A Good Year for the Roses (1988) Read online

  I motored on down the main shopping street, past Brixton Police Station where I'd spent so much of my working life and turned left into The Stockwell Road.

  I found a parking meter in a quiet back street and left the car. I walked through an estate of old LCC flats towards the clinic which was housed in a shop front close to the clock tower.

  I pushed open the glass door and stepped into the clinic. It had been partitioned with plywood into two offices. The front section where I stood was decorated with posters for concerts, unemployment benefits and the Labour Party. An old table was jammed into one corner and groaned with leaflets for various drug programmes and social security schemes. By the door stood an old tin desk, behind which sat a girl, her head bowed over the papers before her. I coughed politely. She ignored me.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said. She slowly lifted her head and looked at me. Her eyes were exactly the shade of lavender blossom. She stared at me but said nothing

  ‘Is Terry in?’ I asked, though I was perfectly sure he was. She continued to look at me with those beautiful eyes. Then she looked away. ‘In there,’ she said, with a sigh that almost broke my heart, and pointed to a door set in the wooden partition. I felt as if I was missing something. ‘Just go in,’ she went on. I sidled over to the door, knocked and opened it. I looked back at her, but once more her head was bowed over the desk. I stepped into a tiny cubicle and found Terry sitting behind the twin of the desk in the front office, his feet propped up on the top.

  He looked the same as I remembered him, only in worse shape. But I suppose none of us are getting any better. Terry was very tall, six foot three or four. His black hair was shot with grey, and hung long and greasy to his shoulders. There was a round, bald spot on the crown. He seemed to have lost weight in the time since I'd seen him and could ill afford to. His angular body was dressed in a battered camouflage suit, topped by an old leather flyer's jacket. On his feet were black, low heeled cowboy boots with silver trimmings on the toes and heels.

  He looked up at me as I entered. ‘Nick,’ he said. ‘You're a sight for sore eyes.’

  ‘Hi Terry,’ I said. ‘Not disturbing you, am I?’

  ‘I'm just meditating my man,’ he said in reply. ‘Looking into my inner being, on the quest for truth.’

  ‘I've tried it,’ I said. ‘And discovered you'll find as much truth looking into the inner workings of a chicken sandwich.’

  ‘Quite the cynic Nick. Lighten up a bit. You always were too uptight.’

  ‘Roger and out, Terry. I'll try my best. What's happening?’

  ‘Same old scam. Different players, is all,’ he replied. ‘The rehab business is not what it was. Once I was treated like Saint Peter laying hands on the junkies and performing miracles. Now you can get crabs by just looking at the little bastards.’

  ‘Is that how you got that?’ I asked referring to a large cold sore on Terry's top lip.

  ‘Fucking herpes,’ he said with a pained smile. ‘I got it from mouth to vagina resuscitation.’

  ‘Your life style is obviously as attractive as ever,’ I said. ‘Aren't you ever going to grow up?’

  ‘Grow up?’ he echoed. ‘Look who's talking. Private eye indeed. I can almost see the credits rolling.’ He dropped even further into an American accent. ‘The city is a bitch,’ he intoned.

  ‘Too funny for words,’ I said drily. ‘I've come to you for help. Are you going to come through or not?’

  ‘With what?’ he asked innocently. ‘Not drugs surely. As I said before, you used to be the expert on all that shit.’

  ‘Let's get a few things straight,’ I said. ‘The past is past, I'm clean now. This business I'm involved in is a one-off. I didn't want to take the case, if that's not too fancy a word for it. I'm helping someone who cried on my shoulder a couple of days ago. It's a coincidence that drugs are involved. I need some information. I'm a freelance now, just like you, and I can do with all the friends I can get. But it's a two way street. You help me now, and maybe in the future I can help you. Is that a deal?’

  I hoped I didn't have to ask. I was sure I could count on Terry. He owed me a favour from way back.

  It had been five or six years earlier. I'd been on the Stockwell Park Estate making routine enquiries about some case or other. Really I'd been killing time until the end of my shift on a hot summer's day, when I noticed a squad car parked in the entrance to one of the basement garages of a tower block. I'd walked down the ramp into the smelly darkness out of sheer nosiness. In one of the empty bays, I saw two uniformed policemen. One was holding Terry in an armlock, whilst the other was giving a black teenager a good kicking. The boy was lying in a pool of brackish water, doubled up in agony. Terry was struggling and screaming at the uniformed men, his words echoing uselessly between the concrete walls. I'd flashed my warrant card and cooled everything out. I got the boy to hospital where he was treated for broken ribs and a fractured jawbone.

  Of course charges were never brought against the officers involved. I had to draw the line at giving evidence against fellow coppers. I was a real establishment figure then. Nowadays the squad car would probably be stoned off the estate before the law could lay a finger on the kid. I wondered if that was progress.

  I'd kept in touch with Terry after that first meeting and we soon drifted into a wierd kind of friendship. I'd taken to calling into his flat after work for a beer or two or nine. That's where I'd heard his Vietnam stories and seen his photographic work bound in leather books, worn along the edges from constant handling. It was good I knew. Perhaps he wasn't a Bailey or Donovan, but his talent was obvious. ‘That seems fair,’ Terry said, interrupting my train of thought.

  ‘Do you remember that black kid we rescued from the flats that day?’ I asked. ‘Have you ever heard from him again? What happened in the end?’

  ‘In the end who knows?’ shrugged Terry. ‘He went back up north to his parents. I've not heard from him since. Couldn't stand southern hospitality, I guess.’

  Terry glanced at his watch. ‘Anyway,’ he said. ‘How about that lunch? There's a pub just round the corner. It's a bit dead, but at least we can talk in private.’

  He hauled himself out of his chair, picked up a packet of Marlboro and a lighter from his desk and made as if to leave. I grabbed him by the sleeve and asked. ‘What's the story with the girl outside?’

  ‘Who, Precious?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Precious, that's her name. Precious Smith. Did she give you the look?’

  ‘I think so, what's it all about?’

  Terry smiled, it transformed his face and I knew why he was my friend.

  ‘She's looking for love. It's as simple as that. Aren't we all? She gives everyone who comes in the look. But nobody seems to pass the test, you included. Trouble is no-one knows what the test involves. I hope she finds whatever she's looking for one day. She's got a lot to give.’

  I looked at Precious as we went out. At least I looked at the top of her smooth dark hair. She didn't bother to look up.

  The pub we were making for stood in a quiet, pleasant looking street. It was a typical Victorian gin palace left high and dry next to a sixties council estate. By the looks of it, the pub was in better shape than the flats. Even then, at lunch time, the boozer was quiet, just as Terry had said it would be.

  The interior of the huge, polished wood and cut glass saloon bar was sparsley populated. A few builders in paint-stained overalls propped up the counter. Some old dears sucked stout through their dentures. One or two punks stared into oblivion, and a couple of black guys played pool together. Someone was playing ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ on the juke box. But then someone was always playing it in every bar I was ever in. Terry and I went into the lounge where the music wasn't so loud. I bought two pints of lager whilst he inspected some sad looking sandwiches under a plastic cover on the bar top.

  I went over to a table as Terry purchased his meal. A tubby old boy dressed in his demob suit was snoozing over a pint two seats aw
ay, otherwise we could have been alone. Terry took a pull at his drink and then said, ‘It's really good to see you again Nick. Where have you been? Why did you never get in touch?’ It was a question I was going to hear a lot over the next few days. I didn't reply. He stared at me. ‘You know you haven't changed a bit.’ I was flattered, but wasn't so sure. I looked in the mirror every day.

  ‘Nor have you,’ I lied. ‘You still look as scruffy as ever.’ At least that was true. In the light of the pub he looked drawn and ill, and he'd missed some stubble when he'd shaved that morning.

  He laughed aloud. ‘Just because you used to ponce about in all that natty gent's suiting, you thought you were the business, didn't you? Well you're no better now, look at the state of you.’

  ‘I've been grafting,’ I protested. ‘Decorating and shit. I didn't expect to be working so soon.’

  We were almost back on our old footing, and I was relieved. As we chatted and drank, I discovered that he knew about the shooting I'd been involved in, and he could hardly restrain his laughter as I told him the whole story.

  ‘Go ahead, Terry,’ I said. ‘Laugh, but it's not so funny when you see your whole life flash before your eyes. Or for that matter when you're limping around on cold mornings, half crippled.’ Then I realised what I'd said. He knew as well as I what it was like to be shot. At least I hadn't been left for dead. He didn't laugh much for a while. He didn't think it was so funny either, when I told him about splitting with Laura and my spell in hospital after. I'd say one thing for Terry, he always had a spot for the underdog. I'd seen that as he tried to protect a skinny kid from two eighteen stone coppers in a stinking car park.

  After a while, after the preliminaries, when the first lager had been drunk, I finally got down to business.

  ‘What's happening on the manor?’ I asked.

  ‘First tell me how it concerns you,’ he replied. ‘What exactly are you up to?’

  I outlined the information that I'd heard from George Bright and John Reid. At the end of the story I pulled the photo of Patsy Bright from the envelope I had brought with me, and showed the likeness to Terry.

  He looked at it for a moment and then back at me. Then he read the details on the back. Finally he said. ‘The face is vaguely familiar. But I see so many people in the clinic and around and about, that it really doesn't mean a thing. She's too old for me anyway.’

  That was another of Terry's problems. He was fatally attracted, and attractive, to young girls. I mean really young. Below the age of consent was his bag, if you'll excuse the expression. I think it was something to do with his stint in the Far East.

  ‘I don't know how you stay in business,’ I said. ‘Don't the authorities object to you screwing fourteen year olds?’

  ‘They don't know about it’ he replied. ‘Besides, the whole thing's going to grind to a halt next year now that the GLC is disbanded. There'll be no more grant, no more clinic, no more me.’

  I didn't want to listen to his troubles. I wish now that I had.

  ‘Come on Terry,’ I said. ‘Concentrate, try and help. Why did she send that letter? That's what bothers me, and I don't know why it should. Are you sure no-one's contacted you about her?’

  ‘Of course I'm sure. We get a lot of this kind of thing. Kids on the run etcetera. But I always keep the details and she isn't one I recognise. Perhaps your client doesn't like social workers. That's what most people think I am, you know.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But I don't. So now you know the story, how about some information.’

  He took a long pull at his second pint and said, ‘Haven't you been reading the papers lately? Or watching TV? The facts they come up with aren't that wrong you know. It's just their attitude that's shit.’ I thought it better not to tell him that where I'd been there were no newspapers allowed, and we only watched comedy programmes on TV.

  ‘We,’ he continued, ‘well society, or whatever you call it, not that I count either one of us in that number, are in trouble. Especially in this sort of shitty area. The fuse has been lit and God knows when the bomb will go off. We've only seen the beginning so far. I'm older than you, and I know what I'm talking about. I've seen it in the States, and I've seen it in the East. Once it starts there's no stopping it. It's my lot, the people of my age who started all this.

  ‘Well now we're in control and trying to run the country, all the garbage is coming home to roost.’ He looked at my face. ‘I know Nick, you don't think I'm controlling anything. Well I should, instead of poncing about, I should have tried. It's chickens coming home to roost. It's just so damned easy to get drugs these days that everyone's at it.’ He tapped Patsy's photograph, lying on the table in front of us. ‘What's she into by the way? Whatever it is it'll have a trendy nick-name. The media love all those names. There's hit records about drugs. Books, films, and every TV show I see has some reference to them.’

  ‘It's always been the same,’ I said.

  ‘But it's never been so easy to get the stuff.’

  ‘What about supplies?’ I asked.

  ‘I could get hold of almost anything within the hour, if I wanted to. It's that easy.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Cheap.’

  ‘How cheap is cheap?’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Heroin?’

  ‘Fifty to sixty pounds a gramme,’ he replied.

  ‘Coke?’

  ‘Eighty pounds a gramme.’

  ‘Dope?’

  ‘A hundred quid an ounce.’

  ‘Who's bringing it in?’

  ‘Everyone. Blacks, whites, Asians, air hostesses, pilots, oil tanker captains, lorry drivers. The whole world seems to have a few grammes in their back pockets or down their knickers. Or else a Volvo artic. Full of hash.’

  ‘What's to be done?’

  ‘Fuck all my friend. The tide's against us. And the media is our worst enemy.’

  Terry had a real thing against the media. I was tempted to ask him why. Perhaps he'd sent a letter to Time Out and they hadn't published it. I didn't have time, he was off again.

  ‘One minute the fucking papers are up in arms about heroin abuse on council estates.’ He continued, ‘The next, they're coyly suggesting that anyone who's cool is snarfing up half Bolivia before breakfast. It makes me want to throw up. Every week I read that some fucking pop star or TV hero has kicked the habit. What they're saying is, that if you've got boo coo bread, you can get away with a bit of a monkey. But if you're unemployed, it's a terrible sin. So all that happens is, the kids who are broke steal to pay for drugs. Then the bloody papers scream about a crime wave. Cynical bastards, reporters couldn't care less as long as they're copping twenty grand a year and a BMW on the firm, and their bijou little residence in Clapham is burglar proof. I tell you Nick, sometimes I just despair.’

  He looked so angry as he talked that I was reluctant to interrupt. When it sounded as if he'd finished and he was having another hit at his lager, I said, ‘I hardly dare mention the police.’

  He gave me a scornful look and said. ‘Why bother? They're more bent than anyone. The police are a private army of racist thugs. They work for the Tory party breaking strikes and persecuting the working class. It's in their best interests to keep a certain amount of dope on the streets. It helps to anaesthetize the kids who might be real trouble. The cops can use it for bribes, sell it for profit and as a last resort plant it on anyone they want to put away.’

  ‘Beautifully put,’ I said.

  In the background I heard the Byrds singing ‘Mr Tambourine Man’. The boozer was a real oldies heaven. Terry abruptly excused himself in the American way and almost ran to the gents. I sat and waited for him and drank some more lager and heard in my mind's eye something of what T S must have heard almost twenty years before.

  I half closed my eyes in the still of the bar and with the sound of the twelve string playing cadences in my ear, I could imagine the choppers thudding down at zero feet above a muddy river bed with just a thin stream
trickling down the middle. Swarms of mosquitoes would be hanging above the water, hungry for the sweet blood of the Americans fed on a diet of rare beef and Coca-Cola. I could pick out the sound of sporadic gunfire in bursts echoing around a deserted village. Somewhere in the lush green forest my spaced out friend was lying under a heap of his dead comrades.

  Terry came back. He seemed brighter, more alert and almost relaxed.

  ‘You're back on the stuff, aren't you?’ I asked with a flash of intuition. He nodded and managed a half hearted grin.

  ‘I always knew you were too sensitive to be a cop,’ he said. ‘I bet you cried yourself to sleep everytime you busted someone.’

  ‘Don't fudge the issue, T S,’ I said. ‘I'm not a cop any more, and you shouldn't be doing what you're doing.’

  His eyes narrowed. ‘OK, so I'm a fucking hypocrite, but don't judge me Nick, not you of all people. I seem to remember hearing some story about vanishing evidence in the form of a quarter of a kilogramme of cocaine going missing from a certain police station's strong room, not so long ago.’

  I shut up. He was right.

  ‘But why?’ I asked eventually, my fingers greasy on the glass I held.

  ‘I just need that feeling, Nick,’ he replied. ‘I go dinky doo without it. When your body's lying there, numbed out, and your mind's out amongst the planets. Running free, skittering around amongst the stars. You must know what I mean.’

  ‘Sure I know,’ I replied. ‘But you always have to come back, and usually you're lying in some strange bed with the sheets all rucked up, and some girl dribbling come onto the bed covers, and looking at you like you're really crazed. You must know what I mean.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said with a big grin. ‘Great, ain't it?’

  Even I had to smile at that. Then I got serious.

  ‘It'll kill you,’ I said.

  ‘Bollocks, it will,’ he replied. ‘It's only a bit of smack. It's a good gear.’