Die Twice

by Simon Kernick

  I shook my head. ‘No, he might make a dash for it, or put up some resistance. Let’s spring it on him once we’re inside.’ I stepped forward and knocked hard on the door.

  There was no immediate answer, which was to be expected. He would now be desperately trying to hide the stuff before someone spotted him through the window. I gave him a few seconds, then knocked again. This time, I motioned for Berrin to take a look through the window, knowing that we had to play this right. I wanted McBride to see Berrin but not me (I looked too much like a copper), but I also wanted him to see him after he’d got rid of the stuff. That way he’d probably open the door.

  As it turned out, we timed it perfectly. I stood back and watched while Berrin gave him a friendly wave and a smile through the window, like a particularly enthusiastic door-to-door salesman, before receiving a muffled ‘Who the fuck are you?’ in return. Berrin just kept smiling and moved away from the window.

  By the time the front door opened a few seconds later and McBride’s head appeared round it, already mouthing abuse, we’d removed our warrant cards and were lifting them for him to see. His eyes widened momentarily and I spoke quickly before he thought about making a dash for it. ‘Mr McBride? We’re here to ask you a few questions regarding the murder of Shaun Matthews.’

  He looked nervous, which was to be expected. ‘Who?’

  ‘Shaun Matthews. I believe you worked with him on a number of occasions on the door of the Arcadia nightclub.’

  ‘Oh yeah, yeah, Shaun. That’s right.’

  ‘Can we come in?’ I said, pushing the door open and stepping confidently over the threshold like I owned the place.

  McBride tried to stand his ground, but without a great deal of success. ‘Look, it’s not a good time right now.’

  ‘It won’t take more than a few minutes,’ said Berrin, pushing his way in behind me.

  ‘Oi, you can’t come barging in like this. Don’t you need a warrant?’

  I smiled and looked him directly in the eye, an easy feat since we were only inches apart. ‘Why? Have you got something to hide, Mr McBride?’

  ‘No, course not.’

  ‘So what’s the problem?’

  ‘I’m just going out. Can’t you come back later?’

  But he spoke this last sentence with defeat on his breath, and I knew we had him.

  ‘We’ll be very unhappy if we have to come back later, Mr McBride,’ I said, ‘and we’ll be asking ourselves why you wouldn’t let us in, and that might mean we have to investigate you further.’

  ‘All right, all right, you win.’ He moved away from the door and led us through the cramped hallway and into the kitchen, well away from the room where he’d been dividing the drugs.

  The kitchen was a mess with a big pile of empty plates and cups in the sink. The tops were dirty and there was a vague smell of grease in the stale air. He leant back against one of the tops while we stood in the middle of the floor facing him. ‘Ask away,’ he said, seemingly a little more confident now. Probably thinking what he was going to tell his friends about this near miss and how stupid the coppers were for not having a clue what he’d been up to when they arrived. I decided to put a pin in his balloon and establish control immediately.

  ‘We’ll level with you, Mr McBride. This is a murder investigation, so it’s information relating to the murder that we’re interested in, nothing else. The fact that you’ve got a load of white powder hidden somewhere in your sitting room, and that that white powder’s very likely a Class A substance, and that possession of such powder with intent to supply is an offence which always ends in a substantial custodial sentence, particularly for someone who already has a lengthy criminal record’ – the blood was draining from McBride’s face and his body had tensed – ‘is not our primary concern. However, if you don’t answer our questions truthfully, then we may suddenly become very interested in that white powder and what it represents. Do we make ourselves clear?’

  McBride looked like he was weighing his options. The tension in his muscles did not bode well. Even the tattoos on his arms were rippling.

  ‘Now, you could try and make a break for it. You’re a big man, you might even make it. But then we’ll have the drugs and we’ll put out a warrant for your arrest, and you’ll get caught, and then you’re in a position one hell of a lot worse than if you simply stay here and answer our questions. Do you understand what I’m saying?’

  ‘How do I know you won’t charge me anyway, whatever I say?’

  ‘I’ve just told you why. Now let’s do this interview somewhere a bit more comfortable. Your drugs den’ll do.’ McBride started to say something but I wasn’t listening. I turned and walked back towards the front room, with Berrin in tow.

  We both sat down on the sofa and motioned for McBride to sit on a chair opposite. He did as he was told, his expression that of a man gutted to have been caught out in such a stupid way.

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘How well did you know Shaun Matthews?’

  He didn’t answer us for a couple of moments as he continued to weigh his options. I looked casually down over the side of the sofa to where the tin of gear, the individual wraps, the baking soda and the scales had been hastily stashed. It seemed to do the trick. ‘OK, I suppose.’

  Berrin consulted his trusty notebook. ‘You worked the door at the Arcadia on sixteen separate occasions in the three months prior to Mr Matthews’s death. I expect it’s fair to say that he was there on most of those occasions, as he was the chief doorman.’

  ‘Yeah, I knew him quite well. He was all right. Fancied himself a bit, but all right.’

  ‘He was the main dealer in the place, wasn’t he?’ I said.

  ‘Look, I don’t want any of this getting back to me…’

  Once again, I looked over the side of the sofa at the incriminating evidence. ‘I don’t really think you’ve got a lot of choice, Mr McBride. Not unless you don’t mind spending the next couple of years behind bars, wondering why you’re the only person left who still believes in that outdated concept of honour among thieves.’

  ‘OK, OK, yeah. He was the main dealer in the place. He ran it all on the floor.’

  ‘How did it work?’ asked Berrin.

  ‘Basically, all the doormen were dealers. Not big time, mind. But we were allowed to supply.’

  ‘By whom?’

  ‘The management.’

  ‘Roy Fowler, yeah?’

  ‘Yeah, him.’

  ‘Carry on,’ I told him.

  ‘We had the monopoly on the place. If anyone else was caught dealing in there, they got a serious kicking. What happened was that it was common knowledge among all the punters that the doormen were the people to go to when you wanted something. You couldn’t just keep going up to the entrance and asking for stuff, so if someone wanted to buy something they asked the doormen inside the building, you know, who were patrolling the dance floor and that. They didn’t usually carry anything on them, just in case it was undercover coppers, but if they were happy with the buyer, they’d give their order to Fowler or Matthews, or one of the other staff, and they’d go off and get the gear. The doorman doing the selling would pocket the cash and then, at the end of the night, everything would get divvied up. Fowler got eighty per cent of everything you sold, that was the going rate, you got the rest.’

  ‘And was business good?’ asked Berrin.

  McBride nodded. ‘Not bad.’

  ‘How much would you make in a night?’

  ‘A couple of hundred on a good one.’

  Berrin whistled through his lips. ‘That’s a lot of money, especially for the bloke taking the eighty per cent.’

  ‘Did all the doormen get an opportunity to make that much money?’

  ‘Yeah, we took it in turns to walk the club.’

  I thought about this for a moment. If McBride was to be believed the club was turning over some serious drugs cash every night. I did the sums in my head. It was more than enough to kill for.

&nbs
p; ‘The Holtzes own the Arcadia, don’t they?’

  McBride’s face experienced a passing shadow of fear. Quick, but noticeable. ‘It’s Roy Fowler, as far as I know.’

  ‘Who owns Elite A?’

  ‘Warren Case.’

  I sighed. ‘You’re not really helping us very much, Mr McBride. I know that it’s Warren Case’s name on the company’s certificate of incorporation, but I want to know who really owns it. Who takes the profits.’

  ‘I honestly don’t know. I just work for them.’

  Once again, my eyes drifted towards the drugs. ‘What is this stuff? Speed or coke?’

  ‘It’s speed.’

  ‘Looks like a fair amount of it.’

  ‘Drugs Squad’ll be interested,’ mused Berrin.

  ‘Very.’

  McBride was sweating. It might have been a hot day but his nerves were unmistakable. He knew he had to talk but the prospect was scaring him. ‘Listen, I’ve told you the truth. I don’t know who owns it. A couple of times this geezer would turn up at Elite A and come in and talk to Case, and once I saw him leaving with this big holdall. I heard him say something to Case, you know just joking, saying that he must have done well that week.’

  ‘So it’s fair to assume that the holdall contained money?’ McBride nodded. ‘But I’m a bit confused here. You said Fowler made eighty per cent of the takings and the individual doormen made the other twenty per cent. So where did all these holdalls of cash at Elite come from?’

  ‘From what I’ve been told, Fowler took the money and checked it, but he didn’t keep it all. Most of it went back to Elite.’

  ‘Which means that Elite and Arcadia were very closely linked, wouldn’t you say?’ McBride gave a very reluctant nod. ‘This man you saw at Elite’s offices, who was he?’

  ‘Jack Merriweather.’

  ‘Well, well, well.’

  Jack Merriweather. Better known, at least behind his back, as Jackie Slap, on account of his shiny Mekon-style bald pate, itself the result of a sudden teenage attack of alopecia. The story went that at the age of sixteen young Jackie had been forced to share a cell in a detention centre with a powerfully built homosexual named Lennie, and such had been the stress of having to fend off Lennie’s unwanted advances that he’d lost all his hair. At the time it had made the news, because there was a lot of controversy over the ‘short sharp shock’ method of teenage incarceration. One wag had suggested renaming it the ‘short sharp slap’, and for Jackie at least the name had stuck.

  Nobody took the piss out of Jack Merriweather any more though. Not now he was a part of Stefan Holtz’s crime organization. It also answered at least one question about who really ran things at Arcadia. Merriweather worked directly for Neil Vamen, who was one of Holtz’s closest associates, in many ways his eyes and ears in the outside world now that the big boss had become something of a recluse. I’d met Vamen once a few months earlier when we’d interviewed him after his name had come up in connection with a box of twelve Kalashnikov rifles that had been discovered at Gatwick Airport. A short, barrel-bodied individual with thinning hair and striking turquoise eyes, he was good-looking in a thuggish sort of way. And very polite, too, I remember that. Someone in CID had once said that Neil Vamen put the manners back into murder, and, I had to admit, there was definitely something charismatic about him. But, like all these blokes, you had this feeling that if you crossed him you’d pay dearly for it, and he’d been linked to more than one murder, including that of a young female accountant who knew a little too much (nothing ever proved, of course, he was far too canny for that), which to me sort of took a bit of the gloss off the image of Raffles, the gentleman gangster. It fitted with his way of doing things that he used Merriweather to collect the money. The truly successful criminals never get their hands dirty.

  ‘I presume you’re aware that Jack Merriweather works for the Holtzes?’

  ‘I’ve heard that, yeah.’

  ‘So it’s probably safe to assume that the Holtzes own Elite A and therefore almost certainly own Arcadia, isn’t it?’

  ‘Are you asking me or telling me?’ he said, using the same phrase Elaine Toms had used the previous day.

  ‘Don’t fuck us about, McBride,’ I told him coldly. ‘We’re only talking in your front room because at the moment we’re giving you the benefit of the doubt. However, so far you’ve told us absolutely nothing that we didn’t know already, so you’re still looking at a nice long spell in the nick. Now, answer my question unless you want to continue this interview down the station.’

  ‘All right, yeah, I suppose it’s safe to assume. I didn’t know for sure he owned the place … both places … but there were rumours. I don’t like to ask too many questions about that sort of thing. You know, I don’t want to get on the wrong side of Stefan Holtz.’

  I changed tack. ‘How well did you know Shaun Matthews? Honestly.’

  ‘I got on all right with him. I knew him a bit, you know.’

  ‘Did you ever socialize with him outside work?’

  McBride paused before answering, at the same time breaking eye contact with me. ‘A couple of times, yeah,’ he said eventually. ‘We was both ex-army so I think he thought we had something in common. Most of the other blokes didn’t really like him much.’

  ‘Why not?’ asked Berrin.

  ‘Well, like I said, he rated himself. Threw his weight about a bit, and he could get nasty if he thought anyone was holding back on money owed to the club.’

  ‘Did he ever upset one particular person more than any of the others? Enough to give them a motive for killing him?’

  ‘He had a run-in with one geezer, one of the permanent doormen, John Harris. John was getting a blowjob in the bogs from one of the punters when he should have been out on the floor. I don’t think it would have mattered – you know, that sort of thing goes on a lot. The birds are attracted to doormen, aren’t they?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ I said, hoping my daughter would never flutter her eyelashes at a lowlife like McBride.

  ‘But the thing was, he did it quite a lot. He was always poking the punters, sometimes two at a time, and the thing was he had, you know, staying power, so he could be at it for fifteen, twenty minutes, sometimes even longer. Which I suppose is why they liked him. Anyway, Shaun had just had enough that night so he went charging into the Gents, kicked open the door, and dragged John out by his dick. John didn’t know what had hit him – you know, element of surprise and all that – and he got a fair old slap. Broken nose, couple of black eyes. Nothing serious, but I think it was the humiliation of it. Shaun marched him through the whole club with his trousers still half hanging down, and booted him out the door. Told him to come back when he’d got his sex drive under control.’

  ‘And did he come back?’

  ‘Not after that. Well, you wouldn’t, would you? Not after someone’s taken those sort of liberties with you.’

  ‘When did this incident take place?’ asked Berrin.

  McBride shrugged noncommittally. ‘A couple of months back. Something like that.’

  Berrin and I looked at each other. We hadn’t heard about this run-in with John Harris, but then no-one at Arcadia was going out of their way to be of help. Berrin made a note in his notebook. We’d track down the sexually energetic Mr Harris later.

  ‘Did Shaun Matthews ever discuss with you any problems he had with anyone, problems that might have resulted in someone wanting to kill him?’

  McBride shook his head. ‘I know he dealt a fair bit on the side, and I don’t think he had too much in the way of respect for the punters buying off him. He told me a couple of times that he used to mix his gear pretty heavily, but he never seemed to worry too much that anyone’d come back and give him any grief about it. He said he’d just tell them to fuck off if they did. That was the thing with Shaun: he wasn’t really scared of no-one. He always thought he was hard enough to get himself out of any shit that came his way. You know what I mean?’

  I knew
exactly what he meant. Plenty of criminals are like that, too cocky to realize they’re walking on quicksand. Matthews was only the latest in a long line of those who found out too late, if they found out at all, that they weren’t as invincible as they’d thought. ‘We’re aware of one particular incident where he dangled a man by the ankles over the balcony of his flat. Do you know anything about that?’

  McBride tried without success to stifle a laugh. ‘Yeah, I remember him saying something about that one. I think the geezer was a student or something. Shaun sold him some stuff that was meant to be skunk but he’d got it cheap off some Moroccan geezer because it was so shit. Apparently, all it did was give you a sore throat. The bloke tried to get his money back and Shaun demonstrated his refunds policy. I don’t think he came back again.’

  ‘Have you got a name for this student?’ asked Berrin.

  He shook his head. ‘No. He just told me the story when we was out one night. I think he said the bloke might have gone to City and Islington, but I couldn’t say for sure.’

  ‘Did Matthews ever say anything to you about ripping off the Holtzes?’

  McBride gave me a withering look. ‘Shaun might have been a bit of a headcase, and a bit of a wanker if you’re honest about it, but he wasn’t totally fucking stupid. He wouldn’t have ripped off people like the Holtzes, and if he had, he wouldn’t have said nothing about it. Not to no-one.’

  I sat forward in my seat and stared hard at him. I don’t like getting withering looks from small-time crooks who’ve got little but not-so-fresh air between their ears. ‘You’re still not helping us much, Craig. And you’re not giving us any reason to walk out of here and forget that you’re sitting on a pile of dope that most assuredly is not for personal consumption. Are you?’

  ‘Look, I don’t know who killed him. Honest. You know, what the fuck can I do about that? I can’t make it up, can I?’

  ‘Several witnesses reported seeing Matthews with a woman with short blonde hair on a number of occasions. We think they may have been romantically linked. She certainly used to visit him at his flat. We’ve now identified her as Jean Tanner. Here’s a photo of her. Not the most flattering one, but mugshots never are.’ I took it out of my pocket and handed it to him. He looked at it quickly, then handed it back, shaking his head. ‘I’d like to think, for your sake,’ I continued, ‘that you can tell me what her relationship was with Mr Matthews.’