As Baldock made his plans he tried to keep a clear head. Revenge was worth waiting for – a dish best served up cold. He’d read that in a book once. Baldock wanted to get even with TJ, and it was necessary to get even with TJ, but he had to maintain his cool, no matter how hard this was. People would be watching. His reputation was on the line.
Baldock liked his revenge hot and sudden – he’d lost it many times in the past, using his fists before his brain started up. When he found out what TJ had been doing he’d wanted to wring the little runt’s neck, but instead he took a deep breath. Baldock took lots of deep breaths, and told himself to take it easy. There was no rush. In a way he almost admired TJ for having the bottle to rip him off. The little sod must have been desperate.
Baldock had his empire to consider, built up over ten years without the police ever getting a sniff. They’d picked up plenty of TJs over the years but none of them had led back to him. No one talked in this neck of the woods. Baldock was The Man now, and had been for some time. He liked to think of his world as an empire, a place where there was order, created by himself, a world where he was boss, number one. He had respect and fear. He had attention. Baldock had most of what he wanted in his life. Most, but not all. Karen had made sure of that.
Baldock stood by the bedroom window of his terraced house, looking out on the street, lost in his thoughts, until his father’s husk of a voice interrupted them.
‘You’re like a bloody statue,’ the old man said, ‘standing there all the time. Worse than your mother ever was.’
Baldock turned round to look at the man swamped in bedclothes, propped up with pillows, once powerfully built, now all bones and cough. His father’s eyes were still full of life though, and they flashed angrily at him now.
‘You haven’t eaten your food,’ Baldock said.
‘Don’t want it. Rabbit food, that is.’
‘You know what the doc said. It’s what you’re supposed to have.’
‘What does it matter what I eat now? It’s as stupid as trying to getting me to stop smoking. I’ve lived long enough, I reckon.’
‘Don’t start that again. You got a good few years yet. I’ll make you a pot of tea. You never say no to that.’
Baldock tried to rearrange his father’s pillows.
‘Don’t fuss, mun. For a big, hard lump, you’re like an old woman sometimes.’
Baldock gave up and took his father’s tray. He bent down close to the old man. His father smelt of a lifetime of smoking, and his face showed a lifetime of work. Old work, the type unknown by people Baldock’s age. His father was marked up with old mining scars, lining his face and hands like blue tattoos. Baldock knew they were all over his body as well. He could just about remember, when he was a young kid, the old man coming home covered in dust sometimes because he couldn’t be bothered to use the pit baths, and his mother washing him in the bath – the old-fashioned way, the way his father liked. That was a long time ago. The last pit in his area had closed before Baldock had left school, and he was only a few years off forty now.
‘It’s your birthday next week, Dad,’ Baldock said. ‘Eighty-two.’
‘I know how old I am. It’s my body that’s worn out, not my head. Aye, I’m eighty-two and you’re thirty-bloody-eight and still looking out the sodding window.’
Baldock smiled. He liked the old man’s temper. It had lost some of its bite and could no longer be backed up by fists, but it was still there. Baldock had inherited it. This brought him round to TJ again. He could see the silly little sod showing off down the ’Bush, until he realised what he’d done and got scared. Very scared.
‘I’ll bring up the tea in a minute,’ Baldock said. ‘Oh, there’s boxing on the telly.’
‘Boxing, be buggered. That’s not what I’d call it.’
The old man snatched up the TV remote and pointed it at the television, which Baldock had mounted on the wall. His father had been a decent fighter himself once, going from working at the coalface to attacking other men in the ring.
Baldock went downstairs to the kitchen to make the tea. There was a knock on the door.
‘Is that you, Tony?’ Baldock shouted.
The back door opened and Sharp Tony entered. He was called ‘sharp’ because he always wore the latest gear. ‘I get it as quick as those London gits,’ he liked to tell people. If you wanted to know what was in fashion, you looked at Tony. He was Baldock’s main man, and Baldock trusted him, as much as he trusted anyone, which was not too much.
‘You’re late,’ Baldock said.
‘I know, boss, I had to wait around for the money,’ Tony answered. ‘You know what they’re like up the site. Specially Maisy.’
‘But no trouble?’
‘Nah. As if. They’re all talking ’bout TJ, though. Wondering what you gonna do, like.’
‘What do you think I’m going to do?’
Tony grinned, showing an even set of teeth with two missing in the middle. It spoiled the effect of his new jacket.
‘I don’ wanna go there, boss. You know I’m the nervous type.’
‘Any news on the little bastard?’
‘TJ? Nah. Just that he’s gone to ground, since the word is out. But all the boys is looking for the git.’
‘Good.’
Baldock took the money from Tony and counted out two hundred notes. He gave him thirty back and went to his goods tin. He’d had it from the start, an old toffee tin of his mother’s, matt black with a picture of two dogs on it. It was almost as old as Baldock. Tony was the only runner who was allowed to see it. It was usually kept in a hole behind one of the kitchen cupboards, but tonight Baldock had it on the table waiting. Tony’s eyes kept flicking towards it, like a fox looking at chickens. Baldock opened the tin and took out the neatly prepared wraps of skunk.
‘These are for the bottom site and Friday night. Give half to Rob and tell him to move himself. I’ve heard he’s been spending most of his time in the club.’
‘Right.’
Tony pushed a wrap against his nose and sniffed deeply.
‘Good stuff, this is. The best we’ve had for ages, boss.’
‘Is it?’
‘Oh aye, I forget you never touch the stuff. Bloody miracle, that is.’
Tony was looking at Baldock with respect, maybe even affection. He was glad to be the number one runner, to have moved up from the ranks. He was glad to be in the same room as Baldock, even if the boss still lived in a terrace. The boys had talked about that a lot. Christ, Tone, they said, he must be loaded by now, why’s he still here? You lot got shit for brains, Tony would answer. Baldock is clever, see. ‘E’s not gonna flaunt it, is he? Nah, he’ll ’ave it stashed somewhere. I wouldn’t be surprised if ’e ’as a place in Spain already. Like them London gangsters.’
‘Off you go, then, Smart Tony.’
Tony grinned his gap-toothed smile and twirled around.
‘Like my new jacket, boss? I’m on a promise tonight. Bird called Mandy. She looks a bit like Karen only no’ so classy, and she’s …’
Tony stopped suddenly.
‘Christ, sorry, boss. I shouldn’t have mentioned her.’
Baldock pointed to the door.
‘I’ll be off then.’
Tony went swiftly and gladly, making Baldock smile for the second time that day. Power always gave him a buzz. Tony had put Karen into Baldock’s mind. His one failure. Karen would have made things complete if she’d stayed. He saw her that first time, when he’d been to check on Tony, the runner he could trust most. Karen was Tony’s cousin who just happened to be staying there. She’d been coming down the stairs with a towel on her wet hair, looking at him with eyes that said they knew everything, eyes so blue they startled him. She wore a thin strip of skirt that almost started and ended at her belly button, and a pink T-shirt that told him instantly that she was not wearing a bra. Karen had met his eyes with confidence, standing halfway up the stairs with one hand on the towel and the other on her hip. She was tall, for a valley girl; her legs seemed to go on for ever and Baldock was impressed. For a moment he’d lost his cool, flicking back his hair nervously, before he remembered he was The Man, and that Tony was watching. Tony had grinned like the fool he was and introduced Karen like she was a trophy to be offered to Baldock. He’d accepted.
Baldock had another image, Karen coming out of the shower that first time she stayed the night. Perfect body, jet black hair, china blue dolls’ eyes staring at him under her fringe. Pulling him onto the bed like she was in charge. She was that time. Clambering all over him like an animal, biting his ear, biting him all over, quickly working her way down …
The old man was knocking the floor above him. He kept an old miner’s boot just for this. There were repeated thumps on the floorboards.
‘Alright!’ Baldock shouted. ‘Keep your hair on, what you got left of it!’
He put the teapot on a tray and added a few biscuits. His father was a stubborn old sod, like he was a stubborn young one, and he always insisted on a teapot. The old man was just about able to stomach tea bags but not if they were in a mug. Tea had to be poured, he said, the way your mother made it. She’d been dead more than ten years now, just before Baldock started dealing hash – just as well, probably.
Baldock had an older sister somewhere, Emma, but she hadn’t bothered with him or their father for years. He wasn’t even sure where she lived now. Emma was a looker, and had married some middle-class ponce. Some sort of property developer rip-off merchant she saw as her ticket out. She bought that ticket. Baldock hadn’t seen her for years but knew she had a few kids now and was living down on the coast. She was depriving the old man of his grandchildren and he hated her for that.
When he got to forty Baldock planned to retire from dealing and invest in something legit. Something he could really make a fortune from. Then he’d find out where Emma was and go down there, maybe in an Aston Martin – no, too many poxy soccer players drove them. Perhaps something Italian and rare. A Ferrari from the sixties in gleaming red. He’d have BB1 on the plate – Baldock Bond. From what the doc had said his father wouldn’t be around by then. His chest was shot with coal dust and they were still waiting for the compensation money. It was difficult to stop the old man getting worked up about this, when Baldock knew that a few grand was nothing to himself. He couldn’t tell the old man this though, because his father had no idea of Baldock’s secret world or the stash of money he’d made from it. The fact he’d taken to his bed years ago made this easier.
Baldock was a cash man, strictly cash. And it was all in the house, there was no other place for it. He stashed it in a big wooden box he’d used for toys when he was a kid, the notes hidden in a secret bottom section that he’d created himself. He’d take out the money and count it every so often, late at night, when the old man was asleep, and most of the village with him. This was like a ritual. He liked the feel of the notes – all twenties. He’d run them through his hands, put them into small stacks, even smell the buggers. They were his friends, the only things he really trusted. Then he’d put the total in the small accounts book that stayed with the notes. There was over a hundred grand now, well over. It was amazing how it had built up. Like the old coal spoils outside the window, going up higher and higher when he was a kid, as sure as night follows day. People round here smoked a lot of spliffs. This was Baldock’s security, his escape money, his reason for living. After Karen went he told himself this more and more. Get out at forty. Get away. Somewhere hot, where he could be cool.