what, exactly, is that supposed to mean?’
‘It means that if these figures don’t show a serious upturn, you’re finished.’
‘See if I care.’
‘Oh, but you do care, Ricky. This is the last train to Clarksville for you, mate. There’s not a newspaper left in London would hire you and if you screw up this gig, there’s not another radio station would touch you either. Just you think on that when you’re diving headfirst into the European wine lake in ten minutes’ time. Think damned hard. Think about your bar bills and your monster mortgage on your funky little bachelor pad. You’ve got to raise your game. If we’re not up at least thirty per cent, back to where we were, by the next survey, you’re dead meat. You’ve got three months.’
Mickey French dropped Andi and the kids at her mum’s house in Palmers Green. They’d driven straight there, round the North Circular. It was nearer than their home in Essex. Andi and the children went inside to change out of their blood-spattered clothes. Andi stood in the scalding shower for a good ten minutes, scrubbing her skin with a loofah, scraping away every trace of the red-hot gypsy blood, which had turned cold and caked in her hair.
‘No, Mum, we’re not hurt. Yes, Mum, we’ll be fine.’ If she said it once, she said it a dozen times as her mother fussed and fretted, while at the same time maintaining a steady stream of strong, dark, bitter coffee and rich Greek pastries.
‘No, we’re not going to the police. Mickey’s dealt with it. We just want to put it behind us. Please, Mum, let’s just forget it. We haven’t lost anything, we’re all in one piece.’
Terry stuffed his face with Nana’s filo fancies and relived the adventure for Andi’s mum’s benefit. If it was possible to embellish their ordeal, Terry managed it. He couldn’t wait to get back to school to tell his mates. This wasn’t a playground punch-up, this was for real. As far as Terry was concerned it had been as big a step on the road to manhood as his first crop of pubic hairs.
Katie hugged her grandmother and let it all come out. After a long soak in a foaming bath, she dressed in the new jeans and spangly boob tube she had been saving for the first-night disco at Goblin’s. With a bit of make-up she could pass for eighteen, she told herself. It made her feel better and helped her forget.
Mickey took the car to his cousin Roy’s body shop in Crouch End. Roy replaced the broken window and rear tailgate lock with identical parts from another Scorpio, which he had towed in at the request of the police and was in the process of cannibalizing. It had been written off when it was wrapped around Crouch End clock tower by a team of joy-riders.
Roy said he agreed with Ricky Sparke’s last caller that day. They should set the dogs on these bastards. You couldn’t move in north London for gangs of gypsies, begging, mugging, and burgling.
To make matters worse, Roy complained, the local council had spent a fortune housing them, yet his sister had been on the waiting list for twelve years without getting any nearer a ground-floor flat.
Mickey shrugged. He was all angered out.
‘He’s a mate of yours, isn’t he?’
‘Who?’
‘That Ricky Sparke.’
‘Yeah. I’ve known him for years.’
‘How 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,
