Long Reach
Page 23
“Sure,” I said sleepily. “But I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing tomorrow.”
“It’s not tomorrow,” Donnie grumbled. “It’s now. There’s a cab outside. Get in it and come down to Catford. It will drop you at the end of Honley Road. Walk up and meet me at the Chilli Peppa club. Don’t hang about.” He cut off the call.
I jumped out of bed and pulled the curtain back. A minicab was waiting downstairs, engine running. Shit. I pulled on a pair of jeans and some trainers, grabbed a hoodie and ran downstairs.
Things were beginning to unravel, I could feel it in my bones. First, the old man turning up, now this call. Plus I was still feeling paranoid about the trip and what Tommy Kelly might or might not have twigged. I felt sure I was walking into a trap. But I couldn’t say no.
FIFTY-FIVE
The cab dropped me in Lewisham High Street. The road was wet and empty. It was nearly two-thirty. A police car sped past, throwing up spray, its siren wailing. I found myself wishing it had been for me. I would have been relieved.
I turned into Honley Road as I had been told. The place was just off the junction. It looked like a run-down bingo club. There was a wire fence to one side and I saw Donnie’s Mercedes in the parking area. Another car was next to it, a black Mazda or something, a four-by-four. The entrance to the club was shut, and the neon Chilli Peppa sign was turned off. I could see a light round the back, so I let myself in through an open side door. The place was still warm and smelt of sweat and alcohol. A violet UV strip light still shone over the stage and sent a creepy glow over the dance floor. Beyond, I could see a door ajar and a chink of light coming from it.
“Donnie?” I called weakly. I walked towards the door and pushed it open. It was the office.
At first I thought it was joke, like someone had been in and splashed red paint everywhere. Then I saw the body on the floor, its white shirt soaked in blood. Donnie was standing over it, his sleeves rolled up as if he had been doing housework.
“Don’t just stand there,” he said. ”We need to move him. Find some bin bags or something.”
I couldn’t move or speak. Then, as if I was on automatic pilot, some practical instinct kicked in. I went back into the dance room and began to pull at the red velvet curtains behind the stage. The first one came down and I took it back into the office.
Donnie rolled it out on the floor, grunting and breathing heavily. “Help me, will you?” he said.
I took the dead man’s arm. It was still warm and I could smell him as well as the sickly odour of blood and death. His black trousers were even blacker, with blood and piss. I tried to roll him over, and as I did my hand slipped into the gash that cut through his shirt, under his ribs and across his belly. He was almost cut in half. I felt bone, then the raw flesh, hot and juicy with bright blood. I quickly pulled my hand away, covered in it. Pushing out from the hole in his side, I could see twisted muscle and gut, purple and swollen. I threw up.
“Behave,” Donnie said. He lay a bloodstained samurai sword on top of the body and threw the rest of the velvet across him. I saw the dead man’s open eyes stare glassily at me as Donnie tucked the fabric around the head. Saw the rough, red knife cuts to the dark skin of his forehead, pink flesh showing through. It looked like the letter K. “Get the other one,” Donnie ordered.
In a trance, I went through and pulled down the other velvet curtain. Ten minutes later we had something that looked like a roll of red carpet. Donnie picked up some keys from the desk and went outside. I stood, trembling, staring at the roll of dead body as Donnie reversed the Mazda up to the back door. I took the foot end and Donnie heaved the body into the back of the car, pulling the parcel shelf down and slamming the tailgate. I watched, as if in a dream, washing my hands in a muddy pool as he emptied a jerrycan of petrol into the bloodstained office.
He threw me the keys to the Mazda. “You’re driving,” he said. “Follow me. Don’t stop. Don’t look at anyone. Keep to a steady forty.” I must have looked blank. “You can drive, can’t you?”
I nodded. It wasn’t the time to tell him that I hadn’t had much practice. Donnie shook his head and hissed a few effs.
“Go on then.”
I did as I was told and started the engine while Donnie put on his jacket, cool as you like, and lit a petrol-soaked rag. The flame glared orange as he threw it in through the door. Then he walked to the Merc and started it up, and we drove out on to Lewisham High Street back through Catford. I followed his tail lights, my hands shaking on the wheel, until we hit the roundabout on to the dual carriageway.
I put the radio on for distraction. A late-night station was playing middle-of-the-road rock for lorry drivers. A smoky-voiced, crap DJ announced, “It’s three a.m. One for all you drivers out there… Mr Chris Rea.”
“She said, ‘Son, this is the road to hell…’”
I hate Chris Rea. He always sounds like he’s singing on the toilet, groaning with the effort of curling out a tom-tit. My brother used to have his album. I switched the radio off.
I stuck strictly to the forty limit, following the Mercedes at about three cars’ distance. The road was pretty empty until just past Eltham, when a police patrol car pulled out from a side road and sat on my tail. I stared straight ahead, trying to keep my nerve. I wondered for a second what would happen if I flagged them down and turned myself in. I imagined the scenario: Donnie would shoot off like a rat up a drainpipe and I’d be left on the hard shoulder with a samurai sword and a carved-up body. And traces of its blood on my hands.
I realized why I was doing the driving. If there was going to be a fall guy, it would be me.
The police car pulled alongside me. The Mazda’s stupid personalized plate had probably given them enough cause for suspicion. There were two coppers. I checked them out of the corner of my eye. The nearest one was looking across at me: an eighteen-year-old, driving an expensive four-wheel drive at three in the morning.
On the other hand, I was sober and driving like I was doing the test.
He was probably weighing up what they might pull me in for. I began to sweat heavily. Could hardly feel my foot on the pedal. The blue light went on and I got ready to pull over, but suddenly the squad car sped away, shooting up to about eighty, passing Donnie in the Merc and disappearing within seconds.
Another call, something more pressing. A fight in a kebab shop or a drunken girl in a gutter.
If only they’d known.
Twenty minutes later Donnie signalled off the main road and turned off for Dartford. I followed as he headed down towards the industrial area near the bridge. I didn’t recognize much in the dark, but I guessed we were somewhere near the “paint factory”.
We drove along a new road, lit with orange streetlights. Warehouses and industrial units dotted the fields on either side. At a roundabout, Donnie took the smallest exit, which looked like a dead end. We drove past a boarded-up caravan that advertised tea and snacks, then turned down a smaller lane, potholed and rough. My headlights picked out a run-down farm building, with bales of straw and rusty machinery. Whatever was being farmed down here on the marshes must have been thin pickings. The land looked hard and sparse.
We drove on for another mile across the black marshes, electric pylons straddling the fields and the road. In the distance I could see the river, defined by the lights of a slow boat inching its way towards London. Donnie stopped, got out and, in the headlights, opened a steel gate on to another track. He climbed back in and we continued winding down the path towards the river.
When we reached the sea wall, Donnie stopped again and signalled me to stop. He opened my driver’s door and moved me over to the passenger seat while he switched off the headlights. He put the Mazda back into gear and drove it up the steep grass bank that ran up to the sea wall. At the top he opened the tailgate and wrestled the body out, telling me to grab the feet. A pair of flashy Nikes were sticking out of the end of the roll. Almost as a mark of respect, I wrapped the velvet curtain back arou
nd them and picked up my end.
The rain had stopped, but a chill wind blew across the river. I could hear the tide lapping some distance away and I felt the sweat on my forehead evaporating in the night air. We heaved the body down, across the gravel and washed-up plastic bottles at the river’s edge, and swung it out into the mud, where it landed with a wet slap.
“Tide’ll take it downriver,” Donnie said.
“It’ll be found.” I had imagined that Donnie was going to bury the body or “disappear” it in a vat of wet cement somewhere.
“Yeah,” Donnie said. “It’ll be a warning.”
I looked at the roll of red-velvet curtain, darkened in the mud. I could still see a trainer sticking out and an arm had come loose and lay, thrown back from the body, fingers curled in the air.
All I could see was my brother, Steve.
FIFTY-SIX
I tried to sleep, but I couldn’t. My hands were still shaking; the sights and sounds were burnt into my mind.
I felt vulnerable and paranoid, as if someone was going to knock on the door at any moment and take me away. The police, or one of the Kelly lot. The bogeyman. I didn’t know.
I didn’t know. Except I knew the bogeyman was real.
A warning, Donnie had said. A warning to whom? To others muscling in on Kelly business? I wondered why Tommy had insisted that I helped Donnie. Was he trying to warn me? Or was he trying to get me involved to a point where there could definitely be no turning back? Implicating me in a murder? I kept looking out at the street from behind the curtains, chewing my nails down till they bled. I decided that I’d feel better at the safe house, so I let myself out and ducked through the back streets down towards the river.
I didn’t feel much better once I was inside. I sat and stared out of the window, across the river to where people were going about their normal lives, in proper jobs in conventional offices. I wished I was one of them, making an honest crust, having a nice ordinary life where I could sleep at night. If I could get out of this, I might be poor with no girlfriend, but at least I’d be back in normal society, honest and poor with no girlfriend. Doing normal stuff blokes of my age do.
But now I was beyond the point of no return.
I thought of calling Tony, or even Baylis, but in my state of shock I didn’t know how I could begin to explain what I’d got myself into. I felt that I had been stained by the night’s events to a level where I was beyond their help or understanding.
I went and found my notebook, hoping that if I wrote some of it down it would calm my nerves. Would help explain how I’d been involved in the disposing of another body at Long Reach.
When the sun came up, I finally got off. I slept all day and most of the following night, my body and mind drained by the trauma. When I woke at four in the morning, the horror hit me again and I started getting antsy. I had left my laptop at the other flat in my hurry to get back here. Not safe. I didn’t want to go out, but I needed my computer, so when it got light, I slipped on some trackies, pulled a beanie over my head and jogged up the road to Deptford High Street.
The market was just waking up and life carried on pretty much as usual, but I felt like someone was going to jump me at any moment. I unlocked the flat and pushed back the door. It caught on a large, brown envelope, which was unusual. I never got post. I picked it up and shoved it into my bag with my laptop and jogged straight back to the apartment.
I felt a little better for the exercise and made myself some tea and opened up the envelope. It gave me a bit of a shock: inside was a postcard from Croatia, just like the one I was meant to pick up. I turned it over. On the back was written: Check your compass. Wish you were still here? My mind spooled through the possibilities. Anna, it had to be.
I took the other, folded sheets from the envelope. They looked official. I unfolded them and began to read:
POST-MORTEM REPORT,
GREENWICH MORTUARY
Name: Palmer, Stephen Christopher
Age: 30 years
I sat down on the sofa.
External examination: Well-nourished, evidence of proper care and attention, height 5 feet 11 inches.
I scanned the columns, which detailed every inch of my own flesh and blood.
Internal Examination:
Skull: Compression fracture to frontal lobe, commensurate with fall or impact from blunt instrument. Fracture to occipital bone, fracture of cervical vertebrae C1, C2, C3
Brain: Contusion to medulla oblongata, intraparenchymal bleed to cerebellum.
From what I could understand, it sounded as if Steve had broken his neck, which had caused a brain haemorrhage. I looked further down the list.
Stomach: Evidence of curry meal, partially digested.
That made sense.
Pericardium, heart, blood vessels: Small food residue, odour of alcohol. High alcohol level in blood. Evidence of cocaine, cannabis, MDMA.
I was shocked. Steve had been chock full of drugs when he’d died.
Cause of death: Injuries to brain and central nervous system commensurate with fall or impact from blunt instrument, exacerbated by high level of toxins.
So he hadn’t drowned. He’d been pissed and off his head, and had then hit himself – or been hit – round the head. Hard enough to bust his skull.
Then I found the detail that answered all my remaining questions:
Other remarks: Incised wounds to dermis of forehead, possibly knife wounds in the form “I<” or letter “K”.
I now knew exactly how he’d died and who had killed him.
FIFTY-SEVEN
Anna’s desk was empty. I charged straight into Tony Morris’s office. I hadn’t seen him for a couple of months and he was surprised to see me.
“Hello, stranger,” he said.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
He knew what I was talking about. “You’re a big boy now, Eddie. Look how far you’ve come this year. You don’t need spoon-feeding any more.”
“You never told me,” I spat.
“You never asked,” he said. He had been expecting this day. He scratched his head and sat down heavily. He looked tired.
“You told me he jumped,” I said. “I know – you know – that he was killed.”
“That was the official line,” he said. “We didn’t want it to get about that we knew it was a killing. It would have made it worse for you and your mum. And it would have made them feel like they’d made their point. They left him there so we’d find him.”
“He was using as well, wasn’t he?” I remembered Steve coming back to Mum’s and sleeping all day, mumbling excuses about a nightshift working as security in this or that nightclub. Remembered the smell of fags and booze that he gave off when he came home, and the remains of the takeaway curry he would hand over to me to finish. Some people remember their mum’s Sunday roast or the smell of the log fire their dad used to make. Takeaway curries always reminded me of Steve and I loved him for it.
Tony brought me back to reality. “Drugs were part of the problem. Steve was never a stranger to narcotics,” he admitted. “That’s why he was so useful. But that’s also why he was high-risk. He knew how to make them, who was selling them, who was buying. We couldn’t pay for that kind of information. But he was under a lot of pressure and I think he cracked.”
I felt I was about to crack myself. “And you thought now was the time to send me his death certificate, so I’d begin to join the dots?”
Tony looked blank. “I never sent you a death certificate,” he said flatly. “But I’d like to know who did. I’ll look into it.”
I remembered the postcard from Croatia and realized who it was that was trying to open my eyes. Who it was that was trying to keep me on track.
“I thought you’d sussed it by now, mate,” Tony said. “I thought you’d joined the dots already.”
I hadn’t. Probably because I didn’t want to.
“So how come he got mixed up with Special K in the first place?” I asked.
“What was he doing for them then?”
“Steve set up their first little E factory down in Dartford,” Tony said.
“And you let him?”
“We wanted to control it, wanted to be able to trace it. It was Steve’s idea to brand it with a shamrock.” Tony rubbed his face. “And we wanted Tommy Kelly to get caught up to his elbows in it.”
“So what happened?” I asked.
“Truth? Kelly outsmarted us at every move. He left the running of it to Steve and the Irish guys. The distribution was through health clubs and courier companies and sub-companies, a really well-run op. We couldn’t keep up with it, and Kelly was five steps removed. But Steve got a bit unreliable. He started making mistakes and we couldn’t help him. He slipped up and they rumbled him.”
“Who?” I demanded. “Who rumbled him? I’ll kill them.” I thought I knew who. And it would take an atomic bomb to do it.
Tony shook his head. “It doesn’t matter who,” he said. “It’s not personal. As soon as Tommy Kelly found out he had a cuckoo in the nest, Steve’s number was up.”
Tony was spelling it out for me, the part I wanted to deny. That my other mentor for the past year, the man who’d shown me the high life and had also trusted me with his daughter, his most precious possession, had killed my brother.
And there was a second home truth: that my brother, my boyhood hero, had feet of clay. He’d failed. I felt the emotion rise in my chest.