It was the trench coat, El thought. Long and dark and tightly belted at the waist, it gave her an old world mafiosa appearance that was faintly anachronistic, though no less intimidating for it. The rest, she hoped, was equally threatening: the blood-red lipstick, the cheekbones powdered and contoured high and hollow as a Milanese pinup’s, the stiletto points sharp enough to weaponise.
“Shouldn’t need to,” she said. “We play this right, and he’s coming to us.”
Nobody had answered Ruby. They hadn’t needed to; all of them could see her cogs were already turning, that she had a scheme of her own for Hartwood already half-formulated.
She wasn’t after their input, their help to extract payback or broker a resolution. She was looking for permission.
And not just permission, El had told herself. Participation. She doesn’t just want us to agree to whatever she’s thinking. She wants us to sign up.
“What do you want to do about it?” she’d asked her. “You’ve got some sort of plan in mind, you must have, so you may as well come out with it.”
Ruby had looked to Sita, who had looked back at her quizzically.
“You remember Turin in ’82?” she asked.
“Of course,” said Sita, surprised. “Who could forget that castle? And wasn’t that the year that…?”
She’d paused, realisation seeming to dawn.
“Ah,” she’d added. “I see.”
“Well?” said Ruby.
Sita considered the unspoken question.
“I suppose it could work,” she said. “But I must warn you, I go down far better with the Italians than the British in those circles. Englishmen are so… mechanical, so technically minded. All they ever want to talk about are pistons and exhaust pipes.”
“I ain’t thinking of you,” said Ruby. “I’m thinking of El here.”
“Me?” El had said. “What about me?”
They’d ignored her, the way they always did during these exchanges.
“She’d need an outsideman, for the rope,” Sita added.
“I got someone in mind.”
“And a second insider. Not to say a third body for the extraction, a strong one. Unless you expect the girl to do it all herself?”
Do what? El had thought. What is it I’m meant to be doing, exactly?
She’d felt it, then: the inevitability, the absolute unshakeable certainty that - regardless of what she did or didn’t want, how much she did or didn’t protest - she was going to be in this, front and centre and up to her eyeballs.
They were like waves, the two old women and their plots: rogue waves, unpredictable and impossible to fight. You couldn’t run; all you could do was ride them out, and hope you didn’t get flattened.
“You’re dead right,” said Ruby, grinning. “And wouldn’t you know it, I got a couple of ideas about that, too…”
When Angela Di Salvo stepped out of her Rolls-Royce onto the grass, heads turned.
Not because she was a woman, in what was - the attendees would be the first to admit - a decidedly male arena. Not because of the entirely impractical way she was dressed, or the flicker of exoticism that spoke to them of Mediterranean climates more temperate than Gloucestershire’s, even in midsummer. And not because of the bodyguard, the young girl in the suit and headset who stepped out in front of Di Salvo as if she were getting ready to take a bullet for her.
No; heads turned for the car.
It was a Phantom V, a 1964 James Young model, hot pink and immaculate - among the prized possessions, though the attendees couldn’t have known it, of one careful lady owner.
There were a lot of classics out on the field that morning, American and European as well as domestic: a Karmann Ghia, a Triumph Roadster, two Sunbeam Tigers and half a dozen Morgans. But none quite so spectacular as the Phantom, nor so beautifully maintained.
“What did I tell you?” said Karen, under her breath. “Old men, as far as the eye can see.”
El allowed Angela Di Salvo a faint, thin smile.
They were barely ten feet from the car when the vultures began to circle: cagouled spotters armed with sharpened pencils, jotting the Phantom’s specs into their notepads with breathless fervour; hobbyist photographers with SLRs around their necks and handheld video cameras at their shoulders; retirees with lunchboxes and flasks of hot tea, scouting around for the perfect space to park their folding picnic chairs. A tall fair-haired boy, younger than the rest but no less intense, his eyes flickering wildly back and forth between her and Karen and the Phantom – wondering, if El had to take a guess, how two women like them could possibly have acquired a car like that.
And a final group, more polished-seeming than their brethren - their equipment more expensive, the gazes they let linger on the vehicles they passed more appraising.
Professionals, El thought.
“They just stroll around the fields, looking?” El had asked Ruby, astonished, while she was prepping for the job.
“That’s the regional shows for you,” Ruby had told her. “You might get the odd burger stand or an RAC bloke looking to pick up custom, but it’s all about the cars, whether you’re a dealer or a Sunday driver in a little red convertible. Looking at ‘em, showing ‘em off, seeing ‘em race round. It ain’t for everyone, but if you like that sort of thing…”
“Wouldn’t it be a bit amateur for a woman like Di Salvo, though? A bit low-rent?”
Ruby had taken a sip of her coffee and a bite of one of the Viennese butter biscuits Dexter had been buying her in lieu of her beloved custard creams, and thought it over.
“You ever been to a car boot sale?” she’d asked.
“Sure,” El had said. “Once or twice, on the job.”
But never for myself, she’d added silently. Never as myself.
“And what did you think of it? Of the stuff on the tables?”
El had let her mind drift back to what she’d seen there: to the cheap plastic action figures and My Little Pony knockoffs, the Jackie DeShannon records and the Barbara Taylor Bradford paperbacks.
“Not much,” she’d replied.
“The thing about car boot sales,” Ruby said, letting another section of biscuit dissolve into the coffee until a sugary froth developed on its surface, “is that most of what you find there is crap. Other people’s crap, and all - whatever they don’t want no more. And nine times out of ten, you leave thinking, what did I bother with that for, when I could have been at home with a sausage butty watching David Frost?”
“But the tenth time, you find something valuable? Is that what you’re saying?”
Ruby withdrew the disintegrating biscuit from the coffee, scrutinised it and then, satisfied, took another bite.
“Valuable?” she said, through a mouthful of watery crumbs. “What good would that do me? If I wanted valuable, I’d take myself to Bonhams and pick a fight with all the other rich bastards over a hundred grand necklace or a bit of Queen Anne furniture. No - what you want from a car boot is something no-one else’d look twice at. Something nobody wants, but you can put a bit of elbow grease into and then take to Bonhams yourself to sell on for a song.”
“Something with potential. Got it. And it’s the same with auto shows - people go looking for hidden treasures so they can fix them up?”
“If they’re clever about it,” Ruby told her, swallowing the remainder of the biscuit. “Though of course, if they’re really clever, they’ll go one better than that. If they’re really clever, they’ll go looking for something they can tell you is valuable that you’ll pay up for, even if it ain’t worth anything at all. And I reckon that sort of thing might be right up your woman Di Salvo’s street, don’t you?”
They walked the rows of cars, El occasionally stopping to examine one model or another more closely before moving on, Karen three paces ahead of her.
Hartwood wasn’t difficult to find. In the sea of sensible brogues, flyaway combovers and lightweight V-neck sweaters, his bleached blond head and fishbone earring calle
d out like a beacon, in spite of his tartan slacks and quilted gilet.
He was standing by a battered-looking powder blue Beetle, deep in conversation with an older man whose gently protruding stomach, thick white hair and twinkling blue eyes gave him a sweetly Santa Claus-ish look. Both men were staring at her; Hartwood, especially, was doing a poor job of concealing his curiosity.
“That him?” said Karen, under her breath.
“That’s him,” El confirmed, just as quietly.
She paused, ostensibly to study the paintwork of a silver Jensen Interceptor; let herself count to ten, then twenty.
“Is he still looking?” she asked Karen, when she thought she’d waited long enough.
“Better than that,” Karen whispered. “He’s coming over.”
“Len Wolf,” Ruby had said. “He’s the roper I been thinking of.”
“Len Wolf?” Sita had replied, wrinkling her nose. “That… stick-up artist?”
There was something unsavoury, to Sita’s mind, about using weapons - real weapons, ones that shot or struck or perforated - in the course of a job. Counterfeits were fine, El knew; Sita had never shied away from a replica gun in the handbag or a bladed letter-opener in the stocking, if it helped to sell a character. But real weapons, real violence - they were a kind of cheating. If you couldn’t persuade a mark to part willingly with their cash or their possessions, to hand over the briefcase of fifties or that Georgia O’Keeffe in the attic with a smile on their face and thanks on their lips, then you didn’t deserve to call what you were doing work, let alone skilled work. Pointing a shotgun at some poor cashier was extortion, plain and simple; money taken with menaces. For a woman to whom the con was an art, an impeccably choreographed dance, and the grifter herself both performer and stage-manager, bank robbery was a kind of destructive finger-painting; a heckle and a wolf-whistle released from the stalls in the third act of Madama Butterfly.
“He gave all that up years ago,” said Ruby. “Been out of commission since he banged up his leg doing over that armoured van in Woodside Park. December ’89, that must have been.”
“And you’re quite sure he’s up to the job?” Sita asked, dubious.
“Bloke knows his cars,” Ruby told her. “Spends just about every weekend on the circuit, at one of them events or other. And I seen him talk his way out of enough tight spots to know he’s got the gift of the gab, so he’ll have the patter down well enough to play the outsideman. Plus…”
She’d hesitated; thrown a dark, admonishing glance Dexter’s way.
“He owes me a favour,” she’d added.
Dexter had let out another deep, remorseful sigh.
“He’s the one who introduced me to Hartwood,” he said, before anyone could appeal for further detail. “I happened to bump into him at a Masters race at Brands Hatch, and when I mentioned in passing that I was selling the Jag, he suggested he might be able to put me in touch with someone he knew from the Classics shows. A potential buyer.”
“Should have known better, bleedin’ idiot,” said Ruby, shaking her head.
It hadn’t been obvious to El which of them she’d considered the greater idiot - Len Wolf, or her uninjured, loose-lipped son.
Hartwood sidled up to them like a used-car salesman, all white teeth and insincerity - coming in so close and so quickly El worried he was going to try to slide an arm around her waist or make a grab for her arse.
Karen thrust herself between them, blocking his way.
“You want to back off,” she told him, angling her body side-on and her head upwards, so that her shoulder grazed his chest and the corded tendons in her neck were directly in his line of sight.
“’S’alright, Jax,” El told her, gesturing for her to move aside. “Let the man talk. I’m sure he’s got his reasons for coming over here to introduce himself. Isn’t that right, Mr…?”
She’d pitched the voice somewhere between Ruby’s Cockney and a more generic Estuary, with just a little of the slip and slide of Calabria in the final, rising syllable. Angela Di Salvo, she’d reasoned, would be second-generation acculturated: Italian at home, English at school and then at work, and London to her core.
“Hartwood,” he said, his manner an unlikely combination of nervous and peeved. Perhaps, she thought, because she hadn’t recognised him, or responded in the way he’d been conditioned to expect from the general public after his brief flirtation with the A-list. “My friends call me Gary.”
“And what can I do for you, Mr Hartwood?” she asked - disinterest dripping from every word, every downward flicker of her eyes.
He ran the palm of one hand nervously over his elaborately peaked hair.
“It’s more a question,” he said, “of what I might be able to do for you, Miss Di Salvo. Or can I call you Angela?”
By the time El met him, Ruby had assured her, Hartwood would be primed. Primed, and a little frightened.
Len Wolf would have seen to it.
He’d make a point of running into Hartwood early on, before El and Karen arrived at the show; would make small talk about the races he’d caught up at Silverstone and Aintree, the Hillclimb at Goodwood and the Sunday Scramble over in Bicester.
Then he’d ask what Hartwood was selling, these days.
Like a lot of the collectors Ruby had known, Hartwood was a neophile - a novelty seeker, easily bored by the models in his lot and perennially in search of the next acquisition, the one that would set his pulse racing anew. And because of this neophilia, he’d become in the course of his collecting as much a dealer as a buyer - selling and swapping and trading up and out, switching an Alvis for an Alta or a Ferrari 250 Europa for a T-Bird, and swelling his own coffers in the process. Even when he wasn’t running his reverse-clocking scam on the greenhorn petrolheads who approached him in good faith with a Healey Westland or a Peerless GT.
He’d be on the lookout for his next fix, Ruby was sure of it; and very likely his next mark, while he was at it.
But he’d also have an eye out for a new customer - for someone who might scoop up the stock he wanted to offload. Someone, ideally, with deeper pockets than the average.
“Why?” he’d ask Len. “You in the market for something?”
Len would laugh - a rueful chuckle suggesting that he most definitely would be, under other circumstances.
“Not sure the wife’d let me,” he’d say. “She had a fit when I came home with the Alfa Romeo.”
There would follow some light-hearted back and forth about the inestimable Mrs Wolf, who - despite her innumerable virtues - had never quite understood the love a man could feel for his motor, much less the seductive pull a reconditioned gullwing coupé could exert on the dedicated Mercedes admirer.
Five minutes or so would pass, Len checking his watch surreptitiously to time the conversation just so. And El and Karen would make their entrance.
“Bloody hell,” Len would gasp, his eyes on El as she walked slowly among the parked cars. “I don’t believe it.”
“What?” Hartwood would ask.
“It’s her,” Len would say - slowly, as if not quite believing what he was seeing. “It’s Angela Di Salvo.”
“Who?”
And Len would tell him.
Angela Di Salvo, he’d say, was a legend - a name spoken in hushed whispers across the more clued-up corners of the London underworld. Hartwood couldn’t be expected to know that, of course - he didn’t run in those circles. But for a bloke like Len, an antique face who kept his ear to the ground… she was practically royalty. Practically folklore.
There were three things, he’d say, that you needed to know about Angela Di Salvo.
The first was the lineage. For all she’d done in her own right - and Christ knew there was a lot of it - she was Niccolo’ Di Salvo’s little girl, first and foremost.
Nicky Di Salvo, he’d say - may he rest in peace - just about ran Hackney in the ‘70s. Had a hand in everything: gambling, robbery, protection, loan sharking… just about anything b
ut the drugs and tarts his staunch Catholicism forbade, the profits he made filtered through a chain of garages spread out across the East End. He was hard, Nicky, but fair, a proper old-school gangster - you didn’t mess with him, and he didn’t mess with you. You did him a good turn, and he’d do you one down the line, no questions asked.
When he died, in ’86, it was widely assumed that his son would take over the business. But Piero was soft, and not too bright - loved his dogs and his birds, the racing pigeons he kept up in his loft, and not a bad bone in his body, but barely two brain cells to bang together, and hardly the sort you wanted fronting your operation. So in stepped Angela, barely into her twenties then, but a mind like a steel trap and twice as tough as even her old man had been. And before you knew it, the Di Salvo kingdom was an empire, stretching south to Lambeth and north to Finsbury Park.
The second thing was: she’d been away, the last couple of years. Not inside, Len would stress - it’d be a cold day in hell before the filth got anything to stick on Angela Di Salvo. But out of the country, somewhere in Palermo; a strategic retreat beaten in the immediate aftermath of a job gone bad - a job she’d overseen - at a safety deposit place up in Birmingham. There’d been no arrests, and not a penny of the £90m taken had been found, but the heat had been on, and Angela had known better than to hang around London waiting for the knock.
But now she was back. Back, and apparently happy to be seen.
The third thing to know about Angela Di Salvo, he’d say, is the cars. Rumour had it she lived a pretty austere life, by her Dad’s standards: no yachts, no glitzy nightclubs, no fancy meals out when she could cook at home. But she’d grown up in Nicky’s garages, hanging about with mechanics and repairmen. And there were few things she liked better than a Maserati A6 or a finely preserved Stradale.
“I heard she shipped half of her collection out with her to Sicily,” Len would say. “And had the other half sold off while she was gone. Sad, really. I expect she’s here to see what’s on the market, so’s she can start to restock. I know I’d be looking, if I were her.”
The Push (El Gardener Book 2) Page 4