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sliding door at the back of the van, pushing it upwards to reveal a solid wall of black plastic refuse bags.
    â€˜Like I said, it’s rubbish. Okay, so it maybe is stuff you should take a bit more care of when you’re getting rid of it. I know, these days, we should all think of the environment, but sometimes you gotta cut corners. Any more problems?’
    â€˜Don’t worry, Angel,’ beamed Tigger, ‘it’s not nuclear.’
    It wasn’t household rubbish or kitchen waste either; there was no smell. Though that wasn’t quite right. There was a faint, antiseptic whiff coming off the van.
    Tigger read my mind: ‘Paint, paint stripper, mild fungicides, the stuff decorators use. That’s what you can smell, but don’t worry, you won’t get any on your clothes. I’m here to do all the heavy lifting.’
    â€˜Yeah,’ said Bert. ‘Tigger’ll look after you.’
    â€˜That’s what worries me,’ I said to myself. ‘Okay, I’m in. Let me shift my wheels.’
    Bassotti looked at me as if I had made an improper suggestion involving several members of his family.
    â€˜Well, you don’t want an unattended black cab parked outside here for a couple of hours, do you?’
    He considered this.
    â€˜Good thinking, Roy. Stick it round the corner, it’ll be all right there.’
    That was when I should have cut and run, just kept on driving, leaving Bert and Tigger playing with themselves in the lock-up, wondering what had happened to me. But the truth was it seemed easy money and I needed it. And a little bit of illegal dumping didn’t seem so bad. I knew I might have to stay away from Greenpeace meetings for a while, but they didn’t issue death sentences just for fly-tipping, did they?
    I drove Armstrong round the corner and parked under a streetlight; not that I relied on that to deter thievery, but it was the sort of thing an honest civilian would do. There was little chance of Armstrong getting pinched. The young joyriders who went ‘hotting’ wanted something with a bit more speed, and the professional car thief would have a hell of a job selling him to anyone other than a real taxi driver, and you can’t imagine a real musher touching stolen property, can you?
    In the glove compartment I found half a packet of Sweet Afton cigarettes I’d forgotten about, two pirate tapes of a Guns ‘N’ Roses studio session, a single black nylon stocking (which for the life of me I couldn’t explain) and then, eventually, what I was looking for.
    If you buy diesel at garages these days they have a dispenser near the pump that gives out cheap pairs of clear plastic gloves. I always take more than I need as, well, you never know.
    I pulled on a couple of them – they are all one size and there is no ‘left’ and ‘right’ – and smoothed them down. They slipped and tore easily, but at least they would do the job. I was damned if I was going to leave my fingerprints on Bassotti’s van, if it was his, which I doubted.
    It turned out to be the only sensible decision I made for quite a while.
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Chapter Three
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    So there we were, in the middle of one of the biggest, richest, most sophisticated cities in the world, at the start of the new decade of the Caring Nineties, and we were taking a job, cash-in-hand, from a man we met in a pub.
    Would you credit it?
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    It went off easy enough. Money for old rope, really. Well, old something or other.
    We made it down the East India Dock Road before the pubs chucked out and then on to the A13, bypassing East Ham and Barking.
    â€˜We turn off here,’ said Tigger unnecessarily. He hadn’t said much during the trip, but I wasn’t going to lose sleep over it. ‘That’s it, River Road. Now we hang a right just down here.’
    I assumed he knew where he was going. As far as I could remember, though I didn’t