Die Last

by Tony Parsons

  A soft hand touched my arm.

  She was a pretty blonde, only in her mid-twenties but with many miles on the clock. She was small, but her heels added five inches, and she wore a black sleeveless cocktail dress that seemed to stop before it had even begun. She tugged modestly at its top, a gesture that seemed to emphasise her semi-nakedness rather than disguise it.

  ‘You want party?’ she asked.

  ‘How about a drink?’ I said.

  I looked around for Billy and saw him being led into the darkness by two women in baby dolls. There goes the budget of the Metropolitan Police for another year, I thought, as I was gently steered in the opposite direction.

  She found us a table.

  A waiter – a young woman dressed in black tie – was immediately by our side, taking the order. My new friend crossed her legs and again pulled up the top of her dress, her manner veering between brazen and modest.

  It was even darker at the table, but not so dark that I could not see the bruises on her arms, as mottled as camouflage.

  ‘What happened to you?’ I said.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, rubbing at the bruises as if that might make them disappear. ‘Sometimes I am so clumsy.’ She suddenly paid attention as the waiter returned with a bottle of Prosecco.

  I looked at the label.

  ‘Champagne, sir,’ the waitress said, with just the right note of defiance. I signed the chit she offered and a red velvet curtain was pulled in front of us, hiding us from the rest of club.

  My new friend was still massaging her bruises.

  ‘What’s your name?’ I said.

  ‘Bianca.’

  ‘Is Bianca your real name or your bar name?’

  She smiled. ‘We’re in a bar, aren’t we?’

  She poured us two drinks, the fizz spilling over the top of first one flute and then the other.

  ‘Whoops,’ said Bianca. ‘I did not think you would want me.’ She sighed elaborately. ‘There are so many beautiful girls in the Champagne Room. I thought you would want …’ She seemed to search for a phrase that she remembered from her English lessons of long ago and far away. ‘Fresh meat,’ she said.

  She self-consciously pulled up her pants. When we sat down on the low velvet chairs, I saw that there were dark bruises on her knees, a deeper, darker hue than the ones on her arms.

  ‘Where are you from, Bianca?’

  ‘Bucharest. But I have been out for – oh, ten years.’

  ‘Where are the other girls from?’ I asked.

  She leaned close to me and whispered her great secret.

  ‘Everywhere but here,’ she said.

  Then the waitress was back.

  ‘Steve wants you in the VIP room now, Bianca,’ she said. And then to me. ‘We’ll get you another girl, sir – what flavour do you like?’

  I waved her away.

  ‘You have to go?’ I said to Bianca, who was already on her feet, a tiny woman tottering on heels as long as hypodermic needles.

  She tugged at the top and bottom of her little black dress.

  ‘Steve is the boss,’ she said, placing a chaste kiss on my cheek. ‘But you come back,’ she said, looking at me for the first time. ‘I like you, you’re nice.’

  ‘Bianca?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘What happens in the VIP room?’

  Another secret to be purred into my ear.

  I could smell the vodka and the cigarettes and her total despair.

  ‘Everything,’ she said.

  I watched her walk away and the sound of her heels cut through the music.

  Click-click, they went. Click-click.

  Then the doorman was standing before me. When he turned sideways to glance back into the Champagne Room I saw that his nose had been punched so flat that it was as vertical as a sheer cliff face, just one long straight line of flattened cartilage, bone and scar tissue.

  ‘The boss wants a word.’

  ‘Bit busy right now,’ I said, grinning foolishly and acting drunker than I felt after a mouthful of sparkling wine.

  ‘Now, Detective,’ he said.

  I looked at him.

  And now I knew where I had seen him before.

  I never saw him fight. I never saw him at York Hall. It was at Smithfield ABC. Banging the bags at Fred’s gym. A few years back now, it must have been. He had turned pro and then almost immediately been put away for running around town with a gun, waving it in the face of known drug dealers.

  I could even remember his name. Peter Chivers.

  ‘Working the doors now, Peter?’

  ‘It’s not Peter any more. It’s Mahmud X.’

  ‘Converted inside, did you?’

  ‘Saw the light.’

  And then Steve Warboys was there, tired of waiting for me to show up in the VIP room. His eyes flitted and moved, frowning at the puddle of alcohol that Bianca had left on the table. There was a natural intelligence about his grandfather Paul that had nothing to do with academic education and his father Barry must have been no slouch to build up his business.

  But Steve Warboys looked as though his lift stopped a few floors from the top.

  ‘So your theory is that we’re bussing in illegals from bongo bongo land?’ he said. ‘Getting our girls under the counter?’ He laughed. ‘You’ve seen too many Liam Neeson films, Detective. Why would we? Look around. The whole world wants to live in this country. And they will do anything – anything – to stay here.’

  ‘Well – Steve – if I may call you Steve – the word is you favour using illegal migrants because they are easier to control,’ I said. ‘Not quite so fussy about pension plans and health care as the locals and the legals.’

  He laughed.

  ‘None of them are easy to control!’ Steve Warboys said. ‘They’ve all got their issues. Issues with their daddy, issues with their boyfriend, issues with their body, issues with substance abuse.’ He looked hurt, misunderstood. ‘In this job, people see only the glamour. They see only the glitz. But it’s hard keeping a stable of girls.’

  He must have seen some doubt in me because he grinned.

  ‘People smuggling is an industry,’ he said, as if I needed to understand. ‘But it’s not my line of work. Now I’m not denying that we might have had a few employees who fell off the back of a lorry in our time. Like dear old – what was her name again, Mahmud?’

  ‘Asuman,’ the bouncer said, and it sounded like a threat. ‘I can’t remember her bar name.’

  They both smiled at my surprise.

  ‘What – you think you can talk to a former employee and we don’t get to hear about it immediately?’ Steve Warboys said. ‘We like to maintain close contact with our former employees.’ His face clouded. ‘Especially when they run off halfway through a contract. Asuman gave us a head’s up that you’d been round.’ He touched his heart and I saw the thick gold rings on his right hand. ‘For which I am grateful,’ he said. ‘And, yes, it’s possible that her visa papers were not completely in order when she worked here. But that was some years ago, Detective. And in those days, their visa was not the first thing I looked at. Know what I mean? But that was then. And it’s a different world now.’ A cloud drifted across his sly, slow features. ‘I think you might be looking to fit us up, copper.’ He held back the red velvet curtain. ‘So get out and don’t come back.’

  I was naturally curious.

  ‘And what happens if I come back?’

  ‘Your new friend – Bianca – will say she gave you a Southend shoeshine,’ he said. ‘Know what one of those is?’

  ‘I can make an educated guess.’

  ‘Believe me, the allegation will be enough to bring in the IPCC,’ he said, referring to the Independent Police Complaints Commission, the body that investigates charges of misconduct against the police. ‘Enough to embarrass your family,’ he said. ‘Enough to get you and your colleague suspended.’

  He held out his phone to reveal half a dozen strippers draped all over PC Billy Greene. One of them
was grinning at the camera as she fiddled with his belt. I had to admit it didn’t look good. And it would look even worse sat in an interview room with the IPCC. Perhaps Steve Warboys was not quite as thick as he looked.

  I stood up and smiled at him. I have seen a lot of young hoods that tried walking like the Richardsons, the Warboys and the Krays – the twins – as if Reggie and Ronnie were the only twins ever born.

  It’s a natural aspiration for the criminally inclined, like a singer wanting to be bigger than Elvis. Steve Warboys did it better than most, but in the end he was not the king of anywhere apart from a pole-dancing joint by the side of the motorway.

  And I wasn’t scared of him.

  ‘I’ve met your grandfather,’ I said. ‘And you’ve got that same colouring. But as far as I can see, that’s all you got from Paul Warboys. You’ve got the name but not the game. Sorry.’

  ‘Get the bats, Mahmud.’

  It is stupid to hurt a cop. However big your gang is, our gang is bigger. However much firepower you have, we have far more. And we have the full weight of the state behind us. Yes, it is stupid to hurt a cop. But stupidity is the distinguishing feature of criminals.

  Even the smart ones are stupid.

  Mahmud X came back with a couple of cricket bats. He gave one to Steve, who hefted it in his hand, grinned at me and strolled back to the bar. The Middle Eastern man with the neat beard still had a woman on each knee. They both shrieked and fled when they saw Steve Warboys and Mahmud X advancing with the cricket bats. And I suddenly saw what they were planning to do.

  Mahmud hit the man across the side of the face.

  Warboys knocked him off his bar stool.

  Phone lights suddenly appeared in the darkness. But there was a sign on the wall. NO FILMING, it said – standard protocol in any lap-dancing joint. Warboys slapped the sign with his open palm and all the smart phones were quickly put away.

  I went to help the man on the ground and found my path blocked by two gorillas in evening wear. They were not quite as big as Mahmud X but they were enough to keep me back.

  ‘You can’t stop it,’ one of them said, sounding almost wistful.

  And he was right. I couldn’t stop it.

  Warboys and Mahmud laid into the bearded man as he sprawled on the ground and women in high heels and bikinis and baby dolls covered their mouths and screamed at the horror and the drunken City boys kept a respectful distance. Now nobody was even thinking about filming the fun on their iPhones and Samsung Galaxies. They contented themselves with just watching. It was a new experience for them.

  The doorman and the club owner both gave the man on the ground a good hiding but the way they worked was very different. It was the difference between a professional hard nut and a raving nut case. Mahmud the doorman beat the man with a calm but vicious professionalism.

  But Steve Warboys enjoyed it.

  He beat the man with the neat beard until his bat was broken in half. When it was over he stood before me, sweating and panting, gesturing at Mahmud X with his shattered cricket bat.

  ‘Get the girls together,’ he said. ‘All of them.’ He gestured at the man at his feet. ‘And get this one to the hospital. He’s only half-dead. You can leave him on the pavement outside A&E. And turn on the lights. Now!’

  The girls were corralled.

  The house lights came on.

  The man on the floor was not moving.

  ‘Tell him where you’re from,’ Warboys told the women. The girls hesitated, anxious not to do anything wrong, unsure of the rules to this parlour game, not understanding that he was trying to prove to me that they were all here legally.

  He shouted in the face of a tall, doe-eyed woman in some kind of cheap satin shift.

  ‘Tell him where you’re from!’

  ‘Italy!’

  ‘That’s the idea. You!’

  ‘France.’

  ‘Latvia.’

  The women were forming an orderly queue now. They nervously told me their country and then stepped aside, tugging self-consciously at their hair or their pants or the hem of their nightdress.

  ‘Russia. Student visa.’

  ‘China. Student visa.’

  ‘See?’ Steve Warboys said, and he laughed at last. ‘Do you understand? It’s a new century, Detective! And a different business model.’

  And then Bianca was standing there, and Warboys roughly shoved her towards me.

  ‘Romania,’ she said shyly.

  And as she turned away, self-consciously adjusting her pants, I saw Steve Warboys’ blood-smeared handprint on her bare back, the bones beneath her skin as fragile as a wishbone.

  10

  The motorway unfurled into the night, the flat fields of Essex stretching off out into the blackness, TDC Billy Greene silent and sheepish by my side, the lipstick traces on his face looking like a tropical disease.

  ‘Your fly’s undone,’ I said.

  He quickly adjusted himself, and started to stutter out an apology.

  ‘Don’t be sorry – be more careful,’ I said. ‘They’re all nice girls but they all follow orders. They don’t have the luxury of doing anything else.’

  I was thinking about Bianca.

  ‘Nothing happened,’ he said.

  ‘I know you’re not that dumb,’ I said.

  Just young, I thought. And green behind the lugholes.

  I had called in the assault to Essex police but it wouldn’t mean a thing if the bearded man had no desire to press charges when he woke up in that hospital bed.

  There was a knot of shame in my gut that I had been unable to stop a pair of career thugs handing out a beating but I could not worry about that now. And I wasn’t worried about Warboys’ hamfisted threats to smear us with snaps of Billy buried under a scrum of lap dancers. The law is not so easily blackmailed. What worried me – what scared me to death – was that TDC Billy Greene was clearly as raw as sushi.

  And that was dangerous.

  For him. For me. And for anyone he worked with.

  ‘I wanted to do well tonight,’ he said. ‘In the field, I mean.’ His scarred hands rubbed together, as if he were washing them. ‘I never planned to be a canteen cowboy.’

  Just as the Eskimos have fifty different words for snow, so policemen have many names for cops who never leave their desk. Station cat. Clothes hanger. Shiny arse. Olympic torch (never goes out). Bongo (Books On, Never Goes Out). Flub (Fat, Lazy, Useless Bastard).

  But I flashed on the night that Billy Greene ruined his hands. I remembered the basement in a suburban house where we cornered a man called Ian Peck, far better known as Bob the Butcher, currently serving a life sentence for murder. I remembered that basement as a place of damp and dust and death, the black hole where my boss DCI Victor Mallory received a fatal knife wound to the neck.

  It was very dark down there, one weak bare light bulb illuminating the horror, and even now I could feel the ache in my ribs beyond the dent in my Kevlar Stealth where Bob had tried to stab me. Bob was small but possessed with the simian power of the insane, and he took me out of the game almost immediately. But through the stars in my vision brought on by a blow to the back of the skull I watched PC Billy Greene throw himself into the flames of a barbecue pit for roasting human flesh.

  It was a ragged hole that had been doused with petrol and a naked woman was screaming inside it, a journalist called Scarlet Bush who Bob had abducted, and I remembered the smell of burning flesh and what Billy had looked like in his hospital bed, his hands wrapped in oozing bandages, months of care ahead of him, his future uncertain. But what I remembered most of all was that he had never hesitated to throw himself into the flames.

  ‘I never think of you as a canteen cowboy, Billy,’ I said. ‘OK?’

  ‘OK. Thanks.’

  ‘Where were your new friends from?’

  ‘Vilnius and Budapest,’ he said, confirming what Steve Warboys had insisted. The women of the Champagne Room were all in the country legally. Give or take a dodgy st
udent visa or two, they were even working more or less legally. The Champagne Room did not import its dancers in the back of a lorry. They didn’t need to. I heard Billy’s stomach rumble.

  ‘You want to stop for something to eat?’ I asked him.

  ‘My mum will have something waiting for me,’ he said. ‘Let’s just get back home, shall we?’

  Going home was always fine by me. And it should have been an easy run. It should have been an hour cruising on the empty late-night motorways that snake through all that Essex countryside and then back home to London, dropping off Billy to his mum, who would be waiting up for him, and then to Smithfield, where Mrs Murphy and Stan would be dozing on the sofa.

  But it didn’t work out like that.

  The motorway miles drifted by and Billy and I had lapsed into silence until we saw the blue and red lights of trouble piercing the darkness somewhere ahead of us.

  ‘Looks like an accident,’ Billy said.

  We had turned off the great looping motorway that encircles the city and come down the long straight stretch that runs all the way to the lights of north London. Round midnight on most nights of the year, it is a strip of road much favoured by the boy racers of Essex. They speed here. They preen here. And too often they die here.

  On the other side of the road, I could see the lights of the emergency services winking far ahead where the blackness of the country began to be lit by the orange sodium lights of the city. Blue for the law, red for the ambulances, and plenty of both. The traffic on that side of the road had begun to slow and thicken and as we got closer I saw the sickening sight of two cars crushed like cigarette packets by the side of the road.

  I slowed the BMW X5 as we passed, close enough to see the expressions of the fire crews and paramedics and the police, their faces taut with shock, and as I pulled away, I saw jagged scraps of metal, careering skidmarks and, glinting like tossed diamonds, the crushed glass of the windscreens. A body bag was being zipped.