‘Do you think she fell for that?’
‘Not deep down, but I think it helped her deal with it and she knew I wasn’t muscle, so maybe she thought I wouldn’t be in harm’s way. If that makes her sound naive then so was I. I used to believe it too, remember?’
‘I remember.’
‘I didn’t sign up for Bobby when I was a bairn. They would tolerate me in the bar between opening hours, if she was tidying or helping the manager clean the lines. She knew the cellar work better than the men. So I’d sit there at one of the tables when the pub was closed in the afternoon, drawing or playing with soldiers, until she was done. Bobby and the crew understood she had to keep me with her. There was no one else. He didn’t seem to mind. He was a big, scary bloke, particularly for a nipper like me, but if he saw me sitting there he’d come over and give me a stern look and say “Your mother’s working, so make sure you sit there quiet like and divvent work yersell.”’
‘What’s that mean?’
‘Basically, behave. So I’d nod my head and he’d just go, “good lad; help yourself to a bag of crisps, just the one, mind,” and I’d get to go behind the bar and get my crisps. When I think now of all the stuff I’ve seen and done, good and bad, since that time, I still look back and think that was the ultimate. I mean I was getting free crisps from the man himself right, from behind Bobby Mahoney’s bar and he was letting me. It didn’t get better than that.’
‘So how did you start working for him?’
‘It was a few years later and it started when I saw something I shouldn’t. He used to have this old snooker hall, it’s not there anymore. It was cheap and anyone could play down there. I was in with a friend once, messing about. We were so small we virtually had to stand on a box so we could reach the tables and we could hardly pot a ball, but we were learning and thought we were cool and grown up, you know. Anyway, one day we were playing on a table that a flash twat called Harry Cassidy liked to use, so he kicked us off. He was a local hard knock who didn’t work for Bobby and he didn’t ask us nicely. My mate was daft enough to complain that we’d paid for the table so Cassidy cuffed him one and he went off crying. The old man who ran the place made himself scarce because he was frightened of Cassidy. For some reason I stayed. There was this massive open cupboard set back in the far wall where they stored all of the old kit that was falling apart; cues, triangles, bits of broken cushion, so I just climbed up there and sat it out until they were done, so I could get back on the table later, all the while looking daggers at Cassidy. I wanted to be the next Hurricane Higgins and Harry Cassidy wasn’t going to stop me. Anyhow the place emptied because of Cassidy, so he was there with his mate, who was a sort of poor man’s enforcer.
‘Next thing, two blokes walk in. I knew from being with me ma that they were members of Bobby’s firm. Jerry Lemon and Jinky Smith. Both tough guys, but Jerry was a fucking psycho. Not a big bloke, but he had that menace, you know.
‘Now Harry Cassidy is a villain but he’s not daft, he knows who these guys are, so he’s immediately wondering if they are after him but they just nod and grunt their hellos and start setting up on the table next to him to play a frame, so he relaxes and so does his minder. They must have been playing fifteen minutes or so, Cassidy and his minder on one table, Jerry Lemon and Jinky on the next one and, even at my age, I must have only been eight or nine, I had an instinct that it was about to kick off. I don’t think Cassidy did, which is one of the reasons you’ve never heard of him.
‘Jerry Lemon is bent over his shot and I can hear him even from my little cubby hole in the far wall. He’s chuntering on to Jinky, “Eeh you’ve left us nowt man, you spawny bastard,” that sort of thing. He goes down on the shot then he comes back up again, takes another look, shakes his head, goes down again, comes back up. While this is happening, Cassidy’s minder bends down on a shot and Jerry suddenly flips his cue around and brings the thick end down hard on the back of the bloke’s head. He goes down like someone just pulled the plug on him, out like a light. I’d never seen anything like it before. I’d witnessed a few fights in the school playground, obviously, but not violence like that. It was shocking but somehow exciting too. Before the bloke has even slumped to the floor, Jerry is after Cassidy shouting “Come here you!” and Cassidy tries to leg it but he can’t, because Jerry is coming for him one way and Jinky from the other side of the table. He’s trapped then, down on the floor on the blind side of the table, where I can’t see him anymore, but Jerry and Jinky gave him a good kicking while Jerry explained the reasons for his beating. I didn’t hear it all but I do distinctly remember the words “Bobby” and “Mahoney” being mentioned as the kicks went in on this helpless bloke. He looked in a right mess when they finished and do you know what I was thinking all the while they were doing it?’
‘What?’
‘Good,’ I admitted, ‘you hit my mate, you fucking deserved that. I think I even had this confused thing going on in my young mind where I actually thought they were giving him a kicking because he’d hit my pal, like Bobby was a good guy beating up a villain for hurting a kid, as if he was Batman or something, only he sent his men to do it instead.’
‘Anyhow, when the beating was over, Jerry turned round and finally spotted me sitting at the back of this dark cupboard, watching it all.’
‘Oh dear.’
‘Oh dear, is right. I was the only witness and I was terrified. “What you doing there?” he starts shouting at me but thank god Jinky was with him because he said, “That’s Tina Blake’s kid, isn’t it?” and that took the wind out of Jerry’s sails, because me ma was family and he knew Bobby liked her. They made me climb down out of the cupboard and Jinky took me away from Jerry and explained how Cassidy was a very bad man who was going to do some really bad things and hurt people, so they had to hurt him first to stop him. I lapped that up because it went along with my Bobby-Mahoney-as-masked-vigilante theory. Next thing, Jinky has taken a pound note out of his pocket and given it to me. A quid note was a lot back then. He tells me that’s for being brave and a reward for never saying anything to anyone about this, then he gives me a message and tells me to run to the club and give it to Bobby. He tells me “If you dae it right, Bobby will give you another pund.” So I run off to deliver the message. I can’t remember the words but it was something vague like, “the problem’s over”. I see Bobby and tell him. He smiles at me, ruffles my hair, says I’m a good lad and, true to Jinky’s word, gives me another quid. It was a grand day’s work.’
‘I can see how that might have started something,’ Palmer admitted.
‘They knew they could trust me after that. I started running errands, simple stuff, messages for other members of the crew. At first I didn’t understand the messages I was given but, as I got older, I worked them out. It didn’t matter. I was practically family and I wasn’t going to tell the police anything, was I?
‘Bobby kept telling me to “stick-in” at school, so I could go off and do something with my life. When I came back in the holidays he gave me bar work, which I was glad of. It was only when I finally left college and wanted to come back to the north-east that I seriously considered working for him. Times were changing and I knew he could use someone with half an ounce of brain; he was being advised by the likes of Jerry Lemon and Finney and they weren’t the brightest. Bobby was sharp as a razor, but he needed someone he could trust to hear him out and give him that second opinion.’
Back then, I knew I could earn more with Bobby than by joining some pseudo, blue-chip outfit straight from the milk round, then slogging it up the corporate ladder for years, before I started making any real money. Plus, I could stay in the north-east and there weren’t many jobs going for bright young things here when I came out of my degree course. It’s ironic when I think about it now but he was against it and I had to persuade him it was the right move. I often wonder what would have happened to me if he’d just told me to fuck off.’