Director's Cut by I. K. Watson Read Free Book Online Page B

Cole asked, “What time?”
    “Make it eight.”
    Butler sat with the phone tapping against his chin before he nodded
purposefully and said to Anian, “You're coming to dinner tonight,
eight o'clock. It's business.”
    “Overtime, Sarge?”
    “Don't take the piss, Anian, there's a good girl.”

Chapter 7
    Rick Cole showered and changed and downed a large Teacher's before
driving out towards the Butler's place. To get there he had to drive
across town.
    Cole knew the city. A lifetime ago he had plodded there, to begin
with under the guidance of a parent constable. Now they were called
street duty PCs. A dozen years later he was wearing plain clothes at the
Yard but those days were so distant that he sometimes wondered if
they’d really happened. For one reason or another everything had come
unstuck and he had ended up at Sheerham. It could have been worse.
He was acting up and had an office to himself and that in itself was a
luxury for a DI. It wouldn’t last indefinitely and the grapevine buzzed
with rumours of a fresh-faced DCI coming over from the Yard.
Driving through town most people would use the main road that
passed through the south on its way to the city, and they'd find it one of
those places that didn't register. Perhaps unconsciously, they'd closed
their eyes. The south was where most of the blacks lived and was congested,,
noisy, filled with litter. It was a place to leave behind.
    The MP was black, Gilly Brown, and his heart was still
    in the West Indies. He controlled the council, or at least
his siblings who made up the majority, and on his behalf they spent more council
tax on coffee mornings than libraries, more on banning the black from blackhead
than bus passes for the elderly. But he was laughing at the system. His pockets
were comfortably lined. Gilly Brown was living proof that enough split votes
would let in the wackos. He'd swear allegiance to the Queen and country, Princess
Anne too. He'd swear to anything that moved so long as it added to his bank
balance.
    Tower blocks littered the skyline, council estates were run down.
Finer roads ran through the north of the town where properties had
their own drives and bordered a well-maintained parkland. Most of the
Jews – outside of Hampstead Garden and Golders Green –
    lived there along with the Maltese gangsters and Gilly Brown. And
Ticker Harrison.
    The Sheerham High Road ran through the centre of town. It was the
main shopping precinct which was dominated by the Carrington
Theatre, a huge red-brick building that once, long ago, attracted the
stars. Narrow side-streets criss-crossed the High Road but the shops on
these petered out quickly to the odd Asian grocery that sold everything
day and night and Christmas Day. Then it was row upon row of
terraced housing. The front gardens were about a yard wide and out
back was enough room to keep the lawnmower. Most of these
buildings were in poor shape, windows were cracked or boarded and
doors were blistered. It was a place covered in graffiti and litter. It was
the place that produced most of the criminals and the highest
    unemployment figures.
    As the night fell and the neon took over, the pensioners barricaded
themselves indoors and the youngsters came out to play. It happened in
every town and city across the country yet here it was concentrated, the
overspill from the city, and the energy was frightening. The bars and
clubs were packed with young drinkers slamming down their highpowered
bottles.
    This was Sheerham.
    Cole's patch.
    While he waited at the crossroads before the Carrington Theatre he
noticed that something from the past was stirring. Lottery money and
local taxes had revamped the Class A building and given it an exotic
quality. The red brick glowed like a furnace and threw out a ray of
comfort over the Romanian beggars as they pushed their smack-faced
kids at the box-office queue. There was a woman on the billboard,
eight-feet high, in skimpy black underwear and