by Tony Parsons
‘Sir, I can see you have to do a trace, interview and eliminate on him, whatever his age. But most recently the beef between Alfie Bloom and Vic Masters has been a literary feud.’
Now he was angry.
‘They’re not Gore Vidal and Norman fucking Mailer! They hated each other for fifty years! They went at it more than once! Bottles, glasses – whatever was lying around. Mad Vic once threw a fish tank at Mad Alfie, did you know that? You think this all just started because they had their bloody memoirs out? Do you have a motive for your suspects?’
He had me there. Oscar Burns and Big Muff were several generations after Vic Masters. They were from a different century. As far as I knew, there was no connection between them.
‘Not yet, sir.’
‘Nothing at all that connects your Chinatown villains to Vic Masters? No reason at all they might want to open his face up and leave him dead in a ditch?’
One of the DIs snickered. I could feel my face getting red.
‘They’re trying to make a name for themselves,’ I said.
‘So they follow an old face on Hampstead Heath? I don’t see the logic in that, Wolfe. But how about this for a motive? Your motive.’
‘Sir?’
Behind his broad back, Flashman’s MIT were all grinning at me.
‘You want them off your back, Wolfe,’ Flashman said. ‘That’s a credible motive. The two little herberts you slapped around in Chinatown. You want them gone.’
I must have looked speechless.
Flashman shook his head. ‘What – you think you can slap a couple of little villains around on my patch and I don’t hear about it? Despite what you might think in West End Central, nothing happens in town without it reaching New Scotland Yard.’
‘I think you should look at them, sir.’
‘Why? Because you want them off the back of your friend – the whore.’
Never for money. Always for love.
‘She’s not a whore, sir.’
He stepped in close. ‘I don’t know what’s going on with you and that whore and I don’t want to know, Wolfe. But do you want to get slung out on your ear? Do you want to spend the next thirty years as a security guard in Selfridges? You need to take a big step back. And you need to take a very deep breath. Because the way you are carrying on, you’re going to end up in the same cell as those little villains. You keep up the Dirty Harry impersonation and you’re going to get done for GBH, detective. And by God you better watch your step around my murder investigation.’ He moved away, nodded briskly at his team. They visibly snapped to attention. ‘Those little villains – they’re nothing. Petty criminals. Young offenders. Not my problem. Not part of this investigation. Now we’re going to visit Mad Alfie Bloom.’
I shook my head with disbelief. ‘You’re seriously taking this enquiry into a care home?’ I said. ‘Sir?’
‘It’s a retirement community. And I tell you this, my friend – Mad Alfie might be knocking on, but you’ve not seen some of the faces who still bring him grapes. We might be looking at some old con with a beef of his own. Yes, that’s shut you up, hasn’t it?’
But I was looking back at the viewing room.
On his stainless steel bed, Vic Masters had kept right on grinning.
7
The Last Gangster
Thirty minutes later I was waiting in the car park of the Leafy Lane Retirement Community on the Finchley Road.
DCI Flashman and his Murder Investigation Team arrived in a silver BMW X5 exactly like the one I was sitting in and went inside. They came back out again after just a few minutes, looking deeply unhappy. I waited until they had pulled out of the car park, heading south for New Scotland Yard, and then I went inside.
The lights were bright and the air was thick with the smell of food. It was a warm spring night but inside the temperature was sub-tropical. In a communal living room, some of the residents, all of them elderly women, were sitting in front of the evening news. A white-coated care worker with West African tribal scars on her face approached me.
‘Can I help you?’
‘Mr Bloom?’
‘First floor. Last room.’ There was a flash of real sympathy in her face. ‘I’m so sorry for your loss,’ she said.
A pair of paramedics brushed past me and I saw their ambulance outside, blue lights pulsing. I stared at the carer for a moment as it sank in. There had been a recent bereavement at Leafy Lanes.
‘Thank you.’
I went upstairs. The corridor was crowded with men between the ages of fifteen and eighty. Most of them were gawping at their phones, but a few of them looked as though they had been crying. And they were not the kind of men who looked prone to tears.
‘I smell pig,’ someone said.
Oscar Burns and Big Muff were there, part of a group of men in their twenties. The demographic seemed to age the further you got down the corridor. Skinny teenage boys with short haircuts at the top of the stairs. The twenty-somethings in their smart suits and elaborate haircuts a bit further down. And a small band of hard-faced old men right outside Alfie Bloom’s room, conferring with the intimacy of men who had known each other for a lifetime.
The door to the room was wide open as the paramedics fussed around him. Someone had removed Alfie’s false teeth and his mouth gaped open, as if desperate for one last breath. His lifeless eyes stared blankly at the ceiling and then one of the paramedics passed his hand gently over his face and the eyes were closed.
They had all clocked me now. They watched me all the way back down the corridor. It wasn’t a good moment.
I tried to steady my pace, walking neither too fast or too slow, but it didn’t make any difference because when I got back to the car park, there were already a dozen young men standing around my car. Mostly they were the youth wing, although two familiar figures in tight grey suits were sitting on the car – Big Muff’s giant rump parked on the bonnet and Oscar Burns perched on the roof like some kind of nimble vermin. I could see the footprints on the silver paintwork where Oscar had clambered up there.
Multiple assailants, I thought. Not good. Sometimes there’s not a lot you can do. If they got me down I would just have to cover up brains and balls and wait until they got bored or tired.
They made no immediate move for me and it gave me a few moments to work out a plan. Maybe if I went down with my front towards the car I would come out of it with less damage. I sized them up, resigning myself to a good hiding, my hands curling into fists.
‘Relax, detective,’ Oscar Burns said, jumping off my car. ‘If we wanted to batter you, you’d be on the ground already.’
There was a big black Bentley parked next to the ambulance that had come to cart off the corpse of Alfie Bloom.
‘Mr Warboys wants to see you,’ Oscar said, his Essex accent hushed with reverence.
‘Paul Warboys?’
Oscar nodded. None of them were smiling now. They had this one chore to do – deliver me to the last surviving member of a generation of celebrity gangsters – and it would not look good on their CVs if they couldn’t manage it.
I walked slowly towards the Bentley. Oscar Burns opened the door for me. I slipped inside. On the far side of the back seat was an elderly man who was dressed for the beach. Tanned and fit, his thatch of thinning hair was dyed an unlikely blond, and there was elaborate gold jewellery on his thick brown arms. No tattoos.
Paul Warboys.
Friend of the Krays, rival to the Richardsons and – whatever foot soldiers like Alfie Bloom and Vic Masters might have told their literary agents – the last of the old gangsters.
‘Do you know who I am?’ he said.
I nodded. There were the Kray twins in the east, the Richardson brothers in the south and the Warboys brothers – Paul and Danny, the children of devout London-Irish Catholics – in the west.
The Warboys were always more active in the West End than the Richardsons and the Krays. Drinking clubs, knocking shops, massage parlours – Soho was on the
ir Notting Hill doorstep. The Richardsons rattled around their south London scrapyards and the Krays brooded in their East End boozers, while the Warboys brothers were sucking the juice out of Soho and its lush environs.
‘Your SIO was just inside,’ Warboys said, his accent from an older London. ‘DCI Flashman.’
I looked back at the bright lights of the Leafy Lane Retirement Community.
‘He’s not my SIO,’ I said. ‘Do you know DCI Flashman?’
‘We’ve met.’ An ironic little smile. ‘Our paths have crossed. But I was away when he was coming through the ranks at New Scotland Yard.’
‘Away? When you were doing your long stretch for removing a man’s tongue?’
‘The evidence was circumstantial,’ he said, still resentful after half a lifetime. Then he shrugged. ‘It was over for us.’ A philosophical sigh. ‘Me and my brother Danny. The Richardsons. Reggie and Ronnie. Them days. They just wanted to put us away. Any excuse to bang us up for twenty or thirty years.’
‘Like Al Capone and his tax evasion?’
‘Yeah – like that.’
‘Forgive me if I don’t get too sentimental about the good old days when everyone could leave their doors open when they were having a good old knees-up.’
He chuckled. ‘Where you from, DC Wolfe?’
‘I’m from here,’ I said. ‘Just like you. What do you want, Mr Warboys?’
‘Flashman thought – maybe still thinks – that Alfie Bloom did Vic Masters. Doesn’t he?’
‘It crossed his mind.’
Paul Warboys shook his head.
‘Alfie didn’t do Vic. He didn’t have it in him. Not any more. Because it leaves you – that killer instinct. They were done old men, Alfie and Vic. Alcohol, cigarettes and hard time – it ages you. They were both born on VE Day, did you know that? The day that Nazi Germany jacked it in. But their wars were over. Oh, if someone tried to mug them for their pensions they would have broke bones. No doubt about it. But they were not going to go out and kill anyone. I know they had their beef. And their bloody stupid memoirs didn’t help. But you don’t take anyone’s life when you’re that close to death. These are not the killing years. These are the dying years.’
I waited.
‘You know why I’m telling you this?’ he said.
‘I’m guessing that you want whoever killed Vic Masters to be arrested for murder.’
Suddenly there was a fury in his blue eyes, and I saw the violence that could give the order to remove a man’s tongue.
‘I’m not a grass,’ he said, his leathery face twisting with rage. Then he laughed. ‘Scared?’ he smiled.
I smiled back at him.
‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘You?’
He laughed.
‘Scared of what? You? The law? I’m a respectable old man. I have a nice life in Majorca half the year and the other half in Brentwood. Lovely gaffs in both places. And I’ve changed. And a man does change as he gets older. I got a degree in prison. Change – real change – it is a possibility. Will you give me that, detective?’
I shrugged. ‘Sure,’ I said.
‘But I never liked a grass. That’s why that grassing lawyer lost his filthy tongue. Still don’t. But times have changed. There’s a lack of respect for everything in this country. For our history. For our values. For the older generation. Vic Masters – who I knew for a lifetime – was a victim of all that. The lack of respect. And it’s a diabolical liberty, Detective Wolfe.’ He looked closer at my face. ‘You’re a boxing fan,’ he said. ‘I can tell. You’ve done a bit of sparring, haven’t you? Nobody’s born with a nose like yours, are they? No offence meant.’
‘None taken.’
I remembered that those old gangland faces were a generation of boys who boxed as naturally as kicking around a ball. Reggie and Ronnie Kray, Charlie and Eddie Richardson, Paul and Danny Warboys – most of the black and white photographs of their boyhood pictured them grinning in boxing kit, their skinny little ration-book frames hunched in a fighting stance.
‘There’s a gym in Whitechapel called Shadwell Amateur Boxing Club,’ Warboys said. ‘Shadwell ABC. It’s above a pub called the Saucy Leper. Heard of it, have you?’
‘I’ve heard of the Saucy Leper. A few people got shot in the face there, didn’t they? Back in the good old days when you could leave your doors wide open because nobody owned anything worth nicking.’
‘Now the Saucy Leper’s a gastro pub and tourists take their selfies next to walls that still have blood stains. You should go to the boxing gym that’s above it.’
‘Why should I?’
‘Because Shadwell ABC was the last place that Vic Masters was seen alive. The next time anyone saw him was when you found him dead in a ditch on Hampstead Heath.’
He tapped the blacked-out window and a uniformed driver slipped into the front seat.
We were done.
I went to get out of the car but Paul Warboys stopped me with a hand on the arm. How old was he? I could still feel the physical power of the man. One on one, I wouldn’t fancy my chances against him unless I got in first.
‘That’s not why I wanted to see you,’ he said.
‘Then what?’
‘I think you have a dog for me,’ he said.
8
Rescue Dog
Shadwell ABC was an old-fashioned boxing gym.
No changing room, no showers and no toilet – if you needed to answer the call of nature, you went down to the toilets in the pub below, the Saucy Leper, a cavernous boozer full of scarred mirrors and the cigarette stains of the last hundred years.
At noon the day after I met Paul Warboys, there was only a handful of hardened drinkers in the Saucy Leper, but Shadwell ABC was jumping – white-collar office workers coming in from the City, small kids in this season’s West Ham shirts shadow boxing and some of those lean old faces that had been doing this training – pad work, heavy bag, speed bag, sit-ups, press-ups, planks, burpees and all the rest – all their lives.
Shadwell ABC was an old-fashioned boxing gym in another way. It was a very friendly place. When I turned up with my kit bag and a pair of 14-ounce Lonsdale gloves, nobody looked at me twice when I did my stretching and then found myself a heavy bag. Boxing gyms are the friendliest places in the world. They have to be because you never know who you might be standing next to.
I banged the heavy bag until I was soaked in sweat and then found myself an empty spot on the floor to do sit-ups. I noticed that among the framed posters on the wall – Ali v. Frazier in Manila, Lewis v. Tyson in Memphis, Mayweather v. Hatton in Las Vegas – there was a roll call of local champions – a hundred years of schoolboys who had won boxing honours in the red and white vest of Shadwell ABC. Their names were inscribed in gold letters on large wooden plaques. There was also a small display of photographs – faded colour photos from late in the last century, and sharp black and white portraits from much earlier. After I had forced out a hundred sit-ups, I got up from the floor to take a better look, feeling the pain in my back, neck and stomach muscles. And there he was – Vic Masters, born on the day the war ended in Europe, a kid who had grown up with bombsites as his playground, grinning back at me as if we shared a hilarious secret.
An old man with a nose like squashed fruit shuffled a broom near my feet, one of those strangely placid characters that only seem to exist in boxing gyms.
‘Vic Masters trained here,’ I said.
The man with the broom nodded. ‘Vic? Man and boy.’
I looked around the gym. Although it abounded with youthful bodies – young women banging the pads, small boys and girls furiously shadow boxing, men in their twenties sparring hard in the ring – there were older faces too, moving at their own pace, swinging battered gloves into heavy bags, doing their stretching, holding on to their boxing as if it was life itself. I could see Vic in Shadwell ABC, even in his old age.
‘I’m Max,’ I said to the man with the broom.
He nodded thoughtfully. I waite
d for a bit.
‘I’m Gary,’ he said in the end.
‘Did you see Vic in here before he died, Gary?’
The man with the broom smiled gently. ‘You’re Old Bill, aren’t you?’ he said, not unkindly.
I nodded. ‘Paul Warboys told me to look around down here.’
‘Paul and his brother Danny used to come in here a bit. Until they went away. And we was always the wrong side of town for them.’
‘But Vic kept coming here. Before he went away. After he came back.’
‘Yes. In his blood, see. Shadwell ABC.’
‘He was some age to be boxing.’
‘Sixty-odd if he was a day. But hard as nails. That generation – they went through the lot.’
‘You remember anything about the last time he was in here?’
Gary fluttered his broom across the floor. ‘Bit of a row, wasn’t there.’
‘A row? That’s unusual in here, I bet.’
Up in the ring a stockbroker had just broken the nose of a banker. At the bell for the end of the third and final round they fell into each other’s arms.
‘Not many rows in here outside of the ring,’ I said.
Gary leaned on his broom.
‘Some herberts were in here. From the pub downstairs. The Saucy Leper. They’d had a few. Smoking a bit of the wacky baccy. Even in here.’ He shook his head with wonder. ‘They got in the ring and they were doing their – what do you call it? The Bruce Lee stuff?’
‘Martial arts,’ I said. ‘Some herberts from the pub came up and got in the ring and were showing off their mixed martial arts moves. And Vic Masters was training in here. What did Vic do?’
Gary held the broom to his face and giggled.
‘Vic laughed at them,’ he said.
The big black Bentley pulled into Smithfield.
We watched the car from the window. Scout and I, Stan and Bullseye. The atmosphere was subdued. It’s always hard to say goodbye to a dog.