To senior ranks only: murder squad investigation, victim: James Lionel Price. Under no circumstances to be revealed to press or below rank of inspector. Preliminary ballistics report, repeat preliminary. Further information to follow within forty-eight hours. No rounds recovered, disintegration on impact. Recovered cartridge, casing-eject pattern consistent with murder weapon used in unsolved 1994 homicide of Lawrence Francis Gower, AKA ‘Crazy’ Larry Flynn, case number–
‘You get it now, do you, Morty?’ asks Gene.
‘Yeah. Whoever killed Larry killed Jimmy?’
‘No. The gun was the same but I gave that gun to him–’ pointing at me ‘– on Wednesday night and he went off and killed Jimmy with it or gave it to someone to kill him.’
‘But where did you get it? Oh fuck, hang about,’ says Morty.
Me and Morty fall in at the same time.
‘I killed Larry,’ says Gene.
‘What! Why?’ says Morty, shocked and surprised. They were best mates.
‘He was getting out of hand, strangling rent boys, couldn’t help himself. He always made me promise if he went over the edge, I was to do the decent thing and pop him. Now, out the fuckin way.’
‘Larry liked boys?’ says Morty, disbelieving.
‘Now stand aside, Morty. This isn’t your quarrel.’
‘You said you knew nuffin about Larry’s murder, swore blind,’ I say, up from out of nowhere.
‘Don’t fuckin contradict me, you murdering cunt,’ screams Gene. Morty turns on his heel, gives me the pointy finger and glaring eyes. ‘Why’d you kill Jimmy? Talk. Don’t try and be funny.’
‘Cos he was a police informer, Mort.’
‘I don’t believe it,’ says Morty, shaking his head.
‘What, you don’t believe I killed him or he was a grass?’
‘You’ll have to do better than that, you lying little cunt,’ says Gene.
‘Give me a chance. I’ve got the proof,’ I say, desperado.
‘What, you going on the word of some gobshite in some old boozer, listening to all the envious gossip, are yer?’
‘I’m going on the word of Jimmy Price. Listen, I’ve got a tape. Get ridda Elvis and put the tape on. Just listen to it.’
Now I’m feeling brave.
‘If you ain’t convinced, the pair of ya, I’ll jump in the freezer and shut the door.’
‘Gene, we gotta hear this,’ says Mort. ‘And Gene, put that fuckin gun away. Someone’ll get hurt.’
I rummage in my pocket and bring out the tape. Morty turns off the Elvis tape just as another little baby boy is born in the ghetto. I can hear a stumbling, tumbling version of ‘Material Girl’ coming up through the floorboards. Then he puts on Eddy’s tape. The same hiss, then Jimmy and Albie’s voices fill the room. I’ve heard this a few times now so the novelty’s worn off. The side of my face is burnt, tender to the touch, my nose is dripping blood onto my suit and my wrist is starting to swell and throb.
Sometimes I wish I was one of the shit-kickers downstairs in the bar, living the simple life. Boozed up, maybe get lucky, blag a sloppy knee-trembler bunk-up once a fortnight, have the crack or the row in a Turkish kebab house on the way home but be content with my lot. I spot Morty flinching and tutting when he realises the coup, works out Jimmy’s little sideline. He starts to comprehend the implications and possible consequences, especially if other firms get to know that we’ve worked under Jimmy’s informant’s licence. Heavy people have got brothers, cousins, pals, wives, husbands, sons and daughters who’ve gone away for long lumps on the back of Jim’s bubble while we jogged on scot-free, getting fat. Are they gonna believe we weren’t in on the swindle? I never had direct contact with Jimmy so I never told him anything but I can see Gene and Morty rolling with body-shots cos information they’d relayed to him in idle chit-chat, over a sherbet, was now being served up to old bill via Albie Carter.
‘Wassa “spook”?’ asks Mort.
‘That’s old-school cozzer-talk for an IC3, a black geezer,’ I reply.
‘Cunt,’ says Mort, shaking his head.
Morty’s no Nelson Mandela but he don’t like being called snide derogatory names cos he’s black.
I know what’s coming next and I’m watching Gene’s face but pretending I ain’t.
‘He’s a bit tick around people and that . . . gundog . . why have a dog and call him “Fuck Off” . . .’ Jimmy’s laughter fills the room. Gene looks hurt. It’s in the eyes. Two minutes ago he was prepared to slaughter me and lob me in a freezer, do the bird-lime, sixteen-year tariff for murder, remember, if captured. Now he’s listening to the geezer he was devoted to for twenty years selling information Gene’s told him in confidence to the odd firm and not only that, belittling him, talking about him like he was a fuckin dog. Gene pours himself a double double, pours it down in one hit. He refills his glass as the band downstairs go into ‘I Will Always Love You’.
The guy on the trot for the serious armed one is a close personal friend of Morty, I know that for a fact, although I’ve never met the gent. By this time they’ve both got their heads down, shaking them gently, looking at the swirly carpet. When the bit about ‘a flash little prick’ comes, Morty looks up at me.
‘That’s you, ain’t it?’
I nod.
‘You don’t fuck about, do ya, pal?’ says Mort, looking at me in a new light.
‘I thought you said he was no good in combat, Morty,’ says Gene very dryly without looking up.
I say nothing. I let it sink right in, soak right up, let them absorb it. I get up and walk over to the music centre and push the stop button with my good hand.
‘Jimmy was always calling other people grasses, everyone was a wrong’un, according to him,’ says Gene quietly into the carpet.
‘For all our sakes, I think it’s a sensible idea if we keep this to ourselves, in this room. Gene? Morty? Agreed?’
They both nod.
‘And we don’t know who did the biz on Jimmy, do we? Agreed?
Neither of them has stopped nodding.
Dare, True, Kiss, Promise and Plot
‘I fuckin asked you about that shooter on Thursday morning and you categorically denied it was yours.’
Everyone’s calmed down a bit.
‘Listen, you was round my house, you was well pissed, more pissed than I’ve ever seen ya. You was performing, acting the goat, you was gonna fucking shoot ’em all, the Here-we-gos, the Germans, the Northern Lads, the fuckin old bill if they came near yer. You’d declared total war, blitzkrieg. There wasn’t a gun big enough for yer. You came right out of yourself. I tried to put ya to bed but you said you wanted to wake up at home, in your own bed, but you wouldn’t give the gun back, grew attached to it, you did. I ran you home and you fell asleep straight away, like a baby.’
‘But when I rang up the next day you said–’
‘I know what I fuckin said, lad, but sometimes you’re so fuckin serious ’bout things, so earnest, so fuckin up yourself–’
‘Okay okay, I get the fuckin picture, Gene.’
‘I thought it was funny, a wind-up, you waking up in the feather with a big ol’ piece like that, with a silencer. I didn’t know you was gonna do Jimmy with it.’
He and Morty smirk at each other like little kids.
‘Is that your idea of a joke, planting guns?’
He leans forward and gives me the pointy finger. He’s serious now. ‘Listen to me and listen good, lad. I Did Not Fucking Plant It. You was gonna shoot me with it if I tried to get it off yer. Where’s the gun now?’
‘Why, do you want it?’
‘Jesus fuckin Christ.’ He throws up his hands. ‘Ya fuckin jokin, ain’t ya? Tell me you are. I don’t want it within a fuckin million miles of me. That bitta kit’ll get someone twenty years. You got rid of it somewhere safe?’
‘I buried it in a park, in a flower bed.’
‘How deep?’
‘Three foot.’
‘That’ll have to do. It’
d be too risky going back now.’
I’ve got a packet of frozen fish fingers wrapped in a tea-towel on my wrist, my nose is full of bloody snot and the side of my face is burning still. ‘I’m a bit better, thank you very much for asking,’ I say to myself cos these two here don’t give a fuck. Morty and Gene are getting chilled out, drinking the Irish.
‘So Eddy wants the pills now?’ says Gene. ‘That’s a turn-up, if you’re a fan of irony.’
‘I probably would be if I knew what it was. Why’s it a turn-up though, Gene?’
‘Because it’s Eddy’s fault, this whole fuckin mess. Him getting Jimmy, may the Lord have mercy on his soul, involved with those Chechen fuckers.’
‘Who are they? Red Indians?’ asks Morty.
‘I’ll explain later, Mort. Have another drink,’ says Gene.
‘Eddy reckons he told Jimmy not to get involved with them, said you told Jimmy to give it a wide as well.’
‘So Eddy’s taking notice of me now, is he? It’s highly fuckin debatable that, but my theory, for what it’s worth, is that Eddy swerved these swindle merchants into Jim to get them offa his back.’
‘And it worked very well.’
‘It worked for Eddy but not Jimmy. He went down for the thirteen mill.’
‘Jimmy got rumped thirteen million quid!’ says Morty. ‘Fuckin ‘ell.’
‘At the time it seemed plausible, very fuckin plausible. They were flying in ex-government officials from Timbuktu and beyond. They would argue about shares, percentages, minute, tiny details all night long, throwing wobblers, crying cos they thought they were getting turned over. Remember this, cos this is important. Jimmy only bought, with thirteen million pounds, a forty-two-per-cent share. They were looking to divvy up about one hundred million pounds. It was worked big.’
‘So he was looking at walking away with a forty-two-mill whack. That’s temptation. What was the cargo?’
‘Heroin that had been seized and parked up by a Pakistani political party when they were in government but who are now in opposition.’
‘Going where? To who?’
‘Montreal, Canada, and then overland into the United States.’
‘But Gene, whose property was it?’
‘One of the Italian, New York families who farm it out to pro-democracy, anti-Castro Cubans, who’ve got a network in place in the southern USA, Miami to Dallas. They in turn punt it into the black communities there.’
‘But surely the Eyeties got the finances in place to do this kinda thing every daya the week.’
‘They’ve got very heavy currency laws out there now, anti-racketeering statutes, RICO, so they find it hard to get cash-dollars moving around. The Pakistanis wanted cash so they could send half to Antwerp and Prague to buy weaponry and the other half delivered to Zurich to split among the top boys.’
‘Couldn’t the Eyeties pay in weapons? Easy to get in the States, firearms. It’s the one thing they ain’t short of.’
‘See what yer did?’
‘What’d I do?’
‘Yer started asking serious questions about something you already know to be a total fiction, an elaborate fabrication, a bollix. It’s already got in yer nut, ain’t it? A little whiff of intrigue and big money and you’re being led by the nuts.’
‘True.’
‘You’re sitting in a room above an ol’ roughhouse boozer in County Kilburn and you was seeing all those places, Miami, the US-Canadian border, Pakistan, Belgium. Admit it, you was already sending postcards.’
‘You’re not wrong. If you’re gonna tell a lie, tell a big one.’
‘Exactly, son. Trying to sell Jimmy a non-existent holiday home in Portugal wouldn’t have worked, give him the opportunity to be a big-time international player, stroke his ego, he’s a fuckin sucker, got wiped out.’
‘Was he potless?’
‘More or less. That’s why he put the thing together in Amsterdam, the bushwhack, with the Banditos. That’s why he was after your shillings, knows you ain’t a spunker,’ says Gene.
‘Jimmy put that skank together? Put the Yahoos up to that?’
Morty looks at me, shaking his head. He doesn’t know either.
‘I thought you’d worked that out already,’ says Gene, ‘a smart geezer like you. I’d have given you that much credit.’
It’s easy spotted in retrospect.
‘How?’
‘Manna from heaven, Jimmy called it. That gobshite Duke, that priceless prick, came to see him, skint because his drug-addled girlfriend had shot up his house and the police were after him. He wanted help, thought Jimmy might know some likely candidates to turn over. Jimmy thought that it’s a bit risky over here, that it might cause problems, so he suggested Holland instead. He gave him some plane-fare, arranged passports and Darren, the Duke, as he liked to be called, took the bait, gobbled it down.’
‘What, Jimmy just wound him up and pointed him in the right direction?’ I ask.
Gene winks and nods. ‘Listen, son,’ he says, ‘I’ve seen Jimmy put teams together to rob banks, get a gullible four waifs together, appoint a leader, tell them that he’s got it all worked out, he’s plotted up and cased the joint, put together a master-plan. The bank’s got two doors right? You run in the first one, do the cha-cha with the sawn-off, get the money and run out the other door, okay? You got it? Back in the jam-jar and away and don’t forget to bring me back my share. If you’re captured, name, rank and serial number only. I know for a fact that he’d only ever driven past the bank in his motor. That was Jimmy all over.’
‘And they would? Bring him back the readies?’
‘They would run round to give him half. Wouldn’t stop to take the balaclava off sometimes.’
‘Why?’
‘Kudos, reflected glory. Strength of personality, Jimmy had it, can’t be denied.’
‘I bet he had double-bubble sometimes, copped for the reward money as well.’
‘That’s a point. I hadn’t thought of that till now,’ says Gene. Jimmy’s died a double-death, physically and reputation-wise. ‘You know,’ he says, ‘there’s no such word as “gullible” in the dictionary, it’s a made-up word.’
‘Really?’ I say.
‘Course it’s in the fuckin dictionary, you stupid cunt, but I got you thinking, doubting your own intuition for a split second, didn’t I? And listen, son.’ He gives it pointy finger. ‘All fuckin words are made-up words.’
‘So Jimmy worked the old go-and-rob-a-bank-for-us-son number on Duke, only on a bigger scale.’
‘Exactly, but Duke was made of sterner stuff, bittova Don himself, was the Duke. He didn’t see why he should split the take with Jimmy after he did all the graft, the shovel work, over in Holland.’
‘Fuckin ingrate. But the German firm found him and liquidated him.’
‘Who told yer that?’
‘Clarkie told me the other day.’
‘Why does he think it was the Germans?’
‘We was assuming.’
‘Good. If everyone’s happy to assume that the Germans did the business on those two, great. Let’s hope the out-of-town posse thinks the same.’
‘You did him, didn’t yer, Gene?’ says my reckless good self.
The band downstairs are playing ‘Everybody Hurts’ painfully. Gene stops and lights a fag. He looks at me, then at Mort, like he can’t believe what he’s heard, but he did give it a bittova drum-roll.
‘You’ve grown balls before my very eyes, son. Seeing as we’re all being so very honest and seeing that the hear-say evidence of a pair of reprobates such as yourselves would be thrown straight outta court, I’ll tell ya.’
‘Not if you don’t want to, Gene. I was outta order askin, even.’
Remember, be cautious what you let people tell you.
‘Oh no, you’ve asked now-’ says Gene a little bit sulky, rolling the Dunhill, ‘– so I’ll tell ya. They turned up at the Paddington car-front, Tuesday, out of the blue, day after you’d told JD those pills were
n’t worth shit, him and the wife, Slasher, demanding money there and then. She started making threats about the law, he told her to shut the fuck up, started hitting her, knocked her spark out. Metal Mickey showed his first bit of initiative ever and shot the Duke in the head while he was stood over her screaming at her to get up. What you two laughing at? It ain’t fuckin funny, two dead people, two bodies.’
‘It’s the way you tell it, Geno,’ says Mort, crashed out on the sofa, getting cosy with the Irish. ‘I’m starting to feel right left out here, I ain’t never killed nobody in years, I’m starting to feel a bittova wuss.’
‘So she had to go as well?’ I ask.
‘Well, you have to be pragmatic ‘bout these things, don’t ya. I don’t like doing birds so Mickey . . . you know.’
When Gene the Gentleman was dividing up the pork balls the other night he used his fingers, ‘’scuse fingers’, he said. The same fingers hacked off their heads and hands. Fuck knows where they are now. I don’t wanna know.
‘I think,’ I say, ‘we should get those pills, out them to Eddy Ryder, carve the two and a half mill, then shut up shop for good, go our separate ways.’
‘Shank them outta their share?’ says Mort.
‘Call it what you like. I’m saying do unto them as they would do unto us.’
‘We could pull together some awesome firepower. Young Mister Clark reckons he might know where they’re holed up with the loot,’ says Mister Mortimer, sitting up, rubbing his hands, getting excited.
‘I don’t want no blood-baths, no comebacks, no messy implications. There’s more than one way to skin a cat.’
‘I not with yer,’ says Geno.
‘Slowly, slowly catchy monkey.’
‘One thing been buggin me,’ says Morty. ‘Did this Eddy Ryder or one of his outfit have my little cousin Trevor killed?’
‘I made a point of askin him that and he categorically denied any involvement, was sorry to hear about it in fact, hoped the two gee hadn’t contributed to the poor young man’s death.’
‘That’s all right then, cos . . . you know.’
You’d have to do something, so I’ve saved you a loada grief, maybe getting one in the temple from Mister Troop. It’s getting too easy to lie these days. I wanna be outta London early next week. It’s grown stale and dangerous for the time being. I wanna be as far away from these two as humanly possible. Nothing personal, but I need blue ocean, seafood and fit birds, not growlers, shooters and grim-boat Londoners.
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