Dying Fall by Sally Spencer

commercial ‘friendships’ with the landlords.
    It had sometimes worked in the past, and the customers had watched with joyous hearts as the landlords slipped a glass under the towels and looked the other way while they were pulling the pint – as if the action had nothing at all to do with them.
    But it didn’t work that night. All the landlords that night were firm. All of them were absolutely resolute.
    â€˜There are a lot of bobbies out on the street tonight,’ they informed the hopeful boozers, ‘and I’m not about to risk losing my licence for one shilling and eleven pence.’
    The landlords had not lied. There
were
a lot of bobbies out on the streets that night, and two of them – PC Roger Crabtree and PC Dave Warner – were driving around the area of the abandoned cotton mills even as the landlords were heartlessly turning down the last desperate requests.
    â€˜Foot patrol!’ Warner said in disgust, as Crabtree parked the car outside one of the derelict buildings. ‘We’re on
foot
patrol!’
    â€˜True enough,’ Crabtree agreed.
    â€˜But we’re
motor
patrol,’ his partner pointed out. ‘That’s why we wear smart flat caps, instead of big pointy helmets.’
    Crabtree chuckled. ‘Are your bunions playing you up again?’ he asked innocently.
    â€˜I don’t have bunions,’ Warner answered, with mock outrage. ‘Bunions are an old man’s affliction, and I’m still a slip of a youth.’
    A slip of a youth who would be twenty-nine next birthday and was already developing a beer belly, Crabtree thought, but he kept the observation to himself, and simply said, ‘As the duty sergeant pointed out, the reason we’re issued with thick boots is so that we can walk if we have to.’
    â€˜And we
do
have to?’ Warner asked, as if still searching for a loophole.
    â€˜Yes,’ Crabtree replied firmly. ‘We do.’
    Warner shrugged. He was not a bad bobby, and he supposed that if that was what the Sarge wanted, then that was what the Sarge got.
    He stepped out of the car. The sky above them was cloudless, and the full moon bathed the old mill in a ghostly golden glow.
    Warner shivered. ‘It’s brass-monkey weather out here,’ he complained.
    â€˜Look on the bright side,’ his partner told him.
    â€˜What bright side?’
    â€˜When all this is over, you’ve got a nice warm bed to go back to, haven’t you?’
    â€˜Yes?’
    â€˜Which is more than any of the poor buggers we’ve been sent out to protect can say.’
    â€˜I heard in the canteen that Councillor Lowry thinks all this is a waste of time,’ Warner said, making one last-ditch stand.
    â€˜And I heard in the same canteen that DCI Woodend
doesn’t
,’ Crabtree said. ‘Which of them would you prefer to cross?’
    Warner grinned. ‘Let’s get patrolling,’ he suggested.
    Beresford had only been a hard mod for a few hours, but had already decided that it was no life for a man.
    The simple fact was that the mods were both bored and boring. What conversation they had was desultory at best. They didn’t talk about their jobs – and why should they, when most of them were employed in mind-numbingly repeti­tive industrial tasks? They didn’t talk about their home life, because the very reason they were out on the streets was to forget about all that. And they didn’t talk about their prospects, because they were realistic enough to accept that – in a declining industrial town – they had none.
    A few years earlier, they would have been conscripted into the armed forces, which would at least have taken them away from Whitebridge for a couple of years, and subjected them to a different
kind
of boredom, but the call-up had been abolished in the early sixties, leaving these lads with nowhere to go but along the streets of their own home town.
    From