To Hell in a Handcart. Richard Littlejohn

did you meet him?’

      ‘It was when I was at Tyburn Row. I was a young DC on the Great Harlesden Cheese Robbery. Ricky was covering it for the local rag.’

      ‘I vaguely remember that.’

      ‘It was bloody hilarious. They were the most inept bunch of crooks I’ve ever come across. It was an inside job. The foreman and his brother-in-law did it.’

      ‘How did you know it was an inside job?’

      ‘Elementary, my dear Roy. They’d tried to make it look like a break-in. The foreman claimed the thief must have got in through a side window. But when I examined the scene, all the broken glass was on the outside. You didn’t have to be Columbo to work it out.’

      ‘Did he confess?’

      ‘Not at first, only after we nicked the brother-in-law. You see, they hadn’t lined up a buyer. They’d half-inched it on spec. And there isn’t a ready market for several hundredweight of catering packs of processed cheese. The brother-in-law tried knocking it out round the pubs, but most of the landlords didn’t want to know. We finally felt his collar when he walked into one boozer carrying a piece of Cheddar the size of a breeze block and offered it for a fiver to an off-duty police dog handler, who was in there having a quiet pint. He’d stashed it in his spare bedroom and it had started to go rancid. He’d forgotten to turn off the storage heaters. You could smell it two streets away.

      ‘Ricky got to hear about it, I filled in the details and he wrote me up on page one of the Tyburn Times as some kind of latter-day Sherlock Holmes. It made the nationals. Ricky sold it to the Sun for £100 and gave me half.’

      ‘Did you take it?’

      ‘Yeah. I know I wasn’t supposed to, strictly speaking, but it wasn’t as if I was bent. Christ, you should have seen some of the coppers at Tyburn Row in those days. Bent as a pig’s dick, most of them. Sure, I pulled a few strokes, cut a few corners, cocked a deaf ‘un once in a while. But I wasn’t on the take like some of them, so I looked on it as a kind of reward. I took Andi on a dirty weekend to Southend with it.’

      ‘So that’s where you got the money from. Her old man went spare, I seem to remember.’

      ‘Yeah. Christ, it was like crossing the Corleones. The Bubbles can be just as grumpy when they put their mind to it. Insisted I married her. I was going to anyway.’

      ‘You always were a sentimental old fucker,’ Roy teased him. ‘Go on. Get out of here. On your way.’

      Mickey drove back to his mother-in-law’s detached house, a substantial Thirties mock-Tudor with added Doric columns on the front porch. It had been bought outright from the proceeds of her late husband’s kebab house empire.

      Palmers Green was where successful Greek Cypriots settled, just as the Jews had earlier colonized Golders Green when they started to make their fortunes.

      Mickey wondered where second-generation Romanian beggars might end up.

      ‘All fixed,’ he announced as he walked into the sitting room. ‘Let’s go home.’

      ‘Mickey,’ said Andi. ‘We’ve been talking. And we’ve had a vote, haven’t we kids?’

      ‘A vote?’

      ‘Yep. And we don’t want to go home. We want to go on. We want to have our holiday.’

      ‘Are you sure? Absolutely sure?’

      ‘Uh-huh.’

      ‘Terry? Katie?’

      ‘Sure, Dad. It was unanimous,’ Katie walked towards him and gave him a hug.

      ‘Mickey, it’s all bought and paid for. You’ve worked hard for this. We’ve all been looking forward to it.’

      ‘Ma?’ he said, looking at his mother-in-law.

      ‘I tried to talk them out of it, Mickey. But you know my daughter. Determined, like her father, God rest his soul.’

      Mickey smiled. ‘OK, then. Let’s go.’

      They got back in the Scorpio. Mickey slipped his favourite Blues Brothers tape into the cassette deck and pulled on his Ray-Bans.

      ‘Right, then. It’s sixty miles to Goblin’s Holiday World. It’s getting dark and we’re wearing sunglasses. Hit it.’

      Their laughter was drowned out by Sam and Dave.

      It was as if nothing had happened.

      They weren’t to know then that nothing would ever be the same again.

       Seven

       Then

      As a graduate entrant, with an honours degree in law, Roberta Peel sailed through the Metropolitan Police training school at Hendon. Next stop was Bramshill, the officers’ academy. She had been singled out for fast-track promotion. But for the time being she found herself as a probationary WPC, stationed at Tyburn Row, attached to the juvenile bureau.

      It was a typical old red-brick London nick, the sort of place Dixon of Dock Green would have recognized, scheduled for closure in two years on the planned amalgamation of three divisions in a purpose-built new station.

      WPC Peel was working the night-shift, sipping tea and reading the Guardian, when she was summoned to the custody area. Another constable, Eric Marsden, had brought in a 15-year-old boy on a charge of malicious wounding.

      He was a wiry, black youth, about 5ft 9ins, with an ebony complexion and afro haircut. He wore a leather bomber jacket, plain green T-shirt, flared denims and a pair of red Kickers.

      He was being held in an adult cell, as there were no separate juvenile facilities. Roberta could see he had clearly been roughed up.

      Eric Marsden was a beat cop of the old ‘clip ’em round the ear’ school. Except that he didn’t always confine himself to clips round the ear. The boy had a split lip and there were signs of swelling around his right eye. As Roberta entered his cell, the boy was clutching his ribs.

      It was alleged that he was part of a gang involved in a fight with some local white skinheads outside a chip shop. One of the white youths had been slashed with a blade and Marsden had recovered a knife which had been bagged and was awaiting a fingerprints examination. The white youth had identified the boy in custody as his assailant.

      ‘Are you all right?’ she asked him.

      The boy stared at the floor.

      ‘Who did this to you? Was it the arresting officer?’

      ‘No it fucking wasn’t,’ a cockney baritone voice boomed. Roberta turned to discover Eric Marsden looming up behind her. He was a big man, 6ft 1ins, a couple of stone overweight.

      ‘You better watch that mouth of yours, my love.’

      ‘I am not your love. I am the juvenile officer responsible for this suspect’s well-being. I am trying to establish the truth here.’

      ‘He’s been in a gang fight. You should get your facts right, sweetheart, before you go making allegations.’

      ‘I am not making any allegations. I am making inquiries.’ She decided to let the sweetheart pass for now.

      ‘Well you can start by inquiring as to what his fucking name is, for a start. I’m going to the canteen. We can’t interview him until his parents or a responsible adult get here. And that can’t happen until we establish exactly who he is. He’s all yours, darling.’

      ‘I am not your darling, either.’

      ‘I suppose a gobble’s out of the question?’