The Price of Love (33 page)

‘Of course I will, gladly. At the moment it will only be Sam working down there, though, won’t it?’

‘Well, yes, during the daytime. I did think that I would go down there straight from work each evening and put in an hour or two. There are bound to be some jobs that Sam can’t manage to do on his own and I don’t want to leave all the hard work to him.’

‘When are you giving in your notice at Carter’s Cars, Robert?’ Brenda asked.

‘Not until we have the shed fitted out as a workshop and the outside of the place painted and our name up over the door. That’s something you two could help us with; we still haven’t decided what we should call ourselves.’

‘I think we need a cuppa to get our brains working in order to do that.’ Brenda smiled. ‘I’ll go and put the kettle on. Do you want to have it in here?’

‘No, we’ll all come through into your living room. There’s still a smell of fresh paint in here so I’ll open the windows and we’ll try not to use the room for a couple of days,’ Sam told her.

Half an hour later, seated round the table and drinking their tea, the four of them pondered over a name for the new company.

Sam thought it should be Robsam Repairs but Robert said that sounded rather amateurish.

Brenda suggested Robert’s Repairs Shop but Robert objected to that because it made no mention of Sam.

‘Why don’t you call it Merseyside Mechanics?’ Lucy suggested. ‘That way no one will be too sure who is behind it and also it sounds like a sound company.’

They thought about it for several minutes, saying the words aloud and savouring the sound.

‘You don’t think a name like that might be a bit too grand for such a small company, do you?’ Robert frowned.

‘Not a bit of it,’ Lucy assured him. ‘Anyway, you may be starting small but give it a couple of years and you will have built the business up into quite a big concern and you don’t want to have to change the name midstream, now do you?’

‘There speaks our business adviser,’ Sam said and grinned.

‘OK. We’ll call it Merseyside Mechanics,’ Robert agreed. ‘At least there won’t be any doubt about what sort of work we do or possibly where to find us.’

Two weeks later and they were ready for action. They’d installed an inspection pit, ramps, a large workbench, and rows of racks to hold all the spare parts as well as various other pieces of equipment.

Lucy thought it all looked very impressive although she wasn’t too sure what they were all going to be used for, even though Sam assured her they were necessary.

The following week they painted the outside of the shed in a deep blue colour and the huge double doors in white. The name Merseyside Mechanics was in black on a white fascia and was positioned prominently over the front of the building. When they all went to see it and voiced their approval Robert said that he felt the time was now right for him to give in his notice at Carter’s Cars.

‘Leave it for another couple of weeks,’ Sam suggested. ‘That will give me a chance to get some customers lined up. I haven’t had a chance to do any canvassing yet.’

‘If you are lucky enough to get some jobs right away, then you won’t be able to cope with the work single handed,’ Robert pointed out.

‘We could manage between us. You could help out when you come down in the evening, if necessary.’

‘You’re probably right,’ Robert agreed cautiously. ‘I suppose we should be careful about jumping the gun too soon. Once I stop working we won’t have any money at all coming in until this place starts to pay. I’ll think about it over the weekend.’

‘I’m going to move in this weekend now that our rooms are ready,’ Brenda reminded them, ‘so if we share our meals with you, then my money will pay for our food.’

Lucy offered to help Brenda move her things but Brenda pointed out that there wasn’t very much to bring. ‘There’re only my clothes and a few other bits and pieces and, of course, my cat. I forgot to mention Fluffy.’ She smiled. ‘I hope you don’t mind cats?’

‘I’ve never had one,’ Lucy confessed. ‘I don’t think Robert is too keen on them, though. I remember he used to grumble about Jenny’s cats when she looked after Anna.’

‘Oh dear, I do hope it’s not going to be a problem,’ Brenda said anxiously.

‘Why don’t you bring her along and see what happens,’ Lucy suggested.

Anna was enthralled by Fluffy. The black and white cat was quite small and looked like a bundle of fur. Anna squealed with delight as she gently stroked it and Fluffy purred happily in response. From then on they were inseparable.

Anna wanted to be the one to put milk into a saucer for the cat and to put its plate of food down in one corner of the kitchen. She talked to it incessantly and, as Lucy said to Robert, she found it made her own life easier because she no longer had to listen to Anna’s constant chatter all the time.

The cat responded well but Lucy warned her that it might scratch her when she announced that she was going to give it a ride in the little pram they’d bought her for her birthday.

Anna promised to be careful. Before Lucy could stop her she’d picked up Fluffy and put the cat in the pram alongside her doll and was covering them both over with the little pink blanket.

For one moment the cat looked as though it was going to object and was about to jump out. Anna stroked it and talked to it, telling it to go to sleep. The next minute, to Lucy’s surprise, it had curled up on top of the blanket and was purring contentedly while Anna rocked the pram.

Robert was saved from making a decision about when to leave Carter’s Cars. When he went into work the following Monday morning he discovered that someone had already told Percy about Merseyside Mechanics and who was behind it. Percy was far from pleased.

‘I’m dismissing you now on the spot. Get your coat and leave the premises right away,’ he ranted. ‘What’s more, I’m having a check done in our workshops to make sure that no tools or spare parts have gone missing. If they find that there is as much as a screw gone adrift, then I’ll have the police on to you.’

‘You won’t find anything missing,’ Robert told him coldly. ‘What’s more, none of the preparation has been done in your time. I’ve worked my hours here conscientiously.’

‘So whom have you hired? Who has been doing the work down there?’ Percy challenged.

‘Sam Collins. I’ve gone into partnership with him. You didn’t give him a job. He had to do something to earn his living.’

‘Sam Collins. He has no qualifications! All he has is a reputation as a reckless driver after crashing one of our most expensive cars and I hardly think that will stand him in very good stead. Who the hell do you think will trust him to drive their car or even want to have it serviced by him? He’s not even a fully qualified mechanic.’

‘No, and neither are you, yet you manage to run a garage,’ Robert told him heatedly.

‘You want to remember that I employ mechanics who are fully qualified and I hardly think you’ll have the necessary resources to be able to do that.’

‘I don’t need to; I am a fully qualified mechanic,’ Robert reminded him.

‘You may know a lot about engines but you know nothing at all about running a business,’ Percy sneered.

‘I’ve managed to run your workshop for the past three years,’ Robert pointed out.

‘Absolute rubbish! You may have been in charge of the other mechanics but you know nothing at all about how to cost out a job or about the administration side of things. You’ve no business experience whatsoever. I’ve been to a top business college in London, remember. In addition I have also learned a great deal of expertise first hand from my father.’

‘Yes, and one of the skills he passed on to you was how to treat your workforce with contempt, wasn’t it?’ Robert said sarcastically.

‘That will do! Collect your wages and your personal belongings and leave immediately. Remember, I don’t want to see you anywhere near these premises ever again.’

Furious about the way he had been dismissed Robert went straight down to the Dock Road. There would be time enough to tell Lucy about what had happened when he got home that night, he reflected. For the moment it was far better for him to work off his anger doing something useful.

When he reached the Dock Road there was another shock waiting for him. Sam was standing outside the building talking to two policemen and the three of them were staring at what had happened to the doors at the front. Overnight the newly painted white doors had been daubed with huge splashes and streaks of bright blue as if someone had thrown a tin of paint at them.

‘What the hell has happened here?’ Robert demanded.

‘Vandals or drunks having their fun, by the look of it,’ Sam said.

‘Any idea who it might be have been? They’ve ruined the look of the place,’ Robert muttered.

‘I was just asking the same question,’ one of the policemen commented. ‘Can either of you think of anyone you’ve upset or fallen out with lately? Perhaps someone who might have objected to you opening here?’

Robert was about to say yes, my old boss at Carter’s and then he realised how stupid that would be. Whatever else Percy Carter might do he certainly wouldn’t throw a can of paint over the front of their freshly painted doors.

‘No idea at all,’ he said shaking his head. ‘Have there been any suspicious-looking characters lurking round here while you’ve been fitting the place out, Sam?’

Sam hesitated. ‘It might sound a bit daft but there have been a couple of young lads annoying me. I’ve had trouble with them before, a couple of years ago. They were the ones who pushed me in front of the marchers on Orangeman’s Day and I ended up in hospital,’ he explained to the policemen.

‘Right. I remember that incident,’ the older of the two policemen observed. ‘The two boys who were involved were from around Scotland Road way, weren’t they?’

‘That’s right. Their name’s Sparks and they live in Horatio Street,’ Sam affirmed. ‘I lived there myself in the same house as they did for a short time and they used to follow me around taunting me because I walked with a slight limp in those days.’

‘That pair are always in trouble of some kind or other,’ the older policeman affirmed. ‘They’ve been up before the magistrates countless times but their mother always manages to come up with some convincing explanation so they are usually let off with a caution.’

‘If I had my way, they’d have been put into a home years ago,’ the other policeman affirmed. ‘You say you think you’ve seen them hanging around here?’

‘Oh I’ve seen them here, all right,’ Sam assured him grimly. ‘They’ve been up to their old tricks of calling me cripple but they always do it from a safe distance because they know I can’t run fast enough to catch them.’

‘You mightn’t be able to do so but I can assure you we will and that we’ll charge them with vandalism if we can get a shred of evidence to prove that it was them,’ the older policeman told him confidently.

‘That won’t be easy; they probably waited until everybody had stopped work and gone home.’

‘We’ll ask around to see if any of the night watchmen on duty at the nearby warehouses witnessed anything. I’m afraid you’ll still have to clean off all that mess and repaint the front again yourselves, though,’ he said, grimacing.

Robert and Sam spent the rest of the day trying to remove all the blue paint and then applying a fresh undercoat to prepare the surface ready for them to repaint it.

‘It might be better if we paint the front blue instead of white so that it is the same as the rest of the building; it mightn’t be such a temptation then,’ Sam mused.

‘That might be a good idea,’ Robert agreed. ‘Although we’ve done our best the blue still seems to be showing through the undercoat we’ve put on.’

‘Yes, and that means it may even show through the topcoat if we use white,’ Sam pointed out.

Lucy was shocked when they told her their news. ‘How on earth did you manage to be down there so early today?’ she asked, looking at Robert in surprise.

‘Percy Carter has heard about our new business enterprise and he was so annoyed that he sacked me the minute I arrived at work this morning. I was so incensed by the way he spoke to me that I thought it was better not to come straight home but to wait until I’d cooled down a bit. I walked down to the Dock Road only to find that matters down there weren’t much better.’

‘Still, it will all be sorted out now that we’ve told the police and they’re handling it,’ Sam reminded him. ‘We shouldn’t have any more trouble of that sort.’

‘I certainly hope we don’t because it has taken us all day to try and clean it off the doors and we’ll have to spend most of tomorrow repainting them.’

‘If you have a bad start like that then things can only get better,’ Brenda told them optimistically. ‘What’s more, with the two of you working down there then the business should get off the ground all that much sooner.’

‘It also means that one of you can stay on the premises while the other goes out scouting for customers,’ Lucy added with an encouraging smile.

There were a good many anxious moments over the next few weeks. Robert spent most of his time scouting around the dockside trying to find customers and Sam, left on his own in the new workshop, grew increasingly frustrated by not having anything to do.

‘Perhaps I should try canvassing for customers as well as you,’ he suggested.

‘I’m not sure about that,’ Robert told him. ‘Don’t forget I have distributed well over two hundred leaflets offering our services so if someone comes here looking for us and finds that the place is all locked up, then they’ll go elsewhere and we’ve lost them for good.’

Midway through the following week their patience was rewarded. Quite by chance Robert had met the manager of a small transport company new to the area. It resulted in Merseyside Mechanics being signed up to maintain their lorries.

A few days later Sam had three different dock workers in one day bring their own personal cars in for servicing and attention.

‘Sam’s customers are very important,’ Robert pointed out when they told Lucy and Brenda what was happening. ‘They will be paying us in cash as soon as the work is finished on their cars. In fact, that’s the sort of customer we will have to depend on at first. Whatever work we do on the fleet of vehicles, we’ll have to wait until the end of the following month before we are paid.’