by John Harvey
Twenty thousand Valentine had paid over, throwing in another five as a sweetener, keep the Dutchman coming to him and not Planer. Twenty-five in all and nothing compared with the sixty the contents of those cases were worth to Valentine out on the street. Thirty-five thousand profit and all he’d done so far was cut open one of the bags and lift a taste of the powder to his tongue, rub a little across his gums.
Sure he was high. Wouldn’t you be?
He was calling back toward the kitchen in search of chicken and dumplings, when the knock came at the door. The Dutchman’s hand moved inside his jacket, fingers touching the grip of his Glock 9mm, the 17L, the kind that doesn’t set off metal detectors at airports.
Leo shook his head and grinned. “Stay cool. It’ll be the kid.”
“Which kid?”
There were two others sitting with the Dutchman’s brother, and one of them got up and checked through the blinds before unlocking the door.
Dressed up for the occasion in his best leather jacket, new Pepe jeans, Raymond gingerly walked in. Valentine had hoped the Dutchman would have been long gone by this time, but what did it matter? This youth already close to pissing himself, acne pits all over his sorry face.
“You Ray-o?”
Raymond nodded.
“Come on in. Get over here. Someone get our visitor something to drink.”
One of the men threw Raymond a can of Red Stripe, which he fumbled and caught; another relocked the front door.
“Sit.” Valentine said, pointing at the vacant chair opposite.
Raymond sat.
“You want something to eat?”
Raymond shook his head.
“Curried goat, all kinds.” Valentine laughed. “Dog, if you lucky. You should give it a try.”
Raymond thought he was being sent up, but wasn’t sure. A woman, small and with her hair in a net, came out from the kitchen with a plate of food and set it down in front of Valentine. It smelled good. Valentine took the top from a bottle of red pepper sauce and sprinkled it liberally over his supper. Raymond was beginning to wish he hadn’t said no.
He popped the can and drank some beer instead. One of the men passed a large spliff to Valentine, who drew on it deeply, holding the smoke in his mouth, before passing the joint across to Raymond. It was strong enough to make him cough and Valentine laughed again, but pleasantly. This was okay, Raymond thought, this was going to be all right.
“So, little brother,” Valentine said, “you got something to trade.”
“Yes.”
“With you. You got it with you?”
“Yeh.”
“Some kind of weapon, I understand.”
“A Beretta. Chrome-handled. A.38.”
Valentine raised an eyebrow high. “Nice.” He held out a hand. “Best let me see.”
Raymond hesitated, Valentine watching him closely to see what he would do.
“I want eight hundred for it, cash,” Raymond said.
Laughter and whistles all round.
“Boy,” Valentine said, leaning forward. “I say one thing for you, you may be one ugly little fucker, but you got some balls.”
Raymond could hear the breath, squeezing out of his lungs. “Eight hundred,” he said again.
“Six fifty, that’s your price. Seven tops. You tell me why I should pay over the odds.”
The words came tumbling out in a rush, not the way Raymond had practiced it at all. “It’s the gun from the Forest, the one you used on Jason. It’s worth eight hundred to you, make sure it don’t fall into the wrong hands. Got to be. Gotta.”
Valentine sat back and shook his head. “Ray-o, boy, your balls ain’t just brass, they big as a house.” And glancing over his shoulder toward Leo, he said, “Count me out eight hundred, why don’t you?” Leo winked at Raymond as he set the notes, fifties, on the table between them, Raymond thinking he’d tell Sheena the price had been two fifty.
“Now,” Valentine said, “time for you to show me yours.”
Raymond’s mouth was too dry for him to speak. Slowly, he reached round to the back of his jacket and pulled out the Beretta.
“Set it down.”
Raymond placed it next to the money.
“That loaded?” Valentine asked.
Raymond shook his head.
“Leo.” Without looking back, Valentine reached a hand over his shoulder and Leo slapped a full clip into it; before Raymond knew what was happening, Valentine had pushed the clip into the pistol and snicked the safety off with his thumb.
“Oh, Jesus,” Raymond said and felt his insides start to melt.
The tip of the gun barrel was only inches from his face. “Thing about Jason Johnson,” Valentine said. “I never did get quite close enough to that skinny bastard. Which must have been why I missed.”
Raymond closed his eyes and started to jabber meaningless sounds. When the barrel end touched, cold, against his forehead, immediately above the bridge of his nose, he shouted “No!” and in the middle of his shout he heard, or thought he heard, a double click.
Nothing happened.
Raymond forced himself to open his eyes.
Valentine was sitting there with the Beretta in one hand and the clip of ammunition in the other, a fat smile all over his happy face.
“Jesus,” Raymond breathed. “Jesus, oh Jesus. Jesus fucking Christ.”
“There,” said Valentine, barely able to contain his laughter. “Didn’t your daddy tell you it was good to pray?” And he reversed the pistol so the butt was toward Raymond. “Your turn. Maybe now you should take a shot at me.” He tossed the clip high through the air toward Leo. “Long as we all know it ain’t loaded.”
By now, everyone was laughing and even Raymond, who had long since learned it was important to be able to take a joke, especially if you were on the wrong end of it, laughed along with the rest.
They were still laughing when the door to the restaurant came crashing in and two men followed through fast, both dressed in black from head to toe, black balaclavas covering their faces, narrow slits for the eyes. One was armed with a shotgun, the other with an Uzi submachine-gun.
“What the fuck …!”
Raymond half-rose, three-quarter turned, the Beretta still in his hand.
A burst from the Uzi hurled him back and across the table in a clumsy cartwheel. Five bullets threaded through him, neck to pelvis; he was probably dead before he hit the floor.
“What the …”
The man nearest to Valentine smacked the barrels of the shotgun hard across his head and Valentine cannoned off the wall and sank down to his knees, spitting blood.
At the back of the room, the Dutchman moved his hand carefully away from the handle of his semi-automatic and stood to attention.
“Okay,” one of the men said, his voice strong but muffled. “The money. Who’s holding?”
First the Dutchman and then Leo emptied their pockets: close to thirty thousand between them. With the eight hundred Raymond had scattered across the floor and what the others were carrying, there was close to thirty-two all told.
“That’s it,” Leo said. “That’s all there is.”
“Is it fuck!” one of the men said and the other one lifted the suitcases, one at a time, up from the floor. They took one each and backed toward the door.
“Stick your head out too soon, you’ll get it shot off.”
Nobody moved, not till they’d heard the roar of a powerful engine, the squeal of tires. And all the while, Raymond’s blood spread slowly across the stained and pitted floor.
Thirty-eight
They were in Helen Siddons’s office, Resnick, Norman Mann, and Siddons herself. Despite the relative warmth outside, the windows were closed tight and the air was thickening with blue-gray smoke.
“So what we’ve got,” Siddons said, “this sorry article, Raymond Cooke, shot to pieces for no reason anyone can think of. A penny-ante restaurant raided in the early hours of the morning by two heavily armed men who got a
way with a couple of hundred from the till, a couple of Rolexes, and small change. That’s the cock-and-bull story they’re offering us?”
Drew Valentine, Leo Warner, and two others had been questioned by teams of officers since first light and so far none of them had deviated from their prearranged story. The interior of the Cassava had been searched and photographed by Scene of Crime. Raymond Cooke’s body had been shipped out in a heavy-duty plastic bag to the morgue.
Before the police had arrived, there had been time for Valentine and his crew to effect a minimum of salvage work, if not as much as they would have liked. First off, the Dutchman and his brother had been bustled into their car and clean away; by now, they were safely out of the country. Second, the Beretta had been stashed out back in a bin of vegetable peelings and old bones, from where it had been taken, wrapped and weighted, and thrown into the River Trent. If Valentine had had his way, and the time, that was where Raymond’s body would have been, too. Less to explain away.
“You knew him, Charlie. This Cooke. His being there, that time of night, it make any sense to you?”
Resnick shook his head. “Not right now, no.”
“Not dealing then, working for Valentine.”
“Not as far as I know.”
“Norman?”
“Cooke, I don’t see as he matters a toss one way or another. No, this was serious, a rip-off. Some other gang’s come in, taken Valentine for everything he’s got.” He shook his head, cleared his throat. “Christ knows what they got away with, thousands, probably, cash or kind.”
Siddons picked up her coffee cup, but it was already empty. “Any idea who might have been responsible?”
Mann laughed. “Too many. Could be someone lightweight, chancing his arm, looking to move up. I might’ve reckoned Jason Johnson for it, if he’d not already been nursing a sore head. If it’s not that, it’s one of the big boys, out to keep Valentine in line, make a tidy profit on the side.”
“Come on, Norman,” Siddons said. “Get off the bloody fence. You’re the one supposed to have your finger on the pulse. Or is that just so much bullshit?”
The look in Mann’s eyes was smarting and dangerous. “Bullshit, nothing. You want to know what I think, the way this was planned, executed, I’d say this was a major player, confident, not afraid.”
“Names?”
“Planer, that’s where my money’d be. Not that he’d risk dirtying his hands himself. No one too close to him, either. He’d bring somebody in from outside. Manchester, London. Whoever it was, they’ll be well home by now, late breakfast, celebration. Champagne. Bastards.”
“And it’s not worth picking him up? Planer?”
“Not unless you want him laughing in your face.”
Siddons scraped back her chair and walked to the window, stared out. “Charlie, you go along with that?”
“Norman’s area, not mine.”
“Listen,” Mann said. “Either Valentine knows who ripped him off, or he’s got a pretty good idea. And he’s not about to sit around and do nothing about it. We might not be able to lay a hand on Planer, but that’s not to say Valentine won’t find a way himself.”
Siddons knotted her hands tight. “That’s the one thing, the one thing I dreaded, the likes of Valentine taking the law into their own hands.”
“Bread-and-butter stuff,” Norman Mann said with a smile. “Slag-on-slag. Long as they stick to shooting themselves, why not keep our heads down, let ’em get on with it?”
“And if another Raymond Cooke gets in the way?” Resnick asked.
“Own up, Charlie,” Mann sneered. “Who the fuck cares about an arsewipe like that?”
Resnick didn’t recognize her at first, sitting close against the wall adjacent to his office door. Save for a few stray wisps, her red hair was hidden beneath a dark beret, the only makeup careful around the eyes. She was wearing a plain, button-through dress and flat shoes. Terry Cooke’s former common-law wife.
“Eileen, come in. Come on inside.” Holding the door, he let her precede him. “Can I get you anything? Tea? Coffee?”
She shook her head and he motioned toward a chair, sat down himself.
“I’m sorry about Raymond.”
Eileen bit down into her lower lip. “I’ve just come from seeing the body.”
Ray-o’s mother had run off when he was four, his father had not been seen in years, his uncle dead by his own hand; Resnick supposed Eileen, in a manner of speaking, was his next of kin.
“They pulled back this sheet,” Eileen said, not looking at Resnick, but at the floor. “They pulled it back and he was just laying there like … like meat. Something they’d hunted and shot down, that’s what I kept thinking. Meat.”
When Resnick had first run across Raymond, the lad had been working at the abattoir close by the County ground, up to his elbows in tubs of guts, intestines, blood, and bone. The stink of it had clung to his hair, his body, had followed him everywhere, rank, like a second skin.
“I’m sorry, Eileen. Sorry you had to see him like that.”
“Whatever he’d done, whatever he was like, he never deserved that.”
She fumbled for a tissue and Resnick waited, patient. Noisily Eileen blew her nose. “Nobody’ll tell me, not really, tell me what happened.”
Resnick leaned slowly forward. “There was an armed robbery at the restaurant. Some shooting. Raymond, as far as we can tell, just happened to be there at the wrong time. Unfortunately he got in the way, the line of fire. Of course, we’re making inquiries, but for now that’s all we know.”
“It’s not right.”
“No.”
“You’re not going to bother, are you? Over Ray-o, I mean. You’re not going to be pulling out all the stops because of him.”
“Eileen, I assure you. We’re taking it very seriously.”
“Yeah? And so far you’ve got nothing, right? You go on about how he just happened to be there. I don’t think Ray-o’d set foot in that place in his life. I know him. I don’t think he would, not without a reason.”
Resnick bent toward her. “There’s nothing you can think of that would help, like you say, give us a reason for why he was there?”
“No.”
“Maybe if you thought about it …”
“I told you, I don’t know …”
“Okay.” He sat back again. “I’m sorry there isn’t any more I can tell you. Not now, anyway.”
Pushing the tissue down into her bag, Eileen got to her feet. “Don’t hold my breath, right?”
He waited till she was almost at the door. “Sheena, Sheena Snape, you know her a little, don’t you?”
“A bit. Yes, why?”
“She and Raymond, were they, you know, friends? Anything like that?”
“Not as far as I know.”
“Only I was in the shop not so many days back and she was there. Raymond seemed embarrassed at me seeing them together. I thought there might be something going on between them, that’s all.”
Eileen shook her head. “Ray-o, he might not have been God’s gift, bless him, but he knew better than to get involved with a slag like that.”
“Business, then. I remember Raymond making out she was there to buy something, but she didn’t back him up. Maybe she was the one with something to sell.”
Now Eileen was looking at him hard. “And you think, whatever it was, it might have something to do with Ray-o getting shot?”
“I’ll be honest, I don’t know.”
“Honest?”
He looked at her questioningly.
“You tried to get round me once before, remember? When Terry was still alive. All nice and understanding. Getting me to inform against him, that’s what you were trying to do. Grass. Same as what you tryin’ now. You want me to go round Sheena’s, don’t you? Do your dirty work for you. ’cause you know, after what happened to her brothers, she wouldn’t give you the time of day.”
Resnick took a breath. “All I’m saying …”
Eileen raised her head. “I know what you’re saying. And I don’t want to hear.”
What Resnick heard was the quick closing of the door and footsteps, fast across the floor.
Maureen was serving a customer when Lorraine walked in, Maureen doing her level best to persuade a matronly body from Wollaton that gold chiffon was the very thing for her husband’s firm’s annual dinner. When she saw Lorraine, Maureen took a deep breath and carried on, Lorraine standing off to one side, feigning interest in a deep-green wool and silk mix jacket by Yohji Yamamoto, a snip at £499.99.
As soon as the customer had left the shop, Maureen went to Lorraine and held her tight. “Have you heard anything?” she asked, stepping away.
Lorraine shook her head. “That’s what I came to ask you.”
“I’ve not seen him since yesterday, yesterday early.”
“You don’t know where he is?”
“No.” Maureen shook her head vehemently. “I don’t know and I don’t want to know. I don’t ever want to see that bastard again.”
Lorraine caught hold of Maureen’s hand. “Did he …” She was looking Maureen in the eye. “Did he hurt you?”
Maureen attempted a smile. “Not so’s you’d notice.”
“And you really don’t know where he went?”
“No. I haven’t a clue.” She gave Lorraine’s shoulder a sympathetic squeeze. “I wish there was something I could tell you. But I’m afraid I don’t know anything.” She paused. “Except I’m glad he’s gone.”
Lorraine half turned toward the door. “If you do see him …”
“I won’t, but …”