“I don’t know whatcha talking about.”
“Well, you might want to see if Brian does.”
He hung up on the man and looked at Jess, who gave a nod of approval. “That should get attention.”
“Yep. So we’d better move this thing somewhere else. Fancy a joy ride?”
“Through the streets of Brixton? What more could any girl want from life?”
“Absolutely. Let’s go.”
Dan gunned the engine, and it smoothly growled into life with tons of power but controlled and slick to steer. He turned in the road, and pulled out onto Cold Harbour Lane, joining the swift impatient stream of bright white headlights heading back to Brixton. Before they reached the centre, Eddie’s phone started playing a rock and roll guitar theme, something old Dan couldn’t quite recognise.
“Get that, will you?” said Dan, his eyes on the road. Jess leaned back and took the phone from the sleeping man’s pocket. She slid the answer button, and put the phone on loudspeaker. Dan nodded to confirm he would take the call.
“Yes?”
“Eddie? Where are ya?”
“I’m in the back of my car, tied up and unconscious. Why? Where are you?”
“Who is this?”
“Brian, you know who this is.”
“Dan Bradley?”
“Ker-ching!”
“You really should have stayed in the ring, Bradley. You were a bad boxer, but it would have hurt less than what’s going to happen to you now.”
“You’re an adoring fan, I know. I’ll give you my autograph when we catch up, get it? Autograph. Just tell me, Brian. You have killed Marka, haven’t you?”
“Do you think I’m an idiot? This could be tapped.”
“Come on, I need some good news. Those bastards beat me within an inch of my life, cut my finger off, and now gypsy gangsters have my girlfriend. It’s been a bad day. In fact, it’s been a pretty bad year.”
“I’ve got tears in my eyes, Bradley. You’ve made me sad.”
“So, make me happy. Then I’ll make you happy.”
“The way you can make me happy is by giving me the car back and flushing yourself down a toilet.”
“Charm school again, Brian. It paid off. Really it did. This car is yours, right? It’s worth too much to be one of your underlings’ cars. You wouldn’t let them drive something better than you, would you? And I think this could be the very car I saw you pick up Remy in, at Leathermarket about ten days ago. All a part of your little scam to use me and Eva to get within shooting distance of Marka.”
“Nice theory. And all bullshit.”
“I’m not a copper - this call isn’t bugged. We are not on air, Gillespie. It’s just you and me and my little friend sleeping Eddie here. So, why don’t you give me some good news, and then we can do a swapsie. I can have Eva back and you can get your pimped-up tractor back.”
“Are you simple? I don’t want the car. Do you think I’m that hard up for a motor? Keep it.”
“Bullshit, Gillespie. You paid a lot of money for this ride. There’s some special stuff in here. This car is bespoke. A bit out of Eddie’s league, I think. Are you sure I can keep it? Can I have that in writing?”
“Keep it, Bradley. I’ll get it back when I take your skin.”
“My skin? That’s a new one. Are you trying to outdo Victor Marka?”
“Do me a favour - drive it into a river. Take Eddie with you.”
“Victor Marka would have tracked me down with dogs and snipers to get his car back. He would have had me publicly flogged then hanged drawn and quartered. Are you telling me you want to let this go?”
“Don’t give me ideas, Bradley.”
“You really don’t mind a little hustler like me stealing one of your best cars from right under your nose and getting away with it. Wow. I should tell all my friends, free Range Rovers at Fenbrook Manor.”
“You’re going to get badly hurt.”
“You’re flirting, Brian. How is Eva?”
“She’s in once piece. For now.”
Dan turned to Jess, and shared a silent cheer. His nemesis was dead and Eva was alive. He was free of a curse. But not altogether free - not yet.
“I want you to let Eva go. Please. Don’t do anything silly. She knows too many people to go missing without some comeback on you.”
“What goes on in Roe Park, stays in Roe Park.”
“Gillespie. Don’t do this.”
“Bradley - I will do whatever I want. Do you hear me?”
Impasse. He couldn’t venture much further than this without risking irking Gillespie so much that he acted it out on Eva. It was too soon. He thought hard and fast. Gillespie loved cars – he should have desperately wanted his car back, and Bradley had gambled everything on it. He needed something else fast.
“One more thing, Gillespie. I know something you need to know about your new partner.”
“What?”
“The man called Damon. In Brixton.”
“Do tell.”
“And you really need to know this.”
He waited a beat for it to sink in.
“You’re taking Marka’s territory. But it won’t be easy, not with what Damon’s got planned.”
“You’re full of shit.”
“Wait until you hear about it.”
“Well?”
“As soon as Eva is back with me. You let me have her back, and I will give you the Range Rover, Eddie Kennedy and the info on Damon. What a deal, eh?”
There was another pause and a muffled conversation the other end.
“You’re blowing smoke, Bradley. You haven’t got a single bloody thing I’ll ever want or ever need.”
“Wrong! I wasn’t going to tell you this because I would have been just as glad to see you come unstuck … but Eva means more to me... Chalker’s got a surprise for you. But I won’t tell you another word until you cut Eva loose.”
Gillespie tutted and did some heavy breathing. Then he spoke.
“The Luxury Inn Hotel. King Street. Hammersmith. We’ll meet you there in two hours. And there better not be a scratch on that car, Bradley. And don’t get cold feet.”
“You saw me in the ring. I don’t get cold feet.”
“After all the hidings, I thought you might have learned when to give up before you got smashed again. I guess not.”
Gillespie hung up. It was going to be a very late night.
Two hours later.
They hadn’t done much more than locate the Luxury Inn, all fancy lit-up like a mini-skyscraper in the night. The lights did a good job of dressing the shabby concrete. Across the broad busy road there was a small coffee shop and some characterless bars. There was another quiet eatery nearby. By now, Dan had knocked out big Eddie all over again. Of Hammersmith, and the Luxury Inn, neither Jess nor Dan was impressed. The so-called Luxury Inn was the kind of place people retreated to after stag parties and stop-overs from the States or Asia to lay their head just for a necessary no-frills sleep. Dan couldn’t understand the reason for Gillespie’s choice at first, until he re-considered the roads. There were clear routes to and from the hotel, and past midnight it would be pretty easy to do a job and then zoom out of the city before the old bill could catch any of them. Yet another reason Dan had to be wary. If Gillespie planned for easy access and a quick getaway, the location made perfect sense. Which didn’t bode well for Eva’s transfer. Of course, Dan knew it was never going to be easy, but he intended to make it as hard as possible for Gillespie to do anything other than cooperate. With the spare 45 minutes they had, they drove around the hotel vicinity, trying their best to keep the Range Rover Autograph off the main drag by cutting across the area at various junctions. They drove past the Luxury Inn and found what Luxury Inns were all about. This one didn’t have much class: it was functional, almost austere with square windows and a wide concrete car park all around it – not a massive car park but big for London, with enough room for around fifteen cars. This was a long way from
Victor Marka. Marka would never have been seen dead near any hotel except the genuine luxury kind. But Gillespie wasn’t about show; he was about ruthless strategy - what was simple, what worked. Dan needed to know what was in the man’s mind in order to prevent it.
Behind the coffee shop opposite the hotel, there was a small road with an arched bridge at the far end. Ravenscourt Avenue. The size of the road made it a residential side street, so any gangsters looking for easy access and a quick getaway would go nowhere near it. Which made it perfect for stashing Eddie Kennedy and the car. Ravenscourt still looked busy enough to scare off prospective car thieves. It was too brightly lit for an easy steal. The roads here were narrower than in Brixton and there was more space in general, as if Brixton was asphyxiating while Hammersmith had all the concrete space they ever needed.
With the car hidden on the side street, they wouldn’t be able to take the car back easily. At the same time, it made any kind of escape just as hard. Once they had Eva, they would be vulnerable to recapture, so Dan needed a plan for that eventuality. He started processing his options as he looked around the vicinity. With twenty-five minutes to spare, they took refuge in another, murkier coffee shop further down King Street, still on the main road where the Luxury Inn was, but far enough away to be safe. While late night drunkards wobbled in and stared at the menu of falafels and bagels, Dan and Jess sat in a corner, drinking strong instant coffee from polystyrene cups. To everybody else, they would have looked like an odd misfit couple, a pair of over-tired drunks who should have gone home to bed, but because everybody else looked the same, they fitted in just fine. And the drunkenness of the other customers, their ears already pummelled by nightclub speakers, meant Dan and Jess could speak loudly without being heard.
“Maybe some of his men stayed in the Luxury Inn,” said Jess.
“Maybe they all stayed here. Compared to the caravans in Roe Park, that hotel is 5 star plus,” said Dan. “Even so, I wouldn’t bet on it. If they had, the place would be crawling with them already. Wherever they were holed up, they must be celebrating tonight. We represent the last small hurdle in a very good night for Gillespie. They’ve pulled off a massive coup.”
“I think some of them must have stayed here. Why else choose this place?”
“Yes, I think you’re probably right. They know the lie of the land. They know it well enough to pick it for a battle ground. Gillespie won’t have stayed here, but it could be any of the rest of them.”
“So we’re at a disadvantage once again.”
“Since when have we ever been able to call the shots in this gig? What’s the difference? It makes them arrogant, and right now they have everything they want apart from their super car, their man and this important new information about Chalker’s mob. They must be feeling cocksure of themselves. Which gives us the psychological edge.”
“You are always so glass half-full that I’m beginning to think you have psychological flaws.”
“You’ve worked with Eva for a while now. It shows. Yes. Optimism. There isn’t much of it around lately, but it helps with the necessity of staying alive. I’m happy with those kind of psychological flaws.”
“So how do you think this will happen?”
“The meeting? It’ll look neutral enough when we arrive, maybe a two on two situation, with Eva in their hands. It will look something like that. But it won’t actually be like that. There will be people hiding in the wings, waiting to pounce. They came up here for a military-style operation in dealing with Marka. My guess is that they have around six or eight men, maybe more, but they won’t waste all those resources on little-old us. Even so, if we see three in front of us, that’ll mean five could be hiding. It could be less, but let’s be conservative for a change. Let’s be glass half-empty.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“When it comes to calculating risks, Eva and I are on the same page. It’s just I like to live on just the right side of cynical.”
“And Eva?”
“Eva sees all the hard edges first and moves to dodge them before they hit. I just stand and take the hits and trade some punches back.”
Jess nodded. It was a pretty fair assessment.
“Okay. We’re outnumbered, and they know the lay of the land. So what’s the rabbit in your hat, Dan?”
“It all comes down to whether they’ll go for it. If they do, we’ll be home free.”
“Go for what?”
“The plan is still forming, my girl. You can’t hurry a genius at work.”
“You don’t have a plan, do you?”
“It’s all in the counter-attack, Jess. Keep the faith.”
In a grand Georgian blue and white hotel room just south of the Thames, a hotel that cost the same price per night as one month in the Luxury Inn Hammersmith, old Brian Gillespie was getting ready to leave. He’d hired an apartment suite, with a view that spread the city out like a map before them, a landscape including vivid greens of the lush parks of Greenwich and the distant green islands of Regents and St James further afield. Now at night, this spectacular view was invisible but for the lights which outlined the black parks. In daytime there were green spots everywhere in the vista, London’s greenery being much more common than many believed. The green spaces had been a great comfort to Eva as a young woman in the city, back when she and a younger Dan used them for weekend walks, picnics and jogging. Looking back, those times had actually been very few, but at least they happened. Those memories only came flickering by as she contemplated the next ordeal she had to endure. Those green spaces were now just black-spots in an ocean of orange, yellow, and blue spots bathing the city in light like a scientific map of electricity in the synapses of a brain.
Gillespie’s men had used the tie-backs from the hotel suite curtains to secure her wrists in front of her. With some effort she could have been free of the knots, but Gillespie’s boys would have been upon her before she was done. The hotel suite was big enough to include anterooms. Now the men prepared for departure, neatening their suits, loading guns into their pockets and checking themselves in the mirrors. Gillespie himself hadn’t bothered to do much preening. He had been on the phone for the last half an hour, making a string of calls to people back in Essex, doling out instructions, and making platitudes in reply to some appreciative comments of his recent success. News about Marka had travelled fast amongst his clan and his allies. Most of the calls seemed to be related to his triumph; Gillespie was moving his top men around like pieces on a chess board. For Gillespie to assume control of his conquered lands, he would have to pull up a few remaining roots. Eva heard the mention that the Marka murder was all over the news. Police were swarming over Surrey Quays. Eva knew the police’s work wasn’t over yet tonight. She didn’t rate her chances of survival very highly. And being in the hotel apartment downgraded her chances even further. When the tattooed man and his ginger chum had brought her in, they took her into Gillespie’s quarters. She had planned to violently resist any sexual advances from the old man, but it didn’t unfold like that. No. In some ways what was happening was worse. Eva sat with her hands tied as Gillespie continued to make his calls to sycophants and generals across his territory. The woman with the black hair and black eyes sat in the corner by the bedroom dressing table with a conqueror’s look in her eyes while she powdered her cheeks, applied her mascara and gazed at Eva sitting behind her in the glass. All the while she drank from a tumbler with a short measure of some amber liquid. Mad Maggie tormented and ravaged her with her eyes. Maggie had spoken just once inside an hour. Her husky voice was loaded with menace.
“I’m glad we got to see each other again, aren’t you?”
It was a question that sought no answer. It was a mocking threat. As the men got ready to move, the man called Terry came in to get her. He lifted her by taking her under her arm. Maggie spoke again.
“You’re not going to let her go.”
“No, Maggie. She’s coming back all right. We need her for bait is all.”
/> “You better keep your word.” Maggie stood, taller than Eva, and walked far too close into Eva’s space. Eva stopped breathing. The woman leaned in close, her hair touching Eva’s face, and Eva could smell the sickly sweet mix of whisky and Chanel on her skin. She pressed her cheek against Eva’s and whispered, loud enough for the guard to hear: “Later on, we’re going to have a little party. Just you and me.” Eva felt nothing but relief as two of the men hoisted her out of her chair and took her towards the front door. Two men walked ahead of her, and one behind. The tattooed man, the one called Terry, looked at her awkwardly as they removed her from Maggie’s presence. His eyes said he didn’t like Mad Maggie’s ways. But sympathy wouldn’t save her, not in the least. Dan and Jess could save her from Gillespie. And if not them, maybe her own desperate wits. Her smallest chance was coming, there was no way she could miss it. Whatever Maggie planned to do with her, Eva knew the end game wasn’t going to be pleasant.
Gillespie stood up and buttoned his jacket. “Terry - tell them we’re coming.”
The tattooed man nodded. The final journey had begun.
Fourteen
The anxiety began to rise up from her stomach, then hot and sharp into her chest and up into her throat. Already Eva was working out the weakest links among the men around her, spotting possible escape routes, even thinking where she might be able to find a weapon. It wasn’t good. They were too close and there were too many of them. And they were armed. The men escorting her nodded business-like goodbyes to reception, the receptionist paying Eva no attention at all. They made it into the outer lobby, with its pale white and pink marble floor, concierge in gold and green uniform, before Eva heard the female voice call after them.
Crossing the Line Page 17