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Victorian terraces butted up to the side of Marks & Spencer’s. The gasworks overshadowed the Kardomah. The swimming baths and the football ground faced each other only yards away from the corporation allotments.
    And really it was a boom town. Thirty years ago it had been just another village hiding in the lee of the Wolds. Then they’d found the sandstone. Thirty years later what had been a small village was a big town and would have been bigger if it hadn’t been for the ring of steelworks hemming in the sprawl.
    On the surface it was a dead town. The kind of place not to be in on a Sunday afternoon. But it had its levels. Choose a level, present the right credentials and the town was just as good as anywhere else. Or as bad.
    And there was money. And it was spread all over because of the steelworks. Council houses with a father and a motherand a son and a daughter all working. Maybe eighty quid a week coming in. A good place to operate if you were a governor who owned a lot of small time set-ups. The small time stuff took the money from the council houses. And there were a lot of council houses. Once I’d scrawled for a betting shop on Priory Hill. Christ, I’d thought, when I’d happened to find out how much they took in a week. Give me a string of those places and you could keep Chelsea. And Kensington. If the overheads were anything like related to what that tight bastard I’d been working for had been paying me.
    We pulled up outside The George. It said T HE G EORGE H OTEL , but all it was was a big boozer that did bed and breakfast. It was all Snowcemed and the woodwork was painted blue and the windows were fake lattice but I knew inside it was crummy. When I first started going in pubs when I was fifteen, The George was the one boozer I daren’t try. It looked so respectable on the outside. Later I learned different. I still didn’t go in, but for different reasons. But at this moment it suited all right.
    The driver whipped round the front of the car and opened my door. I got out. He opened the back door and got the hold-all.
    “How much is that?” I said.
    “Five bob,” he said.
    “Here you are,” I said. I gave him seven and six.
    “Thanks, mate,” he said. “All the best.”
    He made to take my bag towards the hotel.
    “That’s all right,” I said. “I can manage.”
    He gave me the bag. I began to turn away.
    “Er,” he said, “er, if you’re off to be about during next few days and you need owt, driving anywhere, like, give us a ring. Right?”
    I turned to look at him. The blue of the neon and the dead yellow of the high street light made him look as though he needed an oxygen tent. There was an earnest helpful look on his face. Rain looked like sweat on hisforehead. I kept looking at him. The earnest helpful look changed.
    “I told you,” I said. “I can manage.”
    He looked at the hold-all then at me, tracing back my words. He tried to frown, but the little bit of fear made him look more hurt than angry.
    “I was only being helpful,” he said.
    I smiled at him.
    “Goodnight,” I said, and turned away.
    I walked towards the door marked S ALOON and opened it. I didn’t hear him close his.
    Amateurs, I thought. Bloody stinking amateurs. I closed the door behind me.
    You had to give the landlord credit. He’d really tried to make it look the kind of place that married couples in their forties would like to come to for the last hour on a Saturday night.
    There was that heavy wallpaper in panels, the relief stuff that tried to look as though it was velvet. There was a photo-mural of Capri. There were wall seats in leatherette that looked as though they’d been put in a couple of years ago. There was formica on all the tabletops and also on top of the bar. There was some plastic wrought iron creating a pointless division. There was also a clean shirt on the landlord.
    There were a couple of yobboes playing a disc-only fruit machine. There was an old dad with a half-a-bitter and