To Hell in a Handcart. Richard Littlejohn

you failed me.’

      ‘Sorry about that.’

      ‘No hard feelings. I did an advanced driving course and landed the area car. You probably did me a favour.’

      ‘Glad to hear it. But I don’t understand what’s going on here.’

      ‘The good rabbi was just explaining. Apparently, after your contretemps with our Eastern European guests, they gathered up their wounded and ran off through that council estate over there.’

      ‘But where are the traffic lights? The cones? The rest of the tape?’

      ‘They took that, too.’

      ‘WHAT?’

      ‘We had heard rumours, but we’ve never caught them at it.’

      ‘At what?’

      ‘They bring the traffic lights with them, in a van. Then they set up a fake set of roadworks. The tape makes it look official. Gives them a captive audience. They’re very well organized.’

      ‘So none of this …’

      ‘Apparently not, sir.’

      ‘But what about the fella with the knife? I mean, I …’

      ‘Now then, Sergeant, sorry, Mister French. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you the inadvisability of incriminating yourself. The way it looks to me is that with no victim, there’s been no crime. No crime, no complainant, no report, no problem. Unless, of course, you wish to make a complaint?’

      ‘Er, no, forget it. Thanks.’ Mickey turned to go. ‘Hang on, what about the baby?’

      ‘Ah, yes, the baby,’ said the PC. ‘Come with me.’

      He led Mickey over to the side of the road where a small, crushed figure lay crumpled in a bundle of blankets.

      He kicked it.

      The blankets fell open to reveal … a life-size doll.

      ‘I’m sure they can afford another baby, sir. Mind how you go.’

       Four

       Then

      ‘You’re WHAT? You can’t be serious?’ Justin Fromby unscrewed the top of another bottle of Bulgarian Beaujolais and filled a dirty half-pint mug to the brim. He scratched his balls and adjusted his flaccid dick. His Y-fronts had seen better days.

      ‘Oh, I’m serious, all right. I have never been more serious in my life.’ Roberta Peel rolled over on her grubby futon, reached for a cigarette from a pack on the sticky glass-topped coffee table, lit it and drew deep.

      ‘But what about your work?’

      ‘It will be my work.’

      ‘I mean, the law centre. You can’t turn your back on that.’

      ‘I can do whatever I please, or do you only pretend to believe in women’s lib?’

      ‘Of course not. That’s not fair. You know I’m committed to the Project. That’ s why I’m doing it.’

      ‘But, the police, for God’s sake. They’re the enemy. You’ve always agreed on that. You saw what they did to the gay rights marchers. You were on that picket line at the power station. They’re animals, pigs.’

      ‘Precisely,’ Roberta replied with a self-satisfied smirk. ‘And what do you do with animals?’

      ‘Liberate them?’

      ‘Don’t be daft, they’re not smoking beagles or laboratory rats.’

      ‘What then?’

      ‘You train them.’

      ‘Train them?’

      ‘Haven’t you ever heard the expression, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em?’

      ‘Sure.’

      ‘Well, we’re never going to beat them. Not by marching and demonstrating. That’s for students and idealistic dreamers. It’s waning in public.’

      ‘But we’ve had some successes.’

      ‘Such as? A few occupations, petitions? Stopping the traffic outside the Old Bailey? Gestures. You can’t beat the system from without. You have to be within it to make any real difference. We have got to capture the institutions.’

      ‘But that could take years.’

      ‘About twenty, I reckon. Maybe twenty-five years at the outside.’

      ‘But that’s an entire lifetime.’

      ‘Only if you’re in your twenties. Look at the bigger picture, Justin. You’ve got a brain, use it. Ask yourself who, eventually, is going to have the biggest influence on the way society works – a 45-year-old overgrown student activist, pissing around on the fringes? A middle-aged trades union leader, locked outside the factory gates? A 45-year-old journalist churning out agitprop bollocks in a small circulation revolutionary newspaper on sale outside Woolworth’s? A 45-year-old lawyer up to his arse in housing benefit applications and claims for wrongful arrest? Or a 45-year-old judge, a 45-year-old Cabinet minister, a 45-year-old editor of a national newspaper, a 45-year-old Commissioner of Police?’

      ‘Hmm,’ mused Justin, downing his rough red wine and pouring another from the bottle on the mantelpiece, perched next to a six-inch bust of Karl Marx, under the watchful eye of a Che Guevara poster on the voguish mud-brown wall. He wiped a tumbler with his discarded T-shirt, filled the glass and handed it to Roberta, still lying naked on the futon.

      Two middle-class kids with law degrees, fresh out of university, sharing a top-floor bedsit in shabby Tufnell Park, their lives stretching out before them. It was a nowhere district between the Holloway Road and Kentish Town, north London, a tube station between King’s Cross and Finchley Central, two and sixpence, Golders Green on the Northern Line. And it didn’t have a park.

      Roberta was plain, but that’s the way she liked it. At 5ft 7ins, she was stocky, not fat, with full hips and firm tits like rugby balls, and had nipples you could hang a child’s swing on. She favoured kaftans and sensible shoes. Daddy was a vicar, the Rev Robert Peel, in an affluent part of Surrey. He had wanted a son, so Roberta was named for him. Mummy something in the WI, a parish councillor and magistrate. Roberta was an only child and she was pampered, at least to the fullest extent of a parson’s C of E stipend.

      They were thrilled when she left her all-girls grammar school and went off to university to study law. Roberta was sad to leave St Margaret’s, not because she was loath to shed the shackles of school. She had a crush on the games mistress.

      Justin was the son of Edward Fromby, sole proprietor of Fromby & Fromby, the biggest retail coal merchant in Nottinghamshire, and, as he always referred to her at the Round Table cheese and wine evenings, his lady wife Mary.

      Justin was christened Edward Albert Fromby, like his father, his grandfather and his father before him. Mr Fromby Snr wanted his only son to follow him into the coal and smokeless fuel business. But Edward Jnr persuaded him that the discovery of North Sea oil and gas would spell the end of the retail coal business.

      After the miners’ strikes of 1972 and 1974, no government was ever going to allow the nation to be almost wholly dependent on a dwindling resource subject to frequent interruption on the whim of a union run by Communists. He was very convincing. Secretly young Edward admired the Communists who ran the National Union of Mineworkers, but was too scared of his father to mention the fact.

      Edward Fromby Snr was nothing if not a pragmatic man. ‘I’m nothing if not a pragmatic man,’ he said frequently. ‘You don’t succeed in the retail