John assembled a fat spliff using two Silk Cut Silvers. “You always knew that was the coup. But the world has changed since then. These days there are fellas getting cute around wind farms, picking up the fat EU grants along the way. It's sweet as a nut, definitely one up from the old VAT carousel scam. So we looked at that, and maybe we'll have a go. But this movie thing is even better, it’s a proper ‘up yours’ to the Filth and we know we’ll get the investment back on DVD sales alone. Here’s to British justice. Cheers!”
For once I didn’t have much to say.
“The way we treat entrepreneurs in this country is a joke,” he said, scooping a handful of nuts off the neighbouring table. “It’s like seeing rottweilers getting fucked by poodles. But this time the big bad devil dog is winning. I’ve got meself a nice bit of development land over Silvertown way – yeah, in scummy East London. Stevie has been worked hard. We’ve already got the planning permission for top-end flats for City boys. I’m meeting a literary agent bird next week too. She reckons she’ll land me a £50K advance for an autobiography, and I’ll be at the Hay Festival next summer amusing all those chinless cretins with weak handshakes and upper class gels called Jemima and Tabitha who have got the publishing industry sewn-up. Maybe I’ll bag meself a couple before they go off shooting pheasants, or whatever they do when they’re not spending Daddy’s money, running comedy clubs or joining the Labour Party.”
“Maybe you should do a cookbook after that, John, How To Cook In Prison. Like Paulie in Goodfellas slicing garlic, you know what I mean?”
“Are you hungry, gents?” asked a passing, fragrant blonde in her mid-50s.
“Only for your love, Nicola!”
“Soppy sod! Hold up, I'll get you the menu.”
“Governor's wife,” John said softly. “Had more renovation work done than Big Ben. Have a look.”
Nicola came back from the bar with a small laminated list of unappetising culinary pleasures. Up close, her face did indeed carry the evidence of many futile cosmetic procedures. It had been pulled and peeled like a bucket of king prawns, and then poisoned, stretched, filled and prodded so much that it looked like she'd fallen asleep in a wind tunnel. A shame. Do people who have all this surgery done not realise we can tell? Look at poor old Dale Winton on the Lottery show, he can’t even turn his head independently these days, he has to move his entire body instead.
“Fancy the meat madras?” I asked, my voice betraying a marked lack of enthusiasm.
“Only if they've found the vaccine for it.”
“That bad?”
“You'd be better off with the cheese roll, hand stolen today from the Tesco dump bin.”
“Oi you!” Nicola feigned hurt, although you couldn’t tell from looking at her face.
John laughed. “Two of your finest cheese rolls please Nicki, easy on the pickle, there's a darling.”
She went to get the grub.
“She must have turned a few heads in her time.”
“Now it's just stomachs, mate.”
Baker’s smile evaporated. “You Harry, you actually had it worse than me – you were a prisoner with no release date. You must have felt like a deserter in 1944.”
“That’s true enough, John. Except I never deserted, the Old Bill deserted me.”
He’d crumbled a liberal amount of opium into his spliff, making it a Buddha.“And you were on your Jack, of course. The wartime deserters had nowhere to go, so they ended up working with local gangs. In Paris towards the end of the war, there were so many AWOL tooled-up Yank servicemen it was like Chicago in 1929. I read a book about it. There were gun battles with the gendarme every fuckin’ night...
“So you’re living up north, hoping not to run into anyone who recognised you. No one to report to, no one to give you orders, an absolute lone wolf, nervous every time you went somewhere new. Oi, who’s that at the bar? Some villain I stitched up. Some dirty slag of an undercover Old Bill. Some chinless MI5 wonder boy...”
“I got by, John, what can I say? I did what I had to do.”
He sucked hard on his funny fag. “Must be tough being a spook these days. How do you do close surveillance? It ain’t like the old days. You can’t cut yerself a pair of eye-holes in your Kindle.”
He was loving it. I changed the subject, allowing the dark cloud of my own doubts to drift across the habitual sunshine of his outlook.
“Do you trust them now? This deal they’re offering?”
“About as much as you do. But let’s say, like Jo Brand with a rape whistle, I’m optimistic. How about you? Worried?”
“More suspicious, like a man whose mail order Thai bride tells him he wants kids but insists on adopting.”
He smiled. I could match him dodgy simile for dodgy simile all night long.
“How did you cope, John? Inside.”
“I read. I read a lot. Dickens, Shaw, John Steinbeck, Sun Tzu. I found out about the stars, I studied them, studied the galaxy. If we were outside now, I could reel off the names of the constellations in the night sky like Patrick Moore on piece-rate....And I wrote, H. I wrote columns for the Guardian about criminal justice, I wrote the screenplay for this film...” he paused, perhaps surprised by his own seriousness. “You could be in it, Harry. We could always use a good tea-boy.”
The bait was there, but I didn’t rise to it.
“Did they ever give you psychiatric tests, John?”
“Yeah.”
“I did ’em with some geezer from Reading University. He reckoned that if I’d been one point higher on the scale I would have been able to go into court and plead criminal insanity.”
“Go on...”
“They had a few of us in, U/C officers. Did a whole load of other tests too. Under stress, they found that my heart rate actually slowed. Turns out that my anterior insular cortex, the part of my brain that governs empathy, and my amygdale – I think I said that right – the part that governs fear, are both ‘significantly under-developed’.”
“Which means you can use people, and you don’t bottle it. Good warrior qualities. How many women did you bang in the course of undercover work?”
“I couldn’t begin to add them all up.”
“But if you laid ’em head to toe...”
“From here? I reckon we’d get to Mud Shute all right.”
“Not for the first time.” John chuckled, and then paused. Once again his smile dissolved. “I did think, while I was away, about how well you worked your way into us. You were like one of those Horse Stomach Bot bugs that hatch in a horse’s mouth and chew through their tongue and burrow down right into their guts.”
The hidden Hulk was showing his teeth. To deflate him, I went with it. “The art is to blend in, John. You don’t want to be too loud, and draw too much attention to yourself. Get friendly with people on the fringes and work your way in. I had Lesley referencing me, and through her, Slobberin’ Ron referencing me...”
“And through Ronald to me,” he said thoughtfully. “Never too flash but amusing to be around. Good with a bit of banter. Being funny helps grease the passage...”
“So the world’s leading sodomites say. But the job seriously fucks with your mind. You stop trusting everyone. You start acting the part even when you’re at home.”
“Losing the plot...”
“Oh yeah. I could have taken the time to sort out my home and family life, I should have, but you don’t want to show any kind of weakness to your colleagues, it’s damaging, you’d mug yourself off.”
“And how did that make you feel?”
“Empty, and hollow...”
“Like the space between the stars,” he said, quoting Raymond Chandler before switching tack. “We’ve got boys in the Met as well of course, the big players have. Oh I know you know about the odd bent cop but there’s an actual network inside the Yard, it’ll be a proper scandal if that story ever breaks. They’ve kept some proper A-team villains out of court for decades.”
I nodded. I doubted that th
ere was an actual network, but there would certainly be more than one detective in different areas taking bungs for tip-offs. Plenty of expensive high-profile criminal investigations had been abandoned because of leaks.
A sharp cry of pain to our left alerted us to a situation. A young kid, barely out of his teens, was on the floor, holding his ankle which was gushing blood. His Achilles tendon had been sliced, his Stanley knife had cluttered to the floor. We were both on our feet.
“Problem, Bisho?” John asked.
“Not now,” muttered the governor in a voice as heavy and slow as the man himself.
Bisho was a short stocky guy who looked like Bob Hoskins re-imagined by Tolkien as a Hobbit. He moved like a 19th century convict dragging his chains, and spoke robotically in short staccato sentences, almost in monosyllables. “Li'l firm. Out of Camden Town. Trying to make a name for themselves. Slags. They won’t come back.”
He raised his voice. “All barred. Permanent. Got that?”
If there was anyone in the bar who didn’t, they kept well quiet about it.
Time to lighten the mood.
“More beer?” I asked.
“Why not, bruv?”
There were a few people up the bar, including two quite striking Cockney birds, one blonde, one mixed race with a smile that would light up a mine shaft.
“Are you girls waiting to be served?” an ageing Romeo with yellow teeth asked them.
“No, we just like queuing,” replied the blonde, deflating his swagger with such a neat twist of sarcasm it made me laugh out loud. We exchanged a little wink.
Bisho served me “on the ahse” ahead of the herd, and I took the drinks back to Johnny Too.
“Shall we get a couple of the girls over, just for company? There are some lookers at the bar.”
“Go on then, better had, but only for their protection if it kicks off.”
“Gotta be better than stumbling out of here nine sheets to the wind and picking up some bit of stray outside off the wet, heartless streets of Peckham, Fun City.”
“True enough. Skinny bints. The Dorises round here give you a blow-job just to get something warm inside them...You can have the one that looks like a Klingon in a wig, mind.”
“Klingon?”
“I bet she does.”
“Ta-da!”
“If you were captured by aliens would you rather they keep you in their zoo or their circus?”
“Zoo. All the grub, none of the graft.”
“For me it’d be the circus every time. The zoo would be too much like doing bird. In the circus, you’ve got more chance of escaping – or at least taking a few of them out with you.”
“Like they’d ever give you access to the cannon.”
I called out to the bar. “GIRLS! Fancy joining us?”
They started to walk over. “I'll have Miss Dynamite, yours is the blonde in the big heels who looks like Mollie King from the Saturdays, right?”
“Yeah, she looks at least 98 per cent Chlamydia free...And no sign of an Adam’s apple.”
“Ha. She ain’t my type, John.”
“Tsk. All them years undercover, I had you down as a better liar than that.”
49
Paddock Wood, Kent. Five hours later
Gary Shaw’s radio alarm woke him up in time for the 7am Radio 4 Today Show news. It took a moment for the words to filter through the early morning mind-fuzz. The headline story concerned a suspected terrorist device that had detonated in the West End in the early hours, leaving a young man critically injured.
Instinctively, Shaw knew that this was connected to his case. He was right.
50
Temple, London EC4, three hours later
I had another meeting with an ice cream from Box 500 at my barrister’s office just off Middle Temple Lane. He was a good man, Mark Wyatt, a QC into his Chelsea and his Ska. I wanted expert guidance and he was the best. You need someone shit hot on your team, especially when you wake up to find that the Tasmanian Devil has taken residence in your cerebral cortex, and that the bastard has decided to take up drumming.
There were no problems with the agreement we signed. I can’t say too much about it – Official Secrets and all that. But Mark reckoned it was as cast iron as it could be, in the circumstances, with the funny firm involved. What it meant, in simple terms, was that once this job was done I would be a free and upright citizen once again. The past would be re-written with a Stalinist zeal. Ireland would be wiped from the records, as would the file about my suspected involvement in the Nelson killings. I did ask if that meant I’d get me police pension. The geezer from Thames House said he’d get back to me. I won’t hold me breath.
I had a quick breakfast beer with Mark, then shot off to buy some party clobber. I’d travelled down light, just one change of clothes and my emergency grab bag containing the usual – false passports, bundles of cash (pounds and Euros), Sexton Blake credit cards, condoms, painkillers, amphetamine, hair dye, hand gun (a Glock 21) and ammo. A proper little Jason Bourne I was, mate, ready for anything, fight, flight or fuck, at any time
51
Tonbridge, Kent.
Grim-faced Gary Shaw assembled his team. The London bomb was the talk of the office. Especially now that the unfortunate clubber Dom Wilson had died from his injuries. Pictures of the victim in happy times wearing an Aqua Plaid short sleeved shirt had now appeared on the London Evening Standard website.
“So it’s true,” remarked Womble. “Dead men do wear plaid.”
The joke stank like the detective’s breath; Gary Shaw ignored it. “You know what this means, don’t you?”
“SO15?” suggested DC Woodward.
“Yep, they will be all over this now like a cheap suit. We’ll be taken off the case, which means if we want to wrap this up ourselves we have to get a result tonight.”
“Guv,” Wattsie said slowly.
“Yeah?”
“Now that there is no reasonable doubt that Broadwick’s column is the catalyst inspiring these crimes, don’t you think someone needs to have a word? He wrote about ‘putting a bomb under the EU’ and this has happened. There’s a big difference between a set of coincidences and a recognisable pattern. He needs to be made aware that a madman is taking what he writes literally, extremely literally.”
Shaw surveyed their wall full of pin boards detailing every incident. Every case, every picture was linked to a piece by William Broadwick.
“Yes. I need to bat this upstairs, but he’ll have to be told.”
52
Tunbridge Wells, Kent. 1.30pm
Victor Oswald Stevens had been a local legend. He’d won the George Medal in Aden with the 2nd Battalion Coldstream Guards in 1964 when Gulliver was thirteen, fighting the Egyptian-backed NLF, or “sand niggers” as he’d always called them. He also served with distinction in Mauritius. Gulliver looked at his late brother’s medal, displayed next to his picture in his living room, and wept, as he’d seen Victor do for the first and only time when his own schoolboy pal Bernie had died saving the lives of his SAS comrades in Borneo. Pancreatic cancer had taken Vic quickly eighteen months ago. Within three months of the cancerous cells being discovered, Victor Stevens was dead. It was one battle the old soldier couldn’t win.
Gulliver – ‘Gully’, Vic had called him – bit his lip and fought back more tears. His brother had been his rock when they were kids, five years old with the strength and balls to stand up to their violent, alcoholic father. In 1974, Victor had introduced his younger sibling to General Sir Walter Walker, whose anti-Communist politics subsequently shaped both of their world views. Walter Walker had envisaged a time when the army might take over Britain, to the acclaim of the public who “might choose rule by the gun in preference to anarchy”. Both brothers had joined the Unison group, which existed to supply volunteers in event of a long threatened re-run of the 1926 general strike. Mercifully, the election of the sainted Margaret in 1979 had consigned fears of Red revolution to the dustbin of hi
story for a generation.
What would the General make of the country now? What would Victor? We betrayed their memory by doing nothing. He owed it to these brave, fearless men to fight for what was right by whatever means possible.
The knock that Gulliver was waiting for came. He opened the door to the two young men from the British Freedom Party, looking uncomfortable in the wedding suits they had chosen to wear. Stevens had invited them round to collect a cash donation. They stayed for tea and biscuits. The conversation ranged from immigration to the traveller blight via the insight and popular appeal of William Broadwick. Gulliver spoke with such clarity and conviction that they had ended up asking the farmer if he’d stand for them at the European elections in 2015. They also invited him and a guest to the coming London rally. Gulliver Stevens readily agreed, and offered to bring his “very bright, very organised, very committed” daughter along to help out behind the scenes. He had good days and bad days. Today had been a good day. Tonight, he was sure, would be even better.
53
7pm Stringfellows, London, West End
I got down to Stringies early to case the joint and meet up with Gary Shaw, who gave me a guided tour of what was what and who’d be where. It was a big operation. He had plain clothes all over the gaff, even a cute little red-head behind the bar who turned out to be a detective sergeant and who could read me my rights any time the mood took her.
“And you’re sure he’ll show?” I asked.
“Odds on, Harry. The creep has been following Broadwick’s column like the guy is Moses publishing the Commandments on a twice weekly basis...”
“Monkey read, monkey do.”
“Something like that.”
I had a quick half, Shaw declined. He told me about the bomb. “Which is why we’ve got to nab him tonight,” he said, looking grave.
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