‘Got you, you bastard.’
‘Resisting arrest, eh?’
‘You’re in big trouble, you are, mate.’
Their breath stank of triumph and sour milk. He tried to look round to see exactly who the breath belonged to, only to have his face rammed sideways into the pavement.
‘Don’t you bloody move, smartarse.’
‘You’re in big trouble, you are.’
He didn’t move.
‘All right, get on your feet.’
How could he do that? At least five of them were still kneeling on his back.
‘I said get up, cunt.’
He laughed. ‘You told me not to move.’
He shouldn’t have laughed. A fist (or something designed for a similar purpose) crashed into his kidneys. He gasped. These were hard men, he realised. They would smile at you and then knock the teeth out the back of your head if you smiled back.
‘Got a right one here.’
‘He’s in big trouble, he is.’
‘Come on, get up.’
They eased off his back — unwillingly, it seemed to him — and gripped him by the arms. All right, he thought. I’ll get up.
They marched him back towards the wine-bar, two in front, two behind, one on either side. Everything bar handcuffs. Two squad cars waited on the road, engines idling. The crackle of walkie-talkies. Blue whirling lights. A small crowd gathering. This can’t be real, he thought. This can’t all be for me.
They passed Vince skulking in a doorway. He made a face, powerless, apologetic, and shrugged. There weren’t any six policemen kneeling on his back and calling him bastard, Moses noticed.
They escorted him back through the door, down the stairs (past the two ragged holes and the telltale rectangle of clean white wallpaper) and into the bar. One policeman stood guard over him while two others held a conference with a squat middle-aged man who was, presumably, the manager. The few people left in the bar stared at Moses with open curiosity.
He heard the word prosecute. Heav-y. He exchanged a brief glance with the manager. The manager’s eyes were loaded with scorn and disgust. Oh, come on, Moses wanted to say. I wasn’t going to steal that thing. Who’d want to steal anything that corny?
‘He liked the place so much,’ the girl behind the bar was saying, ‘that he had to take a piece of it with him.’
Now that hurt. He remembered smiling at her earlier in the evening and he remembered her almost smiling back. She wouldn’t even look at him now. She went on polishing glasses, her eyes screened by her hair, her lips twisted in contempt.
Some kind of decision was reached. One of the policemen pushed him through the bar, up the stairs and out on to the street. A squad car drew alongside. The policeman spoke into his walkie-talkie.
‘— have successfully apprehended the criminal — ’
Criminal? Criminal? I’m not a criminal, Moses thought.
Oh yes you are, said the policeman’s face.
Moses was bundled into the back of the car. He had to sit between two policemen, his shoulders drawn together, his arms dangling between his legs. The lights of the King’s Road raked through the interior as they moved away. He felt a sudden sense of elation at the novelty of it all.
‘See that shop?’ he cried. ‘That’s where I bought these boots!’
The two policemen in front exchanged a glance.
What was wrong with them? Moses wondered. They’d made their arrest, the tension was over, why couldn’t they loosen up, have a bit of fun? He stared at them one by one, these four policemen who didn’t know how to enjoy themselves. Where was wit? Where was laughter? Where, if nothing else, was job satisfaction? He wanted to entertain them, but all his jokes fell on stony faces.
Then a frightening thought occurred to him. So frightening that he was almost too afraid to ask.
‘You’re not Peach’s men, are you?’
Both the policemen in the back stared straight ahead, expressionless, unblinking.
‘You know. Peach. Chief Inspector Peach.’
Not a flicker of recognition.
‘He runs a police station. Somewhere down south. Pretty small operation by your standards, I suppose.’
Still nothing.
‘You really don’t know him?’
‘Don’t know what you’re talking about, mate,’ the driver said.
‘Well,’ Moses said, ‘that’s a relief.’
But then he thought, they would say that, wouldn’t they. If they were Peach’s men. He tried another tack.
‘Where are you taking me?’
They wouldn’t say.
He leaned forwards and peered at the fuel gauge. Almost empty. Not enough to get to New Egypt then. Thank God for that.
‘Hey,’ he said, ‘careful you don’t run out of petrol.’
‘I think you’d better shut it,’ the policeman on his left said.
‘Oh, life,’ Moses exclaimed. ‘I was beginning to think you were all dead. Bit worrying being driven along by four dead policemen.’
‘Christ,’ the driver muttered.
The car swung left into a narrow backstreet. Now Moses knew he hadn’t been kidnapped by Peach, he began to relax, take in his surroundings. They passed a girl with blonde hair standing by the side of the road. She looked at him as if she knew him. He waved. The girl smiled. Her smile reached through the closed car window, past the taciturn policemen, and into Moses’s heart, where it glowed. There is nothing to beat the smile of a girl you have never seen before, he thought.
‘Peach offered me a job, you know.’ There was something about the silence of these policemen that made him talk. ‘He said I’d make an excellent police officer. No, magnificent, he said. What d’you think of that?’
Before anyone could reply they had pulled into the kerb and parked. Moses was manhandled out of the car and on to the pavement. Seen in the bleak light of the street-lamps, the policemen had hard closed faces, the kind of faces that believe in duty, violence, Margaret Thatcher, and a good chauvinistic fuck on Friday nights.
‘You know, I don’t like Peach very much,’ he laughed, ‘but I like him better than you lot.’
The grip on his upper arm tightened. He would have a bruise there in the morning — and it wouldn’t be the only one either.
*
He was escorted into a grey room with bare walls and no windows. Two policemen in regulation shirtsleeves stood on either side of a solid wooden desk. One was tall and sallow; a few strands of black hair had made the lonely journey across the top of his bald head. The other, stockier, had a bull neck, sloping shoulders, and a blur of ginger hair on his forearms. They had already taken his name and address (they had taken his belt too, and they had dropped it into a transparent plastic bag which made the belt look important and rather dangerous, and meant he had to hold his trousers up by hand). Now they were telling him to take off his boots. Try it sometime when you’re drunk. Hold on to your trousers with one hand and reach down for your laces with the other. Impossible. Either your trousers fall down or you do.
After two or three attempts he said, ‘I can’t.’
The tall policeman walked round the desk and stood over him. ‘Take your bloody boots off, Moses.’ The Moses was a sneer.