Gary Mertz’s eyes got stone cold and he stopped chewing his nails. “What are you saying?” But Eva wondered instead what young Mertz’s eyes were saying. They’d met in the coffee shop by Eva’s suggestion. But the particular choice of venue had been all down to Mertz. The empty brown coffee shop was two miles away from Gary’s part of town. Why had he chosen this place? There were obvious reasons. It was empty for one. He wouldn’t see anyone he knew in here. And maybe because he could see the enemy if he had been followed.
“I’m not saying anything at all, Gary. What do you think happened to Jerry Burton?”
The clear glass cup in front of the boy was empty but for a trail of brown froth left behind. Their talk was almost over, and Eva was playing it cool, but in truth she was desperate for some scrap of information to drive her forward. Just a scrap.
“I don’t know, do I? I’d be making it up. You don’t want me to do that, do you?”
“No, Gary. I want to hear what you think, that’s what I want. Don’t you want to help me track down who did this?”
“You keep pushing me. It isn’t right. I’m in shock too, you know.”
“Why? Do you think it could have been you, instead, maybe?” Fishing, keep fishing, move the rod, tease the fish…
“No! Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Ridiculous, is it?”
“Yeah. It would never have been me.”
“What makes you so sure, Gary?”
“Well, my dad isn’t running for parliament, is he? And I’m not mixed up in all that crazy political shit his family is, am I? Look. I’m not involved in this. I’m innocent, right. So you can stop giving me the third degree and go and find whoever did it, okay?”
“The thing is, Gary, no one is saying a word. And those who are talking, like you, are saying a whole lot of nothing. Where do you think that leaves me, Gary?”
“Up shit creek, I guess.”
“No,” Eva leaned forward. “Reading between the lines Gary, that’s where. And there’s a lot to read, I tell you. I may need to speak with you again.”
“I didn’t do it. I swear.”
“I didn’t ask you that. But something’s not right, Gary. You’ve got a guilty conscience a mile wide.”
“You just don’t get it, do you? You don’t get it at all.” The young man stood up. He glanced out into the rain and pulled his hood up tight around his head. He shook his head at Eva and moved away from the table.
“I don’t get it Gary, because you’re not telling me what I need to get.”
She saw Gary hesitate, his lips moved as if he was going to share something, but then he shook his head once more and moved off quickly. The rain and the traffic noise invaded the coffee shop as Gary Mertz walked into the street. Eva sighed and pulled her iPhone out onto her lap. She opened the notepad and began to finger type a new note.
Gary Mertz. Friend. Injured. Beaten, black eye. Nervous. Furtive. Guilty looking. Looking out of window the whole time. Continual lies. Knows something and is afraid to talk. Theory: People who knew Jerry’s friends did this. Is it the same people who hurt Jerry? If so, Jerry knew his attacker.
“Good afternoon, Miss Roberts. Nice coffee here, is it?” That voice changed everything.
Eva looked up. She’d been concentrating and hadn’t heard the door open, but now she saw it gradually closing out the rain. Her heart started palpitating. She felt like she’d been caught. She shifted in her chair. Peter Serge smiled knowingly, and took the seat opposite her, where only two minute ago Gary Mertz had been sitting. “Don’t let me disturb you. Finish your text,” said Serge with a flourish of his hand as he crossed his legs and sat back with poise.
“I can do that later, thank you.” Eva slid her phone into her bag out of sight. She looked over her shoulder, then forward and to the side where the coffee bar was. There was a big man in a too tight suit ordering from the female barista.
“Why are you here, Mr Serge? Haven’t you got an election to fight?”
“Oh, yes we do, Miss Roberts. And the electorate is all over this town. Even this coffee shop is on our patch.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
The big man made a loud mess of paying, spilling his change onto the counter. Eva and Serge appraised one another. Dan was right, the man liked to play stare outs. His eyes were like onyx, reflecting light, but devoid of life.
“What do you want, Mr Serge. I am doing my best, working for Will Burton’s interests. I thought that your interests and those of Mr Burton were the same, Mr Serge. Is that the case, or is there something I should know? Because if this case gets any creepier I’ll drop it quicker than you can blink.”
“Oh, dear, Miss Roberts. Trust issues, I take it?”
“You followed me. That causes me some trust issues, yes.”
“I didn’t follow you, Miss Roberts. God no! I wouldn’t waste my time like that. I’ve got a campaign to fight. I’m just keeping tabs on you. Keeping you motivated and right on course, that’s all. I like to get value for money. I’m a stickler for it. In fact, I spoke with your partner in the same vein yesterday.”
“Ex-partner. This is my business now.”
“I couldn’t care less whose business this is, Miss Roberts. I told him the results I wanted. Quality ones. Now I’m telling you the same. I want this mess cleared up well before Election Day.”
“Or what? I don’t work well with threats, Mr Serge.”
“Neither do I, Miss. So let’s leave it there. I’ll drink my coffee, and then we can both get back to work.”
“Let’s be perfectly clear, Mr Serge. I work for Will Burton. Especially now after you pulled a stunt like this. And I should tell you, at this stage, every possible suspect is still under consideration. Did you know, in a case like this, the victim usually knows the attacker? Usually, the victim knows them well… Aunts. Uncles. Friends of the family.”
“Isn’t that paedophiles, Miss Roberts?”
“Jerry Burton is of age, Councillor. But as for the rest… I’ll reserve my judgement.”
“Fascinating. You are good, aren’t you? In lots of ways.”
Eva stood up and picked up her handbag. “You’re a creep, Mr Serge.”
“I’m a happy creep. And I usually get what I want. Remember that when all of this is done. And you’ll see I was right. Quality remember. You’ve got three days.”
“Don’t worry your little black heart. I’ve set my heart on finding the culprit. I’m looking forward to exposing them to the whole world. And in good time for that election.”
“Good. I’m banking on it, Miss Roberts.”
“Right now, if I were you, I wouldn’t be so optimistic.”
Eva walked slowly out of the coffee shop and ran fast through the rain, heading for her car. She looked back, but no one was following. She looked all around, there was no sign of any watcher. The bastard was freaking her out, trying to throw her off the scent. What with Dan acting screwy and Jess being even more immature, Eva wasn’t sure she could handle the liars, obfuscation and threats this case was throwing at her. And yet the man who was causing her fear had also given her a major clue. Peter Serge was getting way too involved in their affairs. Was he trying to misdirect her and confuse her? Almost certainly? And if he was, then Serge had made himself a serious suspect, ripe for investigation in his own right. There were a few more witnesses to check off and then Eva would concentrate on Serge. As the rain ruined Eva’s hair, she fixed her jaw and grumbled to herself. “I’ll get you, you bastard.” But to go after the chief of a brutal little army, Eva knew she would need more than determination.
Eight
Fighting was Dan’s second nature. Maybe his first. So when it came to the idea of overcoming his fears, Dan inevitably saw them as a foe to be battled, overcome, pasted, and stomped into the canvas. Feel the fear and do it anyway would have been one way to verbalise the way Dan saw it. Dan’s own version would have involved a lot of expletives. The fight wasn’t jus
t for himself, though when the new panic attacks seized Dan by the throat, and clamped around his heart like a vice, he had all the personal incentive he would ever need. But this was for Eva, too. He‘d endured a year of suffering on the street, and then handled the torture inflicted on him by Victor Marka and his men. If he lost Eva now, it would have been for nothing. And the enemy he had grown to hate with a passion, usually reserved for the headiest love affairs, would have won. Dan had met the suited skinheads in the White Hart yesterday, and he had spent a fleeting time with Eva. He knew she sensed he was a mess. There was caution in her speech and an awkwardness in her eyes, so today he stayed away to prevent revealing any more clues about his weakness. It was best to stay away from the mean little blonde when he was like this. It was all too easy for her to take pot-shots at him while his brain was all swiss-cheesed with fear. Today was about proving his mettle to himself. It was about staying in the game and about coming against the man who was coming to symbolise all his fears and his recent past: Peter Serge. Serge liked to think he was good at following people, turning up unannounced like a ghost. But with a squad like UKFirst, keeping tabs on a couple of high-profile private eyes like Eva and Dan was not so hard a task. The real challenge was to work it the other way. Dan was taking the game to the Bogeyman.
First off, Dan dressed up in the only suit he now possessed. It was not a good one. He looked like a man attending a court appearance, his first job interview after a decade of unemployment, or a quirky TV detective with bad taste, but he could only hope for the latter. He bought a pair of cheap plain glass reading spectacles which made the world a little bigger, and sat down in front of a couple of files and a newspaper in the council office’s canteen. He was there around forty five minutes - drinking coffee which tasted no better than heated toilet water - before the first of the skinhead brigade turned up. Serge wasn’t with them, which was good, because Dan already understood the man was a perceptive and paranoid little gimp. Serge would likely spot him within two minutes. These two bruisers were not so sharp. Dan listened as they talked about Will Burton and Jerry Burton and the election in two days’ time. They were excited. They made no detailed reference to the attack on Jerry Burton, which was a shame, because a statement of who’d done the deed would have been so much easier. But life was rarely easy - and for Dan, never. Dan scribbled notes of everything he heard. Their gruff voices drifted in and out of range like waves on the beach. The notes made a kind of sense. The Railway Tavern. Joe Merton. The problem. Clearing up. Meet up at The Tavern. Joe Merton again. Peter. Will Burton. The hospital. These notes were records. They told Dan this: The skinheads and their bosses used a local drinking hole as much as the Civic Centre canteen for their meetings and planning. Joe Merton was a man who had been mentioned twice in connection with Peter Serge and The Railway Tavern. He was a face in their crew - with what power? The skinheads had experienced some recent problems, and there was a clearing up taking place. Read from that what you will, thought Dan. There was no reason the ‘clearing up’ referred to the attack on Jerry Burton. During an election campaign people like this would be making messes to be cleared up all over town. But Dan couldn’t rule out that Jerry Burton was one of their messes. So he ruled it in. And he needed more, much more. Which called for a different kind of manoeuvre. He called in his plans to the office, and got Jess. Jess didn’t try to talk him out of it. He imagined her chewing gum and nodding with disdain as she took a note of what he said. “Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Yeah. I’ll be sure to tell Eva. Dan, I’ve got to say it’s kind of boring here without you.”
“Miss you too, sweetheart,” said Dan, and hung up. Dan took a breath and closed his bespectacled eyes tight. ”Screw it. Let’s do it.”
Lunch time was a good bet for a busy pub. A busy pub was always going to be an easier prospect than eavesdropping on the clientele in an empty dive. So Dan walked around the town wearing his bad suit, paused in another coffee shop, and considered phoning Eva for a while. He wasn’t sure whether Eva would even get the message he’d left with Jess. But he decided against calling. The girl didn’t like him being around, but she wasn’t that mean. Back in that late night escape from Hammersmith, Dan had been very impressed with the girl’s resourcefulness, and they’d seemed to hit it off back then. How times had changed.
At 12.45 Dan walked into The Railway Tavern after peering through the window from behind a football poster. He saw a gathering of skins and fat men in suits in the right-hand bar. A wall with an archway separated the two bars, which was useful for hiding and listening unseen. There was a pool table in the left-hand bar, and he could hear the clack of the pool balls and smell the seductiveness of the fresh cooked sausage baguettes. Dan walked in, back to wearing his spectacles, now doing his best to look like rent-a-geek. He lowered his shoulders, and took on a weak maudlin aspect to his face. The only trouble was this position made his real fears surge into life, as if by impersonating a fearful man he had suddenly become one. He held his breathing in check. He kept the wall-divider between him and the noisy and boisterous suits on the other side. He ordered a Kronenbourg, and heard his fear make him stammer. Damn, he was weak, and he hated it. The barmaid, a good looking bottle blonde in her twenties paid Dan no attention whatsoever, gave him no please, thank you, or even a smile. Dan didn’t like it, but he supposed the geek chic and the smell of fear put her off. Once he’d broken the back of this fear thing, Dan decided he’d have to go on a mission to rebuild his old charisma. Or at least get Eva back.
Dan nursed his pint at the bar, unfolding a creased up and well used tabloid newspaper as a prop. He pressed it to the bar top, put his head down and began to scan the old news. He strained to listen through the manly chatter, the loud guffawing, the swearing, and the sound of the pool table. The voices were many and difficult to differentiate, but he knew Peter Serge well enough by now, and could hear the thin voice with its hard edges cutting through the others time to time. But Dan needed detail. He listened harder.
“…none of ‘em knows what happened. They’re all fecking useless as far as I can tell. The coppers, they’ve barely started looking. They’re more interested in press conferences to show that they’re doing something. They keep saying they’re not doing us any special favours, as if UKFirst’s offspring are a special case.” It was a gruff voice, but not totally unintelligent. The next voice was the thin one. It belonged to Peter Serge. Dan felt his throat harden and his breath stop in his chest. He blinked but the feeling wouldn’t go away. A swig of beer didn’t help at all.
“The cops on the ground would love to help, I’m certain. We’re bound to get half the coppers voting for us. The other half will vote Labour, thinking about their pensions. But cop chiefs, the commissioner, all that lot, they’re against us because they are scared of the press. Half the press say we’re out-and-out villains, the other half say we’re the answer to all ills. The police chiefs don’t have any backbone, so they’ll always blow with the wind, so they won’t help us one bit. Which is why Will hired those private dicks. A waste of good beer money, is what I think, but you know how he is with presentation. What things look like. He wants to do something. I thought he was going to crack a couple of days back. I mean, anyone would, wouldn’t they? But not dear old Will. Whoever did this must have had a real shock when Will didn’t quit...”
Dan heard the flatness in Serge’s voice. Dan was sure that the man was being disingenuous. He didn’t believe what he was saying, and he wasn’t exactly doing quality method acting. Dan’s guess was that some of the boys around him knew the truth, and some didn’t know it was an inside job. Dan guessed the only person who got a real shock when Will Burton didn’t quit was Peter Serge. These skinhead scumbags were like vermin, tearing each other’s throats out over scraps of food. Whatever Serge tried to pull off with Burton had gone totally wrong. Was the attacker a complete fool? Did they use a muppet with a monkey’s IQ? Or was young Jerry Burton the intended target at all? Maybe scaring Will Burton out of the race would hav
e left the way clear for Serge to stake his claim for the road to power. And there was another question. Will Burton was far too slick for this ramshackle mob. Whether he was playing dumb or not, it must have crossed Will Burton’s mind that his own team were responsible for the attack. Dan needed more clues, more information. There was still time. Only a third of his pint was gone, and it sounded like the heavy mob were settling in for lunch as the barmaid emerged from the kitchen with plates of steaming baguettes. The UKFirst mob cheered. One or two voices dropped away as the eating started, which wasn’t all bad. As some voices cleared others became more prominent.
As Dan listened in, the archway between the bars filled with bodies. Three men walked through the archway, and gathered in a space by the window light. One of the men was Serge, one was a tall man whose head was completely bald rather than shaved, shiny bald like it hadn’t seen a trace of a hair follicle for a very long time. This man had a pudgy face with an eagle like nose. He smiled at Serge and the other man. The other man was wider, a bruiser - some muscle to make up for Serge’s obvious physical inadequacies. Inadequacies which didn’t stop him being a terrifying person. The man gave off evil like an aura. Dan froze and read his newspaper harder than he’d ever read a paper before. He tuned his ears to the low tones of the private conversation. Everyone else in the room was paying no attention whatsoever. The pool game carried on, the barmaid poured drinks and chatted.
“I got rid of all the trouble for now. Well out of the way,” said the tall one.
“Good news. And how is everyone?” said Serge.
“All in good order.”
“Good, good. And it’s only a couple of days now. I’m not happy, of course. But if we have to mop up and settle it later rather than sooner, then so be it.”
“I think you’ll have to leave it, Pete. The heat is on. That ship has sailed, but it’ll come back your way. You’re clearly the best man. A true believer. I see what you bring to the table, Peter. The other boys see it too, not just round here, but regional too. You’re not just local material, you’re leader material. But Will does what he does well.”
Divide and Rule Page 5