To Die For Read online

  ‘Tell me about him.’

  ‘He was a tough old bird. Long time ago, though. Like I say, he’s straight as these days.’

  ‘What was his work?’

  ‘Banks, armoured cars.’

  ‘You know Dave Kendall?’

  ‘Kendall? Yeah, sure.’

  ‘Know of any connection between the two?’

  ‘What, Kendall and Martin?’ He thought about that while he had another gulp of Guinness. The Guinness left a creamy line on his top lip. ‘Can’t think of anything,’ he said, wiping his mouth with his sleeve.

  ‘Where’s he live?’

  ‘I can find out.’

  ‘Do that.’

  He picked up the cue and looked along it. I reached for some more notes, peeled off a hundred and fed them to him.

  ‘Might take a while.’

  He shuffled off towards the bar. I watched him take a seat next to a wall-mounted telephone. One of the young black men was sitting on a stool next to him watching football replays. I watched Bowker for ten minutes or so. The smoke in the place was starting to make my eyes sting. It was grimy and hot in the club, and it made my hands sticky. I felt tired. My neck ached; my back ached.

  I went into what the club had for a bathroom and splashed water on my face. I picked up the soap, washed my hands and dried them on a roll-cloth towel that didn’t roll and probably made my hands as dirty as they’d been before I’d washed them. One of the young black lads came in to use the bog. His clothes smelled of the sickly-sweet ganja he’d been smoking. He gave me a narrow look. I walked past him.

  ‘You know him?’ he said.

  I stopped and turned.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Geezer on the phone. Bowker.’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘Fucker’s dirty, you know. I see you talk to him. Just telling you upright, case you might want to get out of here.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘All I know is he’s a grass and he sounded like he was grassing someone up, you know. Telling someone that someone was here. You might be one of the someones, and the police might be another. All I know.’

  When I went back into the snooker hall, Bowker had disappeared. I didn’t think he’d have the bottle. It had been about ten minutes since he’d first used the phone. I made for the exit, taking the stairs two at a time. When I hit the cold air, I scanned the street and couldn’t see him. I was a dozen yards from my car when I heard the high-low pitch of a powerful car changing gear and gunning towards me. I looked up. The black Merc screeched around the Highbury Corner and fishtailed as it straightened. I wasn’t armed.

  My car was parked facing the oncoming car. I got in and keyed the ignition. The Merc came abreast of me and slewed across the middle of the road as it braked. I saw Paget in the front passenger seat. His eyes were on the pavement. He hadn’t seen me. The two rear doors opened. I waited while the two men in the back of the Merc were halfway out, then I locked the wheel over left and slammed the accelerator down. The road was slick and my car made a 180-degree spin, tyres squealing and smoking with the burning rubber. They’d noticed me now. Paget swung round to see what the fuss was about. When he saw me his eyes became slits, like thumbnail marks. He yelled something to the men at the back, but I’d timed it right and they were caught. I touched the brakes, straightened up and stamped on the pedal again. The man on the far side jumped back into the car and the one on the nearside dithered, started back for the car and changed his mind, diving into the middle of the road. I missed him by inches and smashed my car into the side of the Merc, mangling the open door and sending the car ten feet down the road. I backed up a few yards. I could see the driver frantically trying to get the car going. I took the Makarov out of the glove compartment, got out of the car and walked towards the Merc and put a few rounds in the front tyre. It blew with a puff and the car sank, lopsided. Paget was getting out of his car as I was getting back into mine. He had a gun in his hand. I didn’t think he’d use it; Cole would want me alive and singing.

  The windscreen shattered as his rounds hit. I ducked and put the car in reverse, locked the wheel over and spun the car round. I heard a couple more rounds hammer into the bodywork. I got out of there, leaving them a crumpled mess.

  I threw the car round a few turnings, bypassing Paget, and came back on to the Holloway Road, further up. I cruised for a while, scanning the scene. I had an idea where Bowker would go. I saw him in the distance, scurrying away, his shoulders hunched, his hands in his trouser pockets, smoke billowing from the fag in his mouth. I pulled up beside him. He looked over at me, looked at the mashed front of my car. He didn’t try to run. I got out. He pulled the fag from his lips.

  ‘I had to do it,’ he said. ‘You know I did. Paget would’ve torn my face off if I’d seen you and not told him.’

  He was probably right. I didn’t care. He backed up against the front of a kebab place. A couple of teenagers in there were seated at a table, looking at us over their kebabs, vacant expressions on their faces. Bowker reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a piece of paper.

  ‘Ray Martin,’ he said.

  On the paper was an address.

  ‘Let me go, eh?’

  ‘So you can grass me up again? Did you tell Paget what I wanted?’

  ‘No. Straight up. I knew he wanted you. He told me to keep me eyes open. Last thing I expected was you to come to me. Christ, I shit myself. I mean, what was I supposed to do? I grass you up and you kill me. I don’t and Paget kills me.’

  ‘What do you know about the casino job?’

  ‘Only that you ripped Cole off. You and Beckett, I hear. Beckett’s disappeared. That’s all.’

  I shoved him towards the car. He turned.

  ‘Don’t do it. Please. For old times, Joe. Remember?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That bird of yours.’ He lifted his chin. ‘There. The Sportsman.’

  I turned. Across the road from us was a tall and wide Edwardian building, the brick orange-brown, the gabled windows spilling their yellow light on to the pavement. The name had changed. It called itself a club now.

  ‘I always liked her,’ Bowker was saying. ‘She liked me.’

  From the outside, it looked solid, respectable. Perhaps it was now. I hadn’t realized we were so close to the place, though I’d known it was probably where Bowker was going. He was a rat who scampered home whenever he was threatened. The Sportsman was his home, or used to be. Bowker said something else, but I missed it.

  It was the first time I’d been back. I didn’t know if there was anything in that, or if it was just because I’d never had a reason to go there. The door bounced open and a young couple came out of the place, their breath smoking the moment they hit the coldness. They strolled down the stairs. He said something and she laughed and put her arm through his and snuggled into him to keep warm. They wandered off up the road, leaning into each other. I watched them go.

  When I looked round, Bowker had gone. I hadn’t known that he’d known Brenda. I felt like I was falling back into it all, into that mess. Paget, Bowker, and now here.

  7

  The first time I saw her was in the Sportsman. I’d been working there as security for a few weeks, adding to the stuff that Kendall was feeding me. They let me play whatever I wanted on my own time. I played poker. I was okay at it. People couldn’t read me. I had no expression.

  My shift was over and I was at a table with £175 in front of me. I’d been there maybe four hours and all I had to show for that was a loss of £68 and an empty stomach. We were playing Texas Hold ’Em and I was in a three-way with a fat Indian bloke and an old woman who had orange hair and orange skin and red fingernails. The Indian had a stack of chips up to his chin and he would’ve wiped me out if he’d gone all in, but he didn’t, so I thought he probably had nothing. The woman kept fiddling with her thick gold bracelets and I hadn’t worked out if this was a tell or not. There were two others who’d both folded early on, a man called
Roger from Manchester and a bald bloke. The reason I knew Roger was from Manchester was because he’d told me so when I sat down. Nobody said much of anything except Roger, who said way too much for his own good. When he stopped talking everyone folded. He was losing a lot, but he had a lot to lose and seemed happy to see it go. He was on some free business trip, I guessed, probably the only time he ever got to slip the leash.

  I was holding a couple of jacks and the flop threw up a third one and nothing bigger, so I decided I’d string it out a bit and then go in heavyish and hope someone had a high pair. The turn card was a four of clubs and that made three clubs showing, so then I thought I’d better not give anyone a chance to get a flush on the river and I went all in and, sure enough, I won. That pot was worth a hundred and fifty odd, which gave me a profit of about twenty quid per hour. I could’ve earned more on the door.

  A voice behind me said, ‘Can I join in?’

  ‘Always room for more,’ Roger said. ‘Where you from?’

  When she sat next to me, I had her down straightaway as a pro. Her perfume was too strong, the make-up around her eyes too thick, trying to cover the crow’s feet. She was pushing forty and all that make-up just made her look older. I hadn’t seen her before, but I knew that some of the pros were pimped by Frank Marriot. He had a scam going with the Sportsman’s management. The idea was the pros would pick out mugs from the floor, chat them up, ply them with comped drinks, egg them on at the tables, getting them to lose that little bit more. If they lost, the women would take them to their pad and charge them a fair rate. If they happened to win, the women would try and rob them and split the money with the management. The marks weren’t going to complain too much. What were they going to say? It helped if the bloke had a wedding ring, as Roger did.

  I wondered if I should hang around a while and see if Roger had any more money to lose. If this woman flirted with him, he might get cocky and start laying it down in piles. But I was tired and my head was pounding and I couldn’t give a fuck about Roger’s money, so I gathered my chips and left the table.

  The Sportsman had a lounge. The lounge had thick red carpets and easy-listening music that was just plain annoying. I assumed the idea was to force the punters back on to the tables as quickly as possible. As staff, I was allowed free drinks after work. I usually didn’t bother, but tonight I needed something to loosen me up.

  Matheson was leaning against the wall, reading a tabloid, or looking at the pictures anyway. I took a seat at the bar. He looked up and saw me and brought over a beer.

  ‘Win?’

  ‘Some.’

  ‘Good,’ he said, and went back to his wall.

  I nursed my drink for a few minutes, trying to relax and hope that the headache didn’t get a grip like they sometimes did.

  ‘Was it something I said?’

  I glanced round. The black pro was sitting next to me. I hadn’t heard her arrive.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I take a seat and you leave.’ I shook my head. ‘Does that mean it wasn’t something I said?’

  She had a northern accent. Yorkshire, I thought.

  ‘It means I’m tired.’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said, rubbing her neck. ‘Me too.’

  She lit a cigarette and looked at me. She seemed to be waiting for something. I tried to ignore her. Finally, she sighed and said, ‘Bloody hell. A girl could die of thirst around you.’

  I signalled to Matheson. He strolled over.

  ‘Get her a drink, will you?’ I said.

  He hesitated for a bit, like he’d forgotten who he was and what he did and how to pour a drink. I just wanted to get rid of the woman. I flicked a glance at him.

  ‘What does she want?’ Matheson said to me.

  I shrugged.

  ‘I’m over here,’ she said. She was smiling.

  He pulled his eyes in her direction.

  ‘Double Bacardi and Coke,’ she said. ‘No. A treble. Make it two.’

  She laughed and Matheson snatched a glass and dragged himself to the optics. He poured a double rum and added a splash of Coke and dropped the glass in front of her.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said, sarcasm in there.

  Matheson had wandered off.

  After she’d taken a long gulp of her drink, she turned to me and said, ‘I’m Brenda.’

  I finished my beer and signalled to Matheson. He grabbed another for me and walked by, sliding the beer on the counter as he did so.

  ‘You’re Joe,’ Brenda said. I turned to look at her. ‘I asked the croupier,’ she said.

  I nodded, wondering why she would be asking about me. For a moment, I thought she might be the law, but I threw that idea straight out. She was too worn out to be law, too deflated.

  ‘You don’t say much, do you?’ she said. ‘What’s wrong? You punchy or something?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You done some fighting, though. Right? You look like you did.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Professional?’

  ‘For a while.’

  ‘Heavyweight? You must’ve been or else you put on a lot of weight.’

  My head hurt. I wanted to ease it with alcohol, not make it worse with talk. I wanted her to go.

  ‘So, you ever been in any fights I would’ve seen?’

  ‘How’m I supposed to know that?’

  Her smile faded.

  ‘Yeah, right. Stupid question. What I mean is, have you ever been on TV?’

  ‘Only Crimewatch.’

  She laughed out loud, throwing her head back. I hadn’t been joking. I looked at her then, looked properly for the first time. When she’d finished laughing, she sat smiling. The smile transformed her face. Her eyes, heavy-lidded, sparkled and her wide mouth gleamed with white teeth. She looked okay. I downed my drink and got another from Matheson. I wanted some alcohol now, just to take the edge off, just to escape for a while from the dullness.

  I saw her turn and look around the casino. She froze for an instant and turned back round. The glint had gone from her eyes.

  ‘So why don’t you talk?’ she was saying. She sounded a little drunk and I wondered how many other rum and Cokes she’d earned that night.

  ‘I got nothing to say, so I don’t say it.’

  ‘I just thought maybe you were kinda punchy or something.’

  Another one who thought I was dumb. I’d been getting that all my life, and now I was getting it from some over-the-hill drunk prostitute. The thing was, this time it bothered me. I didn’t know why.

  ‘I’m not punchy,’ I said.

  ‘I didn’t say you were, I just said I thought maybe you were.’

  We sat there in silence for a while. Brenda had become tense, awkward. And yet when she’d sat down and started talking to me, she’d seemed relaxed. Cheerful even. I wasn’t used to that from people.

  ‘Well, maybe it’s because you don’t like me. Huh?’ she said quietly.

  ‘I hadn’t thought about it.’

  ‘It’s just you don’t talk so much. I thought maybe you didn’t like me.’

  ‘I don’t care about you one way or the other. I’m just not in the market.’

  I heard her swallow hard. It sounded like a sob. She got up from the seat and walked quickly away. Matheson came over.

  ‘Know her, Joe?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Tart,’ Matheson said. ‘We get lots of them. Me, I don’t like ’em. Lower the tone.’

  Everyone wanted to talk tonight.

  A man took a seat at the bar, two stools up. I glanced over and saw that the man was Kenny Paget. Back then, Paget was the rising star. He’d started out as a bouncer in one of the Soho clubs. He was small for a bouncer, but he’d had a run-in one night with a couple of drunken loudmouths and he’d put them both in hospital. One had a knife wound from one side of his gut to the other. Paget was nicked for that, faced an attempted murder charge, but other bouncers testified that the knife had belonged to the drunk and Paget got off on self-defenc
e. The bloke who owned the club was Frank Marriot. He recognized talent when he saw it and pushed Paget up until he was pretty much running the whole outfit, acting as Marriot’s enforcer. It was a hard, dirty business and Paget fitted right in.

  When Matheson saw him, he unglued himself from the wall sharpish and tried to look like a barman. He smiled and walked over and said, ‘Usual, Mr Paget?’

  Matheson selected a clean glass, polished it up some more and measured out vodka and tomato juice. He threw in a few other things to make it look fancy and put it on the bar counter, on top of a paper coaster thing, and slid it an inch towards Paget. Paget looked at it. Matheson waited just long enough to see he wasn’t going to get thanked, then floated off.

  ‘It’s Joe, right?’ I turned back to my beer. ‘I’ve heard about you.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Heard you’re one of Dave Kendall’s boys.’

  I downed some more beer. He didn’t say anything for a while, but I knew he was looking at me. I was too tired to play that game. He finished his drink and slid the glass along towards Matheson.

  ‘Get me another,’ he said.

  Matheson did as ordered, not bothering with the chit-chat this time. Paget slid off his stool and slid on to the one next to me. He was like that. He slid.

  ‘You don’t want to talk to me?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You know who I am, though. Am I right?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And yet you don’t want to talk to me. I consider that rude. Or stupid.’

  He leaned forward. Matheson was edging away down the bar.

  ‘They say you’re a bit stupid. That right? A bit lacking in brain matter? Maybe I’d better explain something to you. Drinks are free. The whores aren’t. Got it?’

  I downed some more beer. The man was beginning to annoy me. His voice was buzzing in my head.

  ‘That bird you were talking to, for example. She’s what we call a whore. She fucks for money. The money she gets goes to Mr Marriot. I make sure of that. Got it?’

  He leaned closer still. I could smell his breath. I could hear the click in his throat as he spoke.