To Hell in a Handcart. Richard Littlejohn

the spinal injury unit at Stoke Mandeville, but he was out of the game in plaster and traction and therapy for the best part of nine months.

      They offered him counselling, but Mickey declined politely. He would have declined impolitely had they insisted.

      Some time afterwards, he was talking about it with Ricky Sparke over a couple of large ones in Spider’s Bar, a downstairs drinker in Soho, run by a dubious Irishman called Dillon.

      ‘You know the worst thing about it, Rick?’

      ‘The pain?’

      ‘Nah, nothing like that.’

      ‘What then?’

      ‘Michael Winner.’

      ‘Michael Winner, what’s he got to do with it?’

      ‘He runs this police trust thing, for coppers who get shot on the job.’

      ‘And?’

      ‘Well, I’m lying there in Stoke Mandeville, minding my own, head down in a George V Higgins, more plaster than Paris, and in walks Winner with a posse of Fleet Street’s finest and a couple of film crews from the TV. He’s come to present me with an award.’

      ‘That must have been nice for you.’

      ‘I’d have done a runner but I couldn’t move. And the next thing I knew, he was on me. All that cigar smoke, all those dinners. After he’d gone I asked the nurse to give me a bed-bath – though it would have taken a fortnight in a Jacuzzi full of Swarfega to do the job properly.’

      Dillon sent over a couple of glasses of his own special concoction – Polish spirit and schnapps marinaded with chilli peppers for a month in the deep freeze.

      They swallowed the glutinous liquid whole, Eastern European-style. It was the only way. Otherwise it could strip the enamel off your teeth. If there had been a fireplace they would have thrown their glasses into it. There wasn’t, fortunately, just a battered sofa where the fireplace would have been, containing an actor who used to be in a cat food commercial sleeping off a three-day hangover.

      ‘Actually, Winner wasn’t the worst thing, mate,’ said Mickey, as the drink brought about its inevitable melancholic metamorphosis.

      ‘No? What’s worse than Michael Winner?’

      ‘Not much, it has to be said. But it wasn’t just being shot. I half-expected that. It wasn’t even Philpott walking on a technicality, much as that churned my guts. It was the way his brief told it, made it sound as if we’d planted the gun on him. He painted Philpott as the victim in all this and us as the villains of the piece. That’s what hurt.’

      ‘First thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers. That was what Shakespeare wrote, if my O-level English serves me. Hal to Dick in Henry the Something, part, oh I dunno, let’s have another drink,’ Ricky mumbled.

      ‘Fromby.’

      ‘Eh?’

      ‘Fromby. Philpott’s brief. Smug, self-righteous bastard. Justin fucking Fromby.’

      ‘Mickey. Mickey. Mick-ee!’ Andi prodded him in the ribs. ‘Wake up, Mickey, the traffic’s moving.’

      ‘What? Oh, sure. I’m sorry love, I was miles away,’ he replied, easing the Scorpio into Drive and resuming their journey.

      ‘Anywhere nice?’ she asked.

      ‘Nowhere I’d want to take you and the kids,’ he said. ‘Nowhere I want to go again in a hurry.’

      Mickey checked his watch, a silver Rolex presented to him at his leaving do. Mickey joked it was the best fake Rolex he’d ever seen. Everyone laughed, although he noticed the detective in charge of the whip-round could only manage an embarrassed grin. Mickey didn’t ask and he didn’t check subsequently, either. It was the thought. And the watch told the time and hadn’t gone rusty, not like some of the moody kettles he’d seen over the years.

      ‘Wossamatter, Dad, why aren’t we moving?’ Terry asked, looking up from his Gameboy.

      Mickey explained that the annual festival of digging up the roads used to run from February until the end of the financial year at the start of April. Now you got roadworks all year round, like strawberries. They used to be seasonal, too. That’s progress.

      On Rocktalk 99FM, Ricky Sparke was back-announcing ‘The Guns of Brixton’ by the Clash prior to reading out another bunch of delays. He could only hope to scratch the surface. So many roadworks, so little time. He hadn’t even mentioned the little local difficulty Mickey currently found himself in. Any delay less than an hour was hardly worth the bother any more. People had come to expect it.

      Still, that was then. Whenever he felt bitter, Mickey took stock of his life. He was at least alive, he had a reasonable pension, around £25,000 a year, which he supplemented driving Ricky Sparke around and doing the odd job for a local chauffeur firm. He had a beautiful wife, two smashing kids and his mortgage was paid off. And now they were on their way to Goblin’s Holiday World. Life could be very much worse.

      Now they were on the move again, through the wastelands of north-east London on a new swathe of road for which hundreds of solid, Victorian artisans’ cottages had given their lives.

      There were GATSO speed cameras every eight hundred yards or so, rigidly enforcing a totally unnecessary 40 mph speed limit. Even though Mickey knew the odds were that only about ten per cent of them were likely to contain any film, he wasn’t taking any chances and drove at a constant 39 mph in the middle lane. He didn’t need any more points on his licence and, anyway, they were bringing in the new digital cameras which didn’t need film, nicked you for fun.

      Driving was what he did for a living these days. How else was Ricky Sparke going to get home from Spider’s of an evening without getting mugged or arrested if Mickey and his Scorpio were off the road?

      Either side of him, cars, vans and lorries hurried by, accompanied by a flashing of camera bulbs which would have done credit to the paparazzi outside a West End premiere. Their drivers saw spot fines and suspensions as an occupational hazard, in much the same way old-time villains did their bird without complaint even if they’d been fitted up. If they get caught this time, it’s outweighed by all the times they weren’t. It comes with the turf, or, rather, the tarmac.

      Mickey couldn’t see the point. In a mile or two the shiny new freeway would end abruptly and all three lanes would be funnelled into two, then one. Why risk three points and a couple of hundred quid just to be two or three minutes earlier to the traffic lights or next set of roadworks?

      He plucked another wine gum from the packet on the dashboard and popped it in his mouth. Soon three lanes became two, 39 mph became 20 mph became 10 mph became stop. Mickey found himself at the head of a new queue at a red light, halting traffic at the start of a single lane, cordoned off with the inevitable cones and, unusually, tape, the kind police use to seal off a scene of crime.

      Suddenly he was aware of a swarm of bodies around the car, filthy water being sloshed on his windscreen, knuckles rapping on the side windows. Mickey waved them away to no avail.

      He could see the faces pressed against the glass, foreign faces. There must have been ten or a dozen, swarthy, olive-skinned young men with gold teeth in designer clothes, women in shawls and headscarves with babies in arms, thrusting their hands towards the car.

      ‘Money, money, give me money, English. Hungry. Help. Give. My baby starving.’

      ‘Dad, Dad, make them go away,’ Katie implored him in panic.

      ‘Don’t worry, darling, we’ll be on the move soon. Stay calm.’

      ‘But they’re frightening me, Daddy.’

      ‘Just ignore them,’ said Mickey, checking the central locking and securing the windows of the Scorpio.

      A woman threw herself across the bonnet, pleading, cajoling. ‘Money, English. Give. Hungry. Refugee. Money.’