Top Hard

by Stephen Booth

  "No, Rev, I think the compost heap is right here in front of me."

  Welsh Border took a step towards me. His hand came out, a finger pointing aggressively at my face. His mouth opened to say something offensive, but he didn't quite get round to saying it. His face suddenly went bright red and tears came to his eyes. It would have been nice to think it was his guilty conscience troubling him. But it could have been my boot trampling on his big toe.

  "Get off my foot, McClure. I'll have you charged with assault."

  "Oh sorry, Councillor. I thought I was treading on a worm."

  "I'll - !"

  Just then Dave swung the grass box and slipped it neatly over Border's head, smothering his latest gem. Grass poured over the councillor's shoulders, slithering into the collar of his shirt and down inside his boiler suit. A high-pitched screeching, choking sound came from somewhere inside the box.

  "Oh my goodness," said the Rev. "Are we having a contretemps?"

  With Councillor Border incapacitated, Dave and I decided to make our escape from the churchyard.

  "Grass," I said to Dave as we walked back up the road.

  "What?"

  "Grass. Do you think he got it?"

  "'Course he got it, Stones. I tipped it right over his nut."

  "No, I mean the message, the meaningful pun. Grass. He grassed me up. So we grassed him up. Right?"

  "Some of it were dandelions," said Dave.

  We walked on a few yards more.

  "Yeah, that might have confused him a bit," I said.

  * * * *

  After I'd sent Dave off in the Subaru, there was nothing else much to do except wait for dark. I ate a pizza from the freezer and downed just one can of Mansfield Bitter while I watched TV.

  I was anxious for news that Lisa was safe, but no call came. There was nothing from Nuala either. Had I upset her? Was it something I said?

  The call that did come was from Uncle Willis. I had the answerphone on, but when I heard his voice, irritated at having to talk to a machine, I picked up the phone.

  "Hello, Uncle."

  "Livingstone? In person?"

  "Yeah, in person."

  "Why do you give me a message saying you're not in, when you are?"

  "It depends who's phoning."

  "Well, it seems a bit funny to me. When I phone, I want to speak to the person, not a robot."

  "What is it you're calling about, Uncle?"

  "I wondered whether you've had a think. You know, about that little thing we were talking about the other day."

  "Well, to be honest, I've been a bit busy."

  "Working hard at your business, no doubt."

  "Yes, Uncle."

  "That's good. I want your business to do well, you know."

  "Do you?"

  "Yes. I was wondering, you see, after you'd been to see me, whether you properly realised what I was saying."

  "Well, I think so, Uncle. You're leaving your money to set up a trust to help kids."

  "That's right. But my money won't be enough on its own."

  "Well, there's never enough, is there?"

  "What a trust like that would need is a regular income."

  "Yeah? We'd all like that, I suppose."

  "It would require, let's say, a successful local businessman willing to put in a percentage of his profits each month. Do you understand what I'm saying now, Livingstone?"

  There was a nasty silence. Uncle Willis was waiting for me to respond. Me, I was trying to convince myself that a member of my own family hadn't just made such a suggestion. We both listened to the silence for a bit. It said a lot.

  "It would be a really good move, I think," said Willis. "For public relations. And, er, your standing in the community."

  It was incredible, but true. The old bugger had just threatened me.

  "Tell you what, Uncle. I'll ask around, see if anyone's interested, shall I?"

  He carried on as if I hadn't spoken. "I really hope you'll do it, Livingstone. I know how good you are with young people."

  "You must be mixing me up with some other nephew."

  "You were always like that. I remember you with your cousins, young Charlie and Frank. They always thought the world of you. And of course, you had a lot to do with young people in your job. I mean your proper job."

  "I don't have that job any more, Uncle."

  "No, I know. But you were good at it, Livingstone. You always cared about the young lads you dealt with. Not like the others. Some of them are right bastards."

  "For goodness sake, that's all in the past. It's nothing to do with me now."

  "Maybe. But you don't change, Livingstone. Not in yourself, you don't."

  "Don't you believe it, Uncle."

  I don't like being reminded of my previous life. Like I said to Uncle Willis, it's well and truly in the past. If I was going to let these things get to me, there are reminders all around me, all the time. DI Frank Moxon and DS Wally Stubbs, for a start, who seemed to be very much around me just now.

  "You were good at that job. It was criminal what they did to you."

  Criminal? That was a laugh. It's supposed to me that's the criminal, Uncle, didn't you know? But I didn't say that. Well, you don't.

  "What's this got to do with what we were talking about? I'm in a different business altogether now. I'm not in a position to help these kids that you're on about, Uncle."

  "Yes you are," he said. "That's what I mean. You're still you, the same Livingstone McClure. You still care about the youngsters. But now they'd trust you even more, wouldn't they?"

  This was ironic, but probably true. I just wished Uncle Willis would stop going on about my previous life. In a moment he was going to say it outright, and it would all come flooding back again, the years of hassle and frustration, and that final humiliation and betrayal. I wanted to forget it. Forget it, right?

  "Are you still there, Livingstone? You haven't put me back to the machine?"

  "No, I'm still here, Uncle."

  "So this is what I was thinking, you see. That you've got the right background, the experience. But now you're more in a position where the kids would take notice of you. Now that you're not a policeman any more."

  There, he'd said it. A policeman. Stones McClure? Surely not. That was someone else entirely. It was some naive bastard who thought he was doing a worthwhile job for the community, until reality hit him like a baseball bat. That was some gullible pillock who reckoned he knew what justice was and tried to put it into practice until they squashed him with the rule book. That McClure was a bloke who turned a blind eye once too often to some poor, desperate sod nicking a bit of stuff to feed his kids, and who got shafted by his own side as a result, stitched up and stabbed in the back by a bunch of treacherous creeps in and out of uniform.

  No, that was a previous life. I've been reincarnated since then. Born again, like one of those fundamentalist Christians. Yet I'm still dragging all the bad karma along with me, which is not the way it's supposed to happen. Thanks for the memory, Uncle.

  "Of course, you were a very good policeman," said Uncle Willis, misunderstanding my silence. "You were the best detective inspector that Nottinghamshire has ever had."

  22

  When we called back at West Laneton later that night, Slow Kid was in the driver's seat of an ex-BT Combo van, and Lenny Hooper was in the back. Hooper was treating it like a works outing - his electronic tag didn't allow him out of Bilsthorpe, as a rule, so a drive to West Laneton in the dark was like a coach tour to Skegness for him. He'd got fatter and balder and pastier than when I saw him last. I suppose that's the result of sitting round the house all day getting under the feet of the wife and watching the Columbo repeats on the telly. If they ever try to tag me, I might opt for prison. There's a nice one near here, at Ranby, where they provide you with all the facilities you could want, and you seem to be able to pop out any time you like.

  Tonight, I'd made Hooper wear a woolly hat so that his bald head didn't reflect
the light. What's the use of wearing dark clothes if your head stands out like a bleedin' Millennium beacon?

  "I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't need the money," he said.

  "Join the club."

  "If they find out you fixed my tag, my probation officer's going to be right narked."

  "What's up, Hooper? Are you married to him? It's just a tag, not a wedding ring, you know."

  "I'm just saying."

  "Right. Well, you've said it. How easy will it be for us to get in there?"

  "Dead easy."

  "What about the burglar alarm?" asked Slow Kid.

  "No problem."

  Hooper sounded more confident than I felt, but I knew he had his little tool bag with him. This was a workman's van, so why shouldn't it have tools in the back, officer?

  It was just after one o'clock in the morning. The residents of West Laneton were tucked up in bed. There are no street lamps in these little places, but the big houses like Old Manor Farm all have their security lights. Some are on sensors and come on when you walk into their range. But there's a trend to have lights that stay on permanently, covering the drives in a nasty glare all night. These don't make any difference if you're going in the back way, where no one can see you anyway. Naturally, we were planning on going in the back way.

  Ideally, you'd watch a place like this for a bit to see who comes and goes, and to get an idea how many people there are in the house. But you couldn't do that in West Laneton. We could only see the entrance to the driveway of Manor Farm from one spot on the bend, and there are no pavements, no shops, no pub, not even a bus shelter to provide cover. You'd be blocking half the road and making yourself so obvious that you'd have every horse rider and Range Rover driver in the area ringing up to report your licence number for obstructing the highway. Right now, I didn't even know if there were any cars in the garage at Old Manor Farm. But I had to assume there were, and that the owners were somewhere in the house, counting piles of money in their sleep.

  "Drive round the corner then, Slow. Watch for a gate into those woods about half a mile on."

  We drove past the house of Mr Neighbourhood Watch. He'd left a couple of lights on in strategic places to convince blokes like us that he was sitting up all night with a shotgun on his knee. But I wasn't worried about him. His type are only aggressive in defence of their own property. All hell could break loose next door, and he'd dial 999 with his head under the pillow.

  Slow Kid pulled into the gateway and I cut through the chain of the ancient padlock that held the gate together. With our lights out, we crawled back through the woods towards the village. We left the Combo on the edge of the trees, and the three of us skirted a hedge and hopped over a narrow drainage ditch to get to the back of the garden at Old Manor Farm. There was patchy cloud and no moon tonight, but I was still nervous. This sort of thing just isn't my scene.

  Sure enough, there was a security light at the back, but no one to see us as we nipped through the glare and hugged the side of the house. It was a low-built farmhouse, and they hadn't bothered to get the control box for the burglar alarm too high up. Hooper grinned when he saw it and opened his tool bag. All the bits and pieces inside were carefully wrapped in cloth to stop them clattering against each other. He took out a mastic gun with a long thin nozzle and snipped the end off the tube with a pair of long-nose pliers. Then he got me to give him a leg up against the wall. It would have been easier if Dave had been with us, but who'd want Doncaster Dave lumbering about on a job like this?

  Slow Kid helped me to support Hooper, both of us leaning against the wall while he did his bit with the alarm. Faintly disgusting squelchy noises came from overhead, like someone with a bad case of the balti belly dance.

  "It's dead quiet, Stones," whispered Slow.

  "Well, they don't have all-night acid house parties round here."

  "Yeah?"

  "Not on a Wednesday night anyway."

  "Why not?"

  "Why not? The excitement of Panorama wears them out and they have to go to bed early."

  "You're full of shit, Stones."

  Hooper was starting to wobble a bit on our shoulders, and I heard him give a little squeak of panic. A small blob of black mastic landed with a splat on Slow Kid's shoulder. He squirmed his face to the side to look at it.

  "Do they have seagulls round here, Stones?"

  "Nah. They hang around the rubbish tips and gravel pits, don't they? They'll have posher birds round here, like peacocks."

  "I think a bleedin' peacock just shat on me then."

  More wobbling and grunting suggested that Hooper was ready to come down. We grabbed him and hoisted him back to ground level.

  "That'll fix that bugger," he said. "It's stuck solider than a constipated cow."

  "Okay, now the door."

  Hooper dug into his bag again and bent down to the back door. It was a stable-type affair in two halves, and Hooper had the bottom half open so fast that it might as well have been a giant cat flap left open specially for us cat burglars. That's the trouble with rich gits - they think anyone who hasn't got as much money as they have is stupid as well. This lot were about to learn a lesson in crude peasant cunning.

  We left Slow Kid at the back door while Hooper and I moved about the house. Hooper had no idea what I was looking for, but I needed his experience to keep me from stumbling into an infra-red sensor or something. The only other thing I worried about was a dog. But if there had been one, it ought to be telling us about it by now, and I for one would have been back in those woods like Linford Christie, clutching my lunch box.

  Just inside the back door was a hallway with coats and stuff. Then there was the kind of room that doesn't exist in houses on the Forest Estate. I did see a picture of one once in a Sunday magazine, and the caption on the picture said it was a utility room. I suppose it's where you'd keep your croquet equipment or send your butler to polish the silver. This one looked like you could have kept a couple of horses in it. But it was nothing compared to the next room, where you could have kept the carriage as well.

  Hooper was nodding his approval as he eyed the place up, taking stock of the china and the more movable bits of furniture. I know of one job that Hooper and a couple of his mates did not far from here, where they took everything out of the house, including half a dozen solid oak doors. They just drove up in a furniture van and took it all away. That time there was nobody at home to complain about the draught.

  We walked down a long, dark passageway and passed a door into a dining room with a kitchen beyond it. Doncaster Dave would have been sticking his head in the fridge by now to get at the chicken legs and left-over caviar. But I moved on, trying the next door and hitting lucky. This looked like a study, with bookshelves and a big desk over near the window. Even this was bigger than my entire house. We'd come past five rooms, and we hadn't even seen the stairs yet.

  Hooper gave the study a quick once-over and dropped me the nod. I went straight to the desk and shone my torch on the surface, looking for letters, bank statements, address books - anything to give me a handle on who we were dealing with.

  A couple of letters had been left lying about. Nothing exciting - offers of investment opportunities, credit cards that supported charities, insurance deals, mobile phone offers. It was the usual stuff - the bloke had got himself on a mailing list at some time and his letter box would be jammed up for ever more. But they did confirm the name - Mr N. Perella. What would the first name be, I wondered. Nigel, Nathaniel? Not a Norman, surely? Perella sounded vaguely Italian, but I couldn't think of any Italian first names starting with 'N', apart from Nero.

  There were four drawers, all locked, but Hooper soon whipped them open for me with a little sliver of stiff plastic. The first contained bills and a wallet full of bank statements. Just as I thought - a rich git. My eyes widened as I looked at some of the figures, and my brain started to tick over with schemes for relieving Mr Perella of some of that excess wealth. But then I remembered why I wa
s there and started on the second drawer. This was even more boring - share certificates, tax vouchers, letters from the Inland Revenue, copies of invoices from solicitors, accountants, estate agents. It looked like Perella hadn't owned Old Manor Farm for more than a few months. Such a pity that he hadn't got round to replacing the out of date burglar alarm yet.

  Hooper got the first of the left hand drawers open and I heard him draw in his breath sharply.

  "Bloody 'ell, I don't like guns."

  It was an automatic similar to the one we'd taken out of the German car. If Perella had his own private arsenal, then I was with Hooper on that one. I suddenly felt even more uneasy and itched to get out of the house.

  "You never told me there were guns involved, Stones."

  "Shh."

  There was just one more drawer to go, and now I hit lucky - if you can call it lucky. At least it solidified something I'd been feeling recently. I took a leaflet off the top of the pile and barely needed to glance at the papers underneath, neatly filed away in a blue folder. Yes, I'd found what I was looking for after all. I read the front sheet again, and then a third time. Boy, I was going to like this.

  Hooper was looking at me strangely.

  "Out?" he mouthed.

  "Yeah."

  We crept back down the corridor, hearing nothing from inside the house except the usual little creaking noises from an old building at night. Hooper pulled the back door shut. They might never know they'd been broken into, until the next time they had the burglar alarm tested.

  Slow Kid met us in the garden and the three of us set off back towards the trees. Then I had a thought, or a sudden impulse, and veered off towards the old dovecote that loomed out of the dark across the grass. Slow and Hooper came after me, baffled now, but not able to make a fuss.

  The door on the dovecote was fairly new and solid, and it fit well. It wasn't the sagging, loose-hinged mess that you usually see on old farm buildings. There was a smooth run up the grass to the doors, and it looked to me, even in the dark, as though cars regularly pulled up here. The dovecote was plenty big enough to use for storage. There'd be no interior walls, just tiers of nesting places reaching up to the tiled roof.