Jog On Fat Barry (22 page)

I parked the car. It started to rain. There wasn’t anyone else in the restaurant. I put the biscuit tin on a table and ordered coffee; sat down and listened to raindrops beat against the glass. The waitress put my coffee on the table. I stirred in sugar. A toilet flushed and a door squeaked. I looked up; saw Agne. She crossed the room; sat at an adjacent table. A jacket hung over a chair beside hers, but there was no sign of the man it belonged to. I couldn’t remember how many weeks had passed since I saw her outside the massage parlour: four, maybe five. Whatever it was, she hadn’t taken her own life yet. I picked up the biscuit tin and walked over to her table.

The envelope Jake had given me contained a letter from my dad and a copy of his will. I couldn’t make head or tail of the will, but the letter was simple enough. He had written three lines that said, no one could turn back time, money couldn’t make up for what had been done, and he never stopped loving me. I gave the will to a solicitor in The Edward. He told me Dad had divided his estate equally between Jake and me. I said it would be right turn-up if there was enough money to buy the flat Mum, Gran and I had lived in. The solicitor had laughed, and said my dad had built up a car dealership in Los Angeles which was probably worth a million dollars, plus he’d left me a house in Huntington Beach, and the key to a safety deposit box that contained God only knew what.

“My dad was a good nuts and bolts man,” I told Ronny.

“He was that and then some,” Ronny said back.

Agne glanced at me in the car: we were driving east on the M2. She had followed me when I asked her if she fancied going for a drive but never said a word. I asked her if she was alone but she still said nothing. We’d been driving for an hour and she had remained silent, but then she glanced at me.

“Bashkim went for cigarettes,” she said in broken English.

She said Bashkim was crazy. When he discovered she had left, he would kill her. But that was okay, she said, because she wanted to die and had done so for longer than she could remember. I said I knew she did. She asked how that was possible. I said because it just was. She said she was a prostitute. I said she wasn’t anymore. I told her from then on things would be different. Bashkim would never bother her again. She asked me if I was afraid of Bashkim. I said I wasn’t afraid of anyone: all the fear had been frightened out of me when I was a boy. She said she didn’t understand why I wanted to help her. I said the answer to that lay in the biscuit tin on the back seat. She glanced at the tin for a moment, and then fell silent again for a long time. Near Canterbury she asked where we were going. I said to the seaside.

“The seaside,” she repeated, and smiled. “I like the seaside.”

Ronny arranged the meet with the Albanians after I cleared it with Jackie Pepper and Harry the Syrup. They were the top boys in our firm; nothing got done without their say so. Once they were onside, Ronny and me roped in Big Pat Jacks and Frankie Toast: both were well handy and liked nothing better than kicking shit out of people when things went pear. Agne had been staying with Pauline Jacks, Pat’s younger sister, in Somers Town. Pauline told Pat that Agne seldom left the flat and spent most of her time sleeping. She wondered how long it might take someone to sleep off ten months of being scared shitless. Pat had said she might as well wonder how long a piece of string was.

Agne and me had walked down to the shoreline on Palm Bay at Margate. It was overcast and raining lightly, but there was no wind. I took off my shoes, rolled up my trousers and walked out until the water was just below my knees. Then I tipped Mum and Gran out of the biscuit tin. Some of their ashes sank to the bottom; some floated out to sea.

“Keep an eye out for Granddad,” I said.

My granddad was on HMS Thistle when the German U-boat U-4 sunk her in 1940. He was nineteen and Gran was eight months pregnant. She said, that to her, God died the day my granddad did. WWII was proof enough God didn’t exist. Granddad had drowned off the coast of Norway and never got to see his only child. But Gran reasoned that if I scattered my mum’s ashes in the Channel, and they got washed out to sea, then perhaps, just perhaps, some tiny part of her, and some tiny part of him, might bump into each other, and that had to be better than nothing.

Ronny looked at the Albanians waiting for us as we walked into the saloon bar of The Lansdowne on Gloucester Avenue. He had said £5000 was a lot to spend for freedom when the freedom you were buying wasn’t your own. Bashkim, Duka, and three other men sat drinking at the table. They started to laugh when Frankie ordered lagers. Big Pat asked them if they wanted to kick off right there and then, because the thought of ripping out one of their hearts and fucking it right there on the table was giving him the horn. The Albanians jumped up, all except Duka that is. He had remained seated and suggested everyone calm down. Duka was the mechanic: the others were just oily rags. I put the £5000 on the table. Duka picked it up and started counting. Bashkim started to speak in Albanian but Duka cut him off. The publican said there was a call for Bashkim. He got up, saying something in Albanian. The three men laughed. Duka kept on counting. Bashkim didn’t return from his phone call but I never made anything of it: there was no need to because the situation had been sorted.

I telephoned Pauline earlier in the day to say everything had been sorted. Agne no longer had to be afraid. Tonight we were going to push the boat out. It would be a double celebration, a glass to toast freedom in the nightclub I’d bought into on the Holloway Road. Pauline took Agne to the hairdressers; bought her a dress and a set of heels, and listened to Agne confess she felt pretty for the first time since landing in England. She said later that she never saw who hit her. She and Agne were waiting for a taxi outside the salon when someone chinned her. She was out cold for six minutes and her cheekbone had been broken. No one in the ambulance had known Agne’s whereabouts. Enquiries were made and some bloke selling the
Evening Standard
gave police a description that matched Bashkim. But Jackie had warned me that the Albanians played by different rules.

Ronny, Big Pat and me drove to the Hilldrop Estate and parked up. Two hours later Bashkim arrived alone. I asked him where Agne was but Ronny didn’t wait for an answer. He swung the hammer and Pat had to carry Bashkim up three flights of stairs to the flat. I followed with the tool bag. Ronny went through Bashkim’s pockets until he found his keys. Then he opened the numberless door and Pat walked into the flat.

“Surprisingly heavy for such a lanky cunt,” Pat said, dropping Bashkim on the floor.

Bashkim came to and began shouting in Albanian. When I asked him where Agne was, he pretended he couldn’t speak English and started shouting again. Ronny swung the hammer for the second time. There was a knock at the door and Ronny opened it. Murtagh Madden was standing on the landing. Ronny stepped outside, shutting the door behind him. Minutes later he walked back in with some rope and asked me to remove Bashkim’s shirt. I ripped it off. Ronny put a tourniquet around Bashkim’s right elbow. Then he took an axe out of the tool bag and we waited until Bashkim came to. The moment he did, he started to yell again. I ran duct tape around his mouth to shut him up. Ronny glanced at me.

“This ain’t for Agne,” he said. “It’s for Pauline.”

Ronny placed the axe over Bashkim’s right wrist and nodded at the hammer. Bashkim stared wide-eyed as Pat picked it up and swung. The hammer clanked against the axe and severed his hand. Bashkim howled although all you heard were grunts. Snot ran from his nose. I was surprised at how little blood there was: no doubt a trick Madden learnt in the army. Ronny secured another tourniquet above Bashkim’s other elbow.

“This is for Agne,” he said.

Pat gave me the hammer. I swung it but missed the first time. The second time went better. Bashkim passed out. Ronny asked Pat to remove the Albanian’s jeans, and when Bashkim came to a few minutes later, he saw that Ronny was securing a tourniquet above his right knee. Ronny told Bashkim he would let him go if he told us what it was we wanted to know.

“Your choice,” Ronny said. “Live or die in Tufnell Park.”

Bashkim started crying as I peeled back the tape. He said Agne was at the massage parlour in Kentish Town. Ronny then asked him where Duka was. I heard Bashkim giving Ronny an address as I walked out of the flat. Ronny told me later he didn’t know why he changed his mind about letting Bashkim live.

“I just did,” he said.

Big Pat said Ronny chopped off the Albanian’s ankles, released all four tourniquets, and waited for him to bleed out on the floor in the hall. And in the early hours of the following morning, a dozen members of the Fire Brigade were unable to save the driver of a Ford Fiesta on Hackney Marsh as both the car and driver went up in flames.

Matthew Webb jumped into the river beneath Niagara Falls on 24 July 1883 at 4:25 p.m. He was traversing the rapids for a purse of £12,000 but drowned when a whirlpool sucked him under after he’d been in the water for ten minutes. Webb was the first person to swim the English Channel, on 25 August 1875. He swam from Dover to Calais in less than twenty-two hours, but my mum and Gran had been swimming in the Channel for six weeks the first time I kissed Agne. It was late at night and we were alone in the club. I was cashing up and Agne was checking stock behind the bar. I had given her a job until she worked out what it was she wanted to do. Anyway, it was one of those
I brushed against her
she brushed against me
moments. I turned away slightly embarrassed, but then turned back, and we did it on the office floor.

“I fucking hope you wore a condom,” Ronny had said.

He didn’t have to say much else. I knew what he was thinking. Seven blokes round the clock for nine months added up to a lot of cock. But Agne got tested for everything imaginable the day I’d taken her out of the massage parlour, and was tested again three months later with nothing found that they couldn’t be put right with the jab of a needle.

The owner of the massage parlour threatened me with all sorts when I liberated Agne, but she spun around quick smart the moment she saw the severed hands that once belonged to Bashkim. Pauline, in contrast, was well pleased to see them, even though it was painful to smile. Ronny told me he had soaked Duka with petrol and promised he’d put the match out if Duka revealed where the £5000 was. And Duka may have answered differently if he had known Ronny as well as I did. But Duka didn’t, and ended up barbecued because of it. I wouldn’t take the money. I told Ronny it belonged to him and Big Pat for sorting me out. I said they should take a holiday. So Ronny went to Florida and Big Pat chose Majorca. They didn’t holiday together because deep down Pat always hated Ronny. Pat swore it wasn’t so, but we all knew otherwise. Ronny accidentally on purpose killed Pat’s little brother when he threw him out the window of a moving train.