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Kitabı oku: «To Hell in a Handcart», sayfa 2
‘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
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
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.
