‘I warn you, ladies, if you get a taste for Eau d’Ego, you are never going to be called a cheap date again. When this marvellous perfume goes on sale in the shops, it will have a recommended retail price of forty-nine pounds ninety-five. Now, I’m not expecting you to pay forty-nine pounds ninety-five tonight. After all, you’ve not seen the advertising campaign, you’ve not read all the magazines raving about it, you’ve not seen the effect it has on me. All you’ve got is my word. And if I tell you that the wife helped herself to a bottle and I’ve gone home every night since, that should tell you something!’ He winked. I winced.
‘I’m not even asking you to pay half-price for the privilege of wearing this fragrance. Ten pounds, that’s all. For only a tenner, you can be among the first women to wear a perfume that’s destined to be the scent of the stars. Now, when my hammer falls for the third time, my assistants will have their eagle eyes peeled and the first fifty hands in the air will be given this exclusive opportunity.’ This time, there was no pause. The hammer banged once, twice, three times. The audience proved Pavlov’s theory of stimulus-response, the hands high above their heads as soon as the hammer hit.
All the assistants ran around distributing perfume and grabbing tenners. Terence seemed to be doing exactly the same as everyone else. At least, I couldn’t see any difference. I began to wonder if I was wasting my time.
The salesman had moved on from the perfume.
Now, he was putting together bundles of items. I reckoned I could buy their equivalent down any high street in the land for less than they were asking. But common sense had died somewhere in the salesman’s pitch, and he had stomped the corpse into the dust with his patter. They were fighting to be allowed to pay over the odds for crap that would explode, disintegrate, tarnish, break or all of the above within weeks.
The hysteria rose as he went through the charade of selling serious bargain lots to five handpicked mug punters. I had to admire his style as he relieved them of between a hundred and fifty and three hundred pounds for bundles of goods they thought they’d bought at a huge discount. I wouldn’t mind betting that at the end of the sale, they’d find that they hadn’t been granted the special lots at all. All they’d get would be goods worth rather less than they’d paid, and a wide-eyed assurance that the parcel they’d ‘bought’ had been sold to that (non-existent) man standing right behind them…I was watching carefully, and I’d lost track of what was going on. The mug punters had no chance.
But the most extraordinary was yet to come. ‘Have I been good to you tonight, or have I been good to you tonight?’ the salesman demanded. He was greeted with a reasonably warm murmur. ‘Do you think I’m someone you can trust? You, madam — would you trust me?’ He went through half a dozen members of the audience, pinning them with his stare, demanding their loyalty. Every last one of them bleated a ‘yeah’ like so many sheep.
He smiled, revealing what he’d been doing with some of the profits. ‘I told you about my brother earlier, didn’t I? The one in import and export? Well, he knows how I love to treat you people, so he’s always on the look-out for bargains that I can pass on to my customers. Now, a lot of these things come from outside the EEC, and according to EEC regulations, we can’t display them in the same way. So what we do is we make them up into parcels. Even I don’t know what’s in these parcels, because we make them up at random. But I can guarantee that each of these parcels contains goods to a value well in excess of what I’m asking for them. All I ask of you is that you take the goods home with you before you unwrap them. Not because we want you to buy a pig in a poke but because the contents vary so much. If the person standing next to you sees you’ve got a state-of-the-art food processor for a tenner and he’s only got a toasted-sandwich maker, a set of heated rollers and a clock radio, it can often cause jealousy, and the last thing we want is fights breaking out because some of our bargains are such outrageously good value for money. Now, I’m going to start with ten-pound parcels. Who’s spent money with me here tonight and would like to take advantage of my insane generosity?’
I couldn’t help myself. My mouth fell open. A couple of dozen people were waving their bottles of perfume in the air. Most of them looked like Giro day was the biggest financial event in their lives. Yet they were shelling out hard-hoarded cash on a black bin liner that could have contained a bag of sugar and a half-brick. I wouldn’t have believed it if someone had told me about it. Then, as the salesman moved on to fifty-pound lucky bags, I noticed a change in the pattern. It was hardly noticeable, but it was enough. For the first time that evening, I began to believe I was in the right place at the right time.
Chapter 13
I drove back to Manchester, replaying what I’d just seen, wondering what it meant. If I hadn’t been totally focused, I could so easily have missed the tiny alteration to the pattern. It had happened just after the fifty-pound lots had started. Terence had emerged from behind the platform with a black bin liner, just like all the others. Then he’d snaked through the crowd to a short guy in his early twenties with a red baseball cap and a black leather jacket. Even though the guy didn’t have his hand stuck in the air, Terence had passed over the bag in exchange for a fat brown envelope. It looked to me like it contained a lot more than fifty pounds, unless the guy in the red hat was paying in roubles.
They said nothing to each other, and the whole exchange took the same few seconds every other transaction had taken. Terence was back serving punters within the minute. But unlike the other mugs, the guy in the red hat wasn’t sticking around. As soon as he’d collected his bag of goodies, he was off, shouldering his way through the crowd towards the door, pulling off the red hat and stuffing it inside his jacket. I contemplated following him, but I had no wheels, and besides, I wanted to carry on watching Terence to see what else he’d get up to.
The answer was, nothing. For the short time that remained, he did exactly the same as the other floor men, dishing out black bin liners in exchange for crumpled notes, fending off punters who thought they’d not had the treat they’d been promised at the start of the evening.
Then, with bewildering suddenness, it was over. While the salesman was still speaking, most of his assistants switched their attention from the audience to the platform. With astonishing speed, the boxes that remained on the dais disappeared into the back of the van. By the time his closing speech was over, the platform was bare as my fridge the day before I hit the supermarket.
I worked my way back to the door, joining the punters who were slowly coming back down to planet earth to the depressing realization that they’d been comprehensively ripped off in a completely legal way with no comeback. By the time I made it outside the hall, the satisfied murmurs had turned into discontented mutterings, growing in volume as people began to examine the contents of their blind buying spree. My taxi was waiting, and I didn’t hang around to watch them turn into a lynch mob. Neither did the sales crew. As my taxi pulled away from the kerb, I saw the van and the two cars move across the car park. By the time the crowd got angry enough to do anything about it, the lads’d be halfway back across the Pennines.