The Mammoth Book Of Best British Crime, Volume 8

Top Hard Stephen Booth

The lorry I’d been watching was a brand new Iveco with French registration plates. All tarted up with flags and air horns and rows of headlights, it was like the space shuttle had just landed in a layby on the A1.

I’d got myself a position no more than thirty yards away, slumped in the driver’s seat of a clapped-out four-year-old Escort that had last been driven by a clapped-out brewery rep. Or that was the way it looked, anyway. It was one o’clock on an ordinary Monday afternoon. And all I had to do was wait.

The trouble was, the lorry hadn’t been doing very much. So all I had to look at was a red and white sticker on the Escort’s dashboard thanking me for not smoking, and a little dangling plastic ball that told me what direction I was going in. I might have been facing the soft south, but at least I was nicotine free.

I already knew a few things about this French truck by now, of course. I’d counted its sixteen wheels and admired the size of its tail pipes. I’d seen the sleeping compartment behind the cab, which contained a little ten-inch colour telly, a fridge and even a microwave oven for warming up the driver’s morning croissant. I knew that its forty-foot trailer was packed full of leather jackets, jeans and denim shirts — all good stuff that’s really easy to shift. And I also knew that somebody was going to be really pissed off about that trailer very soon.

Well, it definitely looked like a solid job so far — good information, and a plan that might actually come together for once. And that’s saying something in this part of the world. So all I had to do was sit tight and wait for the action. Yeah, right. It’s funny how things can start out really good and solid in the morning, and then turn totally brown and runny by tea time. It’s one of my own little theories. I call it the Stones McClure Vindaloo Lunch Rule. It’s as if the bloke with the beard up there likes a bit of a joke now and then. And this was going to be one of his joke days. Well, I might just die laughing.

Meanwhile, sitting in a tatty motor was in danger of ruining my image — the Escort just wasn’t worth looking at. Well, that’s the point of it, I suppose. There were an incredible 85,000 miles on the clock of this thing, which proved it hadn’t been handled by a used car dealer recently. The floor seemed to be covered in empty sweet wrappers, the mouldy debris of a cheese sandwich, and dozens of screwed-up bits of pink and white tissue. The inside panels looked as though they’d been trampled by a gang of miners in pit boots. The cover had fallen off the fuse box, and a tangle of wires and coloured plastic hung out of it, for all the world as if I’d just botched a hot-wire job. The car smelled of stale beer, too. Maybe a pack of free samples had split open some time. Or maybe a brewery rep just goes around smelling like that. You can take low-profile a bit too far sometimes.

In a word, it just wasn’t the sort of motor that folk round here are used to seeing Stones McClure in. My style is more poke than parcel shelf, if you know what I mean. More turbo charge than towbar. Not to mention a spot of F and F across the fake fur seat covers.

For the last few minutes, I’d been dozing a bit, clutching my plastic bottle of Buxton Spring Water in one hand and a half-eaten Snickers bar in the other. Don’t believe that means I had no idea what was going on. I’ve got this trick of keeping one eye half open at all times, like an old tom cat. It’s saved me a lot of grief on jobs like this.

One-fifteen. I sat up to take a quick look round. Along the road a bit there was a roundabout where the traffic was grinding its way on to the A614 towards Nottingham or heading west on the A57 into Lincolnshire. Apart from a roadside café, there was nothing around me in the layby — just empty fields on one side, and a bit of Sherwood Forest on the other. I mean there was nothing apart from four lanes of traffic thundering by on the A1, obviously. But the drivers weren’t taking notice of much. They were busy fiddling with their Blackberries and Bluetooth, or counting the miles ticking off as they hurtled towards their next meeting or their latest delivery of widgets. This is what vehicle thieves rely on. Nobody sees anything going on around them when they’re on the road.

Well, people never learn, do they? That’s my second rule. And thank God for it, because this is what keeps blokes like me in beer and Meatloaf CDs for life.

I glanced at my watch. Shouldn’t be long now. Earlier on, I’d watched the driver who brought the lorry disappear into the café, shrugging his shoulders at the smell of hot fat drifting from the window of Sally’s Snap Box. He was a short, thickset bloke wearing blue overalls and a five o’clock shadow. You could practically hear him singing the Marseillaise. This bloke’s load might be headed for Leeds or Glasgow. But it wouldn’t make it to its destination. Not today.

It was the load that was important, you see. Thieves don’t target brand-new trucks for their own sake. If you’re planning to cut a vehicle up for spares, you go for an old Bedford or something. There’s a big export market for old lorry spares. But if you’re nicking the load, it’s a different matter. That’s where the really big business is — at least £1.6 billion worth a year, they say. And people will do anything to tap into dosh like that.

For the sake of authenticity, I was tuned in to a local radio station on the Escort’s battered old Motorola. But the presenter had just stumbled off into one of those endless phone-in segments they seem to like so much. Grannies from all over the county were passing on tips for getting cocoa stains out of acrylic armchair covers, or swapping back copies of People’s Friend for a second-hand budgie cage. It was dire enough to kill off my remaining brain cells — I mean, the few that last night’s booze had left intact.

And then — bingo! An unmarked white Transit van slowed in the inside lane of the A1 and pulled slowly into the layby in front of the French truck. Action at last.

I have a really good memory for registration numbers, but the plate on the Transit was a new one to me. That was no surprise, though. It would have been nicked from a car park in Worksop or Mansfield some time during the past hour, and that was someone else’s worry.

From my position, I could just see a bloke jump down from the passenger side of the van. He had the collar of a red ski-jacket turned right up and a woollen hat pulled low over his face, making it impossible to get an ID on him. As soon as he’d slammed the door shut, the Transit pulled out into the traffic again and disappeared south.

I stayed low in my seat. I ate a bit of my Snickers bar. The chocolate was starting to melt on to my hand and my fingers were getting sticky. I wiped them with a windscreen wipe out of a little packet that I found in the door well. I would have stuffed the used wipe into the fold-out ashtray, but it was already jammed full with more crumpled bits of tissue, all yellow and crusty. Anonymity is fine, but I draw the line at catching some disgusting disease for the sake of camouflage.

The bloke in the cap was fiddling with something I couldn’t see, right up close to the near side of the Iveco’s cab. No one took any notice of him, except me. Then he looked round once, took a step upwards, and was gone from sight.

I speed-dialled a number on my mobile, then waited a minute or two more until I heard the rumble of a diesel engine and the release of air brakes. As I started the Escort’s motor, I glanced in my rearview mirror and saw a large figure emerge from the café. It was a bloke so big that he had to duck and walk out of the door sideways to avoid bringing the side of the caravan with him. He lumbered up to the side of the car, hefting something like a lump of breeze block in his left hand. And suddenly it was as if the sun had gone in. Oh yeah, meet my sidekick, Doncaster Dave. He’s my personal back-up, my one-man riot squad. A good bloke to have watching your arse.

Dave had been stuffing himself with sandwiches and cakes in Sally’s at my expense. Well, it’s better than having him sit in the car with me. He gets twitchy when there’s food nearby, and he’d probably enjoy the phone-in programme and laugh at the DJ’s jokes. And then I’d have to kill him.

“Come on, come on.”

Dave was starting to go into the monkey squat necessary for him to manoeuvre his way into the passenger seat, when the door of the café flew open again and a second figure came out. This one was dressed in blue overalls, and it was gesticulating and shouting. The sight of the lorry pulling on to the A1 seemed to infuriate him and he ran a few yards down the layby, yelling. Then he turned and ran back again, still yelling. This was far too much noise for my liking. And definitely too much arm waving. Even on the A1, he might get attention.

I could see Dave speaking to him, and nodding towards the Escort. The bloke came eagerly towards me, and I sighed as I wound down the window.

“Mon camion,” he said. “My truck. It is being stolen.”

“Let him in, Donc, why not?” I said. So Dave opened the back door of the Escort without a word. The Frenchman climbed in, and Dave squeezed into the front. The breeze block in his hand turned out to be the biggest sausage and egg butty you’ve ever seen, dripping with tomato sauce. The car filled with a greasy aroma that would linger for days. It didn’t go too well with the stale beer either.

The Iveco was already a couple of hundred yards away by now, and the Frenchman began bouncing angrily.

“What’s up, monsieur?” I said, as I indicated carefully before pulling out. I was waiting until I spotted some slow-moving caravans to sneak in front of. Getting on to the A1 from a layby is a bit dicey sometimes — you can easily end up with a snap-on tools salesman right up your backside, doing ninety miles an hour in his company Mondeo.

“We must follow the thieves. They steal my truck.”

“Dear, oh dear. It happens all the time, you know. You can’t leave anything unattended round here.”

“Hurry, hurry! You are too slow.”

I shook my head sadly. Well, there you go. You give somebody a lift, do them a favour, and the first thing out of their mouths is criticism of your driving. The world is so unfair.

“It’s always been like this, you know,” I said helpfully. “This bit of the A1 was the Great North Road. You know, where Dick Turpin used to hang out? You’ve heard of Dick Turpin, have you, monsieur?”

“Comment? What?”

“Highwayman, you know. Thief.”

This is straight up, too. Well, the original Great North Road is a bit to the east, but it’s been well and truly bypassed now. Some of it has deteriorated to a track, fit only for horses and trail bikes. But make no mistake. This whole area is still bandit country.

“Then there was Robin Hood,” I said. “Robbing from the rich to give to the poor. Oh, and we had Mrs Thatcher, of course, who got it the wrong way round.”

The Frenchman wasn’t listening to my tour guide bit. He was gesturing down past the gear lever towards the bottom of the fascia, where there was my mobile phone, a pile of music CDs, and the world’s worst in-car stereo system.

“Yeah, you’re right, it’s crap, this local radio. Le crap, eh? I don’t know why I listen to it. What do you fancy then, mate? Some Sacha Distel maybe?”

I poked among the CDs as if I was actually looking for Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head. It wasn’t likely to be there. Not unless there was a cover version by Enya or UB40. Whoever normally drove this Escort had different tastes from mine. No doubt about it.

“How about this? This is French.” I held up Chris Rea’s Auberge. “Auberge. That’s French, right?”

I slipped the cassette into the deck, and Rea began to sing about there being only one place to go. It’s really funny how you can always find Chris Rea tapes in sales reps’ cars. I reckon they have them so they can play “The Road to Hell” and feel all ironic.

“No, no. You must call for help,” the trucker shouted in my ear over the music. “Roadblock. Stop the truck.”

And then he reached forward, trying to grab the phone. Dave barely moved. He gave the Frenchman a little flip and the bloke hit the back of his seat like he’d bounced off a brick wall.

“Sorry, mate, but the signal’s terrible round here,” I said. “It’s all the trees. Sherwood Forest, this is.”

The lorry driver called me a cochon. I failed French O-level, but even I know that isn’t polite.

“Look, I’m really sorry it’s not Sacha Distel, but I’m doing my best, right?”

As we approached the big roundabout at Markham Moor, the Iveco was already halfway up the long hill heading southwards, growling its way past the McDonald’s drive-thru and the Shell petrol station. I could catch up with the lorry easily. No need for lights and sirens — which was lucky, because we didn’t have any.

But the sight of the red and yellow arched signs across the carriageway put me in mind of something.

“Hey, it’s a bit like a scene in that film, what’s it called? You know, with John Travolta and the black bloke in a frizzy wig. What do they call a Big Mac with cheese in France?”

Dave’s ears pricked up at the Big Mac, but he didn’t know the answer.

The Escort’s steering juddered and the suspension groaned underneath me as I twisted the wheel to the right and we swerved into the roundabout, across the A1 and towards a little B-road that leads past the Markham Moor truck stop. As we passed, I couldn’t resist a glance into the truck stop for professional reasons. On the tarmac stood two orange and white Tesco lorries, a flatbed from Hanson Bricks and a Euromax Mercedes diesel, all backed up against a couple of Cho Yang container trucks. There was a load of NorCor corrugated boarding, and even a Scania full of Weetabix. To be honest, though, I couldn’t see anyone shifting fifty tons of breakfast cereal too easily. Not in these parts.

The Frenchman started gibbering again and pointing to the main road, where the back of his lorry had just vanished over the hill.

“Non, non. Turn round. That way. The thieves go that way.”

“It’s a short cut, mate. What do they call a Big Mac with cheese in France?”

“Merde!”

Then he began to poke his finger at Dave’s shoulder. Well, that was a mistake. Dave stared at him, amazed, like a Rottweiler that finds a cat pulling its whiskers. His immense jaws opened and his teeth came down on the round, stubby thing in front of his face. It disappeared into his mouth with a little spurt of red, and he began to chew. The Frenchman pulled back his finger fast, in case it went the same way as that sausage.

We passed through a couple of little villages before I turned on to a road that was more mud than tarmac. A track led us over the River Maun, past some derelict buildings, through some woods, over another river and into more woods. The trees closed all around us now, dark conifers that wiped out any hope of a view.

But in the middle of the trees a space suddenly opened up on a vast expanse of wasteland — acres and acres of black slurry and weed-covered concrete. There were old wheel tracks down there in that slurry, and some of them were two-feet deep. This was one of our dead coal mines, whose rotting bodies lie all over Nottinghamshire these days — a memory of the time when thousands of blokes and their families lived for the seam of coal they called Top Hard.

Finally we ran out of road and pulled up by a series of slurry lagoons. These lagoons are pretty deep too, and I wouldn’t like to say what the stuff is that swirls about down there.

“Okay, Monsieur Merde. Out.”

The Frenchman looked from me to Dave, who helpfully leaned back to unfasten his seat-belt. The trucker flinched a bit, but looked relieved when the belt clicked open. He got out and looked at the devastation around him, baffled.

Well, this little bit of Nottinghamshire is no picnic site, that’s for sure. We were on the remains of an old pit road, where British Coal lorries once trundled backwards and forwards all day and all night. In some places there are old wagons dragged off the underground trains, filled with concrete and upended to stop gypsies setting up camp in the woods. But there are always ways in, if you know how. Up ahead was a bridge where you could look down on the railway line that had carried nothing but coal trains. The lines are rusted now, but the coal is still there, way below the ground. Top Hard, the best coking and steam coal in the country. Top Hard made a lot of the old mine owners rich.

Yes, this was once the site of the area’s proudest superpit. A few years back, when it was still open, a report came out with the idea of making it a Coal Theme Park, preserving the glory days of the 1960s. There would have been visits to the coal face, a ride underground on a paddy train, and maybe a trip to the canteen for a mug of tea. They had a dry ski-slope planned for the spoil heap.

You’d need a heck of an imagination to picture this theme park now. The buildings have been demolished, and the fences are a futile gesture. There’s just the black slag everywhere and a few churned-up roadways where they came to cart away the debris of a way of life.

The Frenchman stared at the lagoons, then turned round and looked across the vast black wasteland of wet slurry behind him. It would be suicide to try to walk through that lot. He shrugged his shoulders and waited, his eyebrows lifted like a supercilious customs man at Calais. Suddenly, his complacency annoyed me.

“Take a look at this then, mate. What do you think? Pretty, isn’t it? This is what’s left of our mining industry. Coal mining, yeah? It may not mean much to you. You grow grapes and make cheese in France, right? But coal was our livelihood here in Nottinghamshire, once. Blokes went down into a bloody great black hole every day and got their lungs full of coal dust just so that we could buy food after the war. You remember the war, do you? When we kicked the krauts out of your country?”

Of course he didn’t remember the war. He wasn’t old enough. Nor am I, but I’ve read a history book or two. I know we bank-rupted ourselves fighting the Germans, and it was the miners like my granddad who worked their bollocks off to get this country out of the mess afterwards. And since then their sons and grandsons carried on going down those bloody great holes day after day to dig out the coal. Decades and decades of it, with blokes getting crushed in roof falls and burnt to death in fires, and coughing their guts out with lung disease for the rest of their lives.

And this is what thanks they got, places like this and a score of other derelict sites around Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, Yorkshire. Maggie Thatcher betrayed us, the whole country let us down. Even our own workmates stabbed us in the back. It was 1984. Write it on my gravestone.

Somewhere north of Newark, the French truck would be picking up speed on the flat. In a few minutes it would hit the bypass and turn off westwards on the A46. Within the hour it would be in a warehouse on an industrial estate outside town, and it would be nothing to do with me at all. All thanks to Slow Kid Thompson.

Oh, I forget to mention Slow Kid, didn’t I? Slow Kid Thompson is one of my best boys. He’s got a lot of talents, but his number one skill is driving. If Slow can’t drive it, it hasn’t got wheels. Today, he’d just delivered our first big load, a job worth quite a few grand to us all. After years of doing small-scale business, shifting dodgy goods and re-plating nicked motors, we were finally moving into the big time. That Iveco represented the start of a new life.

“You’re lucky, monsieur. I’m feeling in a good mood.”

By now the Frenchman had gone as quiet as Doncaster Dave. I guess it had finally dawned on him that we weren’t going to help him catch his stolen lorry after all. Maybe he’d realized that there’d be no nice British bobbies rushing up to arrest the villains who’d ruined his day. No high-speed pursuit, no road blocks, no one to pull him out of the brown stuff.

Oh yeah, that’s another thing I forgot to mention — you just can’t rely on anyone these days. I call it the Stones McClure Top Hard Rule.