D. Mitchell - The King of Terrors

He would occasionally go back there to wait outside, hang around, watching the flat, walking around the place in a way that allowed him to keep vigil without arousing too much suspicion. Anyhow, there were so many other dodgy people hanging around that one more wouldn’t arouse much suspicion, he thought. Then one day he struck gold; she came out of the flat one Saturday afternoon, holding a carrier bag heavy with something. He followed her. She stopped at a grocer’s shop, went into a chemists, did the usual stuff. Then she ducked into a pawnshop. OK, so they didn’t call them that these days, they went under fancy names, but it’s where you went to hock your stuff all the same. A rash of them had sprung up all over the city as the depression deepened.

Strange thing was she paid a visit to three of them, one after the other. There were only so many watches, gold rings and necklaces she possessed, surely? And he never once saw her wearing any jewellery, come to think of it, not even earrings.

The following weekend she came out, same time in the afternoon, but on this occasion she carried a small suitcase. At first his heart almost skipped a beat. Was she leaving? Going somewhere for good?

He followed her and watched from a safe distance as she waited at a bus stop. When a double-decker turned up and he saw her pay her fare and skip up the stairs, he made a dash for the bus and managed to clamber on board before the doors swished shut.

‘Where to?’ asked the driver.

‘Where do you go to?’ said Billy. ‘Where’s the end of the line?’

The driver told him and Billy stumped up the fare.

Breathlessly he took a seat at the rear of the bus and watched for Beth coming down the stairs.

Eventually she emerged and he ducked down so she wouldn’t glance back down the bus and see him. He needn’t have worried. She left the bus and Billy almost left it too late to leave his seat. The driver was closing the doors and the bus lurched forward when Billy said, ‘Wait a minute, let me off!’

‘Make your bloody mind up!’ the driver grumbled. So much for customer service, thought Billy.

He followed her through the crowds of shoppers, till she ducked into the ladies’ toilets. She was gone about ten minutes. He nearly didn’t recognise her; she came up the steps dressed to the nines, hair brushed up nice, face made-up, a natty two-piece suit and black high heels that she must have had in her suitcase. She went into a store simply called Kennedy’s, the highest-class cash or exchange shop of them all; the stuff they dealt with sometimes ran to the hundreds of thousands. Even those with money sometimes needed to hock their Rolex, he guessed. A higher-class cash or exchange shop for a better class of economic hardship, he thought.

He hung around. She was in for twenty minutes or so. She emerged, went back to the toilets and changed back into her old gear. She caught a bus straight back home. Billy was fascinated, but he had no answer to her strange behaviour. That didn’t stop him speculating.

Yes, he thought, ramming a dented tin onto the supermarket shelf, I know more about you than you know. He wasn’t fooled by that quiet, innocent exterior. She was involved in shady goings-on at the flat. Why else would she pick to live there, lost amongst the dross? She was a fence, most likely, shifting valuables for some hoodlum or other. Some of those shops wouldn’t ask too many questions either.

It didn’t dampen his enthusiasm, it added spice. And he was considering ways he might use that information against her, to get what he wanted from her. Money, for one, to support the Big Plan. And he grew excited by other possibilities. Who gave a fuck that the only way he might bed her was through blackmail? In his soiled book the end determined the means.

He heard the muffled sound of some commotion or other from outside the supermarket. He didn’t pay it much notice. There were many nights when drunken yobs played havoc in the yard. Slimer had regularly called in the police to deal with them when he first started at the supermarket, but he’d called them out so often they pretended not to hear anymore. In the end Slimer accepted it was what you could expect from such a crap posting in such a crap place and ignored the annoying but generally harmless incursion into his territory. Slimer, everyone knew, would much rather sit in his poky little office reading porn or trying to catch up on sleep. One word from a weirdo or two usually put paid to any mischief anyhow.

Billy returned to his shelf filling. He was biding his time, waiting for an opportune moment to confront Beth not-so-innocent Heaney. He let the thought roll over in his mind, the way he’d roll a toffee in his mouth, playing over the sweetness it offered.

The strident, crashing sound of shattering glass rudely interrupted his daydreaming. He couldn’t see the front entrance from his aisle so he left his work and made his way to the front of the store where the tills were ranked. He was joined by the majority of the night staff, each drawn by idle curiosity.

Billy’s eyes widened in disbelief when he saw the seething black mass of a crowd of people gathered beyond the supermarket’s large windows. One of the panes sported a great gaping hole where a brick had been thrown through it. Loud, angry voices raged like a stormy sea. He saw Slimer up front, his finger on a large green button. The metal shutters were shivering their slow way down; he hadn’t bothered to shut them and was giving someone else an ear bashing for his own mistake.

It was too late. More bricks followed the first and a good length of the windows simply dissolved and showered the floor like ice crystals. Slimer jumped away from the button as a torrent of people — mostly youths but some of them were distinctly older — rolled through the rent into the store like an oil slick onto a beach. They wore hoodies to hide their heads, or scarves wrapped around their lower faces, and many of them brandished makeshift weapons like staves of two-by-one timber, or long pieces of iron and chains; some of them still had a brick in each hand.

The crowd charged belligerently, the sound that of an amplified wounded bear, the look in people’s eyes like that of a hungry snake staring at a blind mouse. Slimer, his staff for the first time right behind him, ran down towards the rear of the supermarket screaming: ‘It’s a bastard riot!’

For a moment Billy was rooted, as if his feet had been planted in concrete blocks. He glanced to his right; Beth was also standing motionless, pale-faced, a tin of something or other still clutched in her hands. She looked at him worriedly as the crowd surged towards them.

Stuff this, thought Billy, the instinct for self-preservation never more than a scratch below the surface. He abandoned her to find her own way out it. It was a case of every shelf-filler for himself.

People were hurling shopping trolleys through the opening in the window and they wasted no time in helping themselves to anything they could get their hands on, scooping stock off the shelves and sweeping it into the trolleys like queer kinds of consumer goods waterfalls. Some made directly for the small electrical section, another group for the spirits and wines; a couple of thoughtful fathers, perhaps, began to stock up on tinned baby milk and packets of disposable nappies; another small group, maybe harbouring thoughts of preventing the need for baby milk altogether, loaded up with condoms.

A large contingent simply had violence and destruction in mind and set about trashing all they could with homemade weapons. The sounds of shattering glass and tins hitting the floor added to the horrific din echoing around the supermarket aisles.

Over the tannoy, Englebert Humperdink was singing, ‘Please release me…’