by Peter Cocks
In spite of everything that was going on, he made it sound like my betrayal was the worst thing of all.
“I didn’t throw it away,” I said. “You did. Saul wasn’t doing you over, he was trying to protect you.”
His face hardened; he didn’t like to think that the failure might be his.
“You signed his death warrant, you cheeky bastard,” he spat. “I treated you like a son. With Jason out the way, you could have been…”
He gestured out to the river and we found ourselves watching the vessel’s sluggish escape as Tommy’s words tailed off. The RIB was spluttering slowly across the tide, then the outboard coughed and stopped altogether. In the distance I saw Paul’s silhouette stand up in the stern and pull fruitlessly at the starter cord. The current was pulling the boat back up the river and in towards the shoreline.
“Shit!” Tommy shouted and tried to yank his feet from the mud. They came out with a sticky, squelching sound and he grabbed onto my arm to keep balance. I pulled my own feet out and made for the shore with him, his hand gripping my arm so tight it hurt. I considered pushing him over in the mud and making a run for it.
If Paul Dolan came back ashore, I was dead in the water.
Tommy clearly had the same idea and he was using me to lever himself forwards. Then I saw his face light up for a moment by a beam that swept across the water. He held tight to my arm as he looked out across the river.
“Shit!” he shouted again. From the other side of the Thames, a police launch was heading for the RIB midstream. Its searchlight was sweeping across the river and a harsh, metallic voice was shouting through a megaphone, telling them to stop.
Now Tommy knew it wasn’t just a case of getting Jason away.
He pushed himself away from me and found the solid gravel of the beach while I slipped back into the wet sludge. He ran towards the car. I remembered that I had the keys and fumbled in my jacket, finding them seconds before he reached the car door. I pressed the remote. The hazards flashed and the car announced itself locked with a beep. Tommy cursed and looked around frantically then began to run across the marshes. I continued to slip and scramble in the mud before finally pulling myself to my feet.
Tommy was disappearing across the coarse grass and I could hardly see him in his black coat. I ran in the same direction and caught sight of him again, a black shadow against the night sky. My throat began to burn with the effort, but I gained on him and soon I was close enough to hear him panting. He tripped, and I threw myself into a rugby tackle, bringing him down in a pile of rubble and rusted barbed wire. He was winded; he lay on his back, breathing heavily, and the fight seemed to have gone out of him. It was horribly intimate. I was lying on top of him, my face to his, gripping on to his coat. I could feel his body heat and smell his breath coming fast into my face. Like we were lovers.
There were gunshots out on the river.
“I’ve been good to you, haven’t I, Eddie?” he said. His voice had taken on a wheedling, friendly tone. “Give me the keys and let me walk away from this.”
“I can’t,” I said. “You killed my brother.”
Tommy’s jaw dropped open in genuine surprise.
“Your brother?” he gasped. “Who the fuck’s your brother?”
I was about to have the satisfaction of telling him but my hesitation gave him his chance. He snapped his head hard up into my nose and slammed his knee into my balls.
Weakened by the pain, I loosened my grip. Enough time for him to bite hard into my ear, tearing it, and to grab the car keys out of my pocket.
I had a painful taste of the street scrapper Tommy Kelly must once have been. The man who would shoot his best mate in the head.
He rolled me back into the barbed wire, which scratched across my face and snagged my jacket, trapping me. Using the momentum to push himself off and clamber up, he ran back towards the car.
I tore myself from the wire and forced myself back on my feet, running hard after him. I saw the hazards flash as he unlocked the Volvo from twenty feet away and saw his running figure in the orange bursts of light. He wasn’t far away from me.
He made a final rush for the car and opened the driver’s door, grabbing something from just inside the pocket. When I finally reached him, I slammed myself against the door so he couldn’t get inside. Then I saw a flash of metal as he swung his arm around, and the curved blade that he had pulled from the car door sliced into the sleeve of my padded jacket, spilling feathers into the air. I grabbed his arm and kicked his feet from under him, causing him to slip into the thick mud, then I wrestled him away from the car door. He was awkward to get hold of inside his big, soft coat, and while I struggled to get a grip, he worked an arm free, thrusting his fingers into my eyes. His other arm thrashed wildly with the knife and I felt it cut through my jeans and slice into my leg.
It had become a matter of survival. As we rolled in the grit and mud by the car, I couldn’t see a thing but could still detect Tommy’s distinctive smell, mixed with the oily mud. I locked him round the neck with my left arm and reached into my jacket pocket with my right. Found a biro.
I clenched it in my fist and stabbed it into Tommy’s neck. He screamed and dropped the blade as his hands went to his throat. I scrambled to my feet while he writhed in the sludge, and grabbed the collar of his coat, punching him in the face, hard, breaking expensive teeth. I lifted him by the wet coat collar and drove his head back violently against the wheel arch. It made a sickening clunk. I did it again, and again, and stamped on his face with my heel until he went limp. Then I dragged him up and opened the back of the Volvo, where Jason had been imprisoned minutes earlier.
He groaned as I wrestled him in and slammed the boot behind him. The first attempt brought the tailgate down on a thin, white shin that poked from his trousers, breaking the skin and splintering bone. I lifted the shoeless leg into the boot and slammed it shut again.
Then I grabbed the keys, switched on the hazard lights and locked the car.
Out on the river, the police launch was bringing the RIB back towards the jetty. Another searchlight stung my eyes, sweeping across the wet shore of Long Reach, picking out one of Tommy Kelly’s expensive shoes, sunk in the mud.
I looked at my phone, at the text message I had sent from the back of the car. It read: Rv jch6mg logrnjou. It made no sense at all. Whoever had received it was either a mind-reader or they were tracking me.
Or someone else had tipped them off.
Armed policemen dragged Jason Kelly and Paul Dolan out the RIB, cuffed them and took them off in different directions. Paul was frogmarched up the beach, and as I saw him walking calmly towards me, his face caught in the orange hazards of the Volvo, I could have sworn that he winked at me.
I sat down on the damp grass, nursed my broken knuckles and began to cry.
EPILOGUE
It was nearly 3 a.m. by the time I got back to Deptford. I didn’t want to go back to the flat, but I needed to pick up my laptop and a few bits. What I wanted to do more than anything was go straight to the safe house and sleep for a week.
I felt like something was over, but it didn’t bring me any satisfaction or sense of relief. In a strange way, I felt bad about Tommy Kelly. I hadn’t wanted to hurt him. In my mind, the fatherly figure who had taken me in and the street-fighting murderer who had half bitten my ear off were two different people.
I let myself in and went straight to the fridge for a beer. I flipped the top off and walked through to the sitting room, where I switched on the desk light. There was a loud pop and my first thought was that the bulb had gone and fused the electrics. But the force that hit me in the back and spun me round was stronger than that.
It was a bullet.
As I fell to the floor I saw that it had been fired by Donnie Mulvaney. I dropped to my knees and put my hands to my stomach. Blood was pumping out through my fingers. The gun went off again and I felt a hammer blow to my chest, throwing me backwards, flat on the floor. I heard a door slam.
>
Then I passed out.
I felt myself being moved, gently. My eyes flickered open for a moment and I heard a voice that sounded a long way off.
“Eddie. Stay with me, Eddie, we’re going to try and move you.”
I felt a hand on my face. Smelt something familiar. I tried to focus.
Anna.
“Stay with me. I’m going to look after you,” she said. “Listen to my voice. Stay with me, Eddie.”
I tried, but her voice got quieter, and her face faded out.
Faded to black.
I opened my eyes. White ceiling. Tiles. I blinked and looked around. A hospital room. A nurse leant over to look at me.
“You’re awake,” she said, stating the obvious. I tried to say yes, but no words came out. It hurt to move. She went away.
A little while later, the door to the room opened and Tony Morris came in. He looked anxious but smiled when he saw me awake.
“Hello, son. How you feeling?”
I tried to speak again, but no words came out. I lifted my hand and felt my throat. There was a tube helping me to breathe. I held my hand up in front of my face and saw that there were a couple of drips plumbed into the back of my hand.
“Don’t worry, Eddie,” Tony said. “They’ll have the tube out soon. You’re getting better.” I must have looked bewildered because he wheeled a medical stand close to my bed. There was a clear plastic bucket hanging on it, half full of foamy red liquid, attached to me by a tube. “It’s a lung drain,” Tony explained. “You got shot in the stomach and the lung. You’ve broken a couple of ribs but you’ll be OK.”
I lay back and closed my eyes. When I woke again a few hours later, Tony was still there. Ian Baylis was with him. He leant over my bed and I looked at his thin face sideways on.
“Well done, Eddie,” he said. “You did good, and the great news is, you’ll live. There’ll be plenty of time to talk about all of this when you’re back on your feet, but there’s something I think you should know now. We’ve tried to – well – protect you a bit more. So we’ve put the word out that they were successful. We needed to keep you out of the way, for fear of reprisals.”
I shut my eyes and rolled the thoughts around in my drug-addled brain. Successful? Reprisals? I still wasn’t safe? I was confused.
I opened my eyes and looked at him again. It was like having a strange dream, made stranger by a bloodstream full of morphine. I went to lever myself up in bed, but the pain stopped me. I went to say something but couldn’t. Baylis patted my shoulder and hushed me; leant even closer to my bed.
“You don’t understand, do you,” he whispered. “Eddie Savage is dead.”
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am eternally grateful to uberagent Sarah Lutyens for her straight-talking, sure-footed advice and her push in the right direction.
To Mark Billingham for his long-term co-writing, inspiration, industry, support and encouragement – and for putting up with my endless descriptions of people’s shoes over the years.
To Tommy Roberts and Justin de Villeneuve for their insight and education in the idiom, rhyming slang and ways of the duckers and divers. I have learnt many things at the feet of these masters.
Also to Gill Evans for her faith, enthusiasm and sound editorial taste in this and other projects, and to Emma Lidbury for making me look classier than I really am.
And to Davina for putting up with me at all…
Peter Cocks was born in Gravesend, Kent and studied the history of art at UEA. He worked in interior design, antiques, fashion and performance art in London, New York and Japan before becoming a TV writer and performer in the 1990s. Peter has since performed in and written many BAFTA-nominated shows, such as Globo Loco, Basil Brush, Ministry of Mayhem and The Legend of Dick and Dom. He has also published a trilogy of novels with bestselling crime author Mark Billingham under the pseudonym of Will Peterson: Triskellion; Triskellion: The Burning; and Triskellion: The Gathering. Peter lives on the Kent coast with his wife, two children and three dachshunds. Long Reach is his first thriller.
This one is for the father figures:
My dad, William Daniel Cocks, 1932–98, artist
The man he called his dad, Henry Bernard “Jock” Bush,
aka The Major, c.1915–79, merchant seaman and hero,
who worked the river at Long Reach for many years
Wilfrid Charles Sunnucks, c.1910–80,
bookseller (A&C Black) and English gentleman
And for my son, George Henry Cosmo Cocks,
who has inherited many of the great qualities of the above
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents
are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used
fictitiously. All statements, activities, stunts, descriptions, information
and material of any other kind contained herein are included for
entertainment purposes only and should not be relied on for
accuracy or replicated as they may result in injury.
First published 2011 by Walker Books Ltd
87 Vauxhall Walk, London SE11 5HJ
Text © 2011 Peter Cocks
Cover story test (pp 44–47) © Crown copyright 2005
Cover design by Walker Books Ltd
Image of running figure © 2011 Stephen Mulcahey / Alamy
Image of bridge © 2011 Andrew Ward / Life File / Photolibrary.com
The right of Peter Cocks to be identified as author of this
work has been asserted by him in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,
transmitted or stored in an information retrieval system in any
form or by any means, graphic, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, taping and recording, without prior
written permission from the publisher.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data:
a catalogue record for this book is
available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-4063-3533-0 (ePub)
ISBN 978-1-4063-3534-7 (e-PDF)
www.walker.co.uk