The Picasso Scam by Stuart Pawson Page B

I hadn’t said he could go.
    ‘What’s the grub like?’ I asked.
    He almost smiled; either with relief at the change of subject or at the thought of the next culinary extravaganza. ‘Rubbish,’ he answered.
    I small-talked with him for twenty minutes, asking him about how he was finding it inside, his family,how he’d done at school, anything I could think of. He opened up a little about playing football, but most of the time it was a questions-and-answers session. It usually is with teenagers. After a while I took a long look at my watch.
    ‘Well, I’ll have to go, Lee. It’s been nice talking to you. I have to ask you once again, though, do you want to become a crime-fighter, or would you rather play all your football against a twenty-foot wall?’
    He stared at me across the table with something like contempt in his gaze. ‘You don’t understand, do you?’ he declared.
    ‘Understand what?’ I replied, quizzically.
    ‘Drugs,’ he answered. ‘Drugs are all right. As soon as I get out I’ll start taking them again. What else is there?’
    ‘I’m sorry you feel that way, Lee. Drugs are a one-way ride to an early grave or the mental hospital, and it’s all downhill.’
    I stood up to leave, but as I reached the door of our little cubicle I turned back to him. ‘Oh, I forgot to give you these; you have to have a copy.’ I reached into my inside pocket for the two sheets of foolscap and laid them on the table in front of him.
    He gazed at them for a few seconds, then up at me. ‘What are they?’ he demanded.
    ‘Your new deps,’ I told him.
    ‘I’ve got my deps.’
    ‘You’re not listening, Lee. I said your new deps.’
    He looked bewildered, so I spelt it out for him: ‘We’ve got you down as a nonce now, Lee, with a special liking for small boys. Should make a good-looking lad like you very popular in here. I’ll organise you some new room-mates on my way out.’
    The newly acquired colour drained from his face and he swayed in his chair. I re-took my seat opposite him.
    ‘You couldn’t do it,’ he said defiantly.
    I pointed at the papers. ‘Read ’em. Do you want to risk it?’ I placed my ball-pen across the sheets in front of him. ‘All I’m asking you to do, Lee,’ I said softly, ‘is turn the sheet over and write a name on the back. I guarantee that nobody will ever know where it came from.’ A white-knuckled fist moved a couple of inches towards the pen, hesitated, and then withdrew. His eyes were glistening with tears. He sniffed and shook his head.
    ‘No. I can’t,’ he mumbled.
    ‘A name, Lee.’
    ‘No.’
    ‘One little name, and I’ll go away and take the deps with me and no one will ever know I’ve been.’
    He shook his head. I reached across and turned the top sheet over. Across the middle it said ‘Parker’. The effect was electric.
    ‘I didn’t write that!’ he exclaimed.
    ‘Thanks, Lee, that should do nicely.’ I took the fake depositions back and put them in my pocket. ‘You won’t be needing these any more,’ I explained.
    ‘I didn’t write it, I didn’t write anything.’ He wiped his nose on his sleeve.
    ‘Of course you didn’t, but your face told me what I wanted to know. Don’t worry about it, Lee, we’ve had his name from several sources, I just wanted confirmation.’
    His agitation died down when he realised that we already knew the name. What he didn’t know was how useless that piece of information was to us.
    ‘This Parker …’ I tossed the question in as casually as tossing a cigarette butt into a fire, ‘is he black or white?’
    No harm in answering that; it only narrows the field down to half of the world’s population.
    ‘White,’ he said, gazing at the table like a shell-shocked survivor. The dam was cracking. Some judicious leverage could give us a torrent.
    ‘Do you fancy another tea?’
    He nodded. I fetched the same again and we sipped and munched in silence for a while. ‘Big money in dealing,’ I stated.