As I walked back towards the car park, I passed a small crowd gathered round a sort of covered pulpit, where a bloke in a blue suit and a short haircut was demonstrating a fancy device that could slice carrots, peel apples, chip potatoes and probably boil water for tea as well, all at the same time. His patter was non-stop, and he had the admiring housewives in fits of giggles. Soon he would have their hard-earned cash out of their purses, and maybe later on he would have the knickers off one or two of them as well. God, I really hate crooks.
Slow Kid was waiting for me by the car, trying to look cool and inconspicuous at the same time. He doesn’t like Sunday markets and car boot sales. He has bigger ideas, does Slow.
“Stones. Are we out of here or what? These places give me the creeps.”
“Sure, let’s go.”
He hopped in the car, pleased to be behind the wheel again. He’d been wasting his life as a boy racer when I found him. Burning up somebody else’s rubber on the old pit roads at the back of the Forest. But at least he’d been the best of them, and the fastest. That’s why they called him Slow Kid.
He set off across the grass eagerly, but soon had to jam on the brakes and change down to first gear when he got near the exit. You don’t get out of a Sunday market that fast — especially when everybody else wants to do the same thing. We got a glower from the special constable on duty as he waved us away. I’m sure some of these boys must be on commission. Get ’em in and don’t let ’em leave.
It being Sunday, we didn’t head straight for the pub. Instead, we met up with Dave in Medensworth’s top caff, the Riviera. Dave was already halfway through the contents of the kitchen, but there was probably a few crumbs left for us.
As soon as we were settled at a table, I lost no time getting straight to the point. This thing had been niggling me ever since Friday night.
“Okay. Spill it, Slow Kid.”
“What?”
Slow looked suddenly as if he’d like to leave, but it just so happened that he was sitting between Dave and the window, with me opposite him. He was trapped, and I wanted to know what was eating him. But he didn’t always get on with Dave, and maybe he didn’t want to talk in front of him.
“Dave, are you awake?”
“Eh? Yeah.”
“Fetch me a cup of tea then. And one of those Danish pastry things, you know.”
“Right, Stones.”
“And plenty of milk in the tea, but no sugar. Got it?”
“Yeah.”
Dave struggled painfully for several seconds to extricate himself from the narrow gap between the bolted-down chairs and the table. He seemed to have added several pounds to his already massive bulk while he’d been sitting there. One day he’d get stuck completely and they’d have to send for the fire brigade with cutting gear to get him out.
Dave might not look too bright, and his education definitely owes more to Teddy’s Amusement Arcade than King Edward Grammar School. A lot more time spent in greasy friers than the Dreaming Spires. Not the sharpest knife in the drawer, our Dave. But he does have a memory like an ox.
I watched him wander off towards the counter, then swerve with the grace of a drunken elephant to bring him closer to a tattooed waitress. You could see she was a Worksop lass. They look pretty much like Mansfield women, but they have a better class of tattoos.
Then I saw Dave drop her a massive wink. If women like that could blush, she would have been beetroot. Her biceps rippled alluringly, and a heart tattoo glinted. After food, muscle-bound women were Doncaster Dave’s major weakness. I’d be lucky to get my tea before the tannin ate its way through the polystyrene cup.
“Go on then, Slow,” I said.
“What do you mean, Stones?”
“I mean, what do you know about those people with the load of Reeboks? You recognised that lad with the flat-top, didn’t you? Right?”
“Yeah, I did,” he admitted. “His name’s Josh Lee.”
The name Lee made me think of a certain family of travellers who move around Nottinghamshire in small convoys of caravans towed by vans and flat-bed trucks. They park up on grass verges, disused forecourts, even school playing fields — any acre of accessible ground, but preferably belonging to a district or county council, because it takes that much longer for them to get moved on. It drives the local residents wild of course, being as how the travellers never seem to have to pay Council Tax, road tax or income tax. North Notts seems to get more than its fair share of them, and the Lees got a few lessons to teach blokes like me about how to stay the wrong side of the law without getting caught.
“Should I have heard of him, Slow?”
“No.” He hesitated again, but I wasn’t in the mood for kid gloves after entertaining thoughts about a knife in the guts. I could remember those dead eyes, and they were putting my stomach off thoughts of a Danish pastry.
“Let’s have it. Now.”
“Our Sean told me about Josh Lee. They came across each other in Lincoln.”
“Oh, right.” He wasn’t talking about a chance encounter while boating on the River Witham or admiring the architecture of the cathedral. Slow’s big brother Sean had recently done a spell inside for armed robbery, and Lincoln Prison was one of the local institutions favoured for a short break away from the hurly-burly of crime. Armed robbery is a respectable crime on the inside, the sort that gets you looked up to by all the petty thieves and twockers and Saturday night piss artists who get too handy with their fists and boots. Sean would have made acquaintance with influential types, and would no doubt have been offered a few jobs for when he got out. Did I say it was a break away from crime? More of a chance to make contacts, learn new tricks, and plan the next job. The good citizens who are paying for it all don’t know the half of it.
“Sean said Lee is connected with some of the big pushers. He came over real friendly inside, asking all sorts of questions, he was.”
“About what?”
“Oh, people Sean knew. Who was involved with what, you know. I guess it’s the sort of thing they talk about in prison.”
“Yeah, maybe. So did he offer Sean a job?”
“Well, yeah — I reckon he did. But Sean didn’t want anything to do with him. He said Lee was big trouble.”
“Why exactly?”
“Just the talk, you know. There’s stories about him. Tasty bloke, he is. Well, you saw him yourself.”
“Yeah. But how come you recognised him, Slow?”
“Sean pointed him out to me one day in Nottingham. It wasn’t long after he came out. Sean told me to stay clear of him. Well, you know what our lot’s like about drugs, Stones.”
The Thompson boys had just been kids when they were forced to watch their dad plumbing the depths. An addict himself, he’d made money selling third-rate stuff to kids the same age as his own and nicking money wherever he could get it, including the pitiful family allowance in his wife’s purse. He’d learned the trick of telling his customers that the stuff he was selling was ‘brown’. They aren’t so streetwise as they like to think round here, and they thought it was just another form of cannabis, until it was too late. By the time they found out ‘brown’ was heroin, they already needed it too much.
Sean and Slow, and their mum Angie, had lived among the degradation and despair and danger that Des Thompson had brought upon them, until his body finally disintegrated under the abuse and he OD’d. Slow didn’t need his mum to warn him about the danger of drugs. He’d seen it all for himself.