Deadfolk by Charlie Williams

footstep were a step further into the dark tunnel what only had one end. Even if I stopped and turned arse the other way, it were still a step further. There were no way out. Legs couldn’t help us out of this one.
    No one could.
    I opened the door and climbed into my car, thinking how going to the coppers might not be such a bad idea. I’d go down for years. But at least I wouldn’t find meself dressed in concrete at the bottom of the river, arms and legs lopped off and head shoved up arse. And it were because I were preoccupied with such thoughts that I didn’t notice the feller on the back seat.
    ‘All right, Jess,’ says I as he pulled himself upright.

7
     
    Right here seems a good place to say a few more words about the Muntons, reduced in number as that clan now were. You’ve heard the stories. Can’t very well hear about Mangel without hearing a thing or two relating to the Muntons. And you’ve heard what I’ve already told you, so I’ll do my bastardest not to retread old ground, so to speak.
    But there’s one thing about them that you won’t have heard. It’s a secret all right, sure as shite is brown. And if it ain’t a secret and you has heard it before…Well, I don’t rightly know what. Who told you?
    Happened two summers before the time I’m telling you about. I were working for the Muntons back then, as I had done for the few years previous, and intended on doing for as long as they’d have me. It were good work, see. I were doorman at Hoppers. Head doorman.
    Heard it before, eh?
    Well, Hoppers were a different kettle of kippers back then. These days it were a Wine Bar & Bistro, as you’ve come to hear. But in them days it were something of a local entertainment venue, as well as being a place to get right pissed. Every night there were summat on. Funny man Tuesdays, topless mud wrestling Monday and Wednesday, karaoke Saturday, strippers other nights. And happy hour every night between five and seven. It were popular and all. Not just amongst town folk. They came from miles around, from Barkettle in the north to Tuber in the south. Once I even welcomed a coach party from East Bloater, believe it or not.
    Hoppers were the Mangel Mecca in all but name. And presiding over it were the Munton brothers. Course, it were their old man who made it what it were. Tommy Munton.
    Aye.
    Tommy Munton.
    Let me tell you summat. Everything you’ve heard about Tommy Munton is true. True as grass is green, trees reaches upward, and turnips grows in the ground. Even the one about him ripping off the post office in Lower Flapp dressed as a nun. And the shoot-out in Felcham where he shot their heads off and walked away with nary a pellet up his arse. Course, that’s how Hoppers got started, with all the money he’d robbed. How else do a man borned in a skip and growed up in the gutter get his paws on that kind of coinage?
    But none of his misdeeds mattered if you looks at em as a means to an end. That’s the way most folks reckoned it anyhow. Hoppers were the smartest premises in Mangel. And when Tommy died of old shrapnel, he passed it on to his younguns.
    Which were his first and last mistake.
    Now, you can say what you likes about schools and books, but far as I’m concerned teachers and writing can’t give a feller a business brain. He’s either born with one or he’s picking sprouts with the rest of us. And Tommy Munton were born with one. That’s how he’d made Hoppers the success it were. Helped him with the bank jobs and all, like as not. You’d need to know where they keeps the safe in a bank, for example. But whatever business brains he had, he’d held em back when fathering his boys.
    You’d never have known it to look at the surface appearance of things. To the untrained eye, Hoppers looked healthy as ever under the Muntons junior. Folks was drinking, which were all that counted to my thinking. And that’s why it were summat of a shock when Lee took us aside one night after lock-up and