London Large: Blood on the Streets (17 page)

As Ronnie curled in pain
another blow smashed into his head. He lost consciousness.

He didn’t know how long it
had been - maybe five minutes, maybe five hours - when he started to regain
awareness of his surroundings.

Bunk beds. He was in a
different cell. He was on ‘A’ wing, completely at the mercy of the ruthless
bastards who would break him now and kill him whenever they saw fit. He heard
cruel laughter and banter outside his new cell.

No more. Can’t take no
more. Must end it now.

He looked around for a way
out. His shoelaces had been taken when he’d arrived but the bed above had a
sheet. He sprang up, grabbed it and quickly ripped it into long pieces. He
wanted to act quickly but his fingers and thumbs shook, made clumsy by the
panic that had gripped him.

Make speed not haste
Ronnie, speed not haste.

He focused hard. His dad had
taught him every type of knot in the book as a young boy. He remembered the
lessons. He knew what he was doing. He didn’t have time to consider the irony;
the lessons his dad had given him so he could save lives were now being used to
end his own.

He tied two pieces of sheet
together. Long enough now. He readied the noose.

Ronnie moved the lone chair
to the window, stood on it and tied the sheet securely to the bars. An odd
sense of serenity came over him as he tightened the noose around his neck and
kicked the chair away.

But he’d made haste, not
speed. He’d neglected to shut himself in. Alerted by the noise, a prisoner
entered the cell, lifted his gasping body as if it was lighter than a
scarecrow, undid the noose and tossed him onto the lower bunk.

Ronnie lay there frightened
to look, frightened to think. What lay in store for him now? Multiple rape,
beatings, torture. What more arrows of outrageous fucking fortune would he have
to suffer now, before he would be released from this world?

He had learned that bravado
and terror were uneasy bedfellows, as the derring-do of the suicide attempt
collapsed into fear. He was utterly terrified as he lay on the bed, waiting for
the dreadful fate he thought was about to be unleashed upon him. Fear had
crawled inside his head, had burrowed its way into his subconscious and was now
consuming every fibre of his being, like maggots devouring every single scrap
of a piece of rotted fruit.

Then the prisoner spoke.

‘Every prison is like
separate kingdom. Has own rules, own kings, Ronnie.’

Ronnie turned round, startled
by the reassuring reference to his name, and looked into the eyes of his new
cell mate, eyes that were as deep, dark and impenetrable as his own despair.

‘Who are you?’

‘This wing now my kingdom. I
protect you.’

‘Why. Who are you? Why would
you protect me? Why was I moved here? What’s going on?’

The prisoner vaulted to the
top of his bunk, sat back and wrestled with a broadsheet newspaper.

‘My name is Basim. Basim
Dragusha. Please to meet you, Ronnie. ’

John was feeling not at
all confident as he entered the Queen’s Head pub in Waterloo. He’d heard from
Podge, a small time crook and close friend, about some dodgy goings on in the
area and had decided to take a look. John was a creature of habit and his days
usually consisted of the same pubs, same bookies, same cafe. His confidence
always plummeted when he was off his own manor. He needed his routines like a
junkie needs a fix.

This particular pub was
situated opposite a small estate just off the main drag that led up to Waterloo
Bridge. It wasn’t his type of pub. It was clean, modern and plush leather
chairs adorned its spotless dark oak floors and crisp magnolia walls. Beer was
a fiver a pint. It was a transient kind of place, designed to draw in commuters
for a drink or two before they made their way back to suburban south west
London from the Waterloo mainline. But it did have one advantage, which was the
clean windows through which you could watch the outside world go by. And
Confident John was here to watch.

H had made it clear he wanted
an extra,
extra
special effort to find the bastard who he’d seen fleeing
along Berwick Street after the mayhem at the Russians’ club, and who had been
getting hold of the wife of his best mate. He wanted Agapov found, double
sharpish, if he was still alive. So John had risen to the occasion and decided
to check out Podge’s lead.

‘I’m telling you John,
there’s definitely something happening on that estate around the back of
Waterloo. My mate lives there and says a flat that’s been unoccupied for months
is suddenly a hive of activity. Geezers with dark suits dropping in and out all
hours of the day and night. He reckons they sound like Poles, or Russians or
something.’

He’d heard plenty of rumours
and thought of giving H a call but didn’t want to send him all over London on a
series of wild goose chases. So here he was, giving personal attention to the
possibility that the bastard the big man was so desperate to track down might
be here.

He sauntered up to the bar in
his best non-confident confident manner and smiled at the barmaid

‘Pint of lager please love.’

He took his pint, found a
seat and sat down with a copy of the Racing Post. He sat, unusually, in the
middle of the bar because it had the best views of the outside world. Confident
John was usually more of a quiet corner kind of bloke.

He sipped his beer slowly,
occasionally looking outside with as much nonchalance and disinterest as he
could muster.

He ordered another pint, and
another. He wasn’t used to this surveillance lark. Time drifted by as slowly as
the double-maths lessons at Scott Lidgett school had, when he was a boy. But he
didn’t mind how long he sat there - if there was one commodity Confident John
Viney had in spades it was time. Time to drink. Time to study the racing form.
Time to watch the world go by.

He’d arrived at 2 pm and it
was now 7; London had passed from daylight to darkness.

An SUV with tinted windows
pulled up outside the flats he was watching. His heart rate accelerated. A
mother with two crying kids in tow got the shopping out of the back and went
into a flat a few doors down. John ordered another beer.

A few more beers later it was
close to closing time and he was ready to get a cab back to Bermondsey when a
black Mercedes crawled up and came to a halt outside the pub. Four lumps in
dark suits climbed out and looked about, checking out the landscape. He fought
his compulsion to look at them directly but failed, and one of them clocked him
staring. He became agitated and his breathing quickened.

‘Who do these fuckers think
there’re looking at?’, he mumbled,
as he quickly refocused on the racing form in his paper. He nervously looked on
from the corner of his eye, as the men made their way over to the flats he had
spent the whole day watching, and went inside.

Number 72. Fuck me, I
think Podge has nailed it.

He downed his pint and walked
out of the pub. His confidence was still in extremely short supply as he
crossed the road and headed for the flat. He was shitting himself. He didn’t
normally do things like this but he wanted to be certain. Just a peep through
the windows, see what he could see. Just a quick look.

He was halfway across the
street, perspiring heavily, beer sweating through his pores, when the door
opened. Panic set in. He couldn’t act or think. The messaging system inside his
brain shut down, unable to process the situation. He was like a hedgehog
curling into a ball to protect itself from the oncoming path of a 20-ton tipper
lorry.

A suit stepped out from the
flat; the same one who had clocked him earlier. Their eyes met. John mustered
every single bit of willpower he could find, commanded every sinew in his body
to keep moving and act naturally. He wasn’t a brave man.

Front it son, front it.

He kept walking, head down,
straining to look like everything was normal. Just another day at the pub.
Hiding his fear behind a friendly smile, he strolled past the imposing figure
of the shadowy sentinel. Without looking back he turned into the first
stairwell he came to. A massive sigh of relief released the tension.

He sprinted up to the first
floor where, from the stairwell, he had a reasonable view of the flat in
question. The sentinel went back into the flat.

Who are these fuckers?
Look like KGB men from a Hollywood movie.

So what did he have? Four big
fellas pull up in a Merc, go into a flat and make him feel nervous. He didn’t
want to call H. He didn’t have enough.

With uncharacteristic
decisiveness John settled on a plan of action. Back of the flats, he thought,
ground floor flats usually have small gardens. He made his way round.

He found the gardens and considered
scaling the six foot fence that surrounded them and seeing if he could take a
look into the flat. At that point his decisiveness and courage deserted him.

But he couldn’t let the big
man down. Adjacent to the rear gardens was a small play area. A few swings, a
roundabout, a slide. John tucked himself into the bushes that surrounded the
play area and prepared for night watchman duties.

A proper Italian pizza
restaurant in Dean Street. H arranged to meet Ronnie at nine; Ronnie was
running late. H whiled away a few minutes, nursed a double scotch and
reminisced. They had a lot of spots like this, sites of their adventures as
young men. Boys, really.

Late one wet autumn night
in…what was it, 1977? - Ronnie would know – they’d wound up here after a long
session; they’d needed to take some carbs on board to soak up all the beer. The
meal was hearty, washed down with a couple of bottles of red and a few glasses
of grappa.

‘What sort of money you
holding, Ron?’, H said, picking his teeth and kicking back in his chair.

‘Nish mate. I gave what I had
left to that bird in Crackers, for a cab. I ain’t got a tanner.’

‘We’ll have to do a runner
then. I can’t cover this lot. We’ve done nearly thirty quid here’, said H.

‘I don’t know H…We’ve had a
few tonight.’

‘Sort yourself out, you
fucking tosspot. What are you, a man or a mouse? There’s only one way out of
here tonight’, said H, watching the waiters closely out of the corner of his
eye. ‘You first…on my count…one, two…’

Ronnie was up, his chair
flying backwards, before H got to three, swarming through the door like a tramp
tanked up on paint thinner. Not the surest on his feet he’d ever looked. H was
going to have to back him up. He leapt out of his chair and joined Ronnie on
the pavement outside, straightening him up and pulling him forward.

‘Liven up Ron, let’s fucking
do one.’

And they were off, haring
down Dean Street like there was no tomorrow.

The blood was running high;
they were moving fast and got separated. The pavement was wet underfoot. The
curses of irate and beefy Italian waiters could be heard behind them - this
shit came out of their wages.

H kept going, gasping for
breath, his ears pounding. Suddenly he heard ‘Fuck!’ and a cry of pain as
Ronnie went down. H wheeled himself round and saw four men in white shirts
closing in on his friend like a pack of hyenas.

Ronnie was curled up, trying
to protect his head and already well into the first phase of a proper kicking
by the time H got back to him. He was moving at speed, behind a giant blue
wheelie bin. He skittled two of the waiters over with it and then, while Ronnie
struggled to his feet, launched himself at the other two, flailing, kicking and
shouting.

The two of them on the attack
was too much for the older men to handle. Sixty seconds of old school south
London street fighting and the waiters thought better of it; they retreated
back along Dean Street, gesticulating wildly and uttering foul curses.

Have that, you fucking
mugs.

H snapped out of it and found
himself back in 2015.

‘Penny for ‘em H’, said
Ronnie, looming large over the table.

‘I was just thinking about
the time we did a runner out of here. You went down like a sack of shit that
night, mate. I had to get you out of trouble, as usual. Remember?’.

‘ ‘course I do. Happy days’,
said Ronnie, breaking into his first real smile in an age.

‘Happier than these, mate.
Happier than these. Sit down son,’ H said with a sigh, ‘there’s something I’ve
got to tell you. About Tara.’

Ronnie’s head was down,
and H was having trouble getting him to lift it again. The Ruddock marriage had
seen a few rocky passages, and Ronnie had suspected from time to time that Tara
might have been at it with someone. But this? Sex club-owning Russian
gangsters? Walking round town with her like they owned the place? Owned her?

H had hit him the second
worst hammer blow of his life. Not the big man’s fault. Had to be done. H had
always done what had to be done.

Ronnie sat still, his head
down, saying nothing. He had never known such pain, such rage, such impotent
confusion as he had in the short period since H had phoned him in New York. And
now this. He was glued to the spot, outwardly calm, while volcanic turmoil
raged inside him.

H knew the signs. Better than
anybody. ‘Fancy a livener, son? Drop of scotch?’, he ventured.

Nothing.

Fuck me, he’s lost it.
He’s worse than I was in the park. What did Amisha call it?...Poor bastard.

The long, horrible, pregnant
pause stayed pregnant. H was starting to get the nasty sinking feeling he’d
become too familiar with lately, like it wouldn’t be long before he’d lose
control of his emotions, and then his actions. He glugged his scotch and
ordered two more doubles. He’d take care of Ronnie’s if he didn’t want it.