Gallan
The murder of Shaun Matthews, thirty-one, of the Priory Green Estate in Islington was an odd one from the start. Matthews had enemies, there was no doubt about that. Three months before his death he’d been threatened by two men he’d thrown out of the Arcadia nightclub in Holloway where he worked as chief doorman. One of the two, later identified as twenty-eight-year-old Carl Voen, had claimed that he was going to come back and blow Matthews’s head off. This might not have been taken seriously had it not been for the fact that Voen had a previous conviction for possession of a firearm and two further convictions for grievous bodily harm. He was, by most accounts, a man with a short fuse. He was also, unfortunately, a man with a watertight alibi for the time of death. For at least twelve hours either side of the point at which Matthews had shuffled off his mortal coil, he’d been in custody undergoing questioning about an armed robbery, with the questioning being carried out by two of the detectives who were now investigating the murder.
Shaun Matthews was also a drug dealer. According to anecdotal evidence collated by investigating officers, he supplied Ecstasy, cocaine and, on at least one occasion, heroin to Arcadia clubgoers (apparently in collusion with the club’s management), as well as to individuals visiting his flat. According to more than one source, he had also earned himself something of a reputation for selling below-par products, particularly when operating off the premises. There was a story doing the rounds that one unlucky punter had challenged Matthews about an especially poor batch of cannabis he’d sold him only to have Matthews dangle him by the ankle from the third-floor balcony of his flat while simultaneously slashing his buttocks with a Stanley knife. The punter had needed more than forty stitches on his behind and he, too, had left the hospital muttering words of dark revenge against the man who’d made it so difficult for him to sit down in comfort for months to come.
Nothing about any of this was odd, of course. There are plenty of criminals out there who fail to recognize or abide by even the most rudimentary facets of capitalism, and insist on riding roughshod over their customers and making enemies as casually as old ladies make cups of tea. Sometimes, inevitably, they end up dead, and usually the people doing the killing are those they’ve wronged, but in Matthews’s case there appeared to be more to matters than initially met the eye.
For a start, it had taken two days to conclude that he’d been murdered. Matthews was what a tabloid report might describe as a ‘strapping’ young man: six feet two, sixteen stone of mainly muscle, very fit (at least superficially) as a result of his daily visits to the gym, and no history of medical problems. Therefore when he was found dead in his bed one morning by police officers who’d been called by a colleague from the Arcadia who was concerned that he hadn’t turned up at work two evenings running, it came as something of a shock to all concerned. Not, perhaps, that he was dead but more that there didn’t appear to be any obvious cause. There were no external injuries and no sign of any kind of a struggle. Matthews was lying on his back, with the covers half off him, and his head tilted to one side. The expression on his face was what the first officer on the scene had described as restful. Not fearful, angry, or even shocked. Just restful. His arms were stretched out to his sides with the fists lightly clenched, and he was naked. It looked like death by natural causes, or possibly some sort of drugs overdose.
Matthews’s body was taken away for a post-mortem, and this was when things got interesting. For all his strength and build, in actual fact he probably didn’t have long to live. He had a serious heart condition, thought to have been brought on by an addiction to steroids. There were traces of nandralone in his blood, as well as cocaine and alcohol, and injection marks on his left arm. Initially, the pathologist thought that he’d had a heart attack, but unfortunately such a diagnosis didn’t explain the strange internal injuries Matthews had suffered. There’d been extensive internal haemorrhaging as well as a cloudy swelling in the cells of a number of organs, particularly the kidneys. Somewhat baffled, the pathologist had carried out further tests. These showed significant traces of an extremely potent neurotoxin that would have resulted in these injuries and were, almost certainly, the cause of death. And this was the thing. The poisons department at Guy’s Hospital were called in and quickly identified the neurotoxin as elipadae, or cobra, venom.
Snake poison. Hardly the work of your average lowlife thug, the type Shaun Matthews specialized in upsetting. Which left what? The neighbours all agreed that Matthews received a fair number of visitors which, given his alleged trade, wasn’t particularly surprising, and it was felt that one of them was the likely perpetrator. Where your average small-time drugs buyer was likely to have got hold of cobra venom, however, was anyone’s guess.
The case was an odd one, and as far as I was concerned odd equalled interesting, and interesting equalled challenging, which these days can be something of a rarity. Never underestimate the stupidity of criminals. Most of them’ll make every effort imaginable to get caught. In the last murder investigation I’d been involved in, ten weeks earlier, the murderer, a seventeen-year-old carjacker named Rudi, had stabbed an unfortunate BMW owner to death when he’d had the gall to try to prevent his car being taken. Rudi had been arrested three days afterwards when a passing patrol car had spotted the vehicle parked outside his mum’s flat. Further investigation had unearthed Rudi’s prints all over the interior, as well as those of two of his mates. The knife he’d used, still complete with somewhat telltale blood-stains, had turned up under his bed hidden in a PlayStation box. I reckon the paperwork took up more time than the detective work. Sherlock Holmes wouldn’t even have bothered getting out of bed, and who could blame him?
But this was different. A poisoning opened up all sorts of possibilities. It suggested interesting motives. It suggested intelligence, or at least creativity, on the part of the poisoner, but also an incredible naivety. Poisoning was, in general, a pretty foolish method of committing murder. It was too easily traceable these days which meant its one great advantage — that it could make the victim’s death look like an accident — no longer held true. Having said this, however, the case was now six days old (or at least the murder was) and had yet to throw up any real clues of note, or anything that pointed to one particular person.
It was a fine sunny morning, the fifth day of what passes for an English heatwave, and DC Dave Berrin was driving as we pulled into the walled car park at the rear of the Arcadia nightclub, an imposing post-war structure on the Upper Holloway Road which dominated the corner on which it stood, and parked in a bay marked STAFF ONLY.
Not surprisingly, the club was closed at this time in the morning, but we were expected and walked right in through the double doors at the front. The interior was dark and spacious with tables facing down on to the dance floor on three sides. At the opposite end of the room was a long bar lined with stools. A woman stood on the serving side of it with a pen in her hand, looking down at some papers in front of her. She appeared to be the only person in the place. She looked up when she heard our footfalls on the wooden floor.
‘Sorry, we’re closed,’ she shouted out, going back to her papers. ‘We open at twelve for lunch.’
‘We’re police officers,’ I said loudly, crossing the dance floor with Berrin in tow. ‘Here to see Mr Fowler.’
‘He’s not here,’ she shouted back.
‘He should be. He’s expecting us. We’ve got an eleven o’clock meeting.’
‘Well, he’s not here.’
I strode up the steps to the bar and stopped in front of her. She carried on making notes on the papers on the bar. ‘Perhaps, then, you can tell us where he is.’
She looked up with a faintly bored expression on her face. ‘I don’t know. He should have been here more than an hour ago.’
This one had an attitude, all right. I gave her a quick once-over. Early thirties, slim with well-defined features, a nose that was maybe a little too sharp, and a vaguely Mediterranean appearance, particularly the olive-coloured eyes. She was definitely attractive — very attractive — but in a hard, don’t-mess-with-me kind of way, with the cynical confidence of someone who’s not afraid of a fight. If we’d been Nazi stormtroopers, we wouldn’t have intimidated her. My ex-wife’s all-time favourite film is Gone with the Wind and I think that says something about her (though I’m not quite sure what). This girl looked like hers was Scarface.
‘Is he likely to be at home?’ I asked her.
‘I told you, I don’t know where he is.’
I sighed ostentatiously. ‘But I presume you’ve got his home phone number?’ She nodded. ‘Well, I’d appreciate it if you’d phone him then and tell him we’re here.’
‘Look, I’m very busy.’ She motioned to the notes in front of her.
‘So are we, Miss …?’
‘Toms. Elaine Toms. I talked to a couple of your officers the other day.’
‘Well, we’re very busy too and it would be greatly appreciated if you could phone Mr Fowler and see if he’s at home for us. It won’t take a minute.’
My tone was even but firm, the kind that says I’m going to keep going until I get some co-operation. It always works in the end, but you’d be amazed how many people take a long time getting the message.
Without a word she turned and walked over to a telephone pinned to the wall in the corner, and dialled a number. I was a bit pissed off because I’d been preparing for this interview for close to a day now. We’d talked to Fowler once but only briefly to ascertain his position within the nightclub, what his relationship was with the deceased, and whether he could throw any light on what had happened. He’d come across as very keen to appear as helpful and as friendly as possible, but hadn’t actually managed to tell us a great deal. Predictably, he’d denied knowing anything about Matthews’s involvement in drug dealing. He’d claimed that as Arcadia’s owner he didn’t tolerate drug use on the premises but was aware that it did occur. ‘I’m looking at ways to combat it,’ he’d said, and had talked about installing cameras in the toilets. ‘That’s where most of it goes on, I’m sure,’ he’d added — a fairly logical assumption. Neither Berrin nor I had found the interview very helpful, mainly because there was something not quite authentic about Fowler’s answers, and since then it had come to light that he had a conviction for conspiracy to supply Class A drugs in the late 1980s and that one of his co-conspirators at the time had been Terry Holtz, the late brother of a notorious local crime figure. He’d also been done for driving under the influence of cannabis a couple of years back, and the club had been raided on two separate occasions by the Drugs Squad in an effort to take out suspected dealers, the last time eighteen months ago, although it had to be said that on neither occasion was any contraband found. More promisingly, there was also a rumour doing the rounds that, although Fowler’s name was on the deeds of the club, he wasn’t what you’d call the real owner. That man, it was claimed, was one Stefan Holtz, the same local crime figure whose brother Fowler had once been involved with.
The feeling in the station’s CID was that the motive for this murder was almost certainly drug-related and that it might possibly be something to do with a disagreement between Fowler and Matthews. Since Fowler apparently owned the club, and was almost certainly lying when he said he didn’t tolerate drugs on the premises, and Matthews appeared to have been the chief dealer, it was probably down to an argument about something mundane like the split of profits. All this was conjecture, of course, but DCI Knox, the head of the investigation, specialized in conjecture. Me, though, I wasn’t so sure, not least because I didn’t think Fowler would have used an obscure poison to rid himself of a troublesome business partner. But I did think there were plenty of questions he could provide an answer for, particularly regarding the possible involvement of the Holtzes, and I was keen to hear them.
But it seemed I was going to have to wait a little longer.
‘He’s not there,’ said Elaine Toms, coming back to the papers on the bar. ‘Either that or he’s not answering.’
‘Have you got his address?’ She nodded, and wrote it down on a piece of paper. I took it, thanking her, and put it in my pocket. It was local. ‘And what’s your position here, Miss Toms?’
‘I told you, I’ve already been interviewed about the murder.’
‘Well, we’re talking to you again. I’d just like to refresh myself of your account.’
‘It was a DI I talked to.’
‘DI Capper. Yes, I know. Now, if you’ll answer the questions.’
‘Have you got any ID?’
She was trying to be difficult but I wasn’t going to argue about it, so I took out my warrant card and showed it to her, as did Berrin. She inspected them both carefully, paying particular attention to mine. ‘It’s not a very good photo of you,’ she told me.
‘With me, the camera always lies,’ I said. ‘Now, your position?’
‘I manage the place.’
‘And how long have you been here for?’
‘Just over a year. I joined last July.’
‘You knew Shaun Matthews pretty well, then?’
She sighed theatrically. ‘Yeah, I knew Shaun Matthews pretty well. You know, I’ve said all this before.’
‘Humour me. I presume you knew he dealt drugs?’
‘Are you asking me or telling me?’
‘I’m asking you.’
She shrugged. ‘I heard that he did some dealing here and there and that he might even have done some in this place, but I never saw him do any and I never saw anyone else take any stuff either. Occasionally you get someone off their face, but if they get like that we don’t serve them and we chuck them out. They’re certainly not sold the stuff in here. I only heard Shaun was meant to be this big-time dealer after he died.’
‘You’re sticking to the party line, then? That Arcadia’s pretty much drug free and that you don’t go in for that sort of thing here.’
She glared at me. ‘We don’t. Now, if you’ve finished …’
‘Does Stefan Holtz own this place?’
‘Who?’
‘Stefan Holtz. You must have heard of him.’ She shook her head. ‘He’s a well-known local businessman, to use the term very loosely.’
‘Look, as far as I’m concerned, Roy Fowler owns this place. That’s who hired me and that’s who pays me.’
‘Are you sure the name Stefan Holtz means nothing to you?’ asked Berrin.
‘Oh, it speaks,’ she said with a smirk.
Berrin looked slightly embarrassed. ‘Just answer the question,’ he persisted, trying not to be intimidated by her, but not making a particularly good job of it.
She slowly turned her head, faced him down, took a breath, then spoke. ‘Yes, I’m sure.’ She turned back to me. ‘I don’t know a Stefan Holtz.’
‘Mr Fowler was going to get us a list of casual door staff who’ve worked here over the past six months,’ I continued, ‘but so far we haven’t received it.’
‘Oh dear,’ she said with a cheeky half-smile.
‘You’re the manager,’ said Berrin. ‘Can you provide us with that information?’
The smile disappeared rapidly. ‘I haven’t got time. You’ll need to speak to Mr Fowler about it.’
‘We would do if he was here,’ I said, thinking that this was one of the great problems with policework. That most of the time you were constantly trying to get blood out of a stone. ‘Just tell us the name of the company who supplies the doormen, then,’ I added, not wanting to waste any more time with Elaine Toms, ‘and we’ll contact them.’
She paused, and the reason she paused was simple. If there were any dodgy ownership issues, then they would spread to the company who supplied the doormen because with nightclubs that’s how things work. She wouldn’t want to give out the information but I knew she couldn’t lie about it either, in case Fowler had already given us the name and I was just testing her.
‘It’s an outfit called Elite A,’ she said eventually. Berrin wrote the name down. ‘But I don’t know how much they’ll be able to tell you. I don’t think they’re too hot on the paperwork front.’
‘What makes you say that?’
‘You know what these security firms are like. They use freelancers.’
‘Did Shaun Matthews come via Elite A?’
‘I think so, originally, but it was before my time so I couldn’t say for sure. The papers said something about him being poisoned.’
‘That’s what we believe.’
She shook her head as if she couldn’t comprehend such an end for him. ‘What’s the world coming to, eh?’
‘To the same place it’s always been, Miss Toms. Full of not very nice people doing not very nice things to each other.’ I resisted adding that with Shaun Matthews’s demise there was at least one fewer of them. ‘If you hear from Mr Fowler, please ask him to get in touch with us immediately.’
She took the card I gave her with my number on it. ‘So, have you got any suspects?’
‘We’re working on a number of leads,’ I answered, using the stock detective’s line which was basically a euphemism for ‘No’, and she obviously recognized it for what it was because she turned away with another of those half-smiles. The discussion was over.
When we were back in the car, Berrin turned to me with an expression of concern. ‘I don’t think I did too well in there,’ he said. ‘You handled it a lot better than me.’
Berrin’s young, he’s a graduate, and, like most of us, he’s still got a lot to learn. Unlike most of us, he recognizes it, and it means he’s not as confident as he could be. He’d only been promoted out of uniform three months earlier, and apart from Rudi, the casual killer and carjacker, this was his first murder case. It was also the first time we’d worked together.
I shrugged. ‘I’ve been in the game a lot longer, which makes it a lot easier to handle people like her. Remember, you’re the one who’s the boss. With the cocky ones it can be easy to forget.’
He nodded thoughtfully. At that moment, he reminded me of a contestant from that TV programme Faking It. One month to turn a good-looking Home Counties college boy into a Met detective. He was working hard to master the ropes, to make a good impression, but he didn’t look a natural.
He turned to me, the concern replaced by determined zeal, the kind you sometimes see on the faces of door-to-door missionaries. ‘I let her get me on the wrong foot. That was the problem. I didn’t do enough to make her show me respect. It won’t happen again.’
‘I know it won’t,’ I said, patting him on the shoulder. ‘You work with me, you’ll be Dirty Harry in no time.’
He pulled out of the parking space. ‘Yeah, right.’
Roy Fowler lived in a modern, showy-looking development complex near Finsbury Park. It’s what these days they like to call a gated community, although there usually tends to be very little community-wise about them. We were stopped at the main gates by a uniformed doorman who was well past retirement age and looked like he’d have trouble stopping a runaway skateboard let alone a shadowy intruder. We showed him our credentials and were waved into the car park in front of the five six-storey buildings that were arranged in a semi-circle around the well-kept, if rather dull, communal gardens. Fowler lived in apartment number 12 which was in the second building on the left.
But if he wasn’t at work, he wasn’t at home either. We buzzed on his intercom for several minutes but didn’t get an answer. I phoned the Arcadia and double-checked the address with Elaine Toms. It was the right one. Fowler still hadn’t turned up at the club either, a fact that was beginning to irritate me and her.
We sat in the car and waited for ten minutes without result, then decided to make our way back to the station. It had been an unproductive morning and Berrin was beginning to look depressed, as if it had only just dawned on him that life in CID was a lot less interesting than it looked on the telly.
It was as we were coming out of Fowler’s complex that I saw it. A dark blue Range Rover driving by just in front of us. It only passed our field of vision for a couple of seconds at most but I noticed straight away that it had holes in the paintwork and industrial taping over two of the windows. It kept going and I memorized the number plate as Berrin pulled out, heading the other way.
‘Did you see that car?’ I asked him.
Berrin is not the most observant man in the world. ‘What car?’ was his reply.
I thought about it for a few seconds. Who’d be daft enough to be driving around in a bullet-ridden Range Rover in broad daylight? But those holes didn’t look like they’d been made by anything else — what else could have made them? — and, as I’ve said before, you should never underestimate the stupidity of criminals. It was probably wasting someone’s time but I took my mobile from my pocket and phoned the station to report a suspicious vehicle, giving its location and possible route.
‘Do you want to turn round and go after it?’ said Berrin, looking like his depression was lifting.
‘It’s probably nothing. Let’s leave it for the uniforms. I need to get something to eat.’
‘What do you think? Do you reckon he’s flown the coop?’
The loud, confident voice belonged to DCI Knox, the big boss. No question of him ever losing control of an interview. Berrin and I were sat in his office, on the other side of his imposing desk, explaining the position regarding the lack of intelligence as to Roy Fowler’s whereabouts.
‘We don’t know,’ said Berrin. ‘He was certainly aware that we were meant to interview him this morning.’
‘It seems odd, though,’ I said. ‘Him disappearing off so soon. It’s like an admission of guilt, but, if we’re honest, we haven’t really got anything on him.’
Knox nodded in his sage-like way. ‘True. But then where is he?’
It was a good question. ‘Maybe he had more pressing engagements and thought we could wait,’ I said eventually.
Knox snorted. ‘Well, he’s wrong if he thinks that. We’ll put out an alert. Any patrol that sees him, they can pick him up and bring him in for questioning. I don’t like the way these small-time villains think they’re royalty these days.’
We both nodded in general agreement. It was always good to agree with Knox, always fatal to pick holes in his pronouncements. Unlike Berrin, he was not one of life’s listeners, whatever he liked to claim. ‘My door’s always open’ was one of his favourite mantras, which might have been true literally, but that was about it.
‘What about the list of bouncers? I don’t suppose we’ve got that then, have we?’
I shook my head. ‘No. We spoke to the manager, a Miss Toms, and she told us that a company called Elite A supplied all the casual door staff they used.’
‘I wonder if she’s involved in the drugs scene at the Arcadia,’ mused Knox.
‘Has she got a record?’
He shook his head. ‘I don’t think so, but that doesn’t mean anything, does it? There was definitely dealing going on down there and it’s almost certain that it originated on the door. So the manager’s probably in on it. You’ll need to check up on this Elite A. I don’t suppose whoever runs them’s whiter than white.’ Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Berrin nodding in agreement. Cheeky sod. A politician already. ‘Now,’ continued Knox, ‘we’ve talked to three of the other doormen at Arcadia who all worked there on a permanent basis, so we only really need to catch up with the temporaries who’ve been there the last six months, although that could be quite a few. They’re a busy club. I’ll leave you two to do that. Try to get to talk to them all by Monday p.m. at the latest. We need to tie up all the loose ends on this.’
‘And these other doormen haven’t told us anything useful?’
‘No. They all knew Shaun Matthews to varying degrees but none said they’d ever seen him selling drugs of any description and, of course, they all denied selling any themselves. When confronted by witness statements testifying to his extra-curricular activities, they all expressed varying degrees of surprise.’
‘Perhaps we should offer some sort of reward,’ I suggested. ‘That might persuade them to give us some information we could use.’
‘It’s a possibility if we still don’t get anywhere, but budgets are tight and I’m not sure I’d feel right doling out much-needed money to solve the murder of a violent drug dealer.’ Once again, I caught Berrin nodding.
‘It might get us a result.’
‘We’ll have to see. We’ve got pretty much our whole allocation resting on the Robert Jones case. If we have to pay out on that then we’re not going to be able to offer a reward on anything until 2010.’
I baulked at the mention of Robert Jones. Always did. It was one of the few cases that had truly disturbed me in all my time in the Met. Robert was a thirteen-year-old schoolboy who’d disappeared while doing his morning paper round six months earlier. His body had been found a few days afterwards buried in a shallow grave in woodland out in Essex. He’d been stabbed three times in the chest and his clothing had been tampered with, indicating some sort of sexual assault. I’d had to break the news of the discovery to the parents, along with the WPC who’d been their liaison officer. They’d been a pleasant, ordinary middle-class couple who’d only let Robert do the round because he’d been keen to save up enough money to buy a new bike. I’d watched, unable to do anything to help, as they’d crumbled in front of me, while the WPC had comforted his little sister when she’d appeared in the doorway, too young to understand what was going on. Robert had been their only son, his family’s pride and joy. What had got me the most was the total and utter injustice of it all. A young boy from a good home, never been in trouble — unlike so many of the little bastards we had to deal with — seeking to better himself, only to be struck down in the space of a few moments by someone who probably had no idea of the terrible damage he was inflicting. It was such a waste and, six months on, we were no nearer bringing the killer to justice, even though a reward of twenty-five thousand pounds had been offered for information leading to a conviction: fifteen thousand from the police and ten thousand from a local businessman. Unlike Robert Jones, his killer had had all the luck.
‘What about the poisoning angle?’ I asked. ‘Any more news on that?’
Knox furrowed his brow into deep, craggy lines. ‘Well, it’s coming along,’ he said without a huge amount of conviction. ‘WDC Boyd’s been liaising with the poisons department at Guy’s and doctors from the Home Office about this substance and its possible source, as you know, but I’m not sure how much help it is. I mean, it’s not as if you can pop into the pharmacy, pick some of this stuff up, and sign the Poisons Register. It’s cobra venom, for God’s sake.’
‘So there’s no place you could get it in this country?’
Knox shook his head. ‘Not officially, no. As far as anyone seems to know, the only place you can find it is in the mouth, or whatever, of the cobra. And as far as I’m aware, none of them lives within five thousand miles of here. You’ll have to talk to Boyd about all that, though. She’s now our resident toxins expert. The thing is, I don’t know how much help either she or anyone else can be. We haven’t got a clue where you actually get it from in a usable format, where this particular batch may have originated, or anything like that. All we know is that somehow someone came into possession of enough of the stuff to kill three people, and somehow got the opportunity to inject the whole lot into the left arm of a sixteen-stone bouncer without him noticing, or getting any sort of opportunity to seek medical help.’
DC Berrin exhaled slowly and thoughtfully. ‘It’s a mystery,’ he said. A statement of the obvious if ever there was one, but which pretty much summed things up.
Iversson
The lunchtime traffic was heavy and I was paranoid. Not surprising when you’re driving at speeds a two-legged dog could muster in a car that looks like it’s been used in an Arnie Schwarzenegger film, even down to the blood-stains on the back seat, and you know that most of the bullets wedged in the exterior were meant for you. But what choice did I have? The Range Rover was registered in my name and I needed to stash it somewhere where it was not going to receive undue attention. I was therefore on my way now to the abode of one Gary Tyler, a bloke who did occasional work for us, and who had the invaluable asset of a lock-up over in Silvertown that I could use for storage purposes until I worked out what to do. I looked at my watch. It was five to one. What a twenty-four hours.
There’d been no news on the shootings the previous night. Not a dickie bird. Whoever had organized our little warehouse reception — and some bastard most definitely had — was as efficient as he was ruthless. Three bodies left behind in an industrial estate in the heart of north London amid a load of gunfire, and not a peep about it in the press or on the TV, and I’d checked enough times that day. When I’d spoken to my partner Joe Riggs on the blower earlier, he’d been shocked (although not half as shocked as I’d been when one of our most reliable employees had started taking potshots at me), and it was only when he’d asked me whether I’d managed to pick up the money in advance that I knew the tight bastard was all right. In the end, we’d decided not to say anything about Eric’s death. It was unfair to the family, no one was denying that, and it was a decision that could easily come back to haunt us, but what was the alternative? At least by keeping stum, we’d hopefully avoid a lot of unwanted attention.
But it was Tony’s role in the whole thing we found the hardest to understand. I suppose we both thought we’d known him pretty well. He didn’t work for us so much these days, less and less over the past couple of years, but that didn’t mean a thing. He was still someone we thought we could depend on, and right up until the previous night he’d never let us down once. So what had made him suddenly turn a gun on me and Eric, as well as a man he’d never even met before, just like that? This was the big question.
We’d left it that I would see what I could dig up on Fowler while Joe would do the same with Tony, and we’d meet up the following day. In the meantime, I needed to be rid of this motor, and Fowler’s briefcase, which was still on the front seat.
The lights up ahead turned red and I came to a halt in the nearside lane, the third car back. In front of me was a black BMW with tinted windows blasting out a thumping bass so powerful that it was making me shake in my seat. When I’d been a kid, punk had been the big thing, and my mum had constantly droned on about how the music sounded terrible and you couldn’t understand a word the singers were shouting, and I’d thought what the fuck did she know? Now I knew it was a generational thing. This stuff, this garage shite that had suddenly become all the rage, it was a pile of dung, to be honest with you. There weren’t even any tunes as such, just some bloke bragging about how hard he was, and how much the ladies rated him. Kids these days — they’ve got no taste.
I saw the flashing lights in the rear-view mirror and cursed, because I knew straight away that I was trapped. The lane next to me was full of traffic and the lights were still red. The cop car put its hazards on and two uniforms got out, donning their caps. I was just going to have to front it.
They came round either side of the Range Rover and the one nearest me tapped on the driver’s-side window.
‘Afternoon, officer,’ I said as jauntily as possible.
‘Can you turn your engine off, sir, please?’ he asked, giving me the standard copper’s-in-control, I’ll-know-if-you’re-guilty-don’t-try-to-hide-it gaze. He was about twenty-five and not particularly big. Rosy cheeks, too. About as menacing as Tony Blair.
The lights were still red, and on a main road as well. I couldn’t believe it. No wonder London had traffic problems. That was the fucking mayor for you. A coma victim could have done a better job. Seeing as I had no choice, I switched off. The other copper, who was even younger, looked to be inspecting the bullet holes on the other side.
‘How can I help you, officer?’
‘Can I just take these for a moment?’ he asked, leaning in the window and removing the keys from the ignition.
‘What’s the problem? I’m in a bit of a hurry, to tell you the truth.’
He gave the interior a bit of a nose and spotted the two dark stains on the back seat where Fowler had bled. I’d given them a clean-up earlier that morning, but they still looked a bit suspicious. I’d never been much cop at domestic chores.
‘There appear to be bullet holes in your vehicle, sir,’ he said, totally deadpan, like he was telling me I had toothpaste round my mouth.
‘I live on a rough estate, officer.’
The other one now opened the back passenger door and began inspecting the stains more closely. ‘What happened here?’ he asked. ‘This looks a lot like blood.’
‘It’s red wine,’ I told him. ‘I spilled it in there yesterday. It’s a right bastard to get rid of.’
‘Would you mind stepping out of the car, sir,’ said the first one, opening the door for me.
‘No problem,’ I said wearily, and got out. Still holding the handle, he shut it behind me at just the moment I delivered a ferocious uppercut that sent him flying. He landed on his back, absolutely sparko, narrowly missing the traffic in the next lane, and his cap rolled off, only to be immediately crushed by a passing minibus full of pensioners.
‘Oi!’ shouted his partner, going for his extendable baton.
There was too much traffic to cross the road before he caught up with me so I ran round the front of the Range Rover, mounted the pavement, and charged him before he had a chance to actually extend the baton. I punched him full in the face, knocking him off balance, then got my leg round his and tripped him up. He went down, his nose bleeding badly, and I ran back round to retrieve my keys.
But cars were stopping all over the place now to watch the drama unfolding and the lights had gone red again. A well-built workman was getting out of his van and glaring at me, looking worryingly like he was about to carry out a citizen’s arrest. Then, from up the street, I heard the sound of a siren. It meant a quick decision.
Run for it.
So that’s what I did, and as I tore off at a rate of knots in the opposite direction to the siren, past the surprised expressions of passing civilians, it struck me then that however bad I thought my predicament was ten minutes ago, it was now a hundred times worse.
If anyone ever wanted to kill Johnny Hexham, he would not be a difficult man to find. Every lunchtime between one and two, as regular as clockwork, he was in the Forked Tail public house, a mangy dive off Upper Street, gossiping with his lowlife cronies and plotting his next poxy moneymaking scheme. Sometimes he’d be there earlier, sometimes he wouldn’t leave until the early hours of the following morning, but, without fail, he was always in residence for that one hour. I got there at ten to two, and waited in the doorway of a boarded-up shop across the street, trying to look inconspicuous. As it was a Friday, I guessed that the lazy little shit would be in for an all-dayer, but, like the creature of habit he was, I thought he’d probably whip out for a few minutes to place some bets on the horses, having picked up some tips from the Paddy barman. I didn’t much want to approach Johnny in the bar where there were too many people with big ears, but I would if I had to. Things were not going well for me and I wanted some answers quick.
And bang, like an assassin’s dream, there he was, coming out of the door, already filling out one of the betting slips he always carried with him. I looked at my watch — one minute past two — and crossed the street, coming up behind him.
‘Johnny Hexham. Long time no see.’ And it was, too. Getting close to six months.
He swung round and clocked me straight away. He didn’t look too pleased but worked hard to hide it. ‘All right, Max,’ he said, coming to a halt. ‘How’s it going, mate?’
I walked up and took him casually by the arm. The grip was light but firm enough to let him know I wasn’t fucking around. ‘Not good, Johnny. Not good. There are a few questions I need answers to fairly urgently, and I think you might be able to help.’
‘What’s the Bobby, then?’
‘Eh?’
‘The Bobby Moore, score.’
‘It’s about a certain Mr Fowler.’
‘Fuck,’ he said. ‘I knew he’d be trouble.’
‘You don’t know the half of it.’ I let go of his arm and we walked down in the direction of Chapel Market.
Johnny looked at me nervously. We might have been old schoolmates but he was switched on enough to notice that that wasn’t going to count for much in this conversation. I am a man of compassion but, to be honest, you don’t want to get on the wrong side of me.
‘What happened, then?’ he asked.
‘You put this bloke, Fowler, on to me. Why?’
‘There was nothing bad about it, honest. I just thought the two of you could do some business. He needed some security-’
‘How do you know him?’ I had to remember not to use the word ‘did’.
‘I don’t really. It was Elaine who put me on to him. Elaine Toms.’
‘Jesus. Is she still around?’
Elaine had been in the same year as us in school, way back when Duran Duran were the kings of the rock world and furry pixie boots were all the rage. She’d always been the girl the boys liked because, without exception, she fucked on the first date, the first date only ever meant buying her one drink, and she was nice to look at. Which you’ve got to admit is something of a rare and joyous combination. Not that I’d ever managed to get her in the sack. There’d always been too much of a queue in front of me. And I’d been a bit of a skinny runt in school, too. Like decent wine, I’d matured with age. I hadn’t clapped eyes on Elaine in getting close to fifteen years, probably longer, and briefly wondered what she looked like now.
‘Yeah, Elaine’s still around. She’s the manager of Fowler’s club.’
‘The Arcadia.’
‘That’s the one. I still see her now and again because I drink down there sometimes. Not often, like, cos it’s a bit too young for me, all these kids jumping about, out of it on all sorts, but it’s worth a Captain Cook. Anyway, she told me that Fowler was having trouble with some people and he needed protection. She asked me if I knew of anyone who might be able to assist and so, you know, I thought about it for a couple of minutes, then your name popped up. I know you’re into all that shit. I thought you could do with the business.’ He turned and gave me his trademark boyish smile, the one I knew had got Elaine Toms into bed on more than one occasion back in the old days. Johnny Hexham, the loveable rogue.
But it didn’t work. Not today. ‘It was a bad move, Johnny.’
He looked worried. ‘Why? What happened?’
We turned into Chapel Market and made our way down the middle between the two lines of stalls. As usual, it was noisy and crowded. I decided against giving him the whole story. Johnny was no grass and probably wouldn’t go to the law if his balls went missing, but it was best to err on the side of caution.
‘I almost got killed. That’s what happened. These people Fowler had trouble with, they weren’t messing about.’
‘Blimey, Max, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to get you in the Barry. I thought it was routine stuff.’
‘Who are these people? And what’s the trouble he’s been having, exactly?’
‘I don’t know. Honest. It was something to do with the club. That’s all I was told.’ He exhaled dramatically. ‘Fuck, this is bad news. What’s happened to Fowler?’
I glared at him. ‘Forget Fowler. And forget you ever put him in contact with me. OK?’
Johnny’s head went up and down like a nodding dog. ‘Yeah, yeah. Of course. No problem. Consider it done.’
I took his arm again, this time squeezing harder. He turned to protest but I stared him down. ‘Are you sure you’re telling me the truth, Johnny? You know nothing about that club that might help to explain why people are getting all trigger happy with Fowler?’
‘No …’
‘Because if I find out you do know something, anything at all, then I’m going to hunt you down and I’m going to kill you. Understand?’ Harsh words, but definitely necessary under the circumstances.
‘Fuck it, Max, I’m telling the truth. I know there’s some dealing goes on down there, charlie and all that, but that’s about it.’
They say the eyes are the windows to the soul. I slowed right down and stared straight into his. But the windows were dirty and I couldn’t tell whether he was bullshitting or not.
‘That’s all I know, I swear to you. Look, Max, I’m sorry. I really am. I was just trying to help.’
I let go of his arm, and managed a brief smile, though God knows what there was to smile about. ‘Well, it’s a brand of help I can do without in the future. And remember, say nothing about seeing me to anyone. OK? Including Elaine Toms.’
‘No problem. My lips are sealed.’ He gave me a concerned look. A mate to a mate. ‘Everything’s all right, though, isn’t it, Max?’
‘Oh yeah,’ I told him, turning away. ‘Tickety-fucking-boo. See you around, Johnny.’
Gallan
I didn’t have to work that night but, with my home life being as non-existent as it was, I decided to stay late in the incident room and catch up on paperwork. Berrin wasn’t so keen and took off bang on five-thirty, something I duly noted. There was an all-units out on the car I’d spotted with the bullet holes in it. Two of the station’s uniforms had stopped it and there’d been an altercation with the driver, who’d fled the scene on foot, having assaulted and injured both officers. Suspected bloodstains had been found in the vehicle, which was registered in the name of Max Iversson, an exsoldier with no previous record, who matched witness descriptions of the driver. Thankfully, it was nothing to do with me any more, but I was pleased that my observance had paid off, even if the uniforms who’d done the stopping and who were now off sick probably weren’t.
It was ten to nine when I left the station. I went to a cheap Italian off Upper Street I occasionally frequent and had a bowl of pasta and some garlic bread, washed down with a couple of welcome bottles of Peroni now that I was off duty. I suppose you could say it was a lonely way to spend a Friday evening, and you’d be right, it was, but I was beginning to get used to it. This time barely a year ago, it had all been a lot different. I’d been a DI at another station south of the river, heading up through the ranks in the direction of the DCI slot, with three commendations under my belt. Crime down there was bad, the hours were tough … Paradise it wasn’t. But it wasn’t a bad life and, unlike alot of my colleagues, I still had a stable domestic situation. A wife of fifteen years, an eleven-year-old daughter, a decent house in an area where the weekly mugging tallies were still in single figures …
Then, on the night they brought in Troy Farrow, it all changed.
Troy Farrow was a seventeen-year-old street robber who specialized in making victims of schoolkids my daughter’s age, relieving them of their mobile phones and pocket money, and old ladies, who he liked to pick off on pension day, sometimes breaking a few frail bones in the process. He had nine convictions altogether but had only spent a total of three months inside, so the law didn’t exactly have him shaking in his Nike trainers. He was shouting and cursing and threatening all sorts as the arresting officers booked him in for what was likely to be his tenth conviction: the violent removal of a mobile phone from the ear of a young secretary foolish enough to have been walking down a busy street early evening without keeping her wits about her. Unfortunately for him, the street was under surveillance by officers in plain clothes and he was caught within minutes. I was detailed to interview him, along with a DC, because we were interested in getting information from him regarding the near gang rape of an eleven-year-old by a group who’d also robbed her of her mobile and the bag of sweets she was carrying. We didn’t think Farrow had been involved — it wasn’t his style to molest his victims, and the suspects had been described as being aged between twelve and fourteen — but we were pretty sure he would know who was. There wasn’t much that went on in Farrow’s estate, crime-wise, that he wasn’t aware of, and kids like that would almost certainly have bragged about what they’d done.
Farrow calmed down as he was taken down to the interview room by two of the arresting officers, with me and the DC following a few yards behind. What happened next is still something of a mystery. As Farrow and the arresting officers turned and entered the room, he turned and said something to one of them that I didn’t quite catch but which I was told later went along the lines of ‘You pussies can’t do nothing with me’. The officer had then made a fatal mistake. He’d let his frustration with the legal system and the cocky criminals who frequented it get the better of him, and had apparently called Farrow ‘a black bastard’, causing a further, much more violent struggle to ensue. We’d hurried into the interview room at just the moment when one of the officers slammed Farrow’s head into the wall. Not hard enough to knock him out, but enough to open a nasty cut across his forehead. ‘Assault! Assault!’ he’d screamed. ‘They’re killing me! Get me a fucking brief! Now!’ The two arresting officers had let go, and we’d helped Farrow, who was handcuffed behind his back, into one of the chairs. ‘Get my brief,’ he’d said, all calm now, blood oozing out of the wound. ‘I want to make a formal complaint. I ain’t saying another word until I’ve seen my brief.’ And he didn’t. Not a word.
The formal complaint made, all four of us who’d been in the interview room were later questioned by representatives of the Police Complaints Authority, and all of us stuck to the same story: that Troy Farrow had stumbled during the struggle and had accidentally knocked his head against the wall. The arresting officer who Farrow claimed had racially abused him denied the charge but did admit calling him a bastard, and I couldn’t comment on this because I hadn’t heard the exchange. I know that a lot of people would think it was wrong for me not to say what I saw but at the time I thought no lasting harm had been done. Farrow was patched up by the station’s doctor and needed two stitches, and, anyway, it was no more than he deserved. Plus, I didn’t want to be the whistleblower. The police get enough flak as it is, and sometimes when you’re a copper it does feel like the whole world’s against you, so you don’t want to be putting the knife into your own side. In the end, I was never going to be the one who ruined a colleague’s career (which is what I would have done) over one second’s stupidity and hot-headedness. I just couldn’t justify it to myself.
And, at first, it looked like we might have got away with it. I don’t think the people from the PCA believed us but it was our word against that of a known criminal, and we weren’t budging, so eventually they had little choice but to conclude that the incident was accidental, and that Farrow had misheard what the arresting officer had said.
But that wasn’t the end of it. A couple of months later the second arresting uniform, the one who hadn’t pushed Farrow’s head into the wall, admitted what had happened to a bloke in his local pub after one beer too many, only to find out afterwards that the bloke was a local investigative journalist, doing an expose of racism in the Force. With the conversation recorded, the story appeared two days later in the local paper, and the case was suddenly reopened. I found the local media and even London Tonight parked on my doorstep, asking me if I was a liar and a racist. I might occasionally be the one, but I’m definitely not the other. The whole thing was a nightmare and, although my boss, DCI Renham, a guy I’d worked for for getting close to five years, fought to keep me in my position, the tide of attention was overwhelming, and in the end, with the story refusing to go away, the Brass were forced to act. Both arresting officers lost their jobs; the DC, with me, was put back in uniform; and I was demoted to DC.
It was a shameful episode, the whole thing, and for a long time I found it difficult to come to terms with. You see, in my eyes, I hadn’t done a lot wrong. I’d made a mistake but I thought the punishment far outweighed the crime. I took it out on my wife, made life difficult for her, and maybe things between us hadn’t been quite as strong as I’d thought, because three months later, after one argument too many, we separated. It turned out she’d been having an affair. I suppose this would have been understandable were it not for the fact that the other man happened to be the intrepid journalist who’d broken the story in the first place. The cheeky bastard had gone round to interview her about what effect the story was having on her and the family, and clearly it was having quite a big one because somehow, not long afterwards, maybe even that day, they’d ended up in the sack.
What do you do in that sort of situation? What can you do? Nothing except pick yourself up, dust yourself down, and remember that what goes around comes around. There is justice in this world, it’s just that sometimes it takes a long time before it bothers to show itself. I had no choice but to cling to that fact as I gathered up my possessions, put in for a transfer, and headed north of the river for the first time in my career, ending up at probably the most controversial station in the entire Met, a place still haunted by the betrayal of one of its most senior detectives.
DS Dennis Milne was without doubt Britain’s most corrupt police officer: a valued and long-standing member of CID by day, a hired killer with God knows how many corpses to his credit by night. His shadow still hung over the station like a noxious cloud, even though it had been close to two years since his grim secret had been uncovered and he’d disappeared into thin air. It didn’t matter. Time would be a slow healer here, and there were a number in CID, including DCI Knox, who’d be forever tainted by their long association with the station’s most infamous son. Mud sticks, and maybe that was why I’d settled in so easily there.
Since my arrival, I’d rented myself a half-decent flat in Tufnell Park, and had managed to pull myself back up to the rank of detective sergeant. A far cry from the old days, and I was still waiting for justice (my ex and the journalist were now shacked up together and my daughter even claimed that she quite liked him), but things could always have been worse. I still had a job and, against all the odds, I still got something out of it.
I left the restaurant at five past ten and headed round the corner to the Roving Wolf, a pub used by the station’s CID, to see if there was anyone in there. It was busy, but I spotted a couple of DCs I knew vaguely standing near the bar and joined them for a couple of pints. They were both interested in how the Matthews case was going but I couldn’t tell them a lot. Slowly was the word that about best described it. Conversation drifted on to other things and I left them at eleven, wandering down onto Upper Street in search of that elusive late-night creature, the black cab.
Upper Street was buzzing as usual, its constant stream of pavement cafes and trendy bistros bustling with custom as people of all ages, and pretty much every race under the sun, took advantage of the balmy evening. Strains of jazz, mamba, flamenco and half a dozen other musical styles drifted out of the open doors and windows of a dozen different establishments, giving the place a pleasant, continental feel. It almost felt like being on holiday and, for one who’d travelled up Upper Street a few times back in the 1980s, the transformation was incredible. Once a barren, dark place of nasty drinking hovels and little else where only the adventurous and the foolish came after dark, it had now become Islington’s version of Paris’s Left Bank. If you weren’t careful, you might even forget to watch your back.
Incredibly, I managed to hail a cab near Islington Green after only five minutes, which had to be some sort of record for that time of night. I thought about heading home but for some reason I wasn’t that tired. Instead, I asked the driver to take me to the Arcadia nightclub. He gave me a funny look in the mirror but did as he was told and we made our way in silence up to the Highbury Corner roundabout, and then left onto the less continental and more menacing Holloway Road. I was hoping to catch Roy Fowler in residence and collar him for a few minutes since I felt confident that if he didn’t have anything to hide, he’d return there sooner rather than later. If you’re in the nightclub business, you don’t trust other people to look after your investment for too long, not if you want anything left at the end of it.
Four hundred yards up the Holloway Road, just past the Liverpool Road turning, the traffic slowed right down as a large group of maybe twenty-five or thirty people standing outside a pub suddenly spilled out into the road. Seconds later there were shouts and the sound of glass smashing, and a group of five of them split off from the rest in what looked like a wild dance. Others ran over to pile in and the whole scrum of them lumbered into the middle of the road, breaking apart and reforming as half a dozen individual battles were fought, oblivious to the cars driving by. A bottle sailed lazily through the air, bouncing off the roof of the vehicle in front of us before ending up unbroken in the bus lane on the other side of the street.
‘Fucking kids,’ said the taxi driver in a voice that was half-snarl, half-sigh, as the group, most of whom looked no more than twenty, swirled back towards the pavement. One of them went down, putting up his arms in a vain effort to protect himself as he disappeared beneath a rapid-fire welter of kicks from at least three others. A girl screamed something unintelligible and rushed out of the watching crowd to intervene, wading into the kickers, handbag aloft. The one on the ground, sensing an opportunity, jumped to his feet and got out of the firing line. He was holding his head and bleeding from the nose.
The taxi driver accelerated and we left them behind to their fighting. ‘Fucking kids,’ he said again. ‘They get worse and worse.’ I nodded and mumbled something in reply, thinking that that was the thing with London. One minute you were drinking in the ambient atmosphere of a laid-back summer evening, the next you’d stepped unwittingly into an ugly battlezone. I suppose that’s why some people like it so much. The variety.
There was a long queue of revellers, mainly under-twenty-fives, snaking back along the street from the entrance to the Arcadia. I got the cab to stop directly outside, paid the driver in full, and tipped him a quid. ‘Enjoy yourself,’ he said, with a wave, as he drove off. Probably about ten years too late for that, I thought, but you never knew.
I walked to the head of the queue where a group of four male and one female door staff were frisking the waiting punters. One of them turned to me as I approached and gave me the same sort of funny look the cab driver had, like what on earth was a bloke in his mid-thirties in a suit he looked like he’d been wearing all day doing coming to a trendy joint such as this. ‘Yeah?’ he said, by way of greeting.
I produced my warrant card and thrust it in his face. ‘Police. I’m here to see Mr Fowler.’ I was getting deja vu now.
He inspected the card, then looked back at me. ‘I don’t think he’s here tonight,’ he said.
‘Well, Miss Toms’ll do,’ I said, and walked past him.
There was a line of four further doormen in the foyer just inside the main entrance and I walked past them, showed my warrant card to a very thin young lady with big hair at the desk, and asked her to phone up to Fowler. She reiterated what the doorman had said about him not being in, but I insisted. She let the phone in his office ring for about thirty seconds before telling me he wasn’t there. Next she tried Elaine Toms, who apparently was in, but wasn’t answering either. I had no great desire to enter the club proper but it didn’t look like I was going to have any choice. I thanked her and headed through the door in front of me.
The place was heaving, as befitted a Friday night, with the majority of the youthful crowd packed onto the dance floor. The music was loud, repetitive and boring, the kind my daughter’s thankfully too young to like. At the bar at the far end, I noticed a few older people, mainly men in their thirties, and even one or two in their forties, clustered together against the noise. Some of them were wearing suits, though none of them looked like office workers, and I wondered who they were.
My eyes drifted along, then stopped dead. Someone looked familiar. I walked nearer, manoeuvring my way through the crowd until I was only about ten yards away. Now I was absolutely sure. No doubt about it. I’d seen his photograph four hours earlier, after it was faxed over by his old regiment. The man in front of me, drinking a bottle of Becks and looking like he owned the place, was Max Iversson, the fugitive half the station was looking for.
Iversson
There was no way I was queueing to get into Fowler’s place. There must have been two hundred people standing there like lemons while they waited for the doormen to give them the sort of attention my ex-missus used to give me when she’d drunk too many white wine spritzers. But who wants it off some bald bloke with no neck? Not me, that was for sure. I thought about heading straight to the front and saying I was mates with Elaine but, to tell you the truth, I didn’t really want to draw attention to myself, not now I’d suddenly turned into the Fugitive. So I headed round the back, jumped over the locked gate that led into the staff car park, and scanned the deserted rear of the building for any sign of an entrance. It took all of about three seconds for me to spot a window slightly open on the ground floor, about a foot above head height. It wasn’t much of a size but I’m quite a slim lad so I was confident I was going to get in. I hauled myself up with one hand while using the other to flick off the latch and open the window up fully. At the same time, I heard the unmistakable sound of piss hitting urinals and, as I poked my head inside, I saw a row of three blokes staring up at me as they deflated their bladders.
‘Evening,’ I said with a ready smile, trying hard to wriggle through the gap. ‘You couldn’t give us a hand, could you?’
The bloke nearest me, a young student type about twenty or so, looked shocked but nodded anyway, re-deposited himself in his trousers, and grabbed hold of my nearest hand, giving it a feeble tug.
‘Come on, boy, put some welly into it. You couldn’t even give yourself a hard-on with a grip like that.’
He tried again and, after a few grunts and groans of effort, managed to pull me in, with me landing on him a fair bit harder than I think he was expecting. I thanked him as he got unsteadily to his feet and, ignoring the strange looks coming from the other blokes in there, headed out of the door and into the club, recoiling momentarily from the wall of sound that hit me.
I scanned the room for Elaine, not sure I’d even recognize her after all this time, but couldn’t see any sign of her. Mind you, I couldn’t see a great deal among the buzzing crowd. I took a brief moment to admire a few of the scantily clad young females who seemed to be in abundance, then fought my way to the bar and waited for a space to open up, before ordering myself a beer from one of the harassed-looking bar staff. When it came about two minutes later, it cost me three quid. Three quid for a lousy bottle of Becks. If it was true that people were fighting for ownership of this place then it was no wonder. The money being turned over must have been incredible. I took a sip from the bottle and turned away from the bar, finding myself some space near the dance floor.
Which was when I saw her, walking purposefully in my direction while talking to one of the doormen, a stocky bloke who was striding fast just to keep up with her. I recognized her instantly. She’d changed quite a lot from school, as you’d imagine — I mean, it had been a long time — but it wasn’t so much in the look. It was more the poise, the way she carried herself. Back then she’d been attractive, with lovely big brown eyes and a good body, but she’d never really made the best of it, probably because she hadn’t really needed to. Now she looked hot, the type of woman most blokes are immediately attracted to because they know without a second’s doubt that she’ll be a demon between the sheets. She was wearing a black cocktail dress which matched her long curly hair and high-heeled court shoes. I wondered then whether that hound Johnny had slept with her more recently than school. If he had then he’d been a lucky man.
She turned away from the doorman as the two of them reached the bar and our eyes briefly met. Although she was still a few feet away and there were a number of people in between us, I saw an immediate flicker of recognition pass across her face. She stopped for a moment, then looked at me quizzically before approaching.
‘Max? Max Iversson?’ she shouted above the noise, walking up to me.
I got a glorious scent of musky perfume and warmth as she came up close. I tell you this, I wanted to have this woman before I’d even opened my mouth. She might have started off the chain of events that had almost had me killed but I’d suddenly become a man who was willing to forgive and forget.
‘Hello, Elaine,’ I said as coolly as I could manage. ‘Long time no see. How are you? You look good.’ I gave her a smile.
She smiled back. ‘I’m well. You?’
‘Yeah, not bad, not bad,’ I said, my mouth almost in her ear. I was only going to be able to keep up a conversation with this amount of background noise for so long.
‘Christ, it’s a bit weird running into you like this. The last I heard you was in the army.’
‘I did ten years, but I finished a long time back. You know how time flies.’
‘Too right. So you’re still local, then? I haven’t seen you in here before.’
‘No, it’s a little bit young for me, to be honest. It’s my first time.’ And my last at these prices, I thought.
‘So what brings you in here? On the pull, are you?’ She grinned.
‘Well, I came to see you, actually.’ She looked surprised. ‘It’s about Johnny Hexham.’
The surprise turned to concern. ‘Johnny? What about him? He’s all right, isn’t he?’
‘Oh yeah, he’s fine.’ That bastard was always fine. ‘At least he was when I left him earlier. Look, Elaine, I know it’s an odd request, but I need to talk to you fairly urgently and it would be a lot easier if it wasn’t here.’
The concern now turned to suspicion. This was a woman with a speedy turn in facial expressions. ‘Look, Max, I’m running this place pretty much on my own tonight, so if you’ve got something to say-’
‘I own a company that provides security. A few days ago you asked Johnny to put someone you know in touch with a company like that.’
She clicked. ‘Oh shit. And yours was the company?’
‘Correct.’
‘So where’s Roy? I haven’t seen him all day. Do you know what’s happened to him?’
‘That’s what I’ve got to talk to you about. But I don’t want to do it in here. Is there any way you can get out and we can go somewhere a little more private? And a bit quieter?’
She thought about it for a moment, then nodded. ‘I’ll see what I can do. Wait here. I’ll be back in a minute.’
I nodded and stayed where I was as she turned and disappeared into the crowd. While she was gone, a kid of no more than eighteen, out of his head on something, walked into one of the pillars that bordered the dance floor and knocked himself out. I watched as people stepped over him like he wasn’t there until eventually a couple of his mates turned up and, laughing, dragged him away. Then, a few yards beyond them, I saw a bloke who looked well out of place. Mid to late thirties, scruffy suit, thick black hair; to be honest with you, he looked a lot like Columbo in his early days and, like Columbo, I knew straight off he was a copper. He was talking into a mobile phone and watching me at the same time. Our eyes met and I knew he was on to me, though Christ knows how. It was time once again for quick thinking. If he was in here, there could be more of them out front, making it too risky to go out that way.
I turned and, as casually as possible, headed back in the direction of the toilet, speeding up the moment I’d pushed through a large group of girls out on a hen night.
Gallan
As soon as I saw him, I knew I had to act fast. I didn’t have a clue what he was doing there but he didn’t look like he fitted in, and he was on his own. All that, however, was by the by. The most important thing was that he stayed put until reinforcements arrived. I pulled the mobile from my jacket pocket and called the station, at the same time moving slowly towards a pillar by the dance floor where I could keep an eye on him without attracting attention. I was bumped by a young bloke pushing past me and I turned and gave him a look, not that he even saw it. He was already ten yards further on. Cheeky little bastard. Dispatch picked up and I informed them loudly of my position and the fact that I was within thirty feet of a wanted man and needed back-up. I needed to repeat myself twice above the noise, and when I looked back towards Iversson I saw that he’d spotted me. He turned and walked away and I followed rapidly, telling Dispatch that he was on the move. ‘Get here fast, I don’t fancy tackling him on my own. Not after what happened this afternoon.’
Iversson disappeared into the toilet and I broke into as close a run as the crowds would allow, unsure how I was going to handle this. I didn’t want to corner an ex-para in an enclosed place and present him with no option but to fight. I’m not as young as I used to be, or as fit, and the reason I’m a detective is that I like to detect rather than get involved with all the physical stuff. Plus, I knew I’d lose. But I wasn’t going to let him go either. Not after he’d put two of our uniforms on the sicklist.
I pulled open the door to the toilets four seconds after he’d gone inside, turned left, and headed into the urinals area. There were half a dozen people in the place, all relieving themselves, while at the far end of the room in front of an open window was Iversson. He looked like he was just about to jump up and try to get out through it. Eight yards separated us.
He turned and saw me and I put my hands up to indicate that I wanted things to end peacefully, which I did. ‘All right, police. Come along now, Max.’ And then, of course, the standard police cliche: ‘You’re in enough trouble as it is without adding resisting arrest to the charges.’ I took a couple of slow steps forward, careful not to agitate him.
Iversson nodded and added his own cliche: ‘It’s a fair cop, guv,’ he said, taking a step towards me. Then, without warning, he grabbed an unlucky punter by the back of his shirt and flung him bodily in my direction. The poor sod was still in the process of taking a leak and I had to jump out of the way to avoid the spray, sliding over in a suspect-looking puddle as I did so. I banged my right knee jarringly hard and the mobile flew out of my hand. Iversson immediately turned, heaved himself up to the window with an agility that made me look even more like a Keystone Kop, and began squeezing himself through.
The bloke he’d pushed at me was first to react. Putting himself away amid a welter of curses, he turned, ran up to the window, and grabbed one of Iversson’s flailing legs with both hands. It was a stupid move. The other leg bent, tensed, then lashed out, all in one split-second movement, striking the bloke in the side of the temple and sending him crashing into the communal urinal. His head hit the wall with an angry thud. Iversson’s legs then began to disappear like spaghetti being dragged into a giant mouth. Ignoring the mobile phone, I jumped to my feet and ran towards them, managing to grab hold of one of his shoes just as it started to go out of the window. It came off in my hand and I was suddenly left standing looking at a fashionable-looking khaki moccasin while he made good his escape. I heard him land on the other side, then get to his feet and start running, impaired but hardly disabled by the fact that he now only had one item of footwear.
I looked at the semi-conscious bloke moaning on the floor, then at the handful of other punters who stood watching me in slightly amused silence, then finally at my watch.
It was twenty to twelve. Way past my bedtime.
Iversson
I was waiting when she arrived back at her Clerkenwell apartment. I watched her get out of the taxi and pay the driver from across the street, then as he pulled away and she turned towards the entrance, I crossed the road and jogged up behind her.
‘Elaine.’
She turned round quickly, saw it was me, and narrowed her eyes. ‘Well, well, well. The wanderer returns. What happened back there? You didn’t tell me the police were after you.’
I stopped in front of her. ‘I couldn’t tell you anything in there. It was too bloody loud.’
‘You’d better come in,’ she said, fishing in her handbag for a key. ‘I think we’ve got a fair bit to talk about, don’t you?’
‘You can say that again.’
‘How did you find out where I lived?’ she asked when we were inside her first-floor apartment.
‘You’re in the phone book,’ I told her.
‘So are plenty of other people with the name Toms,’ she said, leading me through to a nicely furnished lounge with comfy-looking black leather chairs. She slung her jacket over one of the chairs and turned to me, waiting for an answer.
‘Not as many as you’d think. I narrowed it down to five, then phoned Johnny Hexham. He said he thought you lived in Clerkenwell and there was only one E. Toms in Clerkenwell. Maybe you should think about being ex-directory.’
‘I’ll bear it in mind.’ She looked down at my dirty sock. ‘I won’t ask,’ she said.
‘The police. They don’t just want collars any more. They want everything.’
She smiled. ‘Do you want a coffee?’
‘Yeah, please.’
Five minutes later, when we were sitting in the leather chairs facing each other, she asked me what had happened with Fowler, and how come the police were after me. There was no point holding back, not if I wanted her to open up to me, so I told her everything, bar the bit where I shot Tony, which she didn’t really need to know. In the account I gave Tony escaped and I never saw what happened to him.
She sat back in her chair and rubbed her hand across her temple. It was a gesture vaguely similar to one of Fowler’s. ‘Shit,’ she said, which just about summed it up. ‘I can’t believe it. Dead. Poor old Roy.’ Which I thought was a bit rich. Fowler had asked for it, I hadn’t.
‘What happened after I got out tonight?’
‘Two vanloads of Plod turned up, and this detective who was already in there, the one chasing you, he started asking me a load of questions about what you were doing there.’
‘What did you tell him?’
‘I said I didn’t have a clue who he was talking about. He didn’t push things.’
‘So, who are the people Fowler was having trouble with? I think I owe them after what they’ve done to me and one of my best employees.’
She leant forward and gave me a cold stare. ‘Max, I’m telling you now. Do not get involved. Consider yourself lucky you’re still in one piece and leave it at that.’
‘Just tell me, Elaine.’
‘You don’t want to know. Honestly.’
‘I’ll be the judge of that.’
She paused, then, seeing that I wasn’t going to give up, started talking. ‘Roy’s been under a lot of pressure lately and he’s fallen in with some of the wrong people. He was getting into debt with the club.’
‘How did he manage that with those prices? I’d have thought he’d be a millionaire.’
‘He’s a big spender and he’s got a nasty coke habit that’s been eating away at his finances. Anyway, he started borrowing money from people he should have kept well away from, and it didn’t take long for them to start calling for their money back. And that’s when he really fucked up. He allowed them to start dictating to him how he should do business. They wanted to sell their drugs in Arcadia with Roy overseeing things.’
‘From what I hear the club’s always had a drugs problem.’
‘There’s always been some dealing there, yeah, but not as much as some people seem to think. The place got raided a couple of times before I joined but that was a long time back and they never found nothing. But this was different. This was organized dealing.’
‘When did it start?’
‘I don’t know exactly. At the time Roy didn’t say anything to me about it. He was done in the past for importing gear, back in the eighties, and he was inside for four years, so it wasn’t something he wanted to repeat. The dealing was all very underhand and if you’d come in there any night, like you did tonight, you wouldn’t have seen it going on.’ I nodded. That was true enough, although plenty of people had been off their faces. ‘But there was stuff in there and if you’d asked the right people you’d have got coke, E, whatever you wanted. There’s a few who do the deals, mainly the doormen, and they’ve never got much on them at any one time, so even if you were an undercover copper, you could only do them for possession. They never deal in big quantities. Roy kept the bulk of the stuff hidden in the place but I never knew where.
‘Anyway, a week or two back, Roy starts acting really strange. Turning up late, shutting himself in his office, not getting involved in the running of the business. I asked him what was wrong but he just brushed me off. Then a few days back our chief doorman dropped dead, and it turns out he was poisoned.’
‘Poisoned? I’d forgotten you killed people like that.’
‘That’s what the law said. And when Roy heard about it, it really set him off. He was jittery enough before, but after that he was all over the place, like he was next or something. But still he didn’t want to talk about it.
‘Then one night after we’d shut, I found him in his office, drunk or coked up or something. I told him he was going to have to tell me what was wrong, that he couldn’t carry on like he was, and that’s when I think he realized he was going to have to say something to someone. So he told me. He told me all about the dealing, how it was organized, what was going on. He sounded really gutted, like he didn’t want to be involved.’ Lying bastard, I thought, but didn’t say anything. ‘But the thing was, that wasn’t the worst of it. He was skimming them. These associates of his. Taking more than his cut of the profits. A lot more.’
‘How the hell did he think he was going to get away with that?’
She shook her head. ‘He told me he was using the money to invest in something — and he wouldn’t tell me what that something was — that would double or triple the cash he put in. Then, with that other cash he’d made from it, he’d pay these people what he owed them and get them out of his hair for ever.’
‘Except it didn’t work.’
‘No. The investment never came through and they found out about the skimming before Roy made his cash. On the night I talked to him in his office, he’d been told by them that they knew what he’d been doing and that they wanted the money back with a hundred per cent interest, or they wanted the club. Roy was scared shitless. He didn’t have the readies and he didn’t want to give up the club. It would have left him with nothing. He’d asked them for an extension on the debt so that he could get himself sorted out, but they weren’t interested. They’re not the sort of people who specialize in being helpful.’
‘I bet they’re not.’
‘When he talked to me he said they’d given him three days to come up with one or the other. The club or the money. He told me that even if he handed over the deeds to Arcadia, he still reckoned there was no guarantee they wouldn’t break his legs for fucking them about. Or even kill him. He said that if he was going to go and see them, then he wanted back-up, but didn’t know where he was going to get it from. He didn’t know who out of the door staff would stand up for him and wasn’t going to count on any of them. So he asked me if I knew of anyone independent, some security company who could be relied upon to provide him with a decent escort.’
‘Why did he ask you?’
She shrugged. ‘I don’t think he knew where else to turn. We’ve worked together a while and I think he trusted me.’
I finished my coffee and put it on the glass coffee table next to me. ‘And you said you’d see what you could do?’
She took a pack of cigarettes out of her handbag and offered me one. It had been a month since I’d quit but for the last few hours I’d known it was never going to last. The way things were going, living to a ripe old age with healthy lungs was the least of my concerns.
‘Cheers,’ I said, and took one.
She lit it for me with a thin black lighter, then lit her own and sat back in her seat, crossing her shapely legs and blowing smoke towards the ceiling. The dress rode up provocatively and I tried hard, but without much success, to ignore it. ‘What choice did I have?’ she asked. ‘I didn’t want to get involved, course I didn’t, but he’s been good to me since I’ve been working for him, and the least I could do was try to help out. So I spoke to Johnny and he spoke to Roy and it sounds like he put Roy in touch with you. I’m sorry about what happened but, you know, I had no idea it would end like this.’
‘Forget it. It wasn’t your fault. But I’ve got to be honest with you, there’s a serious ring of bullshit about what he was telling you.’
‘Look, I-’
‘Yeah, I know, I know. You’re telling me the truth.’
‘I am.’
‘I’m sure you are, but there’s got to be a lot more to it than that. If Fowler was carrying the deeds to the club in the case he took to that meeting, then why kill him before he’s signed them over? And, in fact, why kill him at all? Particularly when he’s got people with him. There’s a lot of unanswered questions.’ I was silent for a moment. ‘But at least there’s one you can answer.’
‘I’ve told you, Max. Don’t get involved. It’s not worth it.’ She stared me down as she spoke, in the way my mum used to do. The expression said: Don’t argue. I thought she’d have probably made a good Miss Whiplash, and a lot of judges and politicians would have paid good money to be dominated by someone as good-looking as her, but I really wasn’t in the mood to be told what to do.
‘I want to know who killed my friend, Elaine. And who tried to kill me.’
‘Why? It won’t help you. I promise you, there’s nothing you can do.’
‘Just tell me.’
She stared straight at me. ‘The Holtzes.’
That stopped me dead.
‘You know who they are, don’t you?’
‘Yeah, I know the Holtzes.’
Everyone who was anyone in that part of town knew the Holtzes, or who they were anyway. Led by their reclusive founder, Stefan, who was now on the wrong end of middle age, they were one of north London’s premier crime families, rulers of a criminal empire that was worth tens of millions. And evil bastards, too. Word had it that they’d been involved in dozens of murders as they’d fought to stay at the top, but, even after years of police attention, they remained intact. If anyone could have staged what had happened the previous night, it was the Holtzes.
Elaine sighed. ‘So, now you see why I said don’t get involved.’
‘Jesus,’ I said, as reality sank in. ‘No wonder I almost got killed.’
‘I didn’t mean to make you a part of it,’ she said defensively. ‘I didn’t know it would be you, and I honestly didn’t think that they’d stoop to killing him, or your friend.’
‘It’s the Holtzes, for Christ’s sake. They’re capable of anything.’
She shook her head wearily. ‘Fuck, what a mess. What the hell am I going to do now?’
‘Keep quiet about it. That’s the best thing. If they find out you knew too much about what was going on, well …’ I tailed off, knowing I’d made my point. ‘Anyway, I’m the one who’s got things to worry about. Not only am I on the run through no fault of my own, I’m a witness, too. I saw two men die. The law are going to be very interested in getting me to talk. The Holtzes are going to be very interested in making sure I don’t.’
‘But you couldn’t pin anything on them, could you? It was your friend, Tony, who did the actual shooting, so he’s the only one who could actually get in any trouble.’
‘Maybe, maybe not. The thing is, they might not see it like that. Especially if the coppers manage to trace the blood on the back seat of my car back to Fowler. If that gets public then I’m going to be on the Holtzes’ hitlist, aren’t I? As well as everyone else’s.’
We didn’t speak for a few moments. She sat there, watching me now, puffing on her cigarette. It was difficult to tell what she was thinking behind the dark eyes.
‘I feel partly responsible for what happened,’ she said eventually. I didn’t bother telling her that she was partly responsible. At that moment I needed all the friends I could get. ‘You can stay here for a couple of days if you want, until things die down.’
‘Thanks,’ I said, ‘I appreciate it.’
‘Do you want a drink? A proper one?’
‘Yeah, I think I need one. What have you got?’
‘Most things. What do you want?’
‘A brandy, please. And a beer, too, if that’s all right.’ I thought that I might as well take advantage of the hospitality on offer, not sure how long it was going to be lasting. She didn’t look like she’d taken offence and smiled as she got up and kicked off her shoes. Her toenails were painted a bright red, which they always say is a sign of passion. I began to stop thinking about my current woes and instead concentrated on more immediate possibilities.
She went into the kitchen to make up the drinks and I took my shoe off and casually followed her in. ‘You’re looking really good, you know,’ I said, thinking that I was going to have to buy a book on chat-up lines or at least put more thought into them. The thing is, I’ve always been a man who preferred the more direct approach. If I thought I was in with a chance — and to be honest with you, I reckoned Elaine owed me one — I tended to go straight in for the kill.
‘Thanks,’ she said, pouring the brandies. ‘You’re not looking so bad yourself. You seem to have improved with age.’ She gave me a quick once-over, like she was checking out a dress. ‘You’ve bulked out as well. It suits you. You were always a bit too skinny in school.’
Cheeky mare.
I took the brandy with one hand and moved the other round towards her shapely rear, thinking that I was taking a bit of a risk here, since she didn’t seem like the sort of person who’d suffer unwanted attentions in silence, and if she kicked me out I really was bolloxed because I had pretty much nowhere else to go. But as the hand made contact, and I gave the left cheek a gentle stroke, she shot me a look that said that after all the fucking mishaps of the day — and by God there’d been a few — I’d finally struck gold. Our lips met Mills and Boon style and her fingers crept up my inner thigh.
Not everything had changed since school, then.