(2005) Rat Run Read Online Free PDF Page A

chalk or washing powder, made more divisions and traded with dealers, the street gangs who controlled a small area of territory in a country town, a provincial city or in the capital. The supplier took his share.
    The dealers sold on the street, but only after further dilution. They were the last in line and their cash rewards were as meagre as those of the mountain farmers. The dealers had the addicts begging them for wraps - tonnage reduced down to a single gram, enough for a day's hit. No cash, no sale. Without money the addict was shut out as a customer.
    Thieving, begging, mugging, stealing were the only ways the addict could feed the need.
    On a housing estate in south-east London, the trail marked out for one little share of Afghanistan's poppy harvest came to an end.
    Malachy knew her life story, and more. He had been led into each cranny of her existence. He sat opposite Mrs Mildred Johnson and drank tea poured through a strainer that caught most of the leaves, a present from a distant relative on her wedding day. He ate ham and cucumber sandwiches, her late husband's favourite filling for his lunch when he'd driven a double-decker bus in London.
    Not expected to talk, only to listen, he occasionally nodded and tried to be attentive. He knew her life story because the same mixture of anecdote and memory was served up each fortnight, but he never showed signs of boredom or irritation at the repetition. He would be there for two hours. She had a small carriage clock with a tinkling chime - a present from her nephew, Tony - and at four o'clock on the first and third Thursday in the month the knock would come on the wall, and at six o'clock, without ceremony, and always the refusal that he should wash up the cups, saucers and plates, when the hour was struck, he would be told that it was time for her to dress to go out to bingo. He was then dismissed.
    He knew she was seventy-four. She had been
    widowed twelve years back after thirty-nine years of marriage. Her husband, Phil, had left no money and she survived on the state's meagre generosity. Her elder brother, Graham, and her sister-in-law, Hettie, were dead. Her only living relative was her nephew, Graham and Hettie's son, Tony - something
    important in the police', and she'd snort.
    He thought she must spend the first three hours of each day scrubbing, cleaning, dusting her one-bedroomed flat. It was spotless. If a crumb from a sandwich fell from his mouth, Malachy was always careful, immediately, to pick it off his trousers so that it should not fall to the carpet.
    Her first married home, when she was a school-dinner lady, had been in a terrace that had been demolished to make way for the Amersham. She, Phil and the budgerigar had moved into the first block to be completed thirty-two years ago. After his death she had been transferred to block nine, level three, flat fourteen. However bad it became, she said each fortnight, she was not leaving the Amersham. She had stayed on, refusing to cut and run, while all her friends and long-time neighbours had either died or left.
    The nephew, Tony - and she did a good imitation of the whip of his voice - had alternately nagged and pleaded with her to quit, even to come and live with his family. She had refused . . . She liked to tell that story. Tony had paid for the grille gate: three hundred pounds, even though the fire people at the council had warned that a locked grille gate made a potential death-trap for the elderly. She was staying on.
    To entertain Malachy to tea, and he reckoned it one of the reasons he was asked on those two Thursdays a month, she wore every item of jewellery she

    possessed. Her fingers were ablaze with rings, her wrists with bracelets, her throat with chains and a Christian cross, and he thought that if she had been able to plug into the lobes more than a single pair of earrings she would have. He assumed they were kept in a box under her bed for just these occasions. She would not have worn