had radically different views of what constituted an appropriate redistribution of wealth. I folded the lease along its creases and said, ‘Looks fine to me.’
Dennis virtually snatched it out of my hand and shoved it back in his pocket, looking far too shifty for a villain as experienced as him. ‘Thanks, love. I just wanted to be sure everything’s there that should be. That it looks right.’
I recognized the key word right away. Us detectives, we never sleep. ‘Looks right?’ I demanded. ‘Why? Who else is going to be giving it the onceover?’
Dennis tried to look innocent. I’ve seen hunter-killer submarines give it a better shot. ‘Just the usual, you know? The leccy board, the water board. They need to see the lease before they’ll connect you to the utilities.’
‘What’s going on, Dennis? What’s really going on?’
Richard pushed himself more or less upright and draped an arm over my shoulders. ‘You might as well tell her, Den. You know what they say–it’s better having her inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in.’
I let him get away with the anatomical impossibility and settled for a savage grin. ‘He’s not wrong,’ I said.
Dennis sighed and lit a cigarette. ‘All right. But I meant it when I said it’s not criminal.’
I cast my eyes upwards and shook my head. ‘Dennis O’Brien, you know and I know that “not criminal” doesn’t necessarily mean “legal”.’
‘Too deep for me,’ Richard complained, reaching for another bottle of beer.
‘Let’s hear it,’ I said firmly.
‘You know how I hate waste,’ Dennis began. I nodded cautiously. ‘There’s nothing more offensive to a man like me than premises standing empty because the landlords’ agents are crap at their job. So I had this idea about making use of a resource that was just standing idle.’
‘Shop-squatting,’ I said flatly.
‘What?’ Richard asked vaguely. ‘You going to live in a shop, Den? What happened to the house? Debbie thrown you out, has she?’
‘He’s not going to be living in the shop, dope-head,’ I said sarcastically.
‘You keep smoking that draw, you’re going to have a mental age of three soon,’ Dennis added sententiously. ‘Of course I’m not going to be living in the shop. I’m going to be selling things in the shop.’
‘Take me through it,’ I said. Dennis’s latest idea was only new to him; he was far from the first in Manchester to give it a try. I remembered reading something in the Evening Chronicle about shop-squatting, but as usual with newspaper articles, it had told me none of the things I really wanted to know.
‘You want to know how it works?’
Silly question to ask a woman whose first watch lasted only as long as it took me to work out how to get the back off. ‘Was Georgie Best?’
‘First off, you identify your premises. Find some empty shops and give the agents a ring. What you’re looking for is one where the agent says they’re not taking any offers because it’s already let as from a couple of months ahead.’
‘What?’ Richard mumbled.
Dennis and I shared the conspiratorial grin of those who are several drinks behind the mentally defective. ‘That way, you know it’s going to stay empty for long enough for you to get in and out and do the business in between,’ he explained patiently.
‘Next thing you do is you get somebody to draw you up a moody contract. One that looks like you’ve bought a short-term lease in good faith, cash on the nail. All you gotta do then is get into the shop and Bob’s your uncle. Get the leccy and the water turned on, fill the place with crap, everything under a pound, which you can afford to do because you’ve got no overheads. And the Dibble can’t touch you for it, on account of you’ve broken no laws.’
‘What about criminal damage?’ I asked. ‘You have to bust the locks to get in.’
Dennis winked. ‘If you pick the locks, you’ve not done any damage. And if you fit some new locks to give extra security, where’s the damage in that?’
‘Doesn’t the landlord try to close you down?’ Richard asked. It was an amazingly sensible question given his condition.
Dennis shrugged. ‘Some of them can’t be bothered. They know we’ll be out of there before their new tenant needs the premises, so they’ve got nothing to lose. Some of them have a go. I keep somebody on the premises all the time, just in case they try to get clever and repo the place in the night. You can get a homeless kid to play night watchman for a tenner a time. Give them a mobile phone and a butty and lock them in. Then if the landlord tries anything, I get the call and I get down there sharpish. He lays a finger on me or my lad, he’s the criminal.’ Dennis smiled with all the warmth of a shark. ‘I’m told you get a very reasonable response when you explain the precise legal position.’
‘I can imagine,’ I said drily. ‘Do the explanations come complete with baseball bat?’
‘Can people help it if they get the summons when they’re on their way home from sports training?’ He raised his eyebrows, trying for innocent and failing dismally.
‘Profitable, is it?’ I asked.
‘It’s got to be a very nice little earner, what with Christmas coming up.’
‘You know, Dennis, if you put half the effort into a straight business that you put into being bent, you’d be a multimillionaire by now,’ I sighed.
He shook his head, rueful. ‘Maybe so, but where would the fun be in that?’
He had a point. And who was I to talk? I’d turned my back on the straight version of my life a long time ago. If Dennis broke the law for profit, so did I. I’d committed burglary, fraud, assault, theft, deception and breaches of the Wireless and Telegraph Act too numerous to mention, and that was just in the past six months. I dressed it up with the excuse of doing it for the clients and my own version of justice. It had led me into some strange places, forced me into decisions that I didn’t like to examine too closely in the harsh light of day. Once upon a time, I’d have had no doubt whether it was me or Dennis who could lay claim to the better view from the moral high ground.
These days, I wasn’t quite so sure.
MOON SQUARES MARS
An accident-prone aspect, suggesting she can harm herself through lack of forethought. She is far too eager to make her presence felt and doesn’t always practice self-control. Her feelings of insecurity can manifest themselves in an unfeminine belligerence. She has authoritarian tendencies.
From Written in the Stars, by Dorothea Dawson
Anyone can be a soap star. All you need is a scriptwriter who knows you well enough to write your character into their series, and you’re laughing
