Pig

By Graham Pryor

“We can do what we like,” said the burly policemen to Bill. “We’re the law.” That sounded just the sort of job that might suit him. Do what you like with impunity, have a bit of power over folk, and get paid a half-decent wage at the same time. It was the moment of his epiphany, but it was a change of life that brought Bill into a larger game than the one he was used to, a world where more powerful people than he exercised their entitlements, a world where he was returned to a familiar struggle against unfair laws and the plight of desperate people. Using his native wit – and a GCSE in Latin, he would proudly claim – Bill treads a risky path to help foil organised people trafficking, sustained throughout by his sense of humour and an old-school irreverence. If you can’t beat them, join them, may have been his motto, but he learns that sometimes one has to accept there are certain elements of established society that will never be beaten. Bill, however, remains optimistic to the last, he has his own inner advocate for survival, and survive he will.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Sep 30, 2022
• ISBN: 9781398476844

Graham Pryor

Graham Pryor studied American Studies and English at the University of Hull. Subsequently, he pursued a career in information management, leaving his childhood home in Hythe, Kent, for the north-east of Scotland, where he has lived and worked for the past forty years. Cerberus is his fifteenth novel and, he says, his favourite.

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About the Author

Originally from Hythe, Kent, Graham moved to Scotland almost forty years ago. There, working in the field of information management, he has been director of library and computing services at the University of Aberdeen and a director of the Digital Curation Centre at the University of Edinburgh. He lives on the north-east coast.

Dedication

This is for the copper I encountered at a David Bowie concert, who said to his mate, Here, this one’s got long hair, let’s see what he’s got in his bag. Inspirational!

Copyright Information ©

Graham Pryor 2022

The right of Graham Pryor to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781398476837 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781398476844 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published 2022

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd®

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E14 5AA

The police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.

Robert Peel, from the Peelian principles

Revealed: police trainees’ violence and dishonesty.

The Observer, 18 July 2021

Cop called officers for help after being pursued by drone but dot in sky was actually Jupiter.

Daily Record, 17 July 2021

Not Quite an Epiphany

In the sixties, so my father told me, or maybe it was the seventies – I ought to be sure, it’s important in my line of business to pursue accuracy in all my recollections – well, whenever it was, some time back when I was just a seed in my mother’s belly, you could buy a T-shirt with the slogan that went something like:

Join the Army, travel to distant lands and see

the wonders of the world, enjoy exotic foods,

meet different people and kill them.

He thought it was a real hoot, my father, as he’d been part of all that anti-establishment stuff that was around then. He was still grinning quite subversively when he described it to me – goading me I suppose, a dangerous thing to do by the way, considering. It would appeal to different people in an entirely different way today though, that T-shirt, it would be more of a recruiting slogan than a mocking criticism of our upstanding British military. Not that that kind of thing would be on sale today anyway; it wouldn’t be allowed, I’m certain of that; but if it had been, I might have found its message appealing if I hadn’t already discovered my own particular furrow to plough.

I say discover, but that’s not how I came to join the force, not through some kind of epiphany or magical revelation that this was the job for me. In fact, I’m not ashamed to admit that back in my more youthful days I was a bit of a toe-rag, quite the jack-the-lad I would dare to claim, and I walked on a different side of the street to the Old Bill.

We were in the Acropolis that day when I first got an unconscious inkling of my possible future. I don’t mean that old ruin in Athens but the coffee bar in the Old High Street. For those of you who are not familiar with it, although locally it’s quite notorious, the Acropolis sits near the top of a steep and narrow thoroughfare crammed with rather tacky businesses that cater mostly for tourists, its tight stretch of cobbles descending very sharply down the cliff to the harbour.

It’s been run by the same Greek family for decades and its walls are covered with plaster reliefs of Greek gods and goddesses both inside and out. Anyway, we were in there minding our own business, which consisted mainly of exchanging a bundle of fivers for a bag of skunk, just having a laugh and arguing over which of the two vixens at the next table would be good for a shag. All very innocuous.

As I say, we were minding our own business when the Acropolis doorway darkened and in shuffled two plods in uniform, a couple we’d seen around quite regularly, we called them Little and Large on account of one being a big fat bastard and the other one a walking stick with arms and legs. They looked quite nervous, even sheepish, entering this so-called den of iniquity, a place they knew they didn’t belong, probably overwhelmed too by the thumping bass from the jukebox, such that they took a while to accustom their sight to the near darkness inside, it being a bright summer’s day in the street. I took that small moment to snatch the precious bag of stash from my mate Don and dive under the table, crawling on hands and knees past the two young scrubbers (nice legs, by the way, I couldn’t help noticing) and by leave of the shadows beneath the other tables I wended my way unseen until I had reached the open street door.

Little and Large had in the meantime approached my two mates, Don and Vincent, both still sitting innocently with Valentine the dealer, and there followed the usual huffing and puffing and sticking out of chests and chins that was supposed to introduce the two plods as considerable representatives of the law, as well as to intimidate my pals. I heard Large guffaw and bark, Don’t mess with me, laddie, what sort of a poof’s name is that? And I guessed he was addressing Valentine with the standard police aptitude for community-focused interpersonal skills.

Meantime, in my other ear, I became aware of the approach from up the top of the hill of a VW Beetle, you couldn’t mistake the sound of that air-cooled engine, I knew it well. There weren’t many still around, and I peeked out to recognise my old schoolteacher, red in the face behind the wheel of his battered old car. He looked like he needed some air-cooling himself; he wasn’t a man known to have strict control over his temper, of which I was well aware from sorry experience, and the fact that it was a legitimate police van blocking the narrow road ahead of him didn’t seem to make any difference to the heat of his ire.

I’m a helpful soul, although I say it myself, and it seemed like the situation needed an injection of initiative. Mr Roberts, my old English teacher, had always applauded me for initiative and here was an opportunity for me to reward his approbation.

In those TV programmes about cops, you see them racing to an incident with the blues and twos flaring and blaring, leaping out of their cars, putting on their caps and making sure their radios are working. But they never lock the car doors, do they? You noticed that? It’s not that way in my manor, I can tell you; we’re always being reminded by the sarge, in his mock Michael Caine voice: Make sure you lock the bloody doors, we don’t want any perps making a getaway in a police vehicle. Well, it seemed that Little and Large didn’t have such a perspicacious sergeant at that time, for not only was their van door unlocked, it had been left half open on the hinge, to the annoyance of the milling tourists attempting to traipse past on the tiny, cobbled pavement. (Excuse me, I need to elaborate: we’re a seaside town, right, with a cross-channel ferry, and the Old High Street is our principal tourist trap, with its scummy trinket shops, fish bars and curtained tearooms. There, sorry, I don’t usually forget fully to describe a crime scene.)

So, with a glance behind me to check that the two Filth were still attempting to menace my mates, which they were, I slipped out the Acropolis door, opened the van door wide and released the hand brake. It was obviously a well-maintained vehicle, for it rolled forward instantly and quietly on keenly greased bearings and took off down the hill, I had barely time to jump back.

But I’d cleared the way for Mr Roberts to continue his journey. I saw his initial look of knowing horror (he’d often said I was somewhere on the spectrum), swiftly followed by a grin and a thumbs up, which I returned before scarpering up the hill into the town. I’d always suspected that old Roberts was a bit of a rebel, I’m good at spotting the true side of people, as was he, and more than likely he’d been a mate of my father’s in their youth.

The Old High Street offers a fairly straight one-way passage and the van ran a direct course to the bottom, where a walled flowerbed eventually gave a slight bend to the road. A number of old dears were flung to the side as it passed, but none were really hurt. I was glad of that. However, I was a little sorry to see the display of brightly flowering roses and camellia pulverised when the van crashed over the low stone flowerbed wall. It gave an enormous crump as it hit, followed by the pretty sound of glass tinkling down on to the road.

Obviously, the heavy bass beat on the juke box had not obscured the noise out in the street, the shouts and squeals of the passers-by who’d witnessed the event proving louder even than the actual demolition of the police van, and all their commotion very much closer to the open Acropolis door, of course. Anyway, as I watched from behind the safety of the townhall’s Doric columns, at the top of the hill, Little and then Large emerged and elbowed their way through the gathering throng of tourists and shoppers, heading they thought for their vehicle. With mouths open and much scratching of heads, it wasn’t until an old gentleman with a bicycle pointed at the mayhem down the bottom of the hill that reality at last dawned upon them.

Well, despite the few random frissons of anxiety that followed, I got away with it. Only Mr Roberts would have been able to identify the culprit, and he’d obviously enjoyed the spectacle I’d engineered, particularly the delicious theatre of dismay on the faces of them two Filth. Like I said, he was probably as much a nonconformist as my old man, and something made me feel comfortable he wouldn’t snitch. Everybody else who witnessed my act of initiative were likely strangers, day trippers or flotsam off the ferry.

So a couple of days passed uneventfully, and I was upstairs at Don’s, getting it on with his girlfriend, Sonia. She was just beginning to squeak when he hollered up the stairs from the hall. I thought he was calling my name, Bill, but he was a little more agitated than usual, and I realised when my head cleared that he was shouting Old Bill, Old Bill. Now Don doesn’t get agitated easily, on account of he’s always stoned, and he isn’t known to pull a stunt like that to ruin a friend’s moment of pleasure, so I knew it was for real and I whipped my manhood out sharpish in order to get my pants back on and look tidy, muttering, Sorry, Sonia, no reflection on your attributes, but we’ve got a case here of interruptus inevitabilis.

The hammering on the front door convinced me that Bill hadn’t been larking about, and I heaved on my jeans, making it down the stairs in time to see a couple of hard-faced bastards in blue being ushered into the living room. Oh bugger, had I been wrong about Mr Roberts, or had some other mean-spirited scrote been surveying my little venture?

The two bastards in blue seemed surprised to see me when I walked into the room.

Where’d you come from, Prentice? said one who recognised me from a previous encounter, as well as from having shared a bench in the school gym. You look a mite guilty.

Betcha he’s been having it away upstairs, said the other. He looks the Mahatma Gandhi sort. Doesn’t even bother to do up his fly. Planning to resume? he leered.

Look, I said, struggling with the zip, what’s going on? Is this a bust or what? It was a foolish question.

Why? snapped the first. You got something to hide? He turned to Don. Now see, we have reliable intelligence… My scoff brought me a vicious glare. Intelligence concerning… (Don coughed at this; he was enjoying my sarcasm.) As I was saying, we are informed by colleagues of ours that on the morning of Tuesday last – he consulted his notebook – you were present with a Mr Valentine Tobin in the Acropolis coffee bar for the purpose of conducting business that may be subject to the appliance of criminal proceedings.

Evidence? said Don, so coolly I was proud of him. They both rounded on him.

I mean, are you here for an arrest because of some incontrovertible (hah, incontrovertible, great word from an ignorant scumbag. I loved that, and the expressions on their faces) evidence of wrongdoing, or are you simply fishing?

Look, you little gobshite, snapped the second and burlier of the two, we know you; we can smell it on you, what you’ve been doing.

Smell all you like, said Don, but you can’t search without a search warrant. Got one?

You, Prentice, said Plod Number One, what’s your role in all of this?

All of what? I knew his next move was going to be regretted, he was known to have never learned the art of discretion.

"The disposal