Angel City

by Mike Ripley

  Title Page

  ANGEL CITY

  Mike Ripley

  Publisher Information

  Telos Publishing Ltd

  17 Pendre Avenue, Prestatyn,

  Denbighshire LL19 9SH

  www.telos.co.uk

  Digital edition converted and published by

  Andrews UK Limited 2010

  www.andrewsuk.com

  Angel City © 1994, 2011 Mike Ripley

  Author’s introduction © 2011 Mike Ripley

  Cover by Gwyn Jeffers, David J Howe, Ally Moore

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Dedication

  Felicity – may she never have to know about such things; and for Emma Hayter, who put me on the road to hell.

  Note

  I have taken the usual liberties with places, times and pubs, but nothing should be taken as reflecting on real people, living, dead or homeless.

  I have been inspired and helped by the vendors of the Big Issue, those charming people who sell you a much-underrated magazine on street corners in London. Please support them.

  MR

  Author’s Introduction

  Angel City was about three years in the making, even though it took less than three months to write when I finally got down to it.

  In 1991, Angels in Arms had won me a second Last Laugh Award from the Crime Writers’ Association and the big presentation event was held somewhere posh like the Law Society. Wherever it was, I have a distinct memory of a flotilla of taxis pulling up to disgorge female crime writers in flamboyant evening gowns and male crime writers in tuxedos and bow ties. I could not help but notice that a fair number of these arriving revellers had to carefully step not just round but over two homeless figures (their ages and sexes undetermined) cocooned inside filthy sleeping bags on the pavement.

  Seeing the homeless camped out on the street, sleeping in subways and shop doorways, was not an unusual sight in those days. One prominent national figure had publicly complained that ‘having to step over the homeless’ really ruined his evening of Covent Garden opera, and a Tory grandee had declared that it was ‘impossible’ to live in London on ‘less than £30,000 a year’. (The salary for a Member of Parliament at the time was £29,000 and beer was £1.10 a pint.)

  On my daily journey to work in the West End, I would use the subway near Baker Street tube station, where it was not uncommon to count 30 or more sleeping bodies each morning and then perhaps another 20 in the doorways of the shops down Baker Street. Most of the street-sleepers were frighteningly young. It was a sight that Sherlock Holmes might have baulked at and Charles Dickens written about.

  Coincidentally, to continue the Dickensian theme, I was working with graphic designers who had their offices near the Old Curiosity Shop, just around the corner from Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and the Fields themselves had been taken over by homeless squatters who had erected temporary shelters, earning themselves the address ‘Cardboard City’, which every London cab driver knew (partly because the public lavatories in the Fields had been a well-known comfort station for black cab drivers).

  So, by early 1992, I was convinced that the next Angel would have homelessness as a theme and had even thought of the twist: how do you find someone in London who has made themselves deliberately homeless? The answer, of course, was that if anyone can, Angel can.

  But I was in no hurry to write the story. I was now reviewing crime fiction regularly for the Daily Telegraph, I had done four Angel novels and perhaps half-a-dozen short stories in four years and was involved with the ‘Fresh Blood’ group of writers (which eventually spawned three anthologies), and my editor at Collins, Elizabeth Walter, had reluctantly accepted the need to retire. Other publishers knew this and I suspect I was not the only Collins author (I know I wasn’t) to be approached by rival publishers, especially when they discovered I had dispensed with my agent and was attempting to go it alone. The continued interest in Angel from television companies certainly helped, but I opted for loyalty to the publisher that had given me my first break and stayed with what became known as HarperCollins. At the day job I had been made Director of Public Relations for the Brewers’ and Licensed Retailers’ Association (formerly The Brewers’ Society), and at home my wife had given birth to our second daughter.

  And then – as you do – I met a woman in a pub and – as you do – told her I was a best-selling comic crime writer, and she trumped that by saying she was a BBC producer. Now I have to admit I didn’t quite believe her until a couple of days later she rang my office to say she’d read two of my books over the weekend and had loved the dialogue, so would I be interested in writing scripts for a television show she was producing called Lovejoy, which was actually being filmed about ten miles from where I lived?

  I did not have to think about it for long. I loved the early books, was a near-neighbour of the author Jonathan Gash and liked the show, plus it was a new challenge, especially as the company that owned the television rights to my Angel books had made it quite clear that they did not want me involved in the scriptwriting process.

  So, for the latter half of 1992 and most of 1993, I was caught up in the wonderful world of television, which was great fun and well-paid enough to allow us to start looking for a bigger house for our expanding family. I also got to meet some charming thespians (particularly Ian MacShane and Leslie Phillips) and got to write a part specifically for one of my heroes, Bert Kwouk (best known as Cato in the Pink Panther movies).

  At some point, I got down to writing Angel City, probably when HarperCollins indicated they wanted to do a two-book deal and were offering a very healthy advance. I knew it was going to have a central theme of homelessness and I wanted to include ‘Cardboard City’, even though the squatters had been moved on by now and many young street-sleepers had been swept up in police operations code-named ‘Whittington’. I also wanted to try and write a story where the bad guy was never seen, just to see if I could do it. I quickly came up with my two big ‘set piece’ action scenes: ‘Hubbard’s Yard’ was based on the scrap-yard I passed on my daily train journey out of Liverpool Street station (though it has gone now to make way for the 2012 Olympics), and the game of Dungeons and Dragons is reported almost exactly as it happened one Sunday in a cave near Biggin Hill.

  It took me about ten weeks to write and was immediately accepted by my new editor, who claimed to like the fact that it had a ‘noirish’ flavour to it, and it was published in 1994. It was launched in The Spice of Life pub on Cambridge Circus at a joint party with my old American friend Walter Satterthwait, promoting his new novel The Death Card.

  The American connection didn’t end there either, as Angel City became the second – and last! – Angel book to be published in the USA (as well as, oddly, the first to be published in Russia). The cover of the St Martin’s Press edition in 1995 was, and remains, a mystery to me, featuring as it does a figure diving into a swimming pool and a cyclist on a Tour-de-France type racing bike ...

  However, it was the cover of the British edition (hardback and paperback) featuring a clutch of hypodermic needles that was to cause the biggest problem. The book isn’t about the hard drug trade: it’s about the illegal disp
osal of hospital waste, a newsworthy topic at the time. The cover HarperCollins chose reflected this accurately, but the automatic assumption of many people was ‘needles = heroin’, so in order not to be seen to be promoting drug-taking, many a bookseller turned their nose up at it, including the very influential (then) W H Smith’s chain. I know this because the chief crime fiction buyer for W H Smith’s was, bravely, the guest speaker at a meeting of the Crime Writers’ Association, and she told me, without prompting, that she was a fan of the Angel books but wouldn’t recommend stocking the new one because of ‘those needles’. To this day I cannot remember ever seeing one of my books in WHS.

  It was not an auspicious sign for Angel’s return after three years, but early reviews were incredibly generous. I had been worried about making one of the main characters gay, in case anyone thought I was taking the mickey or being homophobic, but to my great relief the gay press (and Gay Times especially) seemed to like the book, though it was totally ignored by Big Issue, which campaigned for the homeless.

  All the reviewers picked up on the fact that it was much darker than previous adventures, with one very astute one (www.thatangellook.co.uk) picking up on the fact that many key scenes take place at night – something I hadn’t noticed when writing it. Marcel Berlins in The Times said ‘Exuberant, laugh-aloud fun and cleverness ... but there is, in addition, an edge and an anger’ and for the first time, a reviewer (the late Chris Wordsworth in The Observer) failed to resist the temptation to call me ‘the talented Mr Ripley’.

  Mike Ripley,

  Colchester 2010

  Chapter One

  I was having breakfast sitting on the back of a borrowed Kawasaki in Porter Street, but only because they’d removed the picnic benches from outside the Burger King opposite, when I first met Tigger O’Neil.

  Once those benches had gone, the early morning shift of dispatch riders had deserted the Burger King for the McDonald’s just across Baker Street, parking their bikes round the corner in Porter Street. Those with mobile phones ate inside the Mac; those, like me, with tin-pot North Korean radios had to stay outside to get the reception. As a rule, there would be four or five of us there each morning on the Red Eye shift between 7.00 am and 8.00 am, struggling with the first Egg McMuffin of the day and clutching environmentally friendly (well, almost) cups of coffee, trying to stay one degree above hypothermia.

  The main topic of intellectual conversation was to look up Baker Street to the traffic lights across the Marylebone Road and try and guess which of the outlaw car-wash operators would score. That set of lights has one of the longest time-lags in west London and attracts a fair number of students from the polytechnic with plastic buckets of cold, filthy water and usually one of those plastic ice-scrapers you can buy from garages for under a quid. The trick was to pick on the front two rows of cars stuck at the lights, dive out and start swilling water on to their windscreens. Most motorists, or at least those with a small BMW or above, paid up straight away in order to get rid of them. Some yelled abuse, some sank down in their seats and pretended it wasn’t happening. The trick for the washer was not to get too far out into the road, as when the lights did change, there were always a few hard-case boy racers who looked on them as legitimate targets and tried not to take prisoners.

  There were about a dozen of them working that morning, which meant that their student grants must have been late arriving, as it was still early in the term. They had formed a rota system and seemed to be milking the traffic reasonably successfully, and the only laughs they offered us came when a big Rover swerved slightly to clip one of the buckets left too near the edge of the pavement, sending it spinning out into the cross traffic like a wayward football.

  One of the students made as if to run out into Marylebone Road to retrieve it, but another held him back.

  ‘Aw, let ‘im play in the traffic,’ shouted the Beast, then laughed mirthlessly.

  The lights changed and the cross traffic surged like they were recording sound effects for Le Mans. The bucket got bounced by one of the flash, low-slung Citroens and went under the wheels of a truck carrying fruit-flavoured yoghurts, the sort probably most popular among students at the polytechnic.

  The Beast turned away, the morning’s entertainment over for him, and offered me a cigarette. I took one even though I was determined to give up and normally didn’t smoke before nightfall anyway. I took one because the Beast might have been offended if I hadn’t.

  I think his given name was Tony, which only posed the question who would give him a name at all. I found it difficult to imagine any parental couple, however broody, however Christian, however desperate, ever actually owning up to him. The other riders called him the Beast from the East, because he came from East Ham, though never to his face. Normally, he came across as a sexist, racist, homophobic thug who had once seriously tried to fit open Swiss army penknives to the spokes of his motor bike. But then on some days he could be really unpleasant.

  ‘Thanks, Tone,’ I said, taking a Marlboro and checking that his lighter was on a low gas setting before leaning into it for a light. (Rule of Life No. 93: Sometimes you can never be too careful.) ‘Another coffee?’

  ‘Yeah, four sugars. No, wait, it’s my shout,’ he growled. He took my cup from me and started round the corner, then remembered he wasn’t taking glasses back to the bar, so he dropped them. They rustled down Baker Street until they fetched up against a City of Westminster litter bin.

  I wondered what I was doing sitting there watching paper cups gently biodegrade at that time of the morning, in the company of morons like the Beast.

  Oh yes, now I remember. It’s called work.

  It was the worst of times, it was the shittiest of times. There was a recession on. You could tell that from the way the government denied it. What was worse, it was hitting London instead of some far-flung northern city where they had much more experience of handling such things, and it was doing so after a decade of ultra-positive attitudes to getting rich quick. Even if there had never been a realistic chance of it, there was also the hope that around the corner lay a yet flashier BMW.

  What was serious was that the economic nutcracker was squeezing the really important industries: advertising agencies, marketing and public relations consultants, the pubs, jobbing printers, the video production companies. The very areas where you could pick up a bit of work if you had to pay the rent.

  I had to, because I was skint. The old cash-flow had not so much flowed but done a tidal race out to sea. Times were hard and looked like getting harder in the Big Plum.

  The Big Plum?

  London; because there’s a very hard stone at the centre.

  ‘Oscar Seven. Oscar Seven.’

  I ambled over to where I’d parked Armstrong and picked up the radio from the driver’s seat.

  Armstrong is a black London cab of the old school, the Austin FX4S, a vehicle tailor-made for London traffic from a design inspired by the Panzer sweeps across Russia in 1941. He’s delicensed, of course, and there is no longer room on the clock for enough zeroes to record the number of miles he’s done. There is nothing wrong with owning one, though for obvious reasons, very few get sold off second- or third-hand in London itself. I’ve disconnected the yellow roof light that says TAXI, and where the old fare meter used to be, there is now a tape deck rigged up to my own ICE design – In-Cab Entertainment. So I’m not really trying to pass myself off as anything, certainly not a real musher who’s done the Knowledge, but it is amazing how many people get the wrong idea.

  ‘Oscar bloody Seven, come in. Earth to Planet Oscar, are you receiving?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. Get on with it.’

  I had no patience with the mob back at Dispatch. I mean, here I was with a cab called Armstrong and my name Angel and what do I get as a call sign? Oscar bloody Seven.

  ‘You anywhere near Crumpet Central?’

  ‘Could be,’
I answered.

  Crumpet Central was the name given to Euston Square tube station by the dispatch-riding fraternity, especially over the air where they had code names for key locations in case an opposition firm was listening in. Why Crumpet Central? Because someone with nothing better to do had once sat down and worked out that 84 per cent of the passengers arriving at Euston Square during the morning rush hour were women, mostly aged between 20 and 25. With the recession, all the good jobs like that had gone, naturally.

  ‘The Fly-By Ad Agency on Gower Street have a package for the BBC, Portland Place. Pick up at 8.30, deliver by 9.00,’ said Dispatch like it was his mantra.

  ‘Know it,’ I replied wearily. ‘Goods only, or passenger and goods?’

  ‘Just said package in name of Barton. That’s B for Bastard, A for ...’

  ‘I can spell. This is Oscar Seven, not Hammer One.’

  Hammer One was the call sign of the Beast from the East. He’d been allowed to choose his own as no-one would argue with him.

  ‘Well, it’s just a parcel. Artwork by the sound of it. And get a timed signature to prove it’s there before 9.00. Roger?’

  ‘Angels One Five,’ I said to confuse him, and clicked the radio off, dropping it back on to Armstrong’s driver’s seat.

  Another piddling job. An advertising agency on a promise with somebody at the BBC had screwed up an overnight job and were finishing their artwork before start of business there – in most areas, about 10.15 am. The agency couldn’t take any chances, say on it raining and the stuff getting wet, so they’d booked a cab rather than a bike. They wouldn’t take it themselves because if it didn’t make it on time, they had someone else to blame. They also preferred a cab because the drivers don’t wear crash helmets and can be identified more easily. Therefore they’re more likely to hang around and actually get somebody to sign for the package. The riders usually nip in, throw it down and dive out. Sometimes they get the right building. In fact, it’s only recently that banks and building societies have insisted on bikers removing their helmets before entering so the video cameras can clock them.