No Place in the Sun Read Online Free PDF

five hundred a day some days. Still would be if he could keep out of the pub and the bookies. I expect you to be here when you’re supposed to be here.’
    ‘Five hundred a day? Is there that amount of business in it?’
    ‘It’s up to you. If you can really sell, you know, be ruthless about it, this is the place to make serious money, a lot more than Maurice Milton could ever pay you. I’ll pay you in cash every Friday, or every day if you want. The taxman will never know how much you got, and I won’t leave you short either. Have we a deal?’
    Tom looked him in the eye; this might be good. He held out his hand. ‘Deal.’

    Tom was surprised at how easy it was. He had worked part time in a used car lot about eight years earlier, when he left school, but his experience in the intervening years had fine tuned his selling skills and given him the ability to close sales where he would have been less confident in the past. It wasn’t exactly easy money, but he found that if he kept his concentration and stayed focussed, he could make a very good living. Maybe old Milton had done him a favour by closing down.
    Sometimes he wondered about what he was doing. If he stopped to think, looked back on the day and ran the sales through his mind, it could get inside his head a bit more than he would have liked. Some of the punters were really thick, they knew nothing about cars and it was easy to sell them some really slow movers at high prices. Some of them were smart enough, knew their stuff, and he tended to steer them to the better models. The easiest ones were the guys that talked as if they knew all about cars, but really knew very little; these were the ones that could be milked for the highest prices and the best commission. Still, apart from these occasional doubts, Tom was making some decent money and he was very satisfied with the way things were working out.
    Kevin was happy too; his new salesman was letting very few buyers leave the yard without a car and he was managing to shift the rubbish along with the better stuff. The previous guy had tended to steer buyers away from the duds, but Tom had a lot less scruples when there was a commission to be earned. If Kevin was paying an extra few quid on a particular slow mover, Tom would have it shifted before the end of the day.
    They stood at the back of the yard watching the driver unload the latest crop from the big transporter. Kevin bought in bulk from trade suppliers and from leasing companies, the five and six year old models that the main dealers didn’t want on their forecourts. Every so often he took a big batch of cars from the car rental firms, as long as they were registered to an anonymous company and didn’t have a record of being hired to tourists. These were big profit earners, they described them as one-owner cars and Willie cleaned them up well in the big shed at the back of the yard.
    ‘Who sent me that piece of shit?’ Kevin couldn’t conceal his disgust at the bright yellow Volkswagen that was rolling off the top deck of the truck.
    Tom could barely hold back the laughter. ‘It kinda stands out all right.’
    ‘Looks like a fucking builder’s jacket. Get it round the back and out of sight before anyone sees it, we’ll be a laughing stock.’
    ‘I wonder does it glow in the dark?’ The more Kevin got annoyed, the more Tom could see the funny side.
    ‘There’s yellow and there’s yellow, but that’s the worst colour car I ever saw in my life. Fucking diarrhoea yellow. It’s like the back of a shagging ambulance, nobody will buy that thing.’
    Tom looked inside the car when it was parked up. ‘It’s not in bad shape though, really low miles and very clean.’
    Kevin was sarcastic. ‘Would you buy a car that colour? Who would be interested in that thing? I’ll kill McGuire for dumping that on me.’
    ‘Maybe we might find a colour-blind customer for it.’
    ‘Let’s see you sell it, smartass. Let’s see how good you are, an extra