Another drawback of Terence was his aftershave. Smelt like a blooming spice-rack, ponged out the whole car.
We didn’t involve him till the day of the job. Louis said less the boy knew the better, and I was with him on that. But blimey, if we’d answered all the questions he chucked at us, he’d soon’ve known more about the job than we did.
He wanted to know where we was going, he wanted to know why the three of us was dressed as coppers, he wanted to know if we was armed... coo, he didn’t half go on.
Eventually, Hopper told him to put a sock in it, with the additional sanction that, if he didn’t, Terence would get a mouthful of his uncle’s sock, with foot and boot attached.
But that only kept him quiet for a few minutes, then he was off on the natter again. But at least he had taken on board that we didn’t want to talk about the job. So he decided to delight us with reminiscences of his previous Work Experience instead. You know, this week he’d done with his mum on the old location catering.
So Terence burbles on about that for a bit. I hardly listen. Don’t care for the television much myself... well, except for the sport, obviously.
Mind you, young Terence’s got a ready audience in Milton. Every moment he’s not out on a job Milton spends glued to the telly. He knows all about all the shows, so he’s dead impressed that Terence has met all the people on this reality show his mum was catering for, Danger: Men at Work.
“Ooh,” Milton says, “I loved the one where they filmed in the fast-food restaurant. That waitress didn’t know they’d got the hidden cameras on her, did she? What a prat she looked. Do you know, Terence, if people have ever asked them to stop filming?”
“No,” the boy replies. “They all love it. Being on telly, showing what good sports they are, everyone likes that.”
Like I say, I’ve never seen the show, so none of this means much to me. But Milton got very excited when Terence shows him this printed pass he’d been given so that he’s allowed on the set or the location or whatever they call it. Pass is printed with Danger: Men at Work in big letters.
Anyway, the two of them are going on ninety-nine to the dozen, and we’re getting close to the police station what is our destination. So I tell Milton to stop the car, because now it really is time to tell Terence what his role is going to be in the evening’s proceedings.
And we have found a proper job for him, not just answering phones and photocopying, which I gather is what most kids on Work Experience do. Louis’s idea, needless to say. He come up with it soon as he heard from Hopper how old Terence was. He says, “Perfect. This could not be more serendipitous.” He likes that word. Blowed if I know exactly what it means, but I get the gist. Means on the good side of bad, anyway.
Louis’s planned for us to do the job at eleven o’clock. He says that’s the time the police are most stretched. There’s a lot of ugly stuff goes down when the kids, who’ve been binge-drinking all evening, get turfed out of the pubs. So every cop who can be spared is on the streets, trying to stop the paralytic youngsters from topping each other. Which means there’s less of the Filth in the station and those that are there tend to be preoccupied with emergencies.
It was one such emergency that Louis had planned to use as our cover. And Terence’s Work Experience would involve him being the centre of that emergency. He took his instructions like a lamb, I must say. Gabby he may have been, but the boy was up for anything. I mean, I daresay some kids his age might have objected to being covered with tomato ketchup and minestrone soup. Not Terence. He agreed without a murmur.
Now perhaps I should explain about the tomato ketchup and minestrone soup. With the ketchup you’re probably ahead of me — yes, it was meant to look like blood. But for the purposes of Louis’s plan, Terence didn’t just have to look as if he was injured, but like he’d thrown up over himself as well.
We done a bit of experimentation before we plumped for the minestrone. Back in the old days I remember best thing to use to look like puke was called Sandwich Spread. But could we find it on the shelves down Tesco’s? Could we hell. Then Hopper remembered something that’d been served up at his school dinners called Macedoine of Vegetables. He said one kid threw up in the playground after eating it, and you couldn’t tell the difference between what he’d thrown up and what they’d just all eaten. But with Macedoine of Vegetables we also drew a blank down Tesco’s. What’s happening to all our fine old traditional British foods? Louis even tried going a bit upmarket to Waitrose, but again no dice.
So it was a can of minestrone soup we ended up with. And to make Terence not only look but smell like he’d thrown up, Louis give us this idea of sprinkling the boy with parmesan cheese. Always niffs a bit of vomit, the old Parmesan. And, thank God, it was a stronger smell than the boy’s aftershave.
When we was just round the corner from the police station, Milton stopped the car (one he’d hot-wired earlier in Ladbroke Grove — we were only going to use the thing for this part of the- job, then abandon it). And we set about making Terence look like he was a kid who’d overdone the old booze and got into a fight. Wasn’t difficult. Boy was so scruffy to start with, he didn’t need much extra. Just the tomato ketchup as if it had gushed from his nose, minestrone soup down his front, and he was done.
Hopper and I splashed a bit of the same on our uniforms, to look like we’d been struggling with him, then we took our leave of Milton. His job was to go round the back of the station and hot-wire one of the Pandas ready for the getaway.
As we emerge from the car, Terence reaches into the pocket on his hoodie and pulls out a camcorder. Expensive bit of kit, no bigger than a paperback book.
“What’s that for?” asks Hopper.
“You don’t mind if I film what we’re doing, do you? You know, so’s I’ve got a record.”
“You film us,” says Hopper, “and the only record you’ll have is a criminal one. Will you get it into your thick head, Terence, that in this line of business the last thing you want is a record of what you’re doing. Because that could easily become evidence, and we don’t want to make the Law’s job easy for them, do we?”
The boy looked a bit crestfallen, but he didn’t argue and put the camcorder back into his pocket.
It’s at this point that Hopper and me give Terence his instructions and each of us grab him by one arm.
Now I reckoned, if there was a dangerous bit of the plan, we were going to hit it in the police station’s reception area. Louis’s view was that that time of night we’d have no problems. There’d only be a desk sergeant on duty and chances were they’d be busy with some other emergency. All we had to do was make it from the main entrance to the door leading to the staircase area, and our trou-bles’d be over.
We weren’t worried about the old CCTV. Hopper and I pulled the peaks of our police hats down, and we made Terence, for once in his life, wear his baseball cap the right way round. So his ugly mug was pretty well hidden and all.
Soon as we round the corner and can actually see the police station, we slot into acting mode. Terence goes back to full-on struggling and a bit of sozzled mumbling, while me and Hopper make with a few remarks like “That’s enough of that, young man” and “You’ll feel differently after a night in the cells,” for the benefit of any passing witnesses. We’ve agreed that, once we’re actually inside the police station, we’ll stay schtum. Don’t want to draw attention to ourselves, do we?
When we get through the door, we think it’s all going to be kushti. There’s a rowdy shout-off going on between three drunks and the desk sergeant, who’s far too busy with them to notice our little threesome. So we beetle across to the other door.