Dying Fall (10 page)

‘I know the rules,' Pogo said quietly.

‘And don't go thinking you'll get my leftovers, because there won't be any,' the tramp warned him.

‘Don't want leftovers tonight,' Pogo said. ‘I've got money.'

The other tramp's eyes narrowed. ‘How much?' he demanded.

‘Half a crown.'

‘You could buy two bottles of meths with that.'

‘I could,' Pogo agreed. ‘Or I could go into a proper pub and have a real drink – if I could find one that would serve me. But instead of doing either of those things, I thought I'd blow the money on a couple of bacon sandwiches.'

‘What do you want
two
bacon sandwiches for?' the other tramp wondered.

‘One for me, and one for you,' Pogo told him.

‘I don't know you, do I?' the other tramp asked suspiciously.

‘No,' Pogo agreed.

And it wouldn't make any difference even if you did, he thought. Tramps don't share things with their friends. Tramps don't
have
any friends.

‘So if I don't know you, what's your game?' the other tramp asked.

‘I want information, and I'm prepared to pay for it,' Pogo told him.

‘What kind of information?'

‘I'm trying to find out who set that bloke on fire last night.'

‘Why?'

‘Because I might be marked down as the next victim, and I want to know what to look out for.'

Any other explanation would have left the tramp unconvinced, but self-preservation was something he understood.

‘And that's worth a bacon sandwich, is it?' he asked.

‘Yes,' Pogo agreed.

‘How do I know I can trust you?' the other tramp wondered. ‘I might tell you everything I know, and all you have to say, to avoid paying me, is that it's not worth anything.'

How did we ever get to this state? Pogo wondered. At what point did we start to mistrust everything our fellow man said or promised?

But he knew well enough what the answer to that was in his own particular case.

‘I'll buy you a sandwich whatever you tell me,' he promised.

The tramp thought about it. ‘All right,' he agreed. ‘There was this lad.'

‘What lad?'

‘Young. He had very short hair. Almost like he'd shaved his head. And tattoos on his arms.'

‘And what did he do?'

‘Told me I was making the town untidy. Told me I should think about moving on.'

‘Nothing unusual about that,' Pogo said. ‘You should be used to abuse by now.'

‘But it went further than that,' the other tramp persisted. ‘He said if I
didn't
move on, he'd see to me.'

‘How?'

‘He said the best way to get rid of louses was to
burn
them out.'

‘When was this?'

‘Last week sometime. Didn't think any more about it until I heard what happened last night.'

‘Did you tell the police about this?' Pogo asked.

‘Course I didn't. Don't tell the police nothing.'

‘What I don't understand,' Pogo said, ‘is why, after all that, you're still here.'

‘It's hard work, moving on,' the tramp said. ‘Before you can do that, you need some food in your belly. But once I've got some, I'm leaving.'

And abandoning the rest of us to our fate, Pogo thought.

Still, he supposed, he shouldn't have expected anything else.

‘I've earned my bacon sandwich, haven't I?' the other tramp asked worriedly.

‘Yes,' Pogo agreed. ‘You've earned your bacon sandwich.'

Beresford knew very little about what went on in America, but what he
imagined
was that when gangs met up over there, they did so in clubhouses – which, in his mind's eye, were dark, dangerous places, the urban equivalent of the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang's hideout. The Whitebridge hard mods, on the other hand, had no such institutions, nor the finances to acquire them. Most of the time – if they had the money and had not been banned by the landlord – they met in pubs. Otherwise, their fall-back plan was to rendezvous outside one of Whitebridge's numerous chip shops.

There were half a dozen mods standing outside Joe's Friary as Beresford approached it. A couple of them were eating fish and chips out of funnels made from rolled-up newspaper, but the rest were just looking vaguely into the distance, as if they were waiting – and hoping – for something to happen.

And they seemed quite comfortable with their braces, Beresford thought, though his were continuing to make his shoulder blades itch damnably.

The group noticed him, and awaited his arrival with something approaching interest. Beresford, for his part, found his eyes involuntarily drawn to their steel-toecapped boots – which had the potential to inflict some very heavy damage – and wished that Woodend had given this particular job to somebody else.

As he drew closer, the mods fanned out, blocking his passage and making it impossible for him to keep an eye on all of them at the same time. The only course of action open to him, it seemed, was to come to a halt. So he did.

‘What's your name?' demanded a voice which came from just beyond the edge of his vision.

Beresford turned toward the speaker. He was nineteen or twenty, the DC guessed. He was a big lad with calloused, work-hardened hands, arms covered with badly etched purple tattoos and a scar above his left eye.

‘Don't you have a name?' the hard mod demanded.

‘Do you?' Beresford asked, feeling his mouth drying up.

The mod grinned unpleasantly. ‘Yeah,' he said. ‘I'm Big Bazza.'

Barry Thornley, Beresford thought. Worker at Lowry Engineering, and enthusiastic supporter of Councillor Ron Scranton.

‘So you're Big Bazza, are you?' he asked, as his heart went into overdrive. ‘An' is there a
Little
Bazza?'

Big Bazza scowled. ‘Are you tryin' to be funny?' he demanded.

‘No,' Beresford replied. ‘I was just askin' a question.'

Big Bazza seemed unsure of what to do or say next. Violence was always a good response to any situation, his expression seemed to suggest, but it might just be more interesting to let things slide a little more first.

‘That's Little Bazza over there,' he said, flicking his thumb in the direction of a shorter boy at the other end of the semicircle.

‘I'm Col,' Beresford said. ‘Not Little Col or Big Col. Just Col.'

‘Haven't seen you around here before,
Col
,' Big Bazza said, somehow making the last word sound like an insult.

‘Haven't
been
around here before,' Beresford said.

‘So why are you here now?' Bazza wondered.

‘It's where they told me to come when they let me out,' Beresford replied.

‘Where
who
told you to come?'

Beresford sighed, as if he were already becoming bored with the conversation. ‘The filth. They said they didn't want me goin' back on my old patch, an' that they'd have me if I did. They said they'd fixed me up with a probation officer in Whitebridge who was tough enough to handle me.'

‘Are you sayin' that you've been in prison?' the mod asked.

‘You catch on quick, don't you?' Beresford replied.

‘What did you do?'

Beresford shrugged. ‘Nearly nothin'.'

‘What
kind
of nearly nothin'?'

‘There was this Paki …' Beresford began.

‘Beat him up, did you?'

‘Hardly touched him. I think he must have broken that big nose of his when he fell over.'

There was a few seconds' silence, in which all the mods looked to their leader for guidance. Then Big Bazza nodded to Little Bazza, and the smaller youth stepped forward, holding his cone of newspaper out in front of him.

‘Fancy a chip, Col?' he asked.

T
he town-hall clock chimed eleven times, and in the Drum and Monkey, the Crown and Anchor, the Geo­rge and Dragon – and countless other pubs around the Whitebridge area – drinkers heard the dread sound of a bell behind the bar chiming in sympathy with the municipal timekeeper.

‘It's too late now,' those bars' bells were saying in a language that all the drinkers could understand. ‘If you've miscalculated the amount of ale you need to get you properly pissed – if you were so distracted by your chatter with your mates that you failed to order a last pint when you heard the first warning bell ten minutes ago – well, tough! The towel has gone over the beer pumps, and you've missed the boat.'

There were some drinkers, in all the pubs, who went hopefully up to the bar anyway, in spite of the bells' clear message. There
always
were, and always
would be
. They were doing no more than following a long tradition which stretched back into the mists of antiquity, when the very first licensing hours were introduced.

‘Any chance of one more quick pint?' they asked, smiling ingratiatingly and playing heavily on their commercial ‘friendships' with the landlords.

It had sometimes worked in the past, and the customers had watched with joyous hearts as the landlords slipped a glass under the towels and looked the other way while they were pulling the pint – as if the action had nothing at all to do with them.

But it didn't work that night. All the landlords that night were firm. All of them were absolutely resolute.

‘There are a lot of bobbies out on the street tonight,' they informed the hopeful boozers, ‘and I'm not about to risk losing my licence for one shilling and eleven pence.'

The landlords had not lied. There
were
a lot of bobbies out on the streets that night, and two of them – PC Roger Crabtree and PC Dave Warner – were driving around the area of the abandoned cotton mills even as the landlords were heartlessly turning down the last desperate requests.

‘Foot patrol!' Warner said in disgust, as Crabtree parked the car outside one of the derelict buildings. ‘We're on
foot
patrol!'

‘True enough,' Crabtree agreed.

‘But we're
motor
patrol,' his partner pointed out. ‘That's why we wear smart flat caps, instead of big pointy helmets.'

Crabtree chuckled. ‘Are your bunions playing you up again?' he asked innocently.

‘I don't have bunions,' Warner answered, with mock outrage. ‘Bunions are an old man's affliction, and I'm still a slip of a youth.'

A slip of a youth who would be twenty-nine next birthday and was already developing a beer belly, Crabtree thought, but he kept the observation to himself, and simply said, ‘As the duty sergeant pointed out, the reason we're issued with thick boots is so that we can walk if we have to.'

‘And we
do
have to?' Warner asked, as if still searching for a loophole.

‘Yes,' Crabtree replied firmly. ‘We do.'

Warner shrugged. He was not a bad bobby, and he supposed that if that was what the Sarge wanted, then that was what the Sarge got.

He stepped out of the car. The sky above them was cloudless, and the full moon bathed the old mill in a ghostly golden glow.

Warner shivered. ‘It's brass-monkey weather out here,' he complained.

‘Look on the bright side,' his partner told him.

‘What bright side?'

‘When all this is over, you've got a nice warm bed to go back to, haven't you?'

‘Yes?'

‘Which is more than any of the poor buggers we've been sent out to protect can say.'

‘I heard in the canteen that Councillor Lowry thinks all this is a waste of time,' Warner said, making one last-ditch stand.

‘And I heard in the same canteen that DCI Woodend
doesn't
,' Crabtree said. ‘Which of them would you prefer to cross?'

Warner grinned. ‘Let's get patrolling,' he suggested.

Beresford had only been a hard mod for a few hours, but had already decided that it was no life for a man.

The simple fact was that the mods were both bored and boring. What conversation they had was desultory at best. They didn't talk about their jobs – and why should they, when most of them were employed in mind-numbingly repeti­tive industrial tasks? They didn't talk about their home life, because the very reason they were out on the streets was to forget about all that. And they didn't talk about their prospects, because they were realistic enough to accept that – in a declining industrial town – they had none.

A few years earlier, they would have been conscripted into the armed forces, which would at least have taken them away from Whitebridge for a couple of years, and subjected them to a different
kind
of boredom, but the call-up had been abolished in the early sixties, leaving these lads with nowhere to go but along the streets of their own home town.

From the chip shop, the gang had drifted aimlessly to the shopping centre, but there was very little of interest there, since lads, unlike girls, considered window shopping to be soft. They had eventually found themselves outside the off-licence, where Big Bazza had held a collection, and – armed with the pitiful amount of money that the entire gang could stump up between them – bought a couple of bottles of rough cider.

They'd passed the bottles back and forth. Each member only took a small drink – they were all aware that their leader's eyes were on them – but even with moderation, the bottles were soon empty, and a listless apathy settled over the group again.

At eleven o'clock, the lights in the off-licence went out, and at ten past eleven Big Bazza said, ‘Well, I'm off.'

‘You're what?' asked another member of the gang, who, Beresford had learned, went by the name of Scuddie.

‘I'm off,' Big Bazza repeated. ‘Any objections?'

‘None,' Scuddie said with a grin. ‘I suppose if your mum says you have to be home by a certain time, then you have to be home by a certain time.'