To Die For (4 page)

‘Go on.’

‘That other mob. What’s his name? Them black blokes. Ellis.’

‘What about them?’

‘They got turned over.’

For a moment I didn’t understand him, and then I got it.

‘That Brighton job? That was four weeks ago. I wasn’t on that.’

‘You worked with them on the job they did before,’ he said.

Something cold moved over my skin.

‘That was the job before.’

‘They never use an outsider, Joe. Then, the one time they do, they get done on the next job.’

They’d used me that one time because Caine was a wreck after his wife left him, back on the smack. After the Brighton job, they’d had a haul of cash, but they got hit by some unknown firm. Someone had told someone about the cash. I thought that Caine had said something, perhaps in exchange for heroin, but since he and two others were blown apart by twelve-gauge shot I supposed it would never be known. There was no point me saying all this to Kendall. He wasn’t the one that needed convincing. I looked at him and he half shrugged and made it look like it hurt him to do so.

‘You think I did the one job with them, learnt a bit about their next one and then passed the information on?’

‘No, Joe. I don’t. Course I don’t.’

‘But others think I did? Nathan King, for instance? That why I haven’t heard from him about the jewellery job?’

Kendall held his hands up.

‘Like I’m saying, I know you’re okay. It’s just people are careful. Mud sticks. You’re covered in fucking mud, Joe.’

‘Why would Beckett use me if my name’s bad?’

‘It wasn’t. Not then. Now that Simpson’s dead... well, now it ain’t so good.’

He was right, it looked bad. And if people thought I was bent, London was dead for me. The only people I’d ever get work with would be the type I’d never want to work with. It was nothing personal. I would’ve been just as nervy if I’d known someone with my kind of luck.

When I turned to go, Kendall struggled from his seat. He grabbed my hand and shook it. His handshake was limp, his hand warm and clammy. He held on a few seconds too long. When he finally let go, he patted me on the arm and told me again that he’d never doubted me. I wanted to throw him through the window.

So, that was that. I was fucked. My money wouldn’t last long without any other income. My name was dirt. I was getting old.

Back in my car, I thought things through. There were two problems, as I saw it.

The first was this Beckett thing. Where was he? Where was the money? What had happened to Simpson? It might still be possible for me to survive if I could find out these things.

The other was more immediate. Nathan King. I was supposed to be doing that job with him. If he thought I was bent, I could be in trouble.

I decided to go to King’s house. He wouldn’t like me doing that, but I didn’t think he’d try anything on his own property. I had an old Russian Makarov PM pistol taped to the underside of the passenger seat. I’d take the gun with me but stash it outside King’s place. That way I could walk in without causing friction but still have some protection when I left. If I left.

The Makarov was a small piece, and heavy, but the blowback action gave it accuracy, and it was more reliable than most other automatics. I cleaned the gun and checked its action.

I drove the car to Oakwood tube station and left it in the car park. I walked a couple of blocks to a semi-detached house in a quiet road. I walked up the driveway and stopped next to King’s black BMW. I slipped the Makarov beneath the car, just next to the nearside rear wheel.

The woman who answered the door was short, young and dumpy. She had bleached blond hair and make-up you could bang a nail into. She looked up at me and sighed, held the door open with one hand, put the other on her hip and called over her shoulder:

‘Nat, it’s one of yours.’

She walked away, leaving the door open. I stepped in, but left the door ajar. I could hear a TV playing, kids arguing. There was a thick smell of fried meat and perfume. King came through from the lounge. He was a big black man, with greying temples and a hard, creased face. He was carrying a can of lager. He stopped when he saw me and the good humour slid away, its place filled with a deadened look. His eyelids closed slightly.

‘Joe. What are you doing here?’

‘I need to talk.’

‘About?’

‘Business.’

He took a swig from his can and, as he did so, his eyes moved quickly over my body. I stood still with my arms by my side. A man’s voice called to King from the back of the house.

‘Come see who’s here,’ King called back.

Tony Daley was a stocky white man with a thing for chunky gold jewellery. He’d partnered King for the last twenty years. They’d grown up together in Wood Green, within sight of the Ally Pally. They owned a second-hand car lot in Muswell Hill that gave them their legitimacy. They never did anything half-cocked, never took chances, never tried to take down too big a score. I’d worked with them a couple of times and we’d got along well enough. King and Daley knew what their job was; they did it without fuss. They were smart and careful. If my name was dodgy, these two would tell me. They were also the two who might have most to lose if I was a grass.

Daley smiled when he saw me. It was an easy smile, and I thought that he at least didn’t think me a threat. I relaxed a little and felt the tension in my shoulders ease.

‘Joe. What you doing here?’

‘Business, he says,’ King said.

They exchanged quick glances. I didn’t know them well enough to know what was in that look. If they suggested we leave the house, I’d agree, then grab the gun.

‘Must be important business,’ Daley said. ‘You don’t ever leave Tottenham, far as I remember. ’Cept for a job.’

‘It’s important.’

They exchanged glances again, weighing things up.

King said, ‘Come alone?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where’s your car?’

‘Oakwood tube. I walked from there.’

He looked at Daley, nodding his head towards the street. Daley moved past me and out through the front door. We waited, not speaking. After a few minutes, Daley came back in.

‘Fine,’ he said.

‘Come with me,’ King said.

He led the way back through the house. I passed a few kids sitting in front of a TV. They were playing games on some computer console thing, arguing about whose turn it was. Two women, King’s wife and another woman – Daley’s wife, I guessed – were sitting on a sofa, drinks in hands. King’s wife glared at her husband as we passed. He sighed and looked away from her. She was going to give him a bollocking later. Daley’s wife glanced at me. She looked like she’d seen it all before. She turned back to her drink.

King led us into the bright kitchen, cluttered with dirty dinner plates and stacked pans, and hot from steam and cooked food. We went through the back door into another room that had once been the garage. A pool table had been set up in here, and a bar had been built along one side. Daley slumped into a black leather chair and reached to the ground for his glass of Scotch. I’d interrupted their game of pool. King leaned against the table. Nobody offered me a drink. I hadn’t expected them to. I took a position between the two men, but away from them, near the bar. I had them both in sight. I could grab a bottle if I had to.

‘So,’ King said. ‘Tell us.’

‘I hear you two don’t want to work with me any more. That right?’

King took a deep breath.

‘No. That’s not right. Not exactly.’

‘We were told you might not be safe,’ Daley said.

‘And the job? You cutting me out?’

‘No, Joe,’ Daley said. ‘You ain’t in or out. We’re not doing the job.’

‘Because of me?’

‘What does it matter?’ King said.

‘It matters.’

‘We’re not doing it,’ Daley said, ‘because something smells fishy. No offence, Joe. We gotta take precautions.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘But that doesn’t mean we think you’re a scalper. Nat said that was bollocks soon as he heard it.’

‘Right,’ King said.

‘Besides, we didn’t think you’d want to surface for a while. Certainly not to do a job.’

‘What do you mean?’

King picked up the cue ball and put it down again. Daley shook his head and said, ‘Fuck’s sake, Joe. You can’t hit a man like Cole and not expect any shit to come down on you.’

‘Cole? Bobby Cole?’

‘Of course Bobby Cole. The casino job.’

‘That was Cole’s casino?’

‘Didn’t you know?’ King said.

‘No.’

Robbing Cole was madness. He wouldn’t rest until he had us all strung up. Maybe he’d killed Simpson. And Beckett. If he had, why didn’t Kendall realize it? But then, maybe he did. Maybe he was distancing himself from the whole thing.

‘Who told you I wasn’t safe?’ I said. ‘Was it to do with the Ellis thing?’

‘We didn’t hear it from Ellis,’ Daley said. ‘That was just bad luck, even Ellis says so. He blames Caine for that.’

‘It was Dave Kendall told us,’ King said. ‘Last week. Said he was worried about you, wouldn’t be putting any more work your way.’

Kendall. That explained his behaviour earlier, why he’d felt he needed a bodyguard. He must’ve thought that I’d heard he was throwing shit on my name.

‘I never liked Kendall,’ King was saying. ‘Never trusted him. He talks too fucking much.’

One of Daley’s kids, a small blonde thing, ran into the room and stopped dead when it saw me. It stared at me with huge eyes and mouth agape. Then it remembered it had legs and turned and ran from the room.

Daley said something to me about the kid’s name meaning something or other in Dutch.

‘My mum was Dutch, see,’ he said.

Something King had said was getting caught somewhere. It didn’t fit. When Daley finished giving me his family history, I said to King, ‘Last week?’

‘Huh?’

‘You said he told you this last week.’

‘Yeah. After I saw you that time in the gym I called him up and told him we wanted you for the jeweller’s.’

‘This was before the casino job?’

‘Yeah, of course.’

I felt a weight in the back of my head.

‘Did you tell Kendall that you’d seen me about the jeweller’s?’

‘No.’

Kendall.

Things didn’t make sense. Kendall had told King I was no good before we’d done the casino job. So why hadn’t he warned Beckett? Kendall wasn’t stupid. He wouldn’t risk fucking Beckett up. Another thing, Kendall had told me that it was the raid on Ellis
and
Simpson’s death that made me look suspicious: two jobs, four deaths, two missing cash hauls. I couldn’t argue that the combination made me look guilty of something, or unlucky as shit, but to sling mud at me before the casino job... that didn’t make sense.

I was thinking these things as I trudged up the stairs to my flat. When I opened the door, I held my arms up high in a blocking motion. I didn’t know why I’d done it – the old instinct, maybe. The first blow landed on my right shoulder. Pain shot through my back, my ribs. I gritted my teeth and fought the wave of nausea. The second blow came from the left. I moved quickly, leaning into it, killing its power, but it caught me on the side of the head and sent an electric shock into my neck. Everything spun around and blurred, but I was used to that sort of thing. I hunched over and barged into the direction the blow had come from. I glanced off someone. I threw a left jab, felt it connect with gristle and flesh, felt the smash of bone, heard a grunt and a heavy crash. There was another flash on my right. I stepped back through the doorway. Something whooshed through the air in front of me. It was a baseball bat, I could see now. My right arm was deadened and I’d be unbalanced if I used my left. I charged the man with my shoulder. The two of us fell through into the kitchen, smashing into the sink at the far end, shattering the chipboard cabinets like matchwood. I grabbed shirt, skin, whatever I could. I heard a yelp. I used my body as a pivot and threw the man over my shoulder. I saw a grey mass land heavily on the floor, heard the air rush out of him in a cry of panic and hurt. I raised my foot and stomped on a head. I slammed my foot down, again and again, putting all my weight into each blow. After a while, the grey mass stopped moving. There was a slimy mess on the floor. My shoe was slippery with blood. I was shaking; my heart was in my throat; I felt dizzy. I fell to my knees and tried to breathe. It took a moment for the adrenalin to sink. My arm was throbbing and warm now, but the numbness was going. I stepped over the mess and walked back to the hallway, to where the other man was lying on the floor. He wasn’t moving. I flicked on the light and closed the front door.

The bloke on the floor was young, in his twenties, with shaved blond hair. He was big, like a body-builder, too fresh-faced to have been in many fights. He’d crashed backwards into a low table. There was a hole in the plasterboard where his head had hit. His neck was twisted around, blood trickled from a gash above his eye. His breathing was shallow, his face a grey, washed-out colour. I thought maybe his neck was broken. I didn’t need to worry about him, so I went back to the kitchen. The man there was older and smaller. There wasn’t much else I could make out. He lay face down in a thick and deep crimson pool of blood and gore. I pushed my boot into his face enough to move it around. His eyes were open. He wasn’t breathing at all.

I went into the bathroom, shucked out of my jacket and ripped off my shirt. My gun clattered to the floor. I’d forgotten about that. I looked at my right shoulder in the mirror, flexing it, rubbing it, moving my arm above my head and around. The skin was already discoloured where a bruise was breaking out, but nothing was broken. A pain moved through my head and, for a second, the world went dizzy. I splashed cold water on my face then went into the bedroom and grabbed a leather travelling bag. I went from room to room, packing essentials, some clothing, some dried food.

I left the flat to get some stuff I’d stashed under the landing floorboards. Below me, Akram’s grandmother stared up, eyes wide, hands clasped before her. She was terrified. She said something I couldn’t understand, then turned and scuttered back down the stairs. I ripped back the carpet and pulled up a floorboard. Beneath it lay a black plastic bin bag, taped up to form a package the size of a hardback book. I grabbed the bundle, replaced the floorboard and carpet, and went back into the flat. I opened the package and poured its contents into the leather bag: a Smith and Wesson M10 .38 Special, two boxes of cartridges, one for each of my guns, a silencer for the Makarov, and £5,000 in twenty- and ten-pound notes.