Goodmans Hotel

He and his friend fell out a couple of times over money, but want of cash and hunger for excitement brought them back together again. When they left school Tom found a job as a trainee electrician and his adolescent spate of law breaking came to an end. He took driving lessons, saved up enough to buy his own car and lost touch with the boy he used to go stealing with. Gay pubs, clubs, and sex provided him with thrills of a different kind.

He had shown me photographs taken after he first started work, including images of him with his first boyfriend, a lad as thin as Darren who worked in a department store. Tom told his family he was gay and took the boy home several times, but after four or five months they split up. His parents and brother tried put pressure on him, saying that he was not really gay and would forget about men if he made a proper effort with a steady girlfriend. Dejected and mistrusting his own feelings, he followed their advice and found a girl whose company he enjoyed, but in bed he could perform only by imagining he was with a man. In a supermarket where he had gone alone one day an attractive man looked at him a few times as they passed in the aisles. He responded, they spoke and went back to the man's flat. Holding a male body in his arms again made it obvious to him that with the girl he was merely pretending. He told her he had found someone else and escaped his family's influence by moving out to a flat of his own.

For a while he indulged in a life of one-night stands. One of his pick-ups took him home to an enormous room packed with all sorts of goods: cameras, laptop computers, portable phones, records and stereo equipment. The property was stuffed into bags and suitcases, piled up on the floor and poking out from under the furniture. The explanation given, that all these goods had been bought cheap from car boot sales and charity shops for resale at a profit, was not convincing and Tom rightly assumed they were stolen. He saw the man again by chance; this time was with friends, in a gay pub in the West End. They were guarded in what they said initially, but more alcohol made them incautious and they soon revealed that they were all living outside the law - thieving, buying and selling stolen property, or supplying drugs.

Through them Tom met a car thief who was heterosexual but who used the group to help dispose of property he had stolen from cars. Tom told him about his schoolboy activities, was impressed by the man's tales of stealing cars to order for wealthy villains, and fascinated to hear about new gadgets for overcoming the latest locks and alarms. He learned about falsifying documents, and of a garage workshop under a railway arch where number plates were changed, chassis numbers removed, and vehicles re-sprayed. Wiring houses seemed dull in comparison, and when the man invited him to go along one night to see him in action Tom could not resist. New cars might come with better locks and security devices than before, but inventive thieves quickly developed ways to overcome them.