The Collar and the Cab

In an act of pure opportunist self-promotion and in the hope of selling some I am publishing some extracts from my new book The Collar and the Cab on this blog. There are 35 chapters so it will take a couple of months to offer a little from each. 

You can order the book direct from myself or from the publisher by following the link above.

 

Last post for a few days as I'm away in France on holiday till Tuesday

 12
Hyde Park – The Drugs Trade

 My new work pattern would involve my first experience of
night-time work, and I confess to a fair degree of apprehension
at the prospect, largely fuelled by stories I had heard from
various night-shift drivers about just how dangerous the city
was during the wee small hours. I was accustomed to horror
stories by now – barely a week went by without hearing of one
of the night-time drivers being attacked, abused, robbed or
threatened. After a while I had come to see these tales from the
dark side for what they usually were – inventions or just possibly
gross embellishments. They were scattered like so much confetti
by drivers who preferred working at night and who wanted
to deter anyone who might think of following suit, and who
consequently would be competing for the available work. But
there was sufficient truth in enough of the graphic accounts
to which I was treated to convince me that complacency was
a luxury that I could ill-afford in driving complete strangers
around after dark. During my time in the business a local taxi
driver was abducted, robbed and murdered, and there were
more-or-less weekly accounts in the local press of assault and
robbery of cabbies.
In some respects there was little that could prevent such
things happening, and the odds are stacked against the safety of
the driver. No one in their right mind would drive their private
car around at night picking up a string of complete strangers and taking them wherever requested, and essentially private
hire drivers are doing exactly that. Black cab drivers generally
have the security of a screen between driver and passengers, and
doors that can be safely locked from within the cab, though even
these features don’t provide complete safety. Private hire drivers
have no such protection, since by definition their vehicles must
be ordinary models with no significant modification. The only
concession offered was the dubious privilege of an exemption
from needing to wear a seat belt; I discovered that the main
reason for this was that a number of drivers had been mugged
by means of someone holding a seat belt tight against their
throats while an accomplice located and purloined their takings.
So the driver is faced with the absurdity of risking serious injury
through assault and robbery or putting himself at the mercy of
road users at precisely the time of day when inebriated revellers
are taking to their vehicles convinced they are perfectly fit to
drive.

 It was a long time before I realised through experience that
night shifts posed only a slightly higher risk than their diurnal
equivalents. Partly this was due to the scare stories related by
night shift drivers with the gravitas of Orson Welles and the
malice of a Bond villain; in addition most of us have natural
instincts, sometimes whispering urgently, sometimes shouting,
that darkness is the hiding place of bogey men, ghouls, witches
and any number of other harbingers of death and destruction.
But looking back on this time I can recall only four occasions
when I felt under any kind of threat, and three of these occurred
during daylight hours. Two concern encounters with drug
dealers.

 One of the more inane and random dicta that emanated
from the management on those occasions when they probably
felt that drivers had not been sufficiently berated that week was
to the effect that we should not pick up anyone participating
in the distribution of illegal substances. Unfortunately, and
for reasons that evade my comprehension, the drug dealers
of West Yorkshire were not obliging enough to wear shirts
proclaiming “I’m a Drug Dealer; Stop Me and Buy Some.” The
only information we had access to was a name, a pick-up point
and a vaguely-defined destination, so how were we to know
what the customer was up to? In a wonderful and not untypical
example of Doublethink there was one occasion during my
time in the trade when we received third hand a word of thanks
from the police force for our help in supplying information
about a drugs gang who had been using our services. The
official disapprobation of the sullying of our hands with contact
with this particular underclass was by no means unwelcome; I
must have encountered a dozen or more during my time in the
business, and not a single one of them was the sort of character
I would choose to have a drink with, and certainly not have as a
passenger in my cab.
After a year or so in the business I learned how to avoid
these jobs, though even then occasionally came unstuck.
Any one of a score of streets for a pick-up or drop off began
ringing alarm bells, and there was a fairly common type of body
language of the customers, who obligingly were usually out on
the street waiting, that really gave the game away. Some of the
cul-de-sacs in the seedier parts of the city appeared to house
only drug dealers, and any job to or from them could only ever
mean one thing, though the telephone operators as far as I know
never sifted these calls. There were other locations that seemed
full of the people who bought and sold stolen merchandise
procured by some unfortunate miscreant desperate for another
fix. Seeing a customer out on the street with a computer tower
or widescreen television under his arm waiting to be taken to an
address that specialised in selling this kind of stuff on was a bit
of a giveaway.

The first episode that left me in something of a cold sweat
occurred in the middle of a quiet afternoon and early on in my
career. Later I would have known from the pick-up and drop-off
points on the screen what I was dealing with and simply refused
the job; naively I allowed four young men, the eldest of whom
I estimated should still have been at school, to deposit a rather
expensive looking TV screen into the boot before climbing
aboard for the short journey to what I was later to recognise
as one of the few streets I really didn’t want to find myself in by
day or night. I don’t think I have ever felt so invisible as they
immediately immersed themselves in animated discussion
about the state of “business.” It would have been impossible not
to have listened as, whether out of a sense of misplaced bravado
or imagined immunity to the reach of the law, they discussed
what was the going price for 32-inch flat-screen televisions,
the state of the person who had stolen it and exchanged it for a
supply of crack cocaine, the outcome and casualties of the most
recent knife fight with the neighbouring gang who were trying
to move onto their turf, and current profit margins on Class A
drugs in general. If it was an act it was an exceptionally wellperformed
one. What convinced me of its authenticity was the
matter-of-fact nature of the discussion, as if they were so many
respectable housewives discussing the price of gooseberries at
the Women’s Institute coffee morning.