When he got home, Rachel was fretting about a leak coming from their washing machine. Only the day before her words would have twisted through his skull like a metal drill but now he felt able to handle her incessant whining. He would give it another month before he broke the news to her that their marriage was over, mostly because he had to wait for the money to return and that he did not want to draw suspicion on himself by handing in his notice too soon. With a bit of luck, he might receive a redundancy notice before too long – and then his tracks would be well and truly covered.
Driving to work the next morning Mark was relaxed, elated even, about returning to the scene of the crime. He felt comforted that the works had not been swarming with police before he clocked out the previous afternoon and that he had been able to collect his wage envelope as usual. He’d listened to the likes of Cecil Grant and Bryce McBean and their contention that cops were not great detectives and that the West Midlands force got most of their arrests through informers, stupidity on behalf of the criminals, or simply fitting people up. Perhaps the money’s disappearance would never be noticed, or it would be put down as an accounting error. It did not take long for those flights of fancy to vanish from Mark’s mind. As he clocked in, a man in a grey suit approached him and flashed a warrant card. ‘Mr Beckford,’ he said, ‘my name is Detective Sergeant Ray Boyd, Red Lion Street CID. Would you follow me, please?’ Mark did not have to pretend he was shocked but he had enough presence of mind to say, ‘What’s wrong, sergeant, is it my wife? … I only left her minutes ago, she was …’ ‘No, Mr Beckford,’ said Boyd, ‘it’s nothing to do with your wife. It’s another matter, if you would just follow me.’ He followed the detective to a ground-floor office that had large panes of glass in its metal partitions which were painted dark green. Mark could see George Rowley sitting ashen- faced in another office and could not help feeling a twinge of guilt. He found out later that George had not gone home and had been at the office all night with senior management and the police. Boyd offered Mark a seat and introduced him to his colleague, a constable with an oily complexion and a notebook in his hand. He started off by asking if Mark had noticed anything out of the ordinary during his previous day at work. Mark stuck out his lower lip and slowly shook his head. ‘No, it was jus a borin’ day like every other one.’
‘What about around George Rowley’s office, anything unusual there?’
The movements of Mark’s lip and head remained the same. ‘No.’
‘Say, at the prayer meeting?’
‘No, sergeant.’
‘Bit unusual, a prayer meeting at work.’
‘Depends on if you’ve accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as your personal saviour, Sergeant Boyd. If you believe then every day is a day to give thanks an’ praise.’
‘Not yet, Mr Beckford. Funnily enough, some of the biggest crooks I’ve come across have taken the Good Lord into their hearts, usually while they’re doing bird. Goes down well with the prison governor and the parole board if they think you’ve seen the light. When you arrived at Mr Rowley’s office was anyone else in there besides him?’
Now Mark’s heartbeat started to accelerate. George had obviously given the cops his version of events and probably said he had left Mark in the office on his own. ‘Erm … not that I can remember. No, erm, I think George was there on his own.’
‘And what happened then?’
‘He went out to wash his hands an’ Tom Howard came in.’
Boyd frowned, as if disbelieving, or perhaps he was already wondering how accurate George Rowley had been. ‘When did Mr Howard come in?’
‘Two seconds after George went out. We had a chat, George came back, gave me a slaggin because I’m a Wolves fan an’ he supports the Baggies.’
‘West Brom,’ Boyd muttered under his breath, as though that was enough to put George Rowley under suspicion. ‘And then?’
‘We had our usual prayer meetin’ … an’ that’s it, really. Nothin else.’
‘Do you remember anything about the safe, Mr Beckford?’
‘Safe? Nah.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Only Mr Rowley says he locked it while in your presence.’ Mark was about to say that that wasn’t right and it had been locked while he and Tom were there but that would put the pair of them in the office while the safe was open. It was as he was about to give his answer that Mark instantly recognised that George had put him in the clear. ‘Oh, yeah, now I remember,’ he blurted. He took a breath to slow himself down and added, ‘Yeah, erm, I came in, we exchanged a few words, George locked the safe an’ went out to wash his hand an’ Tom came in a couple of seconds later.’
The constable looked up at his superior and then frowned as if to declare that it wasn’t the greatest line of questioning he had ever heard. Boyd ran the tip of his tongue over his back teeth. He was never good in the mornings; he was more of an early evening person. ‘I hear you’re a footballer, Mr Beckford, with Sabina Park Rangers, no less,’ he said while staring hard into Mark’s eyes. ‘A veritable rogues’ gallery. Put it this way, if any one of several of your teammates worked here I would be questioning them down the nick. A piece of free advice: find yourself a new team for next season or you might find yourself becoming a focus of our attention. That’s all, Mr Beckford … For now.’
‘Okay, sergeant. By the way, what’s happened, I mean why are you here an’ why all these questions?’
‘Somebody’s been breaking the eighth commandment, Mr Beckford. You’ll find a whole list of them in Deuteronomy, chapter five, I think.’
Mark then spent most of the day moving from office to office acting shocked by events and swapping gossip. When he heard that George Rowley had been taken to a police station for further questioning he was unable to eat as remorse set his stomach churning. It could have been just his imagination but he thought Tom Howard had looked at him with accusing eyes.
The elation he had felt driving to work was well and truly dissipated by the time he got home. Rachel had the dinner cooked and waiting on the table for him. She had a strange smile on her face and he hoped to God that she was not about to tell him the last sort of news he wanted to hear.
Claudette Riley called up to Nestor to keep an eye on the baby as she was going out to the shops. Nestor hadn’t been listening; he was busy counting money in his bedroom. Rudolph Naylor had just produced another eleven grand that he had extracted from his flock. Nestor and Desmond had discussed amongst themselves why such a tight-fisted and normally suspicious man was so keen to hand money over to them. They figured it was because he had presided over a number of funerals in which he had thrown dirt over many polished hardwood caskets and he had seen just how much money was going down a six-foot hole. What they didn’t know was that he had already worked out a deal regarding the funerals with Steve Patel. Rudolph would receive a commission for every deceased member of his congregation he put Steve’s way; and he had notions of going into partnership in the box-’em-and-bury-’em business at some point in the near future.
Nestor had just counted his one-hundred-and-second wad of notes when the baby started crying. It wasn’t until he had counted his one-hundred-and-fourth that he decided to go and see what was wrong. Baby Peter was almost purple and bawling loudly despite being told to shut up. Nestor tried putting a dummy in the baby’s mouth but he would not take it and at that moment all Nestor felt was hatred for the writhing little mass of purple flesh in the cot – and for Diane and how she had dumped the pickney on his doorstep. And just like Diane, the baby wasn’t listening to a word he was saying. He picked up baby Peter, cussing the little bastard and his bitch of a mother. He would make him quiet one way or another. ‘Nestor! What are you doin?’
He looked over his shoulder to see his mother. She had forgotten her purse and had heard the racket before she opened the front door. He thrust the baby into her arms. ‘Quiet him an’ then get rid, or else I’m movin out. Right?’
Nestor
went back to his room and started to count the money again. The muscles in his neck were stiffening by the second. It wasn’t only the baby’s bawling that was making him tense, it was the thought of handing over the most serious amount of dunsai he had seen in his life to Steve Patel on Sunday morning. ‘A bird in the hand’ and all that. He had mentioned to Desmond the possibility that it could all be one gigantic skank by whoever Steve was dealing with and if it all went wrong they would have a large proportion of Wolverhampton’s West Indian population arming themselves with machetes and hunting them down. Desmond laughed as he raised his arm – the one with the ugly scar – and reminded Nestor that he had been through a similar experience already, while Nestor had been banged up in the Young Offenders’ Unit. When Desmond was fifteen he had talked a cousin into driving him to Sheffield with one video recorder and a vanload of boxes filled with various bits of electrical rubbish he had picked out of a skip. He had conned almost a dozen people when a machete-waving mob rounded the corner. Both he and his cousin did get out alive – but only just. ‘Jus’ remember, Nes,’ said Desmond, ‘we’re too smart an’ too fast for the people aroun’ here. Them could never catch we, right?’
17
Possession of a sliding hammer was a criminal offence. It only had one purpose: to break the steering locks on motor vehicles. Carl Hooper had one in his bag, along with his strip and goalkeeper gloves, just in case any of the keys Buckshot had given him would not fit into the ignition. Getting in would be easy enough; the car Carl was about to steal was a Ford and throughout the 1980s, locking even the most expensive models was a largely a futile gesture as it was possible to get into most of them with a nail file or a screwdriver. He was about to steal a Ford Escort RS 2000; to be more precise the Ford Escort RS 2000 in the car park of the Wolverhampton Ad News that belonged to the photographer. It still vexed Cecil Grant that he had not taken that photo of the JA City netball players bending over and showing off their beautiful batties. He’d said then that the man didn’t deserve such a nice car – he was asking Carl to steal it.
Cecil and Bryce McBean wanted a fast getaway car for robbing Steve Patel and a man named Khan who was at the Birmingham end of the heroin operation. They had decided not to let Nestor and Desmond know what they were planning until they had handed over the dunsai to Steve Patel, otherwise they might pull out of the scheme and consequently Steve would know something was going down. ‘True,’ said Cecil, ‘once them give Steve the money either them fall in with us an’ mek some money or them gonna get nutten an’ ’ave half-a Wolverhampton chasin’ them clarts.’
‘Exactly,’ said Bryce, ‘once all that dunsai is handed over, them ’ave no choice but to do wha’ we tell them, to ras.’
‘To ras.’
The photographer was gazing blankly out of his office window at an unseasonably grey summer sky when the throaty roar of a two-litre engine drew his attention to a car speeding from the car park. For a few moments he only clucked at the irresponsible waste of tyre rubber until he realised it was, in fact, his tyre rubber being left as black streaks on the tarmac.
Carl Hooper headed for a lockup garage in Whitmore Reans. Buckshot had already left a pair of false numberplates there which he would fit immediately. By the time he strolled into Buckshot’s repair shop the whole operation had taken less than twenty-five minutes, which was still five minutes less than it took the cops to respond to the photographer’s frantic phone call.
‘It done?’ asked Buckshot.
Not a man to waste words, Carl nodded and handed him a bunch of keys. ‘You ’ave to break the lock or anythin?’
Carl snorted and shook his head. ‘It a Ford, Buckie, wha’ do you think?’
‘Good, good. So check me tomorra, okay?’
It was back to nodding from Carl.
‘An’ Eastwood’s sore batty, it still a’right?’
Another slow nod.
‘Then cool, man, me see you later.’
If only they knew then that ‘later’ in this case would be five months later. Carl Hooper went back to the house he shared with his mother, Jamaican stepfather, two half-sisters and Eastwood his three-legged dog. It was not a happy household, and probably never had been; Carl knew he had never been happy there since the day he’d arrived from Grenada at the age of thirteen. Joseph Dean’s resentment of his wife’s child increased with every inch he grew. Carl would have left long before but for his mother; he did not want to abandon her after she’d had a stroke. For the last two years she had been mostly confined to bed and was no longer able to get in between the two men when the arguments started. All she could do now was bang on the floor with a stick when they raised their voices – which meant Carl was always at a disadvantage as he would be the first one to quieten down.
When Carl arrived home from Buckshot’s workshop he used the back door as usual and saw little Eastwood was curled up and shivering in his basket as though he was very scared. Carl could tell that he had been hurt and knew who had done the hurting. Joseph came into the kitchen and sucked at his teeth as he saw Carl examining his dog.
‘So wha’ happen to Eastwood?’ Carl asked in a voice full of anger and accusation.
‘’Ow de ’ell would me know?’
Eastwood was wagging the little stump of a tail furiously as he licked Carl’s arm, nervous that he would be touched where it was hurting. Carl could feel the fury building up inside him. Six years of grumbling about another man’s ‘small island pickney’; six long years of resentment; six years of not one damn good word to say. He put Eastwood back into his basket. ‘Did you ’urt mi darg?’ Carl asked. Joseph sucked at his teeth again and carried on making his cup of tea. ‘Did you ’urt mi darg?’
Joseph spooned in his sugar and began to stir. ‘You too fool, bwoy. It a Hinglish ting to let darg into a ’ouse, you know. Me trip over the flippin’ ting. It was a haccident.’
That was all Carl needed to hear: Joseph had hurt his dog and he was not going to believe any lies about it being an accident. Joseph was taking his first slurp of tea as Carl lifted the heavy kettle from the stove. A blow to the back of Joseph’s neck had him pitching face-first towards the floor. He was later to claim in court that he did not remember what happened next and reckoned he must have been knocked unconscious. This didn’t square with the statements of his neighbours who had heard him begging for mercy and screaming out in pain before they rang for the police, convinced a murder was taking place.
As Joseph had only sustained cuts and heavy bruising and the judge was probably something of a dog lover, Carl was sentenced to only four months. He should have been released after two but he ended up serving five months because of another assault in prison. At the start of his sentence Carl had been sharing a cell with a stocky, heavily tattooed skinhead of around his own age. As Carl wasn’t much for talking he didn’t say as much as ‘hello’ to this man as he’d been in prison once before and knew it didn’t do to get too friendly. For ten nights the skinhead had howled long into the early hours before he finally fell asleep. The bawling was so loud and went on for so long that it not only made Carl wish that he hadn’t had that operation to fix his hearing, but also sent his imagination into overdrive, wondering about what serious crime the guy had committed and what sentence he was doing to be bawling this way. On the eleventh night Carl was laying in his bed as the blubbering started all over again. Exhausted by the lack of sleep, curiosity got the better of his natural reserve. ‘Hey, mate,’ Carl called out, ‘wha’ you in for?’
The man wiped his eyes. ‘Twenty-eight days,’ he sniffled, ‘non-payment of fine.’
Carl had expected to hear about a gruesome murder and a life sentence. Enraged he had lost so much sleep over such triviality he got out of bed and snarled, ‘Right, now me gonna give you somethin to cry for!’
Word of Carl Hooper’s arrest had reached Horace McIntosh almost as soon as the police van had driven him away and Joseph Dean had been loaded into the ambulance. As usual, Friday afternoon was
busy and he had a shop full of customers when Chief Inspector Forbes appeared at the door. ‘Can I have a word please, Horace?’
A row of suspicious eyes silently questioned the nature of the visit as they flitted from the cop to Horace and back again. Horace continued shaving a young guy with his cutthroat razor. ‘Wha’ do you want, Chief Inspector?’ he asked, as his eyes turned to the row of customers shifting uncomfortably on their seats. ‘You can see I’m a busy man.’ ‘It’s private,’ he said, and for the benefit of the onlookers he added, ‘I think you must know that it has to be very important as this is the first time I’ve had to come and see you, Horace.’
Frank Grant let out a few cuss words with a heavy breath. He wanted to let the young men who were waiting for haircuts know that the barber shop was not a place where cops were welcome: a rumour like that could be very bad for business. ‘So wha’ happen now,’ he sneered at Forbes, ‘you arrest another black guy for ridin’ im bike on de pavement?’ Not to be drawn into a fight, Forbes said to Horace, ‘It is urgent. I’ll only keep you for a few minutes.’
MORE THAN a GAME Page 12