Ghost And Ragman Roll

Prologue

PROLOGUE

Four weeks ago

You had to laugh, and people did, since the fight was on a distant beach, the seaward side of Fort Cumberland, situated on the barren South-Eastern tip of Portsea Island. It had been a moonless, pitch black, October wintry night. Apparently, Richard the Lionheart, the founder of Portsmouth as England’s proud strategic Naval Port, turned in his grave; his heritage defended by the 6, 57, a collection of seedy, fascist, football yobs, from an attack by Lenin’s Britain, an equally seedy group of moth eaten, radical, left wing thugs; though not all was as it seemed.

The rip tide sucked out many of the protagonists, those few taken by Police, mainly the wounded, were not talking, and those supposed to have survived, disappeared.

The local paper likened it to the Mods and Rockers, rival fashion gangs that held pitch battles in coastal towns in the nineteen sixties, going on to preach about modern values to a populace that had yet to recover from being r***d and pillaged by greedy Bankers. The British people were still saturated in debt, and life remained difficult with little prospect of change, despite the pressure supposedly being eased after the Nation’s debt had been rescheduled over seventy years, and not a penny paid back by the Bankers. There remained a natural suspicion, latent anger bubbling below the surface, people suspected the Bankers were at it again and grumbled, and those who knew the British temperament warned, this could be a precursor to something a lot worse; letters of complaint? God, and then what?

“It’ll be a lot worse,” Jane Austin said sagely to the newspapers, tapping his nose, “the pressure may be orf, but there’s a residua…, linger…, a lot of anger ‘anging abowt, and that can be manipulated,” and this, ironically, from a man who enjoyed a laugh.

Three weeks ago

It was time to turf the fat bastard out, and he was unceremoniously dumped on Eastney beach amongst a gathering of tramps, ‘Serve the f*****g arse right,’ a passing comment as they turned and left.

Two weeks ago

The financial world was stunned, Banker, Jacqueline Parmentier had left her chic Paris apartment, tipped her hand to her eyes to deflect the gusting rain saturated wind, she never saw the gunman, bumped into him; “Excusez-moi” bystanders reported her saying, just before being shot, twice, in the head.

Now

‘Av a bleedin’ egg and bacon sarnie for Christ’s sake and let’s get going, you can eat it in the car on the way.’

They were getting breakfast at the cabbie cafe in Charing Cross, a quintessential London, greasy spoon, and Delores loved it. She didn’t like her travelling companion though, a hideously overweight misogynist oaf, who will almost certainly end up in Portsmouth with egg yolk down his trousers.

He did, and he tried to wipe it up with his grubby index finger elbowing Delores in the process, causing her to drive all over the place, ‘Oi, watch what yer bleedin’ doing tosspot!’ She rebuked, in her spiky cockney accent.

‘You wouldn’t let me stay and eat this in the cafe, so how am I supposed eat wiv you all over the f*****g show?’

‘Shut it, bozo.’

So he shut it, and she continued weaving down the A3 to Portsmouth.