The Villain
By
Roger Busby
Published by
The Villain
Copyright 2012 by Roger Busby
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy; recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now know or to be invented, without the permission in writing for the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
For Maureen with love
With special thanks to my partners in crime, Elesa and Karl
Table of Contents
Prologue
The Villain
Biography
Other Titles
Prologue
When you’re a career criminal there’s nothing like a police dragnet on your doorstep to spoil your day. So what to do when the burka bandit pulls a diabolical stroke? Well if the Old Bill can’t sort it, better sort it yourself!
The Villain
The day the burka bandit hit the King Kebab mini mosque and sparked an international incident, Detective Constable “Metal” Mike Malloy was raiding his brother in law’s scrap yard. It was good solid CID work, the sort he enjoyed, so whenever the stats needed a boost he would borrow a couple of PCs from the relief, a handful of PCSOs and a dog handler for good measure and they would roar down the Old Kent Road in unmarked cars and a couple of vans blues-and-two’s going full blast and turn the place over in fine old style.
Over his twenty years in the job “Metal” Mike had become a past master in the technique of raiding premises, and every time he would burst into the office, scowl menacingly and announce: “OK, everybody stay put – this is a police raid!” And Alex Donnelly, his brother-in-law would look up from his desk with tired, patient eyes and reply: “You got a warrant this time, Michael?” To which Malloy would invariably respond: “Since when did I need a warrant, Alex, this is family business.” With a sigh Donnelly would push his work aside, produce a concertina print out of his scrap register for official scrutiny, and exchange pleasantries on family affairs while the raiding party, suitably equipped in loaned hard hats and steel toe caps to avoid infringing Health and Safety scrambled over the acres of junk in the yard outside.
When it was all over “Metal” Mike would return to the station, de-brief his team, crank up the system and input the “dynamic intel” in meticulous detail. The Borough had never had a more conscientious crime intelligence analyst than DC Malloy and nobody seemed unduly concerned that the monthly crime profiles uploaded to The Yard’s number crunchers appeared to relate exclusively to the activities of Southside Ferrous Factors, Alex Donnelly’s scrap metal business. Malloy could be relied upon for big number crime stats which kept the dream factory happy, and that was all that mattered.
Of course “Metal” Mike’s preoccupation with his brother in law’s scrap yard was not as simple as might appear at face value. For one thing, Detective Constable Malloy was blissfully ignorant of the fact that Donnelly really was a high-class villain and that was why he never complained to the brass about the seemingly unwarranted intrusion into his business. Similarly Alex Donnelly, who felt quite confident in his ability to hoodwink his numbskull brother-in-law was unaware of the fact that the Borough’s glowing crime stats had risen through the system and had impressed NSY’s Serious and Organised Crime Command. So much so that unbeknown to him, Donnelly had been elevated to the rarefied status of a Zatopec target and circulated to all London-wide crime squads.
Otherwise, this example of familial symbiosis ticked along quite nicely to each other’s advantage; such as the time “Metal” Mike earned his sobriquet by recovering two war memorial plaques, a giant bronze sculpture and a mile and a half of copper signalling cable which had closed the Northern Line for a week thanks to a whisper from his brother in law. While DC Malloy basked in the glory of a two page spread in the South London Press, and twenty seconds on BBC London, Alex Donnelly was quietly satisfied that the media vilification and subsequent court case had put a troublesome rival out of business. Yes, in filial fashion, the unlikely brothers-in-law rubbed along in blissful ignorance until the day the burka bandit hit the King Kebab mini mosque just as Lawson Hollingsworth MP, Minister of State for International Affairs and the Third Secretary to the Pakistani High Commissioner dropped in for cultural visit, and all hell broke loose.
Alex Donnelly cut a fine figure for a South London scrap dealer with his penchant for pin striped business suits and hand tailored shirts. His thick dark hair was greying at the temples adding a distinguished touch to his appearance and he would have passed in the square mile for a merchant banker or stockbroker with his meticulous old world manners and careful attention to the niceties of social etiquette. He had long since disposed of the amusingly alliterative South Side Scrap sign over the gates to his yard in favour of the more up market Ferrous Metal Factors, a respectable cover for his flourishing business exporting other people’s antiques concealed in shipments of processed metal. He had built up a lucrative Euro-business on the booming continental metal exchange which qualified for all the EU subsidies, but to his criminal associates who specialised in plundering country mansions, Alex Donnelly was a twenty percent of market value take-it-or- leave-it fence and as such, a leading light of their fraternity.
If only his waspish younger sister hadn’t upped and married that pride of the local law, Michael Malloy, the chain of events, which eventually elevated Alex Donnelly to the exalted criminal rank of Zatopec target, might never have happened. But as was his nature he took the bumbling attention of his detective relative philosophically and in the course of Metal Mike’s frequent visits to his premises even found him a useful, if unwitting, source of police information. While the raiding party rummaged half-heartedly through the mountains of twisted metal and gutted car shells, he would lubricate their conversation with Scotch and American sipped from cut glass tumblers in quite a convivial manner.
In sharp contrast to the fastidious Donnelly, Metal Mike was studiously slovenly, favouring the de-rigueur attire of the plain clothes street cop, scuffed leather jacket and jeans more often than not topped off with a woollen watch cap which he considered added a raffish touch to his street cred at the factory as an all-about-no-nonsense thief-taker. Quite what his sister had seen in him, Donnelly was at a loss to comprehend, but despite their singular incompatibility things went tolerably well as each played his own game with the other. Then, as so often happens when much has been invested in preserving the status quo, an unrelated event snuffs out the sun and changes everything forever.
By a coincidence of geography, Alex Donnelly’s scrap yard sprawled across a vacant tract of Southwark hinterland between gaunt high rise estates and clutches of low-rent retail and street markets once earmarked for a grandiose shopping / leisure complex, then abandoned as the civic planners fled before the hot breath of the transplanted slum dwellers who had made the neighbourhood their own. And central to this cosmopolitan milieu was the King Kebab and mini mosque where the devout could satisfy both their earthly and spiritual hunger under one roof. Thus it was that at the moment of alignment as the Minister of the Crown and his diplomatic guest from the land of the Wazir sat down for a convivial cultural lunch, the runes were cast in the form of the burka bandit bursting in from the street and emptying the 20 round magazine of a stubby TEC-9 machine pistol into the ceiling with a deafening rasp of automatic gunfire. As the tableau froze under a haze of plaster dust the bandit calmly flipped another magazine into the assault pistol and growled: “Infidel goat-fuckers, you is being robbed…Inshallah.”
ooOoo
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