‘So you reckon they were all military? Except for the Irish bastard; he was just criminal,’ said Skin.
‘Looks like we’re going to have a bunch of mercenaries after us,’ said Dan, trying not to sound too depressed. ‘That’s two East End outfits, the police and—’
‘You’d better get on the phone pretty fucking sharpish and ask for the ransom,’ said Skin, cutting in on him.
‘Me?’
‘Yeah, you. You’re the negotiator. You’re doing the reading and the thinking, so you’re going to do the talking ’n’ all.’
‘And you? Where do you fit in?’
‘I’m the enforcer.’
‘You got that from Goodfellas, didn’t you?’
‘I’m just saying, I do all the physical stuff. I’ll take all the risks.’
‘So from now on you’re doing fuck all.’
‘Until you’ve negotiated the ransom. Then I’ll be the bastard who goes and collects it. The one who sticks his head up over the parapet.’
‘So having found this place, I’m now doing hostage care, research and negotiation,’ said Dan. ‘While you do fuck all, plus occasional violence.’
‘I took out the two in the warehouse. You looked after the girl. You don’t get killed, doing what you do,’ said Skin. ‘And anyway, I once heard Jordan tell Reecey he would only talk to the mother.’
‘What’s that got to do with anything?’
‘I reckon you’d be good at talking to women.’
‘Oh yeah?’
‘You do housework.’
‘Fuck off, Skin.’
‘You listened to all the recordings yet?’
‘No. There’s a hell of a lot of material here.’
‘Maybe Jordan recorded his phone calls, too.’
‘Why do you think he’d be doing that, I mean, recording anything?’ asked Dan.
‘I asked Jordan that before I shot him and he said the only one we had to fear was the Irish bastard, who’s called McManus, by the way,’ said Skin. ‘He said he’d be after us for killing Reecey. Maybe not tomorrow but, you know, in the end.’
‘That’s left me brimming with confidence and so totally relaxed I—’
‘And I didn’t tell you what Alyshia said to me when I shot Jordan, did I? She said: “I think you’ve just done something very stupid”.’
‘She was only recognising an evident characteristic.’
‘Talk English, Nurse, for fuck’s sake.’
‘Time is running out for Amir Jat,’ said the Director General of the ISI. ‘The Americans have a dossier as thick as your arm, of which the last inch is dedicated to Amir Jat’s involvement in the hiding of Osama bin Laden in the Abbotabad compound a hundred kilometres from my office.’
These were words the DG had directed at Lt General Abdel Iqbal in a secret meeting in Islamabad three months ago. Iqbal had left that meeting in no doubt as to what was required of him. He had to solve the Amir Jat problem. The Americans mustn’t take him; it would be far too embarrassing for the government and the ISI.
How he was supposed to achieve this without having him assassinated on home soil was beyond him. Because that, in veiled language, was what the DG had implied to him had to be done. The only problem being that Amir Jat rarely left Pakistan and if he did, it was always in secret.
Then last month Iqbal had been approached by Mahmood Aziz, who he’d met through Amir Jat. Aziz had made a proposal that, if you didn’t know the tortuous machinations that were possible within the ISI, would have seemed incredible. Mahmood Aziz knew what the DG had asked of him. How the content of such a secret meeting could have been leaked to a radical such as Aziz might only be comprehensible in retrospect. Aziz had offered not only to help but also to reward, which had left Iqbal with the flame of his ambition roaring from all cyclinders and yet torn by a range of complex loyalties to the service and his old friend, Amir Jat.
Now Frank D’Cruz had been fed into the mix and there was another complicated loyalty: D’Cruz had funded the life-saving surgery on Iqbal’s son’s brain tumour. That must have been repaid by now, surely. But then again, can the life of your eldest son ever be repaid?
Iqbal paced the room, waiting for the phone to ring, his posture erect, shoulders back, stomach flat, hands behind his back, glancing out into his garden. Nervous. His eyes darted in his large square head, oiled hair swept back off his furrowed forehead but beginning to come unstuck. The call he’d been waiting for finally came through from a secure phone in another ISI officer’s home in Lahore.
It was from Mahmood Aziz, who’d only just recovered his composure after that short conversation with Amir Jat in which he’d seen eighteen months of operational planning potentially go up in smoke because of some unforeseen kidnapping stunt.
Aziz calmly outlined the conversation he’d just had with Amir Jat.
‘He’s coming to see me later this morning,’ said Iqbal.
‘On his way to London,’ said Aziz.
‘He didn’t say.’
‘But that’s where he’s going.’
‘He’s crazy.’
‘Definitely unbalanced,’ said Aziz. ‘But this will give us the perfect opportunity to bring about the change that we talked about last month.’
Silence. Aziz could feel Iqbal’s tension coming down the line.
‘You told me that the Americans were closing in on our friend,’ said Aziz. ‘I am telling you that I have now arrived at a solution. All you have to do is not deter our friend in any way from doing what he wants to do. I will be in constant touch with him throughout. Later, I will tell you when to release the information that he is due to arrive in the UK to Frank D’Cruz. At that point you will also persuade him that our friend is responsible for kidnapping his daughter.’
‘Wait a minute,’ said Iqbal. ‘You can’t give our friend over to MI5. That would be no different to the CIA taking him. And they’ll be watching D’Cruz’s every move. I already have MI6 sniffing around here. They follow Anwar Masood to my door every time he comes to see me.’
‘Just as I am about to entrust you with the considerable financial power from our Afghan “agricultural” operations, a power held onto with such a tight grip by our former friend, you must have complete faith in my actions,’ said Aziz. ‘It is for our mutual benefit.’
‘And what about Alyshia D’Cruz?’
‘What is your concern exactly?’
Iqbal was going to say ‘for her safety’ but veered away from such sentimentality.
‘Frank D’Cruz could be very useful to us.’
‘I am afraid that has not been borne out by past events,’ said Aziz. ‘You will have to accept that his daughter is expendable.’
Jack Auber’s wife, Ruby, was up early. She did not look good. Even before Jack got himself killed, she did not look that good. Now she looked terrible. Ill. Her hair, which had been blonde, hung down to her shoulder blades, but with no structure it looked like an ash pile hit by a north wind. She decided to wear it up on her head with a big toothy clasp at the back. Her face was wrecked from an early life of heavy drinking and smoking. Her cheeks had caved in and her dentures were loose in her mouth, but her eyes were still steely blue and could rivet a man to the spot from twenty paces. Nobody crossed Ruby Auber. She might weigh a little under seven stone but she was five foot nine and had nails that could claw a ploughed field down your cheek.
Nothing was going to help her look any better this morning, so when her daughter Cheryl shouted up the stairs that the taxi had arrived, she just stuck on a slash of lippy and left.
Fifteen minutes later, the cab had dropped them off outside Joe Shearing’s house in Voss Street and Cheryl was ringing on the doorbell. There was an exchange through the frosted panes of glass and the door opened a crack. Cheryl beckoned to Ruby, who came in off the pavement, and they went into the front room.
Joe Shearing had been a boxer at the famous Repton Boys Club in Bethnal Green. The living room was a shrine to his achievements in
the ring. He’d had a shot at the British middleweight title in 1976 and had been knocked out in the fifth by Alan Minter at Wembley. He was still involved with the Boys Club and went to watch training and give talks to the groups of disadvantaged kids, who were brought there from all around the world.
Ruby stood by the fireplace. Cheryl thumped herself down in an armchair.
‘You don’t know whose seat that is,’ said Ruby.
‘Whatever,’ said Cheryl.
Ruby froze her with a gimlet stare and Cheryl slowly eased her enormous buttocks out of the chair, just as Joe Shearing came into the room. He wasn’t a middleweight any more. If he’d had to get in the ring now, he’d have found himself up against David Haye. The lightness had gone out of his feet decades ago, but it had not left his touch. He took Ruby’s slim hand in his hard slabs of stone as if he were showing a butterfly to a child.
‘I’m sorry for your loss, Ruby,’ he said. ‘Jack did not deserve to go like that. He was a good man. I’ll miss him. If there’s anything I can do, you be sure to let me know.’
He did the same for Cheryl, finding something to say about Vic Scully, who he knew from the Repton Boys Club. He showed them the armchairs and Cheryl plonked herself down with a huff, while Shearing, whose hips were a menace to him, eased himself down onto a cushioned upright chair.
‘How are you for money, Ruby?’ asked Shearing. ‘You need any help with expenses, it goes without saying . . .’
‘That’s very good of you, Joe,’ said Ruby, ‘but that’s not why we’re here.’
Shearing nodded, breathed in through his broken nose, loudly.
‘I want you to find out who killed Jack and Vic,’ said Ruby.
‘You know it was nothing to do with me,’ said Shearing. ‘He wasn’t on one of my jobs.’
‘You haven’t given Jack anything for years, Joe,’ said Ruby, not meaning it to come out quite so bitterly.
‘Young man’s game,’ said Shearing, not taking offence. ‘I thought he was doing fine with the sheep trade I gave him and the office furniture.’
‘He was too generous,’ said Ruby, through the slash of her mouth. ‘Gave too much away. Felt sorry for them. Wanted them to be able to send some back home.’
‘That was Jack, though, wasn’t it, Ruby?’ said Shearing. ‘I heard he was badly broken up by those two lads getting it.’
‘That’s why he took Vic along with him on Sunday night for the pay-off,’ said Cheryl. ‘He hadn’t done that, Vic would still be here.’
‘So what do you want me to do when I’ve found out who’s responsible?’
‘Tell us.’
‘I can do that now,’ said Shearing, ‘but I don’t know who pulled the trigger.’
‘Go on, then,’ said Cheryl.
‘Archibald Pike. He runs a crew out of Bermondsey,’ said Shearing. ‘What was Jack doing with him?’
‘All Jack told me was that he’d been approached for a job because his black cab was still in full working order.’
‘But why did he need to do the job? He wasn’t short of money.’
‘She’s up the duff,’ said Ruby, cocking her head at the morose Cheryl. ‘Needs a roof over her head. Scully said he’d do the work at cost on the Grange Road house, but there were a lot of materials to pay for, a new roof . . .’
‘What was Jack getting for this job?’
‘Ten grand.’
‘That would have been all right, wouldn’t it?’ said Shearing. ‘Nobody gets money like that these days without taking some sort of risk, though, Ruby.’
‘It wasn’t that kind of job, the way it was described to him.’
‘I heard what happened to the two sheep Scully sent along. Once you’ve seen something like that, you want to find yourself a shooter with a bit more experience than young Vic.’
‘So what’s this mean, Joe?’ asked Ruby, her derision getting the better of her. ‘You going to do anything or you going to let this Archibald Pike walk all over you?’
‘I’m told, by the size of him, that would not be a wise thing to do,’ said Shearing. ‘What I’m doing, Ruby, is seeking some clarification from Mister Pike. When I’ve heard that, I’ll hold a meeting and we’ll decide what action to take.’
‘So there will be some action?’
‘Let’s see what Mister Pike has to say for himself first.’
They slept apart having agreed, after the intensity of Isabel’s guilt the last time, that they wouldn’t sleep together until after Alyshia’s release. Boxer had been up early, done his circuit training routine and had taken a swim in the basement pool. He was sitting in the kitchen drinking coffee when Isabel came in fully dressed. They kissed.
She spooned out some muesli, cut some apple and banana into it and sat down across the table from him, flipped open the Guardian.
‘You know Mercy’s still in love with you, don’t you?’ she said, as if she was reading it from an article in the newspaper.
Boxer poured another coffee, blinking that statement in.
‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘I told you. We’d been through that one and come out the other side, years ago.’
‘You might have done, but I can tell you she hasn’t.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I can tell,’ she said. ‘The same happened to me. I split from Chico when I still hadn’t got over him. That’s why you’re the first man I’ve been to bed with in seventeen years. What about Mercy: has she had any affairs?’
‘Not that I know of,’ said Boxer, shaking his head slowly, thinking about it.
‘And you would know, wouldn’t you?’
‘So what are you saying?’
‘There’s unfinished business,’ said Isabel. ‘She knows about us. She’s hurting. Why do you think she came round last night?’
‘She’s the co-consultant on this kidnap. We have to update each other on all developments.’
‘Really?’ said Isabel. ‘I think she came to take another look at us together. To see what we were like. To confirm to herself. To find out what she was up against.’
‘Up against?’
‘She’s been living in hope.’
‘I think you’re seeing things that aren’t there,’ said Boxer. ‘I haven’t caught a whiff of anything like that since we split up.’
‘She hides it because she knows that to show it would be the end of the thing,’ said Isabel. ‘But she can’t hide it from me because I’ve already been there.’
‘What about Sharmila?’
‘Sharmila was and is a trophy wife. Their intimacy is restrained.’
‘Does that mean you’re living in hope?’
‘I was, for some time, even with what I knew about Chico. That’s why I hung around for three years before we got divorced,’ said Isabel. ‘It’s very difficult to shake off your first love. That intimacy is long-remembered. You’ll see. Once Chico realises what’s happened between us, he won’t take it lying down.’
There were two things about Archibald Pike, apart from the obvious one, that even the most unobservant members of his crew couldn’t miss. The first was the constant motion, the second was the constant noise. And these were secondary, but necessary, to the one thing that needed no observational skills at all, which was Pike’s colossally evident hyper-obesity.
When Pike was given the news that the morning security shift had turned up at eight o’clock to find two dead bodies in the old refrigeration unit, the viewing panel shattered, the girl gone and a total absence of Skin and Dan, a frightening stillness settled. There was no more reaching out, rustling in, chewing over, brushing down, dabbing off or sucking up. The two fingers he’d just licked stayed in front of his livid lips and his eyes, deeply encased in the fat of his face, looked out with the wariness of a gazelle that had just caught the horrible catty whiff of a cheetah on the plain. Even the subterranean gurgling of his digestive system was momentarily paralysed. Radio 2 was playing Roxy Music’s ‘Do The Strand’, which seemed such an unlik
ely exhortation that Pike’s right-hand man, Kevin, turned it off. The silence buzzed for a further thirty seconds before Pike swallowed, which kick-started his peristalsis, and the incessant business of food passing through his system recommenced.
‘Am I to understand from this,’ said Pike, in his high-pitched, almost falsetto voice, ‘that Skin and Dan shot these two blokes and ran off with the girl?’
‘Nothing’s confirmed yet,’ said Kevin. ‘But we’re assuming that if it had been an outside job, we’d have found Skin and Dan dead on the floor ’n’ all. So we’re working on the assumption that it was an inside job.’
‘And what work are you doing?’ said Pike, not looking him in the eye, blinking, and expecting a very good answer.
‘I’ve got the whole crew out looking for them,’ said Kevin. ‘I told you Skin was trouble. Plays it dumb, but he’s looking and thinking all the time.’
‘And Dan?’ said Pike. ‘What about Dan? I can’t see him getting involved in that sort of stuff. Doesn’t have it in him. He’s a nurse. Thinks things through. Doesn’t take risks. And who’s going to give me my insulin injections now?’
Kevin said nothing. He’d never liked Dan. Didn’t trust him. He wasn’t from London. He spoke with a nancy’s accent. He had qualifications. He had a full head of hair. He was probably a poof. One of those things was normally enough for Kevin to stove your ribs in. All together, they made him murderous. Only Dan’s special nurse/patient relationship with Pike had protected him from Kevin’s boot. Now, though, Kevin was greatly looking forward to finding Dan and taking him down into the basement for some Tudor England re-enactments, involving a red hot poker.
‘Where are the two dead bodies?’ asked Pike. ‘What’s been done about them?’
‘Nothing yet.’
‘Clear the warehouse. Clear everything out immediately. Clean it. Wipe it down. Don’t stop until it shines. When does their next shift start?’
‘Not until ten,’ said Kevin. ‘There’s blood soaked into the concrete floor.’