Take the A-Train

Nick Sharman is in traction, hospitalised for four months, and desperate for a distraction. Then Fiona arrives – a topless model for the tabloids who bullies him into convalescing in her flat in Camberwell…

After his last disaster-ridden case, Sharman has promised himself a quiet life. What he gets – almost the minute his leg is out of the plaster – is more trouble. Emerald Watkins, king of a black south London ‘firm’, has received a tip-off that he’s about to be arrested after a large stash of cocaine is found in one of his lock-ups. He wants Sharman to help his nephew Teddy find out who’s stitched him up.

As Sharman roams the urban mayhem of South London in search of his mystery man, he is in turn bribed, shot at and set up for a particularly gruesome murder… all in a night’s work.

Mark Timlin
has written some thirty novels under many different names, including best selling books as Lee Martin, innumerable short stories, an anthology and numerous articles for various newspapers and magazines. His serial hero, Nick Sharman, who appears in
Take the A-Train
, has featured in a Carlton TV series, starring Clive Owen, before he went on to become a Hollywood superstar. Mark lives in Newport, Wales.

‘The king of the British hard-boiled thriller’
–
Times

‘Grips like a pair of regulation handcuffs’
–
Guardian

‘Reverberates like a gunshot’
–
Irish Times

‘Definitely one of the best’
–
Time Out

‘The mean streets of South London need their heroes tough. Private eye Nick Sharman fits the bill’
–
Telegraph

‘Full of cars, girls, guns, strung out along the high sierras of Brixton and Battersea, the Elephant and the North Peckham Estate, all those jewels in the crown they call Sarf London’
–
Arena

Other books by Mark Timlin

A Good Year for the Roses
1988

Romeo’s Girl
1990

Gun Street Girl
1990

Take the A-Train
1991

The Turnaround
1991

Hearts of Stone
1992

Zip Gun Boogie
1992

Falls the Shadow
1993

Ashes by Now
1993

Pretend We’re Dead
1994

Paint It Black
1995

Find My Way Home
1996

Sharman and Other Filth
(short stories) 1996

A Street That Rhymed with 3 AM
1997

Dead Flowers
1998

Quick Before They Catch Us
1999

All the Empty Places
2000

Stay Another Day
2010

OTHERS

I Spied a Pale Horse
1999

Answers from the Grave
2004

as
TONY WILLIAMS

Valin’s Raiders
1994

Blue on Blue
1999

as
JIM BALLANTYNE

The Torturer
1995

as
MARTIN MILK

That Saturday
1996

as
LEE MARTIN

Gangsters Wives
2007

The Lipstick Killers
2009

This book is for:

HEATHER JEEVES

Who never gives up

RICHARD EVANS

JANE MORPETH

CATHY SCHOFIELD

OLIVER JOHNSON

&

AS ALWAYS,

HMG

WHO FOREVER SAILS WHERE

THE WHITE WATER FLOWS

R.I.P. BABE

I
 was banged up for four months. Four months in traction at St Thomas’s, the police hospital, with a thigh bone chipped by a 9 mm short bullet. But only one policeman came and visited me whilst I was there. Socially at least.

At first I was in a room of my own. I think that was more to keep the press away than anything else. Lawyers paid. They paid me too. Mostly to keep me quiet. I’d been working on a case involving two sisters from a very wealthy family. They weren’t sisters really, but that’s another story. It had all ended rather messily at a building site in Hammersmith. One of the sisters was in an exclusive nursing home. Which is a polite way of saying she was bouncing her head off rubber walls at the cost of a grand a day in an upmarket mental hospital when she should have been in Broadmoor. But money talks louder than justice. The other had moved to Nassau, Bahamas and was permanently incommunicado. I was still in South London and the firm of legal eagles retained by the family had sent me a cheque of such gross proportions, with so many noughts on the end, that it was almost an embarrassment to deposit it at my bank. Almost but not quite. With the cheque came a letter asking me politely to forget the whole incident.

What incident?

After a month, everyone had forgotten who I was and the lawyers stopped paying, so I paid myself. I had the dough and it was a small price for privacy.

I’d had a lot of visitors, considering. Considering I was in a lot of pain from a busted-up leg that just refused to heal. Considering also that my temper was short and my bad moods were long, it was amazing that anyone at all came to visit, a second time at least. My mother came up a few times, and my ex-wife and daughter. My daughter was good, my ex-wife not so. She was large with child, huge in fact. The child wasn’t mine. Maybe that was one reason for my bad temper, maybe not. My ex-wife was due any time and loving every minute. I don’t think my daughter was quite so pleased. She brought me fruit gums. My daughter, that is.

I was visited by other friends too. Wanda the Cat Woman called in during the first week with a wine cooler stuffed with bottles of imported lager. She looked as luscious as ever, blonde, with a Brixton tan and a load of questions I wasn’t about to answer. She asked me if she could do anything for me.

There are a million answers to that; someday I’ll write them all down. I asked her to check out my flat and empty the fridge as I knew I was going to be in for a long stay. I gave her my keys and she told me she would. Finally I asked her to keep looking after my cat. She told me she would have done anyway. After she went I drank too much lager and got in a row with my consultant. I told him to go fuck himself, even offered him a lager bottle with which to do it. From then on I got treated by a regular doctor. I didn’t mind. The regular doctor was female and had warmer hands.

An old girl friend called Teresa dropped in from time to time but she was living down in Bristol so it wasn’t easy for her. Everyone brought something. That was my rule. If they wanted to come up to the tenth floor and watch afternoon TV, then they brought something for me. Shit, it was me that had to sit out the other twenty-two hours of the day when the visitors had split.

Charlie, the mechanic who looks after my cars, came in the second week I was there. He brought me some detective novels. Pretty good they were too. He thought I could maybe get a few pointers from them and stop myself ending up in hospital. I told him it could have been worse. I lined them up on the shelf beside my bed and admired their brightly coloured covers.

Des, who runs a bar in Covent Garden, popped in often during his quiet time in the afternoon and always brought a token bottle. My life fell into a routine pretty quickly. It worked out that I got a visitor every other day throughout the week. I’d sit with my leg up in plaster and traction and talk for a bit and eat grapes, and then I’d get tired and they’d leave. Then I’d run some movies through the little projector in my mind and get depressed and drink the presents I’d been brought and take a pill and sleep perchance to dream … aye, there’s the rub.

I had a room with a river view. The corner window looked out over South London to Crystal Palace in one direction, and up to Battersea and across the river to Chelsea and beyond in another, and back round to Whitehall in a third. I could look at the river traffic, and the road traffic over Lambeth Bridge, and down Albert Embankment, and soon worked out that, if I closed the curtains three-quarters of the way around my bed and kept the curtains at the window open all day, I could get a twenty-four hour movie which beat the one in my head hands down.

So as the summer finished and autumn came I watched the earth turn through that window and the city change from green to brown as the winter began to lock in.

I’d sit in the dawn light, still drunk from last night’s sleepers, and listen to hospital radio through impossibly uncomfortable headphones and watch the spires and skyscrapers poke through the mist and wonder if I’d ever be able to walk the cold streets again.

O
n the first Friday in October I was the last to hear that my ex-wife had given birth to a bouncing baby boy a few weeks before, and I realised that another episode of my life was irredeemably over. I also had a brand new visitor. I’d met her twice earlier during that fucked-up summer and if you’d asked me I would have doubted she would even remember my name. She was about five three or four and built so sweet you wanted to eat her underwear. Her name was Fiona. Just that as far as I knew, and she was a model for the tabloids and the wank magazine set.

She pushed open the door to my room around five p.m. when the late afternoon sun was angled across the bed and reflecting through the dark glass of the Moosehead bottle I was holding, making green spectrums across the ceiling. I’d just been given a shave, had my hair washed, and been changed into fresh pyjamas, and even though I say so myself I thought I was looking pretty attractive and she couldn’t have picked a better time to call.

‘Sharman,’ she said from the doorway, ‘you look like a big poof.’

She’d been a trifle abrasive when we’d met before so I wasn’t as taken aback as I might have been. I maintained my cool and said: ‘Oh, it’s you. Pull up a toadstool and sit down.’ It wasn’t great but it was the best I could do at short notice.

She was wearing one of those real short, tube mini dresses made of some clingy material that was so tight you could see where she’d nicked herself shaving her bikini line. It was teamed with dark tights and a Levis jacket that was distressed to the point of tears. Her hair was thick and dark and hung below her shoulders. It caught the sun and absorbed it, then freed it as reluctantly as a lover, and where the sun had touched were highlights of the deepest red.

She let the door close behind her and came over and hitched herself up to sit on the edge of the bed. Her skirt rode up her thighs and I hoped that no medical staff would turn up to take my blood pressure.

‘You never called,’ she said, fluttering her eyelashes. ‘You said you would.’

‘I haven’t had much time,’ I replied, gesturing at my plaster-covered leg. Was she stupid or what?

‘So I heard. But I still felt rejected. My maidenly juices began to dry up. It’s not often I ask guys to call me.’

‘Shit, Fiona,’ I said, and I think I fluttered my eyelashes too, ‘I didn’t know I had such power over women.’

She giggled. Normally I don’t like gigglers, but on her a squeaking door would have sounded good. ‘You sussed me out, Sharman, and you remembered my name too. You’re a real gumshoe, I can tell. Just like on TV. I get off on gory stories and I read all about you in the papers.’