‘You do believe I’m innocent, don’t you?’ Sami asked him.
‘Mr Macbeth, I’d still believe in Santa Claus if he hadn’t stopped leaving me presents.’
‘Can’t you plead it down?’
‘What would you like - pissing in a phone box?’
‘Can you do that?’
‘I’m being sarcastic, Mr Macbeth. Take the deal.’
‘I didn’t steal anything.’
‘Possessing stolen property is a serious offence.’
‘I didn’t possess the stuff. I didn’t even know it was in the van.’
‘Then it’s another shining example of you being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Take the deal.’
The courtroom was Victorian, huge, high-ceilinged and panelled with wood. The wigged judge told Sami to stand. Then he started talking about how society had to be protected from miscreants like the accused.
He can’t mean me, thought Sami.
Nadia was crying in the public gallery.
Five years. Sami felt numb. They led him downstairs, handcuffed to a policeman. Outside there was a coach waiting to take him to jail. He had a number. He was in the computer. He was part of the vast human cargo system, silent and unseen, shuffling men around Britain, from one prison to the next. First it was Wormwood Scrubs, then Parklea, then Leicester before going back to the Scrubs.
Sami was scared that first night. He knew all the stories about prison bullying and the gangs; the prison sisters, the bikers, the sadistic screws.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the exercise yard. Sami was minding his own business, trying not to make eye contact with anyone, when a big fucker approached and offered him a cigarette.
The guy called him ‘Sparkles’. It became Sami’s nickname.
Sami had a rep. The cons thought he was a jewel thief. Not just any jewel thief, but the man who had broken into the biggest, baddest safe in the world. He had peeled it like a banana, stripped it like an engine, opened it like a tin of sardines.
And that’s how Sami managed nearly three years inside without getting any aggro or becoming someone’s bitch. Other newbies were worried about lights out or bending over for the soap, but not Sami; he was treated as an equal by geezers who would normally have kicked his body around the yard for the fun of it.
In spite of his newfound reputation, Sami learned there was nothing fraternal about the criminal fraternity. The only thing that mattered was the fear you engendered or the respect you were given. Either you were a ruthless fucker or you had a skill.
Sami unwittingly, accidentally, fraudulently, had a skill. He was a cat burglar, a safe breaker, a master craftsman, one of the elite.
Even so, he made sure he played down this talent. He did his time as quiet as possible. Kept away from the sex cases and nonces. Didn’t associate with any of the serious heavies or complete nutjobs. Ninety five per cent of all cons were complete morons with IQs that didn’t match their shoe sizes, which is why they were always getting caught.
Sami is out. Free. ‘Sparkles’ is deader than Andy Palmer. And no matter what else happens in his life, he’s never going back inside. You can bank on it.
Sami walks out of the Underground and looks for the familiar. Ton-of-Brix is not a place you fall in love with, it’s a place you survive. That’s what his father used to say, which is ironic since he’s dead now.
Nothing much has changed about Brixton, as far as Sami can tell. It’s still full of two-up two-down terraces, in narrow streets that are grim and grey and devoid of colour. The corner shops are bolted with steel shutters, padlocked and alarmed, with razor wire on the rooftops.
Middle-class mortgage slaves who couldn’t afford Balham and Clapham have tarted up some streets, planting flower boxes and painting terraces in pastel colours so that local teenagers with spray cans have a better canvas.
Sami used to love the place - just like he loved London. Not any more. It reminds him too much of a prison without the walls and the lousy food.
When he gets to Nadia’s flat, he checks his reflection in a neighbour’s window, wishing he could have cut his hair. A woman answers when he knocks. She is mid-thirties with a pie-plate face. Sami looks past her, expecting to see Nadia.
‘Who are you?’
‘I live here,’ she says. ‘Who are you?’
Sami looks at the number on the door.
‘Where’s Nadia?’
‘Who?’
‘My sister.’
‘How would I know?’ She tries to close the door. Sami spots cardboard packing crates and bulging plastic bags in the hallway behind her. She’s just moved in.
‘The woman who was here - did she leave a forwarding address?’
‘No.’
‘Did she say where she was going?’
She tries to stop Sami looking past her.
‘I had some stuff here,’ he says. ‘Clothes, CDs, a TV.’
‘Place was empty.’
‘I had a guitar.’
‘Ain’t seen no guitar.’
‘A Gibson Fender.’
‘Who’s he?’
Sami can hear Oprah in the background. He pushes past the woman into the living room. She’s not happy. Screaming. Hurling abuse. Says she’s going to call the police, the landlord, the social …
‘That’s my TV,’ says Sami.
‘Prove it!’
‘How do I do that?’
‘I bought it off the landlord,’ she says, defensively. ‘It was confiscated. Unpaid rent.’
Sami looks at her hands, which are twisted with arthritis. He’s on shaky ground. Two hours out of prison and he’s already breached parole.
Nadia has lost the flat. She wouldn’t move without telling him. She’d leave word.
4
Ruiz settles onto a tube from Baron’s Court. He never drives into Central London these days - not since the congestion charge. He’s not opposed to road tolls or traffic fines as long as someone else is paying them.
The train moves through tunnels that pop his ears, before emerging into the light and disappearing again.
Peak-hour is over. The men in suits are in their offices. Not all wear suits these days. Some wear jeans and chinos. What do they do, wonders Ruiz? Sit in front of screens. It seems a poor substitute for hunting and gathering.
There’s no romance in office work. No thrill of the chase. Ruiz was at a rugby dinner a few weeks back, sitting at a table with fifteen men. Successful professionals. A new-comer among them was asked what he did for a living. He said he made concrete blocks.
The conversation petered out. Nobody knew what to say. Then Ruiz pointed out that this guy was the only person at the table who actually made something. The rest of them shuffled paper, traded futures, negotiated deals, added value and took their margins. They didn’t build anything, or save anyone, or make a mark on the world other than on a balance sheet.
Ruiz felt guilty about being too critical. There was no romance in police work either. That’s why he retired - jumped before he was pushed or became an exhibit in the Black Museum.
At Regent’s Park he emerges from below ground and walks to Harley Street. Today is his annual medical. It normally falls on either side of his birthday, but this year the dates have aligned.
He sits in the waiting room. Picks up a magazine. It’s one of those celebrity rags full of paparazzi photographs and ‘at-home-with’ specials where TV stars announce how happy they are together and you know they’ll be divorced within six months.
Ruiz is about to toss it back onto the coffee table when he notices a shot of Ray Garza, smiling at the cameras from the red carpet at Covent Garden. He is hosting a charity performance by the National Opera in aid of spina bifida. There are more shots over the page. Garza is mingling with the great and the good. The cast. The artistic director. The Arts Minister. Celebrities.
The media nicknamed him ‘the Chairman’ years ago and the name has stuck. It’s almost like Garza plays up to it, dressing in charcoal grey
suits, bright ties, and never being photographed without a cigar in his fist, unlit.
Three years after Jane Lanfranchi died, Garza married a society girl with a double-barrelled surname whose father had inherited a pile in Wiltshire but had to sell it to the Government in lieu of death duties. Garza rescued the old man when the only thing he had left was a few hereditary peerages that he was trying to flog off to rich Americans. Garza took over one of the titles: the Earl of Ipswich. It must look impressive on a business card.
Garza wasn’t always a wealthy man. He started out as a soldier - an officer, who specialised in logistics and transport. As such, he understood supply and demand and the importance of being able to move quickly.
A lot of legends have grown up around the Chairman. Not all of them are true - but what’s not in dispute is how he made his first million. Garza helped liberate Kuwait in the first Gulf War and was on hand when the Iraqis were pushed back across the border.
The world saw smoking convoys of vehicles, charred wreckage of luxury cars that had been looted from Kuwait and bombed by Allied planes as they fled across the desert. But that was only some of the stuff. Hundreds of luxury cars were abandoned. Untouched. Mercedes, BMWs, Jaguars and Bentleys were left sitting in the desert, the keys still in them.
There was more. Convoys of trucks full of computers, washing machines, air conditioning units and Mont Blanc pens. The Iraqis looted everything that wasn’t bolted down and the Kuwaitis didn’t want the stuff back. Oil drilling equipment, earthmovers, yachts, helicopters, private jets - Garza found a way of shipping them out of Kuwait.
He finished the job the Iraqis started. He looted Kuwait, stealing from rich oil sheiks, who were so relieved to have their country back they didn’t give a shit about a few missing cars or boats or planes.
Nobody raised an eyebrow. Nobody turned a hair. The only hint of scandal came when a UK Sunday paper did an exposé about an armour-plated Mercedes, specially built for the Kuwaiti Minister for Trade, which somehow finished up under the hammer at a car auction in Croydon.
For Ray Garza it was just the beginning. He left the army and soon he was moving massive shipments of hardware out of countries in the midst of war, famine or caught up in Africa’s perverse interpretation of ‘democracy’.
Questions were asked in Parliament. MI6 took an interest. Nothing stuck. Whenever Garza looked shaky he managed to walk away. Witnesses disappeared. Cast iron cases crumbled. One Spanish middleman jumped off Waterloo Bridge with bricks in his pockets. A junior accountant changed his testimony, spent six months inside and that same year bought a sixty foot yacht.
Meanwhile, Garza launched himself on society. He transformed himself into a patron of the arts, a media darling, the orchestrator of a thousand publicity stunts involving pretty girls in short skirts.
Garza suddenly had a finger in every pie. They were La Maison pies. River Café Pies. Savoy Grill pies. They were the dog’s bollocks and the bee’s knees of pies. He was dining at the head table, supping with the great and the good and the morally bankrupt.
His chequered past, the question marks over his business dealings, nothing seemed to matter. Not even the distant scandal of a rape allegation and a troubled teenager who threw herself off a tower block in Hackney.
A receptionist interrupts. Ruiz looks up from the magazine. Dr Reines will see him now. He tosses the rag aside and stares at the newsprint on his fingers, wanting to wash it off.
The doctor asks him to sit on the examination table. Takes him through the normal checks. Blood pressure, cholesterol, finger up the bum … Having his prostate checked always reminds Ruiz of a joke about knowing you’re in trouble if your doctor checks your prostate and has both his hands on your shoulders.
Doctor Reines is telling him horror stories about fat-choked arteries and how people his age are dropping like flies. Then comes the lecture about him exercising more: walking or swimming - six laps of a pool or two miles on foot.
He listens to Ruiz’s heart. It’s strong. A champion’s heart. A thoroughbred. Everything else about his body is turning to shit, but his heart is going strong.
Dr Reines asks after Ruiz’s mother.
‘How is her Alzheimer’s?’
‘She has good days and bad.’
‘Does she still think I’m Josef Mengele?’
‘She thinks all doctors are Josef Mengele.’
Ruiz’s mother, Daj, doesn’t live in the present any more. Most of the time she’s reliving the war, escaping from the Gestapo and SS, surviving the concentration camps.
Daj met Mengele once. He was standing on a ramp in dress uniform and polished black boots. He wore white cotton gloves and held a cane, directing a sea of exhausted and starving women and children either left or right.
A handsome man, Daj said. Cold. He looked like a gypsy with dark hair, dark eyes and tawny skin. ‘Perhaps that’s why he hated us so much,’ she said. ‘He was purging the world of the things he hated about himself.’
Ruiz leaves the doctor’s surgery and takes a bus to Victoria, before walking along Vauxhall Bridge Road. He has another appointment, another annual check-up.
Every year on his birthday, he has a beer with an old mate from the Met, his former second-in-command at the Serious Crime Group, Colin ‘Bones’ McGee.
McGee was a rising star when Ruiz first met him - one of the university graduates they fast-tracked through training and nudged upstairs after the Flying Squad got disbanded. He topped his class at Hendon, made Detective Sergeant at thirty and Detective Inspector at thirty-five. Then his wings fell off.
It was 2002 - a sting operation involving twelve million quids worth of cocaine found in a shipping container in Rotterdam. McGee took the decision to leave the container on board and let the ship sail for Felixstowe. He ran the surveillance operation.
Can you see what’s coming? The drugs vanished. Not a trace. Maybe the haul got tossed into the North Sea. Maybe it was never on board. It was all supposition and it didn’t wash with McGee’s bosses. That’s when he got the nickname Bones because his career was dead and buried.
Since then Bones has been treading water with the Specialist Crime Directorate, tracking assets and chasing paper trails. It’s a dead end job because no serious player will ever hold assets in their own names. They hide behind shelf companies and dodgy corporations based in the Bahamas and the Caymans.
Ruiz doesn’t particularly like Bones. Never has. He was always a little too ambitious. Too grasping. But when he left the job, Ruiz handed over his old files - including the Lanfranchi case. He asked Bones to keep an eye on it … just in case.
They meet at a pub on Vauxhall Bridge Road. Union Jacks hang from the rafters.
Bones is at a table drinking single malt. He’s lost his boyish innocence, thinks Ruiz - a receding hairline will do it every time - but he still dresses sharply in grey trousers, Italian loafers and a jacket. His copper-coloured hair - dyed most likely - is combed straight back on his scalp.
‘How’s it hanging, Vincent?’
‘I’m good, Colin.’
They swap small talk. Retirements. Promotions. Prostate cancer. There’s twenty years between them - almost a generation - but the job doesn’t change, only the rules.
Eventually the talk gets around to Ray Garza. It’s been years since there was any news on the Lanfranchi case. At past meetings, Bones has made shit up to keep Ruiz happy and Ruiz knew it, but this year he has something fresh, something new, something hot off the press.
‘Ray Garza’s boy got busted two nights ago after a high speed pursuit. They found eight kilos of cocaine in the boot of his Porsche and a semi-automatic, which he waved around at the coppers. Took a shot.’
Ruiz ponders the information. Garza’s son - Ray Jnr - how old is he now? Out of school. Nineteen. Twenty tops.
‘It’s a commercial quantity,’ says Bones. ‘The kid’s going down.’
‘Where is he now?’
‘Spent last night in the Scrubs. He�
��s in court today.’
Bones continues talking, spinning a story about the Specialist Crime Directorate offering Ray Jnr a deal if he turns on the old man. It’s not going to happen, thinks Ruiz. Junior won’t bite the hand that feeds him - not unless he has bigger ambitions. But it still warms his heart to think of Ray Garza losing sleep over his precious boy.
Ray Jnr wasn’t even born when his father raped Jane Lanfranchi and chewed open her cheek. Ruiz always thought Garza should have had a daughter. That way he could have worried when she turned sixteen and went out at night. Wondered about where she was and whom she was with. Hopefully, he’s worried sick now.
‘What about the Lanfranchi case?’ he asks.
Bones shrugs.
‘Any similar rapes?’
‘Nope.’
‘Any missing women with links to Garza?’
‘Can’t you forget the fucking Lanfranchi case for once?’ says Bones. ‘It’s old news. Ancient bloody history.’
Ruiz ignores him. ‘Garza likes the wholesome girl-next-door types. Suburban princesses. He thinks they’re hiding their true natures.’
Bones shakes his head. ‘You’re fucking obsessed. I’d get more sense talking to the wall.’
‘And less whisky,’ says Ruiz swallowing the last of his Guinness.
There’s a moment of friction. Bones wants to tell him to fuck off, but something about Ruiz’s silences has always unnerved him.
‘I’m just giving my opinion, Vince. You don’t have to take it,’ he mutters, speaking slowly like he’s talking to a child. ‘There’s a bail hearing today. Police are going to oppose because Ray Jnr took a shot at a copper.’
‘He’ll walk.’
‘Yeah. Maybe. But it’s going cost Daddy big time.’
‘Where’s Garza now?’
‘He flew in from Geneva this morning. Smart money says he’s going to be in court. Media haven’t got wind of this yet, but the storm’s coming.’
Ruiz takes another sip of beer. Maybe today won’t be such an anticlimax after all.
5
Sami has called Nadia’s friends, her workmates, and talked to her old neighbours. Nobody has seen her. She hasn’t been at work for three days. Didn’t call in sick. Didn’t hand in notice.
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