Max Wolfe 02.5 - Fresh Blood

by Tony Parsons

  ‘We know you’re a busy man, Max,’ Marvin said, gripping my arm in one of his powerful hands. ‘But will you join us in prayer before you leave?’

  I glanced at my watch, embarrassed by the thought that I was going to have to get down on my knees and put my hands together, but I didn’t have the will to refuse. So I nodded meekly and the three of us stood around the foot of the bed and bowed our heads, holding hands as Marvin said the words. Curtis had folded his arms across his chest, wanting no part of it. But it wasn’t as bad as I had imagined. In fact it made me feel something that might even have been hope.

  ‘Dear God, give Curtis the strength he needs and the peace he deserves,’ said Marvin. ‘Stand by us, oh Lord, in these dark days and endless nights. Let us know, dear God, that we are never alone with you by our side.’

  When I looked up I saw that Curtis had closed his eyes and was shaking his head, laughing silently to himself, and I felt the panic rise up in me as his mother and brother seemed to grip my hands ever more tightly.

  3

  True Crime

  ‘Sit, Bullseye!’ Scout said, and that was always the cue for Bullseye to do a runner.

  The English Bull Terrier gave Scout’s face a quick lick before bounding off across the wide-open space of our loft, chased by my daughter and our dog. I had draped my leather jacket on the back of a chair and Bullseye tore it off, dragging it with him to the far corner of the room where he dropped it and began attempting to dig a hole in the bare wooden floorboards.

  ‘I think he wants to bury it, Daddy,’ Scout said, chewing her bottom lip.

  ‘I think you’re right.’

  We were not used to a dog like Bullseye.

  Stan was a typical Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, a chilled-out, peace-loving hippy of a dog who was eager to please, happy to go on long muddy walks but just as happy sitting in a café or curled up next to some human body warmth. Stan wanted what you wanted.

  Bullseye did what he felt like.

  But we liked him. Despite his appearance – and that long sloping forehead gave him the aura of a dangerous weapon – Bullseye was an affectionate dog, endlessly gentle with both Scout and Stan. The dogs had spent a night curled up together at the end of Scout’s bed. But during the day, Bullseye’s restless spirit craved distraction and destruction, and already he had left his teeth marks all over our loft. Perhaps he missed his master. Perhaps he was always a handful. It was probably a bit of both.

  I retrieved my leather jacket and Scout knelt beside Bullseye, scratching him behind his ears. Stan watched her anxiously with his huge round eyes.

  ‘Can we keep him, Daddy?’ she said.

  Stan whimpered as if to say – Yes, he’s cute, but you’ve already got a dog, right?

  ‘We can keep him until we find him a good home,’ I said.

  There was a mobile number on the back of Bullseye’s nametag and I tried calling it again. But just like all the other times, it went straight to the answer machine. Nobody picked up and nobody ever would.

  ‘Thank you for calling,’ the dead man said in a voice that was full of old London. ‘Please leave a message after the beep.’

  In a corner of the Black Museum of New Scotland Yard, I stared at a display of black and white photographs of London gangland in the sixties. Hard, unsmiling white men in dark suits and ties, smoking fags and drinking tea, often in the company of men who looked exactly like them.

  Reggie and Ronnie Kray from the East End. Charlie and Eddie Richardson from south London. Paul and Danny Warboys from west London.

  And all the supporting actors like Mad Frankie Fraser and George Cornell and the ones whose names were never known or instantly forgotten. Here was the other side of the sixties. The world outside was growing hair and dropping acid, but the Krays and the Richardsons and the Warboys still wore their neat suits and ties and had their hair cut in short back and sides.

  There were splashes of colour in the display – the lavish funeral of one of the Krays, and a holiday snap of one of the Richardsons on the run in Spain – but it was mostly a black and white world, the very last time that London gangsters were celebrities.

  ‘I think Vic Masters appears in a few of these,’ said Sergeant John Caine, the keeper of the Black Museum, the Met’s repository of 150 years of criminal activity. ‘Yes, there he is.’

  And there he was – Vic Masters, still a teenager in the early sixties, in the saloon bar of legendary East End pub the Saucy Leper with the Krays and a few of their flat-nosed henchmen, the boy was almost visibly swelling with pride in the presence of his heroes. And again a few years later, at some black-tie event with the Richardsons, standing behind their table, everyone raising a glass to the camera, a boxing ring just visible in the background.

  ‘Vic Masters was a kid when the Krays and the Richardsons were the Beatles and the Stones of gangland,’ John Caine said. ‘He was never affiliated, south or north of the river. Mad Vic did the heavy lifting. He tried to get noticed. He made a living doing the dirty work – pulling the teeth of an informer, cutting off toes with bolt pliers. And then everyone got sent down. The Richardsons in 1966. The Krays in 1968. The Warboys a bit later. Long, long sentences – Charlie Richardson got twenty-five years. The Krays got thirty years – the longest sentence ever passed at the Old Bailey. Paul and Danny Warboys got twenty years for pulling out the tongue of a grass. And as you know, Vic Masters got life for slotting some Jamaican drug baron. I say “baron” – but we are talking about the aristocracy of the gutter. And then it was over. They either died inside or came out as very old men. Into a different world.’

  ‘Vic Masters had no wife? No children?’

  ‘There was a wife who died when Vic was doing life for murder,’ John Caine said. ‘No children, as far as I know.’

  I looked at the display.

  ‘Who hated Vic Masters?’

  ‘I imagine there are a few members of the Jamaican drugs industry who were not too keen,’ John chuckled. He pointed to a hard white face among that world of hard white faces. ‘But Mad Vic’s big beef was with this guy – Mad Alfie Bloom.’

  There was another youth in the two photographs of Vic Masters. They were next to each other in the picture with the Krays, and at either end of the frame in the shot with the Richardsons. Vic Masters and Alfie Bloom were as alike as Reggie and Ronnie Kray, as alike as Charlie and Eddie Richardson. They looked like more than brothers. They could have been twins.

  ‘Mad Vic Masters and Mad Alfie Bloom were cocky kids who hung around these firms,’ John said. ‘They were like – what do you call it? – the interns of gangland.’

  ‘Fighting over the same few scraps.’

  ‘Exactly. They never liked each other much. Mostly because they always ploughed the same fields. One of them chucked a fish tank at the other.’

  ‘A fish tank?’

  ‘Yeah, you know – a big glass tank with tropical fish. In the Saucy Leper. The landlord was trying to give it a bit of class with a fish tank. And then Mad Vic threw the fish tank at Mad Alfie. Or it might have been the other way round. And about five years ago it all flared up again when they both published their memoirs.’

  ‘Vic Masters and Alfie Bloom wrote books?’

  ‘Or had them ghostwritten. Vic’s memoir was called The Original Gangster and Alfie’s was – if I’m not mistaken – The Last True Gangster.

  ‘Mad Alfie Bloom and Mad Vic Masters had – what? – a literary feud?’

  ‘Yeah – like that. A literary feud. And you know what it’s like these days with all the social media. Vic was tweeting about Alfie being a fake. Alfie would put something on Facebook about Vic telling fibs to big himself up. It can get very nasty on those social media platforms. It can be very hurtful when the trolling starts.’

  ‘Is Alfie still alive?’

  ‘As far as I know.’

  The shrine to that lost British gangland was made up mostly of photographs. At the start of the sixties they had been taken by David Bai
ley. By the time it was over, they were being taken in police custody.

  But in front of it there was a dusty table with a few primitive weapons placed on top. A pair of pliers. A claw hammer. A sawn-off 12 bore shotgun. And one of those broad, curved pirate’s swords with an elaborate basket-shaped guard. A cutlass.

  I looked at John Caine for permission.

  ‘Be my guest,’ he said.

  I picked up the cutlass. It was heavy, unwieldy but undoubtedly dramatic – like a child’s idea of a deadly weapon. I almost laughed out loud.

  ‘What drama queen did this belong to?’ I smiled.

  ‘Reggie or Ronnie,’ John said. ‘I can’t remember. One of the Kray twins.’

  I felt the weight of it in my hands.

  ‘Not easy to fight with one of these,’ I said.

  ‘But you wouldn’t want it across your throat,’ John said.

  ‘No,’ I said, and I realised that I had stopped smiling. ‘Or across your mouth.’

  4

  Curse of the Krays

  The woman who runs the most exclusive prostitution ring in London has tattoos on her arms that run from the inside of her elbow to the edge of her palms.

  I got to know Ginger Gonzalez during the winter months when she helped my Murder Investigation Team with our enquiries, but it was only now, with spring coming on and the days getting warmer and her change of wardrobe, that I noticed the tattoos.

  Never for money, said the tattoo on her right arm.

  Always for love, said the tattoo on her left.

  I stood in the open doorway of her one-room office above a Peking duck restaurant in Chinatown and she looked up from a brand new 27-inch iMac as I tapped my knuckles on the sign that said ‘Sampaguita – Social Introduction Agency’. She was a studious-looking Philippina in black-rimmed glasses, more school ma’am than madam, but I suspected the lenses in her spectacles were clear glass. Sampaguita is the national flower of the Philippines, although she had left her homeland when she was sixteen.

  ‘Max,’ she said. ‘How’s your friend?’

  ‘Better,’ I said.

  I had seen Curtis at the hospital on my way to Chinatown. He had not said much but for the first time in weeks, he had not asked me to slip into his room one night and put a pillow over his face.

  ‘He liked her,’ I said. ‘Jana. I can tell.’

  ‘Sweet kid,’ she said.

  Ginger’s company placed wealthy men in contact with beautiful women.

  Despite the big iMac on her desk, Sampaguita had no online presence. Ginger found the men in the swankier bars of London hotels – the Coburg at the Connaught, the American Bar at The Savoy, The Rivoli at The Ritz and The Fumoir at Claridges. I had no idea where she found the women who worked for her, but there always seemed to be new ones arriving in our city.

  I slid an airmail envelope across Ginger’s desk.

  ‘I’d like to book Jana again,’ I said.

  She raised the envelope in thanks, and put it in her desk. ‘Does it have to be the middle of the night? It’s a bit awkward, all this wee small hours stuff.’

  ‘His family are there the rest of the time. They’re very religious people. I don’t want them to think someone’s paying for sex.’

  ‘Even if we know that’s not happening? My girls just go in there and hold the guy. And besides – nobody actually pays for sex, Max. What my clients are paying for is a woman who will go away when it’s all over.’

  ‘Well, Curtis must have liked the way she held him.’

  ‘That poor guy. Is he going to be all right?’

  I shrugged. I could not imagine a future where Curtis Gane would ever be all right again.

  A young Somalian man walked in and placed a carton of coffee on Ginger’s desk. It was from one of those coffee shops where they ask you for your name. The cup had ‘Ali’ scrawled on the side. I watched him take up a position just outside the entrance.

  ‘Security?’ I said.

  ‘There have been some threats,’ Ginger said.

  I looked out of the first floor window. Chinatown was still adorned with the red lanterns of Spring Festival.

  ‘Locals?’ I said. ‘Triads?’

  She shook her head. ‘The Chinese leave us alone. These are white boys. I didn’t see them. They had a word with Ali.’

  I didn’t like it.

  ‘Get him in here, will you, Ginger?’

  She called him in.

  ‘This is Max, Ali. He’s a friend. Tell him about the men who came here.’

  Ali was a tall, skinny kid. Big but raw. And I saw he was very frightened, as if the gig as Security Director at Sampaguita was a touch harder than he had bargained for.

  ‘They came yesterday,’ he said. He struggled for the words. ‘They were young men who dress like old men. Like men from the past. Men from photographs.’

  ‘What did they want?’ I said.

  He indicated Ginger. ‘To talk to Mum Ginger,’ he said. ‘They want money for protection.’

  ‘Did they threaten you?’ I said.

  He took a step into the room and ran his fingers across Ginger’s desk. There was a deep cut in the surface.

  ‘They did that?’ I said.

  Ali nodded.

  ‘One of them had one of those knives,’ he said. ‘No – not a knife. What do you call it? A sword. Like Johnny Depp in that movie – Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. Did you see that movie?’

  ‘I’ve seen all of Johnny Depp’s movies,’ Ginger said. Unlike Ali, she did not seem frightened by the shakedown. Perhaps she was used to it. Occupational hazard. I looked at the mark on the desk and ran my index finger across it.

  ‘What do you call that sword?’ Ali said.

  ‘You call it a cutlass,’ I said.

  The three of us stared at the scar and we only looked up when the door opened and the Kray twins walked in.

  Everything about them was perfect.

  The tight grey suits. The skinny ties. There was even grease in their neat, short-back-and-sides haircuts. But the respectability of their clothes was offset by the violence in their eyes. They considered the tiny room and the three of us with sullen, blank-faced hostility, like creatures about to feed. And in those moments I saw that they had not quite got the look down perfect.

  They were not twins. They were not even brothers, despite looking as though they had been dressed identically by the same doting parent. One of them, the one who came in first, was short, hard, lean. Ten stone of barbed wire. The other one, hovering at his shoulder as if trying to create David Bailey’s iconic photograph of the twins, was much larger, and his skin was darker. The one in front was pasty to the point of anaemia.

  ‘My name’s Oscar Burns and I’m here to collect the tax you owe,’ he told Ginger.

  She slowly took off her glasses, as if she was considering a serious business proposition.

  ‘What tax is that?’ she said.

  ‘The tax on this place,’ he said. I watched the steam building up in him. It always fascinates me, how these little thugs have the ability to whip themselves up into a frenzy. ‘The tax for being a cock-sucking, whore-selling, disease-spreading pimp in my neighbourhood.’

  Ali stepped in front of them and I expected an immediate eruption of violence. But instead they smiled. It seemed like genuine amusement. The young Somalian was visibly shaking.

  ‘You smoke, mate?’ Oscar Burns said. ‘Give him one, will you, Big Muff?’

  They smiled secretively at each other and then Big Muff slowly pulled out a pack of cigarettes from his North Face backpack. That was another thing that was slightly off. They both had backpacks. I don’t recall the Kray twins carrying man bags. I wondered what else was in those backpacks as Ali reached for a cigarette with trembling hands.

  ‘Don’t, Ali,’ I told him.

  Because I already knew exactly what was going to happen next.

  Oscar Burns and Big Muff frowned at me.

  ‘I smell pig,’
Burns said.

  Big Muff narrowed his eyes and it gave him that knotted brow that Ronnie Kray had, the one that made him look like a wounded buffalo about to charge.

  ‘Really?’ Big Muff said. ‘Pig in here?’

  ‘Smell it a mile off,’ Oscar said. ‘Smelt it coming up the whore’s stairs.’

  Big Muff gave Ali a cigarette and Oscar held out his lighter.

  ‘Ali,’ I said, and as he drew on the cigarette Oscar smashed his free fist into the young Somalian’s jaw. There was the sharp snap of a breaking bone and the young Somalian went down with a scream of pain and the roar of their laughter.

  I bent over the kid.

  ‘You run a knocking shop,’ Oscar Burns was saying.

  ‘Sampaguita is a social introduction agency,’ Ginger said, and for the first time she sounded scared.

  They had a laugh at that.

  ‘Call it what you like,’ Oscar said. ‘From now on you’re paying tax. One of us is going to come in here every week and you are going to hand over an envelope with the words, “Here’s that £500 I owe you.” Can you remember that?’

  Ginger hung her head. ‘Yes,’ she said quietly.

  ‘And there’s a tart I’m interested in,’ he continued. ‘Her name is Jana. She’s going to be taking care of us tonight. I’m going to give you the name of a pub and I want her there at ten sharp.’

  I stood up.

  They took their time looking at me.

  ‘You broke Ali’s jaw,’ I said.

  ‘That’s right,’ Oscar said. ‘You’re a very clever pig.’

  ‘That’s a good trick,’ I said. ‘But it’s also a very old trick. I’ve read about that trick. It’s a trick that Reggie and Ronnie Kray used, right? Breaking a man’s jaw while he’s lighting a cigarette. It’s why boxers are taught to bite down hard on their gum shields. Because it’s easy to break a man’s jaw when he has his mouth half-open. Any idiot can do it.’

  I helped Ali to his feet. He was having difficulty standing. I eased him into the seat opposite Ginger and then turned to face the Kray twins’ tribute band.

  ‘Now, shall I show you my trick?’ I said.