No Place in the Sun (5 page)

Kevin looked surprised. ‘Didn’t Walter tell you? All of it. We don’t do basic here, you’ll be self employed; if you don’t sell anything, you don’t earn anything. I’m not running a fucking charity. That’s fair enough isn’t it?’

It wasn’t what Tom was expecting.

‘On the other hand, you can make some serious money of you’re as good as I hear you are. I’ll pay a hundred and fifty a car for full price, a hundred for the coded price, and unless you want to pay me money you won’t sell below that.’

Tom was dubious. ‘Doesn’t sound like a lot. I expected a basic to be honest, you know, for being here to keep the place open when it’s quiet and all that.’

Kevin was showing some impatience. ‘Look, that’s how I do business; it’s not up for discussion. But look, the last guy was making five hundred a day some days. Still would be if he could keep out of the pub and the bookies. I expect you to be here when you’re supposed to be here.’

‘Five hundred a day? Is there that amount of business in it?’

‘It’s up to you. If you can really sell, you know, be ruthless about it, this is the place to make serious money, a lot more than Maurice Milton could ever pay you. I’ll pay you in cash every Friday, or every day if you want. The taxman will never know how much you got, and I won’t leave you short either. Have we a deal?’

Tom looked him in the eye; this might be good. He held out his hand. ‘Deal.’

Tom was surprised at how easy it was. He had worked part time in a used car lot about eight years earlier, when he left school, but his experience in the intervening years had fine tuned his selling skills and given him the ability to close sales where he would have been less confident in the past. It wasn’t exactly easy money, but he found that if he kept his concentration and stayed focussed, he could make a very good living. Maybe old Milton had done him a favour by closing down.

Sometimes he wondered about what he was doing. If he stopped to think, looked back on the day and ran the sales through his mind, it could get inside his head a bit more than he would have liked. Some of the punters were really thick, they knew nothing about cars and it was easy to sell them some really slow movers at high prices. Some of them were smart enough, knew their stuff, and he tended to steer them to the better models. The easiest ones were the guys that talked as if they knew all about cars, but really knew very little; these were the ones that could be milked for the highest prices and the best commission. Still, apart from these occasional doubts, Tom was making some decent money and he was very satisfied with the way things were working out.

Kevin was happy too; his new salesman was letting very few buyers leave the yard without a car and he was managing to shift the rubbish along with the better stuff. The previous guy had tended to steer buyers away from the duds, but Tom had a lot less scruples when there was a commission to be earned. If Kevin was paying an extra few quid on a particular slow mover, Tom would have it shifted before the end of the day.

They stood at the back of the yard watching the driver unload the latest crop from the big transporter. Kevin bought in bulk from trade suppliers and from leasing companies, the five and six year old models that the main dealers didn’t want on their forecourts. Every so often he took a big batch of cars from the car rental firms, as long as they were registered to an anonymous company and didn’t have a record of being hired to tourists. These were big profit earners, they described them as one-owner cars and Willie cleaned them up well in the big shed at the back of the yard.

‘Who sent me that piece of shit?’ Kevin couldn’t conceal his disgust at the bright yellow Volkswagen that was rolling off the top deck of the truck.

Tom could barely hold back the laughter. ‘It kinda stands out all right.’

‘Looks like a fucking builder’s jacket. Get it round the back and out of sight before anyone sees it, we’ll be a laughing stock.’

‘I wonder does it glow in the dark?’ The more Kevin got annoyed, the more Tom could see the funny side.

‘There’s yellow and there’s yellow, but that’s the worst colour car I ever saw in my life. Fucking diarrhoea yellow. It’s like the back of a shagging ambulance, nobody will buy that thing.’

Tom looked inside the car when it was parked up. ‘It’s not in bad shape though, really low miles and very clean.’

Kevin was sarcastic. ‘Would you buy a car that colour? Who would be interested in that thing? I’ll kill McGuire for dumping that on me.’

‘Maybe we might find a colour-blind customer for it.’

‘Let’s see you sell it, smartass. Let’s see how good you are, an extra hundred if you shift it by Friday.’

They went through the rest of the cars. Kevin was in a bad humour from the fluorescent yellow VW, and the rest of the load didn’t help his mood either.

‘Ah Jesus, look at the clocks on these wrecks.’

Tom looked at the car in question, the Toyota had nearly a hundred thousand miles on the odometer. ‘Looks clean though, should go back all right.’

Kevin cheered a bit, but he still wasn’t happy. ‘Myles has to be paid his cut for clocking it though; all comes out of the profit. I’m getting sick of McGuire short-changing me.’

He stomped back to the office and slammed the door. Tom took out his phone and called Myles.

‘Can you call over this evening and adjust a few for us?’

‘How many?’

‘Nearly all today’s batch, about ten, all high numbers but look good otherwise. We need them done tonight though before customers see them tomorrow.’

Tom made two cups of coffee and left one of them down in front of Kevin. ‘Myles is on his way.’

‘Thanks boyo. Can you do something for me on the way in tomorrow? I need a letter dropped off at the test centre, ask for Roger Hall and wait for an envelope from him and bring it back. It’s some paperwork that they didn’t have for me last week.’

Myles arrived just as they were turning off the lights.

Kevin waved his arms at him. ‘For God’s sake, don’t leave that fucking Jeep out front, someone will see it. Bring it round the back quick.’

Myles drove around and into the shed. Tom shook his head. ‘For such a smart fellow with his computers and all, he hasn’t much savvy. Why does he have to have his name written on the Jeep?’

The offending vehicle had a bright sign on each side that told the world that it was owned by ‘Myles Back’, a play on the owner’s name and the nature of his business. The smaller print advised that he was in the business of recalibrating speedometers, a legitimate business need when a garage replaced a broken speedometer with a new one and the mileage had to be brought up to the correct level on the new instrument. While he might get the occasional job of that nature, Myles made most of his money by ‘clocking’ cars for unscrupulous dealers.

Kevin sighed resignedly ‘he’s a bit thick that way, but he comes when we want him and he’s cheaper than the others by a long shot.’

Myles looked at the yellow car in astonishment. ‘It’ll take more than a bit of clocking to make that one sell. Where did you get that thing?’

Tom motioned to him to shut up; Kevin was in a bad enough humour without upsetting him further, but Myles kept rubbing salt in the wound. ‘You could put a ‘Follow Me’ sign on it and sell it to the airport; they could take it out on really foggy days.’

Kevin retreated to the office and slammed the door.

Myles was still laughing at his own joke. ‘What’s up with him?’

‘Don’t mention the war. He’s not too happy with today’s batch, and that thing just added insult to injury. Let’s make a few home improvements, cheer him up a bit.’

‘That’s one ugly car, mustn’t be a standard colour, I never saw one in that yellow before.’

‘It was one of two specials for that radio station that started up and only lasted a few months, do you remember, Mellow Yellow FM, played a lot of oldies?’

‘Oh yeah, crappy music, no wonder they folded.’

One by one, they drove the cars into the shed and closed the doors. Tom popped the bonnet on each car and Myles connected the lead from his laptop to the service port and made a few quick adjustments on the keyboard. In an hour all the cars were a lot more saleable.

Myles closed his laptop and packed it away in the case.

‘Is that the lot, Tom?’

‘That’s all, I’ll just finish putting on the new rubbers on the clutch and brake pedals and then we’re done. We’re going for a few beers, do you want to come?’

‘No, I’ll pass on that, see you next week.’

Tom and Kevin retired to the Willows for a well-earned pint. Walter was sitting at the bar; they motioned him to join them at the corner table.

‘You were right about this lad.’ Kevin clapped Tom on the back.

Walter smiled. ‘Told you he could sell, nearly as good as me, maybe better for your game.’

‘Sand to Arabs, coal to Polacks.’ Kevin was back to his old self.

Walter had heard a bit of news. ‘I hear you weren’t the only one to be screwed by Maurice Milton.’

Tom was surprised. ‘What did you hear?’

‘He never paid the guarantee money over to the insurance company, not for the last year or so, put it all in his pocket and said nothing. He must have been planning to make an exit for longer than we thought.’

‘I had that old bugger figured all wrong.’ Tom was shocked that the old man had turned out to be such a crook.

Walter had more. ‘That’s not the half of it. None of the suppliers were paid for the stuff that we sold from the warehouse. We were selling stolen property for the last couple of weeks.’

Kevin swallowed the last of his pint and got up to leave. ‘All this talk of dishonesty is upsetting me, I’m heading home. Don’t forget the letter in the morning.’

Tom tapped his jacket pocket. ‘I have it here, see you about ten o’clock.’

Tom looked at the envelope on the breakfast table; it was addressed to Roger Hall and marked ‘private’ in large letters. Why would Kevin be sending private letters to the clerk in the test centre, he wondered, and why the insistence on delivering it by hand to Roger Hall?

He snapped on the kettle for another cup of tea, turning the letter over and over in his hand. Finally his curiosity got the better of him and he slit the envelope open; he could always put the letter in a fresh envelope and reseal it, Roger would never know.

He pulled out a sheet of A4 paper with a short note typed on it, and a bundle of cash, five hundred euro in total in hundred-euro notes. The note listed the registration numbers of ten cars; at least one of them looked vaguely familiar. He copied the numbers into his notebook and put everything back in a new envelope and addressed it to Roger hall.

At the test centre he called Roger aside and handed him the letter. ‘Kevin asked me to drop this in to you. Said you had something for him, do you have it on you?’

Roger took the envelope and slipped it into his inside pocket. ‘Give me a minute; I have a letter for Kevin.’ He disappeared into his office.

Ten minutes later he reappeared and handed Tom a large white envelope. ‘Pass that to Kev; tell him thanks.’

Tom was intrigued; he threw the envelope on the passenger seat and headed back to the yard.

Kevin was busy with a customer when he arrived back, and a young man was wandering up and down between the rows of cars. Tom dropped the envelope on his boss’s desk and went outside; there was money to be made. ‘Can I be of help?’

‘I’m looking for a nice low mileage Japanese car, not too expensive to insure, what have you in that line?’ The young fellow was well dressed, shirt and tie, probably worked in one of the local offices, or maybe a clerk in one of the law firms.

Tom switched into selling mode; he gave the customer his warmest smile. ‘You couldn’t have timed it better, we got a couple of beauties in last night, miles in the mid fifties, well maintained, super cars, come and have a look.’

He walked to the back of the yard where three of the cars that had been clocked by Myles had already been cleaned and polished by Willie. They looked great; he knew they would look nothing like high mileage cars once they were given the clocking treatment. ‘You’re lucky, these haven’t been brought out front yet, just in, but any one of them would be ideal. Low insurance as well, how old are you?’

The customer was excited at getting ahead of the pack on these desirable models. ‘I’m nineteen, still on a provisional license, I’d love something a bit bigger but I suppose they would fleece me on the insurance.’

Tom sensed a chance of a killing, maybe get the full commission and even sell this guy the finance as well. ‘Hang on here until I get the keys for these, we’ll start them up and see how they sound.’

He headed back for the office to get the file sheets for the cars; these would show him what Kevin had paid and what the sticker price would be, as well as the lowest price that Kevin would allow him to accept. There was a lot of information on these sheets, in a simple code, and they were essential before getting into negotiations.

He detoured slightly to catch Kevin on the way back; he spoke quietly ‘Have any of the new ones got test certs?’

Kevin was trying to close a sale on a slightly down at heel Passat. ‘All of them.’