Hearts of Stone

by Mark Timlin

  HEARTS OF STONE

  Life as a private detective has proved too much for Nick Sharman, and when a chance run-in with a couple of young thugs secures him a job as a part-time barman, it looks as if he’s found a promising new occupation.

  Unfortunately the drug squad has other plans. With two coppers slaughtered in as many weeks, Sharman finds himself being coerced into helping track down the killers.

  All too soon he is working alongside a pony-tailed Detective Sergeant with unexpected sexual tastes, and consorting even more closely with a beautiful high-class whore who likes to be spanked… never mind some dangerously unpredictable big-spending villains.

  The perils of playing pig-in-the-middle certainly add excitement to life, but Sharman is now mixing with some very bad company, and even he cannot predict the scale of the bloodbath that will follow.

  MARK TIMLIN

  Mark Timlin has written some thirty novels under many different names, including best-selling books as Lee Martin, innumerable short stories, an anthology and numerous articles for various newspapers and magazines. His serial hero, Nick Sharman, who appears in Take the A-Train, has featured in a Carlton TV series, starring Clive Owen, before he went on to become a Hollywood superstar. Mark lives in Newport, Wales.

  ‘The king of the British hard-boiled thriller’

  – Times

  ‘Grips like a pair of regulation handcuffs’

  – Guardian

  ‘Reverberates like a gunshot’

  – Irish Times

  ‘Definitely one of the best’

  – Time Out

  ‘The mean streets of South London need their heroes tough.

  Private eye Nick Sharman fits the bill’

  – Telegraph

  ‘Full of cars, girls, guns, strung out along the high sierras of Brixton

  and Battersea, the Elephant and the North Peckham Estate, all

  those jewels in the crown they call Sarf London’

  – Arena

  Other books by Mark Timlin

  A Good Year for the Roses 1988

  Romeo’s Girl 1990

  Gun Street Girl 1990

  Take the A-Train 1991

  The Turnaround 1991

  Zip Gun Boogie 1992

  Hearts of Stone 1992

  Falls the Shadow 1993

  Ashes by Now 1993

  Pretend We’re Dead 1994

  Paint It Black 1995

  Find My Way Home 1996

  Sharman and Other Filth (short stories) 1996

  A Street That Rhymed with 3 AM 1997

  Dead Flowers 1998

  Quick Before They Catch Us 1999

  All the Empty Places 2000

  Stay Another Day 2010

  OTHERS

  I Spied a Pale Horse 1999

  Answers from the Grave 2004

  as TONY WILLIAMS

  Valin’s Raiders 1994

  Blue on Blue 1999

  as JIM BALLANTYNE

  The Torturer 1995

  as MARTIN MILK

  That Saturday 1996

  as LEE MARTIN

  Gangsters Wives 2007

  The Lipstick Killers 2009

  For Mrs Lancaster,

  who makes the best breakfast in London.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks and best wishes to:

  Simon and Cathy Keable-Elliott, India and Jessie for letting me send them to Blackpool or Blackburn or somewhere like that to open a brasserie, and letting me convert Keable’s Wine Bar into The Twist & Shout.

  Steve Woolmington and the Ford Motor Company, for the loan of a Sierra Sapphire RS Cosworth 4x4, which unfortunately I had to return.

  Adele Wainwright and Caroline Harris at Headline for coffee and sympathy.

  Kerstan Mackness for taking all the digs about Arsenal.

  And, of course, Hazel, with love.

  Three years closer. Ai No Corrida.

  Naijo No Ko.

  Arms consultant: Arms De La Chasse, London.

  1

  I shut up shop in May. I’d had enough of the detective business.

  It was no big deal. I just packed a few things in cardboard boxes, rented a garage to store them, locked the front door of the office, returned the keys to the estate agent, and paid off the lease. Simple.

  I wasn’t short of money, you understand. I had plenty. Enough, in fact, to pay off the mortgage on my flat. See, an old friend of mine had died and left me the sum of her worldly goods, including a rather pleasant terraced house in Brixton. I sold the place. I had considered living there myself, but I’ve got enough ghosts, thank you very much, without living somewhere where one more might walk the corridors on the dark midnight.

  Then my ex-wife informed me that she, her new husband, their young son, and my daughter Judith were moving lock, stock, and barrel to Scotland. Aberdeen to be precise. About as far as they could go and still be in mainland Britain. My wife’s new husband is a dentist, and apparently the teeth business is booming in that part of the world. It must be something to do with North Sea oil.

  At first I did the aggrieved parent bit. You know the sort of thing. But, as my ex calmly told me, it wasn’t as if they were leaving the country altogether. And anytime I was in the area I was welcome to pop in for a visit – I ask you. As if…

  Of course, I eventually calmed down, and we sorted out that I could see her during the school holidays and on her birthday and every other Christmas, and all that sort of malarkey. So it wasn’t too bad. After all, I’d never been much of a father to Judith and, loath as I am to admit it, she’d be better off with her mother and her stepfather, who are rather better role models than I’ll ever be. So that was that.

  I’ve shed a few tears since she left, but sometimes I think they’re much more for me than for my little girl, who’ll be a teenager soon, and would probably have grown to despise me anyway. By the time she left, it seemed that everyone else I’d ever cared for had gone too. Even my cat seemed to prefer other digs.

  I was like a ship that had lost its anchors. I floated where the times and tides took me. I went into a sort of decline. And it was nothing like I thought it would be. I didn’t sit behind closed curtains in a filthy room, unshaven and eating TV dinners and watching porn videos on the box.

  Did I, hell.

  I shaved every day. Shampooed and conditioned my hair, and checked the comb every morning to make sure I wasn’t losing too much. I flossed my teeth, hoovered and dusted every other day, did two loads of washing a week in the Zanussi, and even ironed my T-shirts.

  Every morning I took a stroll to the local café and breakfasted well, and exchanged merry banter with the staff and customers over my second pot of tea and the Telegraph crossword.

  I slept alone. Not entirely by choice. The women I met sensed there was something not right about me. Probably that was just as well. You see, sometimes I’d come awake in the middle of the night calling out a list of the dead and dying who visited my dreams.

  So that was me that summer. And as far as I was concerned, it would be me forever. But like all the best laid plans, it wasn’t to be.

  You see, life goes on.

  2

  And as life went on for me, so it went on all around me, too.

  Take the local bar that I drank in. The couple who owned it had sold up at the beginning of the year and taken themselves and their babies up north, where they opened a brasserie in Blackburn or Blackpool or somewhere like that. The old place was taken over by two ex-cabbies from east London, who decided that what was ne
eded in the area was a tapas bar and Spanish restaurant. We, the locals, decided otherwise, and the new owners lasted just over three months. At almost the same time I closed my business, the bar was bought by a redundant advertising executive named Joe Jeffries. JJ to his friends. He was forty-something, with a surfer’s haircut, a fitness fetish and a 1940s Willys station-wagon with wooden panels on the sides. He changed the name of the place to the Twist & Shout, or JJ’s as it was known locally, stuck in a fifties Wurlitzer jukebox and an illuminated Budweiser sign, but otherwise didn’t mess with the place much. That suited the locals down to the ground. We’re a conservative lot in West Norwood.

  I spent a lot of time in JJ’s that summer, as May became June, which turned into July and then an August which started hot and dry with long, boiling days and short humid nights that brought threats of water rationing on the radio, as the trees turned crisp under the unrelenting sun, and all that could be comfortably worn was T-shirt and shorts.

  Then the weather changed, and August leaked into September under a bloated leaden sky that would suddenly open without warning and let go rods of silver rain that bounced off the streets and pavements until the water ran like rivers in the gutters and carried brightly coloured litter and dog shit to block the drains.

  One day in the middle of the month, when the lunchtime crowd had left and the evening crowd hadn’t arrived yet, JJ and I were alone in the bar buying each other drinks and telling each other lies as usual. I was sitting on my regular stool at the corner of the bar in front of the big water-streaked plate-glass window and sucking on a bottle of Sol lager, and JJ was standing behind the jump, polishing a glass. The jukebox was playing a Ray Charles single, and all was right with the world. Suddenly the street door crashed open behind me and two geezers blew in, let it slam behind them, put up the CLOSED sign and pulled down the blind. I looked at them, and then at JJ, and he looked at me. One of the geezers was black, one was white, they were both young, bigger than average, and dressed in baggy street fashion. Although they could pretty well be described as average customers at the bar, average customers did not usually carry pickaxe handles. I looked over at JJ again, and he looked back at me and shrugged. I carried on drinking and he carried on polishing and we both waited for the punchline. It wasn’t long in coming.

  ‘We’re here for our money,’ said the white guy.

  ‘What money?’ asked JJ, remarkably calmly under the circumstances.

  ‘You know what money,’ said the black guy and slammed his axe handle on the counter, destroying half a dozen or so plates that JJ had washed and dried but hadn’t put away yet. ‘Mr Lasky sent us.’

  ‘Never heard of him,’ said JJ, still calmly, and placed the glass he was polishing carefully on the bar in front of him. I did the same with my bottle.

  ‘The money you pay us so that this sort of thing doesn’t happen,’ said the white guy and slammed the end of his axe handle against a particularly nasty mirror advertising a brand of Pilsner that the bar didn’t stock anymore. I for one was glad to see it go, and I wondered for a moment if these two weren’t from the good-taste police.

  ‘Or this,’ said the black guy and whacked my bottle of Sol a good’un so that it exploded and covered my nearly new Aquascutum trench coat, which I hoped made me look like Humphrey Bogart as Philip Marlowe, in a mixture of beer and broken glass. At that point I stood up. ‘Sit down, cunt,’ the black guy said, and smashed the stool next to mine into four or five pieces.

  I sat down.

  Now, if it had been a movie, JJ and I would have taken the pair of them apart and dropped them outside in the gutter and come back into the bar and had a celebratory glass each. But, being as it was real life, I sat, and JJ stood, and the two gangsters smirked at each other. Then the black guy looked at the jukebox, and tapped it gently on the glass bubble at the top with the lump of wood he was holding.

  JJ went white under his sun-lamp tan.

  ‘Leave it,’ said the white guy. Then, to JJ, ‘save yourself grief and pay up. We’ll be back tomorrow, same time. We want a ton each, and no coppers or you’ll be fucking sorry.’

  I already was. I knew it was going to be murder to get the stains out of my coat.

  The black guy ran his axe handle along the bar, sending everything on top on to the floor, then he and his partner left. I watched them get into a massive Chevrolet Blazer 4WD truck, sprayed bright red, and dripping with chrome, the black guy driving, and peel off into the traffic.

  I looked at JJ, and he looked at me yet again.

  ‘Was that for real?’ I asked.

  ‘Looks like it.’

  ‘So who’s Mr Lasky?’

  He shrugged. ‘Don’t know. Do you?’

  I shrugged back. ‘Did you know they were coming?’

  ‘If I had, I’d’ve baked them a carrot cake,’ he said.

  ‘They seemed to think you did.’

  ‘There’s been a couple of calls.’

  ‘Threatening?’

  ‘Vaguely.’

  ‘Demanding money with menaces?’

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘And you ignored them.’

  ‘I get calls from double-glazing firms. I ignore them too.’

  ‘If they start performing with those pickaxe handles near your window, maybe you’d better keep the phone numbers handy,’ I said. ‘You might be in the market for a spot of double-glazing sooner than you think.’

  He just looked peeved and said nothing.

  ‘Get me another beer, will you?’ I went over and started picking up pieces of broken glass and china from the wooden floor. ‘Got a dustpan and brush?’ I asked.

  Within ten minutes those two geezers might never have been inside the bar, except for the rapidly drying stains on my mac. We cleared up the mess, let up the blind, and turned the sign round again.

  After the equilibrium was restored, JJ said to me, ‘What do you reckon?’

  ‘I reckon you should call Old Bill.’

  ‘And end up with a set of busted windows like you said. Or worse.’ He looked over at his beloved Wurlitzer.

  ‘That’s the risk you take.’

  ‘You used to be in that game,’ he said. ‘What did you make of them?’

  ‘Wankers,’ I replied. ‘Amateur night. They didn’t even have a driver as look-out. They’re just a pair of chancers looking for an easy score.’

  ‘You want to help me out?’ he asked.

  ‘Not me, mate. I’ve finished with all that.’

  ‘I’ll buy you a new coat.’

  I shook my head. ‘I’ll put it into Sketchley’s. It’ll be fine.’

  ‘And I’ll give you a job.’

  ‘Do what? What do I want a job for?’

  ‘You spend most of your time here anyway. You might as well get paid for it.’

  That made as much sense as anything else I’d heard that afternoon. ‘How much?’ I asked. There was no harm in asking.

  ‘Assistant manager. Four and a half an hour, plus a share of the tips, a decent meal and all the women you can pull. It’s amazing how attractive they find barmen.’

  ‘And a clean apron every day?’

  ‘Every other day.’

  What the hell, I thought. It was the best offer I’d had all year. ‘You’re on,’ I said.

  ‘What’ll you do about those two, then?’ he asked.

  ‘You’ll see. I’ll come in tomorrow and deal with them.’

  When I got home I went up into the crawl-space under the roof of the house and pulled out the last reminder of my previous life. I’d kept it for old times’ sake, and this was exactly that – just like old times.

  I felt around in the dark and pulled out a Holland & Holland 12-bore Howdah pistol almost old enough to be an antique. 1913 I think it was made. For an officer in the Indian army. The Howdah is a top lever, back action d
ouble-barrelled pistol, with an eight-inch barrel, pistol grips and exposed hammers. It looks something like a sawn-off shotgun, but the last two inches of the barrels are rifled, and it fires solid cartridges that can bring down an elephant. The whole thing wasn’t much more than a foot long, weighed just over three pounds, and was sheathed in a custom-made holster with a leather bootlace threaded through two holes at the muzzle end, so that it could be fastened just above the knee and allowed the gun to be fast drawn like a revolver. The holster came with a matching belt, with leather loops to carry extra cartridges. The Howdah could be fired one-handed, but there was the risk of a broken wrist if you did.

  I’d taken the gun and holster off someone I’d met whilst working on one of my last cases. It was a good weapon and was just what I needed to put the fear of God into the pair of would-be protection racketeers I’d met earlier. There was half a dozen of the heavy, pointed shells in a box next to the gun. I took just two: they were all I’d need, and I hoped I wouldn’t actually have to use either of them. I took the gun down into my flat and dusted it off and broke it down and cleaned it, dry fired and loaded it. I put on the rig and slid the gun into its holster, and pulled on my Aquascutum. There wasn’t even a bulge to show it was there. I took off the coat and hung it up again, then unbuckled the holster and put it under the bed, and hoped that no one would come calling that evening.

  Who was I kidding? No one had come calling for months.

  3

  The next day, lunchtime, I got tooled up and went to JJ’s for a beer. He was looking a bit green around the gills when I arrived.

  ‘What’s up?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ve been thinking…’ he said.

  ‘Don’t,’ I interrupted. ‘You’ll give up everything enjoyable if you start that lark.’

  It was quiet again, being midweek, and by 3.00 pm we were all alone in the bar, just the two of us. I sat where I’d been sitting the previous day, but angled round so that I could view the street through the big window. My mac was open, hanging down and hiding the Howdah.