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shoulders to look into his illiterate blue eyes – like I always do with any copper.
    Then he started asking me questions, and my mother from behind said: ‘He’s never left that television set for the last three months, so you’ve nowt on him, mate. You might as well look for somebody else, because you’re wasting the rates you get out of my rent and the income-tax that comes out of my pay-packet standing there like that’ – which was a laugh because she’d never paid either to my knowledge, and never would, I hoped.
    â€˜Well, you know where Papplewick Street is, don’t you?’ the copper asked me, taking no notice of mam.
    â€˜Ain’t it off Alfreton Road?’ I asked him back, helpful and bright.
    â€˜You know there’s a baker’s half-way down on the left-hand side, don’t you?’
    â€˜Ain’t it next door to a pub, then?’ I wanted to know.
    He answered me sharp: ‘No, it bloody well ain’t.’ Coppers always lose their tempers as quick as this, and more often than not they gain nothing by it. ‘Then I don’t know it,’ I told him, saved by the bell.
    He slid his big boot round and round the doorstep. ‘Where were you last Friday night?’ Back in the ring, but this was worse than a boxing match.
    I didn’t like him trying to accuse me of something he wasn’t sure I’d done. ‘Was I at the baker’s you mentioned? Or in the pub next door?’
    â€˜You’ll get five years in Borstal if you don’t give me a straight answer,’ he said, unbuttoning his mac even though it was cold where he was standing.
    â€˜I was glued to the telly, like mam says,’ I swore blind. But he went on and on with his looney questions: ‘Have you got a television?’
    The things he asked wouldn’t have taken in a kid of two, and what else could I say to the last one except: ‘Has the aerial fell down? Or would you like to come in and see it?’
    He was liking me even less for saying that. ‘We know you weren’t listening to the television set last Friday, and so do you, don’t you?’
    â€˜P’raps not, but I was looking at it, because sometimes we turn the sound down for a bit of fun.’ I could hear mam laughing from the kitchen, and I hoped Mike’s mam was doing the same if the cops had gone to him as well.
    â€˜We know you weren’t in the house,’ he said, starting up again, cranking himself with the handle. They always say ‘We’ ‘We’ never ‘I’ ‘I’ – as if they feel braver and righter knowing there’s a lot of them against only one.
    â€˜I’ve got witnesses,’ I said to him. ‘Mam for one. Her fancy-man, for two. Ain’t that enough? I can get you a dozen more, or thirteen altogether, if it was a baker’s that got robbed.’
    â€˜I don’t want no lies,’ he said, not catching on about the baker’s dozen. Where do they scrape cops up from anyway? ‘All I want is to get from you where you put that money.’
    Don’t get mad, I kept saying to myself, don’t get mad – hearing mam setting out cups and saucers and putting the pan on the stove for bacon. I stood back and waved him inside like I was the butler. ‘Come and search the house. If you’ve got a warrant.’
    â€˜Listen, my lad,’ he said, like the dirty bullying jumped-up bastard he was, ‘I don’t want too much of your lip, because if we get you down to the Guildhall you’ll get a few bruises and black-eyes for your trouble.’ And I knew he wasn’t kidding either, because I’d heard about all them sort of tricks. I hoped one day though that him and all his pals would be the ones to get the black-eyes and kicks, you never knew. It might come sooner than anybody thinks, like in Hungary. ‘Tell me where the money is, and I’ll get you off with