Body Blow

by Peter Cocks

  “You drunk?” she asked. Donnie shook his head. She softened a little as she saw his battered face, pale and pained.

  “Valerie, love,” he said. “I’ve had an accident. Can I come in?”

  Juana stepped back inside while her mother considered a moment.

  “Please,” Donnie said. “I don’t feel too clever.”

  And he collapsed in a heap on her doorstep.

  SIXTEEN

  Tony didn’t say much in the car.

  He’d sprung me from Manchester Airport a couple of hours earlier. The officers in charge seemed genuinely sorry to see me go. And it wasn’t just because they had begun to warm to me over the last two days. I think the overriding feeling was that I was their “collar”, and they didn’t like me being taken away by another agency.

  Tony Morris, or someone, had clearly done a deal higher up the food chain and allowed me to be released into Tony’s custody.

  “You’re a lucky lad,” the chief officer said to me as I left customs. “That little package would have guaranteed you a seven-year stretch.”

  The idea of a seven-year prison sentence seemed unimaginable. I’d have been twenty-five before I got out.

  “He’ll pay for it,” Tony answered him. “Don’t worry on that score.”

  I was pretty brassed off, to be frank. In my opinion, I had nothing to pay for. Apart from, perhaps, my own stupidity. Before the shooting I’d spent months living on my wits in London, hanging around some of the most dangerous criminals in the country, then ultimately had been stitched up by a one-legged scammer from Stoke.

  Tony told me we were going to call in on the mother ship. He had been in touch with her. Mum had been very worried, naturally, and when she’d found out why I’d been pulled in, her fear had turned to anger. Apparently she’d been livid, assuming I’d got involved with something illegal. She’d already lost one son to drug-related crime. So Tony had promised he’d bring me to her before he took me off God knows where.

  There were tears, of course, and once Mum had released her stranglehold on me, she hugged Tony, clearly grateful for my return.

  We spent the afternoon chatting over endless cups of tea. I told them about the boats, the work and some of Gav’s antics, and how he’d stitched me up at the airport. Mum said she’d never liked the sound of him from the start.

  Cath had gone off again, to Marrakech this time. It was evident Mum was lonely and would’ve liked me to stay, but Tony made it clear that wasn’t an option: I had to be with him under the terms of my release. But for one day we settled into the familiar routine that occurred whenever we were together. Tony and I had a quick one in the pub before going back to Mum’s for a takeaway curry.

  I wolfed down poppadoms and lime pickle, onion bhajis, stuffed paratha, sag prawn and rogan josh, aloo gobi, pilau rice. I sat back in my chair, galvanized by two cans of lager, and belched contentedly, ready for what life might throw at me next. It was like a condemned man’s last meal.

  The next morning was a different story. I felt sick with butterflies in my stomach and a sense of foreboding. A cup of tea and a bacon sarnie did little to settle my guts and I only managed half of it. Tony did some terminal damage to a full English while my mum watched us both, her face strained and worried.

  When the time came to leave, I didn’t think my mum would ever let me go – and the mood I was in, the tug of the apron strings was a powerful force. Both of us would have done anything to have kept me there.

  Tony and I drove onto the endless ringroad around Stoke in silence, which I eventually broke with some quip about how overprotective my old girl was. I didn’t really believe it; it was simply a bit of male bravado to cover up my feelings of insecurity.

  Tony’s reaction took me by surprise. He told me what a good woman my mother was, how I shouldn’t underestimate the work she’d put into bringing us up, how she wouldn’t accept help or handouts from anyone. She’d had a hard time and I should respect that.

  I considered myself told.

  We sat in silence for a while longer until Tony slipped in a CD. I looked sideways at him as he hummed along.

  “What are you thinking, Tony?” I asked. “Coldplay?”

  “It’s what young people listen to, isn’t it?”

  “Not this one,” I said. “The only good thing about that wet fart is Gwyneth Paltrow.”

  Tony laughed for the first time since we’d left and the mood was broken. “OK,” he said. “I’ll give you Paltrow, if you go for that cool preppy thing… Top ten birds.”

  Tony loved a car game. It was usually general knowledge or a pop quiz, but this was a new one.

  “Do they have to be Hollywood?” I asked.

  “Nope. Film, telly, anything.”

  “Dead or alive?”

  “Anyone you like,” Tony said. “But alive’s obviously better if you’re thinking of shagging them.”

  “OK. Scarlett Johannson.”

  “Good choice,” Tony said. His first choice was someone called Raquel Welch. Apparently she’d been in some caveman movie when he was a kid, and her fur bikini had had a lasting effect on him.

  I followed with Penélope Cruz, Anne Hathaway, Kelly Brook and Holly Willoughby.

  Tony went for Marilyn Monroe, Cheryl Cole, Christine Bleakley and, slight curve ball, Meryl Streep.

  I came back with Angelina Jolie, Gemma Arterton, Jennifer Aniston and Beyoncé.

  Tony winced at Beyoncé: she’d been his next choice.

  “Oof,” he said. “Her off ‘Mad Men’…”

  “The blonde wife?” I asked.

  “No, the big one, redhead. Christina Hendricks. She’s all woman.” It was a good counter. She was definitely all woman. “Brigitte Bardot – then, not now. Julie Christie, same. Princess of Wales, God rest … and Barbra Streisand.”

  “Barbra Streisand?” I laughed.

  “Each to his own,” Tony sniffed.

  “People used to think Mum looked a bit like Barbra Streisand when she was younger,” I said.

  Tony nodded. “Yeah, she did a bit,” he said. “Good game.”

  We wrestled over the CD choices, and after settling on a bit of Bob Marley on the M1, we hit the M25 with Queen’s Greatest Hits and found ourselves roaring along, singing about fat-bottomed girls.

  It was good to be with Tony, and for a while I felt happy again. Until we took a turning off towards Beaconsfield and I knew where we were headed next.

  SEVENTEEN

  Sandy Napier looked older than when I’d last seen him.

  He still looked as hard as nails, like the ex-marine commander he was, but his skin appeared tighter across his features, as if he was tense and under pressure. His sandy hair was showing streaks of white at the temples. His handshake was still bone-crushingly firm, though, and he didn’t appear to be angry with me. As far as I could tell.

  “Eddie Savage returns?” He raised his eyebrows in question.

  “Looks like it,” I said. I always felt I sounded like a smartarse in front of Sandy Napier.

  “Well, I’m glad to see you looking so well,” he said. “For a dead man.”

  I laughed, a fizz of excitement growing in my gut as fear ebbed away, a thrill at going back into the fray.

  “Eddie Savage” had been declared dead when I’d been shot, six months or so before, in London. The idea had been to give me time to recover; to lick my wounds and to establish a new identity … and then to work out what to do with me.

  Except that as soon as I’d been able to speak again, I’d told Tony in no uncertain terms that I didn’t want to continue working for their organization. Now, six months down the line, only just over post-traumatic stress disorder, I was back in front of Napier’s desk with a big black mark against my name.

  It appeared I had no choice in the matter.

  “Tony has filled me in on this business in Spain with the drugs and so on,” Napier said, looking at a file on his desk. “From what I know of you, I’ve taken Tony’s word that yo
u were an innocent bystander in this situation.” I nodded eagerly. “But I have to say, Eddie, you were bloody stupid to get mixed up in something so obviously suspect. Have you learned nothing since working for us?”

  I had learned plenty, but my instincts had been poor about Gav Taylor, I had to admit.

  “We had to work like stink to wrest you from the HMRC, and they, like everyone else, are driven by results.

  “Results?” I was confused.

  “Convictions.” The word hung heavy in the air.

  “Sorry, sir,” I said. “I—”

  “Given that, we also have to get those results and share them,” Napier said, cutting me off. “We have to make customs feel as if it was their intel that hooked the big fish.”

  “But I’m not a big fish, sir.”

  “You’re a bloody kipper, Savage. Stitched up, filleted and smelling fishy. But, that being the case, you might make useful bait.”

  Napier was talking in riddles. I looked helplessly at Tony for an explanation.

  “We’re going to send you back over there, kid,” Tony said. “To satisfy the HMRC.”

  “What?” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

  “Listen.” Tony put a hand on my shoulder. “Sandy’s right. You were done up good style. Someone in Revenue and Customs had intelligence on you: they’d never have stopped you otherwise. They don’t usually hang around much early morning when the low-cost punters are coming back from ‘Una Paloma Blanca’ or wherever.”

  “But Gav Taylor was the one who set me up. Why didn’t they nobble him?”

  “We think,” Sandy Napier explained, “that Taylor is a runner for someone much bigger. Someone who is prepared to see a whole kilo of cocaine go to waste to divert attention from their main haul. There’s a hell of a lot of cocaine getting into the UK via the Costa and we’d like you to sniff around, see what you can find out.”

  “We’re assuming your mate had at least four times what you had on him, if not more,” Tony said. “Did he ever take his jacket off? It was probably stuffed in the linings, strapped around his body, stuffed up his arse…”

  “Thank you, Tony,” Napier said.

  I thought back to Gav, sweating like a pig as we went through security at Málaga, remembered him going through the metal detector with his padded jacket still on, his bag through the X-ray. Spending a long time in the bogs. It was all adding up.

  “Why didn’t it show up at security then?” I asked.

  Napier rolled his eyes while Tony spoke to me patiently.

  “It didn’t show up because someone chose to ignore it,” he said. “Nobody walks through security in a padded jacket.”

  “Someone was paid to ignore it,” Napier added. “The technology is in place now to spot ten grams of cannabis resin in a toothpaste tube. All the errors that take place are human.”

  “There’ll be someone, or several people, on security in Málaga who have been bought by one of the major crime firms,” Tony explained. “The bent officer can turn a blind eye, distract his colleagues, all sorts of tricks. That’s how the gear gets through. Tons of it.”

  “And unless customs have been tipped off at this end, then the stuff slips through. Ninety-nine per cent of everything that’s caught is down to intel.” Napier tapped his head. “And someone tipped them off about you.”

  “Who?” I suddenly felt paranoid.

  “Whoever Taylor’s working for,” Tony said. “You were just the fall guy. When you go back, you might be able to find out.”

  “But they’ll recognize me,” I bleated, trying to find a way of wriggling out. Going back was the last thing I felt like doing.

  “That’s something we’ll sort out,” Tony promised. He patted me reassuringly on the shoulder. “And you’ll be here for a bit first, retraining. By the time you’re ready, not only will they have forgotten who you are, so will you.”

  Tony’s attempt at humour didn’t make me feel any better.

  “Your job,” Napier said, “is to go back there and put yourself right in the centre of this cocaine business. You were clearly pretty close already. We want intelligence on how and where it comes in, who controls it and who buys it. We have a few hunches, but we want hard evidence and inside information. When we eventually go in, we want to make sure we cut the head off the snake. Get it wrong and we do more harm than good. Comprendez?”

  “Sí, señor,” I said. I attempted a smile. I thought I knew what he meant, but whichever way, it was a big ask.

  Sandy Napier stood up and held out his hand. “Good luck, Savage,” he said. “Welcome back.”

  EIGHTEEN

  Ian Baylis was no nicer to me than he’d ever been. The fact that I had been shot and effectively killed off on his watch seemed to have no bearing on how he spoke to me. No apologies, no regrets.

  “Thought we’d seen the last of you,” he said.

  “If I’d had my way, you would have,” I said. “Nice to see you, too, Ian.”

  He smirked and gestured for me to sit. “We’re going to start some language coaching straight away,” he said. “You won’t need to be fluent. Your cover is that you’re half Spanish: Spanish father, English mother. You’ve been brought up in the UK by your mother, but you’ve picked up a bit of the lingo visiting your relatives. Have a squizz at this.” He passed me a file across the desk.

  Your name is Pedro Garcia, birthplace Valencia, 1992. You moved to London aged two. Your father left when you were six. You went to a comprehensive school in Ealing and left before sixth form to attend catering college. You dropped out after a year and worked in several London hotels and restaurants, including Sevilla Mia in Hanway Street, La Rueda in Clapham High Street, then in the upmarket Barrafina in Soho. You are keen, polite and friendly, but a little bit slow off the mark…

  “Read, absorb, remember,” Baylis instructed. “We’ll take you to these places so you can form a picture, get your backstory clear in your mind.”

  I felt myself resisting the idea of going through the whole process again. It had not been so long since I’d had to learn to be Eddie. “I don’t even look Spanish,” I said.

  “All in good time,” Baylis said. “You need to crack on with the Español before anything else.”

  The tutor was a nice guy. José Gonzáles, a short, bespectacled man from Seville – Sevilla, he said, pronouncing the v as a b.

  I knew my way around bar talk already and he was pleased when I managed a brief conversation about beer and meatballs.

  “Muy bien,” he said.

  We went through some basic grammar: how to address people without being too formal, how to ask a girl if she’d like a drink.

  “Mistakes don’t matter too much as you have been in England most of your life,” José said. “Is just a case of being relaxed, trying to communicate, is charming.”

  He gave me a long list of vocabulary to learn, mostly to do with restaurants and food; cooking terms. We worked from a GCSE textbook, all about finding your way to the skate park or swimming pool, football teams and la discoteca.

  “I’ve seen enough Spanish clubs to last me a lifetime.” I laughed.

  “You like Spanish girls?” José asked. “Beautiful … guapa!”

  He made me repeat guapa. When I said it, it sounded more like “whopper”.

  I had liked some of the Spanish girls I’d seen: beautiful, distant and dignified, walking around the port with their friends at night. They would stop for the odd café con leche or chocolate caliente, never drunk, never lairy. In truth, most of the girls I’d met in the clubs that Gav Taylor had hauled me around were English. They were of a type: poker-straight blonde hair and make-up designed to be worn in ultraviolet light. Scary in daylight. They were usually full to the brim with Smirnoff Ice and shots; hooters spilling out of lycra tops and lip-glossed mouths ready to snog at the drop of another drink.

  I tried to get my mind back on the grammar.

  “Is enough for today,” José said. He could see that my con
centration was wandering. “The most important thing … muy importante … is to listen and comprehend. You must understand. That way you will get information, but both the British and the Spanish will treat you as stupid and forget themselves when you are around. Act dumb, amigo.”

  I went back to Ian Baylis’s office armed with textbooks, dictionaries and voice-coaching CDs.

  “Qué tal?” Baylis asked in heavily accented Spanglish.

  “Bien, gracias,” I answered, with a slightly better accent.

  “Good. Bien.” Baylis sat down at his desk and flicked through my file. “You’ll be glad to know that I’m no longer your case officer by the way,” he said.

  “Oh?” I was wary. As much as I was inwardly cheering, he was the devil I knew. Another case officer might be even worse.

  “Why?” I asked politely. I thought I should show at least a glimmer of regret.

  “I requested not to be.” He brushed his hand across his crinkly hair and pursed his thin lips. “As you know, I was never keen on bringing you on board in the first place.”

  I nodded at the understatement. But the put-down hurt. I had laid my life on the line in his service. I felt bolder. “So what exactly is it you don’t like about me, Ian?”

  “Apart from your age?” He considered. “I think you’re something of a loose cannon. I’m a bit old school. I was recruited after my degree. A first. Then the master’s degree.” I noticed him swell slightly with pride.

  “What were your degrees in?” I acted interested.

  “Politics, history and postgrad engineering,” he said smugly. “Top of my year. I went straight into the service and spent my first two years analysing data at HQ.” He found something to underline heavily in pen on my file. “Then another year sitting in a darkened room in Sarajevo, listening to the conversation of lunatic politicians and warlords planning – and succeeding despite our best efforts – to wipe out whole villages of young Muslim men.”

  “Heavy stuff.” I didn’t know what else to say.