by Tony Parsons
‘Because the bar my son ran owed everyone money, from the tax man to the company who supplied the beer. The Champagne Room was mortgaged to the hilt but that was only the start. My accountants are still going through the books, but I have seen a summary of the debts and they are in the high six figures.’
‘And why have you suddenly seen these figures?’
‘Because I’m the executor of my son’s estate. My father wasn’t Stephen’s next of kin. I am.’
I thought about it. ‘Do you know what long firm fraud is, Mr Warboys?’
‘No.’
‘There’s no reason why you would. Long firm fraud is when a company is set up for fraudulent purposes. An apparently legitimate business establishes a good credit record and then, out of the blue, everyone gets stiffed. Goods are bought on a massive scale with no intention of ever paying for them.’
‘But what’s the point in that?’
I could not help but smile at his innocence.
‘The goods get sold elsewhere, Mr Warboys. It’s how the criminal mind works. It’s a scam that was perfected in the Sixties. The big family mobs loved the long firm. Reggie and Ronnie Kray. Charlie and Eddie Richardson.’
He looked at me.
‘And Paul and Danny Warboys,’ I said. ‘A long firm takes time and money to set up but it can be massively profitable. It ends with the business run into the ground and the owners long gone. Sometimes they burn the place to the ground before they do a bunk.’ I watched his face carefully. ‘Do you think your father burned that place down?’
He shook his head.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Because my father would never do anything to hurt my son.’ And then a look of doubt came over his face. ‘At least, not deliberately.’
‘I’ve seen your father’s new home. It’s an apartment in a luxury block by the river. It’s not big, but he doesn’t look as if he’s struggling to get by on his state pension.’
Barry Warboys laughed bitterly.
‘My father is broke, Detective. The last of the money was in that Essex house. My father couldn’t sell it while my mother was alive. It was in her name – it had been in her name for forty years, ever since he went away for his life sentence, ever since it seemed the authorities might seize it. But as soon as my mother was gone, there was nothing to stop him putting it on the market.’
I thought of Paul Warboys alone in the soulless luxury of his riverside apartment block and I remembered something my grandmother used to say. Fur coat and no knickers. Meaning a public show of luxury and a private reality of poverty. Was that what the old gangster had come to?
‘Why are you telling me this?’ I said.
‘You asked me about my father’s finances,’ he said. ‘And now I’m telling you. I don’t believe he burned down the Champagne Room. I don’t believe that he – or Stephen – had anything to do with those women in Chinatown. But I do not want to keep anything from you. This is not easy for me, Detective.’
‘I appreciate that,’ I said. ‘If he needed one last score, what do you think your father would do?’
His voice was soft as a prayer and I could hardly hear him over the slap of leather hitting flesh and bone and the groans of pain coming from the ring.
‘My guess would be – anything,’ he said.
We watched the boxers for a while without speaking. They were both very tired now.
‘A room in one of your homes,’ I said. ‘How much would something like that cost?’
‘Retirement communities,’ he said. ‘We have several financial packages that we find suit most incomes. Did you have a guest in mind?’
‘You call them guests?’
‘Yes.’
‘And do you take people who are unwell? You know – struggling to remember things?’
He leaned on the side of the ring.
‘We take anyone,’ he said. ‘Is this a member of your family?’
‘The grandmother of a friend,’ I said.
Barry Warboys gave me his card.
Golden Years
Residential and retirement communities
Elderly care for every pocket.
There was a personal mobile number on the card.
‘Tell your friend to call me,’ he said.
The black boxer bounced off the ropes and walked straight on to a hard right cross that caught him on the point of his chin. He was unconscious before he hit the floor. The white boxer stared at him, dumbstruck with shock.
Then Fred was in the ring, kneeling over the floored fighter, pulling out the gumshield to stop him swallowing it, shouting for Nesha to call an ambulance.
I saw that Barry Warboys was trembling.
‘Will he be all right?’ he said.
‘He’ll be fine,’ I said. ‘But that ring is not for everyone.’
He nodded.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘And if it’s not for you, then it’s the loneliest place in the world.’
23
The white ten-ton truck came hurtling towards us, the morning sunshine turning the windscreen a solid block of molten gold, the growl of its diesel engine growing louder as it picked up speed in the wide-open space of the landing strip.
The abandoned aerodrome was on the north-west edge of London but it could have been the middle of the countryside. There was a lake on one side, shimmering with a thin film of ice, and nothing but flat fields on the other side, all edged with trees that grew close enough together to keep out prying eyes. The big engine howled like a trapped animal as the driver changed gears. The truck wobbled in protest but kept coming towards us.
‘Where’s this one from?’ asked the bespectacled man standing with us, his eyes never leaving the truck.
‘We seized it from a crew who were bringing in counterfeit money inside kitchen appliances,’ I said.
‘Not the vehicle,’ the man said. ‘The driver.’
The sun was suddenly gone from the windscreen and Billy Greene’s face appeared behind the steering wheel, holding on as if it might possibly fly from his grip.
‘PC Greene is one of our detectives,’ Whitestone said.
‘Better stand back a bit,’ said the man.
Glenn was a driving instructor for the Met. Mostly based at Hendon, the twenty specialist courses he taught included anti-hijack protection driving, tactical pursuit and containment, advanced car, advanced motorcycle, off-road, high-speed response and – Billy’s lesson – driving a heavy goods vehicle.
Glenn ushered Whitestone and me off the tarmac and on to the scrubby grass as Billy slammed on his brakes.
This end of the landing strip had a wide circle of tarmac, big enough for a light aircraft to make a complete turn before heading off to the hangars that had been falling down for the last thirty years. Billy was meant to be practising his turn on the circle but he came in too fast and executed his turn too abruptly. The three of us jumped back as the truck went up on its left wheels, hovering dramatically for a long sickening moment until the airborne side came down with the crash of ten tons of steel.
The lorry screeched to a halt.
Billy buzzed down the window and wiped the sweat from his face on this freezing cold day.
Glenn looked up at him and smiled.
‘Good,’ he said mildly. ‘The main mistake that people make when they first drive an HGV is that they go far too slow. You’re not making that mistake. But you’re still struggling with the dimensions of the thing, aren’t you?’
‘Sorry, sir,’ Billy said. ‘I—’
Glenn held up his hand. ‘You’re doing fine. But it’s not a squad car. It’s an ocean liner. Whatever you ask it to do, please give it plenty of warning. Now let’s go again.’
Billy nodded gamely and the truck took off, picking up speed as he headed for the far end of the landing strip. Glenn walked back towards us and exchanged a look with DCI Whitestone.
‘Any other candidates?’ Glenn said.
Whitestone indicated the truck roaring down the tarmac.
‘Bil
ly is it,’ she said. Then she looked at me.
‘It seems possible that old man Warboys was running a long firm at the Champagne Room,’ I said. ‘If that’s the case, then it would have been in collusion with his late grandson, Steve Warboys, although I have no idea if they were partners or employer and employee.’
‘Why the element of doubt?’
‘It’s also possible that it wasn’t a long firm and that Steve Warboys was just lousy at business. The Champagne Room was mortgaged to the hilt and owed money to everyone. But it doesn’t necessarily follow that all the debt was criminal activity. It could be incompetence. I met Steve. He was no businessman.’
Whitestone laughed grimly.
‘But his grandfather invented the long firm,’ she said. ‘Sounds like Paul Warboys was topping up his pension. These old faces never change.’
‘I still can’t see him involved in people smuggling,’ I said.
Whitestone looked at me with something like anger.
‘Why not, Max? The Warboys brothers were the biggest pimps in London. That’s what Paul and Danny did, Max. Not Reggie and Ronnie Kray. Not Charlie and Eddie Richardson. Paul and Danny Warboys. The Warboys brothers were into the flesh trade. And although the world gets all misty-eyed about these old celebrity gangsters, there was no romance in it. Not then, not now. The Warboys firm peddled girls in Soho and if the girls answered back or were too tired to work, then they lost their front teeth. So don’t be fooled by this sweet old man.’
We were silent for a moment.
‘So you want to bring in Paul Warboys?’ I said.
‘I want the old man watched. But I want to bring in this Chinaman for another interview.’
‘But if you like Paul Warboys for this, then why are we sweating Keith Li? He gave us the lorry with the dead girls and the lorry with Lee Hill. Keith Li led us to them.’
‘Exactly. We’re being led around by the head of the Wo Shing Wo, Max. It stinks.’
I shook my head but said nothing.
At the far end of the landing strip, Billy was attempting to reverse but the rear wheels were up on the grass verge and struggling to gain traction on the icy ground.
Glenn began running towards him, waving his hands to stop but Billy kept his foot pressed down on the metal, his wheels screaming in protest, the ten-ton truck going nowhere.
I had a bad feeling about all this.
‘Billy’s not ready,’ I said.
‘He has five more days’ intensive training with Glenn,’ Whitestone said. ‘He will be ready by the end of it.’
‘I’m not talking about the driving. I know he can be taught to handle an HGV. I’m saying that he’s not ready for an operation this dangerous.’
‘Billy’s no canteen cowboy. He’s got a heart on him.’
‘I’m not doubting the size of his heart. He’s just too raw to go into that migrant camp alone. He hasn’t got the miles on the clock.’
Whitestone turned to look at me. The low sun blazed on her glasses and I could not see her eyes. But her voice was full of ice.
‘He’s been in the field with you, hasn’t he?’
‘An Essex strip club? A language school on Oxford Street?’ I could feel my blood rising and I struggled to keep my voice under control. ‘It’s hardly the same thing as that camp in Dunkirk.’
I thought of Billy in the field. How easy it was for a couple of strippers to play him. How he tried to open the back of the lorry containing Lee Hill’s body by chucking a brick at it.
And I felt sick to my stomach.
Whitestone and I watched the lorry at the far end of the runway in silence. Glenn was giving Billy a wide berth as he called out instructions and Billy slowly eased the giant truck off the icy grass.
‘Billy’s going to France,’ Whitestone said quietly, and I exploded.
‘The guy’s used to sitting behind a desk in West End Central!’
‘Don’t raise your voice to me, Detective.’
‘Ma’am,’ I said, almost begging her now. ‘These people operating out of Dunkirk, they have already murdered two men. They saw that Zlatko Draganov was going to be lifted and they turned him into roadkill. They knew – or maybe they just suspected – that Lee Hill had been turned by the law and they lynched him.’ I remembered Troy’s hideous face leering at me, warning me not to hang around because I looked too much like pig. ‘If they have any suspicions at all that Billy is not what he claims to be, then they will kill him,’ I said.
‘They will never know he’s a cop.’
‘They’ll know it the moment they look at him! Jesus Christ, doesn’t that matter to you?’
‘You want to know what matters to me?’ We were shouting at each other now. ‘Those twelve dead women in the back of a lorry in Chinatown. How many more women have to die, Max? Because if we don’t nail these bastards, then I promise you it will happen again.’
My phone began to vibrate.
EDIE WREN CALLING, it said.
‘We’ve got another lorryload of girls,’ Edie said.
I felt my stomach fall away.
I remembered the touch of Hana Novak’s icy hands as she reached out and touched my wrist, too cold to be of this world. I remembered the terrible stillness we had found in the back of the truck in Chinatown.
‘And this time they’re alive,’ Edie said.
24
There was a small but growing crowd outside West End Central, kept back from the entrance by two uniformed officers, their placards bobbing in the grey light of Savile Row.
REFUGEES WELCOME HERE said some. NO MORE BORDERS said others. IMAGINE said one, and I expected to see that it was being held by a young man in dreadlocks with his face blackened by tattoos. But it was not Troy. The IMAGINE placard was held by an elderly gentleman with a wispy white beard and a sensible corduroy jacket and a lifetime of polite activism behind him.
I eased my way through the crowd, nodding at the two young uniforms, a young female PC – the Met no longer calls them WPCs – and an even younger black officer. It didn’t seem like much in the way of crowd control but the protest seemed peaceful enough.
The women were on the top floor, spread out across Major Incident Rooms 1 and 2, all in their late teens and early twenties, all wrapped in blankets as they sipped hot drinks, and all quietly terrified as detectives and immigration officers moved among them with their questions.
‘We found the lorry parked in a motorway layby just outside of Maidstone,’ Edie told me. ‘The driver ran out of petrol and did a runner. Left this lot to stew.’
‘What road?’
‘The M2 motorway. Northbound.’
‘The road from Dover to London,’ I said. ‘Anything in the cab? Passports? Phones?’
‘Not a sausage.’
‘Have we talked to the women?’
‘They’re about to be shipped out. Immigration wants them to have a medical before we do any formal interviews.’
A woman with frizzy hair and an iPad blinked at me furiously behind her spectacles.
‘These women are not criminals,’ she said. ‘They need health care, rest, fresh clothing—’
I wasn’t going to argue with her. I wasn’t going to point out that they might have information that could help us catch real criminals. I knew how it worked.
One of the women had the pale-skinned, dark-eyed look of Hana Novak. They were probably not even the same nationality but they could have been sisters. Nobody was talking to her. They had either processed her already or they hadn’t got around to it yet. I walked over to her. She looked at me warily.
‘What will happen to me?’
She had good English. I decided to tell her the truth.
‘A big coach will come here soon and it will take you to a reception centre. From there you will go to some kind of accommodation that will either be a small hotel or house.’ I looked around the room. ‘It’s likely that some of these women will be with you.’
I didn’t tell her that the accommod
ation would be privately run and that it was in the interest of the private contractors to keep costs at rock bottom. I didn’t tell her that she would be sent to one of the poorest areas in the country – the dumping grounds of the faraway towns, hundreds of miles from the big London houses of the politicians and the protestors down on Savile Row with their pious placards. I didn’t tell her any of that.
Instead I got her a fresh cup of tea.
She sipped it and pulled a shocked face.
‘What is this drink?’
‘Tea,’ I said. ‘Boiled water, two sugars and a bag full of leaves. Is it all right?’
‘Yes. Thank you. Am I in trouble?’
‘You’ll either be allowed to stay in this country, in which case you will have the same rights as everyone else, or you will be sent back to your country of origin. Where was that?’
She hesitated.
‘Didn’t you have a passport when you set off? Did someone take it away from you?’
She shook her head.
‘We were told to destroy our papers when we reached Zagreb in Croatia. I did not want to destroy my papers. We were told we must.’
‘That’s because having no papers makes it easier to stay in this country. And easier to claim asylum. And easier to say that you come from a place where there is a war. Even if you don’t.’
I waited.
‘Tirana,’ she said. ‘My home is Tirana.’
‘Albania,’ I said. I held out my hand. ‘I’m Max,’ I said. ‘May I know your name?’
The immigration officer was suddenly by my side, barking with fury.
‘You do not have the right to interrogate this woman! You make me ashamed to be British!’
My hand was still there.
The young woman shook it.
‘Aurora,’ she said. ‘My name is Aurora.’
‘Nobody’s going to hurt you in this country,’ I said.
She nodded.
The women were filing out of the room.
‘The coach is waiting,’ bristled the woman from immigration who was ashamed to be British.
‘And what did you do in Tirana, Aurora?’ I said.
We both stood up. It was time to go. But we smiled at each other.