'Well, I'll have to go, Lee. It's been nice talking to you. I have to ask you once again, though, do you want to become a crime-fighter, or would you rather play all your football against a twenty-foot wall?'
He stared at me across the table with something like contempt in his gaze. 'You don't understand, do you?' he declared.
'Understand what?' I replied, quizzically.
'Drugs,' he answered. 'Drugs are all right. As soon as I get out I'll start taking them again. What else is there?'
'I'm sorry you feel that way, Lee. Drugs are a one-way ride to an early grave or the mental hospital, and it's all downhill.'
I stood up to leave, but as I reached the door of our little cubicle I turned back to him. 'Oh, I forgot to give you these; you have to have a copy.' I reached into my inside pocket for the two sheets of foolscap and laid them on the table in front of him.
He gazed at them for a few seconds, then up at me. 'What are they?' he demanded.
'Your new deps,' I told him.
'I've got my deps.'
'You're not listening, Lee. I said your new deps.'
He looked bewildered, so I spelled it out for him: 'We've got you down as a nonce now, Lee, with a special liking for small boys. Should make a good-looking lad like you very popular in here. I'll organise you some new room-mates on my way out.'
The newly acquired colour drained from his face and he swayed in his chair. I re-took my seat opposite him.
'You couldn't do it,' he said defiantly.
I pointed at the papers. 'Read 'em. Do you want to risk it?' I placed my ball-pen across the sheets in front of him. 'All I'm asking you to do, Lee,' I said softly, 'is turn the sheet over and write a name on the back. I guarantee that nobody will ever know where it came from.' A white-knuckled fist moved a couple of inches towards the pen, hesitated, and then withdrew. His eyes were glistening with tears. He sniffed and shook his head. 'No. I can't,' he mumbled.
'A name, Lee.'
'No.'
'One little name, and I'll go away and take the deps with me and no one will ever know I've been.'
He shook his head. I reached across and turned the top sheet over.
Across the middle it said 'Parker'. The effect was electric.
'I didn't write that!' he exclaimed.
'Thanks, Lee, that should do nicely.' I took the fake depositions back and put them in my pocket. 'You won't be needing these any more,' I explained.
'I didn't write it, I didn't write anything.' He wiped his nose on his sleeve.
'Of course you didn't, but your face told me what I wanted to know.
Don't worry about it, Lee, we've had his name from several sources, I just wanted confirmation.'
His agitation died down when he realised that we already knew the name.
What he didn't know was how useless that piece of information was to us.
'This Parker…' I tossed the question in as casually as tossing a cigarette butt into a fire, 'is he black or white?' No harm in answering that; it only narrows the field down to half of the world's population.
'White,' he said, gazing at the table like a shell-shocked survivor.
The dam was cracking. Some judicious leverage could give us a torrent.
'Do you fancy another tea?'
He nodded. I fetched the same again and we sipped and munched in silence for a while. 'Big money in dealing,' I stated. 'What's he drive BMW? Merc? Porsche?'
'A Porsche.'
'Fabulous. A black one, no doubt.'
'Yeah, how did you know?'
'Just a guess, black ones look best.'
If it really was a black Porsche we probably had enough to pin him down; on the other hand Lee could be smarter than the average junky.
Might as well go for gold. 'Where does he hang out, Lee?'
'All over. Sometimes in the Penalty Spot, sometimes in the Fireplace.'
The Penalty Spot was the pub outside the football ground, the Fireplace was a nightclub of some repute.
'On match days?' I asked.
'I think so.'
'You think so. Don't you deal with him?'
'No.'
'Then who do you get your works from?'
He looked down at the table. He'd clammed up again.
'Lee, look at me. Are you telling me that Parker is the big fish, the pusher who supplies your dealer.'
He lifted his head and nodded.
'Any idea where he comes from?'
'Manchester, I think.'
'Thanks, Lee. I'll see what I can do for you.'
The drug network is long and tortuous. Between the hill farmers and chemists who produce the stuff and the street-corner dealers who peddle it are chains of middlemen, each raking off a percentage of the final price. What starts out measured in tons, selling for peanuts, finally lands on the streets in twists of foil selling at twenty-five pounds a go. At each transaction the quantities are divided into smaller units, and the price increases by two or three hundred percent.
A heroin junky needs between one and two hundred pounds every day to pay for his habit. The easiest way to get this sort of money is to become a dealer. He'll buy an ounce at a time and sell individual doses of half a gram, probably diluted with something like baking soda.
He's a victim, dealing to pay for the crocodile in his head that needs constant feeding. The people he buys from don't touch the stuff. They haven't got long hair; they wear blue suits, not Funky Junky T-shirts, and do their deals via mobile telephones in their up-market cars. The more middlemen they can bypass, the bigger the profit. But that makes the risks greater, too.
Where Parker fitted in I didn't know, but I was sure of one thing he'd been very careless.
Chapter Seven
I was struggling to write a letter to the Crown Prosecution Service in an attempt to obtain light sentences for the Mountain Bike Gang, on the grounds that they had proffered valuable information, but I kept being interrupted. First it was Sparky.
'Are there two ns in fornication?'
'Only if they're lesbian 'ens, usually it's just one 'en and a cockerel.'
'Cheers.'
'You're welcome.'
Then it was Mike Freer, at last, on the telephone. 'Shagnasty! How y'doin'?' he boomed in my ear. There was a ritual to be gone through before we got down to business.
'Not bad, Fungus Features, how're you?' I replied.
'Oh, fare to Midlands. Listen, Super Sleuth, I want you to know that we're ignoring the rumours and we're all standing by you in spite of everything.'
'Gee, I'm… I'm really choked. I don't deserve friends like you.'
'Just tell me one thing,' he went on, 'was it a very old man?'
