There was a nasty silence. Uncle Willis was waiting for me to respond. Me, I was trying to convince myself that a member of my own family hadn’t just made such a suggestion. We both listened to the silence for a bit. It said a lot.
“It would be a really good move, I think,” said Willis. “For public relations. And, er, your standing in the community.”
It was incredible, but true. The old bugger had just threatened me.
“Tell you what, Uncle. I’ll ask around, see if anyone’s interested, shall I?”
He carried on as if I hadn’t spoken. “I really hope you’ll do it, Livingstone. I know how good you are with young people.”
“You must be mixing me up with some other nephew.”
“You were always like that. I remember you with your cousins, young Charlie and Frank. They always thought the world of you. And of course, you had a lot to do with young people in your job. I mean your proper job.”
“I don’t have that job any more, Uncle.”
“No, I know. But you were good at it, Livingstone. You always cared about the young lads you dealt with. Not like the others. Some of them are right bastards.”
“For goodness sake, that’s all in the past. It’s nothing to do with me now.”
“Maybe. But you don’t change, Livingstone. Not in yourself, you don’t.”
“Don’t you believe it, Uncle.”
I don’t like being reminded of my previous life. Like I said to Uncle Willis, it’s well and truly in the past. If I was going to let these things get to me, there are reminders all around me, all the time. DI Frank Moxon and DS Wally Stubbs, for a start, who seemed to be very much around me just now.
“You were good at that job. It was criminal what they did to you.”
Criminal? That was a laugh. It’s supposed to me that’s the criminal, Uncle, didn’t you know? But I didn’t say that. Well, you don’t.
“What’s this got to do with what we were talking about? I’m in a different business altogether now. I’m not in a position to help these kids that you’re on about, Uncle.”
“Yes you are,” he said. “That’s what I mean. You’re still you, the same Livingstone McClure. You still care about the youngsters. But now they’d trust you even more, wouldn’t they?”
This was ironic, but probably true. I just wished Uncle Willis would stop going on about my previous life. In a moment he was going to say it outright, and it would all come flooding back again, the years of hassle and frustration, and that final humiliation and betrayal. I wanted to forget it. Forget it, right?
“Are you still there, Livingstone? You haven’t put me back to the machine?”
“No, I’m still here, Uncle.”
“So this is what I was thinking, you see. That you’ve got the right background, the experience. But now you’re more in a position where the kids would take notice of you. Now that you’re not a policeman any more.”
There, he’d said it. A policeman. Stones McClure? Surely not. That was someone else entirely. It was some naive bastard who thought he was doing a worthwhile job for the community, until reality hit him like a baseball bat. That was some gullible pillock who reckoned he knew what justice was and tried to put it into practice until they squashed him with the rule book. That McClure was a bloke who turned a blind eye once too often to some poor, desperate sod nicking a bit of stuff to feed his kids, and who got shafted by his own side as a result, stitched up and stabbed in the back by a bunch of treacherous creeps in and out of uniform.
No, that was a previous life. I’ve been reincarnated since then. Born again, like one of those fundamentalist Christians. Yet I’m still dragging all the bad karma along with me, which is not the way it’s supposed to happen. Thanks for the memory, Uncle.
“Of course, you were a very good policeman,” said Uncle Willis, misunderstanding my silence. “You were the best detective inspector that Nottinghamshire has ever had.”
22
When we called back at West Laneton later that night, Slow Kid was in the driver’s seat of an ex-BT Combo van, and Lenny Hooper was in the back. Hooper was treating it like a works outing — his electronic tag didn’t allow him out of Bilsthorpe, as a rule, so a drive to West Laneton in the dark was like a coach tour to Skegness for him. He’d got fatter and balder and pastier than when I saw him last. I suppose that’s the result of sitting round the house all day getting under the feet of the wife and watching the Columbo repeats on the telly. If they ever try to tag me, I might opt for prison. There’s a nice one near here, at Ranby, where they provide you with all the facilities you could want, and you seem to be able to pop out any time you like.
Tonight, I’d made Hooper wear a woolly hat so that his bald head didn’t reflect the light. What’s the use of wearing dark clothes if your head stands out like a bleedin’ Millennium beacon?
“I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t need the money,” he said.
“Join the club.”
“If they find out you fixed my tag, my probation officer’s going to be right narked.”
“What’s up, Hooper? Are you married to him? It’s just a tag, not a wedding ring, you know.”
“I’m just saying.”
“Right. Well, you’ve said it. How easy will it be for us to get in there?”
“Dead easy.”
“What about the burglar alarm?” asked Slow Kid.
“No problem.”
Hooper sounded more confident than I felt, but I knew he had his little tool bag with him. This was a workman’s van, so why shouldn’t it have tools in the back, officer?
It was just after one o’clock in the morning. The residents of West Laneton were tucked up in bed. There are no street lamps in these little places, but the big houses like Old Manor Farm all have their security lights. Some are on sensors and come on when you walk into their range. But there’s a trend to have lights that stay on permanently, covering the drives in a nasty glare all night. These don’t make any difference if you’re going in the back way, where no one can see you anyway. Naturally, we were planning on going in the back way.
Ideally, you’d watch a place like this for a bit to see who comes and goes, and to get an idea how many people there are in the house. But you couldn’t do that in West Laneton. We could only see the entrance to the driveway of Manor Farm from one spot on the bend, and there are no pavements, no shops, no pub, not even a bus shelter to provide cover. You’d be blocking half the road and making yourself so obvious that you’d have every horse rider and Range Rover driver in the area ringing up to report your licence number for obstructing the highway. Right now, I didn’t even know if there were any cars in the garage at Old Manor Farm. But I had to assume there were, and that the owners were somewhere in the house, counting piles of money in their sleep.
“Drive round the corner then, Slow. Watch for a gate into those woods about half a mile on.”
We drove past the house of Mr Neighbourhood Watch. He’d left a couple of lights on in strategic places to convince blokes like us that he was sitting up all night with a shotgun on his knee. But I wasn’t worried about him. His type are only aggressive in defence of their own property. All hell could break loose next door, and he’d dial 999 with his head under the pillow.
Slow Kid pulled into the gateway and I cut through the chain of the ancient padlock that held the gate together. With our lights out, we crawled back through the woods towards the village. We left the Combo on the edge of the trees, and the three of us skirted a hedge and hopped over a narrow drainage ditch to get to the back of the garden at Old Manor Farm. There was patchy cloud and no moon tonight, but I was still nervous. This sort of thing just isn’t my scene.