To Hell in a Handcart

‘That’s not the police, Mickey. That’s the courts.’

‘Accepted. But there’s never any leniency when Muggins in his Mondeo gets another three points on his licence, a thousand-pound fine and another few hundred quid on his insurance. We’re letting off real villains and at the same time turning as many decent folk as possible into criminals. That wasn’t what I joined the police for. And you know what really pisses me off?’

‘Go on, you’re going to tell me anyway,’ Andi chuckled.

‘I know most of this is the fault of the politicians. But there are plenty of Old Bill who not only go along with it, they abso-bloody-lutely love it. From the Black Rats in the jam-sandwiches to the fast-track fanny merchants at the top. That’s why I’m well off out of it. Now do you believe me?’

‘Every time, lover.’ She squeezed his hand and smiled. It was a while since they’d been away as a family and nothing was going to spoil this holiday. ‘You all right?’

‘I’m fine. Sorry to bang on, love. It’s just, you know, every now and then.’

‘Sure, I know. And I’ll tell you something. I’m glad you’re out of it, too. I wasn’t certain how you’d be, at first. There were a few difficult days, you know.’

‘Yeah, I’m sorry. It took me a while, that’s all.’

‘It was bound to. I did understand. If I got a bit agitated sometimes, it was only because I was worried about you. After the, well, you know, after that, after you were shot, not knowing whether you were going to make it. Then not knowing if you’d walk again. Or work again. Not that that mattered. I’d have got a job, we’d have been all right, really we would.’

Mickey squeezed her hand back. Funny, they didn’t talk about it much at home. Too painful, maybe.

They weren’t like those couples who were always talking and touching for fear of what might happen if they stopped. They didn’t need to. So much between them went unspoken.

But he found it easy to talk to Andi in the car. It wasn’t that he dreaded eye contact. He adored eye contact with her, especially when they were making love. Conversation came easier when he was in the motor, that’s all.

Maybe it was a legacy of all those stakeouts, all those long nights in smelly squad cars, full of stale burgers, flatulence, boredom, anticipation and, yes, fear, real fear. He never knew whether the target would be tooled up, how he would react. He’d been trained, programmed, honed, briefed, but when push came to shove, fear and adrenalin kicked in.

And when it happened, there was farce and fuck-up, too. Like on the night he stopped the bullet which nearly killed him.

‘We don’t need to import criminals. We’ve got enough scum of our own,’ Mickey reflected, as the traffic again ground inexorably to a standstill.

It was a routine stakeout. Mickey and his colleagues from the armed response unit were parked up outside the Westshires Building Society in Homsey, north London.

They’d been in this situation dozens of times, acting on information received that rarely came to anything. For once, it was game on.

Chummy strolled round the corner and into the building society, wielding a shotgun, blissfully unaware that the police were lying in wait, courtesy of a friendly, neighbourhood grass who offered him up over Guinness and Jameson’s in the back bar of the Princess Alexandra in exchange for a bit of leeway on a handling charge he was facing in the not too distant.

Challenged by armed officers inside the building, the robber turned and ran. Mickey and two other firearms officers chased him through an industrial estate and onto the railway line.

He was a big lad, out of Seven Sisters, strapping, gangling, six foot tall, and, still clutching the shooter, he ran, ducking and weaving through the parked cars, dodging between the railway carriages.

The police got lucky when he caught his left size-twelve Timberland mountain boot in a badly maintained bit of track, snapped his ankle like a Twiglet and could only crawl underneath a derelict wooden goods van, which hadn’t moved since Dr Beeching.

Trapped, frightened, fuelled by cocaine, he started firing. He wasn’t much of a shot and Mickey and the lads fell back on their training, took cover and followed procedure, which was to lie low, not return fire and wait for the negotiator to arrive.

The temptation, the natural inclination, was always to storm the blagger and stick a shooter up his nose. But as a specialist weapons officer, Mickey knew to play the long game, the waiting game. It usually worked. Only very occasionally did someone get hurt.

When it went wrong, it went horribly wrong. Mickey had been on the Libyan Embassy siege when a gunman started firing out of the window into St James’s. He was only yards away from WPC Yvonne Fletcher when she went down.

The bastard who fired that fatal shot got diplomatic immunity and walked free. It still riled Mickey all these years later.

He had been in Tottenham, too, the night PC Keith Blakelock bought it at Broadwater Farm, hacked to death, his head severed and paraded on a pole.

In the railway siding, Mickey had bided his time, even though five minutes seemed like a lifetime in these circumstances. Then he saw one of his colleagues, Jimmy Needle, leap up and start to run in the direction of the embankment. Two young boys had wandered onto the line from the nearby playing field to see what all the excitement was about and had stumbled straight into the line of fire.

As Needle ran towards the boys, the blagger, Lincoln Philpott, he was called, panicked and loosed off a couple of shots.

By this time Mickey was on his feet. Philpott fired wildly and inaccurately, blasting anywhere. Mickey felt a sudden, almost dull, thud in his back, then a burning, piercing sensation, like acute kidney pain.

The next thing he was lying face down, paralysed in agony. One bullet had ricocheted off a carriage and thudded into Mickey’s lower back, smashing his discs.

I can’t feel my legs, he thought. For some reason the first thing that came into his mind was that old hospital joke.

‘Doctor, I can’t feel my legs.’

‘That’s because we’ve had to cut your arms off.’

Mickey, despite the pain, smiled inwardly. They say that from adversity comes humour. Something like that, anyway. And Mickey spent his life trying to see the funny side. If you didn’t, you’d end up like the Michael Douglas character in that movie, Falling Down, roaming the streets firing at random.

They put him back together in the spinal injury unit at Stoke Mandeville, but he was out of the game in plaster and traction and therapy for the best part of nine months.

They offered him counselling, but Mickey declined politely. He would have declined impolitely had they insisted.

Some time afterwards, he was talking about it with Ricky Sparke over a couple of large ones in Spider’s Bar, a downstairs drinker in Soho, run by a dubious Irishman called Dillon.

‘You know the worst thing about it, Rick?’

‘The pain?’

‘Nah, nothing like that.’

‘What then?’

‘Michael Winner.’

‘Michael Winner, what’s he got to do with it?’

‘He runs this police trust thing, for coppers who get shot on the job.’

‘And?’

‘Well, I’m lying there in Stoke Mandeville, minding my own, head down in a George V Higgins, more plaster than Paris, and in walks Winner with a posse of Fleet Street’s finest and a couple of film crews from the TV. He’s come to present me with an award.’

‘That must have been nice for you.’

‘I’d have done a runner but I couldn’t move. And the next thing I knew, he was on me. All that cigar smoke, all those dinners. After he’d gone I asked the nurse to give me a bed-bath – though it would have taken a fortnight in a Jacuzzi full of Swarfega to do the job properly.’

Dillon sent over a couple of glasses of his own special concoction – Polish spirit and schnapps marinaded with chilli peppers for a month in the deep freeze.

They swallowed the glutinous liquid whole, Eastern European-style. It was the only way. Otherwise it could strip the enamel off your teeth. If there had been a fireplace they would have thrown their glasses into it. There wasn’t, fortunately, just a battered sofa where the fireplace would have been, containing an actor who used to be in a cat food commercial sleeping off a three-day hangover.

‘Actually, Winner wasn’t the worst thing, mate,’ said Mickey, as the drink brought about its inevitable melancholic metamorphosis.

‘No? What’s worse than Michael Winner?’

‘Not much, it has to be said. But it wasn’t just being shot. I half-expected that. It wasn’t even Philpott walking on a technicality, much as that churned my guts. It was the way his brief told it, made it sound as if we’d planted the gun on him. He painted Philpott as the victim in all this and us as the villains of the piece. That’s what hurt.’

‘First thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers. That was what Shakespeare wrote, if my O-level English serves me. Hal to Dick in Henry the Something, part, oh I dunno, let’s have another drink,’ Ricky mumbled.

‘Fromby.’

‘Eh?’

‘Fromby. Philpott’s brief. Smug, self-righteous bastard. Justin fucking Fromby.’

‘Mickey. Mickey. Mick-ee!’ Andi prodded him in the ribs. ‘Wake up, Mickey, the traffic’s moving.’

‘What? Oh, sure. I’m sorry love, I was miles away,’ he replied, easing the Scorpio into Drive and resuming their journey.

‘Anywhere nice?’ she asked.

‘Nowhere I’d want to take you and the kids,’ he said. ‘Nowhere I want to go again in a hurry.’

Mickey checked his watch, a silver Rolex presented to him at his leaving do. Mickey joked it was the best fake Rolex he’d ever seen. Everyone laughed, although he noticed the detective in charge of the whip-round could only manage an embarrassed grin. Mickey didn’t ask and he didn’t check subsequently, either. It was the thought. And the watch told the time and hadn’t gone rusty, not like some of the moody kettles he’d seen over the years.

‘Wossamatter, Dad, why aren’t we moving?’ Terry asked, looking up from his Gameboy.

Mickey explained that the annual festival of digging up the roads used to run from February until the end of the financial year at the start of April. Now you got roadworks all year round, like strawberries. They used to be seasonal, too. That’s progress.

On Rocktalk 99FM, Ricky Sparke was back-announcing ‘The Guns of Brixton’ by the Clash prior to reading out another bunch of delays. He could only hope to scratch the surface. So many roadworks, so little time. He hadn’t even mentioned the little local difficulty Mickey currently found himself in. Any delay less than an hour was hardly worth the bother any more. People had come to expect it.

Still, that was then. Whenever he felt bitter, Mickey took stock of his life. He was at least alive, he had a reasonable pension, around £25,000 a year, which he supplemented driving Ricky Sparke around and doing the odd job for a local chauffeur firm. He had a beautiful wife, two smashing kids and his mortgage was paid off. And now they were on their way to Goblin’s Holiday World. Life could be very much worse.

Now they were on the move again, through the wastelands of north-east London on a new swathe of road for which hundreds of solid, Victorian artisans’ cottages had given their lives.

There were GATSO speed cameras every eight hundred yards or so, rigidly enforcing a totally unnecessary 40 mph speed limit. Even though Mickey knew the odds were that only about ten per cent of them were likely to contain any film, he wasn’t taking any chances and drove at a constant 39 mph in the middle lane. He didn’t need any more points on his licence and, anyway, they were bringing in the new digital cameras which didn’t need film, nicked you for fun.

Driving was what he did for a living these days. How else was Ricky Sparke going to get home from Spider’s of an evening without getting mugged or arrested if Mickey and his Scorpio were off the road?

Either side of him, cars, vans and lorries hurried by, accompanied by a flashing of camera bulbs which would have done credit to the paparazzi outside a West End premiere. Their drivers saw spot fines and suspensions as an occupational hazard, in much the same way old-time villains did their bird without complaint even if they’d been fitted up. If they get caught this time, it’s outweighed by all the times they weren’t. It comes with the turf, or, rather, the tarmac.

Mickey couldn’t see the point. In a mile or two the shiny new freeway would end abruptly and all three lanes would be funnelled into two, then one. Why risk three points and a couple of hundred quid just to be two or three minutes earlier to the traffic lights or next set of roadworks?

He plucked another wine gum from the packet on the dashboard and popped it in his mouth. Soon three lanes became two, 39 mph became 20 mph became 10 mph became stop. Mickey found himself at the head of a new queue at a red light, halting traffic at the start of a single lane, cordoned off with the inevitable cones and, unusually, tape, the kind police use to seal off a scene of crime.

Suddenly he was aware of a swarm of bodies around the car, filthy water being sloshed on his windscreen, knuckles rapping on the side windows. Mickey waved them away to no avail.

He could see the faces pressed against the glass, foreign faces. There must have been ten or a dozen, swarthy, olive-skinned young men with gold teeth in designer clothes, women in shawls and headscarves with babies in arms, thrusting their hands towards the car.

‘Money, money, give me money, English. Hungry. Help. Give. My baby starving.’

‘Dad, Dad, make them go away,’ Katie implored him in panic.

‘Don’t worry, darling, we’ll be on the move soon. Stay calm.’

‘But they’re frightening me, Daddy.’

‘Just ignore them,’ said Mickey, checking the central locking and securing the windows of the Scorpio.

A woman threw herself across the bonnet, pleading, cajoling. ‘Money, English. Give. Hungry. Refugee. Money.’

‘Get off the car. I said, get off the car,’ Mickey shouted at her.

Terry started hammering on the inside of the rear passenger window, where a menacing face thrust itself towards him. ‘Fuck off, fuck off, just fucking FUCK OFF,’ he shouted.

‘TERRY! Stop that. STOP IT. You’ll only make things worse,’ screamed Andi, freaked by the stifling, claustrophobic atmosphere inside the Scorpio.

‘Change, you bastard, CHANGE,’ Mickey hollered at the red light. But the red light stared back defiantly.

‘DADDY! DADDY! They’re trying to get in the car,’ Katie called out hysterically. Mickey could hear the sound of the rear hatchback being jemmied open. All their luggage, Andi’s jewellery, their holiday money in Mickey’s travelling case. It was all in there.

There was a deafening crash to his left. One of the gang had taken a crowbar to the front passenger window. Mickey looked across to see his wife showered with hundreds of shards of glass, cowering in her seat. The assailant tried to force the door, but the Ford central locking held.

Andi was petrified, clutching her handbag as an arm reached through and grabbed for it. Mickey couldn’t hear himself think. The shattered window had triggered the alarm, which pierced the air.

Terry lunged forward and seized the arm, wrenching it away from his mother. Mickey saw a gleam, a flash. He knew instantly it was a blade. He dived across and grabbed the attacker’s wrist as the knife flashed just inches away from Andi’s cheek.

The fist dropped the blade into Andi’s lap. Mickey picked it up and, instinctively, plunged it into the hirsute forearm being gripped by his son.

He could hear the scream of the attacker above the cacophony of the car alarm. Both arms withdrew, blood spurting everywhere, splattering on the inside of the wind-screen, erupting over the dashboard. More beggars threw themselves at the vehicle.

Mickey wrenched the car into reverse and stamped on the accelerator. There was another agonizing screech as the legs of the man attempting to jemmy open the rear tailgate were crushed against the reinforced front bumpers of the car behind, a blue Volvo 740 estate, driven by an Orthodox rabbi from Stamford Hill.

Mickey jammed the gear lever into first and stood on the gas pedal. The car surged forward through the tape, scattering the cones, mounting the pavement.

Mickey’s vision was obscured by the blood on the wind-screen. He tried to wipe it away with his hand, but it smeared. Steering with one hand, he cleared a patch in the claret.

As he did so, he saw the crazed figure of a small, dark-haired woman, arms outstretched, holding her child before her, gesticulating in his direction, screaming hatred. Mickey threw the wheel left in an attempt at evasive action.

Too late.

The woman was hurled backwards and a small body propelled through the air. It bounced once on the bonnet, slammed into the windscreen, rolled under the front nearside wheel and was gone.

Mickey shuddered to a halt.

‘What are you DOING?’ Andi cried, her face dripping with blood. ‘Just DRIVE, Mickey. Get us OUT OF HERE!’

‘But the baby.’

‘Fuck the fucking gypsy baby. What about your babies? DRIVE!’

Three

Mickey swung the Scorpio into the car park of a huge, half-timbered Thirties roadhouse, now plying its trade as an American theme restaurant, at least a mile from the scene of the ambush.

He looked across at his wife, who was shaking and crying uncontrollably. He turned to his kids in the rear seat. Katie was screwed up in a ball, in the fetal position, sobbing.

Terry was bouncing, his eyes on stalks, popping out of his head, blood all over his sweatshirt and on the underside of the peak of his baseball cap. The adrenalin was still pumping. He was punching the roof lining of the Scorpio and roaring like a young lion after his first kill.

‘Yes, yes, YES!’ Terry cried, triumphantly.

‘Terry, son. It’s all right. Calm down. You did well. Just, you know, chill. Cool. Whatever you call it,’ said Mickey soothingly.

He put his arm round Andi and pulled her close. ‘Are you hurt?’

‘No, I don’t think so,’ she replied, fumbling inside her handbag for a wet-wipe. ‘It’s not my blood, lover. I’ll live.’

They both turned to Katie, shivering on the back seat, her arms across her head, trying to shut out the horror of it all.

Mickey disengaged the central locking, silenced the alarm and got out of the car. He walked round to the rear passenger side, opened the door, picked up Katie and cradled her in his arms.

‘Katie. Katie, darling. It’s all right. We’re all fine. It’s all over.’

She threw her arms round his neck. He could feel her warm tears on his face, could taste her terror. She whispered in his ear: ‘Daddy, make it better.’

Mickey looked at the Scorpio. Or rather what was left of it. The lunchtime trade arriving for overcooked burgers and rancid ribs surveyed the devastation.

‘My God,’ said Mickey. ‘The baby.’

‘What?’

‘That woman’s baby. I think I killed it. I’ve got to go back.’

‘You can’t be serious,’ Andi said.

‘Deadly. Look, take the kids inside. Clean yourselves up. I have to go back. I used to be a police officer, for God’s sake. Can you remember that? Please.’

He went to call the police on his mobile, then realized someone would have done it already. But Mickey had to return to the scene. He was looking at failing to stop, failing to report an accident, malicious wounding, death by dangerous driving, even, and God knows what else.

OK, so there were mitigating circumstances. Self-defence, reasonable force. But these things had to be done by the book.

‘I won’t be long. Promise. I have to do this. Get the kids a burger or something.’

Andi knew resistance was futile. He would do the right thing. That sometimes infuriated her, but that’s why she loved him.

Mickey got back in the car, which looked like a left-over from a demolition derby. He turned the key in the ignition, selected Drive and rolled the car back onto the main road.

He drove slowly, unsure of just how far he had come. In the distance he could see the flashing blue light of a patrol car. As he approached, he saw an officer in a fluorescent yellow jacket in animated conversation with a rabbi.

But something was missing. Where were the roadworks? There were a few lengths of tape, fluttering in the breeze, but nothing else.

He pulled in to the kerb, walked over to the officer and introduced himself. ‘I think you’re looking for me.’

‘I’ve just been hearing all about it from this gentleman here,’ he said, indicating Rabbi Chaim Bergman. ‘Are you all right, sir?’

‘Er, yes, I suppose so. In the circumstances.’

‘And the family?’

‘I left them at that burger place down the road. You’ll be wanting a statement from me.’

‘That won’t be necessary, sir.’

‘Won’t be necessary? This was like a fucking war zone twenty minutes ago.’

‘So it might have been, sir. That was twenty minutes ago.’ He looked at Mickey. ‘I know you, don’t I? You were an instructor at Hendon. Weapons, right? Sergeant French, correct? You got shot, over in Hornsey?’

‘Um, yes. And it’s former sergeant. I put my papers in. It’s plain mister now.’

‘You don’t remember me. PC Cartwright, Tony.’

‘Now you come to mention it,’ said Mickey, looking around him, puzzled.

‘Yes, you failed me.’

‘Sorry about that.’

‘No hard feelings. I did an advanced driving course and landed the area car. You probably did me a favour.’

‘Glad to hear it. But I don’t understand what’s going on here.’

‘The good rabbi was just explaining. Apparently, after your contretemps with our Eastern European guests, they gathered up their wounded and ran off through that council estate over there.’

‘But where are the traffic lights? The cones? The rest of the tape?’

‘They took that, too.’

‘WHAT?’

‘We had heard rumours, but we’ve never caught them at it.’

‘At what?’

‘They bring the traffic lights with them, in a van. Then they set up a fake set of roadworks. The tape makes it look official. Gives them a captive audience. They’re very well organized.’

‘So none of this …’

‘Apparently not, sir.’

‘But what about the fella with the knife? I mean, I …’

‘Now then, Sergeant, sorry, Mister French. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you the inadvisability of incriminating yourself. The way it looks to me is that with no victim, there’s been no crime. No crime, no complainant, no report, no problem. Unless, of course, you wish to make a complaint?’

‘Er, no, forget it. Thanks.’ Mickey turned to go. ‘Hang on, what about the baby?’

‘Ah, yes, the baby,’ said the PC. ‘Come with me.’

He led Mickey over to the side of the road where a small, crushed figure lay crumpled in a bundle of blankets.

He kicked it.

The blankets fell open to reveal … a life-size doll.

‘I’m sure they can afford another baby, sir. Mind how you go.’

Four

Then

‘You’re WHAT? You can’t be serious?’ Justin Fromby unscrewed the top of another bottle of Bulgarian Beaujolais and filled a dirty half-pint mug to the brim. He scratched his balls and adjusted his flaccid dick. His Y-fronts had seen better days.

‘Oh, I’m serious, all right. I have never been more serious in my life.’ Roberta Peel rolled over on her grubby futon, reached for a cigarette from a pack on the sticky glass-topped coffee table, lit it and drew deep.

‘But what about your work?’

‘It will be my work.’