by David Belbin
23
Nick’s ground-floor flat was on the Canning Circus side of the Park, the cheaper section of the private estate where Sarah now lived. Nick had always aspired to live in the Park. He and Sarah used to walk around the place, working out where they would move. Their ideal home was a stone’s throw from Nottingham Castle, a five-minute walk to the city centre. In this idyll, she would be an MP and he a university lecturer.
In Thatcher’s Britain, teachers found themselves earning more than university lecturers. Nick took the plunge in 1989, when he could almost afford the flat he’d always hankered after. All right, it was a tatty two-bed with no garden and he’d have to take in a lodger to meet the mortgage payments. One day, perhaps, he’d find a woman to share it with. Women always seemed to back off when Nick got serious – all but Sarah. He wished she’d never joined the police. The police were the enemy. For most people, that changed as you grew older. But not, as things turned out, for Nick.
Structurally, the flat was sound. In every other way, it was a mess. The place had been repossessed after the previous owners defaulted on the mortgage. All the carpets needed replacing, but Nick couldn’t afford that. He hired a sander and began to clean and varnish the floorboards, covering the worst areas with rugs from his previous, rented flat. It was a long, tedious job. He left the large hall until last, as it presented the most difficulty. The dust would get everywhere and, once he varnished, he’d have to move out of the flat until it dried. That meant staying with his younger brother, Joe, in his bachelor pad by Trent Bridge, in the heart of the city’s flash-trash district. He and Joe got on, but they weren’t close. Joe was six years younger, and it could prove awkward, having a younger brother who was more successful than you.
The long summer holidays were nearly over when Nick got round to taking up the hall carpet. The threadbare flooring turned out not to be tacked down at the sides, so it was easily rolled out of the way. The boards beneath were buggered beyond repair. No amount of sanding would get them into shape. Nick couldn’t afford to replace them all. Several had been cut in an odd way. One even had a large hole in the middle. Tentatively, Nick put his hand through it. He was worried about splinters but the sides were smooth, as though they’d been sanded down. The gap wasn’t so much a hole as a handle. Nick reached in and lifted out a large section of floor, the size of a trap door.
Below, Nick could make out the top of a ladder. Excited, he went to look for a torch, but there wasn’t one. It was tempting to use a cigarette lighter, but caution prevailed. He hurried into Halfords in the Market Square and was back twenty minutes later with a heavy-duty flashlight.
The space beneath the hall was small – not tall enough for Nick, at over six feet, to stand upright – and partially boarded, like an attic, rather than a cellar. There was a light switch, too. Once Nick switched it on, he realized that the unboarded area was another hole, one that led to another space, beneath. Beside the gap was a miner’s lamp attached to a large roll of coiled electricity cable. One side of the cable came from the innards of the flat, above. Another length of heavy cable continued below.
The miner’s lamp still worked, casting a dense full moon of a beam. Nick turned off his flashlight and looked for a ladder down. Nothing visible bar a couple of ridges in the sandstone. Hard to tell how deep the cave was. Nick wanted to go down straight away, but prudence got the better of him. He lowered the lamp into the hole. The cave’s walls reflected light back at him. Why? The cave could be flooded, but it seemed unlikely. This was high ground. Even so, the risk of descent was too great. He might not be able to get back up. The presence of the miner’s lamp, however, suggested that the previous owners had been down there. To do the same, all Nick needed was a companion above.
His brother came round the next day, after training.
‘I’ll tie a rope round you and hold onto it, but I’m not coming down,’ Joe told Nick. ‘Don’t want to risk breaking something.’
Joe was in the first team at Notts County. He tied the rope.
‘You didn’t know this was here?’
‘Never even occurred to me.’
‘Think the estate agent knew?’
‘Maybe. It’s not in the plans. Risk of subsidence might put some people off. If she knew, I guess she’d keep quiet about it.’
This city was built over caves. Pubs used them as cellars. Cave passages linked important buildings. Nottingham Castle held tours of theirs. The council were making a museum out of the caves beneath the Broadmarsh Shopping Centre, most of which had been flooded with concrete when they were laying the foundations. Nick liked caves, but at the time he bought the flat he thought all the caves in the Park were lower down the hill.
Getting down turned out to be the easy bit. The drop was only a couple of metres. Once Nick had his feet on dry sandstone, he urged his brother to follow.
‘Those ridges I told you about. They’re steps, cut into the side.’
Gingerly, Joe climbed down. They looked around the dank cavern. It was about the size of Nick’s bathroom, twenty square metres. There was a power line taped to one wall with several large electric bulbs attached to it. The sloping walls were covered with heavy, turkey-size aluminium foil. There were several large, plastic tubs, each with a little earth in them.
‘Looks like you’ll be getting into grow-your-own,’ Joe said.
‘I’m not sure about that,’ Nick said, glancing round the makeshift dope dungeon. ‘Remember what happened last time?’
‘No risk of anyone spotting this by accident.’
Joe was referring to the story that Andy Saint had also reminded her of, when he and Nick nearly got done for growing their own. Sarah had helped him, moving the plants. No career in the police for her if she’d been caught, but that hadn’t occurred to her then. Nick hadn’t dabbled in homegrown since that close call. Given his job, the risk was too big. A dope conviction got you chucked out of teaching. Also, he’d never had an attic, which was what most growers used. Anyway, by the early nineties, attics were becoming dangerous. He’d heard of the police catching growers by using heat sensitive cameras in helicopters. Growing the stuff underground, in a safe dry place, was a new idea. If he got the lighting and ventilation, he could be quids in.
‘Here we go,’ Joe said, picking up a fragment of dry leaf from the ground. He crushed it with a forefinger and thumb, then smelt his fingertips.
‘Result!’ he said.
‘I wonder if these caves go any further back,’ Nick said.
Nick, lamp in hand, led the way. The sandstone caves were not picturesque, but nor were they damp. The gaps between caverns were narrow, yet not too tight. Some caves showed signs of having been widened to let people get through, but none bore any trace of recent use.
‘How many of these fucking things are there?’ Joe asked, as they ran out of cable for the lamp.
The caves turned out to cover half of the street, reaching back into the gardens of the big houses on Cavendish Crescent, behind. There were several spaces larger than the one beneath Nick’s flat and, crucially, air was getting in from somewhere.
‘I don’t want you telling anybody else about this place,’ Nick told his brother. ‘Nobody at all.’
For the rest of the summer, and into the new term, Nick spent many of his daylight hours, when his neighbours were out, working underground. There was plenty to do: clearing, wiring, putting fireproof matting underfoot, testing different varieties of lighting. He read books on caves and on cannabis cultivation (Mushroom, the alternative bookshop in Hockley, turned out to be a good source for them). He went on potholing expeditions to ‘see how he got on’, then weaselled out of joining the club, blaming a bad back that was aggravated by all the twisting and turning.
After this, Nick risked extending one of the gaps at the end of the network. He knocked through a little at a time, slowly creating a passageway just wide enough to squeeze through. These caves, too, were dry, without the rank, earthy smell he’d come across wh
en pot holing. There must be decent ventilation. The new hole led to another hole, which, as he’d hoped, led to a wide, low cave, one of many that had an entry in an overgrown garden on the Park’s south slope. He disguised the enlarged hole with a foul smelling oleander bush that was easily moved should he ever need another way out of the caverns. Then he began to grow weed.
It took a while to source the right strains. At first, Nick was paranoid about fires. He installed a smoke alarm, but it was unnecessary. The sandstone soaked up excess heat. Conditions were perfect. The plants grew quickly, soon acquiring bushy leaves and moist, pungent buds. As the plants thrived, Nick rethought getting a lodger. He didn’t want to share his secret with anyone he couldn’t completely trust. Joe pronounced the first batch of weed, dried out and ready just in time for Christmas, to be top quality.
As the plants grew, so did the mortgage rate. Nick’s flat was worth less than he’d paid for it, eight months earlier, yet kept costing him more and more. Nick sold a bit of grass on, but money remained tight. He saw what he had to do, and used his credit card to buy more lighting. By spring, he’d expanded into two of the neighbouring caves.
Paranoid about the electricity board noticing an unusual pattern of high activity, he bought a small generator. It would power the lamps to heat his plants twenty-four hours a day. Now that electricity usage was no longer an issue, he brought even more of the caves in the system into his hydroponics operation. He visited organic garden centres and subscribed to arcane magazines.
It was easy to keep the equipment and literature hidden from visitors. The biggest problem was the smell. The cellar above the caves acted as a buffer but not enough of one, especially when Nick began growing new strains of skunk weed that gave a heady, dense high. The skunk also gave off a pong that combined the sweet odour of grass with the earthy, lingering stench of overcooked Brussels sprouts. Nick became so inured to this stench that he didn’t notice how the flat smelt until people commented on it. He stocked up on joss sticks and air freshener. Even so, the perfumed reek would cling to him.
Selling the stuff on was a problem. It was no use saying to mates ‘I bought a big bag of homegrown, cheap, do you want to take some off me while it’s fresh?’ The quantities were vast and the quality was rapidly increasing. Nick could have gone down Hyson Green or the Meadows and asked around. Maybe he’d hook up with a wholesaler who could do him some good. Equally likely he’d get beaten up, busted or both. Nick didn’t know people who moved in those kinds of circles. But he knew somebody who did. Sarah didn’t ask him to elaborate on this.
By mid-1991, Nick was turning round a new crop every month, with each cave containing plants of different varieties and ages. It was more work than he’d anticipated. This, rather than teaching, was his real career. That summer, he went onto a job-share, 0.5, telling colleagues that he was buying time to write a novel. He could easily have lived off the dope plants alone but needed a legitimate job to explain his income. Also, he did enjoy teaching English, especially now that it was only two or three days a week, which made the work much less exhausting.
What he needed most was help. The friend who gave Nick the distribution network contacts promised never to breathe a word of where the stuff came from. He gave Nick the starkest of warnings. Trust nobody, he said, when Nick showed him round the caves. The business is incredibly cut-throat. Let nobody know where you grow the stuff and, if you don’t get greedy, keep things around this size, you can get away with it for ever. Never have anyone with anything to do with this business round your flat. Don’t give your distributors your real name. If you want, I’ll show you how to set up overseas accounts. If I were you, I’d buy property. It’s the best bet in the long run.
Nick needed to start investing the money he’d made. The mortgage was paid off. He had piles of cash stacked in cardboard boxes in one of the smallest, driest cellars. Seeing them made him feel like a comic book miser. He could do with advice, but his friend was in New York (escaping, Nick suspected, from a little trouble of his own). There was only one person Nick trusted to help, the only other person who’d been into the caves with him. But Nick wasn’t sure if Joe was ready.
Notts County had had an incredible beginning to the 1990s. For two consecutive seasons they had made it to the play-off finals for their division, each time winning at Wembley. This season, however, Joe had badly broken his left leg early in September. And the team were in free fall. With two months to go, their prospects of staying in the First Division were poor. Joe had hoped to be back in training, but the break was too serious. The doctors now said he would never recover sufficiently to play professional football again.
At least he was off the crutches. He had even stopped using a stick.
‘I’m not going down there again,’ Joe said, one early April afternoon.
‘You don’t have to,’ Nick told him, and offered him the spliff he was smoking.
‘Too early in the day for me. Shouldn’t you be teaching?’
‘One of my days off,’ Nick explained.
‘This place stinks worse than a brothel.’
‘I wouldn’t know,’ Nick said. ‘Never been to one.’
‘Believe me, this is worse. What were you after, anyway?’
‘I thought you might need a job,’ Nick said.
Nick explained how the operation had grown. The turnover was more than adequate to support them both in style, he said, without revealing just how much style he was talking about.
‘Thing is, the work’s getting to be too much for one man.’
‘You want me to climb down those raggedy steps and become some kind of underground market gardener?’ Joe said. ‘Forget it.’
‘I can handle that side of things,’ Nick told him. ‘What I need is somebody to do the driving, make deliveries, shift the stuff at night.’
‘You mean, the dangerous stuff?’
‘It’s not dangerous,’ Nick said. ‘I deliver to businessmen, not gangsters. I’ve never seen a gun. Come on, it’s only dope. Half the people we know smoke it. You’d be getting well paid to provide a service.’
‘It’s worth thinking about,’ Joe said. ‘But I ought to tell you that I’m starting a business of my own.’
He told Nick about his plan for a taxi firm that would be based in Sherwood. Taxi firms were expanding everywhere. Even students used taxis all the time these days. Joe had been a popular footballer. With a name like his behind it, the firm would be off to a great start. He was going to buy a handful of cars, but most of his staff would be owner-drivers snatched from other firms, paying him a cut of their takings.
‘Sounds like a symbiotic relationship,’ Nick said.
‘Sim by what?’
‘Our businesses were made for each other. If you get stopped when you’re making a delivery, you’re a working taxi driver. In fact, I’ve got an even better idea. Why don’t I come in with you? We could be partners.’
Joe became bashful. ‘I’m already taking on a partner.’
‘Someone I know?’
‘Caroline. We’re getting married.’
‘That’s . . . you’re a lucky guy.’ Caroline was the brightest, best looking of the many women Joe had dated over the years. He had chosen well, though Nick doubted that she had. Joe wasn’t the faithful type.
‘I’m going to have to think this over carefully. You know, weigh up the risks.’
‘Even if you decide not to take on the driving, I’d still like to put some money into the firm, help you out.’
‘Thanks for the offer, bro. I’ll discuss it with Caroline and let you know.’
From the guarded tone of his brother’s voice, Nick could tell, without having to wait, what the answer would be.
24
Sarah listened to the story intently, punctuating it with questions. Nick left Andrew’s name out of it. If Sarah guessed who ‘a friend’ was, she didn’t let on.
‘How did they catch you? A neighbour? Your dodgy friend? The only other person who kn
ew about it was . . .’
‘It wasn’t Joe,’ Nick said, with a certainty he wished he felt. ‘I don’t know.’
He told her about the night it happened. It was the evening of the last general election. Anticipating a celebration, he’d just snorted a large line of coke. Chalky flakes irritated his nose. Each bitter sniff accelerated his coke spike. The doorbell rang. Nick put down the paper and went to the window. Privacy was important to him. He didn’t like people to visit the flat without phoning first. His friends knew this, though none of them knew why. Whoever was ringing the bell stood close to the door. Nick couldn’t see who it was. It might be one of the political parties, knocking up their supporters. Unlikely though, as polling was nearly over.
The doorbell rang again, more insistently this time. Nick thought of hiding his living-room stash. Coke paranoia. Flushing his drugs would be too extreme. He opened the flat door to do a reconnaissance. From the large, shared foyer, he could see faint figures silhouetted in the smoked glass on the top half of the door. Two people, at least.
Nick paused for a moment to gather himself.
Behind him, the bell gave a long, emphatic ring. Nick hesitated. He did a mental inventory. Tiny amounts of coke and hash. Only a fine, but in his position, it was always better to err on the side of caution. The drugs could be easily replaced, but he could lose his job, which couldn’t. There was no tolerance for drug offenders in teaching. Fuck it. He went back inside, emptied the old medicine chest where he kept his stash and flushed the lot. The doorbell rang again, even longer this time. Nick decided to brazen it out.
At the door, Nick was confronted by two men a few years older than him – late thirties maybe. One had a moustache. Both wore long leather jackets which, while almost as expensive as the one Nick owned and not entirely unfashionable, nevertheless gave away exactly what they were. Nick thought quickly, but not coherently. In his current state, the only fallback position was denial.
‘Nick Cane?’ the moustache said.
