To Hell in a Handcart

by Richard Littlejohn

  ‘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

  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

  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.’