‘Good God, people don’t put sultanas on pizzas now do they? I know tastes have changed since I was an undergraduate, but I don’t remember being able to buy a pizza with bloody currants on top.’
‘Sultanas…’
‘Sultanas, currants, isn’t one just a larger version of the other?
‘Bruce, I wasn’t suggesting anyone puts sultanas on pizzas. It was just a metaphor. Can we get off the subject?’
‘Oh…’
‘I always say… it would help us enormously, if we were introduced as Home Office liaison people, rather than the shadow men of the Intelligence Services – especially when we have to visit the provinces. It makes it so much harder for the people we interview to remember those important little details that can break a case when they’re terrified of saying the wrong thing. Almost as soon as you’ve confessed your profession, they put up a wall, and you’ve got to charm them and smarm your way in, all over again.’
‘Do you think this business in Whitborough and that human chain at Greenham Common yesterday is a tit for tat response to these expulsions? They must suspect by now we’ve got names and addresses from one of their pet Ivans.’
‘It’s certainly possible. But it’s up to us to pin the tail on the donkey. Whether it’s Russian or Irish, we’ll get the bastards. There are only a few sympathisers in CND – and they’re bottom of the pile people, unless our intelligence is defective. Personally, I’m not convinced there’s a link. Can you imagine the KGB – midstream with those hairy lesbians at Greenham Common? They’d be petrified.’
Chapter Eleven
Sunday Lunch at the Shipley Browns’
At eleven o’clock on Sunday morning, Mary took the bus from Burniston to Whitborough, to have lunch with her parents and her brother. It was the only time they came together, apart from Christmas Day, since the day she had left home to pursue her obsessions. Mary grew to dread the gentle interrogation and teasing which accompanied her visits. But she knew there was no credible way of avoiding their Sunday ritual, if she wanted to avoid the possibility of losing her financial umbilical cord and with it any chance of maintaining her position in the commune. It was also the only time she could take phone calls in relative privacy, as the payphone in the Scout hut was fixed to the wall beside the kitchen door.
Within ten minutes of her arrival, the Shipley Brown family telephone rang and was picked up by Mary’s brother Archie, even though he knew who the call must be for.
‘Maaaaary… it’s for you-hoo.’
‘For me? Oh ta… thanks Arch. Yo, what’s up?’ said Mary, taking the phone gracefully from her brother.
‘Mary? Mike. Listen – me and Digger can’t mek it tonight.’
‘MIIIKE!’
‘Summat’s come up at work. We’ve gotta go in later. The boss wants us to finish the paint on the camper we’re gutting, so it can cure in time for the new trim and decals on Tuesday. We’ll have to stay past seven. It’ll tek us an hour to get cleaned up after. We’ll never mek it over in time.’
‘I’ve been planning this for months! Who am I going to get to do this with now?’
‘Look Shipley, don’t burn my ears okay. I’ve gotta go in, y’know? Some of us have to bloody work for a living. I ain’t got no trust fund money coming in like you. The job comes first. Why don’t you ring Gaz – he’s not doing owt until he starts at the Tech next term?’
‘That’s not fair…’
‘It’s true though, innit?’
‘Don’t be mean Mike.’
‘ME be mean. That’s rich… so, what about Gaz…’
‘He’s going to Leeds with Cassandra to see Discharge. I can’t believe everybody’s doing something else.’
‘Well that ain’t nobody’s fault but yours is it? You should have given us a bit of notice. After what you said to Aisha I should be telling you to piss off anyway, actually. You can be a real dick sometimes Mary. How’s the head by the way?’
‘I’ve got a lump.’
‘No shit.’
‘Don’t bring her back to the hut Mike – please.’
‘I doubt she’d want to come back to see you Mary. Anyway… have you tried Ian? He might be free. Penny’s not doing anything either, as far as I know.’
‘Penny hates me.’
‘Well Ian then…’
‘Ian’s too tall…’
‘Too tall for what? You’re going after dark anyway… What’s it matter?’
‘I s’pose.’
‘It’s your call anyway. I’ve got to go. I’ll see you later okay… oh, and by the way, unless you want to be in a gang of your own, it might be best not to bawl out your friends and call us idiots – just a thought, dumbass.’
‘Okay – yeah sorry. I’ll ring him now.’
Ian Crouch, one of Whitborough’s tallest underachievers, splashed a cap full of Blue Bols on his chest, after his shower, as a substitute for his empty reserve of Brut 33. Then the payphone rang in the communal hallway of the house he rented on Leather Lane with three students from Whitborough Sixth Form College and Robin the Druid, a mad-eyed acid casualty who walked around the town in a dark brown velvet cloak and Jesus sandals. Ian got to the phone just as Robin appeared at the top of the stairs.
‘If it’s Sauron, you ain’t seen me – right brother?’ hissed Robin, whose only concession to modesty was a tatty brown hand towel secured with a clothes peg. A tinfoil tulip, with a burning roll-up inside its petals, hung from his forehead on a huge blob of sticky gel.
‘Uh huh – right Rob, we’re sound buddy. Hello?’
‘Ian, it’s Mary. Don’t hang up… I need your help for Operation Donkey. Mike and Jim let me down.’
‘I’m off for a game of pool in town.’
‘Well now you can help me free some abused donkeys instead; can you think of anything more important than that? You can have a game of pool another night.’
‘But…’
‘What!’
‘They were gonna let me try for the team tonight. Against the Jack of Both Sides.’
‘So what’s more important – their freedom, or your pool game? I can’t believe I’m having to try and argue for them with you.’
‘They’ll still be there tomorrow won’t they?’
‘Are you really suggesting they put up with another cruel night in captivity, so you can try out for some damn pub’s pool team?’
‘How’s it cruel? It’s a brand new bloody stable. It were built by a bloody donkey charity– and they’re getting their grub free. I have to buy my own bloody food.’
‘I can’t believe I’m hearing this… what about the cause!’
‘Yeah… that’s weekends. Weeknights I go to the pub.’
‘It’s Easter Sunday…’
‘I’m doing summat.’
‘Wouldn’t it be tragic if Abbi found out about you and your problem? Your little mates…’
‘What?’
‘The ants in your pants.’
‘You wouldn’t Mary. You wouldn’t dare.’
‘Wouldn’t I…Ian.’
‘Don’t Mary… I mean it. I’ll…’
‘Just help me out – and she’ll never know you had crabs.’
‘Don’t even think about it Shipley – I mean it…’
‘I’ll pick you up at 8. Opposite Tito’s lorry park on Higher Gunstone,’ said Mary, as fast as she could get her words out, before hanging up.
The York to Whitborough train arrived at Whitborough Station at 12.38, bursting at the seams. Senior field agent James Stocke and his subordinate Bruce Dickson of MI5,who were travelling first class in their own compartment, waited for the train’s corridor to clear before disembarking, observing the arrivals and departure gate and concourse from their seats for any suspicious-looking individu
als or groups.
‘Looks clear,’ remarked Bruce.
‘On time too. Right. Let’s go and meet our host. He should be outside in a red Cortina estate. I think I’ll have a shower and a change of clothes first of all. This train smells like all the ones in East Berlin.’
‘What do they smell of?’
‘Stale sausage– and fear.’
‘Welcome to the GDR.’
‘You can checkout any time you like…’
‘But you can never leave…’
‘It never dates, that song, though I’m a Scott Walker man myself. Are you an Eagles man Bruce?’
‘I’ve got the album.’
‘I seem to recall we relocated somebody from northeast Scotland to this place,’ said Stocke, checking the next platform.
‘Witness protection sir?’
‘No. The other sort. Hobson’s choice. A plus one.’
‘What did they do?’
‘Diplomatic incident. It’s on file in the Cod War archives.’
‘What’s the clearance?’
‘Highly Classified. Name of Crosbie. Nasty piece of work… Scottish Mafia.’
Barnett Crosbie, the host for Easter Monday’s annual Battle of the Bands competition, was a man with a very singular reputation, and the manager of Mystery City, Whitborough’s premier rock nightclub, owned by Manshipps Estates, one of the town’s larger post-war real estate empires.
It was one of three clubs owned by the group within Whitborough, the closest to the heart of the old town and harbour, and some distance from its sister venues, Victoria’s Penthouse and the Orange Tree, which catered for the conventional majority of holidaymakers and locals within the areas around the town centre. They also owned the only nightclub in Bridlington – the Cock and Hen Club – and the American Bars, a dance hall-cum-working men’s club in Filey that featured a bar named after Frankie Laine; but Whitborough was the main focus of their operations.
Barnett’s appointment as manager had been rubber-stamped in less time than was typical for such a position, due to the withdrawal of all but one of the candidates, from the second round of interviews. The previous incumbent, Bruce Butcher, had suddenly disappeared from his static caravan above Cayton Bay. Though this did not give Manshipps any real indication of the iniquitous narrative unfolding behind their backs. Bruce was very hard to locate at the best of times, habitually vague about his habits and liaisons.
Manshipps were duped because their primary focus had been to fill the gap in time for their new appointee to bed in before the summer season, which meant they were not as thorough and diligent as they would normally have been, establishing the validity of Barnett’s references.
Once past the brief and reasonably satisfactory probation period – during which Barnett diligently applied himself to learning everything about their operation and the partners, their histories, strategies and ethos, meeting his co-workers, and familiarising himself with his responsibilities – Barnett began to treat the various streams of income the club generated as his own personal piggy bank.
By the time the repercussions of his appointment began to show up in their audits, it was too late for the partners and directors of Manshipps to act. The estate office staff, the bar staff and doormen who prospered in his care all knew of his embezzling, but Barnett was never confronted. Because Barnett was a gangster.
In the beginning, there had been nothing in his cast or bearing to alert Manshipps to his true character or predilections. They had been more concerned initially that he seemed to be a man on the brink of a stroke or some kind of seizure – slight in stature, with a recurring cough, limp mousey hair and a permanent sheen of sweat over a pallid, waxy complexion. He was no one’s idea of a thug. But it was this false frailty, allied to his shocking mercurial violence and the bullet-studded truncheon his brother had made in metalwork classes at Dundee Technical College that had propelled him to the upper heights of Aberdeen’s criminal underworld.
MI5 had put an early end to his ambitions north of the border, on the orders of the Foreign Office, when Barnett made history, by being the first private citizen of the United Kingdom to order the successful sinking of an Icelandic gunboat in the middle of negotiations at the end of the third and final Icelandic Cod War – his revenge for the treatment his nephew had endured after straying into their territory in his brother’s trawler. He had been invited to ‘retire’ by the Security Service to the seaside town of his choice across the border in England after his jail sentence; or suffer an accident of the kind in which there was no prospect of a happy outcome, or indeed any kind of outcome in which he would be walking and breathing.
So Barnett had come to Whitborough and applied himself to the task of accumulating enough of someone else’s money for a comfortable retirement, targeting the cash registers of Manshipps Estates. He chose his prey carefully, appraising the character and histories of men he was to deprive, to ensure the reaction from his victims to his ambitions would not be anything more serious than the simmering resentment of men who discover they have been beaten at their own game, though as an insurance against any retaliatory actions, he compiled a dossier of their own less than legitimate activities; appending several newspaper clippings of his own, that were mailed out to the partners, with invitations to a private meeting, where they were witness to several selective episodes of his own frenzied violence.
There was at least a happy outcome for the office staff, who were delighted to take delivery of new desks, chairs, a suite, fax and copier after his outbursts.
For two years, he had never been challenged. There had even been a mild thaw in his icy relationship with the directors, which no one in the firm could ever have anticipated in the beginning. He continued to steal their money, though the amount he embezzled never altered, in terms of both the amount and the timing. It was to all intents and purposes, a direct debit for services rendered, though never invoiced.
What Manshipps received in kind, for the honour of employing a professional felon, was a smoothly-run nightclub without any incidents of violence. Since Barnett’s arrival, there had been no bills for damages. No misbehaviour or sickness from the staff. And no predation from other criminal elements in Whitborough or sabotage from rivals. Barnett’s presence had bestowed an invisible golden halo of protection over their oddball asset. The directors had grudgingly come to realise that Manshipps had more stability with him than without him.
He had originally been granted permission to leave Aberdeen with one companion, and chose James Stone, his often redundant protector and number two. In physical terms, he was a big brother figure to Barnett’s sickly child. A small heavyset wardrobe of knotted muscle, gristle and malevolence with the presence of Charlton Heston’s Moses. ‘Begg Jamesy’ fell upon the heads of those who had displeased his master, like the black shadow of a barn– and left those who had crossed him in much the same state of health as someone who had been crushed by one, but his apparent invincibility was really a sham, and his outbursts were little more than a quick and easy way to release the anxiety that came from the fear of being exposed as a former building site pervert.
Jamesy’s dark secret was his unnatural love of PVA, a passion that had first manifested itself during his CITB Bricklaying apprenticeship. In the trade it was used as an admixture for cement; though for Stone, it had become the focus of new and bizarre compulsions, which acted as a safety valve from his violent rages.
One of his less alarming rituals involved smearing a thick layer over his hands and forearms to his elbows; drying out the film of glue under a hand dryer, then locking himself in the end toilet cubicle for the sensory orgasm that came upon him during the peel-off. Because of this, his forearms were hairless and he smelled like a primary school woodwork tools cupboard. But it relaxed him sufficiently to keep his ferocious temper at bay, and got him through the day without him resorting
to expressing himself with his fists.
All of this was blown apart when he was discovered by a cleaner at the moment of orgasm and asked to relinquish his place on the course. Through desperation he had gone to work in a bar, eventually meeting Barnett over the unconscious bodies of two Rangers’ fans he had put to sleep with his forehead.
James was often teased for his lack of social skills and unblinking seriousness, but never more than once.
Inside the transformed former sailcloth and rigging factory that was Mystery City, there had been no altercations or even so much as a cross word, since Barnett’s coronation.
The shocking details of his first tantrum on the door travelled swiftly up the grapevine throughout the town, cementing his status as the foremost psychopath of his generation. The carcasses of the two splintered exit doors and their mutilated panes of safety glass – with two head-shaped depressions – were left propped outside over the weekend, as a warning totem to any rivals who might wish to examine his technique.
Mystery City had two rock nights on Friday and Saturday. An ‘alternative’ night on Thursday, a student night on Wednesday and a classic film night on Monday. Or, if the projector was being repaired – a comedian. Barnett lived in a self-contained flat within the loft space and commissioned a suspended office and viewing platform beneath inside the old lift cage frames, from where he could survey the bars and dance floors below,while Jimmy sometimes bedded down on a cot in the projector and utilities room if he had drunk too much to walk home, where he could be alone, with his glue.
On Bank Holiday Sunday, Barnett was compelled to spend a dreary afternoon and the longest part of the evening watching the construction of a large stage inside his club by technicians from Whitborough Technical College and the local Musicians’ Union, for the annual Battle of the Bands competition the following night. A very dull but necessary duty, for which he had prepared by opening the bar, helping himself to a bottle of Bells, a copy of the Racing Post and the Sunday edition of The Scotsman, knowing nothing about the live music scene, apart from the control and intimidation of crowds and the exact amount of violence required to stamp out any dissent. He didn’t want to engage the stage builders, the electricians or the technicians and turned his back on the whole proceedings while Jamesy scuttled from group to group, looking over the shoulders of the workmen with a face that mixed fascination and suspicion with envy and awe.
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