by Peter Cocks
A board outside announced who the business premises belonged to:
LONG REACH SPECIALIST PAINT AND VARNISH CO.
The board was white and flaky – business didn’t look too brisk. Dave pressed the intercom.
“Paul Trombone and Angus McCoatup,” he announced. Donnie grunted a laugh. The door buzzed open and we went in.
In front of us was a trade desk with an old, brown computer. Behind, metal pots and plastic tubs of paint were piled from floor to ceiling. A nervous-looking bloke with a ratty face and an earring stood behind the counter. Tattoos crept up his neck beyond the line of his T-shirt. He was wearing a white coat.
“Specialist paints,” Dave said to me with a wry smile. “Invisible paint, tartan paint, polka-dot paint, striped paint in all colours. You name it.”
The bloke behind the counter gave a sickly grin. He’d obviously heard Dave’s jokes before, but I bet he smiled every time. He lifted up the counter hatch and gestured for me to walk through. Dave and Donnie followed, slamming the hatch down behind them.
“Right,” said Dave. “Take the young man downstairs and we’ll show him what makes us tick.”
Without the tracker, I really hoped someone knew where I was.
FORTY-ONE
The man in the white coat took the lid off an apparently random tin of paint and reached inside. He appeared to have pressed a concealed button because I heard a mechanical clunk, like a lock opening. The man grabbed at one of the uprights on the metal shelving unit behind him and the whole thing swung away from the wall, paint pots and all. Behind the shelf was a staircase, concrete and industrial, leading down. The man began to descend and I followed him. Dave and Donnie brought up the rear, shutting the door behind them.
The staircase and the room at the bottom were lit with harsh halogen spots. Everything was painted white and there was a smell of damp and solvents. Four people were working down there, all in white coats. The space was huge, far bigger than you could ever imagine from the scruffy paint shop upstairs. There was equipment that looked like stuff from a school science lab: scales, centrifuges, tubes and Bunsen burners. Dave introduced me to the bloke who seemed to be in charge. Sean, I think he said, who spoke with a thick, Northern Irish accent. He showed me what they were making. Mostly MDMA, he said: ecstasy. The market was still strong, but there was quite a demand for some of the other stuff, which they also synthesized here: speed, Valium, LSD and steroids. Uppers, downers, mind-benders and sporty stuff, he said. All areas covered. I didn’t really know what most of them were, but I recognized the names – and the fact that they were all illegal and lucrative. He gave me a pot that contained samples of various pills so I could see what each of them looked like. The ecstasy was a pale-blue pill with a shamrock stamped into it. The various amphetamines – speed – were whiteish powders.
“Don’t take them all at once,” Dave said. “If you’ve got any sense, you won’t take any at all. These are for the mug punters.”
I nodded. I had no intention of taking anything. I had already nearly got myself killed by drinking too much and getting careless. I wasn’t out of the woods yet, locked in this drugs factory with the Kelly thugs. I swore that if I got out and lived to fight another day, it was nothing stronger than Diet Coke for me from now on.
“If you’re sent to pick up from here, I’ll give you a pass name and an address to drop them off at. You’ll speak to no one and pick up the goods in paint tins. You won’t need to see down here again.”
There was something I still didn’t understand. “Why is Mr Kelly showing me all this?” I asked.
“Because once you’ve seen our work here, there’s no going back,” Dave explained. “Now you know some of what we do, Mr Kelly won’t have to mention it to you himself. But you’ll know what’s what when you’re sent on an errand, see?”
It seemed to me that going back and telling Tommy Kelly I didn’t fancy it wasn’t an option. I was in the firm because I had been let in on the secret.
I was in, and beyond the point of no return.
They dropped me off a few miles away at Bluewater, the big shopping centre off the motorway, where I was apparently meeting Tommy for a late lunch. I was still reeling with all the new information as I went into the Italian restaurant. It was part of a smart chain: big and airy, with shiny steel shelves and tables. The staff were all attractive and attentive, and a nice Italian girl showed me to the table. Tommy was sitting with his back to a window that looked on to the terrace.
To my surprise, Sophie was sitting next to him. They both looked great. A well-heeled, tanned father taking his gorgeous blonde daughter for lunch. Both dressed in pale-coloured cashmere, both with killer smiles. Sophie stood up and kissed me on the cheek before I sat down. People sitting near by stared.
“How did you get on, Eddie?” Tommy asked.
“Good.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“Dad says you’re going to do some work for him,” Sophie said. “Great, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.” I forced a smile, feeling numb.
“What do you fancy?” Tommy asked, passing me the menu. I didn’t fancy anything much; I still felt pretty sick from my long morning’s initiation into the Kelly business. I chose minestrone soup and Sophie and Tommy both ordered the squid salad. Tommy offered me a glass of red but I put my hand over the glass and asked for fizzy water.
While Sophie went to wash her hands, Tommy took his chance to have a word.
“Everything OK?” he said. “Grasped the nature of the business?” I nodded. “We won’t involve you in that end too much, but you need to know. You can work for me, looking up pictures on the computer and doing all the stuff I can’t.” He saw Sophie coming back to the table and held a finger to his lips. “Not a word to Her Ladyship.”
“Sure.”
“Bit of bad news this morning,” Tommy said, changing the conversation as Sophie sat down. “Jason’s opponent’s dropped out of the charity match.”
“Oh.” I don’t think Sophie cared, but she liked to make the right noises for the old man.
“Broke his thumb, training.”
“When’s it meant to be?” I asked.
“Next month. It’ll be a hard job finding someone else at short notice.”
“Is he good?” I don’t know why I wanted to know. Something to talk about.
“Jason’s got a very fast right hand,” Tommy said. “His defence needs improving, but he’s got a good punch. He’s not stylish but he doesn’t quit. If he didn’t like his leisure activities quite so much, he could be really good.”
I nodded, impressed.
“He’ll be at Brands Hatch on Saturday morning for the Indy bike races, if you’re coming?” Tommy said.
“Of course we are,” Sophie replied for me. It was the first I’d heard of it, but it looked as if I was going.
Tommy left us after lunch and we spent the rest of the afternoon shopping. Sophie seemed pleased, as if me being recruited by her dad made everything good between us. Truthfully, it was good between us. I still fancied her and she still seemed pretty keen on me, leaning against me, squeezing my hand and kissing me every now and again as we rode up the escalators.
“I told you it would work out, didn’t I?” she said. I couldn’t remember her saying anything of the sort, but she had obviously played a part in getting me a job.
Clearly she had plans for me. She just didn’t seem to know how much shit she was getting me into.
FORTY-TWO
“I’ll be honest. We lost you.” Down the line, Ian Baylis’s tone was slightly apologetic. But fell short of saying sorry.
“The bike was a bit obvious,” I said. “The Kelly driver knew straight away that it was following us.”
“The bike wasn’t ours,” Baylis said. “We had a white van that was marking you all the way down to the Dartford bridge. You didn’t see that, did you?”
“No,” I admitted.
“The car you’d changed to pulled
into the slip road at the very last minute and our vehicle was railroaded into the lane for the tunnel. He couldn’t turn around.”
“So I was in an underground drugs factory with two Kelly enforcers and no back-up?”
“About the size of it,” Baylis said. “Although we lost the bug, we knew roughly where you were by the satellite track on your phone – but that all gets a bit unreliable once you go underground. You’ll just have to get used to it.”
I had given him details of the paint warehouse and what they were manufacturing. He took down everything I said, including the stuff about Tommy Kelly’s paintings but, as usual, gave little in the way of feedback.
“So, what are you going to do?” I asked. “Bust the place now I’ve found out where it is?”
“Not that simple,” Baylis replied. “We’ll keep a close eye on it, but we know it’s not the only source of Kelly income. Shut that operation down and it will spring up somewhere else, then we’ll have to find it all over again. We need to find out how the network operates. Who delivers the raw materials and where things go from there. We need the bigger picture, the connections – and that’s where you will be able to help.”
“Look,” I said. “Tommy Kelly runs a drugs factory. Can’t you just go in and arrest him? He’s the hub. If you get him, it stops.”
Baylis almost laughed. “Tommy Kelly is smart. There’s no evidence to connect him with anything. He keeps himself remote from all the goings-on. There are companies and sub-companies, all of which keep him at a distance from the nitty-gritty. It won’t just be the drugs. They are simply easy money. We think he has bigger plans. Organized crime is rarely about one area. As well as narcotics, it will be money laundering, arms … anything that turns over big money. And with the big bucks comes the power. When you have that kind of money, you can buy people off: police, customs, organizations. And that’s where we come in.”
“The only thing he seems interested in are his paintings,” I said. “He never mentions anything else.”
“The forged and stolen paintings are just a sideline, remember,” Baylis said. “The idea seems to appeal to him as a man of taste, or some such bollocks. Bottom line is, he knows if he gets collared for forged pictures, he’s facing a three- to five-year stretch at worst, and no one thinks too badly of a forger. They’re almost gentleman villains, and he’d be treated like a king inside. Remember, Tommy’s no gentleman villain: there are about twenty-three killings we’re trying to pin on him. That’s mass murder.”
If I hadn’t already felt way out of my depth, I did now. I barely knew what Baylis was talking about.
“So what do you expect me to do?” He was scaring me.
“All you have to do is go deeper undercover,” he said. “Now you’re in, you will live your life according to the Tommy Kelly rules. Find out what you can, we’ll do the rest.” He was making it sound easy. “We can’t risk you being tagged all the time, but you will continue to plant devices wherever there’s a possibility. In their bedroom would be particularly good.”
This put a picture in my mind that I didn’t want to see.
“We will need reports back, of course, but they will be less frequent. Keep coded notes in your books so you remember stuff for our meetings,” Baylis continued. “We would prefer them face-to-face, up here at head office, rather than these friendly evening chats on the phone. And remember, we need to find something that links him directly with the big stuff.”
“OK,” I said. Now the job was getting really dangerous. They were leaving me in the capable hands of Tommy Kelly while actually reducing my back-up. It didn’t make sense to me.
“You will also need to make less contact with Tony, and Anna,” he added. “I will be your first point of contact in all circumstances.”
“You’re cutting my lifelines!” I protested.
“I am your lifeline,” he said. “Now that you’ve been embraced by the Kelly firm, all contact with the outside is potentially dangerous. The more people you speak to, the more chance we have of being rumbled. You will need to use the high street flat as your base – the safe house will just be in case of emergency. From now on, you will also refer to me as Nimrod.”
“What?” I said. “Nimrod?”
“Taken from Elgar’s ‘Enigma’ Variations. All our codes on this case will be based on them.”
I looked blank; I didn’t know my Elgar from my elbow.
“Maybe you should ask your Mr Kelly,” Baylis said. He sniggered, which was about as close as he ever came to a laugh. “He likes classical music, doesn’t he?”
“Dunno,” I replied. I felt like a sulky teenager. Which I was, I suppose.
“Keep up the good work, Eddie.”
And that was about the size of it. I was on my own.
I rang Tony, of course, to have a moan. He was a bit more sympathetic but told me that from their point of view, I was doing great. They now had a man right on the inside, which had never been the case before. He told me to keep my nose to the grindstone and do whatever was asked of me, however illegal, as it would help with the case.
Nothing would be held against me.
He said that he would call round to the flat tonight, and we could maybe have a drink. I told him I didn’t drink. The couple I’d had at the wedding had made me drop my guard and I hadn’t touched alcohol since. I didn’t want to get caught out again. Tony told me that I was doing fantastic work and rang off.
Personally, I felt I was having my bollocks yanked in all directions.
Tony dropped by at around seven. I was watching the widescreen, enjoying my remaining time in the apartment, and he quietly let himself in. Tony had a knack of just appearing out of nowhere.
I got him a beer from the fridge and a Diet Coke for myself. We didn’t say much at first, he just kept looking at me. I think he had come to give me a pep talk.
“Listen,” he said. “I just wanted to say, in person, how proud I am of you. You had a bit of a slip-up the other week but you had the guts to go in and play it to your advantage. That gamble has paid off and got us leaps ahead.”
I thought back to when Tommy Kelly had returned my phone and told me to be careful. I was beginning to wonder if he didn’t care more about me than Tony and his lot.
“I don’t think it was brave,” I said. “I don’t think I had a choice – like everything else that’s happened to me since Steve died. I’ve been manipulated.”
“I’m sorry you see it like that, mate,” Tony said. He took a glug of San Miguel. “We have to … arrange situations in this game. Line stuff up to create the best opportunities for intelligence to emerge.”
“Move people around like puppets, you mean?”
“Your words.”
“OK. Tell me you lot didn’t line Anna up to hit on me.”
“Well…” He scratched his chin. “There was perhaps an element of that. We wanted her to look after you. Keep you sweet.”
“Keep me sweet?” I laughed. “Never heard it called that before.”
He looked at me directly. “Not complaining, are you?”
I thought back and blushed. “Not really,” I admitted. “I just feel such a prat, deluding myself that she might, just for a moment, have actually fancied a seventeen-year-old bloke.”
“Eighteen next week,” Tony reminded me. I had almost forgotten. My birthday seemed insignificant in the scheme of things.
My eighteenth.
“I spoke to your mum,” Tony said. “She’s worried about you, of course. I told her not to be.” He pulled an envelope from his pocket. “She sent you this.”
I took the envelope and put it on the glass table.
“Shall I give her a call?” I asked. Tony shrugged.
“You could,” he said, the doubt clear in his voice. “But it might not be helpful right now. For either of you. You know, the tug of the old apron strings…”
I knew what he meant. To hear the old girl’s concerned voice might have me in bits. I knew she would b
lub if I spoke to her. I picked up the envelope. “I’ll save it for my birthday.”
Tony continued to big me up for the next half an hour. Told me that they had been trying to nail Tommy Kelly for nearly ten years, but the bloke was like Teflon. Tommy Teflon: everything they tried to pin on him didn’t stick; every investigation hit a dead end. Every time they tried to convict an associate, no one would testify or give evidence. Tony and the others were sure that Kelly was paying people in Revenue and Customs, in the police … everywhere. Every time he was pulled in, they could find nothing directly against him. On the other hand, with almost every single piece of organized crime that cropped up, Tommy Kelly’s name was mentioned somewhere. Tony told me just to keep my nose clean, do as I was told by Tommy, and report back to Baylis as and when. Then he said we wouldn’t be seeing each other for a while.
I heard his voice crack as he hugged me and said goodbye.
When Tony had gone, I opened the envelope from my mum. There was a birthday card with 18 on the front and a racing car. It looked really babyish. I laughed. Inside was a soppy message, which made my eyes smart. She told me how proud she was of me and how I must take care of myself. I found myself missing her, resolving to spend more time with her when this job was all over.
She had enclosed a fifty-quid note that I wanted to give back, knowing that she couldn’t afford it and I could. I hadn’t had to think about money since I’d joined. There was an anonymous bank account, plus a brown envelope with three hundred quid cash from Baylis that was delivered once a week. The old girl had also sent a note and a gold signet ring, engraved with the initials E.S.
The note explained that the ring had belonged to my mum’s dad, my granddad, the original Edward Savage. He’d died before I was born, so I’d never known him. But I knew he’d worked on the river, then gone into the Navy. That he’d been through the Second World War and survived a sinking in a torpedoed ship. What he had been through was worse than anything that had happened to me, I thought.
I was nearly eighteen. I made up my mind to stop whingeing, shape up and make men like my granddad and my brother proud of me.