Angel on the Inside (27 page)

‘Yeah, they do, don't they?'

He smiled at that, but it was a forced grimace, and for some reason I thought of the story of the German General von Molkte who was said to have smiled only twice in his life – once when told his mother-in-law was dead and once when the Swedish Ambassador insisted that Stockholm was impregnable.

‘But,' I started off hesitantly, knowing I was probably pushing it, ‘with the revolver version – though you can't get them so easily now – if you chuck away the gas cylinder and pellet and you make a shell case that will fit the cylinder, then you can put a real .22 bullet in there and fire it. Or so I'm told.'

Fisher narrowed his eyes at me. He looked like a man desperate for a smoke. I knew I was. Who the hell had the idea to make a prison non-smoking? Somebody cruel, that's who.

‘You are very well informed, Mr Angel,' he said. ‘Who was it told you all this?'

‘I got it off the internet,' I said.

‘Jesus fucking Christ, is nothing sacred?'

‘Not on the internet.'

He leaned forward over the table, but kept his hands palms down, non-aggressive, for the cameras.

‘Do they tell you on the internet that the beauty of the Brocock is that owning the gun isn't illegal – it's an air pistol, for Christ's sake. But owning the doctored ammunition to fit it, now that is a crime. Think about it. In every other case, it's the other way round. You walk into a bank with shotgun
cartridges
about your person, no crime. Go in with a shotgun, even if its not loaded, and it's next stop
Crimewatch
. And the other thing your internet doesn't tell you is just how easy it is to make the shell casings, does it? Any idiot with a small light-engineering workshop can do it.'

As he was speaking, things he was saying were triggering alarm bells. He was telling me things I already knew. Or should know for some reason. Things – bits and pieces – somebody else had said. Things I should have seen coming, but at the time ... At the time, I hadn't paid much attention. Things that Steffi Innocent had told me, ironically in all innocence.

‘Oh fuck!' I said.

Well, it was my turn.

 

‘Haydn Rees was an air pistol champion as a schoolboy and he makes models, light-engineered type of models – trains, remote-controlled helicopters, that sort of shit. Even got a
Blue Peter
badge for it. It's him you're setting up, isn't it? With Brococks. And he's just the sort of nerd who would fall for it.'

‘Keep your voice down,' said Malcolm Fisher. ‘Just because there are no microphones, it doesn't mean nobody's listening in here.'

‘But that's it, isn't it? You and Keith Flowers ...'

I knew now how that spaniel sniffer dog had felt back in the waiting area.

‘We had the idea, but it seems as if you've managed to ruin it for us.'

He sat back in his plastic chair and folded his arms across his chest.

‘Not necessarily,' I said.

 

Fisher stared at me for a full minute. As job interviews went, I'd had worse.

‘You're up for this, aren't you?' he said at last.

‘Depends on the plan,' I said, feeling more confident than at any time since I had got out of Armstrong in the car park.

‘Len Turner wants guns. He doesn't think his boys look tough enough unless they're tooled up, and I don't mean just his idiot son Ron and his grandsons, I mean his crew. They've got interests all round the coast of South Wales, from Newport to Swansea, and he's trying to expand over into Bristol. He's got a problem there, because he's up against some of our darker-skinned brethren who've got diddly-squat respect for an old git who made his name running tarts in Port Talbot. So he thinks a few shooters will impress them.'

‘This wouldn't by any chance conflict with your business interests in that neck of the woods, would it?' I chanced.

Fisher shook his head slowly.

‘Rule of Life Number One, Mr Angel: you never, ever ask somebody what they're in here for.' Then he shrugged his shoulders. ‘But there's nothing to say I can't tell you if I want to, though I don't really want to. Let's just say I'm a robber, I work alone and have been known to get carried away sometimes, so much do I love my work. That's more or less what it said on the charge sheet. What's between me and Len Turner is strictly personal, not business.'

‘Fair enough. So the plan was to – what?'

‘Build up a stock of Brococks, manufacture the shell casings to fit them, load ‘em up with live .22 ammo, get Len Turner interested in buying a job lot, say a hundred, even get a down-payment off him. Then plant the guns and the ammo on Haydn Rees, call the cops and sit well back from the fan as the shit hits.'

I let him have half a minute of looking pleased with himself.

‘You call that a plan?'

 

Fisher looked as if he'd been slapped. The last person who had questioned him like that was still sitting on a creosoted sofa watching a creosoted television. But he took it well, leaned in towards me and spoke quietly and quickly.

‘It'll work because there'll be so much circumstantial against Rees. He's an air pistol nut and has a whole armoury of them, a lot of them Brococks. He also has his own workshop – lathes, machines, the lot – up at his country place in Tregaron, where he builds his poxy toy models. He's well-known as Len Turner's brief, and there's a fair few cops, even in South Wales, who know he's dirty but have never been able to prove anything. Even the cops think twice before fitting up a solicitor.'

‘You're saying he's slipped out of things before, so why can't he talk his way out of this one?' I asked.

‘Because Keith has stitched him up good and proper, using his special expertise. You do know what Keith was good at, don't you?'

‘No, I don't, as a matter of fact.' And I wasn't sure I wanted to.

‘Fraud, that was Keith's thing. He trained as an accountant – the best sort of accountant.'

‘You mean a bent one,' I said.

‘Exactly.'

‘That doesn't narrow it down.'

Fisher smiled his General von Molkte smile.‘No, I know how you feel. I don't like ‘em either. Still, Keith had a good idea way back. That was his trouble; he was always having good ideas that went bad. Anyway, before he went down, he opened a bank account in Gloucester or somewhere in the name of Haydn Rees. He kept dribbling money into it – no big sums, mind you – and writing the odd cheque but never going overdrawn. Then he gets lifted and the account sits there earning a bit of interest but not attracting the attentions of the taxman. When he comes up with his masterplan, he needs a bit of working capital – which is where I came in, having a few bank accounts of my own – but he has enough cash in this Haydn Rees account to get a credit card ...'

‘And buy Brococks over the internet,' I finished for him.

‘You're very sharp,' he said, and I think he meant it.

‘It's what I would have done. About the only place you can buy the Brocock revolvers now is from individuals who are selling second hand. I spotted that when I surfed the web. Something called the National Crime Intelligence Squad is clamping down on official retailers. You can still get the automatics, but not the revolvers.'

I had been amazed at the deals the air pistol people had done with the arms industry so that a Walther or a Beretta air pistol now looked exactly like – and weighed the same as – the real thing.

‘Very good,' nodded Fisher, ‘but I bet you didn't check the wholesalers in Europe, did you?'

I saw where he was going. Where Keith Flowers had gone.

‘You wanted a job lot, so you bought in bulk. There would be paperwork, invoices, delivery notes; all with Haydn Rees's name on them.'

‘You're getting there,' he breathed heavily.

‘But how could Flowers set this up while he was inside?'

‘He couldn't. I told you, they won't even let us buy a fucking Lottery ticket in here.'

‘He had to have a business partner, didn't he?' I jumped in, remembering Len Turner using the phrase. ‘On the outside.'

‘Correct,' Fisher said approvingly.

‘Oh my God,' I said before I could stop myself. ‘
Not Amy …
'

Fisher let out a short bark of a laugh.

‘Fuck, no. She wouldn't even
talk
to Keith from what I hear. I told him to leave it alone, but no, he had to try and see her, didn't he? Should've known then that he was losing it, taking his eye off the ball.'

I wasn't really listening to him, even though he was confirming what was going through my head.

Amy had avoided Flowers like the plague when he started stalking her on his semi-release from Belmarsh. She'd taken out a restraining order. He'd come after her with a gun when he couldn't take the rejection any more. No, Amy couldn't have been his ‘business partner'. Len Turner seemed to know about her anyway, and yet it was me he'd taken for a ride on the Eye, not her. So he didn't just think, he knew she wasn't the silent partner. That was why he'd got Rees to hire Rudgard & Blugden, and by sheer dumb luck he'd drawn their one operative who took the job seriously.

‘Flowers had a mate,' Fisher was saying, and it was time to listen up, ‘a mate called Ion – John – Jones. Known him for years, bit of a nutter, like Keith I suppose.
Mae'n off ei ben
, as they'd say in the Welsh – he's off his head – but he has this knack with machinery, light engineering stuff.'

‘Bullets?' I suggested.

‘It doesn't take a rocket scientist to do what Keith wanted doing; which is just as well, as this Ion Jones, according to my sources, is a case of the gates are down and the lights are flashing, but the train isn't coming. But Keith trusted him to set things up.'

‘You said “trusted”.'

‘So what?'

‘As in past tense. “Trust
ed
”.'

‘Ah, well, that would be because he's sort of disappeared off my radar. You see, he was Keith's man. Keith knew him, trusted him to do what he was told and set him up with the phoney Rees bank account to buy the shooters. Soon as he'd done his probationary month at St Chad's, Keith was going to pop down to Cardiff and do the nasty on our solicitor friend. Trouble is, he never made it, ‘cos he ran into you, Mr Angel. And so, somewhere down in Wales, there's this idiot with a hundred Brococks, enough doctored ammunition to start a small war and a downpayment from Len Turner who's expecting to buy them.'

He sat back in his chair, giving the impression that it was straining against the bolts holding it to the floor.

‘So guess what I want you to do, Mr Angel.'

‘Recommend a good private detective?' I tried.

‘No. I want you to go and find Ion Jones and make sure our plan is still on track,' he said.

‘That would have been my second guess.'

 

Our time was almost up.

‘Tell me why – just one good reason – why I should do this,' I said to him.

So he did.

 

 

 

 

 

I signed out, had my ink stamp checked under ultra violet light and my hand geometry read by the palm print machine, went through a dozen doors and waited for them to be locked behind me, and then, finally, I was in the airlock by the main gate, waiting for the pneumatic hiss that meant: outside.

I needed a drink, a pen and paper, a street map of Cardiff and then probably another drink, in that order. I got Spider.

‘You had your money's worth, didn't you? Thought they'd decided to keep you in there.'

I shuddered at the very idea.

‘Your Mr Creosote had a lot to tell me,' I said, when I had collected my things from the Visitor Centre locker and we were walking across the car park.

‘Did he mention me?' Spider asked, snapping at my heels.

‘Yeah. He told me to find a nice house you could burgle so you could be back inside for Christmas.'

‘That was decent of him,' said Spider in all seriousness.

I stopped dead and he went on a stride before turning and seeing my expression.

‘What?' he asked.

‘You really want to go back into a place like that?'

‘It's what you know, innit? Got a smoke?'

‘No Have you?'

‘Yeah.'

He produced a pack of Marlboros this time, and what looked like a silver-plated Ronson, and I took a cigarette and a light from him without asking any questions.