My mother came to see me last visiting day. I hadn’t been looking forward to seeing her. It had been only a month since her last visit, and this one had been preceded by an unusually brief note announcing her intention to come. Her notes are usually rambling and conversational, written in her large, loopy hand. This letter, by contrast, was terse and telegraphic: this was unusual restraint for her. I was expecting that she had news of some unwelcome development that she needed to tell me about face to face, something that she didn’t want to put in a letter. I’m always happy to see anyone who wants to visit me, if only for the break in routine. But in this case I had the feeling that I would be subjected to something I didn’t want to know about.
As usual, she had come a long way. There is a decent hotel near here, but she won’t stay in it because it frightens her. She says she thinks it’s dirty. That’s not what I’ve heard. I’ve heard that it’s not bad. She comes here every three months and she always does the same thing. It takes her six hours to drive to the prison from home. She sees me for half an hour and then gets back in the car and drives the six hours back. And then when we meet there are a lot of long silences. She does nothing to disguise the fact that she doesn’t like being here. The security is disagreeable to her. She refuses to look the prison officers in the eye, and speaks to them with frosty courtesy. The clanking of keys and the waiting around on hard chairs insult her. She’s not used to that; and she doesn’t like the fact that in my being here I’m responsible for her having to put up with it. There’s nothing chic about prison. She can’t wear her Harvey Nichols suits here, or her Hermes scarves. She never wears any jewellery. Instead, she dresses in the plainest clothes she can find. I don’t mind that: I don’t want anyone to notice her, and she doesn’t want anyone to notice her either.
I don’t want anyone to notice how she talks. Lady Stapleton may be posh, but I’m not posh, and I don’t want anybody to think that I am. My mother doesn’t want anyone to notice that she’s visiting her son in prison. Especially since she was once a prison governor, and used to strut around prisons like she was a member of the royal family, dressed in a smart business suit, with a hat and pearls and a handbag in the crook of her arm, asking all and sundry what they did and what they were in for. (“Murder, your ladyship.” “Splendid, splendid.”) Now she acts very differently when she comes to prison, and I find it gives me pleasure. She’s more uncomfortable in here than I am, but she’s only here for half an hour, and I’m here for six years. It’s interesting to me to see her in shame, with her face cast down instead of gazing up at the ceiling, with the air of being about to deliver an improving sermon: it’s something I had never seen until now, and there have been many times in the past when I have wanted to see it. I have finally succeeded in putting a dent in her confident dignity.
We had the conversation we always have. She asked about my conditions, knowing she would be powerless to do anything about them now. I always say I have nothing to complain about, which intensifies her shame. She doesn’t like the fact that I can cope with prison pretty well. I have no enemies here, and nothing really to worry about. In prison you never know when you’re going to get transferred to another prison, but the fear of that is something you learn to live with.
“When is your next parole hearing?” she said. The nuts and bolts of my imprisonment are a safe subject of discussion for her. It allows me to be reminded that she once held some authority in these matters. There was a time when she could influence such things. But we both know that despite the authoritative tone in her voice she is powerless now.
She never says what’s on her mind. In asking about my parole hearing, she was thinking of a number of related things but preferred not to express them. She wants to know when I am going to be released. More importantly, when I am released, am I going to come home? Finally, she wants me to assure her that when I am released I will change my ways and do my duty and take over the estate. This is always the unstated theme of her talk when she visits me.
I told her that my next parole hearing is in three weeks. I didn’t address the other issues. The answer to the first of her unspoken questions is no, I don’t know when I am going to be released. That depends on any number of unknowable circumstances to do with the law, my record in prison, the twists and turns of government policy, and luck. To the second question, the answer is also no. Whenever it is that I am released, I am not coming home. Ditto question number three: I am not going to change my ways once I am out of here, and I am not going to do what she feels is my duty and assume responsibility for the estate.
The estate is called Hooton, and it has been my family’s property for hundreds of years. It consists of a large Georgian house in landscaped grounds, a wood, a farm, a church and a handful of cottages. It is a beautiful place, and it is where I grew up. I spent most of my childhood in a large, chilly nursery with a high ceiling, bare walls painted instititutional green, raised by a nanny.
My older brother, Toby, who would have inherited the estate, killed himself ten years ago. He put a Purdey shotgun, the one he used to shoot grouse and pheasant and which had been hand-made for him, in his mouth and pulled the trigger. It cost £50,000 and he’d only had it for six months. An idealized picture of Hooton -- nestling amidst fluffy clouds and trees -- had been engraved on the stock.
He was much older than me. By the time I was born, he was always away at boarding school. I rarely saw him, and I didn’t really know him. I certainly didn’t know he’d been depressed.
“Oliver has been very kind,” my mother says, with a deliberate vagueness of tone.
Oliver is my first cousin. He lives on the estate with his family. This is a roundabout way of saying that although Oliver is only her nephew, over the years he has acted more like a son to her than I have. She is making a veiled threat here: she is saying, if I don’t come home and take over the estate, Oliver would be more than happy to do so instead. He can do what he likes. I’m not interested in Oliver.
None of this was unusual, but she seemed more tense than usual. With five minutes left of the visit, before the bell rang and the visitors were led out and we returned to our cells, she revealed the real purpose of her visit. She did have some news after all.
“Two weeks ago I fainted in the garden. It has never happened to me before. I asked Mr Clemence to drive me to the doctor. The doctor sent me to the hospital for tests, and I had a scan. They found a tumour.”
It didn’t surprise me. My mother is nearly eighty. She drinks a lot, and has always smoked like a chimney.
“How are you feeling?” I said. She looked as she usually does, nor better nor worse.
It was time to show some steel.
“Not cold yet,” she said, deadpan, quoting something.
So this was the reason for the urgent note and her unexpected visit. She was reminding me of her mortality, in case I had forgotten. But she will not influence me. She knows as well as I do that my life is elsewhere.
My life is in Brighton. In Brighton I live my life as I choose to live it. When my sentence is over I intend to return to Brighton and pick up where I left off. I’ll be back with a vengeance.


2

In Brighton, I’m everywhere. I’m the seagulls, the pebbles on the beach, the dreadlocked beggars in The Lanes, the drunks spilling out of West Street pubs, the graffiti, the cream and turquoise taxis. I know every paving stone from Rottingdean to Shoreham. My will directs the clouds of starlings over the ruins of the West Pier, and the wind that blows up the streets from the seafront. Nothing stops me, restrains me or controls me. Like the sea wind, I go where I want and I do what I want, day or night. I create whirlpools of litter in the Pool Valley bus station; I blow off your hat and break your umbrella and sometimes I knock you flying.
There’s no door I can’t open; no door I can’t break down. Nothing happens in Brighton that I don’t know about, that I haven’t got a finger in. I own most of Brighton and half of Hove; I’m the town’s biggest landlord. It’s up to me if your life is going to be peaceful and comfortable or a living hell. I determine if you’re going to rest your head on your pillow and have a good night’s sleep or hear an unbearable banging all night long that leaves you a nervous wreck in the morning. If you don’t like the sea wind, move out of Brighton. It’s the same with Bobby Black.
In Brighton, no one knows me as Robert Stapleton, and they certainly know nothing of Lady Stapleton. No one knows about my background here. I don’t sound posh. This is because I was raised by nannies and nannies don’t sound posh, and I spoke with them more than anyone else as I was growing up, so I naturally talk like them. No one takes you seriously in Brighton if you sound posh. If you sound posh, people think, Oh, he’s not from around here; he’s from somewhere else. I don’t have to worry about him, because he’s going to bugger off back to London or the country at the weekend. Then I can breathe easy and not worry about the rent. But I’m not going anywhere, and they do have to worry about the rent.
Go up Queen’s Road from the seafront to Brighton Station: it’s the highest point in the town. Brighton Station is correctly described as a terminus; once a train gets there it can’t go any further. Brighton is the end of the line. Once you’re here you’ve got nowhere else to go -- unless you want to change and take a local train to Worthing or Portslade, and if you want to go there you really are lost. It’s a one-way journey straight down from London. That railway line is like London’s waste water pipe: the effluent flows down from the city and into the sea, and in that effluent is every loser that London chewed up, spat out and flushed away. Brighton is where you go when living anywhere else has failed, when you want to just give up on life and stop worrying about things and lean on the railings and watch the sun set over the sea. You can go up to Brighton station any time of the day and see them pouring out of the trains and onto the platform with their black plastic bin liners in one hand and their dole cheques in the other. Everything they’ve got is in those plastic bags. And the first thing they look for is somewhere to live, and that’s why everyone in Brighton knows Bobby Black.

I like to collect the rents myself, in order to keep an eye on my tenants, because tenants are all either muppets or scumbags who will cheat you if they get even a fraction of a chance. And also, to tell the truth, I’m more interested in people than most people think. People think that money is all that matters to me. It’s fine with me if they think that. Everyone in Brighton thinks that I’m an evil bastard, and I do nothing to discourage it. On the contrary, I positively encourage it. It keeps things simple. As far as my tenants are concerned, all I care about is money and I will go to any length to get it. They can’t fathom how a person could be like that, because for most of them money is the least important thing in the world, and if they saw that we had anything in common they wouldn’t fear me. It means I can keep my thoughts to myself.
Having said that, part of the pleasure of this business is that I can make judgements about people, and act on that judgement. Their lives are in my hands.

There are a lot of oddballs on my books. One of these is Norma. I’ve got a house of bedsitters in Connaught Square, Hove, just back from the seafront. Most of the tenants are students at one of the fleabag English language schools that Brighton has in abundance. None of these students usually stay longer than about six months. I keep the building in reasonable nick because the income is good. These Jean-Pauls and Anne-Maries have plenty of parental money; I make them pay the whole rent upfront. Unlike the rest of the tenants in this building, Norma has been in her little bedsit for twelve years. Her room is at the back of the house; when she looks out the window all she sees is the back of another house and a scruffy back garden the size of a mattress with a mattress in it.
Norma lives on disability. She can’t work because she’s mad. Tiny, petite woman in her fifties, barely five feet tall. She used to be a ballet dancer, or so she tells people. In fact, she only managed one season as a professional ballerina, and then was dropped from the company. Her feet were too big, and not strong enough for point work. She broke both of her big toes almost immediately, and from then on had flat feet. Besides that, she just didn’t look right. She was the right size, but her head was too big for the rest of her body. It looks like a loaf of bread. And she was probably just too weird. People find that off-putting.
During the day you can usually find Norma sitting alone in one of the more genteel bars on the seafront. Places like the Grand Hotel bar or The Ship. She’ll have a schooner of sherry in front of her, its rim smeared with red lipstick. Her face is heavily but untidily made up: it’s as thick as stage makeup. Often her mascara is runny, making her look as though she’s been crying. She’s always dressed as if it’s Easter Sunday, with a shiny dress and lots of clanky jewellery and a black-and-white hounds-tooth coat with big buttons. A down-at-heel Audrey Hepburn, right out of a bandbox. Middle-aged women like this are not uncommon in bars in Brighton, sitting alone, getting slowly and quietly sozzled from mid-morning onwards. Norma, though, looks different from the rest of these old girls. She sits tensely, on the edge of her seat, her tiny shoulders crushed together, gazing around the room with big round eyes, looking open, wounded, vulnerable, lost, in trouble.
You can’t help noticing her. Her fidgety demeanour catches the eye. It demands curiosity, then sympathy. And yet she doesn’t seem to be deliberately attracting attention. She sits so meekly that you think she is doing her best not to be seen. Circumstances seem to have forced her into the open. You wonder, What is troubling this poor soul? And then you think, What can I do to help? Everyone loves playing the part of the good Samaritan when it seems easy enough. People like to feel good about themselves, and a little drama livens up a dull day.
This is how she lures her victims. Mad people have a talent for this kind of thing. They have a sixth sense: they know how to find a person’s soft spot and then attach themselves to it with countless invisible tentacles. When you try to remove one tentacle, two take their place. Soon the bar fills up, and the seats in her vicinity are filled, and then she’ll catch someone’s eye. Her victims are always women.
“Excuse me, darling, do you have a tissue?” Norma says.
Soon the handbag is on the lap and the woman is searching around in it for a tissue. They always have a tissue.
“Are you all right, dear?” the woman asks, as Norma gets out her powder compact and dabs her eyes.
“Yes. I’m fine. Thank you,” comes the reply.
Norma then has a sniffle, and falls silent. She stares into the middle distance and takes a sip of her sherry. Believing the encounter over, but still curious, the woman endeavours to continue her solitary drink. But the hook is in, the bait has been taken. Norma has got her: now she begins slowly to reel her in.
Norma begins again. “I’m sorry to trouble you. You seem very kind. I couldn’t help noticing your earrings. They are very pretty.” She needs to talk. It's all a bit unusual.
“Oh, thank you,” the woman replies, tickled and flattered. “My husband gave them to me.”
“He must be a very nice man.”
“Oh, he is. Are you married?”
“Yes, but my husband isn’t kind in that way. I’m afraid we’ve just had a disagreement. That’s why I had to come out for a drink.” Norma doesn’t have a husband, and never has. God forbid she ever should.
“Oh, you poor thing.”
“Do you have children?”
And so it goes on. Norma knows exactly the impression she is making. (“I met this sweet, funny little woman in The Ship/Grand Hotel bar....”) She is a very good listener: everything the woman says is of the greatest interest and importance. Soon they are having the most intimate conversation about every aspect of their lives. Norma is her new best friend.
Norma is particularly interested in clothes and jewellery. By now she knows where the woman lives, which is usually nearby. She starts dropping hints -- in a context of girly intimacy -- about how she would love to borrow something. Eventually the woman relents and invites her home. By now the woman will be thinking that her agreeing to do this will be part of the process of bringing the conversation to its natural conclusion.
As soon as they enter the woman’s flat, Norma makes herself at home. She drops into the most comfortable chair in the room and carries on a stream of delightful talk. “Oh, what lovely things you have!” she says. She asks about all the people in the framed photographs, especially the children.
After a while she moves in for the kill. “Darling, you must let me see your lovely wardrobe.”
By this time the woman is still carried along by the fun and the novelty of her new friend, so she consents. Norma wastes no time: she gaily riffles through the wardrobe, acting as if what she is doing is as unusual as it is for her friend. But she’s quick. She doesn’t give the magic time to wear off.
“Oh, this is lovely! Can I borrow it?”
“It might be a bit big for you.”
“No, I love it. It makes me think of you.”
While the woman isn’t looking, Norma will slip a ring or an ornament into her bag. Then she’ll make a huge and giddy goodbye and be quickly out the door, vowing to meet again.
If the ring or ornament looks like it might be valuable, she’ll take it up to a shop in the Lanes and get cash for it. If she likes the jewellery, she’ll keep it.
She has another, less dramatic talent for finding her way into people’s homes and stealing things. It’s burglary, but the way she does it is so apparently innocent that I don’t think that even she thinks she’s doing anything wrong. What she does is, she wanders through the front door of a big block of flats -- a place like Seafield Court, on the seafront -- as if she’s on her way to visit someone, or as if she lives there. To convince herself (and anyone that might see her) that burglary is the last thing on her mind, she wears an open, friendly smile on her face, a soft, unworldly expression that seems completely without intention, completely without stealth or slyness. For you can only successfully deceive others if you first deceive yourself. With this veil of self-delusion wrapped as about her as artfully as a chiffon scarf, she drifts through the corridors of Seafield Court, her Betty Boop eyes peeled for an open apartment door. In a refined block of flats like this, with a full-time porter, the residents have no fear of burglary, and often leave their doors open when popping out to post a letter, to walk the dog, or to visit the shops.
Sashaying along the carpeted corridor, with a Casa Pupo shopping bag in the crook of her arm, she spots a front door that has been left ajar. Following her own script, she has her lines memorised. “Oh hello! I was just popping in to tell you that you’ve left your door open. I was passing by on my way to see my friend.”
If that line doesn’t come into play, she merrily trit-trots into the flat. She holds up one or two gorgeous things for admiration, then pops them into her Casa Pupo shopping bag. Then she heads for the bedroom to look for clothes.
This is her weakness as a burglar: she has a soft spot for clothes. She always risks getting caught by spending too much time going through the wardrobe.
“Oh! I’m so sorry. I was passing by and I felt faint, and I had to sit down. And while I was waiting for you to come back, so that I could apologize to you, I saw all these lovely things.” She would say this if caught in the act, but so far it has never happened.
That’s how she pays her rent. You can see her walking around in peculiar mismatched outfits made up of the takings of her adventures. The clothes are always too big for her.
I don’t have a problem with Norma. She doesn’t complain about anything -- probably because she doesn’t want anyone to go into her flat and see what she’s got in there. What I don’t like is tenants who cause problems. Any tenant is a low form of humanity. A tenant who causes problems is a turnip that gets ploughed under.

I had been having a good year before the trouble began and I ended up in prison. I was buying up a lot of properties. One of them was 22 Prospect Drive, out near the cricket ground. It was a large house with five floors and eight bedrooms, and in very bad repair. The paint was peeling and there were budleia bushes growing on the roof. All the window frames needed replacing; the wood was rotten. You could pull bits off with one hand. The house was right opposite a floral clock and was an eyesore in an otherwise attractive street. A house in that condition would have a low market value. The owner was a batty old lady who lived in a little flat on the ground floor and rented the rooms out to a ragbag of elderly friends and misfits. Her name was Audrey Fessel. Earlier in the year I made her an offer and she immediately refused it.
“This is my home, Mr. Black,” she said, and hung up. That peremptory closing of the conversation was supposed to signal the end of the matter. As far as she was concerned she had sent me off with a flea in my ear.
I left it a few months and then rang again. I said I remained interested in purchasing her property, and that as a goodwill gesture I would be willing to help her settle in a nice little flat in one of my buildings on the seafront.
I had to hand it to her in one sense. She wasn’t afraid of me. Out of curiosity, I asked her to suggest a price that might make her change her mind, just to see what she might say.
“Five million pounds,” she said. She closed her eyes into mean little slits as she said it, an expression that you could tell she had never used before. Perhaps she had seen people act like that on television.
It’s always amusing to me when people with no experience of business try to play the game. I think she really did want to give the impression that she was playing serious hardball with me, and that I would take the offer seriously, and make a counter offer that accommodated this outrageous figure. Even in good condition, the building was worth a tenth that amount. It was all very amusing, indeed; but by then she had amused me enough. It was time to give her the opportunity to rethink her position.

There was a concrete parking area with garages behind the house where the residents of 22 Prospect Drive used to park their cars. The garages and ground were a separate property. They were owned by a company I had done business with in the past. It turned out I knew the owner, and better still, that he was someone I had lent money to in the past. I made him an offer and he accepted it. By the end of the week I owned the garages and the land in front of it.
Then I went to see Desmond, one of my odd job men. Desmond didn’t like being called an odd-job man, but that’s what he was. He preferred to be referred to as a business associate. He was very prickly in matters like that. Easily needled. That’s why I enjoyed needling him.
“Desmond, if you’re such a hard nut, why do you have such a poncy name?” I said.
“Is that what you came here for, to take the piss? Anyway, it’s not a poncy name, it was my granddad’s name,” Desmond said. He was sitting at his desk in his portakabin. The portakabin was in the grounds of an industrial park off the A23.
“Just because it was your granddad’s name doesn’t mean it wasn’t a poncy name, does it?”
“What the fuck do you want, Bobby? You must have come here for a reason besides taking the piss.”
He had a fat face and a bald head, and already it was getting pink and sweaty. He was so wound up and agitated that he lit a cigarette and inhaled half of it. I’d only been there two minutes.
“I’ve got a job for you,” I said.
“What is it?” Desmond said, a bit more calmly.
Desmond was in the parking enforcement business. He had a portakabin for an office, a desk, a telephone, a computer and everything you need to make it look like a legitimate business. There was an electric kettle, and there were motivational posters on the wall (“Success,” with a picture of an eagle flying over a mountain; “Excellence,” and a picture of a runner breaking the winner’s tape). The posters had come free with the desk. On the floor by his desk lay the tools of his trade: half a dozen wheel clamps painted yellow, and their chains and locks. He had bought the business through an advert in Loot for five hundred pounds plus goodwill (if you’ll pardon the expression). It was called Integritas Parking Management Solutions.
It looked like a legitimate business, but it wasn’t because he wasn’t registered for VAT and he did all his business in cash.
I told him I wanted him to clamp any car that parked on the lot in front of my new garages. Don’t bother the cars that use the garages, I said. I was only interested in the cars that belonged to people who lived in 22 Prospect Drive. There weren’t that many of them. The contact would be for six months, and he could keep all the revenue. “Don’t mention my name,” I said. “If anyone asks who you’re working for, say the land has been acquired by Lessbridge Holdings Ltd.” This was one of my companies. Then I let him get on with it.
As it happened, Mrs Fessel was the only resident of 22 Prospect Drive that owned a car. It was an old person’s car: an old Morris Minor, pale blue, all rusted up. The salt sea air here doesn’t do cars any good. She’d had that car for thirty years, and she’d always parked it in the same place, behind the house. She’d never had any problems, until now.
Desmond’s unique selling point as a clamper was his complete emotional involvement in his work. The kind of clamper you usually meet is the one who says, as he’s locking the chains around your front wheel on the one day you park carelessly because you’ve had to take your sick child to the doctor, “I’m just doing my job.” Desmond didn’t just do his job: “just” doing something means you’re not really doing it, or that you’re barely doing it, or that you don’t want anyone to notice you’re doing it, or that you’re doing it without enthusiasm, without conviction.
They say you should give one hundred percent of yourself to anything that you decide to do, that you should act with passion or not act at all. Desmond was certainly passionate about his work. Usually when you hear someone say that about a person it means that they love their work. It would be incorrect to say this about Desmond. He didn’t love his work at all; in fact, he hated it. But his work allowed him to express his hatred. The passions that drove him as he clamped people’s cars, and demanded money from them in fines, release fees, clamping fees, removal fees and other treats and surprises were anger and hatred: anger at the offence, and hatred of the offender. He was the only person I even knew who could experience road rage without being inside a car.
When Desmond encountered a car that was parked where it should not be parked, his hands began to shake. His face would go pink and sweaty, and his lips would be compressed in fury. He wasn’t very fit, because he smoked a lot, drank a lot and never took any exercise, so the physical activity of clamping a car was uncomfortable and difficult for him. There was a heavy metal plate that fit in front of the wheel, and a thick chain that reached around the tire and had to be padlocked. The whole operation required kneeling on the ground, and a lot of awkward huffing and puffing. His blood pressure and heart rate increased. He cursed the car, cursed the chain, cursed the clamp, but above all cursed the owner of the car he was disabling. This was not because he felt righteous anger against the violation of the sanctity of private property that the car’s owner had committed, but because the owner had obliged Desmond to get out of the chair in his portakabin and kneel on the tarmac, soiling his hands with oil and sooty rubber. Desmond simply didn’t like to move his body at all, and he resented anything or anyone that obliged him to do it. Only perfect immobility pleased him, and even in that condition he was not what you would call happy. For him, happiness was merely the neutral, featureless state in which he was not in a rage. Such time was meaningless; it was time out of his life.
Desmond affixed a tiny sign on the wall behind 22 Prospect Drive that read, “Private Property. No Parking. By order, Integritas Parking Management Solutions.” He placed it as high up on the brick wall as he could reach with a hammer. Audrey Fessel’s car was where it usually was. He lugged his clamping gear out of his van, and laboriously attached the clamp to the car’s front wheel. Then he peeled a big orange sticker off its backing and slapped it on the windscreen. It read, in big black capital letters, PARKING VIOLATION. £95 CLAMP REMOVAL FEE. Call this number, &c. Then he drove back to the industrial estate.
He could hear the telephone ringing inside his portakabin before he even reached the door. He didn’t rush to answer it as he let himself in. His indifference to the telephone was a hatred both of the telephone itself and of the person calling.
“Yes.” He didn’t identify himself; he didn’t say hello; he didn’t even say ‘yes’ in an interrogative tone. That might have suggested that he was interested in the caller’s enquiry, which would not have been the case.
“Hello. I believe you have placed a clamp on my car.” It was Audrey Fessel, trying to be polite whilst seething with anger.
“Registration number.” Desmond mumbled. It was not a question.
Mrs Fessel gave the registration number.
“One hundred and fifty five pounds is owing for the release of the vehicle. Cheque or credit card is not acceptable.”
“Excuse me. I think there has been a misunderstanding. I am the owner of 22 Prospect Drive, and I have been parking my car in the same place for nearly thirty years. I have an arrangement with Mr. Lamb. There has never been a problem until now.”
“Mr. Lamb is no longer the owner of the property.”
“Well who is?” Mrs Fessel was beginning to raise her voice.
“Don’t raise your voice with me.”
She tried again. “I was not aware that the property had changed hands. Who is the new owner?”
“My client is Lessbridge Holdings Ltd.”
“I don’t know any Lessbridge Holdings,” Mrs Fessel said. “Who are they?”
“They are the new owner of the property,” Desmond said. “The payment due for removal of the clamp is one hundred and fifty five pounds.”
“It says ninety-five pounds on the sticker,” Mrs Fessel said, defeated, weakened with frustration.
“The removal charge is ninety five pounds. The call out charge is sixty pounds.”
“But I’m not paying that!” Mrs Fessel said.
“There is a forty pounds per day fee for late payment.”
Mrs Fessel hung up the phone with a groan. It was her first mistake, the first mistake of many, but she was not to know this.
Very early the next morning, Desmond backed his tow truck up to Mrs Fessel’s Morris Minor. He removed the clamp, stowed it in the truck, and attached the towing hook to the front bumper. He drove it to an empty lot beside the cement works at Shoreham harbour and left it there.
Naturally, Mrs Fessel didn’t know what to do. She rang the police, but they weren’t interested. (They told her to make sure to get a receipt.) Directory Enquiries had never heard of Lessbridge Holdings Ltd. The last thing she was going to do, she vowed, would be to call that vulture with the clamp. That would be giving in to extortion.
Eventually she called Mr Lamb, and he kindly informed her that Lessbridge Holdings was a company that was owned by Bobby Black. “I’m sorry, Mrs Fessel, but I’ve probably let you down. Bobby Black is not a very nice man.”