And then, at the top of the whisper scale, stood classification AREA, referring not to a patch of ground, but Advice Requiring Emergency Action. It had been a flash flood of AREA-quality signals from their voices inside a couple of the London gangs that led to the SWAT move with Esther in command. And to the starling street theatre that day.
THREE
Ralph Ember was at his accounting desk behind the bar at The Monty, business slack just after opening at noon. He felt it necessary to spend time at the desk to check over the previous night’s takings and do some stock ordering by phone or email. But, of course, he meant his spells seated there to be about more than club management: those deeper things. To be installed here, unruffled, in an open, potentially hazardous position surely made those sickening nicknames, Panicking Ralph, or Ralphy, totally misguided, and vicious slanders. Ralph was coolly maintaining a core Monty feature; a feature he, personally, had initiated and would now honour. This captain wouldn’t ditch his responsibilities but was on the bridge, so to speak. And those speaking it would say ‘Ralph’ or ‘Ember’ not ‘Panicking Ralph,’ or ‘Ralphy’.
He had command, and, more important, it could be seen by anyone about that he had command. Admittedly, there weren’t many to see him at present, but enough: the word would circulate – Ralph was where he should be; where his social standing, his character, his robust temperament said he should be, regardless. All right, so there was the thick, inter-pillar metal extra up there offering a degree of protection. Ralph regarded that, though, as simply a bit of basic strategy. Panic it certainly did not signify. Panic took away thought and rationality, but that fortification was the fruit of thought and reasoning. When a jet fighter pilot strapped on his or her parachute this didn’t indicate cowardly terror. It was necessary preparedness; it could save his life and enable him to fly and fight again. When a surgeon pulled on his face mask before operating it was to avoid contagion, giving or receiving, so that he or she and the patient might go on unimpaired in their careers. The shield at Shield Terrace was comparable with that type of professional counteraction against risk.
If those cruel labels, ‘Panicking Ralph/Ralphy’, were even very slightly appropriate he would never have sat at the desk, whether or not the life-preserving fixture were up there. His body would have refused to let him remain in that target situation, stalwart, calm, defiant. An uncontrollable trembling and sweating might have disastrously weakened him. In any case, that custom-made flying buttress was not there only to ward off attacks, was it? Didn’t it have a decorative, mind-widening factor, an instructional factor? How many of The Monty’s members would have heard of William Blake, let alone his Marriage Of Heaven And Hell without those gutsy, collage pictures near the ceiling? This brought a touch of culture to The Monty.
He liked to think of the club as something of an educational beacon. Ralph had begun a mature-student degree at the local university – suspended now because of business pressures – phenomenally expanding Charlie sales particularly – and felt a duty to pass on to The Monty crowd some of the points he’d picked up in his Foundation Year there, such as the remarkable poet and illustrator, William Blake. OK, obviously, The Athenaeum and The Garrick didn’t need to do that because most of their people would already know about Blake’s importance, and his campaign to stop children getting pushed up chimneys by sweeps. The Monty was different and had quite a number of ignorant, unalterable slobs on its books, mostly male, but not all. If some of these louts had been around at the time of Blake and were working as sweeps they would most likely have pushed kids up chimneys themselves. Blake was a Romantic. This didn’t mean he wrote slop, but Romantic poets wanted folk to let it all hang out, long before this slogan was ‘invented’ in the twentieth century.
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens was another work studied in the Foundation Year, and Ralph had heard that film posters for a movie version of this with John Mills and Alec Guinness, could be obtained from a special relics shop in Hull. He thought that after a while he’d have The Marriage Of Heaven And Hell scraped off, using hot water suds, and a fish slice, and replaced by this alternative reference to literature. Probably Monty members would understand about great expectations better than marriages of heaven and hell, although some of their marriages turned out fairly hellish, resulting in home-based abuse. Ralph hated to see women with black eyes in the club bar.
Many Monty regulars had great expectations, although it wouldn’t be in exactly similar ways as in the Dickens book. They had great expectations of a fine price for valuable items they managed to get possession of and brought to their middleman, their fence. Usually, the price from fences was not very fine, but the great expectations in the book took hundreds of pages to come good and, in fact, were shown up to be not at all what Pip in the story imagined.
It might seem disrespectful to get a fish slice going on a soaked William Blake, but this work, The Marriage Of Heaven And Hell, had such a splendid regard from university scholars that nothing could damage its brilliant essence. The Monty would be extending its role as a subtle, committed teacher. Ralph had now and then lost the full urge to bring The Monty up to scratch, but he could never lose that impulse altogether.
In fact, the need for the Blake or Dickens bulwark in The Monty had helped persuade him to moderate the overall improvement plan for his club. He had been fairly sure that The Athenaeum and The Garrick, nor any of the other top London clubs, did not have to rely on an added aerial rampart to ensure management didn’t get slaughtered on the premises. This realization need not prevent him, though, from bringing at least a morsel of refinement to The Monty. Prisoners at the time Great Expectations covered were kept on hulks or shipped off to Australia, and some Monty members should be glad it wasn’t still the same. If any of the film posters showed hulks he’d cut them out.
He glanced fondly up at the Blake now, and then brought his gaze down to bar level so as to greet with a nod and smile and pleasant, ‘Afternoon both,’ a couple of regulars ready for a lunchtime drink or two. Yes, he did feel it pleased and reassured them to see him on his usual perch, relaxed, ready for anything. But, of course, sangfroiding it at The Monty couldn’t eliminate altogether for Ralph the stink of those ‘Panicking’ insinuations. He still needed to travel back for that. But to be at his desk, bold, undeterred, resourceful while he assembled his unblemished memories, made travelling back so much more tolerable than it might have been. These two said as they always said, ‘Afternoon, Ralph,’ but might be thinking, as perhaps they always did, ‘Afternoon, Panicking.’
On that far-past evening, where he compelled his mind to go, the firm had given him a choice of handguns for any future exercises. He’d known something about weapons, but very little. He didn’t rush to pick out one or the other though – Browning, Walther or Beretta automatics. He wanted to seem experienced and particular, so he delayed a bit, as if working out in his head which would be most suitable for the jobs they might be going on soon, taking into consideration calibre, chamber capacity, recoil. He’d talked to people in the outfit about guns as if pistols were what he’d been brought up with, instead of Farley’s rusks. He’d needed to establish himself with these folk.
Ralph was the new boy. He’d more or less drifted into the firm. At the time, he’d been living in a flat with Margaret and the two kids near King’s Cross station. Some of his friends then were serious users. He’d done a bit himself, naturally, but only grass. Charlie was too dear and H scared him, thank God. One winter week the supplier failed to show. People grew despondent and restless. Ralph said he’d go and see what he could discover. It hadn’t been difficult. He found a lad corner-street trading and told him of a new, enthusiastic, established long-term market, backed by fairly reliable money from various ploys, not all of it dubious and precarious. This acquaintance mentioned there’d been a drugs squad onslaught and four pushers were taken in and remained in. Ralph reckoned the previous supplier must have been one.
Ralph’s pals were plea
sed and grateful for the new arrangement. If there’d been a Nobel Prize for salvaging drugs commerce he reckoned they’d have definitely nominated him. This replacement pusher worked for the Pasque Uno – Single Flower – firm, and Ralph’s part in the minor crisis got him some notice by the chiefs there, favourable, positive notice. He could tell they admired his initiative – his willingness and ability to remedy a bad situation. He was a locally unknown face so could courier and trade unspotted by the troublesome, anti-business cops. As he’d understood it, the main troublesome, anti-business cop was Superintendent Esther Davidson, a bit of a monster. Ralph had told the Pasque Uno board that OK, he’d noted the possible difficulties and would go ‘very judiciously’.
‘Yes, go very judiciously,’ someone replied. Ralph had arrived. But he still had his way to make as to, for instance, weaponry. Therefore, the confident talk and seeming fussiness about choice of pistol. Although he knew next to bugger all about guns then, he had to pretend he knew bugger everything.
FOUR
Esther, on her conservatory lounger, turned up the gas heater. December was December even if the sun came out. Her recollections could continue to sprout, though, never mind the season.
Back in those Met days rumour grades R-, R, and R+ had been saying for weeks that a battle might be imminent between the Opal Render and Pasque Uno firms. Oh, really? Without dates, times, names, this alert didn’t go much beyond the obvious, the customary, the useless, like a forecaster announcing there’d be weather tomorrow. Two outfits dealing drugs in districts alongside each other were sure to try for some – all? – of the adjoining ground and customer base. Hitler’s quest for Lebensraum – living space – by taking over neighbouring countries was the same kind of colonizing.
Esther also thought of that Colombian ‘godmother’, Griselda Blanco, and the welter of killings she’d done, or ordered, of rival drugs gang members, until she got drive-by machine-gunned herself, very suitably, when leaving a butcher’s shop, though she might have had no time to enjoy the in-joke. Griselda knew a company must expand or dwindle. It couldn’t just flatline. This was a fundamental commercial, private enterprise law. Hence, Tesco – all those new stores. Flatline had two meanings, as Esther understood it: (a) to stay static; (b) to die, when the heart meter flatlined for a hospital patient, an image and continuous pinging sound much loved by movie-makers. In business, the first would cause the second.
R-, R, and R+ had agreed with one another that this fight would be ‘all-out’, ‘final’, ‘decisive’, ‘bloody’, ‘critical’, ‘definitive’: impressionistic, woolly terms that didn’t help much with forward planning. Ultimately, it had required the AREA service to come up with reliable detail. This guidance had given absolutely correct date, time, location for the fight, and thirteen names, seven from Pasque Uno, six from Opal Render. These companies went in for fancy, mystifying titles – Pasque Uno, the single or unique flower; Opal Render, a glistening, glinting surface. Esther thought it was probably her handling of this lethal, territorial, street super-spat that put her name in lights for a while and helped with the steps up from detective superintendent to her rank now, Assistant Chief Constable. She’d set herself up as Gold – supremo – in a unit command vehicle that day, and had been able to see most of the action direct, or on screens taking filmed coverage from police cameras already in place to survey the probable battle area. There’d been five deaths, two hospitalizations and subsequent jailings, five arrests at the scene, also with subsequent jailings. That added up to twelve, not the AREA figure of thirteen.
She had an idea – less than an idea, a hindsight inkling – she had an inkling that the subconsciously noted starlings had appeared at one of the hottest and noisiest moments in the action. Squawking well, they’d soared and dived, effortlessly keeping their brilliantly tight squadron formation. Below them, Paul Elroy Stanton, leader of Opal Render, took four very cumulative rounds in the face, admirably close-grouped, and fell to the pavement, probably not recognizable any more, even by his mother and/or debt collectors.
Although it was a while ago, Esther recalled that he had on a magnificently cut, custom-made, dark, double-breasted, three-piece suit. His shoes were Raymond Roundel black lace-ups, the undersides showing hardly any wear and glossy with newness. About two centimetres of white shirt cuff fastened by silver links protruded from under the suit jacket’s arms. People in these firms tended to be very meticulous about their clothes, shoes, haircuts and appearance in general. They could afford it. They accepted one of capitalism’s wisest and most fundamental rules: plough profits back in; nourish the companies. They unstintingly invested in their firms. And since the firms were themselves they spent like crazy on tailoring, et cetera. He’d held an automatic in each hand, at least until he hit the ground.
Esther, mulling things now, could still have named all twelve either killed or convicted, and also someone called Ralph Wyvern Ember, listed as in the Pasque Uno contingent by AREA, but apparently not present for the confrontation. There had seemed to be six against six from the firms, plus, of course, Esther and her people, reinforced by marksmen and markswomen from the Met’s specialist firearms consistory at Lippitts Hill in Epsom Forest. Because of the source’s usual excellence on detail, they had done a rapid but very thorough post-op examination of the battle streets and lanes, in case R.W. Ember lay injured somewhere or dying or dead: nothing, though, and all blood and other leavings on the ground, walls, cars and front garden lawn patches, traceable to the twelve. Esther could find nobody of that name in the police national crime computer. Wyvern – the legendary armless dragon: what were his parents thinking when they called him that?
She’d ordered a detective to go back to the AREA source and find what was known about R.W. Ember. Not very much. He’d established a recent connection with Pasque Uno, but where he’d come from and where gone nobody knew. There might have been a wife or partner and children, more than one. Possibly a flat somewhere near King’s Cross station. Apparently, the source oozed apologies for his error. But Esther recognized that thirteen might have been scheduled to take part and something prevented it; perhaps something too near the date for the source to know of; possibly, even, something on the very day of the set-to.
Esther sent a soft-soap, sophistry message to him saying the information had probably been basically right originally but put marginally out of date by an unanticipated change. This was like telling someone who thought it was Wednesday, although, in fact, it was Thursday, that he’d made no mistake because today would have been Wednesday if it were yesterday. She assured him his AREA ranking remained unchanged and that, in fact, he’d be getting a one-off bonus. Her remarkably talented fink had helped neutralize twelve members of two gangs, and must be cherished and, in this instance, excused a gaffe. Clearly, thirteen would have been better, but twelve rated excellent and had led very soon to the extinction of both firms. A detective was as good as his or her informants made him or her, and this operation had placed Esther high, and due to go higher, thanks in part – major part – to a fine, only slightly overstocked, AREA whisper.
She had genuinely wanted her source to feel OK, and not to have worries about his reputation. To achieve and keep top billing an AREA informant must get things continually right and, preferably, completely right. Although major informants would not have ‘By appointment to the Metropolitan police’ nicely displayed on their stationery – or gravestones – a good history was crucial. Mistakes by a previously AREA-level informant could mean a tumble to category R+, or even lower, with a consequent fall in snitch salary; and the demotion very hard to reverse.
Esther remembered from school that Shakespeare had a character called Rumour at the start of one of the plays. Rumour got a pretty good kicking because it stuffed ‘the ears of men with false reports.’ Police didn’t like getting stuffed, and they bore grudges. But the small error in this case could be tolerated, overlooked, and had set up no resentment in Esther.
FIVE
&nb
sp; Yes, back then, Ralph had needed to pretend he knew a real whack about guns. He tried to see himself as the Pasque Uno people would see him. For them, he’d be someone from nowhere who’d done a minor job quite well – fixing up some regular buying from PU by several of Ralph’s friends. It was a start, but only a start. He had to plump up his image, get some solidity into what these others saw when they looked at him. And they would look at him. Maybe ‘scrutinize him’ was a better way of describing it. So, he’d try to seem gun-wise, gun-experienced, gun-choosy.
Of those three pistols available for the immediate situation – Browning, Walther, Beretta – he eventually picked the Walther. He’d acted very much from a gut feeling: that is, he could imagine some Opal Render bastard with a couple of Walther bullets in his guts and, just before he hit the ground, dead, probably deciding to ditch all hope of absorbing any of Pasque Uno’s territory. Ralph liked the look of the P38 model, and it felt good in his hand, as if the metal of the butt had been fashioned specifically for his grip and now radiated a genial welcome to his palm, almost a kind of unstoppably fated fusion, like successful sex.
The P38 was biggish – more than twenty centimetres long, Ralph guessed – which would make it difficult to conceal. The barrel must be about twelve centimetres. But it wouldn’t matter that the gun was fairly obvious; and, in any case, the Beretta and the Browning seemed about the same size, but, somehow, didn’t establish a rapport with him like the Walther. The kind of operation getting cooked up now would have firearms very much in view, nothing furtive or discreet. When you fought a war your weaponry was likely to be on show and as effective as you could make it. Think of propaganda scare pictures of that enormous piece of artillery in the Great War, ‘Big Bertha’. And there was something else from around that era. Even as a teenager, Ralph had liked to read history and he’d been impressed by words from an Admiral of the Fleet, Lord Fisher: ‘The essence of war is violence, and moderation in war is an imbecility.’ At the time, that had seemed to Ralph very acute, an uplifting call for total win-win-win commitment.