Body Blow

by Peter Cocks

  I saw Juana turn round and look at me from the open car door, smiling, white teeth, beautiful face frozen, caught in the moment.

  Then watched as she turned the key in the ignition and blew herself to bits.

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  Donnie was no fan of sailing boats. He’d not actually been on the water since he’d been here. The sea was for paddling hot feet in and for diving in as a temporary hangover cure.

  Or for dumping bodies in.

  He even felt a little nauseous just walking along the pontoon, feeling it bounce underneath his heavy step. It was still early, after all. As much as he dreaded the boat, he knew that flying was out of the question. Too many questions. It would only be a couple of days of misery and then he could put his feet up and spend a few quid on a proper beano.

  He found the boat at the end of the furthest pontoon. Dave Slaughter was on deck.

  “Don,” he said. He held out his hand.

  “Dave,” said Don. He took the hand, shook it, then used it to step daintily over the taffrail onto the deck. Dave patted his back and gave Donnie a look he’d not seen for a long time.

  Respect.

  There was no doubt about it. In the last day or two, among those in the know, his rep had gone sky-high. But Donnie knew that really it was a case of either him or the other bloke. If Donnie hadn’t accepted the job, there would have been a bullet in his own head. His audacity had paid off. It was both payback and a show of loyalty to the real guv'nor.

  And now he finally felt like he was properly back in the game.

  Half an hour later, Donnie stowed the gun below, underneath the bunks with the rest of the gear: five hundred keys of blow, give or take a gram or two. Donnie didn’t need to know the details of how, where or who had managed to cop the biggest shipment of cocaine he had ever seen. The logistics were left to cleverer minds than his. He had been given a simple but high-risk task, and had pulled it off old-style.

  He changed into shorts and sat back out on deck. Shirt off. They motored out of Benalmádena in the quiet of the morning, and not without a pang of regret, Donnie watched the sun shimmering over the place that had been his home for the past year.

  But at least he was alive.

  The sea was calm enough not to make him feel Moby Dick and he and Dave enthusiastically accepted the large vodka and tonics that Carlos, late of Jubarry's, brought up on deck.

  Carlos had turned out to be very useful all round: free with his tongue, easily bought and the mixer of a mean drink.

  An hour later, they turned into the coast again, towards a town called Nerja. They dropped the anchor and drifted for a while.

  “Why we stopping, Dave?”

  “We’re picking him up,” Dave said.

  “Oh no,” Donnie said. “I didn’t know that was part of the deal.”

  “Nor did I,” Dave admitted. “Only got the order last night. From the top.”

  Donnie started to feel a bit gippy, bobbing on the waves. He looked to the coastline to try and fix his eye on the horizon to even things up. He caught sight of an inflatable dinghy with an outboard motor, buzzing through the waves towards them. As it came closer, he could see the familiar blond mullet and colourful shirt.

  Minutes later, he was catching a rope thrown by Terry Gadd and hitching the dinghy to the back of their boat.

  “Good morning, ladies,” said Gadd, hauling himself aboard.

  He seemed in good spirits, Donnie thought – as might any villain who’d pulled off a twelve million quid coke sting under his boss’s nose.

  “Good morning so far, anyway. Everything going like clockwork, just got a ding.” He mimed an explosion with his hand, then looked at his Rolex. “With the wind behind us, we should be in Majorca in time for a beer tonight.”

  “Be nice,” Dave said. “The trip over was pretty easy.”

  Carlos put his head above the hatch. “Mallorca?” he asked.

  “It’s pronounced Merjorker,” Gadd said.

  Carlos came out on deck and looked around him. “No, it’s not that,” he said. “I thought you said I would go to Tangier.”

  Gadd pretended to look puzzled. Tutted. “If I said we were going to Tenerife, you’d want to go to Elevenerife, Carlos. Joining the awkward squad, are you?”

  “I just need to go to Tangier. I have arranged it all.”

  “Have you? Oh dear. Well, you’ll have to change your plans.”

  “But this is not the deal. I have done so much for you, Señor Gadd.” A pleading note crept into Carlos’s voice. “Please just give me my money and drop me off.”

  Donnie watched Gadd’s face as a familiar expression crept over it; a tightening around the mouth, nostrils flaring.

  “Drop you off?” Gadd repeated. “OK, OK, I’ll get your money and drop you off. Tell you what, you take that dinghy and you can go ashore from here – or motor all the way to Tan-friggin-gier if you want.”

  “It’s a long way,” Carlos protested.

  “Get in the dinghy,” Gadd ordered.

  Donnie nodded and helped Carlos climb over the steps in the stern and down into the dinghy where he wobbled, trying to get his balance. Gadd reappeared with a plastic holdall.

  “Here’s your pay-off, you sad shit,” he shouted down to Carlos, and pulled a long automatic pistol from the bag. He threw the empty holdall at Carlos.

  Carlos could see what was happening and Donnie watched as he hopelessly tried to catch the bag, then protect himself with his bare arms. It was like shooting fish in a barrel.

  “No!” Carlos screamed as Gadd put the first shot into his belly. Carlos doubled up as blood spread across his white vest. He screamed again as a second bullet pierced his leg and again as a third went into his flailing arm. The dinghy began to deflate as the stray bullets burst it. Donnie turned away, saw the pleasure on Gadd’s face as he shot more bullets into a screaming Carlos, finally putting one into his head that threw him backwards into the sea.

  Donnie had seen and done some bad things in his career, but this time he knew he really had done a deal with the devil.

  Gadd unhitched the deflating dinghy, then grinned at Dave and Donnie as Carlos’s body floated in their wake.

  “Buenas noches, señorita,” Gadd sang tunelessly. “Now, are you just going to sit there or are you going to get me a drink, Don?” he asked. He held out his hand.

  “You done a good ’un. No hard feelings?”

  FIFTY-NINE

  “Juana Carmel Ruiz Ortega,” Tony Morris said.

  He pushed the photograph across the table for me to see. It was Juana all right. A few years earlier, hair a little shorter. Every bit as pretty.

  I felt my throat constrict and another lurch of emotion heave through my chest. I wasn’t going to cry. My crying had been done.

  I’d howled while chunks of windscreen had been pulled from my chest and face with tweezers. I’d cried as, sedated, I’d been put on a flight from Málaga, where Anna and two armed security men had picked me up at the other end and taken me to a safe house. I’d cried as the image of the red door of the Alfa spinning across the street replayed in my mind, along with the other images burned in my brain; of Juana’s dismembered hand, landing palm up at my feet.

  I made myself look at the passport-sized photo again, paperclipped to a formal certificate from a dossier. Tried to take in the words that were printed in English and Spanish alongside.

  Dead. Muerto.

  Tony rubbed his hand over his cropped head, uncomfortable in the face of my grief.

  “I’m sorry, I really am. She was an innocent bystander, mate. We checked her background as soon as you looked at her. Her old man was inside, for drugs-related stuff, but she and her mum had moved on. Starting again, trying to make a life for themselves. She just got caught in the crossfire; another casualty in the drug wars down there.”

  I knew the implication: Juana had got involved in it all because of me.

  Me. I’d pursued her, gained her confidence. Duped her.<
br />
  I looked up. Tony was watching me, his eyes full of that paternal sympathy that only he seemed able to generate. Anna, sitting next to him, was staring at the table.

  “Her death was accidental, Eddie. She wouldn’t have known you were a plant, and of course you would have said nothing to make her think you were. You played it well.”

  A hot flush of guilt overrode my already fragile state. Of course, I had admitted, once I’d got comfortable with Juana, that I was gathering intel, although I’d only told her half the truth. Her involvement, and her death, were down to me. My own need for emotional support, for love, had resulted in the death of a beautiful girl. The car bomb, whoever had planted it, had been meant for me. I wished it had been me.

  I said nothing.

  “I think she really liked you, Eddie,” Anna said. She cocked her head to one side, the kind of mechanical sympathy only Anna could summon up.

  “Trouble is,” Tony added, “the more people you get involved, the more leaky the whole barrel of biscuits gets.”

  Despite myself, I almost laughed.

  “You just don’t know who’s talking to whom. The gossip goes around the bars, the clubs, it all gets back.”

  I felt sweat pouring down my back as it began to dawn on me that maybe, despite all my hard work, I’d been the weak link, the leak that had messed up the operation. I’d got comfortable talking to Juana, to her mum, to Carlos, to Donnie even. God knows what I’d let slip. Maybe I was shit at the job I’d been given.

  Shit at keeping it all to myself and keeping it in my pants.

  “The car bomb was meant for me, right?” I asked.

  “Don’t know,” Tony said. He glanced at Anna. “Probably.”

  They looked at one another. Then, as if to let me off the hook, Tony said, “This doesn’t go outside this room. But Napier has suspended Ian Baylis.”

  “He didn’t manage to find his Serbian warlord?” I offered.

  “The Serbian was Ian’s big idea,” Tony said. “Do you know what I mean by disinformation?”

  I shook my head.

  “It means planting material to make people think that something is going on when it isn’t … to divert them, to rattle them, to make them change their plans – and ultimately slip up.”

  “How?” I asked.

  “For instance,” Anna put in, “we got a team in dressed as binmen to pick up Gav Taylor’s body.”

  I winced at the memory. Remembered Juana saying there had been a commotion out back.

  “We had to do a post-mortem for your protection. You didn’t need a manslaughter rap against your name as well. For your information,” Tony went on, “his skull was so thin around his head injury, a well-placed punch could have killed him.”

  It didn’t make me feel a great deal better.

  “But we kept the body on ice,” he went on. “So when it looked like it was getting sticky for you, we were able to ditch the body in the harbour with information about the drop to make it look like he was the one who’d grassed them up. They used to do it in the war. Drop bodies in the Channel with fake invasion plans, which the Germans would get when the body washed up.”

  I was sometimes really impressed by the lengths this organization went to, this time on my behalf.

  “Thanks,” I said. I meant it. “So where does the Serbian fit in? No one ever saw him.”

  “That takes us back to the disinformation,” Tony said. “It’s Ian’s area of expertise. He had this idea of creating a fictitious villain who would scare the shit out of everyone, mostly because they couldn’t see him. Ian has spent two years putting out text messages and emails from this Dragomir Radic, issuing false newspaper reports about his war crimes, spreading rumours in the bars, handing out pictures of the bloke, his legend getting bigger as the rumours spread.”

  “And it worked.” I was amazed by Baylis’s cunning. “It certainly rattled Patsy Kelly.”

  “Up to a point,” Tony said. “But Ian’s a very logical guy. He thought everything would fit into place like clockwork. He doesn’t really understand how criminal minds work when they’re fuelled by twenty-four-hour drinking and enough cocaine to sink Colombia. They get paranoid, violent, jumpy and schizo. Unpredictable.”

  I knew the type.

  “Plus, Ian wasn’t sharing his intel with everyone. He’s an ambitious bloke and wanted the big collar for himself – and, as you know, he jumped in too early with the information you fed him. He got overexcited and cocked up.”

  I felt guilty all over again. Who would have known that I would be feeding duff information back to Baylis?

  “I’m sorry if any of this is my fault,” I said.

  “That’s the trouble with this stuff, mate,” Tony said. “It’s not easy to place the blame. Once one phase is over, it raises a whole new set of questions. It doesn’t stop. Most of these cases are a mixture of successes and failures. So, on the positive, you’re still with us and there’s one less Kelly knocking around – but there’s still a massive haul of cocaine entering the market that we didn’t manage to nab.”

  “I’m sorry about Juana, Eddie,” Anna said.

  I felt my nose fizz and I tried to speak, but my voice came out as a strangled sob.

  Tony looked away, embarrassed. “Operation cock-up closed, until the enquiry,” he said. He rubbed a hand over his forehead and scratched the back of his neck. “I need a drink. And you, mate, need a rest.”

  Anna slid the box of tissues back across the table.

  I did need a rest, a long one, and although Anna and Tony had tried to make me feel like I had done my best, I still felt like I’d failed. I’d been sloppy. I’d got involved again, and allowed myself to get hurt. I grabbed a tissue and dabbed at the tears that were running down my face.

  I looked up again at Tony, scratching his armpit, and Anna, chewing her lip, putting her papers together and heading off for another lonely night, and thought to myself that all of us have our weaknesses.

  Nobody’s perfect.

  EPILOGUE

  I’ve had very few callers at the new flat. I’m not even allowed to say where it is for the moment, but it’s safe to say I’m back in London, pretty central.

  It’s a good spot. I can get out at night or get a Tube to another part of the city, where I can disappear among the crowds in a club or a pub.

  Anonymous.

  I might talk to someone, chat to girl, but I keep it light. I’m not ready to make friends with anyone. Let alone get involved.

  I’ve had some more counselling, for what it was worth. Spent a little time back at the old girl’s, but that depressed me even more. So when they asked me where I wanted to live, I asked to be in the thick of things. You can really be hidden away in London.

  Like I say, I’ve had few visitors, so when Tony turned up at eleven one morning I was surprised. I’d only just got up. If I can’t sleep at night, I go out and walk the streets, across the parks. Sometimes I don’t get back until it’s light.

  “You look rough, mate,” he said. Then he stepped inside and hugged me. It felt strange and welcome at the same time. I don’t think anyone had touched me since I’d last kissed my mother goodbye.

  I made us a cup of tea while Tony mooched around the flat, picking up books I was reading and flicking through them aimlessly.

  “I worried about you when you didn’t answer your phone,” he said.

  “I switch it off most days,” I admitted. “So?” I prompted. I handed him a mug and he sat down at my small kitchen table.

  “So,” he said. “I needed to contact you.”

  “Why?”

  He looked down at the table and wiped up sugar granules with his finger. “For your own safety.”

  I felt a familiar sensation in my gut. Uncomfortable; fearful. “What do you mean?”

  “He knows you’re alive.”

  “Who does?”

  “Tommy Kelly.”

  “How?”

  “We’re working on that. We sent someon
e to see him in Belmarsh. He requested it. He knows you’re alive and back over here.”

  The information jolted me out of myself. “So do I have to move again?”

  “No, he doesn’t know where you’re living. It’s weirder than that. He wants to see you.”

  “What?”

  “He’s asked our contact to find you and he wants to see you.”

  My guts tightened further. I suddenly felt small and afraid.

  “What do you think I should do?” I asked after a pause.

  “I think you should go and see Tommy Kelly.”

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  With thanks to Mark Billingham for continuing to be a sounding board for wobbly plot points, and for his continued friendship and support in all areas. We both enjoyed pulpo a fiera outside a bar in Benalmádena and both used it in books. Thanks to the chef.

  To Sarah Lutyens for wise words, to Gill Evans for her faith in Eddie and me, to Emma Lidbury for making me look as if I can write…

  And to secret policeman “Special Branch Paul” for his undercover stories, anecdotes and insights, all delivered with beer and the utmost discretion.

  Peter Cocks was born on the banks of the Thames in Gravesend. As a boy he boxed, sang in a church choir and won a Chopper bike. As an adult he’s worked as a silk screen printer, shop assistant, manager, salesman, actor, cook, performance artist, TV presenter, antique dealer and interior designer in London, New York, Paris, Tokyo and Australia. He has also performed in and written many BAFTA-nominated shows, such as Globo Loco, Basil Brush, Ministry of Mayhem and The Legend of Dick and Dom, and he co-wrote the Triskellion trilogy with bestselling crime author Mark Billingham under their pseudonym, Will Peterson.

  Body Blow is Peter’s second Eddie Savage thriller, sequel to the hugely popular Long Reach.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.

  First published 2012 by Walker Books Ltd

  87 Vauxhall Walk, London SE11 5HJ