by Tony Parsons
I took the road that led to Auto Waste Solutions.
And I saw that it was all lit up.
The silence.
That was what I noticed.
I had never heard Harry Flowers’ yard silent before. Usually there was the scrape of two tons of dead metal being dragged across the yard, and the shouts of the men, and the diesel rumble of the forklift truck and, above it all, the deafening pounding of the car compactor.
The gates were open but I moved away from them, skirting the car pound next door.
The metal fence was designed to stop you driving away with a car, not from getting inside. I scaled it with no problem, dropped into the car pound, and edged closer to the border that it shared with Auto Waste Solutions. And in the valley between two soaring mounds of scrapped cars, I could see into the yard.
Harry Flowers stood by the Bentley Bentayga, its engine idling, as he watched a lorry being unloaded by Mo Patel and his cousins.
I struggled to understand what I was seeing.
Cellophane-wrapped pallets.
Hundreds of them.
Industrial-sized pallets with what looked like thousands of small packets.
And I understood that Derek Bumpus never wanted me to find him.
He wanted me to witness this scene.
But I stared past them all because on the far side of the yard, beyond the great scarred car compactor, its giant maw as black as a cave in the night, I saw a slight, bespectacled woman with neat fair hair watching from the shadows.
Pat Whitestone.
Then the point of something sharp pressed into my neck just below my right ear.
I felt it pierce the skin with the passing pain of a vaccination, and then the dribble of blood on my neck, as warm as soup.
Junior Flowers stood there with a pair of gardening shears in his hand. There were a couple of Mo’s cousins with him, both with cricket bats, looking as though they were about to open the batting at Lord’s.
‘Deep breath, piggy,’ Junior advised me.
Junior led me down into the yard. Derek Bumpus was sitting on the back of the lorry with a shocked, sickened look on his face. His mouth was a mess. Someone had very recently knocked his front teeth out with a cricket bat.
‘Big Del was leading the law here!’ Junior told his father, gesturing at Bumpus with his gardening shears.
‘Shut those gates,’ Flowers growled.
Some of the cousins rushed off to do his bidding. There were more cousins than I had seen before, cousins who had never been at the house. They stared at me without interest or fear.
Flowers considered Bumpus with disappointment. He indicated the lorry. I could see more clearly now what was on the shrink-wrapped pallets.
Thousands of small blue-and-white packets. More white than blue.
‘This is what he wanted you to see,’ Flowers told me. ‘My former employee. This skinhead Judas. This is what he wants you to find.’
He addressed the dazed man sitting on the back of the lorry. They had not bothered to restrain him in any way. Knocking his front teeth out seemed to have slowed him right down.
‘Was that the plan, Del?’ Flowers asked.
Bumpus gave no indication that he understood what was being said to him.
Mo and his cousins stood around waiting for instructions.
‘Get the pigs in and save your own skin?’ Flowers said ‘Your last shot at revenge. Nice try, fat boy.’
I stared at the back of the lorries.
‘Pills,’ I said, understanding at last.
Pills.
Thousands of pills.
A lorryload of pills in blue-and-white packets sitting on cellophane-wrapped pallets.
Flowers winced with professional pride.
‘Ah, they’re far more than pills,’ he said.
We stared at the back of the lorry.
He gave the nod and the unloading continued, Junior cutting off the cellophane with his gardening shears and the cousins breaking them down into neat, smaller stacks, and Mo watching the proceedings while tapping away at a calculator.
‘This is prescription-only medication,’ Flowers said. ‘Factory made, FDA-approved. Your doctor and your local chemist are the drug dealers now.’
‘Bent doctors,’ I said. ‘Crooked chemists.’
He ignored me.
‘It’s all changed since the days when friend Mahone and I were shipping MDMA, weed and white powders,’ he said, studying the contents of the lorry. ‘Big Pharma are the only drug dealers that matter these days. And who can compete with them? Nobody wants home-made drugs. Drugs as a cottage industry? That’s all over. The future belongs to Big Pharma. Prescription drugs are a trillion-dollar industry – Mahone and I never dreamed of this kind of dough! There’s never a bad batch! It’s all perfectly legal! What’s your problem? We have a pill for that! We can cure you! Anxiety? Stress? Depression? We have a pill for that – factory made, Government-approved, sure to keep your doctor happy. Oh, it may make you feel like slashing your wrists six months from now, but who cares? I’m just a middle man.’ He shook his head. ‘I hand it to these pharmaceutical companies – they know what people want and what they don’t want. Nobody wants to dance all night! Nobody is expecting to have their mind expanded! Nobody even wants to get high any more! Nobody even wants a rush! That’s all over. Big Pharma understands. People just want oblivion.’
‘Downers,’ I said, looking towards the lorry. ‘Tranquillisers.’ I looked back at Flowers. ‘What’s this – Xanax? So you got the doctors and the pharmacists working for you, Harry? Or are you working for them?’
Whitestone moved through the half-light between the piles of wrecked cars, edging towards the huge metal bulk of the car compactor, and I saw the Glock in her right hand.
I closed my eyes. Then I opened them.
I watched her aim the handgun at the back of Harry Flowers’ head.
But he abruptly moved towards the dazed and battered man sitting on the back of the lorry.
‘No more talk,’ Flowers said. He turned to his son. ‘Let’s give Del and the detective some free samples, shall we?’
Junior grinned and began to cut the plastic off the nearest pallet with his gardening shears. ‘How’s your social anxiety disorder?’ he asked me.
‘Hold them down,’ Flowers told the cousins.
A swarm of cousins put us on the ground.
Junior was laughing, slashing at the cellophane, then tearing open one of the individual packets, pressing his finger against the silver foil that contained the pills. Again and again and again.
Getting a fistful of Xanax.
‘Open wide,’ he told Bumpus. Two of the cousins pulled Bumpus’s bloody mouth open. He howled with agony and I saw that his jaw was probably broken. Junior emptied the handful of Xanax into his mouth and then helped the cousins to clamp Bumpus’s jaw closed.
Bumpus’s huge body writhed and fought but eventually he choked them down.
‘Now the pig,’ Flowers said.
‘Down the hatch,’ Junior told me, taking a fistful of my hair and bending my neck backwards.
Fingers clawed at my face, pulling my mouth open. My lips, my teeth, my jaw.
I lashed out with my feet, trying to smash someone’s knee, but there were too many of them.
It is not like the stories that they tell you about tough guys.
Multiple assailants can usually do what they like with you.
Hands and boots held me still as they recalibrated, some of them abandoning my mouth to concentrate on pinning me to the ground. Now there were fewer fingers on my tongue, inside my teeth, pulling my lips apart. But they were getting the job done.
Junior yanked my head back again.
Then the pills were poured into my mouth.
They slammed my jaw closed, and I felt my teeth bite on to the tip of my tongue.
I felt some of the pills sliding down my throat. Others were jammed behind my teeth, stuck to the roof of my mouth, the ins
ide of my lips, caught in my throat.
I felt my stomach heave.
I retched, trying to sit up, my mouth still held shut.
And then I swallowed.
‘Don’t be sick now,’ Junior said, patting my back.
They were already lifting Derek Bumpus from the ground.
They carried him to the car compactor, a cousin at each arm and leg, and heaved him inside a machine that is built to pound 2-ton cars made mostly of steel into flat-pack scrap, a piece of kit that sat on the back of a lorry looking like a small garage with one wall missing, a machine that is built to break things that were never meant to be easily broken.
They threw him on the metal slab of the car compactor and he did not struggle or fight or protest.
He lay there like the human sacrifice in some pagan ritual.
As if he was already dead.
I hung my head as the fog descended. And I felt what Flowers had been selling all these years.
Oblivion, he called it. A bottomless darkness.
I sank into it, nearly grateful.
Junior patted my back again, almost tender, and I felt the gardening shears in his hand, slapping lightly against my spine. He took my face in his hands and turned it towards the crushing machine where Bumpus lay.
‘Don’t look away,’ he said. ‘You’re next.’
Harry Flowers was ranting at his comatose goon.
‘Look what you made me do!’ he was telling Bumpus. ‘All those years we had together! You were a kid from a care home and you worked the doors and I took you in! I gave you everything! Look at you now!’ Flowers shuddered, his features frowning with a terrible revelation. ‘You are exactly what’s wrong with the working man in this country, Del.’ Shaking his head with disappointment. ‘I’m sorry but it’s true. Always expecting something for nothing! Always believing the world owes you a living! You fat, ungrateful bastard.’
But Derek Bumpus was not completely lost to the fog.
‘Please, Harry …’ he begged.
‘No, no, no, no, no! Don’t you please Harry me. It is a pleasure to work with people of faith.’ He indicated Mo and his cousins. ‘Yes – the Pakis, Del! I know you never liked them, but I have a lot of time for people who believe in something more than the next pint in their face and the next pound in their pocket.’
I looked for Whitestone but I could not see her. And then suddenly there she was, moving beyond a pile of junked metal and torn rubber and shattered glass, lifting her hand, again aiming at the back of Flowers’ head, then lowering her aim, going for his broad-shoulder back. Jackson had coached her well.
Mo was moving towards the car compactor.
Bumpus lay there, still and silent, medicated to the void.
There was a button on the side of the machine, the white paint worn away to scratched silver metal.
Harry Flowers stopped him.
‘You do it,’ he told his son.
‘What?’ Junior said.
He sniggered with embarrassment. He tapped the gardening shears nervously against his thigh.
His father nodded.
‘Press the button. Time to bust your cherry.’
The yard was silent. Junior looked around, his chin trembling.
And then Junior began to cry.
Mo and his cousins looked away.
‘Gutless,’ Harry Flowers said softly, not remotely surprised, as if that was the worst thing of all.
His son began to sob harder.
I wanted to throw myself at them. I wanted to run away. I wanted to call my gang and have them tear these people to pieces. But the pills had taken hold and I could feel myself slipping into the blackness.
My head felt so heavy.
When I lifted it, there seemed to be a mist in front of my eyes.
In the shadows I saw Pat Whitestone with the Glock in her hand, and I saw her finger curl tighter around the trigger and I closed my eyes waiting for the crack of a gun that seems to split the air.
And then there were the sirens. At first it seemed like a noise heard in a dream, or underwater. But the sound was real and it was getting closer.
Mo and his cousins stared at each other. And then they ran for the gates.
Junior froze, just as I had seen him freeze when Frank Lyle came around a corner with a hammer in his hand, paused somewhere between a paralysed rabbit and roadkill.
His father was in his face.
‘Gutless,’ he repeated, the saliva flying.
Junior wiped his snotty nose.
‘Gutless?’ he said. ‘Who do you think knocked that teacher down? Who do you think knocked nice Lawrence off his fucking bicycle? Me! I got you that girl! I ran over that fiancé and then I reversed over his head! And you tell me to bust my cherry! You tell me I’m gutless!’
Harry Flowers stared at his son, too stunned to speak.
And then he snorted with contempt.
‘I don’t need you to get me a woman, you little cry baby,’ he said.
Junior tried to turn away but his father grabbed a handful of his jacket, turning him around with one hand as he almost casually cuffed his face with the other.
‘Be a man,’ the father told his son. ‘That’s all I want. That’s all I ask. Is that really too much for you?’
And the son stopped crying.
‘Be a man for once in your pathetic little life,’ Flowers told Junior, laughing at him, even as he lifted his hand to strike him again.
But Junior lashed back at his father, still with the gardening shears in his hand, and when the two men took half-a-step away from each other, the gardening shears were sticking out of Harry Flowers’ neck, the blood pumping steadily from a severed artery.
You could smell it. Harry Flowers fell at the feet of his son.
I saw Whitestone step back into the shadows.
Or perhaps I just dreamed it in my Xanax fog.
Then there were blue lights everywhere and also a florist’s van – ‘Beautiful’ Blooms of Barking, it said on the side – and it opened up, as if by magic, to reveal soldiers – no, not soldiers, but Specialist Firearm Officers in grey body armour with short, lightweight assault rifles – Sig Sauer MCX, the Black Mambas – and their faces were covered to protect their identity and to provoke terror in the enemy.
‘Armed police! Drop the weapon!’
Junior Flowers wiped the teary snot from his nose and yanked the gardening shears from his father’s throat, his mouth twisting with the effort.
‘Show me your hands! On the ground now!’
A couple of Mo’s cousins were being dragged into the light by uniformed police officers and Junior considered them for a second before he charged at the shots, showing them his teeth and holding the gardening shears like a javelin.
One of them shot him twice. Or two of them shot him once. There was the yellow muzzle flash close to my head, the noise that assaults your eardrums and instinctively makes you duck, and Junior was thrown backwards as if by some angry god.
These shots are trained to hit the centre of mass, the largest part of the body, the middle of the chest.
And Junior Flowers was dead before he hit the ground.
I looked up and I saw Jackson Rose. He gave me that gap-toothed grin that I have been looking at all my life and helped me to my feet.
My legs did not work. I sank to the ground.
‘We’re still mopping them up,’ he said. ‘Can I leave you for a minute? I’ll come back for you. You know I will, right?’
I nodded.
Jackson left me alone. They all left me alone. I sat on the ground of Auto Waste Solutions. Blue lights pierced the chemical-induced fog. There was running and fighting and orders and screams.
And then there was the voice.
‘Please …’
I got up and staggered on liquid legs to the car compactor.
Unnoticed in his drugged state, Bumpus lay on the car compactor as if he was on a slab in the morgue, or on an operating table, waiting to have
some terminal sickness cut from him.
The blue lights swirled on his round, brutal face.
I leaned with my back against the car compactor, fighting the sickness, struggling in the mist, resisting the urge to sleep forever.
I spat out a Xanax that had been tucked behind my tongue. And then another. The taste of the pills was bitter as vinegar.
Then I pulled myself to my feet, leaning on the scarred machine for support.
‘Help me,’ he said.
‘Her name is Scout Wolfe,’ I said.
‘What?’ he said.
‘She is eight years old,’ I said.
I saw the light change in his eyes.
‘Don’t,’ he said.
And with my legs finally giving up on me, I reached for the button.
40
Dogs live in the moment.
There were two packed suitcases by the front door, but Stan stretched his limbs and lifted his butt and did a spot of early morning grooming – languid licking, energetic scratching – as if we were going on just another walk around the neighbourhood.
It was a cloudless Sunday morning with everyone gone, the 500-year-old meat market all closed up and silent until the small hours of Monday morning. The office workers were out in the suburbs and the club kids were all tired out and tucked up in bed. Smithfield was shuttered for the weekend – the pubs, the shops, the cafés – and only the great cavernous restaurant Smiths of Smithfield was open for business and doing a roaring breakfast and brunch trade to hipster couples, many of them with pushchairs, who still made their lives in the city.
But it was all so quiet and still that as Scout, Stan and I walked under the meat market’s ancient arch, past the line of old red telephone booths and the plaque on the spot where they had executed William Wallace, that it felt as if the city belonged to us. The strip of shops on the far side of the market were closed but music was pouring from the flat above one of them – Sinatra talking to a bartender about the woman who just went away, Frank confessing that he would be happy to tell the guy all about it, but a man has to be true to his own personal code. That’s so true, Frank. There was a sign below the window that had been worn away by more than half a lifetime of weather and work.