Devil Take The Hindmost

Chapter One

A nation of shopkeepers.

That's how Napoleon Bonaparte borrowed a phrase to disparage the English. I'm sure he meant it as an insult, but fifty years later we had built an empire upon which the sun never set and all that was left of Boney was a raft of unfounded jokes about his height and the jar of brandy in which, in the kind of fitting and poignant posthumous tribute to which we all aspire, his deranged doctor had pickled his dick.

Dinner party guests filling glittering Parisian halls had ample occasion in the following century to eat those bon mot, and to cast a suspicious eye to the bottom of the brandy decanter passed around the table lest they drink them too.

As a nation, wheeling and dealing flows through our veins. It competes for space in those tight repressed corridors with imported lager and the distillate of barely suppressed disgruntlement. A heady cocktail of a navy that ruled the waves, remorseless hunger for profit, and possession of testicles so gargantuan that their owners needed to convey them in wheelbarrows led to Great Britain founding a global empire in which everything, and everybody, was for sale.

The British impulse to buy and sell unfettered by heavy-handed government restriction or regulation lives on, crystallizing in these modern times in its most concentrated form, the car boot sale.

On dulcet summer Sundays the length and breadth of the land, the good people of Britain flock to farmer's fields and designated car parks in order to pick over the tragi-comic oddments of each other's lives made manifest in four-hundred-and-ninety-nine-piece jigsaws and implausibly dog-eared Jeremy Clarkson autobiographies.

It's the immediacy of the interaction presented to members of the public, who can sell everything and buy anything, that affords the car boot sale its greatest charm. Are you in the market for a used funerary urn with one careful previous owner? How about a place to offload those false teeth you found in your dead grandmother's bedside table? All of this, and more, is possible in the seething peer-to-peer car boot marketplaces of unfettered capitalism.

It's enough to have the ghost of Adam Smith using his invisible hand to belt out a jaunty chorus of Rule Britannia on his dusty belly trombone.

I'm sure that the ubiquitous boot sale now exists as a perfect microcosm of something, though I'm buggered if I know precisely what. Far from the eyes being a window to the soul, I think that the sight of row upon row of paste tables groaning under the collected and accumulated detritus of this existence offers a significantly more prescient view into the human condition.

So it was that, after determining that I could use a few quid, I found myself standing forlornly behind a hastily erected stall in a muddy field on the outskirts of Wolverhampton; attempting to lure punters in with a somewhat unconventional product and service mix of home-made blackberry jam and private detection.

Neither proposition was proving particularly alluring to the predatory-eyed herds of potential clientele that swept across the field like locusts in voracious search of bargains rather than wheat.

"Have you ever had any worse ideas than this?" asked the dark-haired man lounging on a deckchair to my left.

Tyrone Edge gazed up at me with an implacable, almost cherubic, innocence as he took another loud crunching bite out of an apple. A little flare of annoyance burst to life in my chest and for a split-second I wanted to slap that look right off his tanned chops.

I stopped myself immediately. It would have been a truly terrible mistake for several reasons. Firstly, Ty was my good friend and partner in our business, Waifs and Strays Detection. He had inarguably saved my life on one occasion, and there were a couple of other instances about which marginally more debate could be had.