Captain Cash was the most successful business to come out of Locksley in the twenty years since the car plants closed. Its colourful stores offered to pay instant cash for stuff like laptops, smartphones and jewellery, or short-term loans at crippling rates of interest.
There were now more than a hundred Captain Cash branches, but it had been founded in a shuttered fried-chicken joint, by three seventeen-year-olds in their final year at Locksley High School.
The first partner was Guy Gisborne. He was the well-brought-up son of a librarian and a dentist, but he’d always fancied himself an outlaw. As a teenager, he’d had several scrapes with the law and served four months in juvenile detention.
Everyone hoped founding a successful business would straighten Guy out. Instead, Gisborne used his share of Captain Cash profits to build a criminal empire, slowly taking over every racket in Locksley and getting most of the town’s cash-strapped police force under his thumb.
Marjorie Kovacevic was the second teenaged partner, and the brain to Gisborne’s brawn. She turned down places at top universities to run Captain Cash, and six years later masterminded the sale of the business to the multi-billion-dollar King Corporation. With twenty million in her pocket, Marjorie set her mind to politics.
She became Sheriff Marjorie, the youngest person ever elected as Sheriff of Nottingham, which made her boss of an entire county and guardian of the vast Sherwood Forest to the north.
Completing the trio of seventeen-year-olds who didn’t listen when adults told them Captain Cash was a stupid idea, was Ardagh Hood. To raise money for the business, he’d worked three after-school jobs, begged his grandfather for a loan and spent an entire summer holiday with Guy and Marjorie, scrubbing grease out of the abandoned chicken shop, patching its leaky roof and hand-painting Captain Cash’s first brightly coloured pirate sign.
But Ardagh’s vision of an ethical local business that helped hard-up people get a small loan or free up cash by selling stuff they didn’t need, was at odds with Marjorie’s ruthless quest to squeeze profit out of every customer, and Gisborne using the shop to fence stolen goods and sending thugs to terrorise people who missed a loan payment.
‘Your dad would be a very wealthy man if he’d held on to his share of Captain Cash instead of his principles,’ Robin’s Auntie Pauline often joked.
Ardagh looked irritated every time his sister mentioned this, but Robin often imagined an alternative life, where they had millions in the bank instead of frozen economy burgers and hand-me-down clothes.
But Robin didn’t think about any of that as they stepped inside, because the super-catchy Captain Cash radio jingle was playing on repeat and took over his brain.
Don’t take fright when money’s tight.
Cos Captain Cash will set you right!
Captain Cash’s Locksley branch had long since moved from the former chicken joint where it began into premises ten times the size.
Its illuminated glass cabinets were filled with stuff people can live without when times get tough. Games consoles were stacked like house bricks. Also for sale were pre-loved examples of the smartphone every kid had wanted two years earlier, digital cameras, ping-pong tables, fishing gear, barbecues, wedding dresses and drones.
One entire wall was lined with cool musical instruments like drums and electric guitars that adults buy for themselves, and the ones like flutes and oboes that they nag kids for never practising.
Robin had only been in the store a few times before. The place was always busy and even at three on a weekday afternoon there were eight people queuing to cash cheques, borrow or sell.
A sturdy man in a farmer’s overall at one counter was stressing because they were only offering eighty bucks for his chainsaw.
‘Can’t you double check?’ he begged, flapping a pink Tool Shack invoice in the air. ‘This cost over eight hundred bucks. Ninety-six CCs and a diamond chain!’
The weary clerk drummed raspberry-coloured nails on the counter. Her name badge had a cartoon of Captain Cash with a parrot on his shoulder and read, Hi, I’m Rhongomaiwenua.
‘Sir, we only pay the price that comes up on the computer. You’ve got my queue backed up. So kindly accept my offer, or step aside so I can serve another customer.’
Robin saw the big man’s tendons go tight, turning his deep-tanned neck into a lizard collar. At the same time, Ardagh got furious looks as he bypassed the queue.
‘Sir!’ Rhongomaiwenua snapped at Ardagh.
‘I need to see the manager,’ Ardagh said gently.
Rhongomaiwenua gave Ardagh the exact look Tiffany, Stephanie and Bethany gave Robin when he got a hundred per cent on a Maths quiz.
‘There is no manager here,’ Rhongomaiwenua said. ‘If you wish to make a complaint you need to call head office in Nottingham.’
‘Isla is a friend of mine,’ Ardagh insisted. ‘Says there’s a bunch of computer stuff out back to collect.’
Before Rhongomaiwenua could process this, a sweet-faced woman in a shoulder-padded business suit came out and opened the counter flap.