Ronnie Clavin was a grafter not a villain, but it was well known in the area that he’d been ‘a bit of a boy’ and had ‘run with the hounds’ in his younger days. He had earned the respect of South London’s thriving criminal fraternity by keeping his mouth shut and never talking about other people’s business. Not while they were still alive, at least. So there were always faces hovering about and favours to be done. It was a perfect place for the Harry Tyler identity to be forged and for Harry’s own handsome face to be noted.
Over the weeks leading up to his first encounter with the Nelsons, Harry learned plenty about the scrap business, the yellows (brass) and reds (coppers). He also learned that Ronnie had a major source of income outside of metal dealing – he bought lorry-loads of commodities, but only on the ‘strict understanding’ – large wink – that none of the goods were stolen. ‘They have to be seconds or bankrupt stock, son,’ he told Harry. ‘That’s the company line – and that’s what you’ve gotta tell the Filth if they ever catch you unloading any cases of knocked-off onto a pallet truck, know what I mean?’
Harry found himself doing plenty of unloading too, as Ronnie had put his back out lifting fridges, or so he had said. Banjo Vic, the barman at the Conservative Club in nearby Charlton Church Lane, thought otherwise. ‘It’s the way Ron plays golf that caused that, H,’ Vic confided. ‘He always stands too close to the ball. After he’s hit it …’
Fridays seemed to be the day for any other business at Valley Metals. That was when Ronnie would retreat into the shelter of the office as a Transit van full of designer dresses or Italian suits backed into the yard. Ronnie never said what Harry should do when the bent gear arrived, but Harry knew enough to make himself busy elsewhere. Conversely, when the local CID turned up, as they did on a regular basis, Harry would scuttle off to the office while Ronnie held court in the yard. DS Gunther and DC Muldoon popped by once a month, ‘just to make sure Ronnie was well’. Clavin always seemed delighted to see them, although he must have lost a lot of bets on the football results to the two detectives because he always seemed to be handing them ‘beer tokens’ for the weekend, generally in £20 denominations. After the second time they visited, Ronnie muttered, ‘It don’t hurt to have friends in low places,’ but Harry didn’t respond. His see-no-evil approach paid dividends because five weeks into their working relationship Ronnie was referencing Harry to all and sundry as ‘the kid who works for me’ who was ‘all right’, who ‘minds his own’. But then why should he be suspicious? Harry had come from a trusted source and Ronnie’s yard was never going to be the target of infiltration. He was small fry. A useful idiot.
Ronnie never asked Harry too many questions about himself. He knew he was from the other side of the water, he was West Ham and therefore ‘a wrong ’un’ and that seemed to be enough. He had taken a shine to Harry as soon as he’d met him. OK, he’d slapped him down verbally a couple of times early on in their relationship, just to let him know who was guv’nor, but he liked his cocky boyish style.
It took Harry about two weeks to get the full measure of Ronnie Clavin. He was a man of fixed daily habits. He liked his bet at dinner time, £5 a day – although he had put £50, ‘a bull’s-eye, H,’ on Lloyd Honeyghan to win the world welterweight title later that year. And aside from the odd Mickey Spillane book, he read only the sports pages of the Sun. Every other Saturday Ronnie would watch Charlton; every Friday night without fail he would have a shave, put on a collar and tie and play bingo at the Charlton Conservative Club with his wife Marlene – her real name was Marigold but everyone called her Marlene because she dressed, spoke and flirted exactly like Boycey’s wife on Only Fools and Horses. They had one son, Stevie, who was in the Merchant Navy. Marlene was 44, still very sexy with eyes as bright as morning dew – and Harry would have banged it rotten if he hadn’t thought it would have mucked up his important work experience. Besides, he liked Ronnie – as much as he ever liked anyone. There was a hard cheerfulness about the man. He looked on life’s bright side, looked for possibilities in every setback and cracked gags morning, noon and night. Most men dream of getting rich and buying themselves an Aston Martin, a Lear jet and a country pile. Ronnie, who each week believed with religious certainty that he would win the pools, vowed he would splash out his fortune on a cattle farm. He pictured himself dressed like the Marlboro man, sitting on his picket fence in Montana blowing smoke rings at the sun. At heart, he was still a kid. Whenever a new customer came calling, Ronnie would get them to stand on the scales to see how much they weighed, surreptitiously slipping a steel-toecapped boot on it behind their backs so they would believe they were porking out. The only time Harry ever saw Ronnie lose his temper was when a Nigerian driver reversed a van full of knocked-off Head sports bags right over Mandy the cat. The air was blue with racial abuse – Harry had to stop his boss from killing the poor sod. Then, when the driver had gone, Ronnie sat at his office desk, held his head in his hands and sobbed like a child.
It didn’t take Harry long to get to the bottom of the incident with the Nelsons. Six days before, Ronnie had been approached by a well-known lorry hijacker from Deptford called Mickey Riordan. He had a trailer-load of Wilkinson Sword razor blades that he had stolen from a lorry park in Deptford. Ronnie had middled the parcel and attempted to sell it on to the major firm north of the river, the Nelsons. The problem was that Buck Nelson had already bought the parcel once and laid it down in SE8 for safe-keeping, only for some worthless slag with an obvious death wish to come along and thieve it from him.
Hence the visit to Madison Gardens.
Ronnie had no option but to meet up with Buck the following Monday at the George in Islington, where the errors of his ways were forcefully spelled out to him followed by a simple proposition: name the toerag who had hoisted their razor blades or be seriously hurt. Ronnie knew only too well that if he had stuck Riordan’s name up he would have had a worse fucking hiding for being a no-good grass. So he kept shtum and took a beating that left him with six broken ribs, a dislocated shoulder and a broken leg with a matching ankle that had swollen up to the size of half a cricket ball. When Nicky Nelson had finished with him, his brothers David and Georgie put Ron in a minicab and had him dropped off at the casualty department of Greenwich & District Hospital, which was considerate of them. He never declared who had lifted the parcel, but the lorry-load was handed back to its wrongful owners and all parties respected Ronnie for taking it like a man. On balance, he felt good about the deal. Until he heard a few months later that the Nelsons had known who the tea leaf was before they even arrived at Valley Metals, and that Mickey Riordan’s body had washed up on the Kent coast down by Whitstable a fortnight after Ronnie had been admitted to hospital.
September 5, 1986. Harry was sitting by Ronnie’s hospital bedside eating his grapes. Clavin seemed to have aged ten years. He looked weary. His face seemed heavier. Saggy.
Harry tried asking what had occurred in Islington, but Ronnie just grunted, ‘You don’t fuck with Buck,’ and changed the subject. Ronnie was plastered up but in good spirits. ‘This ain’t a bad old place,’ he observed as a redheaded nurse leaned across him to straighten his pillow.
Harry took in her full figure, slim waiste and long legs. Her heavy breasts pressed against the constraints of her uniform. ‘Will he live, nurse?’ he asked.
‘I think rigor mortis is setting in,’ moaned Ronnie.
‘Any chance of a blanket bath?’ Harry went on. ‘Not for him, for me. I’m free any time you get off work.’
‘Now you stop that, it’s so … Seventies,’ the nurse snapped in a County Antrim accent. But Harry noticed she was blushing.
‘Only pulling your leg,’ he said. ‘Bernadette, was it?’
‘No it was not, nor was it Colleen. I’m a Lucy but I’m only telling you that to stop you working through the whole book of Christian names for Ulster women.’
‘No surrender, would that be?’
‘You’d better believe it.’ She walked off to t
he next bed, but threw Harry a sly glance, which he caught. He smiled back and made her blush again.
When the nurse was out of sight, Harry grabbed hold of Ronnie’s medical notes and made a great show of studying them, shaking his head and tutting.
‘What do they say?’
‘Put it this way, mate, I wouldn’t bother buying any Christmas presents.’
‘Spanner.’
‘No, seriously, you’re going to be fine but if they leave you to go the distance there might be complications with the baby.’
‘Better put us down for a Caesarian then.’
‘What’s the score with Potman and Noodles, Ron?’
‘How d’you mean?’
‘It ain’t everyone who wanders round packing a .45, even in South London.’
‘Funny enough I thought they’d be here by now. I got a message they was coming up today. Here, do you think I could light up in here?’
‘Better not, mate.’
Ronnie belched and nodded.
‘They’re in the scrap, obviously, but they’re proper ’eavy. They’ve got a yard over West with a car shredder that could turn a Sherman tank into a pile of iron filings in five minutes flat. Just the place to lose a body, know what I mean? If you’re in the hurting game and you’ve got a stiff to get shot of, you just call up the Potman and say the magic words “Pizza to go” and that’s it as good as done. Goodnight, Vienna.’
‘How much?’
‘Couldn’t tell ya.’
Harry stroked his chin.
‘Brings new meaning to “pizza toppings”, don’t it?’
‘Yeah. Ha, ha. You wicked bastard.’
‘And then you’re proper garlic bread …’
‘Here, speak of the devil …’
Heavy footsteps made Harry turn. It was Potman, with the smaller Noodles, a sourpuss in army surplus, in tow.
‘Well you’re still alive, then,’ the big Angel observed after hands had been shaken and hellos exchanged.
‘Barely, son, barely.’
‘Nice hospital,’ said the frowning Noodles.
‘Well, on the surface,’ Ronnie moaned. ‘But they keep running out of bog paper. When it happened the other day I used the khazi on the floor below, but it got a bit silly with me on sticks, so I calls over this staff nurse – a right sour-faced old trout – and I says, “’Scuse me, love, there ain’t been no toilet paper in the bog since Tuesday.” She looks down her nose at me and says, “Haven’t you got a tongue in your head?” “Yes,” I says. “But I ain’t got a neck like a giraffe.”’
Potman roared. ‘You must be feeling better, son,’ he said.
‘It’s the people here that cheer me up,’ Ronnie replied. ‘See that fat gut-bucket over there, with a neck like a packet of hot-dog sausages?’ He indicated a thirty-stone man in his fifties. ‘Bottomless Pete we call him, ’cos he never stops eating. Well, yesterday he comes over and tells me he thinks he’s got hand grenades.’
‘Eh?’ said Harry.
‘AIDS, boy, do keep up.’
‘I thought that made you lose weight,’ smirked Potman. ‘He’s fatter than I am.’
‘Maybe he ain’t had it long,’ said Harry. ‘Is he a mate of yours, Ron?’
‘Is he fuck, miserable bleeder. He used to do a bit of business in the yard. Don’t let him see us looking over at him and laughing or all hell will go off. He ain’t the sort of bloke you can have a laugh with. He thinks badinage is an Elastoplast, know what I mean?’
Ronnie shook his head. ‘I’ll never forget, one time he was bending me ear about how he needed to sort himself out a social life, so I put him on to this fella who gets him into a social club down in Dartford near where he lives. Anyway, they have this weekend away at some holiday camp up at Camber Sands or somewhere, you know, a comedy weekend for husbands and wives, no kids. But Bottomless leaves his missus at home and afterward he’s telling me how he’s having a pint at the bar on his Jack ’cos no fucker is talking to him and as he’s gone for a Jimmy the comedian on stage starts coating him off, does a load of fat jokes at his expense, y’know? “Keep clear of the beach, mate, or Greenpeace will cordon you off. Look at the size of him, he’s so fat he bumps into people when he’s sitting down. When he goes to a restaurant he doesn’t get a menu, he gets an estimate.” All the old fanny. So Bottomless stops in his tracks, looks at the comedian and says, “You taking the piss out of me?” and the comedian comes back with, “Fuck me, well spotted. When your IQ hits fifty make sure you sell.” The audience is in stitches, so the comic keeps going. “Only joking, mate,” he says. “I know you’ve got an open mind – I can feel the draft from here.” The audience is creasing up. Well, Bottomless walks up on stage, picks the fella up over his head, walks over to a window and hurls him out. I asked him if it was open and he said, “Does it matter, Ron?” He kills me! So then he’s gone for his slash and when he gets back all the camp security boys are there, with a deputation from the committee. Long and short of it, they tell him he’s got to go home. They follow him to his chalet, he gets packed and they point him out of the gates towards the nearest railway station. And here’s what he says to me:“You know what, Ronnie? They never even offered me a lift to the station. What kind of social club is that?”’
Ronnie’s appreciative audience roared. ‘He asked me once if he could borrow my new Merc. He had this seventeen-year-old bit of stray on the firm and wanted to give it Billy Big Potatoes. So he’s taken it out, wined it and dined it – I had to tell him what to order. Next day, he’s brought the motor back looking all forlorn. Topped up he’s ended up in the fields at the top of her road, in the back seat of my motor, and he’s thought, “I’ve gotta sniff it first,” so he gets down there and she had the littlest panties he’d ever chewed on. He only went and swallowed ’em! He had constipation for three days, and when he give her one he said her eyes went like Nookie Bear!’
Potman exploded.
‘He must have gone on top then,’ observed Noodles.
‘So how come he thinks he’s got AIDS?’ asked Harry.
‘He’s getting funny old dizzy spells and all the fellas in his local are winding him up saying it’s the first sign. ’Cos they know he’s covered in tattoos – he’s got a spider on his bell-end with a cobweb over his nuts, and on his arse he’s got a bulldog on each cheek with a snake disappearing down the old brass eye. So now they’re asking questions about how clean is the tattooist, is it dirty needles? Bottomless insists the fella is pukka and all the needles are sterilised. So they say if it ain’t a dirty needle it must be poofery, he’s obviously been lifting the shirt, and he gets the right hump about that. But they keep on and on about it until finally he says, “Hang on, I give the old lady one up the back every now and then, does that count?”’
Harry and Potman were crying with laughter, even Noodles was doubled up. Ronnie slumped back in his bed, beaming.
As the chuckles ebbed away, he looked at the Hell’s Angels anxiously.
‘Thanks for helping us the other day, lads. Did you get any repercussions?’
‘Nah,’ said Potman. ‘They didn’t know who we are. I don’t think Southall registers on the old North London radar.’
‘You never did tell me what your problem was.’
‘We are being burglarised,’ said Noodles, indignantly. ‘Us!’
‘We noticed a month ago that all the nice mag wheels from the scrap motors were going missing,’ said Potman. ‘Some cunt was having us over.’
‘So we had CCTV camera installised and started recording everything on a Betamax video in the hut,’ Noodles went on.
‘Days passed and nothing on film,’ said Potman.
‘Nix.’
‘So we decided we needed to hole up in the yard ourselves overnight, and we wanted a few more bodies as back-up, ’cos as you know it’s a big yard, not like your little toy-town hovel.’
‘Thanks, lads,’ said Ronnie sarcastically. ‘But surely you’ve got back-up over your way?’
‘Yeah,’ said Potman. ‘But we can’t turn to someone like the Marley brothers, ’cos odds-on they’re the stinking arse-wipes with the sticky fingers.’
‘The Marleys, I know it’s the Marleys,’ Noodles said grimly. ‘Of all the impertinosity.’
‘Well,’ said Ron. ‘I’d like to help you fellas, but as you can see I’m a little tied up.’
He paused. ‘Harry, on the other hand, could be just the job. Take the boy! I insist! He’s got fuck all else to do, and he won’t wanna work at Valley Metals with my brother Alf running the place while I’m in here. Miserable as a rat in a tar barrel, that bastard is.’
Potman looked at Harry. ‘What do you say, son?’
‘Why the fuck not?’
SCRAPHEAP CHALLENGE
September, 1986. Potman was showing Harry Tyler around the scrapyard he ran with Noodles near Southall in Middlesex. It was similar to Valley Metals but on a much larger scale. There were mountains of scrap in all directions, old fridges, clapped-out washing machines and row after row of cars, yesterday’s dream chariots now a wretched detritus of road crashes and abandoned vehicles. There were twisted wrecks and rusting hulks with dented bonnets and shattered windscreens as far as Harry could see in every direction.
‘See what I mean?’ said Potman. ‘The place is too big for two people to cover.’
It had rained overnight but the sun was shining now, leaving little puddles of gasoline rainbows, littered with discarded dog-ends.
Harry looked up at the sun.
‘Quite an Indian summer,’ he said.
Potman grunted. ‘Well, there’s enough of ’em round here.’
The big man was dwarfed by two leaning towers of car tyres as bald as Duncan Goodhew.
Two Faced (Harry Tyler Book 2) Page 3