Top Hard

by Stephen Booth

  "Course not."

  I bought Moggie the drink I'd promised. It always saddens me when greed gets results where threats fail. Then I remembered Nuala. To my surprise, she was still there. I thought by now she would have stamped out in disgust. But she was sitting at the same table where I'd left her. The only trouble was, now she had company. I could see her mouth going nineteen to the dozen, spilling her guts to the nice, polite bloke who'd just bought her a vodka and who had no doubt told her that he knew Stones McClure very well, that he was an old friend in fact. Yes, that's just the sort of trick DI Frank Moxon would pull. It should be in the Police and Criminal Evidence Act - the use of intrusive and unwarranted niceness strictly prohibited.

  I was torn now, between a reluctance to encounter Moxon face to face and a tearing anxiety about what Nuala might be telling him. At the rate she talked, she could have given him my entire life history already, if she actually knew it. Rapidly, I reviewed what she did know about me, what she might have noticed during the short course of our relationship. I'm careful, but sometimes there are moments when I stop thinking too clearly, and Nuala has been intimately involved in one or two of these moments, if the truth be known.

  * * * *

  The drive home was tense. In my mind, all I could see was Frank Moxon's oily smile as he'd slithered away from the table and slimed his way out of the door of the Cow.

  "He told me you had a nickname," said Nuala, blissfully unaware of my mood. "Not Stones, I mean. Another one. One that you don't tell people and you don't use any more, because you don't like it. But Frank knows it - he knows a lot of things about you, he said."

  I bet he did. My only worry now was whether he knew even more about me since his long chat with Nuala. Also hearing her call the bloke Frank was starting to turn my stomach.

  "He's talking through his backside."

  But Nuala just smirked.

  "Tufty. I thought that was really sweet. Can I call you that?"

  She giggled loudly. One vodka too many, by the sound of it. I said nothing, but concentrated on driving. We'd be home soon, and then I thought I might be able to find a way to shut her up.

  "Frank said it was because of your hair cut. I can't imagine it now. Tufty. How sweet."

  "Stay away from Moxon, Nuala."

  I hadn't intended to speak, but it needed saying. Her eyes lit up, loving it. She thought I was jealous, the silly tart.

  "Oh, but he's ever so nice. And he knows a lot about you."

  "Yeah, you said."

  "He says he's met a lot of your friends too. He's going to tell me about them next time we meet."

  "Yeah?"

  "Tufty."

  That giggle again. It was a good job Nuala had compensating qualities, otherwise I would have had her out of the car right there and then, without slowing down. When a woman thinks she has power over you, you're sunk if you don't get out immediately. And here she was thinking I was worried about a deadly rival for her favours in the shape of Detective Inspector Frank Moxon. Me, jealous of the Bill Gates of the Nottinghamshire Constabulary, the supernerd of the CID?

  "He's a plonker."

  "Now, tut, tut. Why are you calling him names? He was very nice about you. He said you were old friends. He couldn't understand why you didn't come over to talk to him. Did you have to speak to all those people at the bar, Stones? I'm sure you were only pretending. Some of them looked quite surprised. You even bought them drinks. It was almost as if you were trying to avoid Frank. I told him that, and he laughed. He said he couldn't believe it, not of an old friend like you. It was then he told me your nickname. Tufty."

  By now, my hands were gripping the steering wheel so hard that my fingers were leaving impressions in the rubber. I realised I'd been imagining the wheel was Frank Moxon's neck.

  The fact was, Moxon had hit me where he knew I was vulnerable. I couldn't tell Nuala to stay away from him because he was copper. She had no idea I was the sort of person who needed to avoid coppers, and that was the way I preferred to keep it. Ignorance is bliss, but it's also security.

  "Oh, I nearly forgot, I've got to call in at the church," I said.

  And Nuala's eyes lit up, just like Lisa's had.

  * * * *

  Medensworth isn't all one big housing estate, though it might look it at first glance. There is still an Old Medensworth. It's bypassed by the main road now, which moves rapidly on towards the sprawl that is New Medensworth. But the old village has an eighteenth century pub serving eighteenth century meat and potato pie. It has some dinky stone cottages lived in by old ladies who've been there since the Year Dot. And it has a manor house, looking a bit battered and neglected, which is often the subject of speculation that it's about to be turned into a conference centre or nursing home. Probably it'll just fall down before they get round to it.

  Best of all, though, it has St Asaph's Parish Church. Bits of this god box are Saxon, and bits of it are Norman, with later congregations adding their fancies to it in a wonderful sort of hotchpotch. It's like a complete record of the last thousand years of what passes for civilisation in this part of the world. Around it there's the churchyard, the quietest spot you'll find for miles, full of crumbling gravestones and ancient yew trees.

  Lisa says there's nothing quite like an old churchyard for making you feel in touch with the past. All those dead folk lying under your feet. You can tell which of them were rich gits by the size of their memorial stones. I'm more interested in the plain ordinary folk, as you've probably guessed. They're a bit special to me. Among this lot will be the actual stonemasons and carpenters and labourers who built the church. Just go inside and look at the thing if you still want to know why they're special.

  When I walk in that churchyard, I can hear them talking to me. What they say isn't always complimentary, true - but I can take it. They agree with me on one thing, though - the rich gits should be in the lower, hotter bit of eternity.

  Down at St Asaph's you'll find the Reverend Gordon Bowring, usually just known as The Rev. He's one of those young vicars - by which I suppose I mean that he's younger than me. Not much above thirty anyway. A child of the Sixties, like. And that means his ideas are more, well... modern than some of the C of E types I've come across before.

  He isn't from round these parts, as anybody can tell from his habit of leaving his car unlocked outside his house. In fact, he's a bit of a southern nancy, to be honest. He was in a parish in Berkshire or Buckinghamshire or somewhere soft before he came to Nottinghamshire.

  The story goes that he got carried away one day and preached a sermon that said it was basically okay to nick things from supermarkets. He meant that if you were poor and hungry, the big businesses wouldn't miss the odd tin of chicken and mushroom soup or a packet of chocolate Hobnobs.

  But the details of the message sort of got ignored, as they do. This scary vicar had said it was okay to steal things. Shock horror, stories in the tabloids and questions asked at the General Synod. And before he could get his cassock off or swing his thurible, the Reverend Gordon Bowring had been banished to the arse-end of the Midlands, where he couldn't do any harm. I suppose they thought that if he told folk in Medensworth it was okay to nick stuff they'd wonder what the hell he was talking about. People here are brought up to nick things - they don't need one of the god squad giving them permission, thank you very much.

  The Rev is not what you might expect for such a villain. He's no more than five foot six or seven, and his hair is vanishing rapidly despite his age. Perhaps it's all that worrying about sin. I try not to do any worrying at all on this subject, and it hasn't harmed me. The Rev's eyes always look vaguely troubled too. He dresses in a really trendy style - well, I seem to remember it was trendy back in the Seventies - and he talks like the Oxford bleedin' dictionary. They should have sent an interpreter up from Berkshire with him. His congregation here have trouble understanding him half the time. Me, I sometimes understand what he's saying. But I can't understand what he's thinking, no way. H
is brain processes defy logic.

  Just imagine a small child surrounded by Lego bricks. He has to build a model of a cathedral, and he's been told he can only use the white bricks. But he finds that all the bricks he's been given are red ones, and they're such a funny shape that they'll only fit together in certain ways, and the building they make is starting to look more like a set of sheds on an allotment. Somehow the child has to convince himself that his bricks are white, and that what he's building is a cathedral. How does he do it? Well, he turns colour blind and becomes the world's biggest fan of avant-garde modern architecture, that's how. Meet the Rev.

  When I parked the Impreza outside St Asaph's, I hadn't intended bumping into him. I only wanted to take a squint at the rotas in the church porch. I'm down on the churchyard rota, you see - which means, I suppose, that in theory I take my turn at tidying up round the graves and keeping the grass in trim. Well, you'd be surprised how fast the weeds grow in the summer. It's practically a full-time job, and obviously the church can't afford to pay anyone. So a group of us caring local citizens put our names down to look after the task in turn. The Rev thinks we're wonderful. And he never seems to care whether we actually do any work, bless him.

  For my reasons of my own, I wanted to get my name down for a turn on the rota this week. It was no problem, as there are always plenty of spare periods.

  The one thing I had to do was make sure my spell was clear of the times when our churchwarden, Welsh Border, was working. He isn't actually Welsh - far from it, he's born and bred in Medensworth, and he won't hesitate to let you know it. He's Councillor Border to his face, chairman of the parish council, retired accountant and a bugger for wanting to do things right. I don't fit into his scheme of things at all, and he has a horrible suspicious mind. I can't do with Welsh Border hanging around when I'm putting in my spell of good work.

  Lisa knows about this, but it was a new concept to Nuala when I explained to her about the volunteer rota. She looked awestruck, like she'd just had a vision of the Virgin Mary. I nipped up to the porch as quick as I could, but the Rev was just coming out of the vestry door and he buttonholed me before I could escape.

  "Ah, Livingstone. Giving of your time as generously as ever, I see. How wonderful. Giving is the greatest of joys, is it not?"

  He's the only person who gets to call me Livingstone, apart from my Uncle Willis. Maybe that says something.

  "Yes, Rev."

  I've found this is the best way to deal with him - just agree with whatever he says. You can't disillusion somebody who already looks so worried and is almost bald before he's thirty-five. It would be cruel, like telling the child with the Lego that he'd just built a public toilet instead of Westminster Abbey.

  "I see you've got your delightful young lady with you. Lisa, isn't it?"

  The Rev gave a coy little wave towards the car, and Nuala waved back from the passenger seat, for all the world like the Queen Mother or something. I swear these two are on another planet. For a start, the Rev obviously couldn't tell the difference between one bird and another, which in my book makes any bloke a very sad person indeed.

  "Yeah, I was just taking her home, so - "

  "I've been wondering when we might have the honour at St Asaph's of reading the banns for the McClure nuptials," simpered the Rev. "Might that be in prospect at some date in the not too distant future?"

  For a minute I honestly hadn't a clue what he was on about. I always thought nuptials were what Nuala would be up to half an hour later in my bedroom. But I'd never heard the Rev talk smutty before. Was he really talking about banning it? Then I mentally translated his words into English, and the penny dropped.

  "Er, I can't say it is, Rev. I'm not really prepared for the, er..." What was the word I was searching for?

  "Commitment?" suggested the Rev.

  Ridicule was the word I wanted, actually. But I let him have his own way.

  "Perhaps you'd like to come and talk to me about it privately one day," he said. "You and the young lady together, or just the two of us if you prefer. Man to man, so to speak. I may be able to put your fears at rest."

  He was doing a pretty good job of increasing my fears by the minute. The last thing I wanted was for him and Lisa to get together when this subject was likely to be on the agenda. If marriage was on the vicar's afternoon tea menu, then Stones McClure was on a diet. Fasting for Lent, in fact.

  "I'll let you know, Rev."

  "Right-ho."

  He actually does say that. Until I met him I thought it was something Leslie Phillips had invented to send up RAF types in all those Carry On films. Right-ho, chaps. Wizard prang. Peppered a few oiks. Tally-ho.

  I made to set off back down the path, but the Rev hadn't quite finished.

  "Oh, when you're here on your mission of goodwill, Livingstone..."

  "Yes?" He meant when I was skiving around the churchyard.

  "I wondered if you would do me a favour and take a look at the vestry roof." He gestured up towards the church. "We seem to have suffered a bit of storm damage. I didn't notice the wind being quite so bad, but sometimes I get a bit absorbed in my work, you know. In a world of my own, so to speak. But it must have been damaged. It seems to be deteriorating rather rapidly."

  I looked up at the roof. There was a bare patch of a several square feet among the ancient brick tiles, and wooden beams and bits of felt were poking through. I looked at the guttering and down at the ground below the roof. There was no sign of any broken bits of tile. Some storm.

  "I'll see to it, Rev."

  "Thank you, my friend. We do need to maintain the fabric of the church as something the people of the village can be proud of."

  In a world of his own was right. When I got back in the car, the first thing I did was make a quick call on the mobile.

  "Slow? You there? Do something for me, mate."

  "Yeah, Stones?"

  "Find out which pillock has been nicking the Rev's roof."

  9

  Beef, Yorkshire pudding, roast potatoes and a mountain of vegetables. Apple pie, cream, cheese, biscuits, coffee and beer. Doncaster Dave was having a snack.

  Dave appeared in court once. It was about the time I met him, actually, but that's another story. He'd got himself pulled in for nicking stuff off the stalls in Mansfield market. Well, nicking was hardly the word for it. When the stallholders saw him coming, they just kind of backed off and invited him to help himself. He only took food, of course. Pork pies and pasties, the odd half pound of cheese or a loaf or two. Even apples and bananas. It's peckish work walking round a market, and there it was, all set out on display. But then some jerk complained one day, and Dave found himself up before the magistrates. Somehow, assaulting the police got added to the charge sheet on the way there. Must have been a mistake.

  I've got to know Dave quite well since then - as far as you can get to know anyone who communicates in grunts. And the thing I remember most about his day in court is the moment when the number one magistrate got right up on her high horse and asked him: "Mr Underwood, don't you know right from wrong?" That was a real laugh. Right from wrong? He doesn't even know right from left.

  "I need your services, Donc," I said.

  "Yeah?"

  He waited for instructions, filling in the few seconds by piling more food into his mouth.

  "There's something going on that smells wrong to me. I want to see Mick Kelk and ask him some questions."

  "Yeah?"

  He was looking down at the remains of the cheese as if he wanted to ask a question of his own, like 'where's it all gone?'

  "We may need to lean on him a bit."

  "Yeah." He nodded. He understood that bit.

  "Trouble is, I don't know where he is at the minute. He might be on a job somewhere."

  Dave looked towards the food counter, where a whole range of desserts were on display. I could see his eyes flicking backwards and forwards across the gateaux.

  "We have to go and look for him down at
the Ferret," I said.

  "Yeah?"

  "As soon as we've done that I'll take you down the Shah Naz for something to eat."

  Dave was on his feet then. "Less' go," he said.

  * * * *

  If you think the Cow's Arse is a bit rough, then you've never been in the Dog and Ferret. Very wise too, if I may say so. I wouldn't touch the Ferret with anybody's barge pole, let alone mine, if I didn't have to call there sometimes for professional reasons. It's been closed more often than a cashier's window at a Post Office counter. It's usually on the orders of the magistrates after complaints by the police about the amount of trouble there.

  And it's not as if it's organised trouble. That I could understand, if it was in the course of business. But it's just general mayhem, people beating each other up as a way of having a bit of a laugh on a Saturday night. Smashing up the bar, turning over a few cars, ripping out the toilets and flooding the car park. You know the sort of thing. It's so primitive and 1950s. Haven't they heard of the late twentieth century, these blokes?

  In any case, I wouldn't go in there without Dave at my shoulder and Slow Kid outside with the engine running. Some of the customers don't know me and might give me a kicking by mistake. Some do know me and might give me a kicking on purpose. Sadly, this is where Mick Kelk and some of the other Medensworth blokes hang out.

  When we walked through the door it was almost like one of those Western movies. You know the scene, when the strangers mosey in, call for a couple of shots of redeye and start demanding to know where the sheriff is? And all the customers go really quiet and start twitching their trigger fingers? Well, it was a bit like that. Only there ain't no sheriff in Medensworth, and the only redeye in the Ferret tonight was the one the lad was wearing who staggered past us out of the door. In fact, his eye was so red the blood was making a mess on his shirt.

  Inside, nobody looked as though anything out of the ordinary had been happening. They were just having a quiet drink, as far as anything was ever quiet in the Ferret. The jukebox was on full blast, the fruit machines and video games were bleeping and farting at one end of the bar and a bunch of pool players were arguing about a shot at the other end. In between, everyone was shouting at everyone else to make themselves heard, and those at the bar were having to shout even louder.