by Robson, Roy
H’s anger was about to burst out of his chest when Ronnie appeared from his flat. He suppressed it, knowing that today, of all days, he had to keep it together.
‘Ready son?’ H said as Ronnie clambered in.
Ronnie said nothing, just exhaled massively and shook his head. No. Not ready. Not ready for this.
They drove down in near silence. Ronnie could not have looked so forlorn and lost, H thought, since Goose Green.
Poor fucker. He’s in bits. Don’t feel all that clever myself.
The miles rolled on - Ronnie mute, H in the kind of agitated state he couldn’t put a name to - until eighty or so of them had passed. The old house came into view. H pulled up next to the high Cotswold Stone wall. Ronnie, in the passenger seat, was staring ahead and gulping hard. H touched him on the shoulder; out they got. Through the gate and into the grounds, and there was the clan, and its hangers on, in full array.
‘Stay close H’, said Ronnie.
‘Count on it, son.’
Ronnie led the way in, moving slowly and nodding to people as he went. He stationed himself just outside the chapel, on the opposite side of the door to the rest. He did not look at them. But H did. He saw a fair bit of private muttering as they entered and plenty of side-of-the-mouth stuff going on among the cliques. H found himself back in the zone, itching and twitching.
What is it with these people?
They were summoned inside; Tara and Jemima were already there.
Sir Basil - looking haggard, hunched and a hundred years old, and dressed, indeed, in some sort of Edwardian funeral getup - delivered the eulogy. He extolled his daughters’ virtues, their beauty, their achievements, and tried to say something about the family’s sense of loss. He was having a hard time bearing up, an impossible time, and H felt a pang of sympathy for him. The sight of the two coffins, side by side at the front of the chapel, was overwhelming everybody. This was too much to take in.
Ronnie sat still throughout, staring at the ground, sobbing quietly. H, from time to time, put his arm around Ronnie’s silently heaving shoulders, and had to bite down hard to prevent himself from losing it.
Outside, the gloom had deepened; the sky had moved from slate grey to near black. H and Ronnie could see it as they processed down the aisle, hard by Sir Basil and Jemima’s husband Oliver (a gormless lump, as Ronnie had him, who was ‘something in the city’). Only nods were exchanged. Along with these two, they would be last out.
People had arranged themselves around the garden in a semi-circle, waiting for the coffins to emerge. The wind howled and the sky threatened rain. H was struck by the extent to which Ronnie was keeping his distance from Tara’s family. He was polite to condolence-bearers when they approached him, but made no effort to go beyond himself and engage other people. To Sir Basil he had not said a single word.
‘How’s it going Ron?’
‘I can’t have a lot more of this H. I want to do the off at the earliest available, alright?’
‘Yep, no argument from me on that score son. Ready when you are.’
The coffins came, and H saw Ronnie set his feet far apart and dig them in. To stop his legs from buckling. This, H understood, was to be an orgy of old-school, stiff upper lipped Englishness. No wailing or moaning or gnashing of teeth for these paragons of rectitude. H respected them for it. Better that way.
It was only as the coffins were loaded into the hearse that a few little moans and sobs could be heard. But Ronnie stood firm as they pulled away, and out of sight. Out of sight forever.
He exhaled. ‘Get me the fuck out of here, H.’
‘On our way son’, said H, taking him by the arm.
They moved towards the gate with as much speed as propriety would allow. They heard whispering and muttering behind them, but they did not look back.
29
It had been a boneshaker of a ride across Eastern Europe, through Germany and the Netherlands, followed by the small fishing boat to an inlet on the Suffolk coast, and thereafter the ride south-westward.
The two battered transit vans pulled up to their clandestine location, a private garage just off of Camberwell Green, in the early hours of the morning. If anyone had been around to see its fatal cargo they would have marvelled at how much you can fit into a couple of vans. If the twenty silent men of serious intent were not enough, the heavy crates that followed them seemed to defy the physics of available space.
One by one Dragusha greeted the new arrivals with a hug, making sure he paid individual attention to every one of them, looking each of them in the eye. His fierce eyes were discernible in the half light of the single faint bulb that illuminated the garage, and his stare held each of them in turn, like mice frozen under the fierce gaze of a marauding cat. He knew most of the men, and trusted them. But the bosses had sent some new recruits. In the battle to come he needed to know the men he stood with would hold firm under fire and assure them, without words, that the consequences of letting him down were worse than anything the Russians could serve them up with. The boxes were cracked open to reveal an arsenal of automatic rifles, handguns and some hand grenades thrown in for good measure. Dragusha rallied the troops and dished out the weaponry.
‘Welcome to London. You travel many miles, and must be tired. I understand. But we have problems that must be dealt with quickly. Take rest but soon we move. Take strength and courage from knowing we will soon avenge our brothers.’
He rolled out a blown up map of the location the small army had come to obliterate - a certain private members club in Peter Street - and went through the plan, if a plan it could be called. Paraphrased, in its essentials it was pretty much ‘rock up, kick the doors in and annihilate everything that moves.’
‘Make no mistake. No one leaves club alive.’
When it comes to putting your life on the line most men, if given a choice, will sooner run for cover than face a bullet. But Dragusha was a rare creature - he was excited by danger and the thought of the ensuing battle filled him with rampant expectation. His will to succeed, to persevere in the face of the odds stacked against him would not be cowed by a couple of severed heads thrown into a shithole of a caravan site on the wrong side of London.
The men ate sandwiches and sipped on water. One of Dragusha’s rules was no alcohol before a slaughter – it took the edge off too much and led to a sloppy and inefficient kind of courage. He was happy for his men to drink, but rakia and vodka were for after the battle. Celebrate the victory and lament the dead. And dead there would be - no question about that.
They clambered back into the vans. Dragusha rode shotgun in the lead vehicle. As they pulled out into the back streets of south east London an eerie silence saturated the world. It was the time of night by which most people had locked themselves into the relative safety of their homes, the time of night when the city is transformed into a different place, where different characters populate the streets.
This was a desperate area - one half of the populace were unemployed and the other half were under-employed, scraping a living below the radar. Dull concrete flanked them on both sides; boarded windows and vandalised doors offered an insight into a world where burglary and petty crime were a standard part of everyday existence.
The convoy emerged into Camberwell New Road and then left towards the Elephant and Castle. A group of foxes that had migrated deep into the heart of the city criss-crossed the deserted roads with impunity, feeding on the scraps that even the tenants of the decimated concrete jungles had seen fit to discard.
The van snaked its way past Camberwell and into the Walworth Road. Dragusha looked on with indifference at two lost souls huddled by a shop window - frozen, vanished, undead - and listened with indifference as a far off scream broke the silence. He had seen and heard much worse in his time, back in the old country. A rare walker crossed in front of them accompanied by three Pitbull Terriers, the attack dog of choice of the denizens of this shattered dump - best not to go out without your bodyguards this time of
night.
The convoy rolled on, right at the Elephant roundabout and then left towards Westminster. Halfway there. You could cut the tension inside the vans with a knife. The ever-present curls of cigarette smoke hung thick and impenetrable, making the atmosphere as claustrophobic as a coffin.
Dragusha broke the silence.
‘London is shithole, yeah? But shithole with money.’
The men laughed. The tension eased a little.
Even after six months in the city he could barely differentiate one south east London concrete housing estate from another. But as they approached Westminster Bridge the city started to come to life. This was 24 hour London, the London the tourist board sold to the globe, the London of iconic landmarks seen on websites and picture postcards everywhere. Landmarks that were known all over the world passed by them, half-noticed by the rows of sombre men sat in the rear of the vans. Westminster Bridge, The Houses of Parliament, Trafalgar Square, that monument to a deadly battle several lifetimes ago, remembered now just as an innocent fable, distant and unreal. But the battle about to erupt on London’s streets would be in the present, in the now, and, in its own way, as bloody and as deadly as anything that happened in a far off time on a far off sea.
The vans pulled up outside their destination, in a no parking zone.
‘Put Balaclavas on’, ordered Dragusha, ‘cameras everywhere here.’
Pete Abbot, driver of one of the famous London black taxis that swarmed around this part of London 24 hours a day, found himself trapped behind the vans and growled with impatience.
‘Oi, what you doing, you can’t park there…sort yourselves out.’
But Pete looked on in transfixed disbelief as twenty men armed with automatic rifles calmly exited the vans. He had been working the streets of London for twenty years. But this was a first, an absolute stonker of a first. Being a clever man he quickly realised that the gentlemen with the guns were not very concerned about parking illegally and, if he kept his trap shut from this moment on they might hopefully not be too concerned about him mouthing off his thoughts on the quality of their parking choices.
‘Fuck me’, he said as he rolled up his window, ‘these boys ain’t here to party.’
30
The music was too loud for H, and too squawky, so they got a table at the back of the room. They’d been coming to Ronnie Scott’s for years now, for their annual reunion. Since their paths had diverged - Ronnie’s into the aristocracy and the world of high, global finance, H’s deeper into the same tough streets they’d come up on - they always made a point of meeting here at least once a year, partly to catch up, partly to relive their youth.
The room was hot, crowded and smelled of wine, perfume and Italian food. The music pulsed and clattered. Ronnie liked his jazz, had done since he was a kid and used to come here, amongst other hotspots, to hear the funked-up jazz/disco stuff they all loved ‘back in the day’ - a phrase he did not use in H’s company. H himself was not so keen on the improvised, difficult stuff, preferring to hear a crooner working with the standards.
Like his father before him, and as he still hoped his own son might one day become, H was a Sinatra man. Through and through. End of.
Since the funeral they’d made their way, through Soho’s rainswept streets, around the old watering holes. Or those of them that had not yet been turned into high-end apartments or frothy-coffee outlets. Both of them were, by now, the worse for wear. Both were hurting, and hurting bad.
They’d boozed and talked long and hard, and were now almost talked out. How much grief, pain, anger, and confusion can a man get through in one sitting? They settled into their chairs and Ronnie ordered a bottle of wine that would have put a good-sized dent in H’s weekly wages. H tried to move the conversation on a bit, to get on a more normal footing, and assailed Ronnie with some of his professional woes.
‘I’ll wring the soppy little cunt’s neck one of these days. He ain’t half the copper I am, Ron. Not a quarter. But he’s moving upwards like a rat up a drainpipe. Ten minutes out of university and he’s already at my level. He’s got plenty of qualifications, and he can Powerpoint you to death, but he couldn’t fight his way of a paper fucking bag. That’s what they’re all like now…it’s a nightmare. All of a sudden, I’m the dinosaur. They don’t want people like us no more Ron.’
‘Stop feeling sorry for yourself H, you are a stroppy old bastard. In ain’t 1985 any more mate. You’ve got to try and move with the times a bit.’
‘Move with the times? Move with the fucking times?’
H was gearing up for another rant. Ronnie slowed him down.
‘Anyway, all I care about is the investigation. Why is this Miller-Marchant wanker in charge of it? I understand why they haven’t put you on it, but is he really the best man for the job?’
‘Well’, said H, ‘he’s what there is now. If it wasn’t him it’d be someone like him. But he is out of his depth; Lord Snooty and his pals are running rings round him. I don’t know how you’ve put up with that shower of shit all these years. Something’s not right with that lot mate, I’m telling you. Old Shitbreath’s got some wrong ‘uns round him. They’re up to something.’
‘You say that, H, but that’s just what they’re like. I think…’
H interrupted him.
‘Listen, Ron, it’s not just that I’m too close to the case, it’s that…I went off my head in the park the other day. When I saw Tara, I…’
‘I know H - I know.’
‘My guvnor thinks I’m mentally unstable. She’s got me running round after all these fucking gangsters…but she thinks I’m going off my head.’
‘You’ve been off your fucking head for years, mate’, said Ronnie, kicking back in his chair, smiling broadly and raising his glass. ‘Here’s to you, H.’
H was choked. He felt tears welling up in his eyes. He was losing control of his emotions again.
‘I’ll get them, Ron. I swear to God I’ll get them. Whoever did that to Tara is going to wish they’d never been fucking born. I promise you that.’
The band was between sets now, they noticed, and the place was relatively quiet. Just the hubbub of conversation and clinking glasses.
And then all hell broke loose. Burst after burst of fire from automatic weapons. They both knew the sound well, and for a second the volume and intensity of it took them back to that day in 1982.
‘Fuck me!’ said Ronnie.
Most of the other patrons were now beneath their tables, hunkering down instinctively. But H was concentrating.
‘Sounds like it’s coming from Wardour Street, somewhere there.’
A two minute run from where they were sitting, in Frith Street.
‘What the fuck’s going on, H?’
‘I’ve got a fair idea mate. Stay here…I mean it Ron. Stay here.’
H hit Frith Street like a man possessed and barrelled, along the glistening pavement, towards Wardour Street.
I’ve had just about enough of these cunts.
31
H was gasping for air as he trundled into Peter Street. The run from Ronnie Scott’s had winded him severely; he was in worse shape than he’d realised. And clearly also becoming more stupid - what was he doing running at full tilt towards bad men equipped like a militia, by the sound of it, without so much as a water pistol in his hand?
What the fuck am I doing?
Such were his thoughts as he staggered towards what looked, as far as he could tell by the fleeing, screaming crowd, like the site of the action. But the madness was only just beginning.
The crowd thinned suddenly and melted away, and in a chaos of driving rain and wailing alarms H made out a gang of heavily armed men piling into two vans. One man was doing all the barking and pointing, and H focused in on him. He recognised the face beneath the balaclava, by the eyes; it had been all over the surveillance footage and photos of The Island in Bermondsey since the shoot-up and head tossing. Basim Dragusha. Amisha and a few of the others who’d bee
n analysing the surveillance data had him down as the No. 1 man on the firm. He certainly looked like a handful now, calling the shots and getting his men the hell out of there. He jumped into the front of the lead van, turned and met H’s eye as it pulled away. H would remember the look in those eyes long after; it was mocking, malicious, savage...and happy. Exultantly happy.
Gotcha, you bastard. I’m going to bring your world down around your ears.
H stood, unsteady on his feet, and caught his breath. Before long the initial joy of putting a name to a face gave way to reflection, as he calmed himself. Evil bastards had glared at him before. But this one was special. This nutter was clearly capable of taking violent chaos to a whole new level, in London terms. This wasn’t old school gangsters with sawn-off shotguns having a pop at the odd bank - it was warfare, Yugoslavia-style warfare. Did he and his firm have what it took to stop it? Did they have the resources and the will, the fight, the balls? Would they have to call the army in?
An image flashed across his mind: Joey Jupiter, as exultant as Dragusha, stabbing gleefully with his two thumbs at the tiny keypad of a little plastic phone...
Backup arrived: a couple of squad cars and an armed response unit. Ambulance and fire engine sirens could be heard in the distance. The epicentre of the chaos proved to be exactly where H had expected it to be: the Russians’ night club. It was now a blown-out hole in the wall, reminding H of those old photos of wrecked buildings during the Blitz, and the bomb sites he grew up playing on, still there in the 1970s while he was learning the ropes in Bermondsey.
Broken glass and chunks of shattered masonry everywhere, alarms still wailing, smoke and dust filling the air and...the smell. The smell of blood, an abattoir’s worth of blood, and burning flesh.
He had been here before. He turned on his feet and, without consulting anyone, headed towards the club. His senses were working overtime, his whole body was zinging. But alongside this was a sense of dread, which sharpened as he got closer. He gulped hard and took a breath. Phrases he’d picked up as a boy, and hadn’t used in years, were coming back to him: