Loose Head

LOOSE HEAD

by Jeff Keithly

Published by Jeff Keithly at Smashwords

Copyright 2011 Jeff Keithly, Loose Head LLC

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Acknowledgments

I would like to take this opportunity to thank Detective Chief Inspectors Ian McMurdie and Alan Bostock  for their insights into the inner workings of the Metropolitan Police Service. They were immensely helpful and patient, and also convinced me never to take up a life of crime in London. I would also like to thank my friends Edie and William Bell, Andrew Fraser and Jane Moulson, for their generous English hospitality, and all of my present and former teammates on the Portland Rugby Club and Portland Old Boars, the living and the dead.

This book is dedicated to my daughters, Lilli and Elise, who have always believed in the power of a good story.

For Mara Lynn, who would have preferred Nicki.

Prologue

On those rare occasions when I have contemplated my own death, I always assumed it would be in some noble cause: dismembered by a train as I tossed a wayward child to its mother; killed by a stray bullet as I dragged a police comrade out of harm’s way; even flattened by a bus as I attempted to rescue a panicked puppy. But not like this. Not like this.

The heavy rusted chain clamped round my ankles was as hard as a divorce solicitor’s heart, and as warm. The other end of the chain passed through the ruined hulk of an engine block – it appeared to be an old Ford V-8 – grating moodily back and forth across the teak decking. I stood, arms bound behind my back, in the stern of a 30-foot motor launch, heaving at idle somewhere off the foggy coast of Dover. The night was moonless, and black waves slapped the sides of the boat as it rolled sickeningly in the chop. Below me lay 50 fathoms of icy, lightless brine. All my life I have feared deep water, and now my soul throbbed with dread.

Any moment, as soon as the four big men in the wheelhouse had consumed sufficient whisky to steel themselves for the deed, the engine block would be heaved to the rail and dropped overboard. I would have little choice but to follow, plummeting through Stygian darkness, pulled down by 400 pounds of steel, my brain pleading for air, my eardrums rupturing from the pressure, until I could resist no more and icy seawater filled my lungs...

With luck, I would be dead before I hit the seafloor. Offhand, I could think of no worse way to die.

The empty bottle went overboard with a splash. ”Time to do what we came for, boys. Let’s get it over with.”

Artemis Paul. Not a shred of human emotion in that voice. Not that I expected any. Paul was a clinical sociopath, but one who had turned an otherwise-crippling malady to his advantage in a very successful criminal career. Loan-sharking. Pimping. Maybe murder as well, though I had no hard evidence. Not until tonight.

“Mr. Paul. He’s SCD. You know how they’ll react.”

“You let me worry about that.” Paul’s voice was hammer-head hard. “All you should be thinking is what you won’t owe me after tonight.”

So he was cancelling their undoubtedly substantial debts in exchange for this little night’s work – clever. Knowing how much Artemis Paul loved money, I realized just how desperately he wanted me dead.

They came for me now, the rough seas and the whisky keeping their movements slow and careful. The two I didn’t know seized one side of the greasy engine block, somewhat squeamishly, I thought, not looking at me, concentrated on preserving their digits as the boat rolled. The two I did know – Artemis Paul and Mick Ryan – took the other side of the wallowing hulk of steel, and made ready to feed me to the sea.

The evening had just gone from bad to worse.

Chapter 1

A storm was coming, and my only consolation was that it would wet the virtuous and vice-riddled alike. As the wind waltzed with a weary whirl of withered leaves and the first plump pearls of precipitation plummeted parkward, my partner, Brian Abbott, and I made a brisk circuit of the secluded, shrubbery-screened seraglios of Soho Square. I jammed my fists deeper into the pockets of my mac and hissed in annoyance. The bell of St. Patrick’s church on the east side of the square tolled somewhat mockingly, I thought. Our quarry was nowhere in sight. Time to check the chalet.

I was looking for Mick Ryan, a leg-breaker in the service of one Artemis Paul. Paul was a particularly loathsome specimen of London loan shark – or, to be more accurate, all-around turd-snapper -- a man with the lifestyle of a lord and the pitiless soul of a Thames estuary seagull. Mick Ryan was one of Paul’s enforcers, a curly-haired, cheerful-looking thug whose forte was inflicting agony without leaving a mark. More than one delinquent Paul client had soiled himself under Ryan’s sympathetic ministrations, and afterward, we had never been able to prove a thing. But for all his proficiency, Ryan was no sadist; to him, dislocating digits and traumatizing tissues was just a job, one he could leave at the office when his long day’s toil was done.

In fact, by the standards of the day, Mick Ryan was a virtuous man in a brutal profession. Quiet and surprisingly abstemious in his personal habits, he didn’t do drugs or lash out in random violence. He was even unencumbered by the love of the bottle that plagued so many of his Irish brethren. Oh, he would take a pint or two of Sam Smith’s Sovereign Best Bitter after indulging in his twin passions: playing flanker for the London Celtic rugby union football club, and the Uilleann pipes in a traditional Celtic band called Poteen. But he was just a social drinker, not a pro.

This is not to say that, despite a face better suited to a Renaissance cherub than a loan shark’s enforcer, Mick Ryan led an entirely seraphic life. He did enjoy an occasional wager. And then one day, his brother introduced him to Shane McMurdo.

Shane was a jockey, one of the best – five feet and eight stone of red-haired, whip-wielding dynamite. Ryan’s brother, Timothy, had done McMurdo an unspecified service, and in return, a grateful McMurdo laid bare the secrets of his guild. Specifically, he told the brothers Ryan which horse to bet in one race of a given meet, in return for half of the resulting swag.

And so Mick Ryan made the transition from casual gambler to major player. At first all went gloriously according to plan, and McMurdo’s tips proved to be pure gold. But there came a day when both the Ryans’ ever-increasing winnings and their clandestine chats with the diminutive McMurdo came to the notice of the wrong element. At the jockey’s direction, the brothers put £50,000 on a filly called Cucaracha in the fourth race at Epsom Downs. Cucaracha failed to place, and McMurdo vanished from the jockey’s lounge and was never seen again.

Alas for Mick Ryan, 25,000 of those pounds had been the sum total of his and his brother’s ill-gotten gains from their earlier wagers. The other £25,000 he had borrowed, in certainty of quick repayment, from his boss, Artie Paul. And in two minutes flat, Ryan made the transition from valued employee to deadbeat customer.

Time passed, and accumulated interest triggered an automatic response. Ryan found himself on the receiving end of the same treatment he had so often meted out. But with no source of income other than his weekly pay envelope, Ryan had no hope of paying what he owed. Then, ogling Ryan’s too-pretty features and rugby-hardened body, Artemis Paul offered a diabolical choice: die, or join the legion of rent-boys plying their trade in his service. To sweeten the pot, Paul said he would credit Ryan’s account with double the going rate for each sexual act.

And so it was that I approached the ancient, half-timbered chalet in the centre of Soho Square. I saw that the decrepit padlock on one of the doors had been torn off. Nodding to Brian, I nudged the door open with my toe. As my eyes adjusted to the gloom within, I beheld Mick Ryan, kneeling in fellationic worship before a chubby, red-faced Dutch tourist. At my entrance, both looked up, with the startled eyes of guilty pets; I flourished my warrant-card and the tourist, fumbling with his fly, fled.

“Still sucking peter to pay Paul,” said I, sadly. “A shame you aren’t as good on the bagpipes as you are on the skin flute. A few gigs with the Chieftains and you’d be laughing.”

“What d’you mean, barging in here like that and chasing away me customers?” Ryan snarled, rising menacingly to his feet.

“It’s my job. And I didn’t see you return his money. Anyway, at least you didn’t have to swallow.”

“Ahh. What d’you want, Reed, ya Cockney bloodsucker?”

“Hah. Better a Cockney bloodsucker than a bloody coc...”

“Yes, yes, most amusin’. Why’re ya bustin’ me balls?”

“I need a small favour – and it’s not your balls I’m out to squeeze. In fact, you may come to think of me as your avenging angel.”

Ryan’s scowl didn’t change, but something kindled in his eyes, a sort of hopeful ferocity, the kind of look I had often seen when the rugby ball suddenly popped loose after a tackle. Ryan was a very good flanker, one of the best I’ve ever played against, strong, agile and ferocious. Only a slight lack of ambition, an inability to commit unreservedly to the game, had held him back from true greatness.

“So what is it, then?”

“Simple. I want you to introduce me to your boss.”

And it had all gone so smoothly. SCD – Specialist Crime Directorate – were interested in Paul because of his pimping and loan-sharking, obviously. There was also the matter of Martin Wallace. Wallace was a small-time drug dealer who, my sources told me, was looking to make a reputation as a man who feared no one. He borrowed £10,000 from Paul, then ostentatiously refused to repay the debt, flaunting his “fuck you” attitude for all the London underworld to see.

One night Wallace staggered forth from his local, fairly foaming at the ears from the beer he’d consumed. Half an hour later, the denizens of the neighborhood were startled from their beds by a flaming apparition, caroming from car to car down the middle of Redchurch Street and uttering ghastly, window-rattling howls. At last he collapsed, and the horrified neighbors rushed out to smother the flames with blankets. It was Martin Wallace; someone had doused him with petrol and ignited him. He died an hour later, in agony. We at Hendon SCD had a strong suspicion who that someone might be, but there was the small matter of proving it – hence my visit to Mick Ryan.

On the strength of Ryan’s good word – he told his boss I was a rugby mate who needed the money for a sure-thing stock tip – I borrowed £5,000 from Artemis Paul that night, promising to repay him within two weeks at 30 percent a week interest. Paul had even credited Ryan’s account with a 10 percent commission. It was now two weeks later. A bit early to pay Paul a return visit, but then, leaving work, I suddenly thought of Mick Ryan, and his surprising second career. A few minutes later, almost without intervention of conscious thought, I alighted from a taxi in front of Paul’s nightclub, a surprisingly tasteful and jazzy enclave called Blue Hour ‘round the corner from the Kilburn tube station.

A nagging voice inside told me I was being stupid. It’s completely against Metropolitan Police Service policy to deliberately seek out a suspect on your own – you always take a colleague along, both for safety and to corroborate evidence. Still, I told myself, this was merely a visit of reassurance, to let Paul know I’d have his money soon, to keep the investigation ticking along. As I pulled open the door, I prayed my supervisors – and my partner – would understand.

I had hardly licked the cream from my Irish coffee when I felt a hand on my elbow. He wasn’t a tall man, but he was a hard man, his neck threatening to burst his collar like ice from a frozen pipe, his shoulders and biceps straining the fine wool of his black cashmere turtleneck. “Mr. Paul would like to see you,” he said pleasantly, and shepherded me firmly toward the back.

Paul’s office was surprisingly spacious, given the rents in this corner of London. A series of CCTV monitors on the opposite wall displayed views of the club: the bar, the dance floor, the booths, the kitchen, the cellar, the toilets, the sidewalk outside. In the women’s loo, a willowy blond was just settling her knickers as I entered, and I paused for an appreciative ogle. I caught sight of myself in the office monitor – a head taller than the bloke who had me by the arm, thick-necked, slope-shouldered, nasty scar over the left eye, ears like rawhide dog-chews from my years in the forward pack, a flash of watchful green eyes beneath close-cropped black hair.