He Poured My Water Into the Gutter — Then the Inspector Read My Licence Number Out Loud
He tipped a full bottle of water down my front, dropped the empty in the gutter, and told the whole row the pitch was his.
My name is Emeka Balogun. For eight months I've set my crates level on pitch 12 at four in the morning and chalked my name small on the awning post where nobody looks.
Denny Croft has worked this row for twenty years. Everyone knows the pitch is Croft ground. Everyone knows his brother-in-law chairs the committee.
I said nothing. I slid his flower crate back level and stood in a soaked shirt.
Later that morning I heard him say the committee would have me barred from the whole market before the weekend was out.
Denny's crates carry no trader licence tag. Only his brother-in-law's committee badge, zip-tied to the handle.
He never answers a question about his licence. He says the pitch is family.
Rose Aduke has sold vegetables on the corner for thirty years. She has never once contradicted Denny in public. That morning she said nothing — but she dragged her trestle round to the front of her stall and left it there, facing the row.
Two minutes past eleven the market inspector came down the row the way she does twice a week. She always stops at my crates. That morning she stopped at Rose's trestle instead and laid the bound register flat on it.
She turned the page so the row could see.
Emeka Balogun. Licence MKT-4471. Pitch 12. Awarded three months ago.
In the next column, against Denny's squatter's mark, the box for a licence number is empty. No number. No date. Nothing.
The row went quiet the way a market never goes quiet.
She asked him one question. Under which licence have you been trading?
Denny looked at the page. He looked at Rose. He looked at every trader who has ever slid him cash on a Saturday morning for a corner of that pitch, and not one of them looked back.
Rose took her glasses off the cord. Thirty years of not saying it, and she said it out loud — she named the men who paid him, and how much, and which Saturdays.
Denny backed into his own barrow. He couldn't lift his head.
His crates went off the pitch onto the walkway. My licence number went up on the awning post in chalk where my name used to be written small.
I was still wet through when the inspector shook my hand.
There is a folder in the council office that answers the rest of it — the audit trail, the cash envelopes, and the traders who quietly paid to stand on ground that was never his. How a man held a council pitch for years with no licence, and who was keeping him there, is written under a case number I only read that afternoon.
👉 How did Denny hold a council pitch for years with no licence, and who was quietly paying him for the space? The next post has the audit trail, the cash envelopes and the morning the council chalked a real name on pitch 12 — follow the link below.
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