To Kill For Page 16

  ‘Vice?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You know he’s bent, but he’s still there. That means you got no evidence.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘But even without evidence, suspicion would be enough to get rid of him. So he must have friends high up. Who are they?’

  ‘You don’t expect me to answer that?’

  ‘Fine. He’s got connections, though. He must have if you don’t trust the local law.’

  ‘All we know is he may have connections. He has a lot of friends in Manchester, we don’t know about here.’

  ‘Manchester?’

  ‘That’s where he’s from. Why?’

  I thought about what King had told me. I said, ‘I asked someone to do some digging about. He doesn’t scare easily, this man, but he got frightened off by someone who knew about his kids, his wife. The bloke who warned him off had a Manc accent.’

  ‘This someone you asked to do the digging – he has form?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But he’s known to the police? Been suspected of something?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What? Heavy stuff?’

  ‘Armed robbery.’

  ‘That’s Glazer, then. He’s got access to all sorts of intel at the touch of a button or at the end of a phone.’

  It made sense. I got King to ask around about Glazer. He’d called Bowker who must’ve called Glazer, not Paget. Glazer got scared, suddenly finding that some hard case criminal is asking about him. He hits some buttons, gets details on King and King’s family and makes the call. What I didn’t understand at the time was why he would bother to do that. Paget knew that Cole and I were after him, and if Glazer was working with Paget, he’d know too. Why, then, would he have been bothered about King asking questions? He would want to keep his connection with Paget quiet. But, in that case, why would he have turned up at Ponders End that night? Why would he involve Hayward? Unless…

  ‘Maybe they’re not working together,’ I said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Paget and Glazer.’

  ‘Sure they are. We’ve been over this. We know they are.’

  ‘No. You told me they were tied together. It’s not the same thing. Paget would’ve known that my friend’s inquiries weren’t important, not with Cole already on their tails. Paget would’ve known that I was probably behind the enquiry. If Glazer was working with him, he would know it too. But maybe Glazer didn’t know.’

  I thought back to Ponders End when I’d been waiting with my rifle, waiting for Paget to show. Paget must’ve suspected a set-up, or Bowker grassed it up to him. That was why he didn’t turn up. But why send Glazer, then? Unless he just had nobody else. That didn’t sit right. Paget wouldn’t have worried about using someone else to get rid of one of his problems, though. I looked at Compton.

  ‘I don’t think Glazer knew what Paget got him into.’

  Compton looked at Hayward.

  ‘Del, is that possible?’ he said.

  Hayward looked at me, considering what I’d said. Compton watched him, and waited. Bradley held his burning cigarette.

  ‘Yes,’ Hayward said. ‘Yes. It’s possible.’

  ‘Tell me about your role in this,’ I said.

  He looked at Compton.

  ‘Tell him,’ Compton said.

  ‘I was with Glazer,’ Hayward said to me. ‘You’re right, I was working vice with him, his second in command—’

  ‘Never mind that.’

  ‘Right. Well, a couple of weeks ago, Glazer gets spooked. I mean, one minute he’s fine, then he goes out and when he comes back he’s not the same, he’s panicky, sweating. I knew then this could be what we were after, hard evidence, a link. We spent months on my cover and I spent months more worming my way in till he thought I was as bent as him. So, anyway, he tells me he has to do something, help an old friend, off the books, and he needs help, someone to watch his back. I didn’t see much of him then for a while, but one night he calls me up and asks me to drive him to see someone. That was when I met Paget. I knew of him, of course, and knew he’d worked for Marriot, and I knew this was to do with Elena, had to be.’

  ‘You met him in Loughton? At this Tina’s place?’

  ‘Yeah. Paget was hiding out there.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘So, Paget tells Glazer that he’s in trouble, tells him that Marriot got some money from a job on Cole’s casino and that Cole’s now after him.’

  ‘The rest, we put together,’ said Bradley.

  ‘So that’s why Glazer panicked when he found out your friend was making enquiries about him,’ Compton said to me. ‘A known blagger starts asking questions, and Glazer thinks Cole’s going to think he was involved in the robbery.’

  ‘Could be,’ I said.

  They weren’t even pretending now that they knew about my involvement. They could smell blood – Glazer’s, Paget’s – but not mine.

  ‘Did Paget say anything about drugs to Glazer?’ I asked Hayward.

  ‘What drugs?’

  ‘Never mind. Go on.’

  ‘The next time I saw Glazer was when you shot me.’

  ‘Did Glazer say anything about that? About going there?’

  ‘No. He just tells me he needs a driver, tells me to take him to Ponders End. To the car park. We get there and he’s looking around—’

  ‘Was he armed?’

  ‘Was he? Fuck, yes. He had a fucking magnum in a shoulder holster and a pocketful of shells and an ankle piece. And he was sweating.’

  My mouth had gone dry. They looked at each other.

  ‘Are you alright?’ Compton said.

  Bradley was leaning forward now. Hayward stared at me.

  I felt it in my gut, a sickening, empty hole.

  Brenda, I thought. It all went back, back.

  Compton was half standing. Bradley looked at me like I’d gone mad.

  ‘Joe,’ Compton said. ‘Joe, what is it? What’s wrong?’

  ‘What does it mean?’ Bradley said. ‘What the fuck’s wrong?’

  I felt it in my head, the blood draining away.

  ‘Tell me about Elena,’ I said, my mouth dry, my voice cracking.

  ‘Elena,’ Bradley said to Compton. ‘Fucking Elena.’

  I felt it in my balls, tightening in fear.

  ‘Has to be,’ Compton said. ‘You know something, Joe. What? What is it?’

  I felt it in the cold sweat seeping from my body and in the hair on the back of my neck.

  ‘Tell me about Elena,’ I said.

  ‘You said they were tied together,’ Compton said. ‘Is that it? Do you know why?’

  I felt it in my lousy fucking heart, what was left of it, hammering away, pumping that black blood. I spoke, and when I did the words crept out of some dark place.

  ‘Tell me.’

  They stared at me. Hayward edged away.

  ‘Take it easy, alright?’ I heard him say

  Compton’s eyes were wide. He wet his lips. He breathed heavily.

  ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘Just talk.’

  He nodded to himself.

  ‘Alright. Well, you were right about us investigating it.’

  ‘Start from the beginning.’

  ‘Fine. Yes. Operation Elena. A good name, to be sure. About the only good thing about the whole mess. Elena was the name of a girl the Met picked up once, a long time ago, seven, eight years. She was a Latvian, worked in King’s Cross for some Russians. She was fourteen. She wandered into a station in Stoke Newington. She’d been beaten, and she was thin, but she had guts. Yes, she did. They got her to testify and some pretty hard cases went down. They rehomed her, sent her up to Northampton, gave her a new name. A year later they found her body in a skip.’

  His face was grim. Hayward and Bradley were waiting for him to spill it. I had the feeling that it was personal for Compton, but not so much for the others. I think he knew what revenge meant. I think he could taste it like I could, the bitter swe
etness always with him. He glanced over to Bradley.

  ‘Give us one of those, will you.’

  Bradley gathered his cigarettes and lighter. He half stood and reached over to give them to Compton, who snatched a fag and lit it. His hands were shaking.

  ‘It was in the papers,’ he said, the words coming out with the smoke. ‘There was some fuss over it. Someone high up decided to target immigration-related prostitution and sex crimes – trafficking, porn, that sort of thing. Specifically, East European related crime. Glazer was senior in the vice unit and he got the job. Needless to say, the operation was dodgy from the word go. They made some arrests, sure, but when the papers forgot about it, nothing much had changed. I was in an anti-corruption squad at the time. I didn’t like what I heard about Elena. A year or so ago, I was given charge of a small squad to investigate it. What you see before you is most of the squad. We needed someone on Glazer’s team. You were right, he was wary about who he was stuck with, so we got young Del here from another vice unit and stuck him with Glazer. For most of the last year, we’ve not had a sniff of anything. And then the whole thing went stratospheric. Marriot was killed. Paget went missing.’

  He paused and took a drag of his cigarette.

  ‘They’ve got something, Paget and Glazer. We don’t know what, but we’ve an idea. They’ve got pull, in high places. Glazer’s dangerous, and if Paget’s working with him, or has him under his thumb, that makes Paget dangerous. But then, you already know that.’

  After he’d finished, we were all silent. The TV mumbled in the corner, the clean-faced kid having his final showdown with the clean-faced villain. Bradley, another cigarette burning in his fingers, looked into space, a pained expression on his face. Hayward looked at Compton with the kind of eyes a dog makes at its master, a sort of longing, a sort of fear.

  And me… well, now I understood.

  ‘He was after me,’ I said, my voice hoarse. ‘Glazer, that night, at Ponders End. He was after me. That’s why he was there.’

  It seemed like another life. I glanced at Hayward. He was looking at me, waiting. I don’t think it even occurred to him that I was talking about the night I’d shot him.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Compton said. ‘Why would Glazer be after you?’

  ‘Paget told him who I was. Paget knew it was an ambush. But he also knew I wouldn’t stop till I’d killed him. He needed to take me out, and this was a good opportunity. But he was alone, no men, nobody to call on and he couldn’t raise his head, not with Cole hunting him. But he knew Glazer would fear my existence. He told Glazer that I was supposed to meet this grass called Bowker and Glazer took it from there. He went there to kill me.’

  Bradley said, ‘Why would Glazer want to kill you?’

  If I told them, they’d have something on me. I knew that. But I didn’t care any more. I was past that. I didn’t care what they got on me, what they would do with it. If they sent me down for a hundred years, it didn’t matter. All I cared about was my vengeance, boiling now, bubbling and writhing. Compton felt it, like me, I was sure. His eyes glistened, unblinking. He knew what I’d done, and why. Maybe Bradley and Hayward did too. At any rate, they respected Compton, I could see that much. I said, ‘I knew a woman. Her name was Brenda. She was a pro, worked for Marriot. She was grassing him up to the law. I think Glazer was the copper she was grassing to and I think Glazer told Marriot what she was doing. Paget sliced her face off for it.’

  Compton nodded.

  Bradley said, ‘That why you killed Marriot? And why you want to kill Paget?’

  Hayward put a hand on him.

  ‘We don’t want to know.’

  Bradley nodded. We wanted Paget. We wanted Glazer. We all had our own reasons. What they knew about me didn’t matter. Nothing mattered, except that sweet bitterness inside us, that cancer, that lust that crept up from our balls and through our guts and into our chests. Vengeance. We wanted it. We could taste its sourness in the backs of our throats.

  I got rid of them around midnight. Compton wanted me to stay in touch, to let them know what I was up to. I told him I would. He didn’t believe me. It didn’t matter.

  After they’d gone, I switched the TV off, then the light, and I sat in darkness and tried not to think about it, about Brenda and what they’d done to her and why. There was a sickness inside me when I thought of it all, that rotten black blood pumping through my veins. I don’t know how long I sat like that. I looked up when I heard a noise at the door. Browne’s figure stood there, shadowy and stooped.

  ‘Bad?’ he said.

  ‘Yeah.’

  He went into the kitchen. When he came back he had two mugs of tea. He gave one to me and took a seat. We sat facing the blank TV screen.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  One time, we went to a pub near the Angel tube station. It was a Saturday night and crowded. She was ‘off duty’, as she called it, and wore jeans and a jumper. The short skirts and high heels were part of her job, the uniform. Out of hours, she didn’t go near that sort of thing. I suppose she could cope better if she split the two parts of her life.

  I was working in the casino, back then, as security. She worked around there too, sometimes in the casino itself, picking up the odd out-of-town businessman who’d had too much to drink or was on a winning streak or wanted company for a bit. She said she wanted to go somewhere away from all that. The Angel wasn’t far enough.

  There were booths in the pub, and you could have some kind of privacy. It mattered to her, that sort of thing. She liked to sit and be separate from people, as if she needed life around her, but couldn’t face being a part of it.

  There was a jukebox in the pub, and she’d been listening to some song, tapping her fingers on the oak table. She was chain smoking, and downing one gin after the other, trying, I suppose, to dull the knowledge she carried. After a few minutes of silence, she held out her hand and said, ‘Give us a quid, will you.’

  I gave her the money and she got up and squeezed out of the booth and wandered over to the jukebox. She couldn’t walk straight, and she bumped into a table, but she made it to the jukebox and placed her hands on the glass dome and started scrolling through the CDs. From where I sat, she looked like a million other women on a night out, nearing middle-age, tall, thin, trying to look young, trying to forget life for a while, trying to be just like everyone else. She looked tired, though, and her eyes were dull.

  And then her face lit up for an instant and she looked at me, and there was that smile on her face, the one that made her look young. She beckoned me over. She was looking at the CD covers.

  ‘There,’ she said, pointing at one of the covers.

  It was an old Motown compilation, full of the usual stuff. I looked at it and she looked at me looking, waiting for my reaction.

  ‘It’s a CD,’ I said.

  She sighed theatrically, and nudged me in the ribs.

  ‘I know it’s a bleedin’ CD, fool. I mean, look at the name there. That song. See?’

  I looked, but all I could see was the usual list of singers and groups.

  ‘Brenda Holloway,’ she said. ‘See it?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘That’s who me mum named me after. Brenda Holloway. That song there, “Every Little Bit Hurts”. It was a hit when me mum was pregnant with me.’

  She pushed the pound coin into the slot and selected that song. She had a couple of other choices for the money so she selected the song a couple more times.

  ‘“Every Little Bit Hurts”,’ she said again. ‘That’s bloody right.’

  And then her smile was gone, and the spark of her eyes, and the dullness was back and she looked hollow and wasted. She turned away from me and lurched back to the booth to wait for her song.

  The heat in the pub was getting to me, and the smoke was stinging my eyes. I’d never liked herds of people. Even when I was fighting, I hardly ever sat in the crowd and watched. Here, the people heaved and laughed and shouted to each other from a few feet
away and I felt like they were closing in on me, trapping me with their straight and normal lives. My neck was starting to stiffen and I could feel another headache beginning to get a grip. I pushed my way through the throng and into the Men’s room. I spilled a few tablets down my throat and splashed water on my face. I waited a while and wondered why, but then I realized I was waiting for her songs to come and go.

  By the time I came out, Brenda was back in the booth, facing me, but not seeing me. Her shoulders were hunched and she’d pushed herself into the wall. Sitting next to her was a man. From where I was, on the other side of the pub, I could see the man’s dark blond hair and thin, long mask-like face. I could see his small mouth and his expensive suit. I could see the thick gold bracelet on the hand he was using to hold Brenda’s wrist. Mostly, what I could see were his eyes, narrow and dark, slashes in the white face. He was telling her something, his hand squeezing her wrist, and he was leaning close and she was leaning as far away as she could. I could see she was in pain, gritting her teeth to keep from crying out.

  I knew the man, of course. His name was Kenny Paget.

  At the time, Brenda was pimped by Marriot, and Paget was his hatchet man. That was the way it was, and Brenda had stopped me several times from changing it. I hadn’t understood why she wanted to stay. I didn’t push her on it. But I didn’t work for Marriot or Paget, and I didn’t have to take their shit.

  The pub was thick with people now and even with my weight, it took me a few minutes to push my way through to Brenda. By then, Paget had gone. Brenda hadn’t moved, though. She was still pushed up against the wall, her shoulders still hunched, her eyes shut.

  ‘What did he want?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘What?’

  She opened her eyes and looked at me. Her face was empty. It was like she was somewhere else, seeing someone else. Then something clicked and she looked at me as if she’d only just realized I was there. Whatever was in her thoughts, it wasn’t me. I turned and searched Paget out. He was at the bar. I started to move towards him, but Brenda grabbed my arm.

  ‘Don’t, Joe. Leave it. Please.’

  I nodded. But I wanted a drink, now, and Paget was at the bar and if I happened to stand next to him, well, that’s just the way things happen.