To Hell in a Handcart

by Richard Littlejohn

  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.