Ronnie gives me a big hug and keeps saying “Thank you.” I tell him that he should have his break and go to the bank and pay in the cheque.
Just then Stella comes over to enquire if we need anything and I ask her for the bill. It comes to £6.20. I leave her a twenty-pound note.
Chapter Twenty
TRENTBRIDGE
I’ve lived in Trentbridge from the age of eight. I moved here with my parents and it’s been my home ever since. And as a police officer who went on to become a detective I’ve always thought it’s a place I know quite well.
I’ve decided the best plan is to use the money and help local people. Therefore, I’m thinking about the different areas that make up the town and where the money might best be used. Like most towns, we have a mixture of rich and poor. The more affluent side is Cherrywood. It enjoys easy access with the motorway just two miles away.
Then you have the actual town and central area, which includes the retail shopping areas, railway station and hospital. To the north is Milton and to the south is Trumpington. Both are a mixture of private houses with some council housing. To the west is Pickstone which runs along the town side of the River Stern and on the other side of the river is Asbury Park.
Asbury Park started life as an extension of a tiny hamlet called Asbury, hardly a village, consisting of one street called Foundry Road with thirty-two houses built in the thirties to house key people who were employed at the Asbury works. In its time the foundry was one of the main employers. There was a bridge across the river joining it with the town.
During World War II the military took it over to make equipment for the war effort, and one night in 1943 the entire area was bombed by the German Luftwaffe. The result was 224 people lost their lives in the raid and the bridge was destroyed. The foundry closed down when the war ended in 1945 and after that it became a remote place.
There’s plenty of land where the foundry stood and in the boom years of the late seventies when the town looked like it was heading for a new growth period, the council purchased the land and decided to regenerate the area, working together with a number of local developers. They invested heavily in creating what they hoped would be an expanding community with new houses and space for local industry to grow. Work started in 1977 and they built 880 new houses plus a handful of industrial units.
It’s a good location apart from the fact it is on the ‘wrong’ side of the River Stern and therefore separated from the town. However, in their original scheme the council planned to rebuild the bridge and road infrastructure that once linked it directly with the town. Unfortunately, when the recession hit in the early eighties most of the developers went out of business and the council couldn’t afford to build the connecting bridge. Over the years they talked about investing, but things never managed to progress, with each successive council blaming the failure on the previous one. Local politics at its finest!
So, the school and the doctors’ surgery were not completed. It all came to a halt, and in one final attempt to rescue things, the council purchased all the houses they didn’t already own back from the liquidators for a song. However, the cost of building the bridge and adjoining roads was beyond what anyone was prepared to invest.
Nowadays the only route to Asbury Park is by following the road which runs along the town side of the river, through Pickstone to the end of the River Stern and then following the road round to the other side of the river which is a journey time of around twenty-five minutes.
A lot of the elderly people moved out after four deaths from heart attacks when the ambulance couldn’t get there in time as the road is susceptible to flooding at various times of the year. One of the main reasons younger families don’t want to live there is because it was built in a time before broadband and 4G phone masts and nobody wants to live in an area with slow Internet or a decent signal on their mobile phone.
Overall, Trentbridge is not a bad place to live. Crime rates are average and houses are affordable if you compare them to the ridiculous prices people are paying to live in the south of England. In a place like Cambridge, for example, a three-bedroomed semi-detached house can cost between £400,000 and £600,000. Here in Trentbridge new properties can cost anywhere between £120,000 and £170,000 depending on the part of town. Places about a mile out of town towards Cherrywood and the new developments close to the railway station and hospital are the most expensive.
Chapter Twenty-One
DAVE
The motorway is quiet as Dave drives home from the airport. He lives in a luxury apartment complex called Mountview which is set over two levels. It’s located just four streets away from where his mum lives in her self-contained retirement home.
He reaches home at 9.45pm and after opening the front door he picks up the pile of mail his cleaner has placed on the hall table. He makes his way into the kitchen and with the flick of a switch the coffee machine spurts into life. Once it has done its work, he sits down to catch up with the pile of letters.
There is nothing in the mail to warrant his urgent attention: a few bills which his accountant can deal with and a couple of pieces of junk mail.
His
