The Runaway

by Martina Cole

  He took another long pull from the whisky bottle and Gates looked at him in silence for a while.

  ‘I take it you had the information he wanted, Flinty. After all, you’re still here to tell the tale, ain’t you?’

  ‘Too right I told him, Mr Gates, you’d have told him anything an’ all but it didn’t stop the cunt from starting in on poor old Billy Wright. I tried to save the poor old git, I swear on my daughter’s he—’

  ‘You ain’t got a daughter, Flinty - she’s dead, remember? Overdose, if I recall.’

  Flinty ignored him. ‘On her grave then, wherever that is, but I tell you now, Mr Gates, he’s a fucking lunatic. I told him where that brown hatter Pasquale hung out because it’s common knowledge. Joey was good to me over the years, but I’d have told O’Hare anything. Yes, even you, Mr Gates, would have shit it with him and his Bowie knife looming over your face. Now leave me alone.’ He began to cry then in earnest.

  Gates stared down at the man and spoke through gritted teeth. ‘I’m not leaving till I get what I want, and believe me, Flinty, that ponce won’t have nothing on me if I lose my temper. I think you should consider that, don’t you?’

  He refilled the kettle, saying as he did so: ‘Next time I’ll pour this in your mouth, and then, mate, you won’t ever be telling anyone anything again, will you?’

  Flinty put his head into his hands and said brokenly: ‘He drinks in a spieler off Camden Market. It’s the meeting place for his men. That’s all I know, I swear.’

  Gates smiled then, one of the lightning smiles that made him look almost handsome. ‘See how easy it was? All you had to do was tell me that, and me and you would never have fallen out, would we? I’ll phone an ambulance for you now, OK?’

  With that he left the flat, Flinty already gone from his mind. It was all in a day’s work for Gates.

  Half an hour later, he picked up two brothers from Tottenham - two black men called Lincoln and Roosevelt. The brothers were heavies for a price and every now and then Gates used them for ‘persuasive’ duties.

  Both would kill their own grannies for a few quid - perfect credentials as far as Gates was concerned.

  Tooled up with ‘squirts’ - ammonia in washing-up liquid bottles - knuckledusters and small telescopic coshes, they all wore Crombie overcoats with special poacher’s pockets inside to house their baseball bats and pickaxe handles. Lincoln always used a baseball bat with eight-inch nails through the tip, for maximum damage.

  As they arrived at the small spieler in Camden, they were all hyped up.

  Lincoln turned to Gates and said cheerily: ‘Five hundred, yeah?’

  Gates nodded.

  ‘Right then, who’s the mark?’

  The policeman had been dreading this and as he said, ‘Derrick O’Hare,’ waited for a refusal. He didn’t get one.

  ‘The Scouser, is it? What a touch! I hate fucking northerners. ’ Roosevelt’s voice was jovial and Gates grinned.

  ‘Let’s go get them, shall we?’

  The two men nodded.

  As they walked inside the music hit them. It was Gilbert O’Sullivan singing Clare and the two black men mimed being sick, much to Gates’s amusement. The doorman stared at them. Taking out a twenty-pound note, Gates tucked it into the man’s breast pocket. He smiled and waved them through.

  All dressed in Crombies, they looked just like any other lags on a night out. Gates had taken the precaution of wearing a black Homburg to hide his face and tell-tale bald head.

  Inside the club it was dark. Girls in various stages of undress and drunkenness milled around looking for punters. They gave the blacks a wide berth which suited all three men. The gambling was subdued as it was early in the evening yet, only just past ten-thirty, and the main money spinner here was drink or the buying of drugs.

  The air was thick with cannabis smoke. Amphetamines would go down later in the evening when men wanted to feel more alert as they gambled away their wages.

  Going to the bar the men ordered shorts and looked around them. There was no sign of O’Hare. Pulling one of the girls towards him, Gates whispered: ‘Where’s Derrick’s office? There’s a tenner in it for you, love.’

  The girl eyed him suspiciously then, taking the tenner, said slowly: ‘Top of the stairs, turn right. But he ain’t there.’

  Gates knocked back his drink and ordered another. They people-watched for ten minutes before making their way to the stairs that led to the toilets and the upstairs offices. No one took any notice of them as they cut through the throng. Gates could not believe the lack of security. It was as if the man thought himself indestructible.

  The office door stood open as they walked inside. Whatever O’Hare was up to, Gates decided, he didn’t plan it from this little room. It was more of a book-keeping centre than anything else.

  As they searched through the drawers, the door was opened by a muscle-bound Scouser who said pointedly: ‘Can I help you gentlemen at all?’

  The three men behind him were all big too and all muscle-bound. But as Gates always said: Handsome is as handsome does. Some of the most muscle-bound men he had known were as weak as kittens.

  Lincoln and Roosevelt felt the same way and the men began their tear-up in record time. The sudden appearance of the baseball bats and pickaxe handles took the smug looks off the faces of the Liverpudlians. They’d expected a fist fight. Instead they got a massacre.

  But Gates, as he fought them, knew in his heart that tonight he would not get O’Hare. He enjoyed the fight all the same. Whatever happened, he was going to stop O’Hare before he harmed anyone else, especially Cathy.

  If O’Hare wanted the West End and all it entailed, he would have to take it over Richard Gates’s dead body.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Derrick O’Hare sat in the bar of the Café Central and sipped a glass of ice-cold Chablis. He was dressed in a white linen suit and black shirt. His black loafers were hand-made and his socks bright green.

  As a fashion statement he was a disaster; as a good tipper he was greeted with enthusiasm.

  He sat at a small table, smiling and waving at passers-by who either waved back or dropped their eyes from this bloke who seemed to be drunk or mentally deranged.

  It was his eyes that made people think he wasn’t the ticket. They seemed to stare right through you. O’Hare knew this and used it to his own advantage. He enjoyed his notoriety, and also the money he garnered through intimidation. London to him was a criminal Mecca. He wanted it so badly he could taste it. He was even bringing down men from his other patches in Nottingham and Leicester to work with him here, putting them up in Bayswater and giving them large retainers until he needed them. He knew that muscle, and only muscle, would get him London. It was all the Southerners understood.

  A tall man with a military bearing walked up to his table and whispered something in his ear. Derrick rose from his seat and followed the man out of the bar and into a small ante-room. He grinned widely to see the man waiting there.

  ‘Docherty, you bastard! Long time no see.’

  Eamonn unfolded himself from his chair and shook hands with the man with whom he had been dealing for the last twelve months on IRA business.

  ‘How was your flight?’ asked O’Hare.

  Eamonn shrugged and sat down again. ‘The usual. This is my first time home for years though and it feels strange.’ He didn’t want to explain himself to O’Hare of all people.

  ‘So tell me, what’s been happening?’ he asked. ‘I hear there’s skulduggery afoot.’

  Derrick laughed harshly. ‘I’m just putting a few old faces out to grass that’s all. It’s about time, eh? Come on, let’s go out and eat and then we can talk. I hear you’re staying in Park Lane. I can get you any kind of brass you desire. Just say the word: blonde, dark, black, white, big tits, little tits, long legs . . . Tell me your preference and I’ll have it delivered to your door.’

  Eamonn smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. ‘You don’t have to pimp for me, D
errick, I’m quite capable of finding my own diversions. And I don’t pay for it - never have and never will.’

  O’Hare knew he had made a major faux pas. Shrugging, he said, ‘I was paying, it was a gift. So no hard feelings, eh?’

  Eamonn didn’t leave his chair. Instead he poured himself another Scotch from the bottle in front of him.

  ‘I’ll skip dinner and get straight down to business, if you don’t mind. The Cause contributions are drying up, and the Irish want to know why. So do I. You see, we need you and what you can offer us over here, but we don’t need you that much. Your Liverpool contacts have been disappointing recently. We’re running out of safe houses, and it’s getting harder to position people we need in the smaller communities. Now you know what we need these things for.

  ‘We are moving outwardly respectable Irish people into council estates. They will live as members of those communities until such time as we need them to do our work for us. These people are called sleepers, and your lot seem to be in a fucking coma these days because we haven’t heard anything from or about them for months! Now we have paid you a lot of money for this venture and suddenly you’re shafting us. We want to know the score.’

  Derrick O’Hare was not scared of much, it wasn’t in his nature, but the IRA scared even him.

  Eamonn carried on talking, knowing he had the man on the hop and wanting to keep up the pressure.

  ‘The reason I am here as opposed to one of the IRA big shots is because my London accent will go unnoticed, whereas an Irish accent in London is noted now and listened to. If one of the main men has to come over, you’re a fucking dead man, O’Hare. Now where is the money and what’s happening with the sleepers?’

  Derrick had let the Cause go in recent months, mainly because he was bored with the whole situation. When he had first taken it all on it had been exciting and a lucrative money spinner. He had taken their money, set up the deal, and then gone on to bigger and better things - namely, financing the London takeover. Now he had to pay the piper and wasn’t sure how he was supposed to do that. Nor was he sure exactly what the Irish and Americans wanted of him now.

  ‘I’ve had a few problems meself,’ he temporised. ‘I’m in the middle of a big deal here and I have to oversee it personally. Once that’s sorted out, I’ll be back on top form with everyone.’

  Brought up in an Anglo-Irish household, and having never been to Southern Ireland, let alone the North, he found the whole concept of an undercover army not only juvenile but mad. The British Army would soon rout them all out and that would be that, surely? Until then, he would appear to toe the line. The British Army had tanks, they had bombs, they had manpower. It was only a matter of time before this lot were banjaxed and either dead or locked up.

  Eamonn picked up a newspaper and placed it on the table between them. ‘How come you didn’t know about this?’

  Derrick saw a photograph of two people being led out of a small redbrick house. There were coats over their heads and a heavy caption above crying out: IRA arms cache found in Liverpool council house.

  ‘That was yesterday’s Daily Mirror. Even you must have heard of that. It’s the biggest news story about at the moment.’

  That O’Hare was stunned was evident; that he didn’t really know what was going on in his own back yard was beyond Eamonn’s comprehension.

  ‘Like I say, I have other things on my mind at the moment,’ he said, trying to shrug it off. ‘Anyway, I couldn’t have avoided that happening. Even you must see that much.’

  Eamonn leant across the small rickety table and hissed: ‘You should have known about that within minutes of its happening. We would have had lawyers and men from the Cause shouting about police corruption, framing, and anything else we could use to take the heat off. Instead we had to read about it like everyone else. Now you listen to me, O’Hare, and you listen fucking good. There’s some big arses on the line and yours is the fucking biggest. The IRA even frighten the fucking Mafia. Take it from me because I know that from first-hand experience. A small-time Liverpool wanker means nothing to them. Fuck all.’

  Derrick O’Hare was having trouble swallowing his pride. All he wanted to do was take Eamonn Docherty, his handsome face and thick well-cut hair, and throttle the life out of him. That was Derrick’s answer to everything. But in the back of his mind was the memory of the £750,000 the IRA had paid him. He wanted to keep that money at all costs.

  ‘These things happen,’ he muttered lamely. ‘I couldn’t have stopped the police from raiding that house.’

  Eamonn shook his head in disbelief. ‘The money you were paid was so you could fund a few good informants in the local and national police! On a local level, you could have found out what was going down and we could have moved the people out overnight - before the neighbours knew anything, before the filth knew anything. Instead they’re awaiting a trip to prison for a seriously long time. Now I don’t know about you, but that kind of thing aggravates the life out of me and mine. In New York you’d be hung, drawn and fucking quartered for that, and the same is usual in Belfast. Now it looks as if you might find it also happens in London. Because outside this room there are men waiting to escort you to your final fucking resting place.’

  Knocking on the table top loudly, he summoned two large men into the room.

  Derrick O’Hare was in a state of shock and it showed. His mouth was hanging open.

  ‘From today, you’re an ex-criminal and an ex-human being. All your assets are now ours and all your men are now ours.’

  Derrick O’Hare, psychopath and gang boss, stared at Eamonn Docherty as if he had never seen him before. ‘You’re joking?’

  Eamonn laughed contemptuously. ‘What’s to joke about? You fucked up big time. Now you have to pay the price.’

  He walked out of the Café Central in broad daylight but Derrick O’Hare was not seen again for one week. Then only his head and his left hand came to light.

  Lottie took her own life shortly after his few remains were found.

  Lee Bonham was still speeding and still impatient. He knew the word on the street about Joey, also that the Irish had a few big wigs in town and had disposed of O’Hare. He also knew he was privy to information that even the British Government couldn’t get hold of. It was a professional thing. He was tipped the wink by an old mate of his in the same line of work.

  Lee had broken a cardinal rule and arranged a meet with the Irish connection, as he referred to Eamonn Docherty.

  They met in a small pub called the Peterboat in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, where they talked surrounded by day-trippers and locals, all enjoying a quiet Sunday drink. Both were dressed casually and looked for all the world just like every one else around them. But their conversation would have blown the mind of any eavesdropper.

  ‘I had to kill Joey because it was a job,’ Lee began. ‘Nothing personal like, I hear he was a good man. But then again, they all are. This is my business. If ever you needed my services, I’d extend you the same courtesy I did O’Hare. Except I hear O’Hare upset a lot of people, including the Irish. Now I can’t tell you how I came by this information, but the fact you’re here shows me I’m right, don’t it? See, I never did get paid for that job. You took O’Hare out a bit too sharpish for me. But I hear you’re interested in anything to do with his business. I can fill you in on all you need to know, for a price - that price being the twenty grand I was to have been paid for taking out Joey. Now do we have a deal or not?’

  Eamonn was impressed by the thin man before him. He knew Lee was speeding faster than an express train and yet a lot of hitters did the same thing. They said the speed gave them an added edge.

  ‘I’ll see what you have to say before I decide if it’s worth twenty grand, OK? I can’t be fairer than that.’

  Lee shrugged and gulped at his lager shandy. The speed always made his mouth dryer than a buzzard’s crotch, as he’d freely tell anyone who’d listen. Then he launched forth on his story.

  ‘As you probabl
y know, O’Hare was after the West End, that’s why he wanted Joey’s demise. Now Tommy Pasquale will want to shake your hand because he’s been after O’Hare himself and had already set up a hit. What Tommy seems to have forgotten for the moment is that his father hid a lot of money for the bullion robbers - remember that robbery in the late sixties? Well, all the blokes involved are still banged up and keeping stumm. Joey was an old-style villain. He knew where the bullion was hidden but he kept it to himself and never once dipped into it. He knew that once the market was flooded with gold, there’d be a national enquiry. When the gang was released, then they could do what the fuck they liked and pay him for his silence. You see, when they were caught and convicted, they had to get word to someone to hide the stuff properly. Believe it or not, it was in a warehouse in fucking Norfolk for all that time.’

  Lee laughed at the farcical situation.

  ‘A little old lady had rented it to them for a fiver a fucking week. She didn’t give a toss about what was in it, it was just a few quid to her on top of her pension. It was her old man’s scrap yard, see. Anyway, the rub is word got to Joey and he had the stuff moved. Only he knew where it was. He didn’t even trust a contact to take word to the men inside. “Careless talk costs lives”, and all that old wartime crap, I suppose. Anyway, they all trusted him. They had to.

  ‘Well, when one of them was banged up in Durham nick and under the influence of a bit of the old wacky baccy, he tells a face. The face tells O’Hare and O’Hare puts two and two together and decides he wants London and the bullion. What he didn’t do, though, was find out off Joey where the bullion actually was. He killed Joey, then went out to the Essex marshes and looked for the stuff. It wasn’t there. It’s actually hidden near there, O’Hare was on the ball in some ways, but you see he listened to one of Joey’s close companions, a bloke called Hemmings from Ilford. Hemmings, thinking he was on a touch, told O’Hare he thought the bullion was on the marshes. A lot of people thought that. Everyone knew Pasquale had hidden the bullion. For the record, my money’s on Aveley Lakes of Tilbury. But either way, it don’t matter, does it? Because no one is going to have the balls to touch it.