The John Milton Series Box Set 4

by Mark Dawson

  “All good?” the driver asked him.

  “All good.”

  They skirted the Memorial Playing Ground until they reached the East London Cemetery. He had been meaning to come here all week. Milton thanked the driver, taking out his phone to rate him and leave a tip. He passed between the double piers of an open gate and made his way along the central drive that led to the chapel. He looked left and right and saw thousands of graves.

  Milton had looked on Wikipedia during the drive across town: the cemetery had been established in the 1870s to accommodate the increasing demand for space from the city and the surrounding boroughs. It was the final resting place for Karl Hans Lody, the last person to have been shot as a spy in the Tower of London. That, he thought, and the death all around, seemed apt.

  He had asked Ziggy to find the grave that he wanted. Now he found the aisle that Ziggy had indicated in the northwest corner of the cemetery and walked slowly along it, his eyes cast down at the headstones. It took him ten minutes to find it.

  In Loving Memory of Son & Brother Dennis Rutherford.

  The simple marble headstone had been maintained, and Milton saw that a bouquet, still wrapped in plastic, had been left on the grave in the last few days. He knelt down and rested his hand on the cold stone, laying his own bouquet next to the one that was already there.

  “I’m sorry,” he said quietly.

  He stayed there for a moment, his eyes closed. He listened to the birdsong and, in the distance, the sound of someone tilling the ground. He stood, his knees creaking, and made his way back to the gates.

  33

  Milton looked at his watch. It was ten o’clock. He looked back up and saw that a man was waiting by the gates.

  “Punctual as ever,” Milton said as he drew near enough to be heard.

  “That’s the army for you. Old habits die hard.”

  Alex Hicks grinned and put out his hand. Milton took it and allowed himself to be drawn into a hug. Hicks clapped him on the back.

  “Jesus,” Hicks said. “What happened to your face?”

  Milton instinctively reached up for his jaw. “Yes,” he said. “That. I’ll tell you about it in a minute. Want a coffee?”

  There was a café a short distance from the cemetery, and Milton led the way there. It was empty, and Hicks took one of the Formica tables as Milton ordered. He looked back at his old friend. There was nothing particularly distinctive about Hicks’s appearance: short hair kept close to the scalp, medium build, athletic rather than muscular, average height. He looked just like a typical special forces operator, appropriate given that he and Milton had both been in the Regiment together. Hicks had been tapped as a possible recruit for the Group, and Milton had been responsible for assessing him. He was an outstanding soldier, but Milton had detected an underlying goodness running through him and had recommended that he be passed over. Milton had been in the depths of his own self-loathing then and had dismissed Hicks because he had seen something admirable in him. Milton had been unable to sully that. He couldn’t drag Hicks down into the blood and the dirt with the other killers who made up the Group.

  He put the coffees onto the table and sat down. “Thanks for coming.”

  “Not a problem.”

  Milton had helped Hicks extricate himself from an entanglement several years earlier, and Hicks had made it clear that he considered himself to be in his debt. Milton had told Hicks that he owed him nothing, but Hicks, apparently, did not agree.

  “It’s Christmas,” Milton said. “You have kids.”

  “They’re going to the cinema. They won’t miss me.”

  “Still, I appreciate it. What did you tell Rachel?”

  “That you need a hand with something. You know what she thinks about you, John. She would have killed me if I didn’t come.”

  Hicks’s wife had been fighting cancer for several years. A lack of money for her treatment was what had forced Hicks into the compromising situation from which Milton had extricated him, and then Milton had helped find the money to pay for the treatment.

  “How is she?”

  “Still in remission,” Hicks said. “She’s tested twice a year. We’re all over it.”

  “Good.”

  They sipped their drinks.

  “So,” Hicks said with a smile. “What’s so important that you needed to spoil my Christmas?”

  “Do you follow boxing?”

  “Not really.”

  “There’s a young fighter—Mustafa Muhammad.”

  Hicks frowned. “I’ve heard of him. Supposed to be good?”

  “He’s very good,” Milton corrected. “He’s fighting on Christmas Eve. Biggest fight of his career.”

  “And what does he have to do with you?”

  “I know him,” Milton said. “Met him a few years ago. His real name is Elijah Warriner. He was in trouble—got in with the wrong crowd, went off the rails. I tried to put him straight.”

  Hicks sipped the coffee. “And?”

  “And I nearly did. I got him into boxing, anyway. But this was when I was trying to leave the Group. Control sent one of the others after me. I was shot, and the man I introduced Elijah to was killed. I had to run. Elijah thought—probably still thinks—that I did it. I’ve never really forgotten about him, or his mother. They’re good people. They had a lot of bad luck that they didn’t deserve.”

  “And now?” Hicks said.

  “The kids he used to run around with are jealous. I think they’re going to cause trouble. There was a scuffle at a workout yesterday, and I think that was just the start. There’s one of them in particular—I had a conversation with him yesterday, and he made it very clear that he considers that they have unfinished business. I think something’s going to happen this week—either before the fight or after it.”

  “So can you look after him?”

  “I tried that.” Milton pointed to the side of his face again.

  “That was him?”

  Milton nodded. “He’s going to be hard for me to reach. And it’s just me. I don’t think I’d be able to do it alone.”

  “Fine. I’m in. What do you need me to do?”

  “Thank you.” Milton wasn’t surprised that Hicks had volunteered, but that didn’t mean that he wasn’t grateful. “I need you to follow him. He’ll recognise me. He doesn’t trust me enough to let me get close.”

  “But he doesn’t know me.”

  “Exactly.”

  “For how long?”

  “The next couple of days. The fight’s on Christmas Eve. He’ll be out of the city after that.”

  Hicks nodded. “How observant is he?”

  “He’s no fool.”

  “So it’s just me on him?”

  “No,” Milton said. “We have backup.”

  “We do?”

  Milton gestured over to the door. A hunched figure pushed it open and stepped into the café. He had a hood over his head and a rucksack hooked over his shoulder.

  Hicks groaned. “Seriously?”

  “Be nice,” Milton said.

  “You’re that desperate?”

  The figure reached up and pulled down the hood.

  “Look at this,” Ziggy said. “The band’s back together.”

  34

  Sol had an apartment halfway up the old Centrepoint building. Pinky had texted him and said that he wanted to meet; Sol had told him to come over.

  Everyone recognised the old building, one of the first skyscrapers to go up in west London, and he had heard that Sol had bought an apartment just after the place had been converted from offices to residential. Pinky had googled for details in the back of the Uber and had gawped at how much the apartments were going for: they started at £1.8m for a small one-bedroom apartment and went all the way up to £55m for the penthouses on the top floor.

  Pinky gazed out of the car window as the building loomed overhead and shook his head in wonder: everyone knew Sol was smart, but there was smart and then there was million-pound-apartme
nt smart. Bizness had never managed anything like this. Maybe his brother had got the brains in the family.

  Pinky went into the lobby. It was all glitz and glamour, steel and smoked glass with a weird-looking crystal chandelier suspended over a broad flight of stairs that went up to the first floor. He felt out of place here, like he was somewhere he wasn’t supposed to be. He guessed that was the point of it all: the people who lived here had the money to feel special, and they were happy to make it known that they were better than everyone else. Pinky reached down, hiked up his low-slung jeans, and slouched over to the desk.

  “I’m here to see Solomon Brown,” he said.

  The man looked down his nose at him, and, for a moment, Pinky thought that he was going to ask him to leave.

  “Name?”

  “Shaquille.”

  “Mr. Brown said you should go straight up,” the man said. He told Pinky to take the lift to the tenth floor and then make his way to apartment 1016.

  Pinky went across the lobby and pressed the button for the lift. He was sweating and his finger left a smear of grease on the polished metal. Good. He reached out with his hand, pressed all four fingers and thumb on the gleaming elevator door, and drew them down, five trails of grease spoiling the perfect shine.

  The elevator opened and he stepped inside. He pressed the button for the tenth floor and leaned against the wall as the car ascended. The walls and ceiling were mirrored; Pinky looked at his reflection, put his shoulders back and his chin out. His gold chain glittered in the artificial light. He looked good, he thought. He could imagine himself in a place like this. It was beyond him now, of course, but who would have thought he would rise so quickly through the LFB in such a short space of time? He wasn’t a fool: he had been no one before, a no-account younger just like all the others. He had worked hard to ingratiate himself with the elders, with Bizness and his bloods; he had taken their shit, gone to Maccy D’s to pick up their food, ran their errands, all so he could bring himself closer to them, inch by inch by inch. He hated having to suck up to them, to take their jibes and jokes, but he knew it was a means to an end, and that the end would be worth it. That was what had annoyed him so much about JaJa—how the little bitch had caught Bizness’s eye and got closer to him in days than Pinky had managed in months. Fuck that, he thought now.

  Fuck all this, he decided. It was taking too long. He wanted this now, not in five years.

  He hadn’t been ambitious enough. That was going to change.

  The elevator reached the tenth floor, and Pinky found his way along the corridor to the door for 1016. He took a breath to settle his nerves and rapped his knuckles against the door.

  It opened. A woman was standing inside. She was fit, dressed in clothes that Pinky could tell were expensive, her skin smooth, her brows plucked into two neat diagonals.

  “Come in,” she said.

  “I’m here for Sol.”

  “I know. He’s just having a shower. Go through into the living room. There’s beer in the fridge if you want one.”

  Pinky went inside. There was an entrance hall, what looked like a bedroom and then a larger living area and kitchen. The floor of the hall was tiled in a pattern that Pinky guessed was designed to look like the outside of the building; he went through into the living room and gaped at the huge expanse of glass and the view outside, London laid out far below, its lights glittering magically.

  He sat down on a chair that looked more suited for display than comfort, took out his phone, and watched the footage again, unable to keep the smile from his face. Everything had gone just how he wanted it to. The youngers had done their job well, he thought. They’d caused mayhem, and, by the time the police had come to close it all down, fights had started between members of all the local gangs. They had instigated it, then let natural enmities take their course. Lots of brothers in the same place, amped up after watching the boys in the ring, a powder keg ready to explode. All he’d had to do was light the match.

  His thoughts ran to the old man and his mood soured. They’d put Little Mark in a cab and told the driver to take him to the hospital. Brother couldn’t put any weight on his right leg. Pinky watched plenty of football, and he knew there was all sorts of shit that could go wrong inside someone’s knee. Zlatan had torn up his ACL, and he had been on the shelf for months. He’d never been the same, not even on FIFA. Little Mark said that the old guy had known exactly what he was doing, dropping down out of the way and then hitting him with ‘kung fu shit.’

  Pinky thought of the conversation he’d had with the man on the phone. He remembered him from before. The man had broken into Bizness’s place on the night of the riot, shot him down, and then put a cushion over his face and suffocated him. Pinky had been hiding, pressed down against the floor behind a sofa as the bullets from Bizness’s machine gun tore up the place. The man had taken the cushion away from Bizness’s face and had looked up and seen him.

  Pinky remembered: his expression had been dead, as if what he had just done meant nothing to him at all. He was cold—a killer—and Pinky had thought about him a lot ever since that night.

  Pinky wasn’t scared. He was a killer, too. They had that shit in common, but now the man was back, putting his nose into other people’s business again, and there would be consequences.

  Pinky had decided before they had spoken on the phone: the man was going to have to get done.

  He looked at his watch. He had been waiting for ten minutes. He felt a twist of impatience in his gut. Sol was keeping him waiting to make a point. That shit was childish. He told himself not to get worked up about it.

  35

  The weigh-in had been scheduled for York Hall with the public in attendance, but after what had happened at the workout, that had all been changed. It was now to be held at the hotel that had staged the press conference, and the audience had been restricted to the press.

  Milton had spoken to Sharon on the telephone earlier, and she had said that Elijah would meet him at the back of the hotel once the weigh-in was concluded. She said that she had managed to convince her son to speak to him for a few minutes. He would hear him out, but there were no promises. Milton didn’t know if it would be enough time, but he wanted to try.

  Milton made his way to the passage behind the hotel in plenty of time. He waited for over an hour before the back door opened and people began to leave. He stepped away from the wall he was leaning against and stood ready for Elijah to emerge.

  Finally, Milton saw him. He was dressed in a black tracksuit with a hood over his head. He was drinking from a water bottle and had headphones draped around his neck. He wore black sunglasses even though the clouds were iron grey overhead and there was the promise of snow in the air.

  Milton stepped away from the wall.

  Elijah came up to him.

  “You going to hit me again?” Milton said.

  “I should do more than that,” Elijah replied. His jaw was set and a tic pulsed in his cheek. “You deserved it.”

  “I didn’t do what you think I did,” Milton said, looking into the black lenses that hid Elijah’s eyes.

  “Not what the papers said.”

  “I know,” Milton said.

  “The police, too. They know you’re here?”

  “No,” Milton said. “They don’t.”

  “So?”

  “I told your mum what happened.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “She told me.” He dismissed that, and anything that Sharon might have said to him, with a wave of his hand. “You remember when we had dinner in Nando’s?”

  “Yes,” Milton said.

  “You remember what I asked you?”

  “You asked me what I did for a job.”

  “That’s right. And you remember what you said?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “I do,” he said. “I remember it like yesterday. You said you were a problem solver. Except that’s not what you were, was it? You caused more problems than you solved. My mum got bu
rned. Rutherford got it worse—he got shot. Even if you didn’t do it, he’s still dead and it’s still your fault.”

  Milton remembered that conversation. It had been three years ago, and Elijah had changed so much in that time. He had been a boy then, reticent, suspicious, and difficult to reach. Milton had worked so hard to earn his trust, and that was the moment when he had felt that he had finally been successful. But he knew there was no point in pretending otherwise: he hadn’t done what he had promised, and he had probably caused problems that could otherwise have been avoided. Elijah had a point.

  “It wasn’t supposed to happen like that. I wanted to help you. I wanted to help your mother.”

  “So she said.”

  “She tell you everything?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She tell you where she and I were the first time we met?”

  Elijah paused. “No,” he said. “What difference does that make?”

  “She jumped onto the tracks in front of a train,” Milton said. “I pulled her out of the way before it could hit her. I took her to the hospital, and then, when they let her out, I brought her home.”

  Elijah’s jaw slackened as the anger and tension dripped away to be replaced by something else. Milton couldn’t see his eyes behind the shades, and he couldn’t gauge his reaction. “What?” he said quietly, the hardness gone.

  “I didn’t tell you before,” Milton said. “I didn’t see what good it would do. But maybe you need to know. Do you know why she did it?”

  Elijah looked down at his feet.

  “You and your brother,” Milton said. “She was at the end of her rope. I know what it’s like to feel desperate—I felt the same way then. You still want to know what I used to do? The truth this time?”