The Graft

‘Tell him!’

  ‘It was Proctor . . . Proctor and Leary and their mate Rudde. It was Rudde who brought them here in the first place.’

  Billy looked at the man and said in a high, incredulous voice: ‘Rudde? Peter Rudde? The filth?’

  Tyrell nodded.

  ‘Tell him everything.’

  Winters was gabbling now, trying to get it all over with as quickly as possible.

  ‘It was Rudde who tracked them down for us. He looked in the station books, kept an eye out for the runaways and the homeless kids, then Proctor passed the names and details on to me.’

  ‘What about Leary, where did he fit in then?’

  The man sighed heavily.

  ‘Nick was always here - still comes, in fact. Him and Sonny . . . well, I don’t have to paint you a picture, do I? But Nick likes the kids, Lenny Bagshots provides them.’

  Billy’s eyes were open to their widest. If this man had told them Gandhi himself had been in this flat he would have found it easier to believe than what he was hearing now. ‘Fuck off! That’s bollocks . . .’

  Rudde he could cope with, but Nick Leary?

  ‘No, it ain’t, Billy. You ain’t heard the half of it yet.’

  Billy didn’t answer Tyrell. He couldn’t. He had been to Nick’s home, had spoken to him . . . Nick Leary was one of them. He was a face, a diamond geezer.

  Billy was reeling from the news.

  But he knew deep inside that this scum Winters was telling the truth. He didn’t know how but he knew. He had thought Nick cold and sexless the last time they’d met. Seen how he blanked his own highly desirable wife. Now here it was, the missing piece of the puzzle, and he knew it to be true as surely as he knew his own name.

  ‘Nick Leary lured my boy to his house that night to finish him off, get him out of the frame.’

  Tyrell let his words sink in. He knew how Billy was feeling, had felt the same himself. But Winters wasn’t lying.

  ‘It’s Peter Rudde who keeps this place from being trounced as well. There’s a big network of them, see. They all work together. Sonny had threatened to expose Leary.’

  Billy Clarke was still in shock but he could see the pattern here. Rudde was Nick’s tame filth, everyone knew that. They’d even had villas built side by side in Spain. Nick had paid for them, of course, and Rudde’s wasn’t a patch on Nick’s place, but it explained a lot.

  The old saying was so true: Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer still.

  The man on the ground was whimpering now. Fear and cold had kicked in and he just wanted this over with once and for all.

  ‘I told you the score, now please let me go. I told you everything you asked of me.’

  Tyrell stared down at him for long moments. This man had had intimate knowledge of his boy, his child.

  This man had fucked his boy.

  This man had taken rent from his son here and allowed him to be used by the likes of Nick Leary and now he wanted to walk away as if nothing had happened?

  Leave him here and he’d corrupt other young men, use them until the next new kid on the block hooked his attention.

  Tyrell stubbed the cigarette out on the man’s cheek.

  Then, grabbing him by the neck, he lifted Winters bodily in the air and threw him over the balcony with all the force he could muster.

  Angela was on the floor. Tammy was kneeling beside her, feeling the sticky blood soaking into her silk dressing gown as it ran like a river from the woman’s body. The knife was poking out of her back, the black handle trembling as she tried to breathe. She was making a choking sound in her throat, a bubbling noise, and it was making Tammy want to be sick. She held a hand over her mouth to stem the flow as she started heaving once more.

  Angela was grabbing at nothing now, her hand clutching at empty space.

  ‘Oh, Angela love, please be all right. You have to be all right.’

  Getting up, Tammy ran into the hallway and picked up the phone.

  She was going to be sick again.

  Really sick.

  But she dialled 999 first. Screaming and shouting, she tried to explain what had happened, but fear had overtaken her now and she was incoherent.

  She finally threw up all over the entrance hall floor.

  Peter Rudde was sitting in his house eating a microwave meal for one. He liked Iceland’s ready meals. They were not only cheap, they contained no GM ingredients. Rudde was funny like that. Liked to take care of the pennies and his health.

  He was watching The Shield on Channel Five, his favourite programme, and drinking a nice cold beer. He had a forty-two-inch flat-screen set and he loved it. He liked the TV programmes on Saturdays as well. Providing no one decided to commit too heinous a crime he had an easy night of it ahead.

  He finished his beer and went out to his state-of-the-art kitchen during the commercial break. Putting his plate in the sink, he opened another Grolsch. Then he went back to the front room and settled himself once more in his chair.

  His phone rang just as the storyline was hotting up. Rudde answered it without interest. In seconds he was turning down the volume on the TV and saying, ‘You are joking?’

  Putting down the phone, he started walking around the room, saying, ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake!’ over and over again.

  But he had to pull himself together. He was dressed and out of the house in less than fifteen minutes. He knew that whatever else happened tonight, nothing would ever be the same again for any of them.

  Willy was still sitting in the car and waiting patiently when he saw a body come out of the dark sky and land with a thud on the pavement. He guessed that Tyrell and his friends would not be long now.

  He was right.

  They bundled into the car and drove away quickly. Willy had seen the other man go inside and realised he was with them when he followed their car.

  Terry was laughing his head off. He was high on adrenaline now he was out of that place.

  ‘You fucking finally crossed the line, Tyrell. You realise that, don’t you, man?’

  Louis answered for his friend.

  ‘We all realise it, Terry, now give it a fucking rest.’

  And for once Terry did as he was asked without a row.

  The paramedic had injected Tammy to calm her down. Now she was holding on to Peter Rudde’s arm as if her life depended on it. She was still babbling away and he was shushing her.

  ‘Please, Peter, you have to help us . . .’

  He saw the WPC watching them with interest and snapped, ‘Why don’t you go and make this woman a cup of tea, love? Do something constructive for a change?’

  She went out of the bedroom quickly. Her boss wasn’t the friendliest of men at the best of times and everyone knew he had formed a close relationship with this family after the tragic burglary that had caused so much interest in the media.

  Now there had been a fatal stabbing in the same house, and he seemed to think it was a revenge attack, or so he had insinuated when he had got there.

  But if that was the case, why was the wife walking around without a scratch? Hers, though, as a WPC, was not to reason why, and she knew it. It had been explained to her enough times.

  ’Are you sure that’s what he said?’

  Tyrell was getting annoyed now as he snapped, ‘I am hardly liable to forget it, am I?’

  Billy finally took umbrage then.

  ’All right, keep your fucking hair on! I have to make sure, don’t I?’ This was a living nightmare as far as he was concerned. ‘I’m sorry, Tyrell, but this is all fucking doing my head in.’

  It was Tyrell’s turn to be stroppy now and he said with heavy sarcasm, ‘You don’t fucking say?’

  He picked up a joint from the ashtray and relit it before continuing.

  ‘None of this is easy for me, you know. I found out things tonight that no one should ever know about their kid.’

  He looked meaningfully at Willy Lomax and they all realised he was only telling them the half of it for the
sake of this boy. But he continued talking and his anger was unmistakable.

  ‘Now I am sorry if you all think Leary and his cronies are the dog’s knob, but I want him. I fucking want him . . .’

  He leaned forward in his chair and they could all see the hatred in his eyes.

  Terry grinned.

  ’And you’ll get him, sunbeam, don’t you worry about that.’

  ‘But we have to find him first.’

  It was Billy speaking once more. The brothers all knew that his was the voice of reason. He was a man who never made any kind of move without thinking it through thoroughly. It was his sensible head that had kept them all out of prison for so long.

  He picked up his mobile and started to ring round. Twenty minutes later they left the flat. Willy watched them go, aware that none of them even remembered he was there. He put the TV on and hoped against hope they’d resolve it all sooner rather than later. He picked up Tyrell’s joint and smoked it slowly, savouring the good weed and laughing at the cartoons.

  His little holiday would be well and truly over then. He would be back on the street before he knew it and wanted to savour the warmth and easiness of this life for a little longer.

  It was strange but if he’d been anywhere else he would have seen the light, realised he was on his way out and blagged the place. He would have gone long before he was asked and taken half the place with him. He would need all the money he could get once he was back on the street.

  But he would not do that to Tyrell. He liked him too much and Tyrell had been good to him. But Willy did sort out his few belongings and pack them neatly, in case he had to go on the quick like.

  Nick was pacing around the room, mumbling to himself. The young man watched him in earnest, not knowing what to do. He had not seen Nick for two weeks, and had been wondering when he would be launched out of this flat in Barkingside.

  He liked it here, liked the area.

  But he knew he was only here for as long as he was welcome and had thought maybe he was not welcome any more.

  Now here was Nick, but he was a different man tonight. He looked frightening, half-demented, and the boy assumed he was on drugs. He was certainly drunk anyway, he could smell the drink on him from here.

  ‘Can I get you anything?’

  Nick looked at him finally, looked right at him, and the boy was pleased about that.

  ‘What you got?’

  ‘Depends what you want, Nick.’

  This was said with a leer and Nick closed his eyes in annoyance. The boy tried to make amends. It was something you learned quickly on the streets, how to adapt to other people’s mood changes. Especially if they held all the trump cards, which invariably they did.

  Nick took a small wrap of coke from his pocket and the boy’s eyes lit up.

  ‘Shall I get you a drink, Nick? How about a Scotch?’

  He nodded, then grunted at him to hurry up. When the lines were cut the boy brought back drinks for them both. Nick snorted two lines, one after the other, and downed his drink quickly. Justin snorted a line then, but only after asking Nick’s permission by raising his plucked eyebrows.

  This boy was beautiful.

  ‘I was going to pack my bags and leave, I hadn’t seen you for so long.’ The words were said with as much feeling as Justin could muster.

  Nick looked fleetingly at him, and seeing him for the money-hungry little piece of trade he was, said nastily, ‘Don’t push me, Justin. I had another one just like you and I soon got rid of him.’

  The boy didn’t say anything else. He knew what Nick was talking about.

  Nick started to cut more lines on the table top. Justin sat back in a chair and wondered, not for the first time in his young life, where the night would end.

  Nick could feel himself coming up once more. Coke was great like that, it made you feel that you could take on anything or anyone.

  And he needed that feeling now, more than he had ever needed it before.

  Lenny Bagshots was shitting himself and everyone could see it, including his girlfriend who picked up their daughter and walked deliberately from the room. She went into the master bedroom and turned on the TV. Whatever happened she wanted no part of it. She just wanted to keep her daughter and herself safe from the men who had literally invaded her home.

  She turned up the volume and, cuddling her daughter to her, watched Kill Bill with vacant, frightened eyes.

  She heard her boyfriend shouting from the front room and turned the volume up once more.

  ‘Who told you that?’

  Lenny was playing the wronged party so well it was almost laughable.

  Tyrell looked at him and sighed.

  ‘Gordon Winters, and he has the photographs to prove it apparently. Now you’d better tell us where Leary might be or I am going to kill you stone dead.’

  It was said with such quiet conviction Lenny believed him. He looked at the Clarke brothers, all standing in his home and all looking like they wanted to be anywhere else in the world but where they were. Terry looked like he was just waiting for the word to pounce, and knowing him he was. Lenny knew it was all over then. He knew they were on to him, and he also knew once the word got out, and it would get out, he would be finished in every way.

  That is, providing they left him alive.

  Nick was like a cat on a hot tin roof, he just couldn’t settle down. He was a bundle of nerves, and every time he thought about his mother he felt the familiar terror envelop him like it had after Sonny Boy.

  How could she even have contemplated grassing him up? He could have taken it off Tammy, because she would have had good reason to do it. But he knew no matter what, she wouldn’t do it because she looked after number one first and foremost. But his mum? After all he had done for her? The way he had cared for her, the way he had loved her? And she would have put it all on the line without a second’s thought. He knew she had meant what she had said, he had seen it in her eyes. He had known there would be no talking her round this time, not like before. She wouldn’t believe what she wanted to believe any more.

  He had known then and there that those days were gone and he had to look out for himself. Which was what he had done. He had not stabbed his mother, she was already dead to him, he had stabbed a fucking grass. He wasn’t worried about Tammy, though, she would know to keep her trap shut. He had made sure of that years ago. She would not put her lifestyle on the line even for her newfound best friend, his so-called mother.

  Peter Rudde would sort that out, and Nick would call in every favour he had ever been owed. There was a dirty great big network of them, and he knew who they all were. Rudde even recruited from the CPS files via a mate there, from prison files and court documents too. They tracked down like-minded men because the bigger the network, the less chance they had of being found out.

  Nick had blackmailed some of them over the years to get where he was, whether it was for planning permission, bigger overdrafts, or even just an extension on his club licences. ‘Use what you got,’ his mother always told him. Well, he had taken the advice and look where it had got her. He liked his little men, felt happy with them. And he had loved some of them, really loved them.

  His phone rang and the sudden noise made him and Justin jump.

  Nick answered it quickly.

  ‘Open up, Nick, it’s me - Rudde.’

  The words were music to his ears. He switched off his phone and smiled, his first real smile.

  ‘Get in the bedroom. And no matter what, you fucking stay there, right?’

  Justin did as he was told without a murmur.

  Nick went to the front door quickly, pleased that his friend had finally turned up. If anyone could help him it was this man and this man alone.

  When he opened the front door, though, it wasn’t Rudde standing there, it was the Clarke brothers and Sonny Boy’s father.

  Nick Leary’s capture had finally arrived and they all knew it.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Tammy
sat by the hospital bed and held on to her mother-in-law’s hand.

  She had taken Rudde’s advice and gone in the ambulance with Angela. She had also taken his advice to keep her mouth shut.

  For the time being, anyway, if Nick had gone on the missing list then she would wait until she knew the score before deciding what she was going to say. At the moment she wanted to see what happened to poor Angela. She was serious but stable. Tammy stared down into the older woman’s wrinkled face and wondered at a woman whose son had accused her of abuse and yet who lived her life quoting her good friend Jesus morning, noon and night.