by Tony Parsons
He laughed at me.
Tommy chuckled along with him.
‘No,’ said Paul Warboys. ‘It was never business with me and Theresa. Not back in the day when this one here was born. And not now. Do you think I was ever interested in her because I thought I could make a few quid? Theresa wasn’t always an old lady, Max. She was beautiful. They were all over her back in the day. Sniffing around. All those big names. Film stars, Max. Politicians.’
‘I’ve heard all the names.’
‘And she chose me,’ he said, and half a century on his voice was still full of pride. ‘A rough boy from Hammersmith.’
‘A married man from Hammersmith,’ I said. ‘Your son – your other son, Barry – told me that you betrayed his mother and that’s what the real problem is between the pair of you. Not that Barry wouldn’t go into the family business. Not that he was too soft for your taste. Not that he was too straight for his dear old dad. And not even that you took one look at the dolly birds of Swinging London and decided that you wanted some of the action. Tommy,’ I said, and the boy-man grinned at me, raising his eyebrows at the sound of his name. ‘Tommy is the reason that Barry hates you.’ And a deeper truth now seemed obvious to me. ‘But Barry doesn’t hate you just because Tommy was born,’ I said. ‘Barry hates you because you love him.’
There were tears in the old gangster’s eyes but his mouth was twisted with violence. Not for the first time, I wondered what would happen if the pair of us went one on one. I would not fancy my chances unless I got in first.
‘But I was never a pimp, Max. That’s where you’ve got it all wrong, son. And I told you once before – if I wanted an extra couple of quid, I wouldn’t stick a bunch of poor little cows in the back of a lorry.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘I don’t care what you believe. You know what I believe? I think you wanted my scalp all along.’
I turned away.
‘I’ll let you spend time with your son,’ I said. ‘But settle your affairs, Paul. Because I’m coming for you.’
34
We smashed down his door at dawn.
The time of pliant suspects in their pants, pulled from REM sleep with slow reflexes and the vulnerability that comes with all that naked flesh.
But Paul Warboys stood fully clothed in the narrow hallway of his docklands flat with a black sap in his hand.
Waiting for us.
‘Come on, you cow sons,’ he said, and it struck me that he still spoke the lost language of old London – only the oldest faces still said cow sons – and that some words die with their generation.
Then he brought the sap down on the head of the leading copper.
He was a big uniformed sergeant, one of mother nature’s rugby players, as brave as they come, but he went down like a snowflake, his legs giving way the moment we heard the dull thwaaack of leather-clad lead on the thin crust of bone that covers the skull, out stone-cold before he hit the deck.
It was as narrow as Thermopylae in that hallway and Paul Warboys, a student of military history, was the Spartans. He was outnumbered and outgunned but fighting on ground that he had chosen. He had also chosen his weapon well. Civilians think that they can protect their homes and their family with a baseball bat. But you can’t swing a baseball bat in a confined space. The baseball bat is not a close quarters weapon.
You can swing a sap in a telephone booth.
‘Come on, come on,’ he said.
We had made the mistake of sending the uniforms in as our vanguard, half a dozen officers pouring past the shattered door the moment the scarred red battering ram brought it down. They all had their batons drawn but somehow the old gangster had the element of surprise. The sap came down again and again, delivering massive impact with minimum applied force.
Warboys grinned at me above the heads of the fallen officers.
I threw myself at him, seizing him in a bear hug, pinning his arms to his side before he had a chance to open my head with that sap. We slammed hard against one side of the hallway and then the other, glass breaking as we collided with a watercolour of the Thames, and I could smell his sweat and aftershave and I suddenly knew that he had been waiting for us all night long.
He cursed me, straining against the bear hug, he tried to sink his teeth into my ear.
Behind us, I could hear the cries of pain and threat.
‘You old bastard,’ I said into the side of his face, feeling his strength as he raged against me, my arms losing their grip. ‘If you’re an innocent man then why are you fighting?’
He laughed out loud.
‘Because you’re in my home,’ he said.
Then he threw me off and, as I bounced off the wall, aimed the black leather sap at the bridge of my nose.
I stumbled backwards, fell over a uniformed officer who was on his knees and felt the stubby black weapon slap hard against my bicep. In the broken doorway I could see the grey Kevlar body armour of the Authorised Firearms Officers, struggling to get inside, stepping over the fallen bodies.
I rolled away, a dull ache in the thick meat at the top of my arm, and Warboys raised the sap again as the AFOs came into the flat, only their eyes showing above their face masks and below their helmets, screaming their warnings – ‘Drop the weapon now! Drop the weapon now!’ – as they edged around the fallen officers, their assault rifles all aimed at the chest of Paul Warboys.
He charged at them, the leather sap raised above his head, still shouting about cow sons. The armed officers all carried a Sig Sauer MCX, the Black Mamba, a short, superlight firearm perfect for use in confined spaces. It is a weapon favoured by American Special Forces, although the ones the Met use are configured not to fire on semi-automatic, meaning that the ones levelled at Paul Warboys fired just one round for every trigger pull because the Met makes its officers justify every use of deadly force. That’s why every AFO could be a highly trained armed officer at breakfast and the object of a murder investigation by lunch.
I braced for the explosion of gunfire, the sound that is always so much louder than you ever expect, steeling myself for all the noise and fear and mess of 5.56 rounds passing through fragile flesh and blood and bone.
But they did not fire.
Warboys threw himself into them, the sap rising and falling, but now striking the lightweight body armour that the AFOs wore under all that grey Kevlar.
One of them, a woman, stuck a reinforced elbow into Warboys’ throat. He reeled backwards and she bounced the butt of her assault rifle off his chin. He stared at her with his watery blue eyes wide with shock, the sap now held loosely at his side.
She did it again and he went down.
Then they were stepping over his prone body, someone kicking the leather sap down the hall, and they were pouring into the small flat, clearing each room one by one, but the only sound was the noise our people made.
I looked for the great sloping head of Bullseye, his beloved English Bull Terrier, but Paul Warboys was a responsible dog owner, and his pet was already gone, and no doubt missing his master in some new loving home.
I picked up the black leather sap. It was a good one – eight inches long, flat, beaver-tailed black leather, weighted with lead at either end, with what felt like a semi-flexible steel spring running down the weapon’s spine.
I walked into the living room, stunned again by that view of the Thames, a light flurry of rain coming down on the river as the sun glittered behind the glass towers of Docklands. The flat still didn’t feel like a real home, despite the evidence of Warboys that was all around – the Otis Redding and Tamla Motown vinyl, the World at War boxed set on top of the home cinema, the framed photographs of his late wife.
No photographs of Tommy.
No photographs of Madam Theresa.
But then I guess you can love someone without putting their picture on your wall.
Someone shouted with joy in the tiny kitchen.
A uniformed officer held a box of Weetabix upside down and shook out red rol
ls of fifty-pound notes bound tight with elastic bands. There were more bundles of fifties in the tea, the sugar, in every corner we looked. A Specialist Search Team would do a search of the property that would take up floorboards, look in the ceiling and punch holes in the walls. But it felt like we hardly needed them.
Everywhere we looked, we found those neat rolls of fifties, and the smiling face of the Queen.
As they dragged Paul Warboys away I felt the weight of the sap in my hand, enjoying the slap of it on my palm, and I watched the sun rise above the river where his father had worked on the docks.
They called me when he was out of the hospital and tucked up in the holding cell.
Paul Warboys sat on the washable plastic bed in that cream-coloured room as if it was familiar territory. But he looked beyond tired, and it was more than waiting up all night for us to kick down his door, it was more than going a few rounds with coppers who were half a lifetime younger than him, and it was more than the concussion he got from the butt of the AFO’s assault rifle.
The old gangster looked as though he was at the end of everything.
‘I thought you were above living on immoral earnings, Paul. You know how much cash we found in your little flat?’
‘It’s not what you think. It’s not from Theresa.’
I waited.
‘It’s from London property, Max. The reserve currency of the world. Better than gold. The money you found is rent money. Cash in hand, saves on the paperwork. That’s where my dosh comes from – my tenants. Everyone wants to live here but there are only so many houses, only so many flats. I’ve been buying property all over town for donkey’s years.’
Donkey’s years. There was another one that would die with him and his generation.
‘How did it work?’ I said. ‘Who recruits the women you brought in?’
He exhaled with frustration.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Did you approach Imagine or did they come to you?’
‘What’s Imagine when it’s at home?’
‘Imagine are a bunch of British anarchists in the refugee camps of northern France. They don’t believe in borders. They’ve been facilitating the people smuggling out of Dunkirk.’
He shook his head.
‘Nothing to do with me. I could never stand hippies.’
I leaned across the desk. ‘Your old flame was getting through twenty girls a week up at the Hopewell Centre. What happened to the women who went missing?’
He stared at me with his pale blue eyes.
‘I don’t know what they’re doing up there in the penthouse,’ he said.
I turned away. His voice stopped me at the door.
‘You want the truth, Max?’
I stared at him. People will say anything. That’s the first thing you learn. People will say anything to save their skin.
I waited.
‘The truth is that I met a girl,’ he said. ‘And she stole my heart. Corny but true. Happens to the best of us and the worst of us. And she stole it even though I was a young married man with children. And she stole it even though I knew she had done bad things for money. We fitted together – I’m not good with words. Never had any education. So maybe that’s the best I can do. We just fitted, Max. She was the best fit that I ever knew. And I thought about starting over. We talked about it. And she got pregnant and that just made it even better. But when the baby was born it all went wrong. And the baby – this beautiful little baby – there was something wrong with him that we couldn’t understand and we couldn’t deal with. So we locked him away and I think the shame of it killed us. We didn’t deserve to be happy any more, see? Theresa and I haven’t had any contact for years. For half a lifetime. We’re strangers, Max. You can understand that, can’t you? How you can love someone and then they become a stranger? You had a wife once, didn’t you? Now you tell me – do you feel like you still know her? Or does she feel like a total stranger, Max?’
I banged on the door of the holding cell.
‘I’ll see you in the interview room,’ I said. ‘But we will not be talking about the good old days, Paul. We’ll be talking about lorries full of women left to freeze to death in Chinatown. And we’ll be talking about the slave market you ran in that penthouse.’
He sighed and shook his head.
‘All right, you cow son,’ he said. ‘Give me a pen and paper. I’ll write it all down for you. Make it nice and easy. What you want to know about, Max? People trafficking? Prostitution? What are those hippies called – Imagine? I’ll give you the lot if you give me pen and paper. Where the women came from. Who finds the drivers. Who gets paid at the border. Who gets paid all the way down the line. Is that what you want, Max?’
There was no pen and paper in the holding cell. I borrowed a yellow legal pad and green Ball Pentel from the duty sergeant on the desk outside and brought them back to Paul Warboys. Then I left him alone.
My phone began to vibrate as I was on my way up to MIR-1. I recognised the faint Australian accent of the Director of Nursing from Summerdale Psychiatric Hospital.
‘DC Wolfe?’ she said. ‘I thought you would want to know.’ I heard her take a breath. ‘Tommy Defarge died at some point during the night.’
‘What?’
‘We will be conducting a full investigation, but the bottle we found in his room indicated that he had somehow obtained Fentanyl. He just slipped away. He wouldn’t have felt a thing.’
She was still talking about how difficult it is for patients to get their hands on prescription drugs at Summerdale and how there would have to be a full investigation but I was already running down the basement corridor screaming for the duty sergeant to unlock the holding cell containing Paul Warboys.
As he struggled with the keys I looked through the small window in the door and I saw the arterial spurt that had sprayed the cream-coloured tiles.
Then as the door to the holding cell swung open there was the body of Paul Warboys, a heavy flow of blood pulsing from the hole he had punched in his jugular and, still in his lifeless fist, the pen he had used to gouge, tear and finally open up the veins of his neck.
35
Chinatown is underground.
The world flocks to the restaurants, medical centres and massage parlours of Gerrard Street, Lisle Street and Shaftesbury Avenue, but there is another Chinatown below the city streets, in basements and cellars down a narrow flight of stairs, and it has existed since the city’s first Chinatown, Limehouse in the East End docks, was obliterated by the Luftwaffe.
It was down one of these unmarked flights of stairs, halfway down Gerrard Street, that I found Keith Li.
He was playing Mahjong in a low-ceilinged basement so huge that it must have stretched from Gerrard Street to Leicester Square. There were dozens of small square tables, each with four players, most of them elderly, every one of them Chinese, and the sound of their bone Mahjong tiles being banged together blurred into one unbroken cacophonous note.
Keith was playing with two old ladies and a man, none of them below eighty, yet they picked up and discarded tiles at breakneck speed, attempting to get three of a kind, four of a kind and running straight, but with a set of tiles that were three times the size of a pack of cards, depicting dragons, the four winds, bamboo, circles and a bewildering array of Chinese characters.
When the game ended and the tiles were face down and being shuffled – in Mahjong they call it washing – Keith stood up and looked at me for the first time.
‘Do you understand this game?’ he asked me.
‘I tried to once,’ I said. ‘But I’m not meant to understand it, am I?’
He said something to his companions in Cantonese. Then I followed him to a small office in the corner of the basement, a tiny glass box where we could see all those grey, white and bald heads bent over their Mahjong tiles, although the noise was not quite so deafening.
There was a portable gas stove in the corner of his office, suitable for
a camping trip, and Keith heated water in an aluminium pan and spooned some leaves into a cracked brown teapot. He offered me a small cup but I shook my head.
He settled behind his desk with a cup of boiling tea.
I remained standing.
‘You have not come to arrest me,’ he said. ‘Because you would not have come alone. And yet you have not come to thank me because you will not sit and drink tea with me.’
‘Who was she?’ I said. ‘The woman you came for in the Hopewell Centre?’
‘Her name is Li Jin Jin,’ he said.
‘Li,’ I said. ‘The same family name as you.’
He shrugged.
‘The same family name as ninety-three million Chinese. Li is the second most common surname in China. Many people are called Li. We are two a penny.’
I saw the glint of relish in his eye at his use of the phrase. Two a penny.
‘So I’m meant to believe that it’s a coincidence that you have the same family name as the woman you came for?’
The woman you killed for, I thought.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Jin Jin is the daughter of my brother. She is nineteen years old. A student in Wanchai, an area on Hong Kong island. There are many bad people there,’ said the head of the Wo Shing Wo. ‘And she met a man who told her that he could help her find work in London. We say – heiyu. A snakehead. You are familiar with that expression?’
He still sounded like the man I had met on that first day, in thrall to a version of the English language that he had heard on the BBC World Service.
‘A snakehead is a Chinese people smuggler,’ I said.
He gazed out through the glass wall, as if anxious to return to his Mahjong. It seemed to be a game without end. The washing of those bone tiles by all four players. The thundering clack as the tiles were matched and discarded to the cries of Chinatown’s most senior citizens. And then again the washing of the tiles, face down, all of it done in a hurry.
‘The Chinese invented many things,’ he said. ‘Do you know what we call the Four Great Inventions of Ancient China?’
‘Gunpowder, paper, printing and the compass,’ I said.