#taken

by Tony Parsons

  I looked at her fresh, untouched face. And I found it hard to believe she had ever taken anything stronger than a protein shake.

  ‘You have to stop all that before you’re seventeen, of course,’ she said. ‘Or it shows forever. And my mother didn’t like it very much – and my stepfather liked it even less. And he told my mother that it was me or him. She chose him – no contest – and they threw me out. And then I met Harry – already making a lot of money – and I wouldn’t sleep with him. Because I suspected that, with a man like Harry Flowers, that’s what it would take to seal the deal. And so it proved. And so here we are.’ She chuckled. ‘And there are policemen with assault rifles at my daughter’s wedding!’

  ‘I’m sorry we had to come here today,’ I said. ‘We have no intention of ruining your daughter’s big day. But we’re seeking information on two men who are on the run. Information for what could turn out to be a murder investigation.’

  ‘And there was me thinking that you had just come here to intimidate my husband.’

  She had finished one flute of champagne and started on the one that she had offered me. And for the first time I could see her as one of those party kids who come from a home where there is plenty of money but not much of anything else worth having.

  ‘Intimidation is a part of it,’ I said.

  I remembered her on the day she had found out about Snezia, hurling her husband’s possessions out of a first-floor window, and I wondered how much she really knew about her husband’s other life. About the petrol can emptied over the Mahone family. About the dedicated phone, the mistresses, the flat in a good neighbourhood that he had kept for years.

  The uniformed officers were leaving now. Through an open window, decorated with white ribbons, I could see them filing past the side of the house and heading for their vans. Someone cheered. The volume of the music went up. Alicia Keys at her most achingly romantic. And something about Alicia’s voice – promising that there was no real life and no real happiness without you, singing in a way that made you believe her – unlocked something inside me.

  ‘How can you stand it?’ I said. ‘Living with a man like your husband?’

  Charlotte Flowers smiled at me, as if she was a woman who could survive anything.

  ‘There’s nothing you can tell me about my husband that I don’t know – or can’t guess – already,’ she said. ‘So he has some little bit of a girl on the side. Or two or three – or even his own private harem.’

  Charlotte Flowers was the kind of woman who would say harem rather than whorehouse. Even if they had never loved her, someone had spent a small fortune on her education.

  ‘Do you think that compares to twenty-five years of marriage?’ she said. ‘Do you think he’s with them on Christmas Day? Even if some little hussy attempts to trap him by getting pregnant, do you really think it compares with raising a family?’

  With a half-empty champagne flute, she gestured towards the garden, taking it all in – the marquee that looked as though it was built to last and the romantic music that had been carefully chosen and the river of champagne.

  I saw that Harry Flowers was out there now, happy again, red-faced with pride and alcohol as he greeted his guests.

  Charlotte Flowers watched me watching him.

  ‘Whatever he’s done, it’s nothing next to all this,’ she said. ‘Are you sure you can’t have one drink to toast the bride?’

  ‘Enjoy your day,’ I said. ‘And I am sorry if we spoiled it.’

  ‘Nothing could ever spoil today,’ she smiled.

  The shots were stretching their legs at the front gates. The uniformed officers were getting back into their vans. Joy Adams was in the BMW, checking her messages.

  And Pat Whitestone was in the back of the small unmarked van with Jackson Rose, staring at the Glock 17 he held in his hand.

  They both looked up at me, their faces unreadable.

  And then they shut the doors.

  A cheer came from the back garden.

  The father of the bride was dancing with his daughter.

  26

  Fred’s gym.

  There was a svelte forty-something woman who looked like she should be running through her yoga asanas banging seven bells out of the heavy bag. There was an old man in glasses with a blood-pressure monitor attached to his upper arm and the latest Asics on his feet walking steadily on a treadmill, taking his time, as if he planned to live forever. There were a couple of young men in their twenties who looked like cage fighters but who worked in the City, pumping the free weights that were all printed with one word.

  Fred’s

  And Fred was in the middle of it all, silver hair pulled up in a topknot, counting down someone’s reps, then fussing with the music, looking for a soundtrack that matched the mood to perfection, and always urging encouragement.

  ‘You’re so lucky to be training,’ he told me, as he put on some Chic and I whaled away at the heavy bag until a buzzer went and I got down on the floor for ten burpies and ten press-ups. By the time I got up from the press-ups and burpies the minute’s break between rounds had almost gone by and Fred was waiting for me with curved Lonsdale punch mitts on his hands.

  ‘On the bell – double jab and move away,’ he said. ‘Recover while you work.’

  On the final buzzer, Fred tossed the punch mitts aside and went off to change Chic to The Jam on the sound system, Nile Rodgers somehow not quite hitting the spot. And as I was waiting for him to return, Jackson Rose appeared before me, watching me, already in his training kit, black-and-yellow protective wraps on his hands.

  ‘Put some gloves on,’ I told him, putting the punch mitts on my hands.

  Jackson slipped on a pair of red Cleto Reyes 16-ounce gloves, the old Mexican leather cracked and worn.

  ‘Double jab, straight right, left hook,’ I told him.

  He threw out the combination I had called, his punches hitting the pads I held up with a whiplash crack, his left hand drifting away from his chin with the final punch, dropping down by his hip.

  With my right hand, I slapped him hard across the left side of his face.

  ‘Keep that guard up,’ I said. ‘Triple jab, straight right, two left hooks.’

  He did as he was told, his punches harder now, the light brown skin on one side of his face reddened by the pad.

  This time he kept his guard up.

  ‘You are not doing Pat Whitestone any favours,’ I said. ‘Double jab and move away.’

  He threw out two stiff jabs. They rocked me back an inch.

  Jackson was not a natural boxer but he had what the old-timers called heavy hands. He hit hard.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said.

  We began circling each other. Jackson held his guard up in peekaboo fashion, and I had the pads held loosely by my side. When I showed him one of them, lifting it to head height, he smacked it as hard as he could.

  ‘You’re meant to be on her side, Max.’

  ‘I am on her side,’ I said, showing him the left pad. He hit it with a straight right and kept hitting it until I pulled it away. Nobody was listening to us but I lowered my voice anyway. ‘If you provide her with a firearm, you’ll be getting her into more trouble than she already has.’

  ‘Who said I got anyone a firearm?’

  He dropped his guard and I clobbered him around the left side of his face as hard as I could with the pad in my right hand.

  There was the slap of hard leather on flesh and bone and, at last, the first sign of real anger in his eyes.

  ‘Pat Whitestone thinks that Harry Flowers is trying to own her,’ he said. ‘Like he has owned dozens of good cops. Men who are now behind bars because they took his money or did him a favour or looked the other way or tried to stay on his good side.’

  I held up both pads and Jackson struck them with a furious combination.

  ‘You want that to happen to her, Max? You want Flowers to own your friend?’

  ‘Nobody’s
going to own her. Have you tooled her up already, Jackson? What is she – a hitman all of a sudden? What’s she going to do? Blow his brains out?’

  ‘Maybe someone should.’

  We had both forgotten the pad work.

  We stood facing each other in that crowded gym, Paul Weller singing ‘Eton Rifles’ on the sound system.

  ‘She’s got a teenage son, Jackson. You dumb bastard.’

  ‘Do it again, Max. Go on. Call me a dumb bastard again.’

  ‘She’s bringing her boy up alone. Great kid. Justin. Can’t see. Lost his sight in some stupid bar attack. What happens to him if his mother goes down because some dumb bastard got her a gun?’

  And finally he lost his rag.

  ‘I remember Justin. I remember his mother kept seeing the scumbag who blinded him. What were they called? Oh yes – the Dog Town Boys. She ever have any problem with any of the Dog Town Boys these days? And I remember that swaggering little sack of shit who hit Justin with a bottle. What was his name?

  ‘Trey N’Dou.’

  ‘Trey N’Dou. If it wasn’t for me, Trey N’Dou would still be wandering the streets where they lived as if nothing had happened. And I remember we went up to see him. You remember any of that, Max?’

  I remembered it well.

  I remembered the desperation of Pat Whitestone at seeing her son’s attacker wandering the streets as if nothing had happened.

  And I remembered driving north with Jackson one hot summer’s night two years ago.

  Whitestone wanted the scumbag gone. Not dead. Not the score evened up – because the score could never be evened up. But she wanted Trey N’Dou gone. She was sick of looking at the face of the man who had blinded her son. So Jackson and I went to see Trey N’Dou. But reasoning with him didn’t work. Even threatening him didn’t work. So Jackson got him on his back in a car park on Liverpool Road and made Trey N’Dou wet his baggy jeans by firing two shots between his legs.

  ‘Am I dead?’ Trey N’Dou had said.

  And that worked.

  The idea had been that Jackson was going to watch my back while I sorted out this problem.

  But Jackson had done more than that.

  He had made the problem go away.

  ‘This isn’t the same thing, Jackson, and you know it.’

  ‘I remember that Dog Town Boy – I remember he laughed in your face. And I remember that I had to deal with it. I had to clean it up. Just as I have been cleaning up your mess all your life, Max.’

  I punched him in the face.

  It really hurts to be hit with a punch mitt.

  They are not nicely rounded like boxing gloves. The side of the things have a thick, hard edge and that was what connected with Jackson’s gap-toothed mouth. He took the blow and then swung back at me, all discipline gone, lashing out with a wide haymaker that I had time enough to roll away from.

  But then he was on me, punches raining down on the top of my head as I covered up and started digging the hard ridge of those punch mitts into his lower ribs.

  It was all pretty even.

  I was always tougher than him.

  But he was wilder.

  He had that touch of madness that Flowers had talked about with such admiration.

  Then Fred had both of us by the scruff of the neck and was pulling us apart.

  ‘I could sell tickets to you two,’ he laughed.

  And I saw that TDC Joy Adams was standing by Fred’s side.

  ‘We’ve found Ruben Shavers,’ she said.

  27

  The short row of shops had been burned out in the last riots.

  They were blackened and boarded up, their steel shutters down and stained with fading graffiti. The For Sale signs on every one of them looked overly optimistic. The small flats directly above the shops were all unoccupied, vacant rooms above a torched ruin, their broken windows cloaked with net curtains that were grey with time and the smoke of burning buildings.

  From the BMW, we watched the flat above the end shop. Its name had been lost in the flames but there was a drawing of an Afro-Caribbean woman carrying what looked like a basket of fruit and veg on her head. There was a red, gold and green awning above the shop, its colours faded, the fabric scorched by the flames of the riot and worn thin by time.

  ‘What was that place?’ Whitestone said.

  ‘It was a Jamaican supermarket,’ Joy said from the back seat. ‘Jamaican and British produce all mixed. Ackee and callaloo and Aunt May’s Bajan sauce and saltfish, as well as your Hovis and HP sauce and Heinz Baked Beans.’

  ‘It was the owner who called us,’ Whitestone told me, her eyes not leaving the window. ‘At first she thought it was kids in there, but then she saw a man at the window. A tall, good-looking black man.’

  ‘What are we waiting for?’ I said.

  ‘Shavers has got a wife and two kids in the neighbourhood. They may be in there. It would be easier for everyone if they went home for their tea.’

  A florist’s van was parked outside the row of shops. On the side was a sign promising ‘Beautiful’ Blooms of Barking. And inside it were SFO Jackson Rose and a team of shots out of Leman Street police station, Whitechapel, base of SC019, the specialist firearms unit of the Metropolitan Police.

  A flock of children turned the corner and gathered in the doorway of a burned-out shop.

  The younger ones were on bikes and in school uniform. The older boys wore hoods that gave them the appearance of Tolkien’s elves. All of them were black. One of the older boys produced a matchbox and heads leaned in to examine its contents. Most of the group began to move away in the direction they had come. The boys on bikes lingered.

  In the back seat, I heard Joy Adams exhale.

  I turned to look at her. ‘Recognise any of them?’

  ‘The smallest one,’ she said. ‘The one who looks little for his age.’

  Now Whitestone turned to look at her too.

  ‘He’s my brother,’ Joy said.

  ‘Bring him here,’ Whitestone said.

  Joy hesitated for just a moment. Then she got out of the car and the boys on the bikes all turned to look in her direction. They quickly pedalled off, scattering in all directions, making themselves impossible to follow.

  Only the one who was small for his age remained.

  Joy spoke to him and then turned back for the car. He slowly followed her. The pair of them got into the back seat, the boy nervously looking at his bike leaning in the doorway of a dead shop.

  ‘What if someone nicks my bike, man?’ he asked his sister.

  ‘Nobody’s going to steal your bike,’ she said. ‘Jordan, this is DC Wolfe and DCI Whitestone.’ She appraised the child in school uniform, whose eyes flicked nervously from our faces to his bike and back again. ‘And this is my brother Jordan,’ she said.

  ‘Hello, Jordan,’ I said.

  ‘Wagwan?’ he said in greeting. What’s going on?

  Joy shook her head. ‘Wagwan? You Jamaican now, are you? Our people are from Kumasi, Jordan. You know where Kumasi is?’

  ‘Ghana, innit?’ he said. ‘West Africa. Gold Coast. Where the slave ships came from. I tell you, man, I’m dead worried about that bike.’

  ‘Jordan?’ Whitestone said. ‘Please show me the matchbox.’

  ‘What matchbox is that, miss?’

  She held out her hand. The boy reached into his school blazer and took out a matchbox. Whitestone looked at the contents and then gave it to me. Maybe a dozen blue pills, identical, all with a sleeping emoji face stamped on the front. Two flat-line slits for the eyes, one flat-line slit for the mouth.

  These were the tranquillisers that Harry Flowers had sold when Ecstasy was old hat.

  Loopers were back.

  I gave the matchbox to Joy and she looked inside.

  Then she slapped her brother around the top of his head.

  ‘Stupid, stupid, stupid,’ she said. ‘Why do you let these big kids use you? Why don’t you stand up for yourself?’

  She gr
abbed the collar of his school blazer and shook him. He pulled away from her, his eyes bright with tears.

  ‘I haven’t done nothing, Joy,’ he said.

  ‘I wonder if you would do me a favour, Jordan,’ Whitestone said calmly.

  We were all silent.

  Jordan glanced anxiously at his bike. ‘Yes, miss?’

  ‘What I want you to do,’ Whitestone said, pulling out a £10 note, ‘is to go over the road and buy a pizza.’ We all looked at the fast-food shop across the street. Pizza Paradise. The only business around these parts that had survived the riots.

  ‘Then I want you to take it up to the flat above this first shop,’ Whitestone said.

  ‘Them flats are empty, miss,’ Jordan said.

  ‘Maybe,’ Whitestone said. ‘And maybe not. But if you ring the bell and say you have a pizza delivery, then I am not going to ask you to empty the pockets of your school blazer. How does that sound?’

  She smiled at him. Jordan did not smile back.

  He was thinking about what he had in the pockets of his school blazer. Did he have more than the ugly great zombie knife that all the kids were packing these days? Probably not. No gun. No acid. Just a big, bad knife. But it would be enough to get him in more trouble than he could handle.

  ‘Then I can go, miss?’ he said, and I realised he addressed Whitestone as if he was talking to a deeply feared teacher.

  ‘You do that little favour for me,’ Whitestone said, ‘then you’re a free man.’

  He took the tenner.

  ‘What kind of pizza you want, miss?’

  ‘A Margarita will be fine.’

  We watched him cross the road to Pizza Paradise.

  ‘Nice kid, your brother,’ Whitestone said.

  ‘There are no nice kids around here, ma’am.’ Joy said. ‘As soon as they’re old enough, nobody lets them be nice.’

  Within minutes Jordan was back with a steaming 12 x 12 box. Whitestone nodded encouragement and the boy went up the stone staircase by the side of the shops. A few minutes later he came down without the pizza.