Crack Down

salesman admonished. ‘I promise you, everybody who wants a bargain here tonight will get one.’ As he ended his sentence, the hammer banged for the third time, and a thicket of hands straggled into the air. The salesman made a pretence of looking around to see who was first, nodding histrionically as he caught the eye of his henchmen scattered round the room. Twenty punters with waving hands were selected for the cigarette-lighter bargain. It looked to me as if they’d been chosen at random. As we progressed through the cassette tapes (fifty pence), the videos (one pound) and non-stick frying pans developed as a by-product of the American space programme (two pounds), the same arbitrary selections were made. The salesman’s assistants only seemed interested in checking out the contents of people’s wallets.

The salesman had them in the palm of his hand now. The initial loss leaders had convinced them that tonight they really were going to get bargains. The salesman tossed back his curls and fastened the top button of his jacket, as if to signal it was time to get down to serious business. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I’m not going to insult your intelligence here tonight. I bet you all watch That’s Life. You know that there are unscrupulous people out there who want to part you and your money. Now, I’m not like that. So here’s what I’ll do. If you put your trust in me now, I will see to it that your trust does not go unrewarded. Ladies, this is something that will change your lives. Gentlemen, this is something that will change your luck. Every now and again, in the perfume laboratories of Paris, men in white coats come up with something that transforms the woman who wears it from the everyday to the absolutely sensational. With the right perfume, any housewife can make the man in her life feel like she’s Liz Taylor, Joan Collins and Michelle Pfeiffer rolled into one. It’s a scientific fact. They did it with Chanel No. 5. They did it with Giorgio. Now, they’ve done it with this!’

He brandished a box in the air. Candyfloss pink and silver stripes. It looked unlike anything I’d ever seen before. ‘Here it is, ladies and gentlemen. My brother is in the import/export business, and he has secured a case of this unique Parisian perfume for my customers before it goes on general sale. This exclusive perfume, Eau d’Ego, will be the subject of a major advertising campaign right through the summer, ladies and gentlemen. It’s going to be the hottest seller this Christmas, I promise you that. And tonight, you can be the very first people in Britain to own a bottle of Eau d’Ego.’

I struggled to keep a straight face. My French might not be up to much, but when Richard and I had spent a romantic weekend in Paris, we’d done a tour of the city sewers. I don’t think you’d find many chic Parisians wearing a perfume whose name sounds suspiciously like eau d’egout — sewage.

The salesman was still in full flow, however. ‘Now, we have a massive selection of bargains here tonight. But inevitably, we don’t have enough of our most popular items to go around. My boss puts limits on me. I mean, how many of you would like to buy a camcorder for under a hundred pounds?’

Nearly half the punters waved frantically at him. He gave a satisfied smirk. ‘Exactly. Now, my boss would sack me if I was to sell more than three of our bargain camcorders in one evening. So I have to ration you. Now, I have fifty bottles of Eau d’Ego here on this platform tonight. If you trust me enough to buy a bottle of this exclusive Parisian fragrance, I will give you first refusal on the lots I’m selling here tonight. I’m not saying you can’t buy a camcorder if you don’t buy the perfume, because that would be illegal, ladies and gentlemen. What I am saying is that the people who trust me enough to become my customers now will be given priority when it comes to buying the lots where we have restricted numbers. Now, I think you’ll agree, I can’t say fairer than that.’ His tone left no space for argument. It wasn’t a particularly clever pitch, and he wasn’t the world’s greatest spieler, but they loved it.

‘I warn you, ladies, if you get a taste for Eau d’Ego, you are never going to be called a cheap date again. When this marvellous perfume goes on sale in the shops, it will have a recommended retail price of forty-nine pounds ninety-five. Now, I’m not expecting you to pay forty-nine pounds ninety-five tonight. After all, you’ve not seen the advertising campaign, you’ve not read all the magazines raving about it, you’ve not seen the effect it has on me. All you’ve got is my word. And if I tell you that the wife helped herself to a bottle and I’ve gone home every night since, that should tell you something!’ He winked. I winced.

‘I’m not even asking you to pay half-price for the privilege of wearing this fragrance. Ten pounds, that’s all. For only a tenner, you can be among the first women to wear a perfume that’s destined to be the scent of the stars. Now, when my hammer falls for the third time, my assistants will have their eagle eyes peeled and the first fifty hands in the air will be given this exclusive opportunity.’ This time, there was no pause. The hammer banged once, twice, three times. The audience proved Pavlov’s theory of stimulus-response, the hands high above their heads as soon as the hammer hit.

All the assistants ran around distributing perfume and grabbing tenners. Terence seemed to be doing exactly the same as everyone else. At least, I couldn’t see any difference. I began to wonder if I was wasting my time.

The salesman had moved on from the perfume.

Now, he was putting together bundles of items. I reckoned I could buy their equivalent down any high street in the land for less than they were asking. But common sense had died somewhere in the salesman’s pitch, and he had stomped the corpse into the dust with his patter. They were fighting to be allowed to pay over the odds for crap that would explode, disintegrate, tarnish, break or all of the above within weeks.

The hysteria rose as he went through the charade of selling serious bargain lots to five handpicked mug punters. I had to admire his style as he relieved them of between a hundred and fifty and three hundred pounds for bundles of goods they thought they’d bought at a huge discount. I wouldn’t mind betting that at the end of the sale, they’d find that they hadn’t been granted the special lots at all. All they’d get would be goods worth rather less than they’d paid, and a wide-eyed assurance that the parcel they’d ‘bought’ had been sold to that (non- existent) man standing right behind them…I was watching carefully, and I’d lost track of what was going on. The mug punters had no chance.

But the most extraordinary was yet to come. ‘Have I been good to you tonight, or have I been good to you tonight?’ the salesman demanded. He was greeted with a reasonably warm murmur. ‘Do you think I’m someone you can trust? You, madam — would you trust me?’ He went through half a dozen members of the audience, pinning them with his stare, demanding their loyalty. Every last one of them bleated a ‘yeah’ like so many sheep.

He smiled, revealing what he’d been doing with some of the profits. ‘I told you about my brother earlier, didn’t I? The one in import and export? Well, he knows how I love to treat you people, so he’s always on the look- out for bargains that I can pass on to my customers. Now, a lot of these things come from outside the EEC, and according to EEC regulations, we can’t display them in the same way. So what we do is we make them up into parcels. Even I don’t know what’s in these parcels, because we make them up at random. But I can guarantee that each of these parcels contains goods to a value well in excess of what I’m asking for them. All I ask of you is that you take the goods home with you before you unwrap them. Not because we want you to buy a pig in a poke but because the contents vary so much. If the person standing next to you sees you’ve got a state-of-the-art food processor for a tenner and he’s only got a toasted-sandwich maker, a set of heated rollers and a clock radio, it can often cause jealousy, and the last thing we want is fights breaking out because some of our bargains are such outrageously good value for money. Now, I’m going to start with ten-pound parcels. Who’s spent money with me here tonight and would like to take advantage of my insane generosity?’

I couldn’t help myself. My mouth fell open. A couple of dozen people were waving their bottles of perfume in the air. Most of them looked like Giro day was the biggest financial event in their lives. Yet they were shelling out hard-hoarded cash on a black bin liner that could have contained a bag of sugar and a half-brick. I wouldn’t have believed it if someone had told me about it. Then, as the salesman moved on to fifty-pound lucky bags, I noticed a change in the pattern. It was hardly noticeable, but it was enough. For the first time that evening, I began to believe I was in the right place at the right time.

Chapter 13

I drove back to Manchester, replaying what I’d just seen, wondering what it meant. If I hadn’t been totally