Crack Down (15 page)

“Now, who wants to start the ball rolling with me tonight? Who needs a cigarette lighter?” A few hands shot in the air. “Who could use a pack of five blank cassettes?” A forest of hands joined them. “And is there anyone out there who would like a pack of three brand-new video tapes?” I was probably the only person in the room not waving wildly. I buried my pride and stuck my hand up. The salesman grinned. “Now if it was up to me, I'd be giving these items away, but unfortunately, the law of the land forbids me from exercising my natural generosity. So, you need to give me a token payment for these little tasters of what's to come.”

He paused for dramatic effect. The crowd hung on his words, rapt as a nineteenth-century congregation in thrall to some lunatic visionary minister. “I'm going to be as fair as I can be. My team of lads are keeping a careful eye on you all, to see who qualifies. Now, I've got twenty of these disposable lighters here, and the first twenty to stick their hands in the air …” he paused again, and half a hundred arms flew wildly into the air. “The first twenty to stick
their hands in the air
after
I give the word, those lucky people can purchase a lighter for only one penny. Now, I can't say fairer than that, can I?”

The crowd obviously thought not. The salesman waved a ridiculous gavel in the air. “Now, I'm going to bang me little hammer three times, and when I hit the counter the third time, that's the signal. Then the lucky twenty will be privileged to be allowed to buy a cigarette lighter for only one penny.” There was a pregnant pause. The hammer descended once, then twice. Half the hands in the room flailed in the air at the moment the hammer should have fallen the third time. Embarrassed, they dropped their hands again. “Don't be greedy now,” the salesman admonished. “I promise you, everybody who wants a bargain here tonight will get one.” As he ended his sentence, the hammer banged for the third time, and a thicket of hands straggled into the air. The salesman made a pretense of looking around to see who was first, nodding histrionically as he caught the eye of his henchmen scattered round the room. Twenty punters with waving hands were selected for the cigarette-lighter bargain. It looked to me as if they'd been chosen at random. As we progressed through the cassette tapes (fifty pence), the videos (one pound) and non-stick frying pans developed as a by-product of the American space program (two pounds), the same arbitrary selections were made. The salesman's assistants only seemed interested in checking out the contents of people's wallets.

The salesman had them in the palm of his hand now. The initial loss leaders had convinced them that tonight they really were going to get bargains. The salesman tossed back his curls and fastened the top button of his jacket, as if to signal it was time to get down to serious business. “Ladies and gentlemen, I'm not going to insult your intelligence here tonight. I bet you all watch
That's Life
. You know that there are unscrupulous people out there who want to part you and your money. Now, I'm not like that. So here's what I'll do. If you put your trust in me now, I will see to it that your trust does not go unrewarded. Ladies, this is something that will change your lives. Gentlemen, this is something that will change your luck. Every now and again, in the perfume laboratories of Paris, men in
white coats come up with something that transforms the woman who wears it from the everyday to the absolutely sensational. With the right perfume, any housewife can make the man in her life feel like she's Liz Taylor, Joan Collins and Michelle Pfeiffer rolled into one. It's a scientific fact. They did it with Chanel No. 5. They did it with Giorgio. Now, they've done it with this!”

He brandished a box in the air. Candyfloss pink and silver stripes. It looked unlike anything I'd ever seen before. “Here it is, ladies and gentlemen. My brother is in the import/export business, and he has secured a case of this unique Parisian perfume for my customers before it goes on general sale. This exclusive perfume, Eau d'Ego, will be the subject of a major advertising campaign right through the summer, ladies and gentlemen. It's going to be the hottest seller this Christmas, I promise you that. And tonight, you can be the very first people in Britain to own a bottle of Eau d'Ego.”

I struggled to keep a straight face. My French might not be up to much, but when Richard and I had spent a romantic weekend in Paris, we'd done a tour of the city sewers. I don't think you'd find many chic Parisians wearing a perfume whose name sounds suspiciously like
eau d'égout
—sewage.

The salesman was still in full flow, however. “Now, we have a massive selection of bargains here tonight. But inevitably, we don't have enough of our most popular items to go around. My boss puts limits on me. I mean, how many of you would like to buy a camcorder for under a hundred pounds?”

Nearly half the punters waved frantically at him. He gave a satisfied smirk. “Exactly. Now, my boss would sack me if I was to sell more than three of our bargain camcorders in one evening. So I have to ration you. Now, I have fifty bottles of Eau d'Ego here on this platform tonight. If you trust me enough to buy a bottle of this exclusive Parisian fragrance, I will give you first refusal on the lots I'm selling here tonight. I'm not saying you
can't
buy a camcorder if you don't buy the perfume, because that would be illegal, ladies and gentlemen. What I am saying is that the people who trust me enough to become my customers now will be given priority when it comes to buying the lots where we have restricted numbers. Now, I think you'll agree, I can't say fairer than that.” His tone left
no space for argument. It wasn't a particularly clever pitch, and he wasn't the world's greatest spieler, but they loved it.

“I warn you, ladies, if you get a taste for Eau d'Ego, you are never going to be called a cheap date again. When this marvellous perfume goes on sale in the shops, it will have a recommended retail price of forty-nine pounds ninety-five. Now, I'm not expecting you to pay forty-nine pounds ninety-five tonight. After all, you've not seen the advertising campaign, you've not read all the magazines raving about it, you've not seen the effect it has on me. All you've got is my word. And if I tell you that the wife helped herself to a bottle and I've gone home every night since, that should tell you something!” He winked. I winced.

“I'm not even asking you to pay half-price for the privilege of wearing this fragrance. Ten pounds, that's all. For only a tenner, you can be among the first women to wear a perfume that's destined to be the scent of the stars. Now, when my hammer falls for the third time, my assistants will have their eagle eyes peeled and the first fifty hands in the air will be given this exclusive opportunity.” This time, there was no pause. The hammer banged once, twice, three times. The audience proved Pavlov's theory of stimulus-response, the hands high above their heads as soon as the hammer hit.

All the assistants ran around distributing perfume and grabbing tenners. Terence seemed to be doing exactly the same as everyone else. At least, I couldn't see any difference. I began to wonder if I was wasting my time.

The salesman had moved on from the perfume. Now, he was putting together bundles of items. I reckoned I could buy their equivalent down any high street in the land for less than they were asking. But common sense had died somewhere in the salesman's pitch, and he had stomped the corpse into the dust with his patter. They were
fighting
to be allowed to pay over the odds for crap that would explode, disintegrate, tarnish, break or all of the above within weeks.

The hysteria rose as he went through the charade of selling serious bargain lots to five hand-picked mug punters. I had to admire his style as he relieved them of between a hundred and fifty
and three hundred pounds for bundles of goods they thought they'd bought at a huge discount. I wouldn't mind betting that at the end of the sale, they'd find that they hadn't been granted the special lots at all. All they'd get would be goods worth rather less than they'd paid, and a wide-eyed assurance that the parcel they'd “bought” had been sold to that (non-existent) man standing right behind them… I was watching carefully, and
I'd
lost track of what was going on. The mug punters had no chance.

But the most extraordinary was yet to come. “Have I been good to you tonight, or have I been good to you tonight?” the salesman demanded. He was greeted with a reasonably warm murmur. “Do you think I'm someone you can trust? You, madam—would you trust me?” He went through half a dozen members of the audience, pinning them with his stare, demanding their loyalty. Every last one of them bleated a “yeah” like so many sheep.

He smiled, revealing what he'd been doing with some of the profits. “I told you about my brother earlier, didn't I? The one in import and export? Well, he knows how I love to treat you people, so he's always on the look-out for bargains that I can pass on to my customers. Now, a lot of these things come from outside the EEC, and according to EEC regulations, we can't display them in the same way. So what we do is we make them up into parcels. Even I don't know what's in these parcels, because we make them up at random. But I can guarantee that each of these parcels contains goods to a value well in excess of what I'm asking for them. All I ask of you is that you take the goods home with you before you unwrap them. Not because we want you to buy a pig in a poke but because the contents vary so much. If the person standing next to you sees you've got a state-of-the-art food processor for a tenner and he's only got a toasted-sandwich maker, a set of heated rollers and a clock radio, it can often cause jealousy, and the last thing we want is fights breaking out because some of our bargains are such outrageously good value for money. Now, I'm going to start with ten-pound parcels. Who's spent money with me here tonight and would like to take advantage of my insane generosity?”

I couldn't help myself. My mouth fell open. A couple of dozen people were waving their bottles of perfume in the air. Most of
them looked like Giro day was the biggest financial event in their lives. Yet they were shelling out hard-hoarded cash on a black bin liner that could have contained a bag of sugar and a half-brick. I wouldn't have believed it if someone had told me about it. Then, as the salesman moved on to fifty-pound lucky bags, I noticed a change in the pattern. It was hardly noticeable, but it was enough. For the first time that evening, I began to believe I was in the right place at the right time.

I drove back to Manchester, replaying what I'd just seen, wondering what it meant. If I hadn't been totally focused, I could so easily have missed the tiny alteration to the pattern. It had happened just after the fifty-pound lots had started. Terence had emerged from behind the platform with a black bin liner, just like all the others. Then he'd snaked through the crowd to a short guy in his early twenties with a red baseball cap and a black leather jacket. Even though the guy didn't have his hand stuck in the air, Terence had passed over the bag in exchange for a fat brown envelope. It looked to me like it contained a lot more than fifty pounds, unless the guy in the red hat was paying in rubles.

They said nothing to each other, and the whole exchange took the same few seconds every other transaction had taken. Terence was back serving punters within the minute. But unlike the other mugs, the guy in the red hat wasn't sticking around. As soon as he'd collected his bag of goodies, he was off, shouldering his way through the crowd towards the door, pulling off the red hat and stuffing it inside his jacket. I contemplated following him, but I had no wheels, and besides, I wanted to carry on watching Terence to see what else he'd get up to.

The answer was, nothing. For the short time that remained, he did exactly the same as the other floor men, dishing out black bin liners in exchange for crumpled notes, fending off punters who thought they'd not had the treat they'd been promised at the start of the evening.

Then, with bewildering suddenness, it was over. While the salesman was still speaking, most of his assistants switched their attention from the audience to the platform. With astonishing
speed, the boxes that remained on the dais disappeared into the back of the van. By the time his closing speech was over, the platform was bare as my fridge the day before I hit the supermarket.

I worked my way back to the door, joining the punters who were slowly coming back down to planet earth to the depressing realization that they'd been comprehensively ripped off in a completely legal way with no comeback. By the time I made it outside the hall, the satisfied murmurs had turned into discontented mutterings, growing in volume as people began to examine the contents of their blind buying spree. My taxi was waiting, and I didn't hang around to watch them turn into a lynch mob. Neither did the sales crew. As my taxi pulled away from the curb, I saw the van and the two cars move across the car park. By the time the crowd got angry enough to do anything about it, the lads'd be halfway back across the Pennines.

I pondered all the way to Manchester. It was still almost too slender even to be called circumstantial, but all my instincts told me I was following the right track. I was pretty sure I'd just witnessed the handover of a parcel of illegal substances. I just hoped that it wasn't wishful thinking that was shunting my instincts down the trail of Terence Fitzgerald.

 

It was nearly twenty to nine when I abandoned the Peugeot on a double yellow line a couple of streets away from the sprawling court complex round Crown Square. I was cutting it fine, since visiting ended at nine. I'd covered my back by phoning ahead en route from Sheffield, telling the duty inspector I'd been delayed by a puncture but that I would definitely be there within visiting hours. Looking on the bright side, I'd only have been allowed fifteen minutes anyway. I kicked off the tart's shoes and pulled on the pair of Reeboks I always keep in the car, yanked off the hair band and shook my wavy auburn hair free. I grabbed the plastic bag I'd packed in Richard's bungalow, then I jogged round to the back of the Magistrates' Court building.