Читать книгу The Confessions Series - Ash Cameron - Страница 9

At training school we were warned about prisoners, property and prostitutes. If anything were to go wrong, it would usually have something to do with at least one of them. In the late seventies, around the Life on Mars years and before I joined the police force, I had dealings with all three.

Family circumstances had meant that I left home at seventeen and lived on my own in a cold and tiny flat opposite the sea. I needed two jobs to pay my bills, so I worked in an office during the week and in the cloakroom of a popular nightclub Thursday, Friday and Saturday. The money was rubbish but it helped. I fancied doing bar work, but the Fugly brothers who ran the tacky joint said I was too clumsy and not pretty enough. They may have had a point on the first and the book is open on the second.

One Thursday night, a long time after the supposed closing time, I was still at work in the club. It was about three in the morning and I was desperate to go home as I had to be up early for my office job. A drunken woman and her partner came to collect her coat but she couldn’t find her ticket. She told me it was a white fur jacket with tissues in the pocket. There were three men’s jackets and one white fur hanging on the rack. I found tissues in the pocket.

Maybe I shouldn’t have given it to her but I did.

Half an hour later, the Fugly brothers tumbled down the stairs from their exclusive hidden bar, arm in arm with women I knew to be prostitutes, followed by half a dozen regulars – CID officers from the local nick, with their own cackle of voluptuous prostitutes.

The next night uniformed police came to arrest the elder Mr Fugly, a wiry ex-boxer, for knocking out forged fifty-pound notes. He was back an hour later, no charges and big fat grin. He sat at the corner of the bar, laughing.

‘CID sorted me out. A case of mistaken identity,’ he said, throwing back a slug of Scotch: Prisoners.

A few days later the brothers called me in to see them. The younger of the two had so many rolls of flesh around his neck that he looked as though he was wearing a scarf. With his bald bulldog head and flaccid bottom lip, he was intimidating. He stood over me, drool slavering down his chin as he ate a bacon roll. It made me feel sick.

Apparently, I’d given away the wrong fur jacket. The nightclub had secret CCTV cameras that nobody knew about, but I did now. It showed a woman handing over a ticket at 11 p.m. I gave her a fur jacket from the corresponding hanger. At 3.30 a.m. it showed me handing over the other fur jacket to the woman who didn’t have her ticket. I could never understand how the first woman came by the ticket of a coat she says wasn’t hers. Or how the second woman identified the remaining jacket, down to the tissues in the pocket. Yet they had the wrong coats. It caused mayhem and that was the end of my beautiful career in hospitality. Thanks to Property.

Many years later, I dealt with a case involving a family headed by a matriarch who openly declared that back in the day she’d been a prostitute who slept with policemen and gave them information. She knew one of the officers on the case.

‘Old friends, sort of,’ she said.

A short time later the officer took early retirement.

Aye. Prisoners, property and prostitutes.