by Mike Ripley
I turned Armstrong round and did a run back, slowing down to scope the place properly. Nothing. No sign of life, no lights, no vehicles.
The only place open at all in the area seemed to be a greasy spoon (greasy fork, greasy knife) café round the corner. That had a sign in the window saying ‘Breakfasts All Day’. It sounded like a threat.
I parked Armstrong and, after checking in the mirror, decided to remove my cheek mask. People might gasp at the multi-coloured bruise, though it was fading, but at least that might get me some sympathy instead of Lon Chaney jokes.
The café was just called ‘Café’, which was just as well, as even that probably contravened the Trade Descriptions Act. It was certainly the freshest thing about the place. The tables only matched in the sense that they were all made of wood and plastic to some degree or other. They all had salt cellars and sugar bowls and ketchup but no two containers or brands matched. Even the menu chalked on a wall-mounted blackboard had been written in a variety of coloured chalks, although obviously by the same person as the spelling was consistently bad. Actually, thinking about the overall chaotic effect, if they could have moved the place up to the West End, or maybe Chelsea Harbour, and served something other than chips, then they could have tripled their prices and made a fortune.
The tall, lanky youth behind the counter glared at me from under the shank of black hair he had trained to fall over his right eye. He wiped the counter with a dirty grey cloth as I drew near. The body language was clear. Don’t try asking for a full breakfast at this time of night. Mate.
‘Just a coffee, please,’ I said, and the words came out roughly right, at least he seemed to understand me. Maybe people talked like that around here.
‘Cappuccino, espresso or ordinary?’ he asked, spoiling me for choice.
‘The frothy one,’ I said, not convinced I could manage ‘cappuccino’, and anyway, it was the least suspicious one to have to drink with a spoon.
It was surprisingly good cappuccino and seemed to be a popular item judging by the rings of foam that had dried on the outside of the cup. The lad behind the counter watched me through his curtain of hair, waiting for a complaint. There was no-one else in the place to complain, so I felt sorry to have to disappoint him.
I was wondering how to engage him in conversation short of picking a fight with him, when I spotted the notice board next to the blackboard menu. It was just a pin board with numerous visiting cards drawing-pinned there offering a variety of services, though not those you find advertised in telephone boxes. There were minicabs and 24-hour plumbers, as you might have expected. There were also a couple of surprising ones, like ‘Shiatsu Massage in Your Home’ (I hear in the street, it’s still an offence) and an advert for the Convention on Cryptozoology (Barking Branch) offering lectures on ‘Unknown Hominids’. The New Age had even reached Stratford. Was nowhere safe?
I stood up and pointed to the one printed on pink card that advertised H B Builders.
‘Is that the firm just down the road?’ I tried, and the youth understood me perfectly.
‘Well it was, mate, until they turned up their toes this week,’ he said chattily. ‘Last Friday, they was there working full belt. First thing Monday morning, shop shut, gone away, staff all get given the DCM medal.’
The DCM – Don’t Come Monday – redundancy.
‘That was a bit sudden, wasn’t it? I was round there last week asking for a price on a job.’
‘Too bloody right it was. Dead previous as me mum would say. ‘Course, it’s hit our trade as well. This place used to be a gold mine.’
If he meant by that dirty and ill-lit, you had to agree with him.
‘So, what’s the score? Somebody do a runner?’
‘Looks like the boss did.’ Then, over his shoulder he yelled, ‘Doesn’t it, Kelly?’
The swing door behind him opened and the girl I’d last seen in Bassotti’s office stood there, drying her hands on a grease-streaked apron. The Doc Martens’ were the same, but the punk make-up had gone, replaced by a harassed, washed-out look that would never catch on.
‘Doesn’t it what?’ she asked, giving me the eye. I could see recognition dawning slowly.
‘Your old boss, Bertie. Looks like he’s done a runner, eh?’
‘Well, I was ready to give him the benefit of the doubt, yer know,’ Kelly started generously.
‘Until Tuesday,’ said the youth.
‘Well, yer know, it’s just that, like, he hasn’t even tried to get in touch. I mean, yer know, we all turn up for work on Monday, well some of us do, yer know, and it’s like a ghost town. All locked up – padlock on the gate even. No sign of Bert – Mr Bassotti – and he owes me two days’ overtime.’
‘Well, you can kiss that,’ said the youth, though nobody had asked him.
‘Nobody asked you, Clint,’ said Kelly, reading my mind.
Then she conceded: ‘But he’s probably right, yer know.’
‘And no sign of Mr Bassotti since?’ I asked, trying to get the most out of them before they wondered why I was asking in the first place.
‘Not a sniff. I hung around for hours on Monday but I couldn’t even get in the office. A couple of the casuals turned up but didn’t hang around long. So, yer know, I came round here to see Clint and use the phone.’
‘And walked straight into another job,’ smirked Clint. ‘Not bad, eh, these days?’
‘Job?’ snorted Kelly. ‘Bleedin’ slave labour’s more like it. But beggars can’t be choosers, and Bassotti doesn’t look like he’ll be making up the wages this week.’
‘Did you ring him at home?’ I tried, riding my luck.
‘‘Course I did, but there was no bleedin’ answer, was there? Haven’t got through all week.’
‘That’s his house in – Dagenham, isn’t it?’ I guessed.
‘Naw, he lives in Romford, always has.’ She looked at me curiously, trying to work out if she’d been conned in some way or other. (Rule of Life No. 83: Approached in the right way, anyone will tell you anything, and it will usually be true.)
‘But he’s not answering the phone, eh?’ I asked, filing away the idea that there couldn’t be that many Bassottis with first initial ‘U’ in the Romford phone book. (And if he’d been ex-directory, let’s face it, he wouldn’t have given his number to motormouth Kelly.)
‘Is there an echo in here?’ she said sarcastically. ‘I said I’ve tried every day, didn’t I? So anyway, yesterday I blew him out and left an earbashing on his answerphone at work.’
‘And a right earbash it was too, I can tell you,’ Clint added. ‘Some serious GBH of the lugholes there, mate.’
‘He loves that answerphone,’ Kelly smiled. ‘I used to call it his Godbox.’
‘I have to ask,’ I said, trying to smile, but in my state it must have come out like a leer. ‘Why Godbox?’
‘‘Cos he got his orders from above on it. Every time there was a message, he’d kick me out so he could listen to it in private. Maybe he had a bit on the side, I don’t know, but listening to his messages was one of the highlights of his day.’
‘He probably had some tart make obscene calls so he could pull his own chain,’ Clint volunteered. ‘You know, cream his own jeans.’
‘Don’t be gross,’ Kelly admonished, smirking as she did so.
‘What sort of an answerphone was it?’ I tried innocently, but my credit limit had just been reached.
‘How should I know? It was a black one, with long-play tapes. He bought it from Abdul’s Electrics round the corner. Said it was the only thing he’d ever bought there that worked.’
‘How come you’re so interested anyway?’ Clint said in his most macho voice. Even in my wrecked and weakened state, I wasn’t too worried about him. Kelly, on the other hand, scared the hell out of me.
‘Yeah,’ she said, wising up, ‘how come you’re
so interested in Bert?’
‘You saw me there last week,’ I said as if that explained everything.
‘Well, yeah …’
‘You were wearing those red hot pants and you can’t expect me to have forgotten those.’
‘Yeah, that’s right.’ She blushed. She actually blushed. Clint glared at her.
‘And if it’s any consolation, you’re not the only one the bugger owes wages to.’
‘Well, if you find him first, don’t forget me will you?’ she said coyly, or what for her passed for coy.
‘How could I?’ I said honestly.
I had assumed that ‘Abdul’s Electrics’ was local lazy slang to cover any East End trader not obviously white or called Harry, in much the same way that people refer to late-opening shops as ‘Patels’ these days. The Patels ought to get organised and register a trade name.
As it turned out, the shop down the road was actually called Abdul’s Electrics, but was in fact run by a depressive Scot who wore a badge saying ‘You can call me Jock’ and who had bought the business from Abdul the year before. I knew all this because he had a handwritten sign stuck to the cash register explaining it all. I guessed instantly that here was a man who could turn ugly if he heard one more Abdul reference.
Yes, he did do a black answerphone, just the one, and his tone suggested that he didn’t believe for a minute I was the market for it. Still, he went through the motions, looking at his watch to let me know I was keeping him. But then again, where does it say you have to be civil?
Naturally the one I wanted was right at the back of the top shelf. That produced a few under-the-breath curses, and while he was reaching for it, I checked my profile in the video monitor he had set up as a demo model. The bruising on my cheek was still vivid but no longer glowing in the dark. I looked up to see Jock watching me watching myself on the monitor, so I smiled at him. It did look like a leer. I must watch that.
The answerphone was a Telecom model with push buttons, a limited memory and remote function for dialling, all the standard jazz. I lifted it out of its box and tried to look interested.
Underneath the machine itself, nestling in the styrofoam packaging, was the instruction book and all the other bits and pieces they give you: the guarantee card, little bits of sticky paper to write your number on, screws and rawl plugs for mounting the thing on the wall. There was also the one thing I wanted, and when I said to Jock that I’d like to see a white one before I completed my market research, he turned with a sigh to reach for another box, and I palmed it. I wasn’t even worried about the camcorder filming us; I was confident the palm went smoothly.
I made all the noises Jock was waiting to hear about how I’d think about it and get back to him, and I left him packing the phones back into their boxes.
He never noticed that one of them was now missing its handy, wallet-size plastic-coated card that told you how to ring in from a remote phone and collect the messages on your new, black Telecom answerphone.
I wasn’t going to waste much time in Romford, because Armstrong was the wrong sort of vehicle for a long surveillance job. In the middle of town no-one notices a black cab, not even one parked for a suspiciously long period in the same place. But out in commuter land where the houses have gaps between them, taxis mean someone is coming and going. Taxis parked and not moving draw attention.
So I found a garage and filled up with diesel (apparently something beyond the powers of a Grand Vizier) and looked up Bassotti in the local phone book. I had been right; there was only one with the initial ‘U’ and he lived on Peveral Road. The garageman behind his armoured screen took great delight in giving what appeared to be a London cabbie street directions, and I took it with suitable humility.
Out of sight of the garage I found a phone box and tried the number listed for the Peveral Road address. No answer; and no answerphone.
Peveral Road was semi-detached country with front gardens down to the road. I found Number 27 easily enough – it was the one house on the street in total darkness – and parked outside under a streetlight. Nothing suspicious in that. Any inquisitive neighbour could see that a black London cab had pulled up and there was a London cabbie going about his lawful business, walking up the garden path to ring the front doorbell.
And when there was no answer, what more natural than for the aforementioned cabbie to start knocking loudly, then pacing around the bay window, trying to look in. And then, his normally limitless patience fast expiring, he goes next door, where the net curtains have been twitching all along, and rings the bell there.
So that really is 27 Peveral Road, party name of Bassotti? Ordered a computer cab an hour ago for a trip up West? What? Nobody there since Monday? Well, bugger me if people don’t take liberties, eh? And I’d come all the way from Great Portland Street for this? And naturally I’m sorry to disturb you, ‘cos you’re not the sort to call cabs out on wild goose chases, but are you sure nobody’s been there since Monday? Oh, did an early morning flit did they? Really? Suitcases and all? In a minicab? There, that proves it. Can you trust people who use minicabs instead of proper, licensed hackney carriages? Of course you can’t. Bet the bloke was running out on his missus. Oh, so the wife was with him, was she? And the kids? And this was early Monday morning? 5.00 am, eh, as early as that? And not a word except a note to the milkman? Some people, eh?
Some people.
I had Bassotti’s number at H B Builders from the business card he had given me, and I had the card that told me how to do a remote interrogation on his answerphone. Unless, of course, he had been clever enough to add in a security code to stop people like me doing what I was going to do. The trouble with programming in a code, though, was that you could only use it yourself via a touch tone keypad phone (the ones that play tunes when you dial). Unless you could always guarantee access to one, you were limited in how and when you could pick up your messages, so most people never bothered adding the security back-up.
Back home at Stuart Street, I made myself as comfortable as possible with the house phone tucked under my left cheek. I don’t think I could have fitted it under my right. Then I dialled H B Builders and got the answerphone message telling me to speak after the tone.
From then on, I followed the instructions on the Telecom card.
After the beep, keep quiet for six seconds until a single beep.
Then speak for five seconds without pause (‘So there was this bloke called Harry who went into work one day and said, “No, this morning it’s Lucky Harry”, and the doorman says, “Why?” And Harry answers …’) until you hear two more beeps.
Then remain silent for four seconds until you hear three beeps.
Then speak for four seconds (‘ ... “I was running for the bus and I saw a ladder up against a wall and I said ‘I’m not going under that,’ and the first person who did got a pot of paint right on the head, so I said ‘It’s lucky …’”‘) until a single beep.
If there are no messages, the machine beeps rapidly. If there are, it rewinds the tape and plays them to you. Down the line, the tape whirred.
‘Bert? Listen, it’s Hubbard. There was no need for you to go tearing off like that last night. You knew the little prick had it coming to him. Anyway, he won’t try and shaft us again. Sammy had some stuff that kept him quiet, and you won’t hear any more about it. Trust me. Just keep your cool, okay? I’ll call you next week and get some more drops sorted.’
Click.
The next message was from a punter in Stepney who wasn’t convinced the dampcourse H B Builders had put in was working and he wanted his money back. The other three were from Kelly, starting out rude and ending obscene.
It had been first time lucky for me, if not for Tigger.
Chapter Fourteen
Stop. Rewind. Pause. Frame advance.
My jaw and teeth were beginning to throb, so I took four co-proxamol painkillers and
an anti-inflammatory pill at one go. The instructions on the box said do not mix with alcohol, but I had rescued the emergency vodka from Armstrong to help wash them down just to make sure they did their job. Within five minutes, I couldn’t feel my face. My kinda painkillers.
I knew I had about ten minutes more before the old eyelids snapped shut like a barmaid’s smile at closing time, so I lay on my bed and tried to think it through.
I had Tigger connected to Bassotti and Bassotti connected to someone called Hubbard, presumably the Hubbard of Hubbard’s scrap yard where Tigger had insisted we dump the last loads of whatever it was we were being paid to dump. I also had another link, though I hadn’t let on to anyone, and that was the weasel-faced individual I had recognised as one of the two who jumped Tigger and put me in need of cosmetic dentistry. Presumably the same ‘Sammy’ referred to on the tape.
Then there was what Tigger had said; something about Lee. He hadn’t told Lee anything because he knew he had a loose mouth. Told him about what? Not where he was, because Lee knew he went ‘monstering’; it was just that in his chemically challenged state he wasn’t sure what that meant. No, I reasoned with myself, there was something else Tigger hadn’t told Lee, but whether that was because he did not trust him or because he wanted to protect him, I couldn’t know.
And if I wanted to find out, I had three options. The first was to ask Bassotti, which wasn’t on as he’d done a runner. The second was to go see this Hubbard guy and risk ending up trying to drink the Thames dry like Tigger had. The third was to talk to Lee, but I didn’t know where he was. Still, I’d found him once before, hadn’t I? Where was the problem?
The problem was that someone had hung weights from my eyelids and had wired up an amplifier to my lungs so that each breath seemed to boom around my head. I went under and dreamt of nothing worth remembering.
I awoke after ten hours’ solid. It would have been longer had not Springsteen been pacing up and down the bed plucking at the duvet with his claws, looking for an opening so he could get at bare flesh.