Just the Job, Lad

by Mike Pannett

  ‘There’s one other thing,’ Ann called out from the kitchen. ‘Well, two. So shall I give you the bad news or the . . . interesting?’

  ‘Go on,’ I said. ‘Hit me with the bad stuff.’

  ‘The chimney has to be rebuilt. According to Soapy it’s cracked and unstable.’

  ‘That doesn’t surprise me. So we’re looking at builders trailing in and out and—’ I clutched my head at the thought. ‘I had this before, years ago. They park all over your lawn and chew your drive up. You end up eating cement dust with your grub. And you get Minster FM from dawn to dusk at about 110 decibels. Bloody marvellous.’

  Ann came back through and handed me a glass. ‘Cheers,’ I said. ‘Here’s to sanity in the face of imminent calamity.’

  Ann clinked hers against mine. ‘And to our anonymous benefactor.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘Well, you didn’t buy this, did you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And I wouldn’t spend that much on champagne, never mind Scotch.’

  ‘We should have more parties,’ I said, pointing towards the sideboard. ‘Before we have to restock that.’

  ‘I think you’ve got a point there.’ Ann sat down on the arm of my chair. ‘Anyway, I was going to tell you another piece of news.’

  ‘And you said that this one wouldn’t be as painful.’

  She took a sip from her glass. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘Algy was very apologetic about everything.’

  ‘So he should be. It’s a landlord’s responsibility—’

  Ann held up a hand. She had her ‘Are you listening?’ face on.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Very well, then. I shall proceed. Algy is suddenly feeling bad about the price he quoted for us buying this place.’

  ‘He actually said that?’

  ‘No, he didn’t utter those precise words, but I took the liberty of telling him that of course you and I had made a very shrewd decision.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About not buying a property that was in such a dangerous state of dilapidation. And he said he would have to – and I quote – reconsider his position.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Yes. I opened the door and he walked right in. I’m a dab hand at negotiating, you know.’

  ‘Looks as though living with me is rubbing off on you.’

  ‘Mike, I’m my father’s daughter. You ought to know that by now. Anyway, Algy also gave me the impression that, what with Lord Nelson taking so much of his attention, he really finds all this landlord business a bit of a faff.’

  ‘Hmm,’ I said, ‘Lord Nelson. Thought you were going to straighten his lordship out?’

  ‘Don’t be changing the subject. The long and the short of it is, I think that your pal and mine is ready to see sense and consider a realistic price for this place.’

  ‘Once he’s fettled the roof, you mean?’

  ‘Naturally. We wouldn’t want to take on a burden like that, would we?’ She clinked her glass against mine. ‘Cheers.’

  I was in high spirits when I breezed into work next day, and had put the disappointment of our first drug-investigation shift behind me. Things were looking up – at home, at least. The sun was shining, the carpet was drying – slowly – and Ann had raised the enticing prospect of Algy dropping his asking price.

  ‘Another day of casting bread on the waters is upon us,’ I told Fordy as we met up in the locker room. ‘Anything is possible, my friend, anything.’ All we had to do was run the gauntlet of the parade room, and the outgoing shift, putting their fingers to the lips with theatrical exaggeration when they spotted us.

  ‘Well, who’d have guessed it? It’s Pannett. And his sidekick. Never recognised you two in your . . . disguise. But hey, we won’t say a word. ’Cos it’s all hush-hush, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah yeah yeah, very funny, lads. Just you wait. When we haul the big fish in and you lot are standing to attention watching the big white chief patting us on the back, we’ll see who’s laughing then.’

  Fordy never said a word at first. I think he’d taken it to heart, the previous day’s apparent failure to seize any ecstasy, and I was waiting for him to get it off his chest.

  ‘They get right up my nose,’ he said, as we got our things together and prepared to hit the road. ‘Bunch of pillocks.’

  ‘It’s only banter, Fordy lad,’ I said. ‘They’re jealous to death that they’re not getting a go at it. Out on the beat on a fine day like this, and we’re on a special operation. Probably be a spate of domestics by teatime, just you see if there isn’t. And here’s us, free to wander wherever our feet take us. They hate it, that’s what it’s all about. Get used to it. There’s always going to be a bit of shift rivalry, wherever you work.’

  Fordy didn’t answer. Jayne had come in, grinning like a Cheshire cat. ‘Why the long faces, lads? Thought you two was on a little jolly? North Yorkshire’s own drug squad. Although from what I hear you haven’t exactly nailed Mr Big yet.’

  ‘Put it this way, Jayne,’ I said. ‘Our enquiries are ongoing. They are at an embryonic stage. When the breakthrough comes – when, not if – you will be among the first to know.’

  ‘Meaning you ain’t had a sniff of a result, yeah?’

  ‘It’s early days, lass, early days. We’ll get there, you see if we don’t.’

  She shot a glance at Fordy. ‘You should’ve ’ad me on the team, Mike.’

  ‘Jayne,’ I said, just before we slipped outside, ‘if I’d been the chairman of selectors, you’d have been the first name on my team-sheet.’

  ‘Is that right?’ Fordy asked, opening the car door a few moments later. ‘That you’d rather have her with you?’

  ‘What am I gonna say? She’s keen, same as you are. It’s only natural she’s disappointed,’ I said. ‘Listen, I don’t mind who I work with, so long as they put a hundred per cent into it.’ I got into the car beside him. ‘Tell you what, though, I wish I felt as confident as I sound.’

  ‘I s’pose it’s a case of keeping the faith,’ Fordy replied. ‘That’s what I was always told.’

  ‘You’re right, matey. Something’ll show up. Has to.’

  The thing with policing – especially the kind of policing we were now engaged in – is that you never know when you’re going to get that break. What’s important is, when something does come along, you have to be prepared to grab hold of it with both hands. And, being the optimist I am, I always expect my luck to change. Like that guy in Dickens – Mr Micawber. What did he say? ‘Something will turn up.’ Even so, I could hardly believe it when Fordy turned right at the traffic lights at Butcher Corner and there, passing us in the other direction, was the purple VW with the blond-haired fellow at the wheel.

  ‘Hey, that looks like the lad I’ve had a tipoff about,’ I said, craning my neck round to watch the car turn into Yorkersgate. ‘He might be worth looking at.’

  ‘Right.’ Fordy was clutching the wheel and braking hard. For a moment I thought he was going to turn us round right there in the middle of Wheelgate.

  ‘Steady on,’ I said. ‘Nip up the top and cut through the back of the cattle market. Plenty of traffic about. He shouldn’t be far ahead of us.’

  A minute or so later we were coming out by the war memorial, joining a stream of cars heading west, with our friend just eight or ten vehicles in front.

  ‘So what’s the SP on this bloke?’ Fordy asked as we made our way towards the bypass.

  ‘Basically that he’s flashing a lot of money around, and he doesn’t seem to have a job.’

  ‘Any intelligence on the car?’

  ‘No. I checked it on the PNC and it came back with nothing. Only odd thing was, it’s registered in Pickering, to a female. Could be innocent enough, I suppose.’

  ‘But on the other hand . . .’ Fordy left the sentence hanging, putting his foot down to pass a couple of slow-moving cars and keep the VW in sight.

  When you’re following someone in these
circumstances you have to tread a fine line between not losing sight of the target and not getting so close that he becomes suspicious. The traffic was pretty heavy as we joined the bypass, with a solid line of cars snaking around the curves on the approach to Golden Hill. We were barely doing forty miles an hour, but as soon as we hit the dual carriageway we found ourselves doing seventy-five, and the VW was still threatening to get away.

  ‘Bloody hell, Mike. Couldn’t we have got something with a bit more poke?’ Fordy had his foot flat down and was leaning forward, as if willing the Corsa to go faster.

  ‘Relax,’ I said. ‘Soon as we get up to that Indian place he’ll slow right down again.’

  We could already see the Jinna restaurant, and the cars were all braking as the two carriageways merged into one.

  ‘Wonder where he’s heading,’ Fordy said.

  ‘Let’s hope it’s this side of York. Any further than that and we’ll have to let him go. This is a local operation. If he heads off to Leeds or somewhere we’re not set up to conduct a proper surveillance job.’

  ‘Ah, but he isn’t!’ Fordy was braking sharply as the guy signalled right, slowed down, pulled into the forecourt of the Highwayman café and disappeared behind a couple of large trucks that were parked at the far side.

  ‘Don’t be following him in,’ I said. ‘Just drive by. We can turn around at the Hopgrove.’

  It took us seven or eight minutes to get down to the big roundabout and back, and Fordy was getting edgy. ‘Hope he’s still here,’ he said, peering over the wheel as he drove slowly between the rows of cars, the loose stones crunching and popping underneath us.

  ‘He will be,’ I said. Fordy nosed the car past the trucks. ‘See?’ I pointed to the VW, parked on its own, out of sight from the road.

  ‘Now what? Do we park up where we can keep an eye on him or what?’

  ‘Why not just go in and get a cuppa,’ I said. ‘Less suspicious than sitting in the car park, isn’t it? Just act naturally. We’re two guys on a trip to town, right?’

  ‘Fair point. Maybe he’s meeting someone, doing a spot of business.’ Fordy unsnapped his seatbelt. ‘Yeah, come on.’

  Inside, the café was busy. Mostly it was families enjoying a snack and a drink with their children on their way to or from the coast, but there was a scattering of commercial drivers, most of them hunched over large plates of food, with newspapers unfolded in front of them. And there in the far corner was our man Baker, seated at a table and deep in conversation with a balding, middle-aged man wearing blue overalls.

  We got ourselves a cup of tea apiece, Fordy picked up a newspaper from the rack by the counter, and we made our way towards a place that looked out onto the car park. It was as close as we dared get to Baker and his associate, perhaps ten or twelve feet away. I could just about see them out of the corner of my eye without turning my head.

  If I say so myself, we put on quite an act. Fordy turned to the sports pages of his paper and started reading out bits of cricket news to me. I answered him in monosyllables, straining my ears to hear what was being said across the way. I couldn’t catch much, because the two men were keeping their voices low, but what I did pick up – and Fordy noticed the same thing – was that the older guy had a pronounced foreign accent. Dutch, by the sound of it.

  ‘Here we go, Fordy.’ I nudged him under the table. They’d both got up from their seats and were heading for the door. As soon as they were through we shoved our mugs aside and followed them. The guy Baker went to his car and drove straight off, back towards Malton, while the man he’d been talking to got into an HGV.

  ‘We gonna follow him, or what?’ Fordy asked.

  ‘No, we don’t want to arouse suspicion,’ I said as I scribbled down the registration number of the HGV. ‘Thought so,’ I added. ‘Dutch.’

  We made our way back to town at a leisurely pace. Fordy, at the wheel, didn’t say anything for quite a while, not until we were climbing Whitwell Hill.

  ‘Oh well. It’s something, I suppose.’ He sighed, as though he wasn’t convinced we’d achieved much.

  ‘Contact with a Dutch lorry-driver?’ I said. ‘I should say so. All these little bits of information, when we put them together, will start to form a picture. They may not add up to much yet, may not make much sense, but mark my words, if our man is dodgy – and he’s got to be, hasn’t he? – it’ll all start to make sense before too long.’

  Later that evening it became apparent that word had got out about our plain-clothes job and the fact that we were out and about doing stop-searches. Just as we expected, really. Quite a few of the people we stopped mentioned that we’d been seen out the night before; it seemed everyone was talking about it. This is what you get in small market towns, which is not a bad thing. Part of the objective was to raise our profile, so we couldn’t complain. As I said to Fordy, the big success of the day was that we’d spotted our man Baker – and I was convinced he hadn’t spotted us.

  Inspector Finch was waiting for us when we wound the operation up that night. He invited us into his office and told us to sit down. He remained standing. He’s one of those people who seem to think more clearly when they’re on their feet, pacing the floor. It sets me right on edge. ‘How have you two got on?’ he asked. ‘Have you made any progress?’

  ‘Well, sir, we tried our level best. I’d say we achieved a bit of disruption. Word has already got out that we’ve gone proactive, but in terms of seizures we’ve basically drawn a blank.’ I pulled out my notebook. ‘Eighteen stop-searches, and we found four people in possession of cannabis.’

  ‘Plus a couple of underage drinkers,’ Fordy added. I could’ve kicked him.

  Birdie looked at him. ‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘Cannabis, you say? That all?’

  ‘As a matter of fact we did uncover something that might be of interest, sir.’ I told him about Baker, and the meeting with the Dutch lorry-driver. And I reminded him about the tipoff from my source.

  He stood there, hands behind his back, rocking to and fro, lips pursed, eyes closed. ‘Very good, Pannett. Yes, that’s very interesting indeed.’ I nudged Fordy. Maybe this would convince him we’d put in a decent weekend’s work. Birdie sat down and was suddenly quite brisk and businesslike.

  ‘When are you next on duty?’ he asked me.

  ‘Tuesday, sir.’

  ‘Right then, when you come back I want you to dig up some intelligence. Talk to DC Carter, and bring in the crime analyst.’

  I’d never really worked on a job like this with Amanda, but I had a fair appreciation of what she did. The one definite thing I knew about her – apart from the fact that she was a civilian employee, occupied a tiny office on the second floor and had information on just about every suspect individual throughout Ryedale and beyond – was that she would not tolerate being addressed as Mandy, as I’d found out to my cost the first time I’d gone to her for help. I was also aware that we had a mutual acquaintance in Walter, because her dad was none other than Ronny, one of Walt’s Three Wise Monkeys, and bass player in the country and western band he’d put together.

  However, I wouldn’t be seeing her until Tuesday morning. Before that I had a few things to sort out on the home front. Somehow Ann and I needed to prepare ourselves for the imminent arrival of Soapy and his band of workers.

  What I’d clean forgotten in all the excitement was that Walter had invited me and Ann for a day out in Scarborough, where Yorkshire had a limited-overs cricket match.

  And we’d invited him over for a cooked breakfast beforehand.

  We were in the middle of shovelling the wet newspaper outside when he showed up. In his best brogues and trousers, with his white V-necked sweater tied around his middle and his flat cap perched on his head, he looked like a village-green umpire. ‘Oh heck,’ he said, when he saw the mess. ‘I heard you’d had a bit of rain getting in. Didn’t realise it was this bad. Have we to abandon our plans?’

  ‘Wouldn’t even think of it,’ I said. ‘I know how much your cric
ket means to you, mate. But you’ll have to go on your own, I’m afraid.’

  Walt wasn’t sure. He shoved his old hat back and ran his fingers through his hair. He looked like a man who was wrestling with his conscience. ‘Why, you’ve a job on here, lad. You’ll be needing all the help you can get.’ He popped his head through the back door, looked into the kitchen and smacked his lips together. ‘On the other hand . . . didn’t you say sommat about breakfast?’

  ‘Hey, give me a few minutes to get organised,’ Ann said. ‘Have you not noticed the hole in the roof? Go on, outside with you.’

  ‘Aye, I’m off – but can I have me ball back first?’ He plonked himself on the log, and chuckled like a naughty schoolboy before turning to me and saying, ‘By heck, I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes, lad.’

  ‘What? You mean Ann?’

  ‘No no no. Your Ann’s all right. No . . .’ He was looking up at the roof, where Soapy’s tarp was flapping in the breeze. ‘I mean with t’building works. If you need a hand, you know I’m not afraid of a bit of hard graft.’ He held his hands out in front of him. They looked like a pair of shovels. ‘Didn’t get these by hiding out the road when there was work to be done.’

  ‘Walt, I appreciate your offer, but you’re forgetting one important thing. This isn’t our place, it’s Algy’s. It’s down to him to put it right. All Ann and I have to do is tidy up inside, bung a few dust-sheets over our furniture and await the builders. Algy’s sending a team round first thing Monday morning. Just relax, enjoy your breakfast and then get yourself off to the match.’ I sat myself down next to him. ‘And if you ask Ann very nicely,’ I said, cupping my hand to my mouth to make sure she could hear me through the open kitchen door, ‘I’m sure she’ll bring you a cup of tea while we’re waiting for the fry-up.’

  ‘And I s’pose you’ll want one too,’ she said, coming to the threshold and giving me the hard stare.

  ‘Goes without saying, love.’

  Walt loved his cricket, and of course like all Yorkshiremen he was convinced that our county was the only team worth watching – every bit as much as he believed this was the only place to live. He’s one of those people you still meet from time to time who has never, in his entire life, been outside of Yorkshire. Never has, and doubtless never will. In fact, he claims only to have left North Yorkshire on one occasion and that was many many years ago when, as a youngster, he had to undergo surgery at Leeds General Infirmary. As he always says, it was against his better judgement and it caused him a lot of pain in a tender spot – so he made up his mind there and then that he wouldn’t be going back. What this meant was that in order to see the finest cricket team on the planet he always had to make a note of the Scarborough dates as soon as the fixtures were announced, and keep them clear of social engagements. ‘Course,’ he said, as he sat there on my log, tea in one hand, flat cap in the other, his nose twitching as the smell of smoked bacon wafted through the back door, ‘if you go back a few years we used to play at Middlesbrough.’ He thought for a moment, then sighed. ‘Aye, I went there a time or two.’