The Blue Notes Read Online Free

filming us on their phones. The next day it’s all over the internet, honest. Sometimes I just wish people would just enjoy things as they happen, and not feel the need to work all the bloody time. You know what I mean, love?’
     
     
    At that same moment, and only a few streets away, Davey Hood pressed a button on his battered G-Shock and started the countdown timer. He used his bolt cutters to get the gates to the yard open, then he rolled the big plastic drum across the yard, keeping up a jogging pace all the way to the diesel pump in the corner. He knew that there was CCTV, and that the alarm would start ringing in a few seconds, but he still had time. Even if someone called it in it would still be at least five minutes before the cops arrived. And he’d be well clear by then, no problem.
     
    The process of persuading the diesel pump to work was simple enough, if you knew how. And Davey most certainly did. He pumped a hundred and fifty litres, feeling the drum fill up. Then he put the nozzle back, and made sure that the pump was turned off again and was absolutely safe. He didn’t want some poor sod getting drenched in diesel, or worse, in the morning. And he smiled when his watch alarm went off, because he’d just finished rolling the drum into the back of the van, had secured it with chocks, and was putting away the steel loading ramps. Then he drove away slowly, and even as he was leaving the industrial estate he still hadn’t seen a police car.
     
    The local St. John Ambulance base was less than a mile away, and it took even less time to reverse the process. And this time he picked the lock to the yard too, so that he could leave the place properly secure when he left. Or, more accurately, he could leave the place no less secure than he found it. But Hood was slightly disappointed to discover that the two ambulances in the yard only took about thirty litres of between them. He’d hoped that they’d have needed more.
     
    When he’d finished he reloaded his van, secured the St. John’s yard and drove back to his own small depot, with the freshly painted Hood’s Haulage sign swinging stickily in the cold, midnight breeze. He parked the van, checked that his storage building was secure, and walked home. And a police car did come past, with its blue lights flashing, just as he was about to turn into his own street. He made that about a thirty five minute response time, assuming they were headed to his first port of call. They’d have been down on Botchergate before, he thought, sorting out the drunks and the dirtbags, and in a few minutes time they’d be talking to the irate owner of another one of his competitors.
     
    But Hood didn’t give a shit about Harry Watkins, or his business. Because Watkins knew something that the two PCs in that jam sandwich most certainly didn’t, which was that half of his haulage contracts came courtesy of Dai Young, whose boys made bloody sure that when the best local contracts came up for renewal they went to Watkins, and a couple of other local firms too. Davey Hood was sure that they all paid handsomely for that muscular endorsement, and no doubt they also moved stuff around for Young as and when required, but he also knew for certain that he’d never, ever go down that same path.
     
    When he’d left the army, over a year before, one of the so-called advisors down at the dole office had told him that soldiers tended to be a bit too rigid in their thinking when they returned to civvy street, and that they often needed to work in structured environments, where they were given clear instructions. And Hood had told the bloke, in no uncertain terms, that the only reason he’d left was to get away from a bunch of upper-class chinless bloody wonders telling him what to do all day and night. And now, with a van bought and paid for, and two decent ex-army lads on the payroll, he’d be buggered if he’d let the likes of Dai Young give him orders.
     
    And his twelve years