Gallan
‘Do you ever stop work, Sarge?’ asked Berrin, nursing his black coffee. ‘Turning up at the Arcadia on your tod at half eleven at night, getting involved in a scuffle, and then coming to work next morning. That’s the sort of thing you’re meant to do when you’re like eighteen, isn’t it?’
‘I was trying to recapture the fading spirit of youth. I won’t be trying again for a while.’
‘So, did you get anything else from Elaine Toms?’
‘Nothing of any use. She said she hadn’t heard a word from Fowler, and she claimed she didn’t know who Max Iversson was.’
‘Do you believe her?’
I shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I didn’t see him with her so she could be telling the truth. There just seemed something a bit coincidental about it.’
It was nine o’clock on Saturday morning and Berrin and I were the only people in the Matthews incident room. I hadn’t left the club until quarter to one and I was tired. However, I didn’t look as bad as Berrin, who was carrying a mean hangover, and whose breath smelled of long-dead fish. About the only thing he’d got remotely enthusiastic about in the ten minutes since we’d got in was the altercation I’d had with Iversson. He’d found it particularly amusing that the ex-para had chucked someone at me while they’d still been taking a leak. ‘Simple but very effective, I should think,’ was how he’d summed it up. Fair enough, I suppose. He was right.
It was day six of the heatwave and day seven of the Matthews murder inquiry, and we had plenty to keep us busy. Knox, who wasn’t coming in until later, had dropped on my desk a note with a photograph of a hard-looking blonde with Myra Hindley’s haircut and the same sort of amiable, light-up-the-world expression. The note identified her as Jean Tanner, a former call-girl, two of whose partial prints had been recovered from Matthews’s flat, one of them on a coffee mug, suggesting she’d been more than simply a passing punter after some gear. Knox had supplied us with the address, somewhere up in Finchley, and had instructed us to go round, take a statement from her and find out what she’d been up to there. Like a lot of the work on a murder investigation it was routine stuff, but something that had to be done. He signed off by telling us to continue trying to track down Fowler, whose prints had also been found on a number of items in Matthews’s flat, even though he’d claimed the two had never socialized.
Before we collared Ms Tanner, we drove over to the Priory Green estate to show her photo to Matthews’s neighbours and see if she was the blonde woman identified by two of them as having gone to his flat more than once in the past few weeks. This, at least, would give us something to throw at her if, for some reason, she proved uncooperative.
The estate itself, a medium-rise collection of red-and greybrick buildings just north of the NatWest building on Pentonville Road, was leafy, quiet and relatively well kept. A few years earlier it had received a large cheque from the National Lottery’s Heritage Fund to spruce things up, and there was still a lot of building work going on. So far the money looked to have been pretty well spent, which isn’t always the case with construction projects. Priory Green had none of the menace of so many of London’s sixties- and seventies-designed council estates, those graffiti-stained fortresses with their mazes of darkened walkways so beloved of muggers everywhere, that for a copper always feel like enemy territory. Bad things might have gone on here, but they were done in quite a pleasant setting.
Things got off to a good start as well. Both the witnesses — a young black woman with a very fat baby and several other yowling kids in the background, and an elderly man who insisted on haranguing us about the estate’s supposed litter problem — were in residence and able to confirm that they’d seen the woman in the photo going either in or out of the flat on several occasions, though not in the past couple of weeks. The elderly man thought he might have seen her three times, but he couldn’t be sure. While we were there we knocked on a few other doors to see if we could jog some memories but, where anyone bothered to answer, we were given the kind of welcome usually reserved for Jehovah’s Witnesses, and no one could provide any help.
I wasn’t sure how much use it was finding out that Jean Tanner, ex or current prostitute, had visited the flat of a known drug dealer on more than one occasion, even if he had supplied her with coffee, but at least it was something. However, our good fortune, if good fortune it could be called, didn’t last very long. On the way to Jean’s place there was an accident on the Caledonian Road that held us up for getting close to half an hour in steadily increasing heat. Then Berrin, who was in charge of navigation on the basis that I didn’t trust him behind the wheel in the state he was in, got us lost in the backstreets of East Finchley. By the time we finally tracked down the address — a flat in an ultra-modern, heavily alarmed four-storey block that sat like an eyesore between the Georgian town-houses on either side of it — it was almost half eleven. And, after all that, she wasn’t in.
We had six more addresses to visit that day, all of them doormen who had worked at one time or another in the past six months at Arcadia. The list had been supplied by the proprietor of Elite A, a Mr Warren Case, himself a one-time doorman. We’d interviewed Case, who could fairly be described as a man of many sovereign rings, the previous afternoon at his home, an untidy third-floor flat in Barnsbury which also doubled as Elite A’s offices. Case had shown us Elite A’s certificate of incorporation and VAT registration, both with his name on it, and had provided us with a list containing nine names. Two of them had already been interviewed during the course of the investigation, and another had left the country for Australia more than a month before the murder and was, as far as Case knew, still there. He’d given us the addresses of everyone else and then we’d been on our way. As we’d left, I’d asked him how well he’d known Roy Fowler. ‘Well enough to know that he was a slimy cunt,’ he’d replied evenly. Which was probably a fair enough description, but made me think that if you’ve got a man like Case saying that about you, then you’ve really got problems. Although, of course, at that time I didn’t know the half of it.
We hadn’t phoned ahead to warn any of the interviewees we were coming, which was not untypical practice in a murder inquiry. It was unlikely that any of them would know anything of real help, but if they did and they didn’t want to talk, a surprise visit would help to prevent them making up a convenient story. However, it also meant that, like Jean Tanner, they might not be there when we called, particularly on a hot summer’s day like this one, and not surprisingly the first two on the list weren’t, while the third was just going out as we arrived. He’d only worked with Matthews on a handful of occasions, and claimed he couldn’t really recall too much about him. ‘He was a bit of a wanker, I remember that much,’ he told us, which wasn’t exactly news. Him and Fowler must have been a right pair of cards.
By the time we left him it was gone one o’clock and food called. We stopped at a Greek-owned sandwich place off the Finchley Road, and ate in relative silence, both feeling worn down by the drudgery of detective work.
‘You know, don’t get me wrong, Sarge,’ said Berrin between mouthfuls of turkey, salad and mayo baguette, ‘but I thought that there’d be more excitement to murder investigations. I don’t mean that it should be fun or anything, but it just seems to be the same sort of monotony that you always get.’
I chewed thoughtfully on my ham and pickle sandwich. It was quite tasty except for the fact there was too much fat on the ham. ‘Dave, if it was really like it was on The Sweeney, no one would ever leave, would they?’
‘I know. I just wish it felt like we were getting somewhere, that’s all.’
He had a point, and at that moment I felt the same way. It would have been a good day to sit out in the garden with a decent book, catching a bit of sun and letting the world drift idly by. Or maybe even to take my daughter out somewhere, making the most of the fact that she was still young enough not to look at me with a teenager’s wincing embarrassment. But I’d learnt long ago that you don’t do policework for the laughs or the job satisfaction. You do it for the desire to put away criminals, which basically is an end in itself. I could see, though, that Berrin, who was still new enough to think there was a lot more to it than that, was flagging and needed a bit of an interest injection.
‘This Jean Tanner’s got herself a nice pad,’ I said, taking a sip from my mineral water and wishing it was beer. ‘How much do you reckon it’s worth?’
‘Just the location’s got to be worth a fair bit. The thing is, we don’t know what her actual place is like.’
‘Well, say it’s a one-bedroom flat. It’s a nice area of Finchley, it’s still got to be worth — shit, I’m no estate agent, help me out here.’
‘Two hundred grand. Maybe more.’
‘And it’s probably bigger than one bedroom. I don’t reckon we’d be looking much short of two fifty. That’s a lot of money for a prostitute, the type who hangs about with a lowlife like Shaun Matthews. Particularly if she’s got a drugs habit.’
‘So what are you saying?’
And this was where the interest went out of the injection. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It just seems odd.’
The fourth address was on a residential road of run-down whitebrick terraces, less than half a mile away from Highbury stadium. The traffic was appalling on the way there, mainly due to the fact that Arsenal were playing at home, and it was half two and about ninety degrees when we finally parked up almost directly outside the lower ground-floor flat of Craig McBride. According to Case, McBride had worked for Elite A for the best part of a year in a freelance capacity and was still used by them at fairly regular intervals. He was twenty-seven years old and had prior convictions for ABH, threatening behaviour, theft, and possession of Class A and B drugs, a fact that had been discovered when we’d run his name through the computer. It wasn’t strictly legal any more for someone with his record to be employed as a door-man, unless he’d somehow convinced the council that he was a reformed character, which I doubted. But I knew it happened, and for the moment it wasn’t worth taking the matter up with Warren Case.
A set of greasy steps led down to McBride’s abode. The front door was shabby, the once-white paint peeling off in strips to reveal dull-coloured wood beneath, while an ancient-looking hanging basket containing nothing but dry earth and a cluster of weeds hung limply from one of the outside walls. There was a small dirty window to the right of the door. I wondered briefly whether it had ever been cleaned. It didn’t look like it. Straightening my tie, I peered through it and immediately my spirits lifted. Eureka. Just what we needed.
Within a Western country’s somewhat limited means of coercion, there’s no surer way of getting someone to talk than to give them the alternative of criminal charges, and it looked like Craig McBride was indulging in an activity that left him very much exposed to the latter. Even through the stains on the window, I could clearly make him out sitting on a sofa in his front room behind a coffee table on which a plate piled with white powder was sat. Next to the plate was a large tub of baking soda, and next to that were small transparent plastic wraps, each containing more of the powder. Sherlock that I was, I hazarded a guess that the contents of each one weighed pretty much exactly a gram. McBride himself, dressed only in a pair of shorts, was leaning forward, head down, fiddling with what looked like a small electronic weighing machine. As if confirmation of what he was doing was needed. Criminal mastermind young Craig was not. He might as well have put up a sign on the road saying ‘Drugs this way’, such was his total and utter recklessness. Never underestimate the stupidity of criminals. Sometimes it’s the only thing that keeps a lot of us going.
I turned to Berrin, put a finger to my lips, and motioned for him to have a look. Berrin peered in, then stepped back, smiling. ‘It seems a shame to disturb him,’ he whispered. ‘He looks so busy. Do you think it’s worth knocking on the window?’
I shook my head. ‘No, he might make a dash for it, or put up some resistance. Let’s spring it on him once we’re inside.’ I stepped forward and knocked hard on the door.
There was no immediate answer, which was to be expected. He would now be desperately trying to hide the stuff before someone spotted him through the window. I gave him a few seconds, then knocked again. This time, I motioned for Berrin to take a look through the window, knowing that we had to play this right. I wanted McBride to see Berrin but not me (I looked too much like a copper), but I also wanted him to see him after he’d got rid of the stuff. That way he’d probably open the door.
As it turned out, we timed it perfectly. I stood back and watched while Berrin gave him a friendly wave and a smile through the window, like a particularly enthusiastic door-to-door salesman, before receiving a muffled ‘Who the fuck are you?’ in return. Berrin just kept smiling and moved away from the window.
By the time the front door opened a few seconds later and McBride’s head appeared round it, already mouthing abuse, we’d removed our warrant cards and were lifting them for him to see. His eyes widened momentarily and I spoke quickly before he thought about making a dash for it. ‘Mr McBride? We’re here to ask you a few questions regarding the murder of Shaun Matthews.’
He looked nervous, which was to be expected. ‘Who?’
‘Shaun Matthews. I believe you worked with him on a number of occasions on the door of the Arcadia nightclub.’
‘Oh yeah, yeah, Shaun. That’s right.’
‘Can we come in?’ I said, pushing the door open and stepping confidently over the threshold like I owned the place.
McBride tried to stand his ground, but without a great deal of success. ‘Look, it’s not a good time right now.’
‘It won’t take more than a few minutes,’ said Berrin, pushing his way in behind me.
‘Oi, you can’t come barging in like this. Don’t you need a warrant?’
I smiled and looked him directly in the eye, an easy feat since we were only inches apart. ‘Why? Have you got something to hide, Mr McBride?’
‘No, course not.’
‘So what’s the problem?’
‘I’m just going out. Can’t you come back later?’
But he spoke this last sentence with defeat on his breath, and I knew we had him.
‘We’ll be very unhappy if we have to come back later, Mr McBride,’ I said, ‘and we’ll be asking ourselves why you wouldn’t let us in, and that might mean we have to investigate you further.’
‘All right, all right, you win.’ He moved away from the door and led us through the cramped hallway and into the kitchen, well away from the room where he’d been dividing the drugs.
The kitchen was a mess with a big pile of empty plates and cups in the sink. The tops were dirty and there was a vague smell of grease in the stale air. He leant back against one of the tops while we stood in the middle of the floor facing him. ‘Ask away,’ he said, seemingly a little more confident now. Probably thinking what he was going to tell his friends about this near miss and how stupid the coppers were for not having a clue what he’d been up to when they arrived. I decided to put a pin in his balloon and establish control immediately.
‘We’ll level with you, Mr McBride. This is a murder investigation, so it’s information relating to the murder that we’re interested in, nothing else. The fact that you’ve got a load of white powder hidden somewhere in your sitting room, and that that white powder’s very likely a Class A substance, and that possession of such powder with intent to supply is an offence which always ends in a substantial custodial sentence, particularly for someone who already has a lengthy criminal record’ — the blood was draining from McBride’s face and his body had tensed — ‘is not our primary concern. However, if you don’t answer our questions truthfully, then we may suddenly become very interested in that white powder and what it represents. Do we make ourselves clear?’
McBride looked like he was weighing his options. The tension in his muscles did not bode well. Even the tattoos on his arms were rippling.
‘Now, you could try and make a break for it. You’re a big man, you might even make it. But then we’ll have the drugs and we’ll put out a warrant for your arrest, and you’ll get caught, and then you’re in a position one hell of a lot worse than if you simply stay here and answer our questions. Do you understand what I’m saying?’
‘How do I know you won’t charge me anyway, whatever I say?’
‘I’ve just told you why. Now let’s do this interview somewhere a bit more comfortable. Your drugs den’ll do.’ McBride started to say something but I wasn’t listening. I turned and walked back towards the front room, with Berrin in tow.
We both sat down on the sofa and motioned for McBride to sit on a chair opposite. He did as he was told, his expression that of a man gutted to have been caught out in such a stupid way.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘How well did you know Shaun Matthews?’
He didn’t answer us for a couple of moments as he continued to weigh his options. I looked casually down over the side of the sofa to where the tin of gear, the individual wraps, the baking soda and the scales had been hastily stashed. It seemed to do the trick. ‘OK, I suppose.’
Berrin consulted his trusty notebook. ‘You worked the door at the Arcadia on sixteen separate occasions in the three months prior to Mr Matthews’s death. I expect it’s fair to say that he was there on most of those occasions, as he was the chief doorman.’
‘Yeah, I knew him quite well. He was all right. Fancied himself a bit, but all right.’
‘He was the main dealer in the place, wasn’t he?’ I said.
‘Look, I don’t want any of this getting back to me …’
Once again, I looked over the side of the sofa at the incriminating evidence. ‘I don’t really think you’ve got a lot of choice, Mr McBride. Not unless you don’t mind spending the next couple of years behind bars, wondering why you’re the only person left who still believes in that outdated concept of honour among thieves.’
‘OK, OK, yeah. He was the main dealer in the place. He ran it all on the floor.’
‘How did it work?’ asked Berrin.
‘Basically, all the doormen were dealers. Not big time, mind. But we were allowed to supply.’
‘By whom?’
‘The management.’
‘Roy Fowler, yeah?’
‘Yeah, him.’
‘Carry on,’ I told him.
‘We had the monopoly on the place. If anyone else was caught dealing in there, they got a serious kicking. What happened was that it was common knowledge among all the punters that the doormen were the people to go to when you wanted something. You couldn’t just keep going up to the entrance and asking for stuff, so if someone wanted to buy something they asked the doormen inside the building, you know, who were patrolling the dance floor and that. They didn’t usually carry anything on them, just in case it was undercover coppers, but if they were happy with the buyer, they’d give their order to Fowler or Matthews, or one of the other staff, and they’d go off and get the gear. The doorman doing the selling would pocket the cash and then, at the end of the night, everything would get divvied up. Fowler got eighty per cent of everything you sold, that was the going rate, you got the rest.’
‘And was business good?’ asked Berrin.
McBride nodded. ‘Not bad.’
‘How much would you make in a night?’
‘A couple of hundred on a good one.’
Berrin whistled through his lips. ‘That’s a lot of money, especially for the bloke taking the eighty per cent.’
‘Did all the doormen get an opportunity to make that much money?’
‘Yeah, we took it in turns to walk the club.’
I thought about this for a moment. If McBride was to be believed the club was turning over some serious drugs cash every night. I did the sums in my head. It was more than enough to kill for.
‘The Holtzes own the Arcadia, don’t they?’
McBride’s face experienced a passing shadow of fear. Quick, but noticeable. ‘It’s Roy Fowler, as far as I know.’
‘Who owns Elite A?’
‘Warren Case.’
I sighed. ‘You’re not really helping us very much, Mr McBride. I know that it’s Warren Case’s name on the company’s certificate of incorporation, but I want to know who really owns it. Who takes the profits.’
‘I honestly don’t know. I just work for them.’
Once again, my eyes drifted towards the drugs. ‘What is this stuff? Speed or coke?’
‘It’s speed.’
‘Looks like a fair amount of it.’
‘Drugs Squad’ll be interested,’ mused Berrin.
‘Very.’
McBride was sweating. It might have been a hot day but his nerves were unmistakable. He knew he had to talk but the prospect was scaring him. ‘Listen, I’ve told you the truth. I don’t know who owns it. A couple of times this geezer would turn up at Elite A and come in and talk to Case, and once I saw him leaving with this big holdall. I heard him say something to Case, you know just joking, saying that he must have done well that week.’
‘So it’s fair to assume that the holdall contained money?’ McBride nodded. ‘But I’m a bit confused here. You said Fowler made eighty per cent of the takings and the individual doormen made the other twenty per cent. So where did all these holdalls of cash at Elite come from?’
‘From what I’ve been told, Fowler took the money and checked it, but he didn’t keep it all. Most of it went back to Elite.’
‘Which means that Elite and Arcadia were very closely linked, wouldn’t you say?’ McBride gave a very reluctant nod. ‘This man you saw at Elite’s offices, who was he?’
‘Jack Merriweather.’
‘Well, well, well.’
Jack Merriweather. Better known, at least behind his back, as Jackie Slap, on account of his shiny Mekon-style bald pate, itself the result of a sudden teenage attack of alopecia. The story went that at the age of sixteen young Jackie had been forced to share a cell in a detention centre with a powerfully built homosexual named Lennie, and such had been the stress of having to fend off Lennie’s unwanted advances that he’d lost all his hair. At the time it had made the news, because there was a lot of controversy over the ‘short sharp shock’ method of teenage incarceration. One wag had suggested renaming it the ‘short sharp slap’, and for Jackie at least the name had stuck.
Nobody took the piss out of Jack Merriweather any more though. Not now he was a part of Stefan Holtz’s crime organization. It also answered at least one question about who really ran things at Arcadia. Merriweather worked directly for Neil Vamen, who was one of Holtz’s closest associates, in many ways his eyes and ears in the outside world now that the big boss had become something of a recluse. I’d met Vamen once a few months earlier when we’d interviewed him after his name had come up in connection with a box of twelve Kalashnikov rifles that had been discovered at Gatwick Airport. A short, barrel-bodied individual with thinning hair and striking turquoise eyes, he was good-looking in a thuggish sort of way. And very polite, too, I remember that. Someone in CID had once said that Neil Vamen put the manners back into murder, and, I had to admit, there was definitely something charismatic about him. But, like all these blokes, you had this feeling that if you crossed him you’d pay dearly for it, and he’d been linked to more than one murder, including that of a young female accountant who knew a little too much (nothing ever proved, of course, he was far too canny for that), which to me sort of took a bit of the gloss off the image of Raffles, the gentleman gangster. It fitted with his way of doing things that he used Merriweather to collect the money. The truly successful criminals never get their hands dirty.
‘I presume you’re aware that Jack Merriweather works for the Holtzes?’
‘I’ve heard that, yeah.’
‘So it’s probably safe to assume that the Holtzes own Elite A and therefore almost certainly own Arcadia, isn’t it?’
‘Are you asking me or telling me?’ he said, using the same phrase Elaine Toms had used the previous day.
‘Don’t fuck us about, McBride,’ I told him coldly. ‘We’re only talking in your front room because at the moment we’re giving you the benefit of the doubt. However, so far you’ve told us absolutely nothing that we didn’t know already, so you’re still looking at a nice long spell in the nick. Now, answer my question unless you want to continue this interview down the station.’
‘All right, yeah, I suppose it’s safe to assume. I didn’t know for sure he owned the place … both places … but there were rumours. I don’t like to ask too many questions about that sort of thing. You know, I don’t want to get on the wrong side of Stefan Holtz.’
I changed tack. ‘How well did you know Shaun Matthews? Honestly.’
‘I got on all right with him. I knew him a bit, you know.’
‘Did you ever socialize with him outside work?’
McBride paused before answering, at the same time breaking eye contact with me. ‘A couple of times, yeah,’ he said eventually. ‘We was both ex-army so I think he thought we had something in common. Most of the other blokes didn’t really like him much.’
‘Why not?’ asked Berrin.
‘Well, like I said, he rated himself. Threw his weight about a bit, and he could get nasty if he thought anyone was holding back on money owed to the club.’
‘Did he ever upset one particular person more than any of the others? Enough to give them a motive for killing him?’
‘He had a run-in with one geezer, one of the permanent doormen, John Harris. John was getting a blowjob in the bogs from one of the punters when he should have been out on the floor. I don’t think it would have mattered — you know, that sort of thing goes on a lot. The birds are attracted to door-men, aren’t they?’
‘I wouldn’t know,’ I said, hoping my daughter would never flutter her eyelashes at a lowlife like McBride.
‘But the thing was, he did it quite a lot. He was always poking the punters, sometimes two at a time, and the thing was he had, you know, staying power, so he could be at it for fifteen, twenty minutes, sometimes even longer. Which I suppose is why they liked him. Anyway, Shaun had just had enough that night so he went charging into the Gents, kicked open the door, and dragged John out by his dick. John didn’t know what had hit him — you know, element of surprise and all that — and he got a fair old slap. Broken nose, couple of black eyes. Nothing serious, but I think it was the humiliation of it. Shaun marched him through the whole club with his trousers still half hanging down, and booted him out the door. Told him to come back when he’d got his sex drive under control.’
‘And did he come back?’
‘Not after that. Well, you wouldn’t, would you? Not after someone’s taken those sort of liberties with you.’
‘When did this incident take place?’ asked Berrin.
McBride shrugged noncommittally. ‘A couple of months back. Something like that.’
Berrin and I looked at each other. We hadn’t heard about this run-in with John Harris, but then no one at Arcadia was going out of their way to be of help. Berrin made a note in his notebook. We’d track down the sexually energetic Mr Harris later.
‘Did Shaun Matthews ever discuss with you any problems he had with anyone, problems that might have resulted in someone wanting to kill him?’
McBride shook his head. ‘I know he dealt a fair bit on the side, and I don’t think he had too much in the way of respect for the punters buying off him. He told me a couple of times that he used to mix his gear pretty heavily, but he never seemed to worry too much that anyone’d come back and give him any grief about it. He said he’d just tell them to fuck off if they did. That was the thing with Shaun: he wasn’t really scared of no one. He always thought he was hard enough to get himself out of any shit that came his way. You know what I mean?’
I knew exactly what he meant. Plenty of criminals are like that, too cocky to realize they’re walking on quicksand. Matthews was only the latest in a long line of those who found out too late, if they found out at all, that they weren’t as invincible as they’d thought. ‘We’re aware of one particular incident where he dangled a man by the ankles over the balcony of his flat. Do you know anything about that?’
McBride tried without success to stifle a laugh. ‘Yeah, I remember him saying something about that one. I think the geezer was a student or something. Shaun sold him some stuff that was meant to be skunk but he’d got it cheap off some Moroccan geezer because it was so shit. Apparently, all it did was give you a sore throat. The bloke tried to get his money back and Shaun demonstrated his refunds policy. I don’t think he came back again.’
‘Have you got a name for this student?’ asked Berrin.
He shook his head. ‘No. He just told me the story when we was out one night. I think he said the bloke might have gone to City and Islington, but I couldn’t say for sure.’
‘Did Matthews ever say anything to you about ripping off the Holtzes?’
McBride gave me a withering look. ‘Shaun might have been a bit of a headcase, and a bit of a wanker if you’re honest about it, but he wasn’t totally fucking stupid. He wouldn’t have ripped off people like the Holtzes, and if he had, he wouldn’t have said nothing about it. Not to no one.’
I sat forward in my seat and stared hard at him. I don’t like getting withering looks from small-time crooks who’ve got little but not-so-fresh air between their ears. ‘You’re still not helping us much, Craig. And you’re not giving us any reason to walk out of here and forget that you’re sitting on a pile of dope that most assuredly is not for personal consumption. Are you?’
‘Look, I don’t know who killed him. Honest. You know, what the fuck can I do about that? I can’t make it up, can I?’
‘Several witnesses reported seeing Matthews with a woman with short blonde hair on a number of occasions. We think they may have been romantically linked. She certainly used to visit him at his flat. We’ve now identified her as Jean Tanner. Here’s a photo of her. Not the most flattering one, but mugshots never are.’ I took it out of my pocket and handed it to him. He looked at it quickly, then handed it back, shaking his head. ‘I’d like to think, for your sake,’ I continued, ‘that you can tell me what her relationship was with Mr Matthews.’
McBride made a number of noises suggesting he was thinking hard but they weren’t particularly convincing. ‘He might have mentioned something once, about some girl he was seeing, but he didn’t really say anything about-’
‘Craig McBride, I’m arresting you on suspicion of possession of Class A-’
‘All right, all right, hold on. Don’t be hasty.’
‘What do you mean, don’t be hasty? I could grow a beard waiting for you to tell me anything.’
‘Look, I don’t want any of this getting back to me. Seriously.’
‘Any of what?’
McBride put his head in his hands, then removed them and exhaled loudly. ‘Any of what I’m going to tell you.’
I didn’t get too excited. ‘We’ll treat it as an anonymous source if it’s applicable,’ I said. ‘Now, I suggest you get on with it.’
‘Shaun had a girlfriend, a girl he’d been seeing for a few months, and her name was Jean, but I don’t know what her second name was. The thing was it was all really hush hush. I’m surprised anyone saw them together. He only told me about it one night after he’d had too much gear and drink. I think he wanted some advice.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, this girl, and I think it must be the same one, she was sort of already spoken for. She was seeing Shaun on the side.’
‘It happens,’ I said.
‘Not to Neil Vamen it doesn’t.’
Once again, Berrin and I looked at each other. This certainly put a new angle on the whole thing. The gentleman gangster. ‘You’re telling us she was Neil Vamen’s girlfriend?’
He nodded. ‘That’s what Shaun said.’
‘Christ,’ said Berrin. ‘No wonder he wanted it kept quiet. Do you think Vamen found out?’
‘I don’t know. Honestly.’
‘How did Shaun meet her?’
‘I heard she used to work as an escort girl for this agency Roy Fowler runs called Heavenly Girls. Maybe that’s how he met her.’ I raised my eye-brows. This was an interesting one. We hadn’t realized that one of Fowler’s sidelines was managing a brothel.
Berrin finished writing in his notebook and looked up. ‘Neil Vamen’s married, isn’t he?’
McBride shrugged. ‘Yeah, he is, and his missus is a looker too, but you know what blokes are like. Especially ones with money. Everyone knows he plays away from home.’
Berrin looked across at me, waiting to see what came next. It was difficult to know what more we could ask McBride, or whether what he’d told us was enough to get him off the hook.
‘One more question,’ I said. ‘Who did you buy these drugs from?’
McBride sighed, looked pained for all of about one second that he was about to betray someone, then gave us the name of a fairly well-known local dealer. I knew immediately he was lying. The drugs had almost certainly come from somewhere within Stefan Holtz’s organization. It was rumoured that Holtz himself strongly disapproved of drugs and, unlike many underworld figures, had never touched them himself. However, his people were responsible for importing one hell of a lot of the cocaine that passed through London every year, so his personal stand clearly didn’t prevent him helping to ruin the lives of plenty of other people.
I leant over, picked up the plate of dope and the individual wraps, and stood up. ‘If you hear anything, anything at all about the murder of Shaun Matthews, I want to hear about it.’ I handed my card to McBride who accepted it with a relieved expression on his face.
‘Course I will,’ he said. ‘Thanks.’
‘Where’s the toilet in here?’ I asked, walking out of the room, with Berrin following.
‘It’s just on the left. What are you going to do with the gear? I’ll give it back, but the thing is I haven’t paid for it yet.’
I went up to the dirty-looking bowl and emptied the plate into the water, before chucking down the wraps. I gave it a healthy flush and watched as most of it disappeared.
‘Don’t take the piss, Mr McBride,’ I told the distraught-looking doorman as we left his flat. ‘We’ve done you a major favour here.’
When we were back in the car, Berrin gave me a worried look. ‘Was that such a good idea, Sarge? You know, letting him off like that. We could have got a lovely little collar there.’
‘And it would have just bogged us down in paperwork, and wouldn’t have done anything to hinder the Holtz supply chain. Sometimes you’ve got to let the small fish go so you can get hold of the big ones. But do me a favour and don’t say anything to anyone about it.’
‘Course not. Do you think it was worth letting him go like that, though? Did we get enough out of him?’
‘We’ve got other people with motive now, so it’s putting us further forward.’
‘All we’ve got to do is find them.’
‘That, my friend, is what it’s all about.’
Iversson
It was three o’clock in the afternoon when I buzzed Joe up and led him through to the lounge. It was a stinking hot day and all the windows were open. Outside, the traffic rumbled endlessly past.
‘Nice place for a hideout,’ he said, dropping on the floor a bag containing belongings he’d picked up from my flat. He sat down in one of the leather chairs, and put the four-pack of beers he’d also brought down on the glass coffee table. I went and got a couple of glasses and emptied the contents of two of the cans into them. ‘So, where’s the girl?’
‘She’s gone out,’ I said, sitting down opposite him. ‘She’ll be back later.’
‘And how long’s she going to let you stay here for? I mean, she doesn’t even know you, does she?’
‘I told you, I went to school with her.’
‘But, Max, you’re not eighteen. That was a long time ago now. You haven’t seen her in, what? Twenty years.’
I took a drink from my beer. ‘Not that long.’
‘But long enough. You’ve got to be careful. Time changes people. She might just run to the law.’
‘She won’t.’
‘Well, either way she’s going to want you out of here pretty soon, isn’t she?’
I nodded, not liking to think about that. After the sexual athletics of the previous night, I was in no hurry to go anywhere. ‘I suppose so.’
‘So we’ve got to discuss what you’re going to do. The police came round to see me this morning, asking about you. Questions like, what were you doing driving a car riddled with bullets? And why were you so keen to make a break for it when you were stopped for questioning, smacking two coppers in the process? That sort of thing.’
‘What did you tell them?’
‘What do you think? I didn’t tell them anything, just said I’d always thought you were pretty straight, and that I didn’t think you were involved in anything untoward.’
‘Do you reckon they believed you?’
He shrugged. ‘Difficult to tell. I think so, but you never know. It helps that you’ve never been in trouble before. But they’re definitely looking for you, Max, and that’s not good.’
‘You don’t think they followed you here, do you?’
He shook his head. ‘No, I was careful. Anyway, at the moment you’re probably not a big enough fish to waste that many resources on. I mean, there’s still no proof you’ve actually done anything other than deck a couple of coppers.’
‘Fowler bled over the back seat when he died. Not much, and I gave it a fair old scrub afterwards, but one of the coppers spotted the stain when they stopped me. I don’t know if they can trace it back to Fowler or not. What do you think?’
He pondered that one for a few moments. ‘I doubt it. If they don’t know who Fowler is and they haven’t got a blood sample of his, then I would have thought you’re in the clear.’
I took another drink from my beer. It was going down well. ‘What a fuck-up,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘So did you get anything on that bastard Tony? Anything that might explain what the fuck he thought he was doing?’
‘I talked to a few people, other people he’d been doing work with, but no one seems to have anything bad on him. He did some guarding work for Barry Unwin, looking after wealthy Arabs, and he even had a stint through Barry as a minder for Geri Halliwell, and everyone reckoned he did a fine job. And he’d been with Barry a while, too. More than two years.’
‘Well, something happened. Somewhere down the line he met someone who was willing to pay him big money to get involved in some very nasty shit.’
Joe seemed to notice his drink for the first time. He picked it up and took a healthy swig. ‘How about you? What did you get?’
I told him what Elaine had told me.
Joe rolled his eyes at the mention of the Holtzes. ‘Fucking hell, Max, that’s all we need. Let’s make sure we stay well clear of it if it’s anything to do with them. I don’t want to get into a confrontation with people like that.’
I knew he was right, and if a man like him was saying it, then it was best to listen. But the thought of not doing something to retaliate still pissed me off.
‘Joe, no offence, but I almost got my head blown off the other night. If I hadn’t been carrying, I’d probably be at the bottom of the Thames now. It’s sort of affected my viewpoint on all this. We also lost Eric, and no way did he deserve to go like that.’
‘I know he didn’t, and apart from anything else he’s going to be difficult to replace. And his ex-missus called in this morning.’
‘Shit.’
‘Yeah, my sentiments exactly. He was supposed to be looking after two of their grandkids today, only he hadn’t turned up. So she phones, asking me if we’ve seen him. Luckily she didn’t know he was working for us Thursday. I said we hadn’t clapped eyes on him since last week.’
‘How did she sound?’
‘Worried. She said it was totally out of character for him not to turn up, especially for his grandkids.’
‘It would have been. He was always our most reliable bloke. I can’t remember him ever missing a day. Did she sound like she was going to call in the law?’
‘Not yet, but she will do eventually, no question. And that’s going to pose a problem because it’ll give them a chance to make a link with you. We’ve just got to hope they don’t take it too seriously. I mean, it’s not like a kid going missing. This is a sixteen-stone ex-soldier in his fifties. They may just conclude he’s fucked off on some military adventure, but the problem is, it’s all a little bit coincidental.’
I had to agree with him on that one.
‘Anyway, the best thing we can do is forget about everything that’s happened and put it down to experience.’
‘It doesn’t seem right, letting them get away with it.’
‘This was a professional operation, Max. Three people dead, but no peep from the press, no sign of any bodies. No nothing. It’s like it never happened. Which is exactly the Holtzes’ style. Do you remember that jeweller out of Hatton Garden, Jon Kalinski, the one who did a runner with about a quarter of a million in diamonds? About three years ago?’
‘Yeah, I remember reading something about it.’
‘Well, I heard he didn’t do a runner at all. I heard it was the Holtzes who had a role in that particular disappearance. Apparently he owed Krys Holtz, Stefan’s boy, a lot of money, which was part of some scam they were both involved in, and Krys was worried they weren’t going to get much of it back. So he paid one of Kalinski’s girlfriends to phone him up and invite him round to her pad in Hampstead. When he turned up, Krys and a few of his associates were waiting for him. They took the keys to his safe, found out where every penny he’d stashed was, then killed him. And the girlfriend. Dismembered them both in the bath tub, cleaned everything up so there was no trace they’d even been there, then took the bits out in suitcases in the middle of the night. Then they went down to Kalinski’s place of business and cleaned him out of everything he owned, and everything he didn’t. Do you know how they got rid of the bits of the corpses?’
‘I’m surprised you do.’
‘Well, it might be bullshit, I don’t know, but it’s got a ring of truth to it.’
‘Go on.’
‘You ever wonder where all those thousands of maggots you get in fishbait come from?’
‘No. I can safely say it’s never crossed my mind once.’
‘Well, they come from maggot farms, places where they breed millions of the bastards in these big stinking rooms. One of the Holtz businesses is a maggot farm out in Essex. They chucked the body parts in there and then let the maggots eat them down to the bones. Then they ground down what was left into dust, and scattered it to the four winds. And that was that. No trace. Gone.’
‘If they’re so secretive, how come you heard about it?’
‘I heard it from a bloke who used to know people attached to them. A while back. I never thought about it too much at the time, not until now.’
‘And this bloke, isn’t it possible to ask him what all this stuff with Fowler’s about?’
Joe managed a humourless smile. ‘Not really. The bloke was Tony.’
‘Great.’
‘The point is, let’s just leave it.’
‘Don’t worry. I think you’ve convinced me.’
‘You’re going to need to get out of town for a bit,Max. Probably a couple of months at least. Until everything dies down.’ He reached into the pocket of his jeans and produced two thick rolls of notes, which he put down on the table. ‘There’s six grand there. The money from the job the other night. Use it to rent a place down by the coast or something.’
‘I can’t take it all, Joe. Three grand of it’s yours.’
‘And half of Tiger Solutions is yours. Forget it. It’s the least I can do. Let’s see how things go and then, if you need any more, I’ll try and pull some out of the business somehow.’
‘Shit, Joe, I don’t know what to say.’ I leant forward and picked up the money. ‘Thanks, mate. Thanks a lot.’
‘That’s what friends are for, Max. Remember it.’
And I did remember it. Would always remember it. Me and Joe went back a long, long way. We were like that, you know. We’d been in the paras together and, even though Joe had been an officer while I’d never risen above the level of colour sergeant, we’d always been mates in a way that rarely travels across the ranks of the British army. I owed him now — but then, to be honest with you, I’d always owed him. You see, a long time back I’d done something to him that to this day he didn’t even know about, but which meant that one way or another I was always in his debt.
Joe was two years older than me, and towards the end of his military career he got married to a German girl he’d met while we were stationed out there. Elsa, her name was; twenty-one, far too good-looking, and with an attitude to sex that you’d have to say was slap bang on the liberal end of liberal. Why she got married, I’ll never know. She just wasn’t cut out for making do with a one-dick-and-two-ball escort. But the problem with Joe was the same problem you get with a lot of blokes: he was just too smitten to notice. I’d heard stories about her knocking around with other squaddies all through the engagement, but decided it was best to keep quiet about it. In the end, it was none of my business. Joe had made his choice and that was that. I know that might sound a bit harsh, but in my experience no one ever thanks the bearer of bad news, especially when the bad news is about his missus and her shenanigans.
Then, a few weeks after the wedding, I ran into her in a local bar. She was on her own as well, which was unusual for her. She was quite a looker, was Elsa. We got talking and she told me that she and Joe had had an argument. I didn’t mean for anything to happen, you know, but I offered to walk her home and one thing just led to another. We did it in a field full of bored-looking sheep (twice as well) and I knew I should have just left it at that and hoped nothing was ever said, but the thing was, Elsa had a way about her that could really reel a man in. She was addictive, that was the best way to describe her. We started to see each other regularly behind Joe’s back, doing it whenever and wherever, including in their marital bed, which I know was a terrible liberty. I felt guilty about it, I really did, and jealous, too, because I knew I wasn’t the only one of her lovers. But I just couldn’t stop myself. That’s my only defence, if you can call it that. I just couldn’t help myself.
Then one day, no more than a couple of months after that fateful night in the sheep field, Elsa’s partly clothed body was discovered in the grounds of a local high school. Her head had been smashed to a pulp with a blunt instrument. There was a police investigation that initially focused on the army base and its occupants, particularly the husband, but quickly spread into the local community as other lovers came out of the woodwork. After only three days, an arrest was made. A nineteen-year-old local bloke, Dietrich Fenzer, had been seen arguing with her on the night she’d died, not far from where the body was found, and it was known that he was one of her lovers. He also had two prior convictions for crimes of violence. A search of his home revealed the murder weapon, a small lead-filled cosh, and he was promptly charged. Six months later he was convicted and sentenced to twenty years in prison, which I’d always thought was a bit lenient, especially as he’d probably be out in ten.
The whole thing was extremely hard on Joe, as you can imagine, but he held up well considering the humiliation of having your new wife’s numerous affairs aired in public. Thankfully for me, the police never did dig deep enough to find out about our little fling, so my friendship with him remained intact. But the reality was that it was the end of Joe’s army career. He felt that he couldn’t continue to command the respect of his men after what had happened, and he was probably right, especially since half of them had shagged her. Within a few months he’d left the military for good to begin a new career as a security consultant, or, more accurately in those early days, a gun for hire. For me, though, the guilt never completely disappeared, and from then on I always felt that I had a lot to do to make it up to Joe for betraying him in such an underhand way. And here he was doing all this for me. It fair choked me up, to tell you the truth.
‘Are you all right, Max?’
I nodded. ‘Yeah, yeah. Just dreaming, that’s all. All this humidity’s sending me into a trance.’ I pulled from my pocket a pack of cigarettes Elaine had bought me that morning.
Joe gave me a dirty look. He was like that, always wanting to make sure I stayed on the straight and narrow. ‘When did you get back on them?’ he asked, not worrying, however, about taking one off me.
‘Well, getting shot at by one of my best employees started to break my resolve, but then, after spending most of yesterday running away from various members of the local law enforcement, I thought, fuck it, lung cancer’s the least of my worries.’
We both laughed and drained our beers. ‘Are you in a hurry,’ I asked him, ‘or have you got time for another one?’ It was rare these days that we sat and socialized, and now I had the feeling that we might not get the chance for a long time to come. It seemed important to make the best of things.
He nodded. ‘Yeah, course I’ve got time.’
So I poured the other two beers and we sat back and smoked and talked about the old days: people we’d known, experiences we’d shared, places we’d served. Only once did things go quiet, when Joe mentioned Elsa and his eyes clouded over as he thought back to what could have been. And I felt guilty again and hurried on to the next subject, maybe just a little bit too quickly.
It was early evening and Elaine had yet to reappear by the time Joe said he had to go, and there was something a bit gloomy about the formal handshake we shared. As if we both knew that for some reason nothing between us was ever going to be the same again.