To Hell in a Handcart

by Richard Littlejohn

  He walked over to the dual tape deck, unwrapped a blank C60. He took the Tyburn Row tape back out of the Federation case, placed it into the adjoining cassette slot and pressed FAST DUB. When it was complete, he repeated the process.

  He was finished by the time Andi came back downstairs.

  ‘All fixed.’

  ‘I wish you were coming, Mickey.’

  ‘Now then. When I’m done here. I promise. I’ll run you to Gatwick first thing. I’ll call Uncle Tom later. He’ll meet you at Orlando. You’ll have a great time.’

  ‘If you say so, Mickey.’

  ‘I want you to look after something for me.’

  He took one of the duplicate cassettes and placed it in her left hand.

  ‘Is this what I think it is?’

  ‘It’s a copy.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Insurance. Take it with you.’

  ‘Mickey French, I hope you know what you’re doing.’

  ‘Who me?’

  They both chuckled.

  ‘Come on, I’ll take you to your mum’s then come back and let Brian’s boys in. I’ve got to see Ricky later, but I’ll join you at mum’s later, say about eleven.’

  Mickey locked the door, opened the boot and dropped the bags inside.

  As they sat in the front of the car, Andi threw her arms around Mickey’s neck and kissed him on the cheek.

  ‘Whatever you’re up to –’

  ‘I’m not up to anything.’

  ‘Whatever it is, just promise me you’ll be careful.’

  ‘I promise.’

  Thirty-one

  ‘You’re late.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘He’s on his second bottle,’ said Dillon, wiping a wine glass on a tea-towel and handing it to Mickey.

  He found Ricky Sparke sitting at a corner table, clutching protectively a bottle of Chilean Chardonnay and doing the crossword in the last edition of the Evening Standard.

  Spider’s was quiet. A few afternoon drunks were sleeping off their long lunches. A couple of leathery ex-Windmill girls were sipping sherries at the bar and remembering past glories.

  There was always a lull early evening. Spider’s didn’t really start to rock and roll until pub chucking out time. It was normally still heaving at two-thirty in the morning, with bar, restaurant and theatre staff unwinding after another night on the West End hamster wheel.

  ‘You’re late.’

  ‘I’ve already had that from Dillon,’ said Mickey. ‘Sorry, it’s been a bastard of a day. Bastard of a weekend, come to that.’

  Ricky poured the last of the wine into Mickey’s glass.

  ‘I can’t stop too long, mate. I’m on a three-line whip.’

  ‘I was just thinking,’ mused Ricky. ‘You know how they say you can tell someone’s personality?’

  ‘How?’

  ‘For instance. Take a bottle of wine. An optimist sees a half-empty bottle as half-full. A pessimist sees a half-full bottle as half-empty.’

  ‘So what’s your point, Bertrand Russell?’

  ‘Well my bottles are either full or empty. And even when they’re full, I can see them empty. So what does that make me?’

  ‘A piss artist.’

  ‘Almost. A thirsty piss artist,’ he laughed, draining his glass.

  ‘OK, I can take a hint,’ said Mickey, signalling in Dillon’s direction.

  Dillon had anticipated their requirements. He walked over to the table, dressed, like his hero Johnny Cash, all in black. He was clutching two, already opened, bottles of Chilean Chardonnay.

  ‘I dunno about two,’ said Mickey.

  ‘Shall I take one away?’

  ‘No, no, no. That won’t be necessary,’ Ricky insisted. ‘I’ll make sure it goes to a good home.’

  ‘Slate?’

  ‘Mine,’ volunteered Mickey.

  Ricky refilled their glasses.

  ‘Half-full?’

  ‘Half-fucking-empty,’ said Mickey.

  ‘Like that?’

  ‘Not many.’

  ‘Tell your Uncle Rick.’

  Dillon went into the room behind the bar and changed the CD. Spider’s had the best muzak in London. Like Rocktalk 99FM without the phone-in plankton and phoney mid-Atlantic DJs.

  Where else would you get the soundtrack from Mean Streets at half-eight on a weekday evening?

  Smokey was doing ‘Mickey’s Monkey’.

  ‘Oi, they’re playing your song, old son.’

  ‘Me Mickey. You Monkey.’

  ‘Bollocks.’

  ‘These days I’ve Got to Dance to Keep from Crying.’

  ‘You could get on the radio with stuff like that.’

  ‘That’s your department, Rick.’

  ‘Transport, law and order, that’s mine. Or at least I used to think it was.’

  ‘Come on, spit it out.’

  Mickey recounted the trials and tribulations of the last weekend. The lot. The roadblock, the gyppoes, the speed traps. Goblin’s, the burglary, the damage, the shit, the piss, the cat. The whole nine yards.

  Every so often, Ricky would interject.

  ‘A fucking ELF?’

  ‘You are KIDDING?’

  ‘Holy SHIT.’

  By the time Mickey had finished, so were the two bottles.

  Ricky went to attract Dillon’s attention.

  ‘No more for me, mate. I’m under starter’s orders. I’ve got an early off. If I don’t get the overground to Palmers Green, I’ll have to get a black cab, if I’m lucky.’

  ‘No motor tonight?’

  ‘I drive for a living. Have you forgotten? A couple of gallons of Dillon’s Chilean Chardonnay and that’s my licence.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Look, I’ve got to have it on my toes. I’m taking Andi and the kids to Florida tomorrow.’

  ‘You’re going to Florida?’

  ‘No, I’m not. They are. I’m taking them to the airport. That’s why I wanted your cousin’s number. Ta. He did me a deal.’

  ‘Why aren’t you going?’

  ‘Reasons. I dunno. We’ll talk about it tomorrow. I’ll pick you up from the radio station.’

  ‘But you haven’t heard about my weekend yet.’

  ‘Let me guess. Rolled by a couple of Eastern Europeans. Last £250. Getting warm?’

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘I heard you ranting on the wireless. It sounded personal.’

  ‘Too right. It got a massive response from the callers, too. I seem to have hit a raw nerve.’

  ‘Right. I’m off. Do me a favour, will you?’

  ‘Anything, as long as it doesn’t involve bestiality, Scottish country dancing or eating Pot Noodles.’

  ‘Nothing like that. I just want you to look after this for me.’

  Mickey took a package from the poacher’s pocket in his outback jacket and put it on the table.

  ‘What’s this? It’s not my birthday.’

  ‘Just look after it for me, will you?’

  ‘Sure. But what is it?’

  ‘Important is what it is. Dynamite, you could say. What’s in here is more lethal than Semtex.’

  ‘It’s not going to go off in my hand, is it?’

  ‘You’re safe enough. There are some people who would love to get their hands on it, though.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘A couple of very important people.’

  ‘Am I to be told who they are?’

  ‘Tomorrow. I’ll tell you everything. Just guard it with your life. Outside the family, you’re the one person I trust. Just don’t get pissed and leave it on the tube.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I’ll call it a night, too. It won’t do me any harm. I’m on air at nine.’

  ‘Very wise.’

  ‘Go on, run along. Give my love to Andi and the kids.’

  ‘Remember what I said. Guard it with your life.’

  ‘Have I ever let you down?’

  Thirty-two

  ‘Those were the l
atest headlines. Coming up in an hour, Ricky Sparke. Stay tuned to Rocktalk 99FM. This is Squeeze.’

  Georgia Claye stirred under the duvet. She reached out her right hand and hit the off button on the clock/radio.

  What time had she gone to bed? She didn’t recall.

  The inside of her mouth tasted like a tramp’s trainer. An empty red wine bottle nestled beside her on the pillow.

  The blinds were open, the window closed. The atmosphere inside the bedroom was fetid.

  Georgia rubbed her eyes. The black mascara she’d forgotten to remove smeared off on her knuckles.

  She eased herself upwards on her elbows. She was still wearing her bra. Her knickers were marooned on her left ankle. She must have passed out while undressing.

  Her breasts drooped apologetically, like two supermarket carrier bags half-filled with water. They rested on her beer gut, which sagged onto her thighs as she leant forward.

  Georgia rolled towards the edge of the bed and attempted re-entry. As she hoisted herself up, she caught a glimpse of her body in a full-length mirror.

  Fifty looming, flabby and forlorn. She had legs like Popeye’s trousers, pitted with cellulite and varicose veins. Her long, lank, once black hair had turned grey. She looked like the Witches of Eastwick’s ugly mate.

  She’d been considered something of a beauty when she arrived in England from Gary, Indiana, in the 1970s, to study journalism. Fell in love with a handsome Italian student doctor training at Bart’s. They married after a whirlwind romance, but it didn’t last. He left her for a man he met at a Tom Robinson gig when Georgia was seven months pregnant and was last heard of heading an AIDS project in central Africa.

  She had considered going back home, but was caught up in the metropolitan whirl, the excitement of pub rock and punk, so decided to stay in London and bring up her son.

  Georgia contracted a doomed second marriage to a scaffolding contractor who used her as a punch-bag. She dabbled with lesbianism, too, but her heart wasn’t in it. A succession of unsuitable ‘uncles’ passed through her son’s life.

  Now the boy was gone, too, running a pioneering gay bar in Dumfries.

  Georgia threw on a dressing gown and made her way unsteadily downstairs. Back in the Eighties, she’d gone all open-plan and dispensed with the stairwell and the banisters after her second husband had taken a lump hammer to them in a fit of drunken rage. She kicked him out and somehow never got round to replacing them, making an architectural feature out of their absence.

  This morning she had cause to regret it. She had nothing to cling onto as she negotiated the precarious incline. She dared not look down. She froze to the spot, fearful of falling forward. If she fell, it could be days before she was discovered.

  There was only one way down. She sat on the steps and slid down on her arse, jarring the base of her spine, effecting a soft landing on the pile of newspapers which had been pushed through the front door.

  She had to move. A flat would be nice. Ground floor. No stairs. But she was loath to leave her little piece of Holloway. Georgia struggled to her feet and made her way to the kitchen. She filled the kettle and plugged it in. She opened the fridge, retrieved a bottle of cider and poured it into a glass.

  Halfway down it kicked in.

  She picked up the papers and sat at her desk in the open-plan lounge, knocked through by a couple of moonlighting McAlpine’s Fusiliers in exchange for £500 in their hand and three-in-a-bed with Georgia. The threes-up was Georgia’s idea.

  The room looked like a skip. There were old newspapers and empty bottles everywhere.

  The walls were decorated with yellowing cuttings and cartoons, documenting Georgia’s passage from unpaid contributor to Puke, a small punk rock rag, to occasionally paid Fleet Street freelance.

  She currently had a sort of contract with the Clarion, a soft-left, small-circulation daily broadsheet. But her contract wasn’t worth the paper it wasn’t written on. She hadn’t had anything published for a couple of months.

  On her desk was the only award she had ever won. The Golden Spike. It stood nine inches high on a wooden base and was given to her by the Publish and Be Damned Association in recognition of the number of articles she had written which an assortment of editors had refused to publish.

  Georgia liked to believe that her bold exposés of female circumcision and police corruption were simply too hot to handle. The Publish and Be Damned Association, a self-congratulatory collection of disaffected and embittered radical hacks, certainly thought that.

  In truth, most of Georgia’s work ended up on the spike because it was complete bollocks.

  Which is why she struggled to get anything published. So she supplemented her meagre stipend from the Clarion as a rent-a-gob pundit on bear-pit television shows and two-bob radio stations.

  Such as Rocktalk 99FM.

  As she drained her cider, the phone rang.

  ‘Georgia?’

  ‘Speaking.’

  ‘Hello. Timmy, here. I’m a researcher on the Ricky Sparke show, Rocktalk 99FM.’

  ‘Hello, Timmy.’

  ‘We were wondering, Ricky was wondering, if you’d like to do our newspaper review this week.’

  ‘Usual time?’

  ‘That’s right, ten till eleven am.’

  ‘Let me check my diary.’

  Georgia put her hand over the mouthpiece and opened her diary. Blank.

  ‘Ten till eleven, you say?’

  ‘Uh-huh. We’d need you here by ten forty-five.’

  ‘Well, I do have a couple of rather important engagements.’

  ‘That’s a pity.’

  ‘But I suppose I could try to rearrange them.’

  ‘Could you? Oh, that would be super.’

  ‘Will you send a car for me?’

  ‘I could do, but only if you waived your fee.’

  ‘Is there a fee?’

  ‘Not if you want a car.’

  ‘What if I find my own way in?’

  ‘We could probably run to fifty quid.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘And we’ll make sure there’s plenty of hospitality.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘A couple of bottles of wine. A few crisps. Ricky likes to let his hair down occasionally.’

  ‘OK, I’ll do it. I’ll take the tube.’

  ‘See you.’

  ‘Bye.’

  Georgia opened another cider and made a mental note not to get shit-faced the night before the show.

  Fifty quid was fifty quid.

  And there would be wine.

  Thirty-three

  ‘Your boy’s in number three, sir,’ said the custody sergeant. ‘Bag-snatching, on the tube.’

  ‘Thank you, sergeant. I’ll see my client now,’ said Justin. ‘If you don’t mind me saying, Mr Fromby, sir, this is a bit beneath you, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ Justin gave the sergeant a reproving look.

  ‘I mean, bag-snatching. Small time.’

  ‘I was taking my surgery at the law centre when we got the call informing us that you were holding a refugee in custody and that he was in need of legal assistance. There’s no ceremony, no hierarchy at the law centre. Cabs on a rank, sergeant. No injustice is beneath me, as you put it. Everyone is entitled to the best possible defence.’

  ‘If you say so, sir.’

  ‘Oh, I do say so.’

  The sergeant unlocked cell three and showed Justin Fromby inside.

  ‘Would you like me to wait outside, sir?’

  ‘That won’t be necessary.’

  ‘Very well.’

  ‘Oh, sergeant. Shut the door, will you?’

  Ten minutes later, Fromby emerged from the cell and informed the sergeant he would like to speak with the arresting officer.

  The young undercover detective constable, name of Collins, was summoned from the canteen.

  ‘You haven’t charged my client, yet.’

  ‘We are going to, sir. All in due time.’


  ‘Witnesses?’

  ‘Myself and my partner, sir. We caught him bang to rights.’

  ‘And the woman?’

  ‘Woman?’

  ‘You know perfectly well who I mean, detective constable. The owner of the alleged stolen property. The woman whose handbag was allegedly taken by my client. Surely she is also a witness.’

  ‘Oh, her, you mean?’

  ‘Yes. Do you have her witness statement?’

  ‘Actually, sir, the woman in question is a police officer. She will be making a statement in due course.’

  ‘A POLICE OFFICER?’

  ‘British Transport Police. It was a joint operation.’

  ‘Operation?’

  ‘Operation Artful Dodger, sir. Targeted at robbery on the transport network.’

  ‘I’m sorry, constable,’ said Justin, with the emphasis on cunt. ‘What we have here is a clear case of entrapment.’

  ‘That’s bollocks. This was a lawfully constituted operation, sanctioned at the highest level. The arrest was done by the numbers.’

  ‘I can’t accept that. In my opinion, my client was enticed into a compromising situation. This was a highly dubious arrest. I wish to see your superior officer.’

  ‘That’s not possible.’

  ‘Not possible.’

  ‘All senior officers are away attending a diversity training seminar. There’s no one here above the rank of sergeant.’

  ‘In that case, I must insist that you release my client immediately.’

  ‘I can’t do that, Mr Fromby.’

  ‘SERGEANT!’ Fromby called.

  The custody sergeant came shuffling through, clutching a polystyrene cup of decaffeinated coffee substitute.

  ‘You rang, sir?’

  ‘Sergeant, I must insist on my client’s immediate release.

  Now that I have been acquainted with the circumstances of this arrest, I realize that we are looking at entrapment and this station and the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police are looking at a substantial suit for damages. The Clarion will have a field day. Undercover cops prey on stateless, vulnerable refugees, that sort of thing. Should be able to get Panorama interested, too.’

  The sergeant paused for reflection, sipped his coffee substitute and scratched his balls.

  ‘I can’t release a prisoner without an address.’