Shredder (6 page)

Who the hell was that? I thought. His accent sounded East European—Russian, I guessed, though I hadn't heard many Russian accents outside of movies. With all that bling…was he Russian mafia? Had it really been the kid's idea to go exploring? Or had that old man been curious to know what was being discussed—and to get a look at the messenger? For a moment I felt I was the center of attention, like a rare medical specimen. Then I remembered what happens to rare medical specimens: they get dissected.

“He's very persuasive, this friend of yours,” said McGovern to me. He tossed the handset back to Red, who immediately started dismantling it.

“You're going to meet him?” I said.

“Yeah. Good old-fashioned face to face.”

“Where?” asked Junior. “Somewhere neutral?”

I don't want to hear this, I thought. Screw Amobi and the NCA—I'd done my part, and now Zoe would be safe. Amobi might be pissed off that I didn't know the venue, but if the Guvnor never told me it wouldn't be my fault.

“Trafalgar Square,” said the Guvnor. “Noon tomorrow.” He scooped up another few pistachios.

The rest of the room fell silent for a beat, taking that in, while I thought, Oh shit…because now I could feel myself being sucked into that swamp.

“You must be kidding,” said Junior. “Out in the open? All that public, all that CCTV?” The Guvnor's two wingmen were still silent, but the look on their faces spoke volumes—they agreed with his son.

“There is nowhere neutral, is there?” said McGovern. “There's nowhere in this town we don't control, he knows that.”

“Send someone else, then,” Red piped up. His accent was South London, his voice calm and even, calculating. “Send Steve.”

“Why send anyone?” said Steve. “Why are we even negotiating with this piece of shit?”

“Who said anything about negotiating?” said the Guvnor. “He thinks, Trafalgar Square, all that public, all that CCTV, we'd never pull anything there. He thinks it's safe.” He tossed the empty nutshells back into the bowl. “Scum will never know what hit him.”

There was another moment of silence. They were going to murder the Turk in the middle of Trafalgar Square? If anyone else considered the idea insane, they didn't say so. I suddenly remembered a story I'd come across when I first learned about the Guvnor: that he'd once gone to an underworld conference to bury the hatchet with a rival firm. All weapons had been checked in at the door, but as soon as he'd come face to face with other firm's boss, the Guvnor had strangled him with his bare hands. After that there was peace. McGovern got away with the most outrageous shit: that was how he got to be the Guvnor.

“Still no need for you to be there,” said Red.

“He knows what I look like,” said McGovern. “If I don't show, he's not going to sit down.”

“But we don't know what this Turk looks like, do we?” said Junior.

“One of us does,” said the Guvnor. And he grinned at me.

“You're in here.” Gary opened a door and stood back. I stepped into a small, neat, white-painted room with a single bed, a washbasin in one corner, a built-in closet and a flimsy white dressing table. A small old-fashioned TV on an extending arm faced the bed, and the only window was a long narrow one at high level—too narrow to climb through—and all that showed beyond were thick thorny bushes. It had once been a staff bedroom, I assumed. Gary nodded up the corridor. “There's a kitchen up that end. Make yourself something if you're hungry, have whatever's in the fridge. Anything you need?”

A phone
, I almost said, but I knew there'd be no point. “A toothbrush?”

Gary frowned. He was one of the Guvnor's sidekicks, the one with bulging eyes and the gardener's tan. The other one, the ginger guy with the shaved
head, was called Martin, and he was the senior of the two, which was presumably why Gary had been detailed to show me to the room where I'd be spending the night. He didn't seem to mind, until I asked for the toothbrush—now he seemed to be figuring out if it was worth the effort, when he wanted to get back to the Guvnor; there were plans being laid.

“I'll find out,” he said, and he strode off down the corridor the way we'd come.

I'd noticed as we entered that there was no lock on the door, but I'd seen half a dozen other heavies lurking in the hallways beyond—this wasn't a house where I could creep about unseen, looking for a phone or an unlocked laptop; there was no way I'd get a message to Amobi tonight. I decided I might as well make myself something to eat, as Gary had suggested.

The kitchen, like my bedroom, was neat and compact with high windows, but it wasn't empty. At the small round laminate table in the center two kids were eating pasta, supervised by a girl not much older than me. She had thick, wild golden hair woven into an old-fashioned plait that sat on her shoulder, and she was laughing as I entered, the sound tinkling like a crystal bell; but when she saw
me her laugh died away, as if she was frightened or embarrassed.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hello,” she said cautiously. That one word was enough to tell me where she was from—Glasgow, or thereabouts. Her voice too had a crystal ring, and her eyes were big and brown in her almond-shaped face. She was really quite beautiful, I realized; this brief confinement might be bearable after all.

“Finn!” The Guvnor's son Kelly clambered down from his seat opposite the girl, abandoning his bowl of pasta. Grabbing my hand, he dragged me over to the table. “This is Finn,” he announced loudly. His younger sister—I'd never learned her name—was sitting between Kelly and the older girl, who I presumed was their nanny; recognizing me, the little girl smiled but said nothing.

“Hey,” I said. Then realized I'd said that already.

The nanny looked up at me. “You want some pasta, Finn? There's plenty to go round.”

“I'd love some,” I said.

“It's got sausages in it,” said Kelly, clambering back into his chair.

“My favorite,” I said.

“I'm Victoria, by the way,” said the nanny as
she brought out a bowl from a high cupboard and reached for the pan of pasta on the stove. “Bonnie, eat up now,” she told the little girl. “I don't want you asking for biscuits later.”

“I told them you were here—they didn't believe me,” said Kelly, twirling a fork in his spaghetti with slow concentration.

“Yes I did,” said Victoria, plonking the bowl in front of me. “It's just, you weren't supposed to go wandering round the house, you know that.”

“But Dimitri was with me!” protested Kelly.

Victoria's smile concealed a wince. “And we're not supposed to talk about your daddy's friends, or his business,” she said.

There was a moment's awkward silence; I pretended not to have heard the old Russian bloke's name, while Bonnie looked down into her bowl. I'd guessed that after Kelly had taken Dimitri on his guided tour someone had administered a bollocking to Victoria, and the kids hadn't quite understood what had been going on. Kelly was frowning now, puzzled, as if he didn't know what he was and wasn't allowed to talk about.

“This pasta's lovely, thanks,” I said to Victoria. She smiled at me so warmly I suspected I'd done
something stupid, and sure enough, I'd managed to flick a dab of sauce onto the end of my nose. Kelly squealed in delight.

“Kelly, that's not nice,” scolded Victoria, so sweetly I wished she'd been scolding me. It was incongruous, finding a girl this angelic in the Guvnor's basement, while upstairs some horrendous violence was being plotted. I remembered the hug Kelly had given me when he found me upstairs, and wondered if it was this girl who'd taught him to be so warm and open with his affection. Hugs didn't seem to fit in with the Guvnor or his circle—a handshake was as physical as they ever got, if you didn't count the violence. Junior hadn't come across as the touchy-feely type when he punched me in the face.

“How come your brother doesn't eat with you?” I asked the kids.

Kelly looked baffled. “My brother?” he said.

“Steve,” I said. I saw Victoria glance at me, suspecting my motives for asking, but I didn't have a motive, apart from being nosy.

“Steve's not my brother!” snorted Kelly. “He's only half a brother.”

“We've got a different mum,” said Bonnie.

“Have you got a brother?” Kelly asked me.

“Naw,” I said. “No brothers, no sisters, no folks, just me.”

“Oh,” said Bonnie.

“It's fine,” I said. “Mostly.” I could tell that, like most kids, they found the thought of being all alone in the world quite scary. So did I, sometimes. I glanced at Victoria, but she didn't ask any questions. Just as well: I didn't really want to explain in front of Bonnie and Kelly how my parents had been murdered. “You a friend of the family?” I asked her.

She hesitated. Maybe I should have asked her something harmless, rather than put her on the spot; but tomorrow the Guvnor was taking me to an execution, and I might end up being one of the bodies left behind. I didn't feel like discussing the weather.

“My dad…he knew Mr. McGovern back in…They were business associates.” She floundered to a halt, blushing. So her father was a gangster too? I thought. A dead one, by the sound of it. Amobi had warned me long before that the Guvnor was dangerous to know, and I'd ignored him. And now here I was.

“Don't suppose I could borrow your mobile a minute?” I asked.

This time when Victoria looked at me there was a
steely glint in her eye, as if now I really was going too far. “I don't have one,” she lied.

“Hey, you two! Have you been good?”

We looked up from our food to find the Guvnor's young trophy wife, Cherry, entering. She still looked like a supermodel, all dangerous curves and golden skin, but her glance slid off me as if she didn't want to acknowledge my presence.

Her kids leaped in delight from their chairs to greet her, and while Victoria explained what they'd been doing that day—playing and watching TV, mostly—I took in the minder who had entered with Cherry. He was a tall tanned bloke in his midtwenties, with curly dark hair and flashing brown eyes. Like most of the Guvnor's retinue, he wore a suit, but he wore his better than any of the others wore theirs. He looked at me, reached inside his jacket, pulled out a toothbrush in a cellophane-sealed packet and tossed it to me. “Thanks,” I said. He grinned, cocky as a rock star.

Cherry was collecting the kids to take them home, letting their nanny have the night off; they said noisy goodbyes to Victoria, embracing her while Cherry looked on, obviously keen to get the hell out of the house. I knew how she felt. Finally she led them
away up the corridor, leaving just me and Victoria and the tall tanned minder. Now he reached into a side pocket and produced a DVD in a clear plastic sleeve, labeled with a marker scribble.

“I got the next few episodes,” he said to Victoria, as if I wasn't there.

“Great,” she said, blushing sweetly. She didn't bother introducing us, which was fine, because I really didn't care who this guy was. She just said, “See you later, maybe, Finn,” and went off with him down the corridor to a bedroom opposite the one Gary had shown me, closing the door behind them. It didn't look like they were going to spend their evening watching a pirated DVD: I hoped the walls had decent soundproofing.

Then I thought of Zoe, and felt a twinge of shame for leching after some girl I'd just met when I'd only left her that morning. But she was in a safe house, I knew, surrounded by cops, while I was banged up here—pretty much the exact opposite of a safe house—for what might be my last few hours on earth. And anyway, she'd never have found out….

I left the scattered dishes in the kitchen—Victoria was being paid to tidy up, I wasn't—headed back down the hall to my cell, and unwrapped my toothbrush,
then realized I'd forgotten to ask for toothpaste. I scrubbed my teeth with water, tossed the toothbrush in the sink, pulled my clothes off, lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling.

I wasn't aware of having slept, but when the knock came I suddenly realized my eyes were closed and I wasn't fully dressed.

“Yeah?” I said.

Gary opened the door. “We're leaving in fifteen minutes,” he said. He waited till I nodded to demonstrate I'd understood, then shut the door again.

I swung myself out of bed and sat on the edge of the mattress for a moment, trying to clear the sleep from my brain and figure out what I should do. Get to a phone somehow, obviously, and warn Amobi what was going down. But that had been impossible last night, and this morning would be no easier. What about doing a runner? If the Guvnor needed me around to make this meeting happen, maybe I could scuttle it, or at least delay it, by not being around. I glanced up again at the window. It was no wider than it had been the night before, and though I was pretty sure I could run faster than any of the Guvnor's goons, I had nowhere to run. I could feel
the adrenaline building up in my system; maybe it would be better just to duck through the ropes into the ring and get this confrontation over with.

Gary returned as I was polishing off a bowl of cornflakes. I left the bowl on the table and he walked me back through the house to the garage. I didn't head for the boot of the car parked there—a sleek silver Jag with darkened windows—because I didn't fancy being brought to this fight like a dog in a cage. But that didn't seem to have been Gary's intention. He merely grunted at me to hold still, pulled a black cloth bag from his pocket and dropped it over my head. I didn't resist but I didn't offer to help, either. The hood was of a soft, thick material that allowed me to breathe but made it impossible to see my surroundings or even tell day from night. I heard a rear passenger door open and felt Gary's hand on the top of my head, pushing me downwards, and I went with it. I shuffled along and settled into the seat; he bent over me, pulled the seat belt round my body and clicked it home.

I sat there for five or ten minutes, wondering who the last person was to have worn this hood. It smelled of soap, mostly, but there was also a subtle hint of vomit that the soap had failed to wash away. That wasn't a pleasant or useful train of thought,
so I focused instead on the meeting about to happen. If it was out in the open, in public, that meant I too would be out in the open, in public. I might get a chance to grab a passerby's phone, call Amobi and raise the alarm…except of course it would be too late to summon the NCA by then. I still had the Turk's number in my head—maybe I could call him at the last minute and warn him he was walking into a trap. But why the hell would I do anything to help the Turk?

I heard the connecting door to the house open again, and soon the garage was filled with a bustle of bodies, but there was little talk—no last-minute recaps or changes of plan for me to overhear. Everybody knew the strategy and understood their role. The driver's door and the other passenger doors opened, and someone got in beside me. I knew instantly it was the Guvnor himself, from that expensive-smelling aftershave he liked to splash on. I heard the whine of the garage door opening and felt the gentle shudder of the Jag as the engine fired up; then we rolled out into the glorious morning I'd glimpsed earlier through the windows of the kitchen. I presumed it was still glorious—I couldn't see a thing through the hood.

“Sleep all right?” the Guvnor grunted.

“Fine, thanks. You?”

He snorted at my familiarity. “Like a baby,” he said. “When we hit the M25 you can lose the hood. Won't be long.”

We rode together for a while in silence, the car weaving, stopping and starting as it followed the lanes out towards the main road. Then we picked up speed and soon I could hear the hiss and roar of other vehicles we passed. I was about to ask for the radio to be turned on, but it didn't seem appropriate somehow; some cretinous DJ wibbling on about this hot and sticky weather was the last thing I wanted to hear. Especially as it might well be one of the last things I heard.

McGovern said nothing, but I wasn't picking up any tension from him; on the contrary, the mood was relaxed and mellow, like were heading to a picnic in Hyde Park. I wondered why I had been given the honor of riding with the Guvnor himself, and it occurred to me I might as well make the most of it.

“Why are you doing this, Mr. McGovern?”

“You what?” His voice suggested he'd been lost in thought.

“It just seems so risky. I mean you've been in”—I was about to say “in hiding,” but I reconsidered at the
last minute—“incognito since you came back. And now you're meeting up with the Turk in public, in broad daylight, as if you don't care who sees you. Especially when…”
Especially when you're planning an ambush
. It seemed unnecessary to finish the sentence.