Streets Of Filth

By S.D. Gripton and Sally Dillon-Snape

Hill's Maryport, out on the Peninsula, is a poor, polluted, violent town where the good guys are very bad and the bad guys are just despicable. Drug dealers, thieves, abusers, pornographers, are all going about there business on one August night. But who will live and who will die?
Meet The Drill Bandit, Johnny Rotten, Wyatt Earp, Pretty Boy, John Wayne and Fad, the most amazing dog in the world.
Possibly the most anarchic book you will ever read.

• Language: English
• Publisher: S.D. Gripton
• Release date: Dec 27, 2011
• ISBN: 9781466148581

S.D. Gripton

S.D. Gripton novels and real crime books are written by Dennis Snape, who is married to Sally who originate from North Wales and Manchester respectively and who met 18 years ago. I work very hard to make a reading experience a good one, with good plots and earthy language. I enjoy writing and hope readers enjoy what I have written. I thank everyone who has ever looked at at one of my books.

Book preview

Streets Of Filth

A Crime Novel

By

Dennis Snape

Copyright © Sally Dillon-Snape & Dennis Snape (2022)

The moral right of the author is hereby asserted in accordance with The Copyright Act 1988

All characters and events in this publication other than those of fact and historical significance available in the public domain are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons living and dead is purely coincidental

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in retrieval systems, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher

The cover is by Snape

This novel is dedicated to the colossus known as Hilda Teasdale – one of the most remarkable females ever born

Chapter 1

August 1982

Tuesday

Hill’s Maryport

The Midnight Hour

Little Willy, whose real name was Shawn Allerton, but who was universally known as Little Willy because that’s what he had, a little willy, was a truly despicable character.

He knew he was despicable.

He reveled in his despicability.

But Little Willy was going to be rich and he knew that when one was rich, it mattered not how despicable one was, as friends, women and things could all be bought.

It was what he believed; the poor disillusioned fool.

Because what made Little Willy so despicable, was that he sold drugs to schoolchildren.

Any kind of drug, but exclusively to schoolchildren.

He wanted nothing whatsoever to do with fully grown drug users, who sometimes became extremely violent. No siree. Little Willy got them hooked young, then passed them on to other dealers when they grew. He just didn’t have the build for violence, or the backbone come to that which, in his case, was made of particularly poor-quality sticky paper.

What he did have was extremely bad eyesight, so bad in fact, that when he wore his spectacles, for all the world it looked as if he was carrying two lumps of see-through concrete on his face, so thick was the glass. Added to his scrawny build, his shock of bright red hair, his bulbous nose and the unfortunate lack of any size in his private parts, the resemblance to The Little Red Rooster was uncanny.

As if to enhance this resemblance ever further Little Willy was, at that moment, dressed in a pair of bright red pyjamas. At least they would have been bright red if only they’d ever been laundered, if they hadn’t been filthy and semen stained, if they’d ever had any attention given to them, but the last time these rags were near any water the Red Sea was yet to be parted.

Little Willy was a filthy little runt, dressed in rags of pyjamas, standing in his apartment on The Grange housing complex, his apartment messy and dirty, so dirty no word had yet been invented to describe it; his abode where he’d lived alone since the death of his mother, and abandonment by his father.

He’s a lovely boy, his mother used to say, when she was alive to say it.

He’s a filthy little bastard and needs putting down, his father was wont to state.

But Little Will’s apartment did make the average garbage dump seem clinically clean by comparison.

Willy gave not a jog or a fig.

He was going to be rich.

He was one of the chosen.

Chosen less than one hour ago by Mr. Plumley Cuddington, a moderately successful, moderately respected but snakelike businessman who worked out of Badgerpool, but who lived in pretty suburbia in a town called Bornton Bough, which was regarded as the last vestige of civilized living on the Peninsula.

Unfortunately, the Peninsula resembled a large rabid dog, the back of which, where all the shit piled up, was Peak Head, with the poisonous front, the killing end of the dog being Hill’s Maryport, and everything in between these two places was the scabrous, rotten body.

But Mr. Plumley Cuddington adored living on the Peninsula because he could afford the very large house in which he, and his family, lived. He could afford it because in another persona, beyond his respected businessman front, he was an ace, violent drug smuggler.

And he had chosen the nauseous Little Willy to take charge of, and safely deliver, a shipment of cocaine due this night. For this small venture, Little Willy would receive one-thousand dollars, a whole grand; something Willy had never earned at one time in the whole of his wasted life; and a minute portion of the drug for him to sell to his schoolchildren, the future adult customers.

Unbeknown to Mr. Plumley Cuddington, Little Willy was so excited he thought he might come in his pajamas.

So, he did.

***

The Drill Bandit was a thief.

This occupation presented no social stigma in Hill’s Maryport where he lived. No, indeed. In Hill’s Maryport good thieves were thought of as being akin to the financial wizards of Wall Street. It was the same crime with just a different standard of living.

And the Drill Bandit was a very good thief.

He was also a spineless, arrogant, egotistical, cruel, frightening, miserable piece of shit who robbed only the homes of old ladies, either widowed or unmarried, who lived alone. For those activities, and by way of an exception, Hill’s Maryport despised him and all his activities.

The Drill Bandit could have cared less.

He gave no thought to the vulnerability of his victims, or to the fear and panic he introduced into their lives. What he cared about was infamy, the local media headlines, the gloating secrecy, the satisfaction of a job well done, the feeling of power.

The Drill Bandit was seriously sick.

He was sixty-years of age, extremely thin and very tall, with a long face topped by an oval, bald dome. He had the build, and all the inner warmth, of an icicle. No woman had ever wanted him, not even his own mother, who had likened him, at a very young age, to Count Dracula.

Yet life, as is often the way, threw up the perfect, possibly the only, career for a person without pity, charm, compassion, who was cold and uncaring in his personality.

Step forward Mr. Leyland Squires, the Drill Bandit and, until recently, a Senior Social Services Officer.

What a bastard.

***

Sheila Diggle was twenty-eight years of age, five feet five inches tall, with blond hair, brown eyes, a round, pretty face, Bridget Bardot lips, pert upturned breasts with large nipples, a slim ass and short but shapely legs.

She was sitting in her own home in Hill’s Maryport, on her own couch, watching her own TV, while her sons Andrew, six, and Terence, four, slept in their beds. She wore a thin, short, blue nightdress and no underwear.

In approximately one hour’s time, she would be raped, buggered, beaten, whipped, humiliated and degraded.

She would know her attacker.

***

Thomas, aged eight, and Anthony, aged ten, the beautiful and adored children of Mrs. Helen Ince should, by this time, have been safely tucked up in their beds. All things being normal.

Except things weren’t normal, and they were neither tucked up nor safe.

Obnoxious Oswald was being, as usual, obnoxious, and Mrs. Daisy Hill and Johnny Rotten, both living human beings, would be neither before many night hours had passed.

***

The Station House of Hill’s Maryport was situated next to the Town Council Chambers, which was central to all corners, and all comers, of the town. Both buildings were flat-roofed and gray, much in the way of sixties design of public edifices. Neither of them was a palace of fun.

Upon entering the Station House, through the large front doors, one encountered The Desk. To attract the attention of the Duty Sergeant or Duty Desk Officer, a person rang a bell, the button of which was embedded in the aforementioned Desk. If a person did not ring, no one appeared. And would not appear from then until Doomsday (which could be much closer than people think).

On the second storey of this bleak building there was a large open-plan room, liberally sprinkled with desks, typewriters, chairs, telephones and mounds of paper.

This was the home of Major Crimes.

Not where they were committed, one hoped, but where the cops who investigated such crimes gathered to tell each other stories of what had happened on the golf course over the week or which female cop was up for anal sex or a blow job.

No one was home.

Goddamn.

You can never find a cop when you need one.

***

Throw the ball.

Throw the ball.

Throw the fucking ball.

Ford threw the ball, which wasn’t a ball at all, but an empty, yellow, ice-bucket, and it soared up into the air towards John Wayne.

With all the hand-to-eye coordination of a blindfolded squirrel, John Wayne, unsurprisingly, failed to catch it, and he was hit a mighty blow dead center of his forehead. For one so tall, six-feet-two-inches, broad of shoulder and chest, he did a remarkably good impression of a skilled Chinese acrobat as he flipped over backwards several times, then totally ruined the effect by crashing into a row of greenery that protected the garden from the river. He came to a halt without disappearing into the wet stuff.

The two opposing teams, laughing hysterically, sauntered over, gathered, knelt, and stared down at John Wayne and the bruise that was forming on his head. It was approximately the size of the Black Hole of Calcutta. Ford, feeling a modicum of guilt for hitting his friend and colleague between the eyes, reached out with one of his salami-sausage-sized fingers and touched the bruise.

John Wayne’s eyes shot open, Ford’s massive arm shot back, and John Wayne slowly climbed to his feet.

Fuck it, he said. Let’s have another drink.

So, the three-aside Football game came to an end, the ice-bucket was abandoned and the six men, all stripped to the waist, adjourned to a small windowless room to further enjoy their drinks.

The umpire came too.

She wore only panties.

***

The Fucking Maniac had not always been so. At one time, he had not even been any kind of maniac. In what seemed like a previous existence, another dimension maybe, another world, another place, he’d been Norris Slaithwaite, built like a crate on wheels, with a massive shoulders and chest, but with extremely short legs, more like long knees, really; he’d been known for his humor, his mischievous grin, his howling laugh and especially for Juliana, his beautiful young wife, and his three gorgeous children. It was only at that point in his life when these special people, whom he loved and adored above all else, decided they could quite easily live without him that he became the Fucking Maniac.

Through his years of pain and booze, this man with the peculiar build, had struggled to come to terms with his loss. Jobs had come and gone and life, for what it was worth, was seen through a haze of alcohol and fights. Always the fights. Big guys, little guys, the tough and the not so tough. The Maniac did not care. They all went the same way. Down. A quite remarkable feat for someone who was only five-feet-six-inches tall.

But even at his lowest, at his most despairing, his loneliest, his most grief-stricken, he had a friend. He had his friend The Dog.

The Dog had saved his life, and it was known as Fad, and it was one third Border Collie, on third Springer Spaniel and one third human, with the snout of the former, the ears of the second, and the intelligence of the latter. This was a dog who could jump ten feet in the air and do tricks all at the same time. Maniac loved that dog and the dog loved him.

It was missing, errant wife, Juliana, who’d given the dog its name. She might have been young and beautiful but she was not