London Large: Blood on the Streets (12 page)

‘I’m in bed mate.’

‘Get up then - I’ll be there
in twenty minutes.’

He called a cab from Wardour
Street and sat down on the curb outside what had once been The Marquee Club; he
recalled halcyon nights here watching, as a boy, Eddie and the Hot Rods. Were
they still alive? What might they be doing, tonight, in this wrecked, fallen,
senseless world? Ping! went the phone. Olivia. He didn’t answer.

Not now. I can’t, not now.

H stared into space, trying,
again - how many times had he been forced to do this lately, he wondered - to
gather his thoughts, remember to breathe properly and process the world of
bullshit and horror he seemed doomed to wade through.

Ping! The phone, again.
Amisha. H held the device at a distance, as if he’d never seen it before, and
was overcome by a wave of nauseous panic. It seemed to be rising up from his
guts and clawing at this throat, at his mouth. Without thinking he launched the
phone into the air, it landed in the middle of the road and broke up into tiny
plastic shards.

A car had pulled up a little
further down the street. He didn’t see it, and Hilary Stone didn’t see him as
she got out of it and hurried down towards Peter Street, babbling loudly, her
phone glued to her ear.

H’s cab arrived. He hauled
himself up, utterly exhausted now, and leaned into the driver: ‘Bermondsey
please mate. Silwood Street. Sharpish.’

‘Still nothing?’, said
Hilary.

‘No maam. His phone’s gone
dead. I’ve called practically everyone he knows, or at least I know that he
knows, and nobody has seen him since he left Peter Street last night’, Amisha replied.

Hilary wheeled her chair back
from her desk, sat back with her hands linked behind her head, and exhaled
loudly.

‘The old bastard’s really
done it this time. He’s off duty, wanders alone into what will probably go down
as the worst murder scene we’ve ever had in London, and disappears from the
face of the earth for fourteen hours, or however long it turns out to be. This
is all too much, even for him. He’s lost it; I fear he’s really lost it now.
His days as a copper are numbered. We’ve got to find him before…’

‘I’m on it maam. I’ve just
been making calls until now. I think I’d be better off having a “mooch about”,
as he calls it, see if I can lay eyes on him in one of his old haunts.
Permission to get out there, maam?’

‘Granted. Don’t come back empty
handed.’

But Amisha had been
economical with the truth. When she’d spoken to Olivia earlier in the day she’d
been told that H was probably ‘on the missing list.’ She was given to
understand that this had happened before, and that H would surface when he was
ready.

‘When he really needs time to
himself he takes it, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. He hasn’t done
it for a while. He used to do it more, he’s been better the last few years. So
that would be my guess… I hope to God I’m right’, Olivia had said.

Amishsa was intrigued, and
more than a little reassured: ‘But what does he do, where does he go?’

‘He finds one of his old
mates and they go on a bender. They drink themselves into a coma. And then they
drink some more, sometimes for days. It’s not that uncommon where he comes
from. He calls it having a “good drink”, but it’s more than that. I think these
guys have some sort of death wish - they push it as far as they can. He gets
himself into a terrible state, and these days it takes a lot out of him. I’m
afraid one of these jaunts will finish him off. A lot of the people he knows
use cocaine as well I think. I’m talking about the older guys down there, not
the kids. I’m not sure if H does or not. He says not.’

‘And all this would take
place where?’, asked Amisha.

‘Somewhere on his old
stamping ground usually. They have their places. There or Soho. I’d start with
Confident John if I were you. Find him, Amisha. Please.’

Julie let out a heavy
sigh and dropped her phone onto the kitchen table for what seemed the fifteenth
time. And it was still only 11 am. She hadn’t lived through a morning this
long, this endlessly long, since H was out in the Falklands.

‘Jesus, where is he? Why is
he never available when you really need to talk to him?’ Justin, sitting
opposite her at the table, chewed his sun-dried tomato and kept his own
counsel.

It wasn’t like she needed to
talk to H very often; he’d withdrawn a long way back from her and the kids
after Justin had come onto the scene on a permanent basis.

Julie often thought about H’s
final outburst after she’d put him in the picture once and for all, what seemed
like half a lifetime ago:

‘Jules, don’t talk to me
about that soppy little yoghurt-knitting, sandal wearing, sociologist ponce. I
don’t want to see him and I don’t want to hear about him. What is Little Ron
going to learn about being a man from that fucking little old Mary Anne?’

‘OK H, stick around then, and
he can learn how to be a violent, chaotic pisshead like his real dad. Now
there’s
a role model for him. Justin’s worth ten of you, you fucking slob. Piss off.’

And now Little Ron was on
remand - as confused and unsettled a young man as you could wish to meet. His
hearing had been brought forward and by this time tomorrow he would have been
up before the beak, and would know more about his likely fate. Julie herself
was in utter turmoil, had hardly slept or eaten since his arrest. Little Ron
was putting on a brave face; but he was Harry Hawkins’ boy, and they were
tearing him to pieces in there. His father’s enemies, sworn enemies, were
legion. Only H could deal with this situation; she was out of her depth, and
Justin knew nothing of the world Little Ron was now struggling to survive in.

She picked up the phone
again, without thinking. Nothing. No maximum-call-charge message from a
well-spoken robot, no voicemail. Nothing.

‘It was always like this.
When the kids were little and they were ill, and I really needed help, I could
never find him. Always on the missing list, always working, always drinking,
never in the house…’

‘Well, Jules’, ventured
Justin, ‘men from that background, that culture…’

Julie had had enough. ‘What
“culture”?’, she shouted, ‘what bloody “culture”? Why are you defending the
bastard? All his “culture” ever taught him to do was fight, and work like a
maniac, and drink. They're all the same. They talk about family, and honour,
and values…and they‘re never there when you really need them. It’s all talk.
They’re all the bloody same, whether they’re coppers, or villains, or something
in between. All cut from the same damn cloth. Don’t talk to me about their
“culture”. Pig-headed dinosaurs is all they are.’

Justin said nothing, and took
her hands in his. She calmed down.

‘Cup of tea, my love?’

She nodded yes. ‘If the
selfish bastard doesn’t surface today, or show up tomorrow, I’ll never talk to
him again. Not for as long as I live.’

Nothing had been heard from H. Julie, Justin and Little Ronnie’s brief Michael Church were
the full strength of the boy’s support at the hearing. The Old Bailey could
still do the business: Julie and Justin, on coming into view of it, had been
awed, pacified and made anxious by its imposing majesty.

‘Hanging them high and
pressing them down since 1734. Good old British justice’, said Justin, through
gritted teeth, as they mounted the stairs.

They got into their seats
early, Julie ruminating sadly about the past, the breakup of her family and the
miserable prospects for her son; Justin thinking about his old research in
radical criminology and keeping to himself his bristling contempt for the ‘site
of power’ in which he was now, for a moment, trapped; the lawyer gloomily
reviewing his notes. Church had been saying all the positive things on the way
up, but was now wearing the face of a man who had been joined during a relaxing
session in his hot tub by a giant Richard the Third of unknown origin.

The court was sparsely
populated by…whom exactly?, Julie wondered. None of the others present were
known to her. Was it some sort of grim, low key spectator sport for those with
nothing better to do?

There was a stir in the
unseen lower regions of the building and suddenly Little Ronnie was brought up
into the defendant’s box. Julie shrieked involuntarily and began to cry. The
boy was cut and bruised about the face, and looked emaciated and confused. His
mother’s heart bled; she felt some kind of uncontrollable hysteria growing
inside her.

Justin moved to comfort her,
placing both his arms around her and drawing her into himself. ‘Shh, shh my
love’, he said, but was himself shocked and appalled by what he saw next.

The judge had entered, his
pinched scowl preceding him. Sir Peregrine Blunt was announced to the assembled
company and sat himself down with some ceremony.

‘No, not this old bastard’,
he whispered to himself, ‘this reactionary old brute. Not good. Not good at
all.’

Is this not the one we were
expecting?’, asked Julie.

‘No, this is Old Blunt. He’s
one of the old hang ‘em and flog ‘em brigade. As merciless as the day is long.
Horrible old pervert.’

‘Why pervert?’ asked Julie,
reeling now, as bad news was followed by worse.

‘Oh, just a figure of speech,
my love. But they’re all perverts, nasty little leftovers of the old public
school establishment. All those beatings and whatnot warped them. Look at his
face. I can’t believe they’re still getting away with it. We won’t get much out
of this old bastard, I’m afraid.’

The room settled. Church
cleared his throat and began his shpiel. To Julie he sounded like a detuned
radio, buzzing in and out of her ears. She was on the verge of panic, and her
old friend vertigo was making an unannounced guest appearance. She heard ‘…boy
with an unblemished record’, ‘…no previous convictions…’, ‘…appeal for
clemency…’, and finally ‘bail.’

The Judge halted him with a
raised hand.

‘Have you quite finished Mr
Church?’

‘Brace yourself, my love’,
Justin whispered as gently as he could into Julie’s ear.

‘I have, My Lord.’

Brace yourself.

‘Then I must inform you that
I have no intention of granting bail in this case. Your client is charged with
an extremely serious offence and in my view presents a clear flight risk. He
will not be granted bail, nor moved down to a lower court. He will face the
full weight of Her Majesty’s law, here, at the Bailey, in due course. Take him
down.’

Little Ronnie was led down.
He would not catch his mother’s eye. Julie collapsed to the floor. As he
comforted her, Justin fished her phone from her bag and punched in H’s number.
Nothing.

H’s arms hurt so much
it felt like the fire was working its way down from the top of his biceps to
the rest of his body. But he refused to cave in to the pain and grimly
continued with the chin-ups on the exercise bar in his bedroom for a further
minute before collapsing to the floor, gasping for the oxygen he needed to
re-stabilise his heart rate.

He’d woken up an hour earlier
and downed three pints of water to slacken the raging thirst of a body
dehydrated to an extent that only a three day bender could induce. But his body
could only deal with so much water. He opened his sock draw and grabbed the
bottle of scotch he kept tucked away in the corner, and took a couple of swigs.
He felt the soothing effect of the alcohol rush and his muscles relaxed.

Hair of the do
g
, nothing like it.

Hiding his sharpeners was no
more than habit. He knew Olivia knew where his bottles were, and he knew that
she knew that he knew. But old habits die hard.

Olivia entered the room.
She’d phoned Amisha the previous night when H had turned up, bedraggled and
wasted. She’d taken one look at him and winced when she thought about the
amount of alcohol coursing through his bloodstream, but left him alone as he
stumbled up the stairs and crashed into bed. She didn’t reproach or harangue
him. She had simply put a cover on him and kissed him gently.

‘I’m surprised you can still
do chin-ups after what you’ve put your body through the last three days.’

‘Don’t start Liv.’

Olivia had heard the tales of
how super-fit he had been in his army days and in the early days of his police
career. She had seen pictures of the once legendary six-pack and the powerful
biceps. Wouldn’t it be wonderful, she mused, if he could look like that again?
But he didn’t. In fact he looked like 10lbs of shit in a 5lb bag as he admired
his paunch in the full length wardrobe mirror. A soft, uncontrollable giggle
forced itself from Olivia’s mouth.

‘What?’ he said.

‘Nothing, get ready. Your
driver says ten minutes’ she said, as she left the room.

H went through the rest of
his morning routine. As usual it was that bit at the end, the sweeping of the thatch
of thin grey hair across the crown of his head, that caused him the most
anguish. But thoughts of fitting a rug or having a weave never entered his
mind. Celebrity-style hair surgery was not for Harry Hawkins.

Then the ring on the
doorbell. Since H’s disappearance Olivia and Amisha had spoken a couple times.
Their old enmity was fading.

‘Hi Olivia. How’s the
patient? Will he be ready for work?’

‘He’ll be ready. I’m pretty
sure he’s had enough alcohol to stun an elephant, but his powers of recovery
are still mindboggling.’

Amisha entered the living
room; H was gulping hard from a cup of coffee.

‘Nice to see you looking so
spritely guv, how are you feeling?’

‘Hello Ames. I’m fine, what’s
happening?’

‘Well guv, do you want the
good news or the bad news?’

‘Bad.’

‘If you switch the TV on just
now you’ll find your friend Joey being interviewed.’