whole truth, either. He must have been cut out to be a lawyer.
‘Justin. That’s a funny name for a coal-miner’s son,’ Roberta remarked when they were introduced.
‘Hmm, yes, I suppose so. I wasn’t christened Justin actually, but whenever I came home from school, my mother would call out “You just in, are you?” and it sort of stuck. A bit of a family joke,’ he claimed. He almost believed it himself.
‘So what were you christened?’
‘Oh, it doesn’t matter.’
‘You’re right. It doesn’t matter. What’s in a name? This is the 1970s. We can be who we want to be. If you want to be Justin, that’s fine by me.’
Their friendship was forged at university. They weren’t so much lovers as good friends who had sex sometimes, usually unsatisfactorily for both of them. But neither was experienced and neither was sure what to expect. Perhaps that was all there was to it. Roberta had been cloistered in an all-girls school and opportunities for adventures with the opposite sex were limited. Justin, or Eddie as he then was, had been an awkward, lanky youth. His overbearing mother had discouraged him from forming relationships with girls.
At university, Roberta experimented with other men, but they were usually pissed and it didn’t seem much of an improvement on what she had with Justin. For his part, Justin didn’t seem to mind who she slept with. Their friendship transcended the sexual. He contented himself with his studies and increasing involvement in student politics.
Their relationship was more brother and sister, even if it was occasionally incestuous.
They were at ease with each other. They squabbled but had few hang-ups. They were not embarrassed to be naked together, or to bare their emotions.
Justin and Roberta lay on the futon and drained the last of the Bulgarian Beaujolais. Justin rolled a joint, which he liked to smoke with cupped hands, Rastaman style.
‘Hey, stop hogging that,’ Roberta complained. ‘Pass it here.’ She sucked hard and inhaled the weed, holding her breath for several seconds before releasing the smoke.
‘This will have to stop, you know.’
‘What?’
‘Dope, booze. If you join the police.’
‘There’s no if about it. I have joined. I start two weeks on Monday.’
‘Better make the most of it, then.’
He passed her the joint again. She took it, greedily.
‘You sure it’s worth it?’
‘One hundred and fifty per cent certain. You are sharing a joint with the future commissioner of the Metropolitan Police,’ she wheezed.
‘Get real.’
‘This is real. You watch me. And if you take my advice, you’ll get out of that law centre and find yourself a proper job with a real law firm. Make a difference, Justin. Make a difference. You can do your pro bono social work in your spare time. We’ve grown out of “the revolution starts when this pub closes” stage of our lives. The revolution starts now.’
‘If you’re serious about this police thing, you’re going to need me. You’re going to have to make compromises, bite your lip, never let go in public. But there will always be somewhere for you to come. I will always be here for you. I will keep your secrets and never betray you. I do love you.’
‘Then make love to me,’ she demanded.
This was the bit Justin was dreading. He adored Roberta, loved to lie naked with her, but somehow the sex thing didn’t really work for him. Still, he tried.
He rolled on top of her and kissed her dirigible breasts, almost choking on her rigid nipples.
‘Fuck me. Fuck me hard,’ she pleaded. ‘Inside me, now.’
They’d already made love once that evening and it had been over in an instant. He’d taken her from behind. He found that doggy-fashion, in the dark, was the only way he could muster any enthusiasm. Twice in a night was asking a bit much and this time she wanted it on her back, with the light on.
Roberta reached down, ripped off his pants and squeezed his balls, but the best he could manage was a lazy lob.
By now she was frenzied, as the alcohol and narcotics kicked in, maybe for the last time in her life.
She grabbed his cock and pulled it towards her, willing him to harden. But it was no good. It was like trying to push a marshmallow through a letter box.
‘Sorry, sorry, sorry,’ Justin kept repeating. ‘It must be the dope, or the booze or both. Just give me a minute.’ He so wanted to please her.
But Roberta didn’t have a minute to spare.
She reached up and lifted the six-inch bust of Karl Marx off the mantelpiece.
She lay back on the futon, raised her sturdy arse, parted her knees and thrust the father of international socialism head-first between the thighs of the future Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.
Five (#ulink_d0302986-72fc-50be-bbe7-950026371eaf)
Now
‘You’re listening to the Ricky Sparke show on Rocktalk 99FM. Let’s go to George on line one. Morning, George. Good to have your company today. What can we do for you?’
‘Hello?’
‘Hello.’
‘Can you hear me?’
‘Loud and clear, George.’
‘Er.’
‘Fire away, George. We’re waiting.’
‘You can hear me?’
‘Yes George. You’re live on air.’
‘Is that you, Ricky?’
‘No, it’s the Samaritans, George.’
‘What?’
‘George, you’re live on Rocktalk 99FM. You rang us. A nation awaits your pearls of wisdom.’
‘Well, like, what I wanted to say was, er …’
‘Get on with it, George. I can’t wait much longer. I’m losing the will to live.’
‘Well, you know, it’s about these beggars, like.’
‘What about them?’
‘Well, er, something should be done.’
‘And what precisely do you have in mind?’
‘Dogs.’
‘Dogs, George. I see.’
‘They should set the dogs on them.’
‘What dogs?’
‘Police dogs, I dunno. Any kind of dog.’
‘Alsatians?’
‘Yeah. And Dobermans and Rottweilers.’
‘Yorkshire terriers, miniature poodles?’
‘Are you taking the piss?’
‘Perish the thought, George. It’s just that, well, don’t you think dogs are a bit drastic? How about firehoses?’
‘Firehoses. Yeah, why not? That’s a great idea.’
‘Flamethrowers?’
‘I don’t care, I just want them off the streets and back where they came from. It’s not safe for a little old lady to go out of the house without being mugged or raped by these beggars …’
‘Ah, yes … I was wondering when the little old lady would turn up. She normally makes an appearance whenever anyone runs out of rational argument. Tell me, George, when exactly was the little old lady in question last mugged or raped by a beggar?’
‘I’m not taking anyone pacific, like.’
‘Specific.’
‘What?’
‘Specific. The Pacific is an ocean.’
‘Anyway, it could happen if something isn’t done. These Romanians are a bloody menace. They should be rounded up at gunpoint and sent back to Rome where they belong.’
‘Goodbye, George. Don’t bother ringing us again. It’s coming up to midday. That’s all we’ve got time for today and this week, thank God. Join me again at the same time on Monday for another unbelievable assortment of losers and lunatics live on Rocktalk 99FM. Until then, this is Ricky Sparke, wishing you good morning and good riddance. We are all going to hell in a handcart.’
Ricky removed his headphones and threw them onto the console next to the cough-cut button and a rack containing eight-track cartridges. The red on-air light was extinguished, indicating his microphone was switched off. He put his feet up on the desk, lit a cigarette and leaned backwards.
Where on earth do we find these people? It was the same every day, a telephonic procession of inarticulate imbeciles, radio’s answer to the fish John West reject.
Ricky had one underpaid, overworked producer in charge of everything from the running order to making the tea and working the fax machine. His only back-up was a girl on a work experience scheme who couldn’t operate the phones properly and appeared to be clinically dyslexic.
Rocktalk 99FM was the latest incarnation of a station which had started life eight years earlier as Voice FM. Its founders had won the franchise by persuading the Radio Authority they planned to broadcast a cerebral schedule of original drama, discussion, debate and documentaries dedicated to politics, humanitarian issues and the arts. It was going to sponsor live concerts and forums and gave a solemn and binding guarantee to recruit at least forty per cent of its staff from the ranks of the ethnic minorities.
That was the theory, anyway. The ‘promise of performance’ document managed to impress the assorted worthies who make up the Radio Authority, which regulates the commercial sector, and Voice FM was awarded a ten-year licence.
Six weeks before the station went on air, the founding fathers received an offer they couldn’t refuse from an Australian consortium desperate to break into the British market. They trousered the thick end of £15 million between them and withdrew to spend more time with their mistresses.
When Voice FM was launched, it bore little resemblance to the original pitch. Having spent most of their money actually buying the licence, the Australians had virtually nothing left over to spend on content. Out went original drama, documentaries and live concerts.
There was certainly discussion and debate, if that’s what you call cabbies from Chigwell complaining about cable-laying and bored housewives ringing agony aunts with their mundane grievances and PMT remedies.
As for recruiting from the ethnic minorities, that promise was kept, up to a point. The security officer was Bosnian and the cleaners were all illegal immigrants from Somalia.
Two years on, Voice FM was relaunched as Bulletin FM, a cheap-and-cheerful rolling news station, hampered by the fact that it didn’t actually employ any correspondents, just a roster of failed actors hired to read out agency reports and stories copied out of the newspapers and off the television by kids on work experience.
The traffic reports were delivered by one Ronnie Dugdale, an alcoholic ex-bus driver who had once enjoyed fifteen minutes’ fame as a contestant on Countdown. He was the first player to score nil points, failing to muster any word over four letters and missing the target on the numbers board by more than two hundred. After the show he was escorted from the green room by security for attempting to grope Carol Vorderman, the show’s attractive co-presenter. On the way home he was breathalysed, disqualified from driving for two years and sacked from the bus company. Still, it made him a minor celebrity and minor was all the celebrity Bulletin FM could afford.
When the motoring organizations withdrew co-operation because they hadn’t been paid, Ronnie took to making up his traffic reports, which became increasingly bizarre as the day wore on and he shuttled backwards and forwards between the Bulletin FM studios and the Red Unicorn over the road. One afternoon, he arbitrarily announced the closure of half a dozen main arteries and advised drivers to avoid Westminster and Waterloo Bridges because of a fictitious demonstration and march by 20,000 dwarves, demanding equal rights for the vertically challenged.
Unfortunately, thousands of drivers took him at his word. It caused gridlock in central London on an unprecedented scale. The Strand was still jammed at two o’clock the following morning. He was fortunate charges were not preferred.
That was the end of Ronnie’s radio career. Last heard of he was awaiting trial for driving a minicab through the front of a halal butcher’s shop while several times over the limit and while still serving a suspended sentence for driving while disqualified, without insurance, road tax or a valid MOT certificate.
It was also the end of what passed for Bulletin FM’s credibility. The station’s owners decided that rolling news was not the way ahead and convinced themselves that sport was the next big thing. Having seen the success of Sky, they decided to launch a dedicated football station, Shoot FM. Not actually having the commentary rights to any live football, they were reduced to inviting listeners to call in match reports on their mobiles from the back of the stands. This lasted about six weeks, until the lawsuit landed from the Premier League. Shoot FM struggled on, covering non-league football and commentating on the Spanish Primera Liga, until Sky realized it was being ripped off and the commentator was in fact sitting in Shoot FM’s studio watching the game on Sky Sports Three.
With three years left on the licence, the Aussies played their last card. Scouring the franchise document they discovered it allowed them to play forty per cent music by content. They decided they could always fill the other sixty per cent with phone-ins and thus Rocktalk 99FM, a mixture of classic rock and pig-ignorance, was born.
It coincided with Ricky Sparke, controversial columnist, being shown the door by the ailing Exposer, a downmarket tabloid aimed primarily at the illiterate and famous for being the first Fleet Street publication to feature full-frontal nudity.
The Exposer was Ricky Sparke’s last-chance saloon as far as newspapers were concerned. He’d blown more jobs than Linda Lovelace, largely through drink and an inability to tolerate fools. He was a gifted polemicist but had a history of throwing typewriters through windows if some lowly sub-editor changed so much as a single syllable of his prose.
For once, drink and madness played no part in Ricky’s downfall. His contract had run its course and the editor decided there was no longer any point in paying £100,000 a year to a wordsmith for a once-a-week column, given the fact that few of his readers could actually read.
Ricky was replaced by a former lap-dancer who dispensed sex advice in the form of a comic strip with voice bubbles, True Romance-style. When her first column appeared, readers were invited to take part in a competition to describe in no more than twenty words why they’d like to give her a bikini wax. The winner got to give her a bikini wax. Ricky entered under a false name and came second.
Ricky had frequently appeared on Voice FM, Bulletin FM and Shoot FM as a guest pundit, filling the voids between callers with sarcastic banter and mock outrage. It didn’t pay much but there was always a steady supply of drink in the studio, which Ricky reckoned at least saved him a few bob. He was quite good at it, too.
When Rocktalk 99FM was launched, Ricky received a call from Charlie Lawrence, the programme director, who offered him a job as the mid-morning presenter.
Lawrence was a former salesman who started off selling solar-powered boomerangs to tourists at Circular Quay in Sydney, wound up in newspaper telesales and graduated to promotions manager at an ailing talk-radio station.
He transformed the station, turning it into Down Under AM, Australia’s first all-gay on-air chatline.
Lawrence shipped up in London, headhunted by Rocktalk FM’s Australian management in an act of desperation.
‘We need controversy, we need to provoke people. We need someone who’s not afraid to speak his mind. You’re the man, mate,’ Lawrence had insisted over a bottle of Polluted Bay Chardonnay.
Ricky didn’t take much persuading. He was also available. What Lawrence didn’t know was that Ricky had already been told his contract at the Exposer wasn’t being renewed and that he had nowhere else to go.
Ricky was almost potless. Although he had always been handsomely paid, his prodigious thirst and the mortgage on his flat in a mansion block at the back of Westminster Cathedral swallowed his earnings. He could just about manage to service his credit cards and his extended bar bill at Spider’s.
He could have lived somewhere cheaper, but he needed to be at the centre of town. He also liked being driven, especially since the London Taxi Drivers’ Association had blacklisted him following a column in praise of minicabs. Ricky only discovered this when he clambered into the back of a black cab in Soho one night and asked to be taken home.
The driver looked at Ricky in the mirror and checked. He took a newspaper cutting off his dashboard, held it up to the vanity light, inspected it and turned to get a better look at his dishevelled passenger.
‘You’re him, aren’t you?’
‘Eh?’
‘Sparke. You look older in real life. And fatter. But I can tell it’s you.’ The driver was clutching Ricky’s picture by-line, torn from the pages of the Exposer. It had been taken some years earlier in a professional studio and enhanced by Fleet Street’s finest photographic technology. Although Ricky had worn badly over the years, it was still recognizably him.
‘OK, so it’s me. Give the man a coconut. Now take me to Westminster.’
‘You must be kidding, mate, after what you said about us. You’re barred.’
‘Then take me to the public carriage office. You can’t do this.’
‘I can do what I like. Now get out. Go on. Out!’
Ricky stumbled out of the cab and retraced his steps downstairs into Spider’s. Dillon laughed when Ricky told him the story, gave him another one for the strasse on the house and called a local chauffeur firm to take him home.
When the car turned up, it was being driven by former police sergeant Mickey French, an old mate Ricky had known since the Seventies, when he was a local newspaper reporter and Mickey was PC at Tyburn Row, although he hadn’t seen him for a couple of years. Mickey took him back to his flat, declined an offer of a drink and said he’d call Ricky in the morning. Since that night, Mickey had been Ricky’s regular ride around town.
Not today, though. Mickey had taken the family off for a long weekend at Goblin’s Holiday World and Ricky was left to his own devices. Lunch loomed. Ricky had no wife to go back to. He was married once, to a copytaker on his first newspaper, a printer’s daughter from Lewisham, south-east London.
But it wasn’t going anywhere. Ricky refused to go south of the river and she could never settle north. Since he never came home, it didn’t really matter where they lived. She moved out, filed for divorce after less than a year of marriage and ended up with a used-car dealer in Eltham, three kids, a facelift, a tummy tuck and a villa in Marbella, where three times a year she topped up her fake tan with the real thing.
Ricky never remarried, was never bothered about children, rather liked his bachelor existence. The booze had taken its toll over the years, but had never taken over. Ricky prided himself that he always got up for work, no matter how rough he felt.
‘I’m a milkman. I deliver,’ was his proud boast. And he did deliver. Abuse and insults by the bucketloads, tipped over the heads of the great and the gormless, the rich and fatuous in a succession of newspapers. He’d always been good for circulation but his off-the-ball antics cost him a string of jobs, right back to the time when still in his teens he clattered the long-serving chief reporter of the long since defunct Tyburn Times, sending him tumbling downstairs, in a heated dispute over punctuation, and caused his first employer to tear up his indentures.
A quarter of a century later, he had mellowed, rather like a top-class single malt. Probably because of single malt. His fighting days were over, ever since he had mistakenly stripped to the waist on the Central Line and offered violence to half a dozen Millwall fans making a nuisance of themselves on the way to Loftus Road. He spent three weeks in hospital as a result of that piece of foolhardiness. It cost him three teeth, replaced with some expensive bridgework. Ricky had been knocking off a divorced dental hygienist at the time and had been able to negotiate a discount for cash from the South African dentist with whom she shared a surgery. She eventually gave up on Ricky, hooked up with the dentist and moved to Jo’burg, where she was killed in a drive-by shooting. Some people never know when they’re well off, Ricky remarked when he heard the news.
‘How’s it going, mate?’
Ricky looked up and saw Charlie Lawrence standing in the studio doorframe.
‘This isn’t a job for grown-ups,’ he replied, running his fingers roughly through his hair, massaging his scalp as he did it, trying to relieve the tensions of dealing with the great unwashed and their uninformed, unfocused view of the world, three hours a day, five days a week.
‘You look plenty grown up to me, mate. A little too grown. Not so much grown up as grown out. You should take up squash,’ said Charlie, indicating Ricky’s middle-age spread.
‘You must be joking,’ Ricky said. ‘Anyway, this is all bought and paid for. Once you’re older than your waist size, it’s not worth the bother.’
‘Oh, no? Take me, mate. We’re, what, about the same age? I’ve still got a six-pack.’
‘So have I. It’s in my fridge and it’s full of Guinness.’
‘You should take more exercise. It’ll do your temper good, too.’
‘There nothing wrong with my fucking temper.’
‘That’s not what it sounded like to me this morning.’
‘What are you going on about, Charlie?’
‘I thought we were a little bit on the grumpy side today.’
‘We? You mean me. Well, it’s all right for you sitting in your strategy meetings. I’m the one who has to handle all these fuckwits. Who needs them?’
‘That’s where you’re wrong, mate. They may be fuckwits, but they’re our fuckwits. And we’ve got fewer of them by the week. Who needs them? We need them. The advertisers need them. You need them, mate. You definitely need them.’
‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’ snapped Ricky, swivelling on his chair, his right arm colliding with his Rocktalk 99FM mug, sending stale, cold coffee cascading over the console.
‘Can we have a word?’
‘That’s what we are doing, isn’t it?’
‘I mean an official word. In my office.’
‘This is my office. Say what you’ve got to say.’
‘I’ve just got these, mate. Take a look.’ Charlie threw a stack of ring-bound A4 paper on the console. Ricky picked it up and studied it. Numbers, figures, graphs.
‘What is this?’
‘The RAJARs, mate. The official listening figures for the last quarter. We have been experiencing some very serious churn.’
‘Since when have you been running a dairy?’
‘You’re the one who’s always boasting about being a milkman. I’m afraid you’re not delivering.’
‘I’m here every day. I’ve never let you down.’
‘We’re not talking attendance here. You don’t get a silver star for turning up. This is what matters,’ said Charlie, pointing to the bottom line on the second sheet of paper.
‘And what does it say?’
‘It says that between nine and noon we are down almost thirty per cent. And who’s on between nine and noon?’
‘That’s only to be expected. I’m new to the station. People have got to get used to me. You have to figure that it will take time to win people round. Three months ago, before I started, this was a football station, with no fucking football. I’ve had to start from scratch.’
‘You can’t argue with a fall of thirty per cent.’
‘I can. Three months ago, the only listeners you had were a bunch of soccer-mad morons too stupid to find Radio Five.’
‘That’s as maybe, but there were thirty per cent more of them.’
‘Of course, that stands to reason. The kind of terrace plankton you had listening to you then are hardly going to stay tuned for adult-orientated rock interspersed by saloon-bar pontificating.’
‘I know that. But if you look at the figures more closely, you’ll find that the new audience is falling away, too. It’s down ten per cent over the past two weeks, according to our tracking.’
‘You picked the format. And you picked the presenter. Me.’
‘True. But I didn’t know you were going to go out of your way to piss off the listeners.’
‘I don’t.’
‘You do, mate.’
‘Don’t.’
‘What about George just now?’
‘The man was a fucking idiot. Turn the dogs loose on beggars? For fuck’s sake.’
‘A lot of people out there agree with him.’
‘A lot of people want to bring back hanging, drawing and quartering.’
‘Look, Ricky, all I’m saying is lighten up. Cut them some slack. Don’t be so short with them.’
‘Short is what I do.’
‘So you’ve got to do something a bit different. Look on the audience as our customers. Be nice to them once in a while. Play to their prejudices. Don’t sign off by dismissing them as a bunch of losers and lunatics. God knows what message that sends to the advertisers.’
Ricky got up and pulled on his coat from the back of his chair. He picked up his bag and headed for the door. Charlie didn’t move.
‘Excuse me, Charlie. I don’t need this after a long week. I’m off to get pissed.’
Charlie’s eyes hardened. His corporate smile faded.
‘I don’t think you’ve been listening to me, Ricky.’
‘Sure I have.’
‘Oh, I don’t think so.’
‘So what’s your point?’
‘My point is that this station, particularly in this time slot, is going down the dunny. I’m paying you a lot of money. Too much money. I’d never have given you so much if I’d known you’d already been kicked out of the Exposer.’
‘I wasn’t kicked out. I just, er, left.’
‘Don’t lie to me. They didn’t renew your contract. And they replaced you with the Picture Book lady. I should have fucking hired her myself.’
‘And what, exactly, is that supposed to mean?’
‘It means that if these figures don’t show a serious upturn, you’re finished.’
‘See if I care.’
‘Oh, but you do care, Ricky. This is the last train to Clarksville for you, mate. There’s not a newspaper left in London would hire you and if you screw up this gig, there’s not another radio station would touch you either. Just you think on that when you’re diving headfirst into the European wine lake in ten minutes’ time. Think damned hard. Think about your bar bills and your monster mortgage on your funky little bachelor pad. You’ve got to raise your game. If we’re not up at least thirty per cent, back to where we were, by the next survey, you’re dead meat. You’ve got three months.’
Six (#ulink_6fc088dd-7163-5ebe-86b7-5c63c87ce755)
Mickey French dropped Andi and the kids at her mum’s house in Palmers Green. They’d driven straight there, round the North Circular. It was nearer than their home in Essex. Andi and the children went inside to change out of their blood-spattered clothes. Andi stood in the scalding shower for a good ten minutes, scrubbing her skin with a loofah, scraping away every trace of the red-hot gypsy blood, which had turned cold and caked in her hair.
‘No, Mum, we’re not hurt. Yes, Mum, we’ll be fine.’ If she said it once, she said it a dozen times as her mother fussed and fretted, while at the same time maintaining a steady stream of strong, dark, bitter coffee and rich Greek pastries.
‘No, we’re not going to the police. Mickey’s dealt with it. We just want to put it behind us. Please, Mum, let’s just forget it. We haven’t lost anything, we’re all in one piece.’
Terry stuffed his face with Nana’s filo fancies and relived the adventure for Andi’s mum’s benefit. If it was possible to embellish their ordeal, Terry managed it. He couldn’t wait to get back to school to tell his mates. This wasn’t a playground punch-up, this was for real. As far as Terry was concerned it had been as big a step on the road to manhood as his first crop of pubic hairs.
Katie hugged her grandmother and let it all come out. After a long soak in a foaming bath, she dressed in the new jeans and spangly boob tube she had been saving for the first-night disco at Goblin’s. With a bit of make-up she could pass for eighteen, she told herself. It made her feel better and helped her forget.
Mickey took the car to his cousin Roy’s body shop in Crouch End. Roy replaced the broken window and rear tailgate lock with identical parts from another Scorpio, which he had towed in at the request of the police and was in the process of cannibalizing. It had been written off when it was wrapped around Crouch End clock tower by a team of joy-riders.
Roy said he agreed with Ricky Sparke’s last caller that day. They should set the dogs on these bastards. You couldn’t move in north London for gangs of gypsies, begging, mugging, and burgling.
To make matters worse, Roy complained, the local council had spent a fortune housing them, yet his sister had been on the waiting list for twelve years without getting any nearer a ground-floor flat.
Mickey shrugged. He was all angered out.
‘He’s a mate of yours, isn’t he?’
‘Who?’
‘That Ricky Sparke.’
‘Yeah. I’ve known him for years.’
‘How did you meet him?’
‘It was when I was at Tyburn Row. I was a young DC on the Great Harlesden Cheese Robbery. Ricky was covering it for the local rag.’
‘I vaguely remember that.’
‘It was bloody hilarious. They were the most inept bunch of crooks I’ve ever come across. It was an inside job. The foreman and his brother-in-law did it.’
‘How did you know it was an inside job?’
‘Elementary, my dear Roy. They’d tried to make it look like a break-in. The foreman claimed the thief must have got in through a side window. But when I examined the scene, all the broken glass was on the outside. You didn’t have to be Columbo to work it out.’
‘Did he confess?’
‘Not at first, only after we nicked the brother-in-law. You see, they hadn’t lined up a buyer. They’d half-inched it on spec. And there isn’t a ready market for several hundredweight of catering packs of processed cheese. The brother-in-law tried knocking it out round the pubs, but most of the landlords didn’t want to know. We finally felt his collar when he walked into one boozer carrying a piece of Cheddar the size of a breeze block and offered it for a fiver to an off-duty police dog handler, who was in there having a quiet pint. He’d stashed it in his spare bedroom and it had started to go rancid. He’d forgotten to turn off the storage heaters. You could smell it two streets away.
‘Ricky got to hear about it, I filled in the details and he wrote me up on page one of the Tyburn Times as some kind of latter-day Sherlock Holmes. It made the nationals. Ricky sold it to the Sun for £100 and gave me half.’
‘Did you take it?’
‘Yeah. I know I wasn’t supposed to, strictly speaking, but it wasn’t as if I was bent. Christ, you should have seen some of the coppers at Tyburn Row in those days. Bent as a pig’s dick, most of them. Sure, I pulled a few strokes, cut a few corners, cocked a deaf ‘un once in a while. But I wasn’t on the take like some of them, so I looked on it as a kind of reward. I took Andi on a dirty weekend to Southend with it.’
‘So that’s where you got the money from. Her old man went spare, I seem to remember.’
‘Yeah. Christ, it was like crossing the Corleones. The Bubbles can be just as grumpy when they put their mind to it. Insisted I married her. I was going to anyway.’
‘You always were a sentimental old fucker,’ Roy teased him. ‘Go on. Get out of here. On your way.’
Mickey drove back to his mother-in-law’s detached house, a substantial Thirties mock-Tudor with added Doric columns on the front porch. It had been bought outright from the proceeds of her late husband’s kebab house empire.
Palmers Green was where successful Greek Cypriots settled, just as the Jews had earlier colonized Golders Green when they started to make their fortunes.
Mickey wondered where second-generation Romanian beggars might end up.
‘All fixed,’ he announced as he walked into the sitting room. ‘Let’s go home.’
‘Mickey,’ said Andi. ‘We’ve been talking. And we’ve had a vote, haven’t we kids?’
‘A vote?’
‘Yep. And we don’t want to go home. We want to go on. We want to have our holiday.’
‘Are you sure? Absolutely sure?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Terry? Katie?’
‘Sure, Dad. It was unanimous,’ Katie walked towards him and gave him a hug.
‘Mickey, it’s all bought and paid for. You’ve worked hard for this. We’ve all been looking forward to it.’
‘Ma?’ he said, looking at his mother-in-law.
‘I tried to talk them out of it, Mickey. But you know my daughter. Determined, like her father, God rest his soul.’
Mickey smiled. ‘OK, then. Let’s go.’
They got back in the Scorpio. Mickey slipped his favourite Blues Brothers tape into the cassette deck and pulled on his Ray-Bans.
‘Right, then. It’s sixty miles to Goblin’s Holiday World. It’s getting dark and we’re wearing sunglasses. Hit it.’
Their laughter was drowned out by Sam and Dave.
It was as if nothing had happened.
They weren’t to know then that nothing would ever be the same again.
Seven (#ulink_3c1c8a69-b2e5-5719-b90a-b016628a8d28)
Then
As a graduate entrant, with an honours degree in law, Roberta Peel sailed through the Metropolitan Police training school at Hendon. Next stop was Bramshill, the officers’ academy. She had been singled out for fast-track promotion. But for the time being she found herself as a probationary WPC, stationed at Tyburn Row, attached to the juvenile bureau.
It was a typical old red-brick London nick, the sort of place Dixon of Dock Green would have recognized, scheduled for closure in two years on the planned amalgamation of three divisions in a purpose-built new station.
WPC Peel was working the night-shift, sipping tea and reading the Guardian, when she was summoned to the custody area. Another constable, Eric Marsden, had brought in a 15-year-old boy on a charge of malicious wounding.
He was a wiry, black youth, about 5ft 9ins, with an ebony complexion and afro haircut. He wore a leather bomber jacket, plain green T-shirt, flared denims and a pair of red Kickers.
He was being held in an adult cell, as there were no separate juvenile facilities. Roberta could see he had clearly been roughed up.
Eric Marsden was a beat cop of the old ‘clip ’em round the ear’ school. Except that he didn’t always confine himself to clips round the ear. The boy had a split lip and there were signs of swelling around his right eye. As Roberta entered his cell, the boy was clutching his ribs.
It was alleged that he was part of a gang involved in a fight with some local white skinheads outside a chip shop. One of the white youths had been slashed with a blade and Marsden had recovered a knife which had been bagged and was awaiting a fingerprints examination. The white youth had identified the boy in custody as his assailant.
‘Are you all right?’ she asked him.
The boy stared at the floor.
‘Who did this to you? Was it the arresting officer?’
‘No it fucking wasn’t,’ a cockney baritone voice boomed. Roberta turned to discover Eric Marsden looming up behind her. He was a big man, 6ft 1ins, a couple of stone overweight.
‘You better watch that mouth of yours, my love.’
‘I am not your love. I am the juvenile officer responsible for this suspect’s well-being. I am trying to establish the truth here.’
‘He’s been in a gang fight. You should get your facts right, sweetheart, before you go making allegations.’
‘I am not making any allegations. I am making inquiries.’ She decided to let the sweetheart pass for now.
‘Well you can start by inquiring as to what his fucking name is, for a start. I’m going to the canteen. We can’t interview him until his parents or a responsible adult get here. And that can’t happen until we establish exactly who he is. He’s all yours, darling.’
‘I am not your darling, either.’
‘I suppose a gobble’s out of the question?’ Marsden laughed out loud, turned on his heel and headed for the canteen, where he could slag off Miss Prim and Proper fucking fast-track graduate entrant to his mates over a bacon sandwich.
‘What’s your name?’ she asked the boy. ‘It will be better for you if you tell me. The sooner we can notify your parents, the sooner we can interview you, the sooner you can go home.’
‘I don’t want my parents. I want a brief.’
‘I’ll call a duty solicitor.’
‘No. Get me Mr Fromby.’
‘Mr Justin Fromby?’
‘You know him.’
‘I’ve heard of him. Doesn’t he work at the law centre?’ said Roberta, anxious not to let on.
‘Yeah.’
‘I’ll see what I can do.’
Roberta left the cell door open and walked along the corridor.
‘He wants a solicitor,’ she told the station sergeant. ‘He’s asking for Justin Fromby.’
‘That’s all we fucking need, that Trotsky wanker,’ said the sergeant. ‘You won’t find him at this time of night.’
‘Oh, I think I might be able to find a number for him.’
‘How are you going to manage that?’
‘I’m supposed to be a police officer, aren’t I? The phone book might be a start.’
Roberta slipped into a side office and dialled Justin’s number from memory.
He answered after a couple of rings.
‘Justin, it’s Roberta.’
‘Hi. You coming over?’
‘No. I’m at work. Can you come here?’
‘I’d rather not. I’ve just got back from the RAC rally.’
‘RAC rally? You don’t even drive.’
‘Not the RAC, the RAC – the Rock Against Capitalism rally at the Roundhouse. The Jam were top of the bill. Your American friend, Georgia Claye, was there. You should have seen the state of her. Out of her skull on something. She tripped over pogoing to “Eton Rifles” and smashed her head on the side of the stage. I helped carry her out.’
‘Never mind her, Justin. She’ll end up living in a cardboard box the way she’s going. You know her husband’s left her already?’
‘The Italian guy, medical student?’
‘Yeah, anyway, I haven’t rung you to discuss Georgia Claye’s problems. This is important. We’ve got a boy in custody and he’s asking for you.’
‘For me? What’s his name?’
‘He won’t tell us.’
‘What does he look like?’
‘Black, slim, 5ft 9ins, afro, age about fifteen, I should think.’
‘Hmm.’
‘Do you know him?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Well he knows you.’
‘What’s he in for?’
‘Malicious wounding.’
‘OK. I’m on my way.’
Justin Fromby called a cab and arrived at Tyburn Row three-quarters of an hour later.
The desk sergeant needed no introduction. ‘Evening, Trotksy,’ he said dismissively. Justin didn’t rise to the bait.
Roberta appeared from the corridor.
‘This is Mr Fromby,’ the sergeant told her.
‘Pleased to meet you, Mr Fromby,’ she said, without the slightest hint of recognition. ‘I’m WPC Peel, from the juvenile section. If you would be kind enough to follow me, I’ll take you to your client.’
Roberta showed Justin into the cell.
‘Hello, Trevor,’ said Justin, immediately.
‘Hello, Mr Fromby.’
‘You two obviously know each other.’
‘Yes, WPC Peel, we do. This is Trevor Gibbs. He lives on the Parkgate Estate. I know his father.’
‘Don’t tell my dad, please Mr Fromby.’
‘OK, but they’ll need your name and address. I’ll handle it.’ He turned to Roberta. ‘The law allows my client to be interviewed in the presence of a parent or responsible adult. I shall sit in for his father.’
They walked out of the cell and back to the custody area.
‘The boy’s name is Trevor Gibbs,’ she told the sergeant. ‘He is ready to be interviewed. Can you call PC Marsden?’
‘I’ll fetch him from the canteen. I fancy a cup of tea. The walk will do me good,’ the sergeant said.
Once the sergeant had left the custody area, Roberta ushered Justin into an ante-room.
‘Well? Who are we dealing with?’
‘His dad is Everton Gibbs. He’s the community leader on the Parkgate. A good man, standing for the council. What about the boy? What have you got on him?’
‘He’s alleged to have cut another boy, a white youth, in a fight outside the chip shop. Marsden found a blade and he’s bagged it for prints.’
‘That’s unfortunate.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Three weeks ago, in this station, I represented him. He was cautioned for possession of a knife. On the day-shift. I forget the name of the arresting officer off the top of my head. Young chap, maybe twenty-three or -four. Trevor’s father doesn’t know. If any of this came out it could seriously undermine his position. He might even lose the election. We need men like him on the council. We’ve got to prevent Trevor being charged.’
‘How the hell are you going to do that? Marsden brought him in, he’ll be the interviewing officer. I’ll only be sitting there.’
‘I can handle Marsden. But you’ll have to lose the knife and his form.’
‘I can’t do that, for God’s sake. What if someone found out?’
‘They had better not. Look, it’s late, there’s hardly anyone around, no one will know.’
‘Marsden will.’
‘He’s a lazy bastard. I’ve come across him before. A bit too handy with his fists. I’ll deal with him.’
When Marsden appeared five minutes later, Roberta retrieved Trevor Gibbs from his cell and led him into the interview room.
Justin spoke first. ‘I would like to place on record that this is an unlawful arrest. My client has been subjected to a racially motivated assault. He is the victim here. Furthermore he alleges that you, PC Marsden, beat him up. I am preparing a formal complaint.’
‘Oh, do fuck off, Fromby. I’ve heard it all before. All the spades pull that stroke.’
‘I won’t listen to racist language,’ Roberta interrupted.
‘You’ll shut up and do as you’re told, petal. Or have you been promoted while I’ve been in the canteen?’ Marsden barked back.
‘This young man’s father is a respected figure in the community, a personal friend of your commanding officer. You, on the other hand, have a reputation for, shall we say, heavy-handedness. Given the choice between a frightened, fifteen-year-old boy from an oppressed minority and a fat thug like you, I think I know who people will believe.’
‘This interview is suspended right now,’ Marsden said. ‘Take him back to his cell,’ he told Roberta. ‘We’ll resume later.’ Marsden returned to the canteen to consider his options. Justin went outside for a long smoke.
As Roberta led Trevor Gibbs through the custody area, another young officer was bringing in a prisoner, a drunk and disorderly.
PC Mickey French smiled at Roberta, then looked at her prisoner. As they passed, Mickey grabbed hold of Trevor’s arm, spun him round and took another good look.
‘OK,’ he said.
‘Mickey?’ said the desk sergeant.
‘Nothing, sarge. Let’s get this geezer booked in, D&D. Complaint from the landlord of the Dun Cow.’
Roberta put Trevor back in his cell and left the custody area. She walked along the corridor, past the canteen, up the stairs and into the juvenile bureau. She switched on an anglepoise lamp and walked over to a filing cabinet. It was unlocked. Under G, she found it. Gibbs, Trevor, possession of an offensive weapon, to wit, one knife. First offence. Caution administered and recorded. Arresting officer, PC107 French.
Fuck it.
‘Found what you were looking for?’
Mickey French startled her.
‘Er, yeah.’
‘And what are you going to do about it?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’ve been talking to Eric Marsden.’
‘And?’
‘Fromby’s trying to fit him up on an assault on the prisoner.’
‘I reckon he did beat him.’
‘Eric denies it. Says he got the injuries in the fight outside the chip shop. Sounds about right. I nicked Gibbs the last time. He’s a nasty little fucker. You going to charge him?’
‘Mr Formby says that if we charge Gibbs, he’ll make a formal complaint against Marsden.’
‘If this caution comes to light, you’ve got no option but to charge him.’
‘What should I do?’
“That’s up to you, girl.’
Roberta thought that this was no time to raise the issue of inappropriate sexist language. Actually, she rather liked Mickey. He wasn’t as much of a bastard as the older Plods.
‘Fromby knows about the previous. He wants me to lose it. And the knife,’ she blurted out in panic.
‘What, this one?’ said Mickey, waving a plastic bag above his head containing the knife Marsden had confiscated from Trevor Gibbs.
‘Where did you get that from?’
‘Never you mind. What are you going to do with the previous?’
‘The way I see it is that everybody wins here. Fromby gets what he wants, Marsden’s off the hook. Everybody’s happy,’ she replied, nervously.
‘And what if I don’t give a fuck and turn you in?’
Roberta froze.
Mickey raised his other hand. It contained a small cassette recorder. It was still running.
Shit.
‘Give me that,’ he said, motioning his hand towards the folder Roberta held under her arm. ‘You’re a lucky girl.’
‘Lucky?’
‘There’s two copies still in here. Usually we keep one and send the other to central records at the Yard. This hasn’t gone off yet. I must have forgotten.’
‘So what happens now?’
‘You’re a silly fucking cow. Old Eric Marsden may be a cunt but he’s only got a year left to his pension.’
Roberta was in no position to take exception to the use of the vaginal expletive or to protest about being called a silly fucking cow. She knew she was a silly fucking cow. At least on this occasion.
‘So?’
‘So why wreck anyone’s career here. Eric Marsden’s or yours?’
‘What about the sergeant?’
‘He is the original wise monkey. He sees nothing, hears nothing, says nothing. He doesn’t want to know. No charge, no paperwork. He’s sweet. Fromby’s hardly going to say anything. The boy certainly won’t object to being released. Eric will stay shtoom and he’ll put the frighteners on the skinhead who picked him out. He’ll tell the sergeant that Gibbs is being released pending further inquiries. That’ll be the end of it.’
‘And you? What’s in it for you?’
‘I don’t want Eric going down the shitter and I reckon you’ve got a big future.’
Nice tits, too, he thought.
‘What are you going to do with all this – the knife, the file, the tape recording?’ she asked.
Mickey stroked the stubble on his chin and shrugged his shoulders. ‘I haven’t thought about it. Nothing, maybe. Who knows?’
Eight (#ulink_aa4f8556-feef-59e0-9899-ab904cdff055)
Ilie Popescu knew the men from Moscow would come looking for him. His father, Marin, had set him up in the car-smuggling business and sent him to Hamburg, where he stole Mercedes, BMWs, Audis and Porsches to order and shipped them to the former Soviet Union. The hard cash he sent back to the Tigani helped finance his father’s other line of business, an organized begging racket across Western Europe.
At twenty-one, Ilie was an accomplished car thief. It was easy money. In the first six months, Ilie successfully stole and despatched cars worth almost $3 million on the black market. The deal was always cash on delivery.
On a roll, emboldened by an unblemished track record, Ilie met his Russian contact and explained that in future he would need half the money up front. He had overheads, he explained. There were police officers and port security guards to be paid off.
The message was relayed to the men in Moscow, who were unhappy about the new terms and conditions. But they trusted Marin Popescu, with whom they had done business for several years since the fall of Communism. They would extend that trust to his son.
A week later, Ilie received $500,000 in advance of his next consignment, in unmarked, used notes in a leather attaché case, passed to him by his contact in a bar off the Reeperbahn. In return he was handed a list containing the marque and specification of the vehicles he was to supply, some of them destined for clients in the Middle East.
The deliveries were to be completed within one month. Ilie would receive the balance when the cars arrived in Moscow.
That gave him plenty of time to party. He was a good-looking boy, lean, about 5ft 9ins, with short, jet-black hair, chocolate-brown eyes and a winning, slightly menacing, smile. In Hamburg, he had developed a taste for expensive clothes, nightclubbing, whores, cocaine and gambling.
Cocaine and gambling don’t mix. There’s calculated risk and then there’s recklessness. Ilie came down on the recklessness side of the equation. In one week in the casinos, Ilie blew the thick end of $350,000 on the tables, $350,000 the Russians had given him as a down payment.
So what? Ilie told himself. It doesn’t concern them. They’ll get their cars and I’ll get the balance.
The cocaine convinced Ilie he was invincible. It also made him sloppy.
His modus operandi had always been to target vehicles belonging to Hamburg’s high-rollers and wealthy industrialists, importers and exporters. He stole them individually from parking lots and garages, paying off chauffeurs and car park attendants for information and silence.
Single car thefts attracted little attention from the authorities. The owners were irritated, but insured for full replacement value. Why should they worry?
Within a fortnight, Ilie had frittered the whole $500,000. He hadn’t stolen a single car for over two weeks, his Russian contact was becoming concerned. Don’t panic, Ilie reassured him. Have I ever let you down?
That night, his tame policeman, Jurgen Freund, called at his hotel for his regular $10,000 monthly retainer. He found Ilie in bed with two whores. The room was littered with empty bottles – champagne, Polish vodka, scotch. The whores were sharing a substantial joint. Ilie’s eyes were on stalks and his nose was streaming.
‘I’ve come for my wages,’ the cop said.
‘You’ll have to wait. I don’t have the money right now,’ Ilie replied.
‘Not good enough,’ Freund said.
‘Hey, relax, man. Have a drink. Have a smoke. Hey, baby,’ he said to one of the prostitutes. ‘Be nice to the man.’
‘I didn’t come here to get laid. I came to get paid,’ Freund said angrily. ‘Two weeks ago, you received $500,000 from the Russians. Do you think I’m stupid? All I want is $10,000. You owe me.’
‘I said you’ll get it.’
‘You’re running out of time. You’ll never make your delivery. You haven’t stolen one car in the last two weeks.’
‘I’ll be fine. I’ve got it covered.’
‘Don’t get careless,’ Freund warned.
‘I’ve got it all worked out. There’s a car transporter coming in from Wolfsburg on Friday. Problem solved.’
‘That’s not the way it works.’
‘It does now. Why steal cars one at a time when there’s a dozen for the taking? It makes no sense.’
‘Only if you’ve done the amount of coke you have, Popescu. You must be mad. You’ll attract attention to yourself. We might be able to overlook the odd Mercedes here, the occasional BMW going missing there. But a transporter-load? No fucking chance.’
‘Who’s running this operation?’ Ilie barked.
‘You’re on your own this time, my Roma friend.’
‘Fuck you,’ screamed Ilie, pulling a pistol and pointing it at Freund’s face. The cop backed away from the gun and opened the door to leave.
‘Fuck you, I don’t need you. You’re off the payroll. Now get out.’
Two days later, a car transporter pulled off the autobahn near Hamburg and onto a slip road. It drew to a halt at a set of temporary traffic lights.
Ilie Popescu and another Romanian, Gica Dinantu, also from the Tigani, scrambled up an embankment, scaled the side of the cab and ordered the driver at gunpoint to get out and surrender the keys.
The driver offered no resistance. He climbed calmly from the transporter and walked away with a measured step. Ilie took over in the driver’s seat, Gica rode shotgun.
As Ilie engaged the gears and eased the transporter forward, the driver started to run. He threw himself over the embankment and rolled downhill.
Ilie laughed. This was a piece of piss. He pressed the accelerator and drove the giant transporter straight through the traffic lights, which he had put there fifteen minutes earlier.
Ilie Popescu had just stepped up a division and out of his league.
As the transporter rounded the first bend, Ilie was confronted with the flashing blue lights of a police roadblock. Cars and personnel carriers filled the road ahead. Armed officers crouched behind them.
Freund, the double-crossing bastard.
Fuelled by cocaine, Ilie hit the gas and charged the roadblock. A volley of shots pierced the windscreen. Ilie ducked instinctively as the first salvo somehow missed his head.
Freund had no intention of taking them alive.
‘Gica, fire back man, FIRE BACK,’ he screamed. His words landed on dead ears.
In the passenger seat to Ilie’s right, Gica Dinantu was slumped forward. The top of his head had been shot off. Blood and brains oozed out of his skull.
Ilie ploughed through the roadblock, scattering police cars like Dinky toys. Bullets bounced off the side of the transporter and ricocheted around the cabin. Miraculously, Ilie was unscathed.
The massive bulk of the transporter was being propelled with unstoppable momentum. Despite the power steering, Ilie struggled to maintain control. The tail of the heavily laden articulated vehicle swayed violently from side to side, like an agitated alligator.
Ilie clung on as he kept his foot flat on the floor, trying to put as much distance as possible between himself and the Hamburg police department armed response unit.
In the passenger side rear-view mirror, Ilie spotted a police motorcycle gaining on him. The pillion passenger had a high-velocity rifle trained on the transporter. The cop fired twice, puncturing the front nearside tyre, which exploded and shed its rubber tread like orange peel.
Ilie hit the brakes. As he did so, the police motorcycle skidded, hit a pothole and began to cartwheel. The two officers were killed on impact as the bike sliced through the back window of a brand-new Mercedes E320 estate car, upon which an antiques dealer from Hamburg had already paid a substantial deposit.
They were ejected onto the tarmac when the transporter lurched to the right and turned turtle at 110 kmph. It skidded off the road and travelled a couple of hundred meters on its roof, crushing its top floor cargo like cigarette cartons, before spinning again and crunching to a halt, driver’s side up.
Ilie had retained consciousness throughout, courtesy of the copious quantity of cocaine he had consumed before setting out on his first big-time lorry hijacking.
He tried to push open the driver’s door, but the force of gravity conspired against him. He attempted to lower the window, but the electrics were dead. With his right foot, he kicked out what remained of the windscreen, unfastened his seat belt, swung from the door handle and jumped.
He landed safely and rolled, parachute-style, away from the transporter. He looked up and saw in front of him an M320 sport utility vehicle which had slipped from its berth of the lower deck of the transporter, been thrown clear and landed on all four wheels, remarkably unscathed.
Ilie yanked open the door, dived under the steering column and twisted the ignition wires together. The old hotwire routine. The engine sparked into life.
The tank contained enough gas to put maybe ten kilometres between Ilie and his pursuers, if he was lucky. The motorcycle cops were the advance guard. The rest of the posse was still some way off.
Ilie pushed the gear lever into Low and engaged the four-wheel drive. He guided the M320 about fifty metres away from the scene of the crash and turned towards the transporter, which lay motionless on its side, displaying its seventeen remaining tyres and soft underbelly.
Ilie lowered the electric driver’s side window, pulled the pistol from his belt and pumped six shots into the fuel tank. As the first flames shot into the air, Ilie gunned the M320 in the opposite direction.
He was about 250 metres away when he heard the explosion. The reflection in the rear-view mirror turned bright orange. The heat from the fireball engulfed the M320 but it outran the flames. Ilie didn’t look back. He knew the inferno would keep the chasing policemen at bay.
With any luck they would think he had perished along with his childhood friend, Gica Dinantu, and one million dollars’ worth of Daimler-Benz automobiles.
But that wasn’t all that went up in flames.
So did Ilie Popescu’s chance of recovering the $500,000 he owed the Russians.
Marin Popescu had listened in silence as Ilie related his predicament. He could not believe his son’s foolishness.
After abandoning and torching the M320 on the outskirts of Hamburg, Ilie had found his way back to the Tigani via the extensive network Marin used to infiltrate his gangs of professional beggars throughout Western Europe. The German police would eventually piece together what had happened and the men from Moscow wouldn’t be far behind.
Marin knew they would come. There would be retribution. And first he had to break the news of the death of their only son, Gica, to his old friends, the Dinantus. They would blame Ilie, two years Gica’s senior.
Marin was furious but he had to protect his son. Fortunately for Ilie, Marin didn’t only smuggle cars, he smuggled people.
Ilie joined a party of Roma bound for England. Marin gave him $5,000 and told him to lose himself as soon as he got to London. He was not under any circumstances to contact his elder brother, Boban, who ran the London end of the car theft racket. They would be watching Boban, Marin warned. Nor must he attempt to phone home. Ilie would have to vanish until Marin could square things with the Russians. Marin would get word to his son when it was time.
Ilie and the other Roma, men, women, children and babes in arms, who had paid $3,000 each for their passage to England, left Romania at the town of Timisoara, on the Hungarian border. They were hidden in false ceilings in lorries and driven across Europe to Calais. Once there they were transferred to fresh vehicles and loaded on cross-Channel ferries, unhindered by the French authorities.
Ilie and the others had their instructions. Once at sea, they were to destroy all the passports and documents, anything which might identify them. Britain had a reputation throughout Eastern Europe as a soft touch, for interpreting the 1951 Human Rights Convention on Refugees more liberally than any other country. Asylum-seekers from Kosovo, Albania, Bosnia and Romania poured daily across the Channel.
Ilie and his party had been abandoned at a motorway service area near Ashford in Kent. The women had immediately started begging outside a fast-food outlet. The men banged on car windows at petrol pumps, demanding money. The children descended on the convenience store and stole everything they could carry.
When the outnumbered private security staff called the police, a single squad car arrived. The officers handed out leaflets in thirty-two different languages, many of them scribble, instructing the new arrivals to make their way to the immigration service reception centre at Croydon, in Surrey. Transport would be provided.
Ilie’s instinct was to slip away. But where to? He couldn’t get in touch with Boban. He needed a new identity. He boarded the luxury coach laid on by the local authority and travelled with the rest of the party to Croydon.
If he bucked the system, he reckoned, he might still be arrested and deported.
At Croydon, as a further precaution, he told the inquiring immigration officer through a resident translator that he was sixteen. His father had told him they could not deport him if he was a minor. Ilie could just about pass for sixteen from a distance. The immigration officer looked at him and shrugged. He was past caring. He was on a promise and just wanted to get home for the night.
Under ‘age’, he wrote ‘sixteen’.
Under ‘name’, he wrote down the first name that had come into Ilie’s head. The name of the man Ilie left dead by the roadside in Hamburg.
‘Gica Dinantu.’
Nine (#ulink_49850215-dd33-5f9f-b255-b3e38ee46b8d)
‘And in a late-breaking story, before the Deputy Prime Minister flew off to Acapulco he decreed that as part of the government’s integrated transport policy the whole of central London, Birmingham and Manchester were to be pedestrianized. He also confirmed that proposals to put humps and other traffic-calming measures on motorways were being studied at the highest level in line with global warming and road safety targets. That’s all for this bulletin. Next news in an hour. You’re listening to Rocktalk 99FM, your first choice for classic rock and conversation. Here’s Jimi Hendrix with some of that old “Crosstown Traffic”.’
Mickey hit the OFF button. He’d had enough cross-town traffic for one day. Enough cross-country traffic, too. Enough motorway traffic. Enough traffic to last him the rest of his life. Full stop. But they’d made it. Four and a half hours after leaving Andi’s mum’s house in Palmers Green, and several light years after leaving home, the French family finally arrived at Goblin’s.
As they drew up to the entrance, Mickey couldn’t help noticing that the ‘l’ and ‘s’ were missing. The gap-toothed neon sign above the door consequently read ‘GOB IN’. It made it sound like a punk rock revival.
The car eased to a halt. Mickey put on the handbrake. No one else stirred. Terry had eventually come down to earth on the south side of the Dartford River Crossing and had collapsed into a deep sleep.
Sheer exhaustion had caught up with Andi and Katie, too. They had both slept most of the way and Mickey had to content himself with Rocktalk 99FM for company.
He only really listened to the station because Ricky Sharpe worked for it. He thought the other DJs were brainless chimps, who belonged on children’s television. He liked the music, though, so he stuck with it.
‘Andi, wake up love,’ he said, gently shaking his wife’s right shoulder. ‘We’re here.’
The kids were unconscious. ‘Come on kids. Terry, son. Kate, love. Wake up, bambinos. The eagle has landed.’
Mickey eased himself out of the car with a modicum of difficulty and lit a Marlboro. He could feel his back. Although the doctors at Stoke Mandeville had made a fine job of rebuilding his shattered discs, his back was prone to seize up on long journeys. He had experimented with one of those seat covers made out of wooden balls, which some cabbies and bus drivers swear by. But he’d thrown it away. It had been like sitting on marbles and played havoc with his Chalfonts.
‘Your back OK, Mickey?’ Andi asked, with a trace of anxiety. She still feared it might snap without notice.
‘A bit stiff. I need to straighten up.’ Mickey stretched, rocked on the balls of his feet, supported his weight on the driver’s door and attempted a couple of squat thrusts, which brought on a violent bout of coughing.
‘I think you’re supposed to take the cigarette out of your mouth first,’ Andi joked.
Mickey smiled back. ‘A Radox bath should do the trick.’
‘I’ll give you a nice massage, if you play your cards right.’ She blew him a kiss.
‘Carry on like that and it won’t only be my back that’s stiff.’
‘Dad! Mu-um!’ said Katie. ‘Don’t be so-oo gross.’
Mickey and Andi reddened. They’d thought the kids were still asleep.
‘Only joking,’ Mickey said. ‘You know we’re far too old for that sort of thing.’
‘Old enough to know better, too,’ Katie played along. Secretly she was thrilled that her mum and dad still fancied each other. It’s just that she didn’t want them flirting in front of her. And they didn’t usually. Although they had always been open with the kids, privacy was important, too.
Whenever they went away, even though it hoisted the bill, they always got the kids separate rooms of their own, ever since Katie had reached the self-conscious stage. They’d booked three rooms adjoining at Goblin’s.
Mickey walked round to the back of the car and opened the rear tailgate. Cousin Roy had done a good job.
As he reached inside to begin unloading their luggage, Mickey heard a shout.
‘Oi, you.’
Mickey looked up and saw a belligerent elf, about 5ft 11ins, in a Lincoln-green jerkin, green tights, curly boots and red felt hat, marching towards him, gesticulating like a deranged tic-tac man. He wore a green and white badge the size of a side plate, bearing the words: ‘Goblin’s Greeter. Here To Help You Have Fun.’
‘Oi, you. Yes, you. I’m talking to you. What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ the elf barked.
‘Excuse me. And who are you, exactly?’ Mickey replied.
‘Security.’
‘You’re kidding me. You don’t look like security. You look like something that just fell off a toadstool.’
‘Company policy. All employees dress like elves. Disney’s got Mickey Mouse and Goofy. Goblin’s has got elves.’
Whatever the outfit was supposed to achieve, the effect was spoiled by the clumsy tattoos on his forearms.
Mickey couldn’t resist a loud guffaw. He thought about chinning him but decided against it. He was too tired for a start. Anyway, think of the court case. GBH on an elf. He’d never live it down. Easier to take the piss.
Mickey engaged the elf in eye contact, then slowly surveyed him, up and down, from the bell on his hat to the curly points of his pixie boots.
‘And how many O-levels do you need for your job?’ Mickey asked.
‘I’ll have you know I used to work in a bank. But they’ve shut down all the branches round here and replaced us with hole-in-the-wall machines. You take what you can get. It was either this or Burger King. Anyway, stop changing the subject. You can’t park here. Can’t you read?’ The elf pointed to a sign indicating parking for the exclusive use of staff.
‘Just give us a minute, boss. I’m unloading my car. I’ve just arrived. I’m checking in,’ said Mickey, the joke wearing thin.
‘Well you can unload somewhere else,’ the elf said.
‘I’m supposed to be the guest here,’ Mickey protested.
‘Not my problem. Now move it, or I’ll have it clamped. There’s a £120 recovery fee.’
‘I don’t fucking believe this.’ A quarter of a century in the police force and here I am being ordered around by a fucking pixie, Mickey thought. ‘This is unreal.’
‘Only doing my job, mate,’ said the elf.
‘That’s what the Wehrmacht claimed.’
‘Eh?’ said the elf.
‘Ve vere only obeying orders, mein Führer.’ Mickey snapped his heels and thrust his right arm forwards and upwards in a Nazi salute.
The elf took two paces back.
‘Look, mate,’ Mickey said, wearily. ‘I know you’ve got a job to do. But, as I said, we’re the guests here, right? We’ve had a long day, we’re dog-tired. We just want to get checked in, go to our rooms and sleep. So this is what I’m going to do. I’m going to unload the car, put the bags down here, and then, and only then, will I move the car. Is that all right by you?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Elves have feelings, too,’ said the elf.
‘Sure,’ said Mickey. ‘Tell you what, do us a favour. While I’m moving the car, why don’t you frolic indoors and get a porter to help us with our bags.’
‘The porter doesn’t work nights. Check-in time is 6 pm. You’re late.’
‘I know we’re fucking late. You don’t have to tell me we’re late. I don’t suppose you’d consider giving us a hand with the luggage?’
‘Love to, mate, but I’m not insured, see. And I’ve got a dodgy back.’
‘Tell me about it, mate.’ Mickey shook his head.
Mickey dumped the bags on the kerb and Terry began to manhandle them up the steps to reception.
‘That’s all right, son. I’ll do it when I’ve parked the car.’
‘I can manage, Dad.’
‘OK. But leave that big one. I’ll fetch it indoors.’ Mickey shut the tailgate and walked round to the driver’s side door.
‘Satisfied?’ he asked the elf.
‘Not quite.’
‘NOW what?’
‘This is a no-smoking facility. You’ll have to put that out. We don’t allow tobacco anywhere on the site.’
Mickey took a last puff, threw the stub on the floor and crushed it underfoot.
‘And if there’s anything else I can do to help, please don’t hesitate to ask,’ said the elf.
Fuck off and die, Mickey thought to himself. That would be a great help.
Mickey parked the car, walked back the hundred yards to reception, took the bags inside and registered.
The girl behind the counter was dressed in the same elfin uniform as the security guard.
‘Check-in is 6 pm,’ she said robotically, in the kind of voice employed by women in call centres.
‘So we’ve been told.’
Mickey asked if there was any chance of getting something to eat.
‘Sorree,’ said the girl. ‘Goblin’s Grille closes at 9.30 pm, Monday to Saturday and 8 pm on Sunday.’
Room service?
‘Sorree.’
Mickey asked if there was an all-night take-away nearby, where he might pick up some food.
‘Sorree, guests are not allowed to consume food bought off the premises in their rooms. Policy. You’ll find a full list of rules in the welcome pack in your room.’
Mickey would have to wait until breakfast, 7.30 am to 9.30 am, Monday to Saturday, 8.30 am to 10 am, Sundays.
The receptionist handed Mickey their room keys. ‘Second floor. You’ll have to use the stairs. The lift is out of order. Sorree.’
‘Great,’ said Mickey.
‘Glad to be of assistance, Mr French. Welcome to Goblin’s. Have a nice day.’
They lugged the cases up the stairs and, as Mickey settled the kids into their rooms, Andi ran him a hot bath.
‘At least the water works.’
‘Come on, it’s not that bad.’
‘No, of course not. I didn’t mean it like that. It will be great, just great.’
‘We’ll unpack in the morning.’
‘Fine.’
Mickey towelled himself dry and collapsed on the bed while Andi pottered in the en-suite bathroom.
He started to drift off, the horrors of the day subsiding.
He was on the brink of deep sleep when he felt a gentle tingle in his groin. He opened one eye and looked down as Andi ran her tongue between his balls and up the shaft of his cock.
‘I’m sorry, love, I haven’t got much energy,’ he apologized, though he felt himself responding.
She looked up at him, doe-eyed, squeezed hard and lightly kissed the tip of his now engorged dick. ‘You just lie there. This one’s on me,’ she said as she took him in her mouth, her eyes still locked onto his, which by now were both wide open.
‘What have I done to deserve this?’ he asked, desperately trying to delay the inevitable.
‘Everything, lover. You’ve heard the expression: when in Rome?’
‘Uh, uuugh,’ Mickey grunted in acknowledgement.
‘Well, as the lady said,’ Andi smiled as Mickey’s scrotum tightened, ‘welcome to Goblin’s.’
Ten (#ulink_c81d263b-9aff-591e-a229-980c878188ec)
Tyburn Juvenile Panel
Wayne Sutton dug deep into his left nostril with the long nail on the index finger of his right hand, which had HAT tattooed, or rather Biro-ed, on the knuckles in erratic, pre-school letters. Wayne thought it spelled HATE. Spelling had never been his strong point, which, since he had rarely attended school, was no great surprise. He was once moved on for begging outside Tyburn tube station with a cardboard sign reading HUNGREY AND HOMLES.
Wayne dislodged a large, crusty bogey. He rolled it between his right thumb and forefinger, examined it, popped it in his mouth, toyed with it with his tongue, threw back his head and propelled it into the air.
‘Wayne. Please pay attention,’ said the plump, middle-aged lady sitting opposite him.
Wayne shrugged and tugged his right earring. He had the body of a man and the mind of a moron. He wore his lack of education on the sleeve of his designer shell-suit, which he had stolen at knifepoint from another kid on the Parkgate Estate. Taxing, he called it.
Ever since he was ten, he had terrorized the estate and its environs, leading a semi-feral existence. He was no stranger to the courts, but since the law granted him anonymity he was known to readers of the Tyburn Times only as Monkey Boy, owing to his ability to scale drainpipes and gain entry to premises through upper-storey windows.
Wayne never knew his father, who could have been any one, or all, of a gang of bikers his mother had obliged in a caravanette in Clacton. Or a travelling salesman she had screwed on the end of Clacton pier in return for the price of a bottle of sherry.
Wayne’s mum was a slag. There was no other word for it. She had stumbled through a succession of drunken, violent relationships, existing on benefits and a few extra quid selling her favours to old men in the derelict bowls club, which had been closed since Wayne’s first, bungled, arson attempt.
She would meet her punters in the pub opposite the Post Office and, after a couple of milk stouts, would relieve them of their sexual tensions and a substantial part of their pension money. She even charged one old geezer an extra 50p for tossing himself off without permission while he was waiting in line.
It had been obvious to all that Wayne was being neglected and was in desperate need of a stable home environment. But social services, in their wisdom, rejected fostering on the grounds that it was best to keep the family together.
Family. That was a laugh. The only family Wayne had ever known apart from his mother was whichever feckless thug was currently punching his mum’s lights out in between bouts of heavy drinking, drug taking and thieving.
‘Mr Pearson, please continue,’ said the middle-aged magistrate.
‘Thank you, ma’am.’ Mr Pearson cleared his throat.
‘January 16. Abusive behaviour to staff and customers at Patel’s Minimart and Video Library.
‘January 22. Breaking a 14-year-old boy’s arm at Tyburn fairground.
‘January 23. Smashing a plate-glass window at Corkeez wine bar.
‘January 28. Throwing stones from the bridge above the underpass in Nelson Mandela Boulevard onto passing vehicles.
‘February 4. Shoplifting at Waterhouse’s department store.
‘February 7. Breaking the windows of a number of premises on the Parkgate Estate. The list is attached, ma’am.’
‘I am obliged to you, Mr. Pearson.’
‘February 11. Setting fire to a tramp behind the Odeon.
‘February 14. Abusive behaviour, criminal damage to St Valentine’s flower display at Buds the florist in the High Street.
‘February 21. Criminal damage to bus shelter.
‘February 22. Shining a laser beam into the eyes of a cab driver in Roman Road, causing him to swerve and career into a fruit and vegetable stall, hospitalizing the stallholder, a Mr Bunton.
‘March 2. Kicking over litter bins in High Street. Graffiti spraying on wall of Town Hall.
‘March 6. Shoplifting in Waterhouse’s again.
‘March 9. Attempted burglary at SupaTalc the chemist’s.
‘March 17. Thrown out of Toy Town for attempting to steal Buzz Lightyear dolls.
‘March 19. Threats made against cashier at Continental Stores in Market Road.
‘March 25. Burglary of homes on Parkgate Estate. You have the list, once again, ma’am.
‘March 31. Possession of controlled drugs, cannabis and Ecstasy tablets, with intent to supply.
‘April 1. Urinating from walkway on Parkgate Estate onto the head of PC 235 Watkins, home beat officer.’
‘I think we’ve probably heard enough, Mr Pearson. Thank you. I have read all the relevant papers and social reports.’
‘Then you will see that over a five-month period this year, Wayne Sutton has committed no fewer that seventy offences, ranging from assault and robbery to taking and driving away motor vehicles, culminating in a high-speed chase through the Parkgate Estate in May. He is also in breach of a curfew order, imposed by this panel last December.’
‘Indeed, Mr. Pearson. I am most grateful.’
‘In addition to the evidence in your file, we also have video footage of Wayne committing a large number of the offences, taken from the closed circuit security cameras in the High Street and within the Parkgate centre. In some of the footage, you will see Wayne actually waving to the camera, in the full knowledge that he was being filmed.’
Wayne smiled.
‘Are you suggesting that Wayne knew the seriousness of his behaviour?’
‘Without question, ma’am. He has been before this panel on a number of occasions, been subject to a series of supervision orders.’
‘Yes, but does he realize what he is doing?’
‘The police service are of the opinion that he does and that for his own benefit and the protection of the community at large, a custodial remedy would be appropriate and desirable. I would remind you that he has already broken an Anti-Social Behaviour Order.’
‘And what do the probation service have to say on the matter, Mr. Toynbee?’
Jez Toynbee looked up from the thick file in front of him. He had been christened Jeremy, but thought Jez sounded more democratic. At 5ft 8ins, he was no taller than his young charge, Wayne, sitting alongside him.
‘Wayne Sutton is an averagely intelligent young man, in need of guidance and encouragement. He comes from a dysfunctional background. He has never had a father figure. His mother is an alcoholic, part-time prostitute. She undoubtedly loves Wayne, but is deficient in the parenting skills department. Wayne’s only male role models have been itinerant men who formed temporary liaisons with his mother.
‘We in the probation service believe that although Wayne is clearly disturbed, his offences were not committed out of wickedness but as a cry for help.
‘While the panel has the power to send him to a young offenders’ institution, we do not believe that would be beneficial at this stage of his development. In fact, there is every reason to believe that it would actually be counter-productive.
‘In a secure institution, Wayne would come into contact with other young offenders, which could further disrupt his personal development. We sincerely believe that he can be rehabilitated and go on to take his rightful place in society and make a full contribution.’
‘Bollocks,’ muttered Pearson under his breath.
‘Did you say something, Mr. Pearson?’
‘No ma’am.’
‘Pray continue, Mr Toynbee.’
‘Thank you, ma’am. As I was saying, we believe that Wayne Sutton is not beyond redemption. The problem in his case has been his deprived childhood. He has not been showered with presents, like other children, which explains his thieving. He has never had the luxury of a family car, which contributed to his taking and driving away of vehicles. While his mother loves him, she has been incapable of showing him affection. He has been routinely assaulted by some of his mother’s, er, male associates. He has a repressed anger, which manifests itself in assault and criminal damage.
‘We believe that if Wayne can be shown the kind of affection missing in his life, can be exposed to some of the normal treats which other children expect as their birthright, he can be persuaded of the error of his ways. Before you consider a custodial solution, I would urge you to put this unfortunate young victim of society first. His welfare and his future must be paramount.’
‘What, exactly, are you suggesting, Mr. Toynbee?’
‘The probation service, with the assistance of the local authority and the Victims’ Trust, have recently established a scheme aimed at broadening the horizons of offenders like Wayne. Under close supervision, young offenders are taken beyond their immediate environs and given a glimpse of the wider world which awaits them. We find it helps them confront their criminality and makes them feel valued. In turn, this will help them reject their previous behaviour and become valued members of the community.’
‘Very well, Mr Toynbee. This panel is always reluctant to impose a custodial sentence. Having read all the reports and having heard your submission, we are agreed that Wayne should be released into the supervision of the probation service. Wayne, stand up, please.’
Wayne dragged himself to his feet and stared past the magistrates and out of the window.
‘Wayne, we have been persuaded by Mr. Toynbee that you deserve one more chance to take your rightful, and lawful, place in society. But if you don’t respond, you will find yourself locked up. You will report back here in three months. Do you understand?’
Wayne farted.
Eleven (#ulink_f3a382d1-3d6c-54b1-9add-157e8863e012)
Ricky Sparke stumbled upstairs and, by placing one hand over his left eye, managed to locate the keyhole in the front door to his flat. He stepped over the pile of unopened mail on the doormat, threw his coat on the sofa and reached for the vodka bottle.
He unscrewed the cap and turned it upside down. It was empty. He wrung the neck, like a man strangling a chicken, but the bottle was spent.
Ricky retrieved another from the washing machine.
Since he had a laundry service, he had no need of the Indesit combined washer/drier. So he used it as storage space. Every other surface was covered with old newspapers, magazines, CD cases and LP covers with coffee mug stains on them.
Ricky picked up a dirty glass, wiped it on his shirt tail, poured a large slug of Smirnoff into it and topped it up with half a bottle of flat slimline tonic.
By drinking slimline tonic, Ricky had convinced himself that it wasn’t really drinking at all.
It was his concession to fitness. He was always trying fad diets, none of which worked, largely on account of the fact that he would insist on supplementing them with vodka and Guinness.
He once went on a white wine only diet, after reading that Garry Glitter had lost three stone on it.
Ricky lost three days.
He devised his own version of the F-Plan diet. He called it the C-Plan. Ricky thought that if it worked he would market it and make his fortune.
The principle was fairly simple. You could eat anything you wanted, provided it began with C.
The diet started well on day one, Ricky eating nothing but cottage cheese and cabbage.
On day two, he dined on corn on the cob and cucumber.
Encouraged by the results, he extended the diet to his drinking habits. Two bottles of Chablis later, he moved onto Chartreuse and, eventually, Carlsberg Special Brew.
Then came champagne, chicken tikka masala, chips, cheese and onion crisps and cognac. He had completely forgotten about the chicken tikka massala until he brought it up on the platform of Upminster tube station.
Ricky had fallen asleep on the District Line, passed his stop at Westminster, slept all the way to Ealing Broadway, turned round and slept all the way back, past Westminster once more and onto Upminster at the eastern end of the line.
He was woken by a guard, turfed off the train, threw up, slipped in his own sick, smashed his head on a bench and passed out.
Ricky discovered a previously unidentified side effect of the C-Plan diet.
Concussion.
He slept the night on Upminster station and made his way back the following morning, breaking his journey at Aldgate East for an extremely painful and deeply unpleasant shit.
Since then he’d stuck to vodka and the occasional can of Nigerian lager, which had been his first news editor’s pet name for Guinness.
Ricky took a slug of his vodka and slim and retrieved a can of Guinness from the fridge to chase it down with.
He made a mental note to go shopping the following morning, Saturday. He was down to his last bottle of vodka and five cans of Guinness. Oh, and some milk might come in handy, too.
Ricky slumped back on the sofa and hunted for the remote. He located it under a pile of soft-porn magazines. He didn’t know why he bothered buying them any more. Half the time he was too pissed to toss himself off.
Ricky laughed. It was true. He was the one sad bastard who really did buy Penthouse for the articles.
Ricky hit the remote and the 33-inch Loewe TV in the corner came alive. Along with his Linn hi-fi, the state-of-the-art television was his pride and joy.
He loved his home entertainment. He was a cable junkie. And his collection of CDs and LPs, which he still played on a 20-year-old Linn Sondek LP12 turntable, was larger and more comprehensive than the record library at Rocktalk 99FM. Ricky often took his music in with him.
Charlie Lawrence didn’t believe in wasting money on immaterial software, such as records. He relied on freebies. And since all the popular stuff disappeared overnight, Ricky reckoned that the only way he’d get a decent show on the air was by supplying his own CDs. Otherwise he’d be reduced to playing Lena Zavarone, Kenneth McKellar and the crass soft rock no one even wanted to steal.
Ricky flicked through the channels, hoping to stumble across some hard-core German channel.
It was always more in hope than expectation. The only porn he ever found late at night seemed to have been made in the 1970s. Before they got their kit off, all the players looked like Abba, during their ‘Waterloo’ period.
Ricky paused when he saw what looked like a game show come on. The spangled host grinned insincerely and introduced the programme.
‘Good evening and welcome to a brand-new edition of ASYLUM!’
‘Today’s programme features another chance to take part in our exciting competition: Hijack an airliner and win a council house.
‘We’ve already given away hundreds of millions of pounds and thousands of dream homes, courtesy of our sponsor, the British taxpayer.
‘And, don’t forget, we’re now the fastest-growing game on the planet.
‘Anyone can play, provided they don’t already hold a valid British passport. You only need one word of English:
‘ASYLUM!
‘Prizes include all-expenses-paid accommodation, cash benefits starting at £180 a week and the chance to earn thousands more begging, mugging and accosting drivers at traffic lights.
‘The competition is open to everyone buying a ticket or stowing away on one of our partner airlines, ferry companies or Eurostar.
‘No application ever refused, reasonable or unreasonable.
‘All you have to do is destroy all your papers and remember the magic password:
‘ASYLUM!
‘Only this week one hundred and fifty members of the Taliban family from Afghanistan were flown Goat Class from Kabul to our international gateway at Stansted, where local law enforcement officers were on hand to fast-track them to their luxury £200-a-night rooms in the fabulous four-star Hilton hotel.
‘They join tens of thousands of other lucky winners already staying in hotels all over Britain.
‘Our most popular destinations include the White Cliffs of Dover, the world-famous Toddington Services Area in historic Bedfordshire and the Money Tree at Croydon.
‘If you still don’t understand the rules, don’t forget there’s no need to phone a friend or ask the audience, just apply for legal aid.
’Hundreds of lawyers, social workers and counsellors are waiting to help. It won’t cost you a penny.
‘So play today. It could change your life for ever.
‘Iraqi terrorists, Afghan dissidents, Albanian gangsters, pro-Pinochet activists, anti-Pinochet activists, Kosovan drug-smugglers, Tamil Tigers, bogus Bosnians, Rwandan mass murderers, Somali guerillas.
‘COME ON DOWN!
‘Get along to the airport. Get along to the lorry park. Get along to the ferry terminal. Don’t stop in Germany or France. Go straight to Britain.
’And you are guaranteed to be one of tens of thousands of lucky winners in the softest game on earth.
‘Roll up, roll up my friends, for the game that never ends. Everyone’s a winner, when they play:
‘ASYLUM!’
Was he taking the piss, or what?
Who could tell?
Ricky switched off the TV, picked up the CD remote and pressed Play. Randy Newman. ‘Bad Love’.
Ricky drained the can of Guinness and topped up his vodka. He reflected on his earlier encounter with Charlie Lawrence.
Fuck him and his fucking job. Who needs it? Ricky’s inclination was to walk away from Rocktalk 99FM. But Charlie Lawrence was right.
Actually, Ricky needed it. He’d never been out of work, he had an expensive flat and expensive tastes.
Tonight, Dillon had handed him his bar bill at Spider’s. It came to £1,234.75. Ricky had to promise to pay him next week, when his salary cheque was paid into the bank.
Ricky collected the mail from the doormat.
Junk, bills, flyers, pizza menus, minicab cards.
And one registered letter, marked URGENT.
It was from the Tyburn Building Society.
Dear Mr Sparke,
We note from our records that you are now four months in arrears with your mortgage. As of today (see date above) …
Ricky looked at the letter heading. It was dated two weeks ago.
… you are deficient on your repayments to the tune of £7,240.70. Interest is accruing daily.
Please contact us immediately and make arrangement for payment. Failure to make full restitution within twenty-one days will result in county court proceedings for recovery of the debt and repossession of the property.
Shit.
Twelve (#ulink_f674174e-216a-5228-a835-cc870d508308)
Ilie Popescu swallowed another handful of aspirins to dull the pain. It had taken fifteen stitches to treat the deep wound in his right arm.
He had told the staff at North East London Memorial Hospital that he had impaled himself on a garden fork. His English was imperfect, but he could get by.
Ilie had given them the name he had adopted, Gica Dinantu, the name of his partner in crime, now deceased.
It had been accepted without question by the immigration officer at Croydon and since he had no papers, it was impossible to prove otherwise. He couldn’t risk being traced.
Having registered at Croydon, he was issued with temporary papers and a berth in a hostel in Tottenham, which now housed almost a hundred asylum-seekers from Eastern Europe. It had been a dilapidated old people’s home, due for closure. The local council shipped out the last of the elderly residents and spent £400,000 refurbishing the building in the style to which the migrants intended to become accustomed.
All rooms had satellite television and small refrigerators, like hotel minibars. There was a communal canteen offering a variety of food, no worse, Ilie thought, than his expensive hotel in Hamburg.
There was a snooker room and, in the grounds, a brand-new tennis court and five-a-side football pitch.
Ilie was amazed at the generosity of the British. He received free board and lodging, clothing coupons and £117.50 a week in cash, which he supplemented with the proceeds of begging and petty crime.
Ilie had struck up a friendship with a pretty Kosovar Albanian girl, Maria. They’d been hustling passengers on the London Underground when they were spotted by a gang of skinheads, roaming the West End rolling foreign tourists, putting the boot into beggars and nicking collecting tins from the homeless.
Ilie and Maria were chased up the escalators at Warren Street, through the Euston underpass and into the sidestreets at the back of the railway station.
They lost their pursuers in an alleyway behind the Exmouth, a popular pub with railway porters and guards. Panting furiously, hearts pounding, they grasped each other frantically. He hardened instantly. She reached inside his tracksuit trousers, lifted her skirt, put her arms round his neck and raised herself, straddling him. He pulled aside the gusset of her knickers and she lowered herself around him, knotting her ankles behind his back. The sex was violent and brief. They came together.
Since then they had spent every night together at the hostel. Their encounter with the shaven forces of English nationalism had not deterred their begging. Their expeditions became ever more ambitious.
Soon Ilie, or Gica, as even Maria called him, was running street crime and begging out of the hostel. There was no shortage of willing volunteers.
Using a stolen van, Ilie would transport his gang to various areas of London, where they would burgle, beg, snatch handbags, and hustle drivers, posing as squeegee merchants at traffic lights.
It was Ilie’s idea to steal the temporary traffic lights from the High Street and set them up at various locations. Easier to sting a captive audience. It was a variation on the idea he had used to hijack the car transporter in Hamburg, which would have worked like a dream had it not been for Freund’s treachery. If he ever straightened things with the Russians, Ilie vowed, he would return to Hamburg one day and slit Freund’s throat.
Ilie also came up with the idea of buying, or rather shoplifting, a doll to use as a prop. The English were mugs, he reckoned. Real suckers for a woman begging with a bay-bee.
That day they’d set up their phoney roadworks on the main drag through north-east London at the point where three lanes funnel into one.
Ilie’s gang surrounded the car and went into their usual routine, banging on the windows, sloshing dirty water on the windscreen.
The driver was a big man, his wife much smaller. There were two children in the rear. A pretty little girl and a boy, younger, a scale model of his father.
Ilie tried to grab the woman’s handbag, smashing the passenger window with a crowbar and reaching through with his knife to cut the straps.
The driver had grabbed the knife and buried it deep into Ilie’s forearm, accelerated away, brushing Maria into the gutter.
At the hospital, they insisted on giving Ilie a powerful tetanus jab. Now his arse was sore, as well as his arm.
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- Жанр: Прочее
- Язык: Книги на английском языке
- Объём: 390 стр. 4 иллюстрации
- ISBN: 9780007387991
- Дата выхода книги: 30 июня 2019
- Версия: 📚 Электронная книга
Richard Littlejohn exposes the madness of modern Britain in this thrill-packed rollercoaster ride of a novel, bursting with all the humour and irreverence that have made him Britain’s No 1 newspaper columnist.What right do you have to protect your family and property from violent criminals? Richard Littlejohn has explored this and other burning social issues in his work as a journalist. Now he takes it even further in a fast-paced powerhouse of a novel, part polemic, part comedy, part tragedy.Mickey French is just an ordinary bloke, an ex-cop struggling to look after his family as self-righteous do-gooders and bungling bureaucrats bring the country to its knees. But Mickey’s life is turned upside down when he is attacked in his own home and forced to defend himself. His arrest for murder is front-page news, and soon the whole nation is watching as he battles for justice, lost in a maze of dodgy lawyers, politically correct police officers, bogus asylum-seekers, self-publicising politicians, shameless journalists and rabble-rousing shock-jocks.
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