Dance With the Dead

by James Nally

  These criminals became masters in a new art – laundering or cleaning dirty money so that it couldn’t be traced back to criminal activity. Reilly hired dodgy expertise to rinse his filthy lucre through property, clubs, bars, restaurants and a waste recycling plant. He shifted yet more into untraceable offshore accounts.

  By the late 1980s, he’d become something of a criminal venture capitalist, investing in the importation of ecstasy from Holland while his ‘muscle’ forcibly took over nightclubs where it could be distributed. He also set up chemical companies to develop ‘designer drugs’, substances that could replicate the effects of E and cocaine while avoiding the illegal classification.

  But he still wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty, especially when it came to dealing with people who crossed him.

  Reilly’s flair for innovative savagery underpinned his fearsome reputation.

  First, they quoted a statement made by criminal Paul Clarke who’d borrowed a car from a dealership controlled by Reilly in Barking – only to have the vehicle seized by creditors. When Clarke returned to the showroom and broke the news, Reilly explained how he ‘couldn’t be seen to let something like this go’ and produced a four-inch knife. Clarke thought he was about to be stabbed. Instead Reilly pushed the knife up through Clarke’s chin then pulled it all the way to his left ear. Clarke described ‘this terrible scraping noise’ and ‘feeling as though the skin on my face was flapping’. He made the statement after receiving 45 stitches and life-saving treatment at the local accident and emergency ward, then promptly withdrew it the next day.

  Just before Christmas, Reilly carried out a ruthless double hit on a couple in Epping Forest, Essex. Terry Golden, 39, and his girlfriend Marlene Anderson, 28, were found slumped in the front seat of a black F-reg Mercedes on an isolated forest track, blasted to death by a sawn-off shotgun. Police could prove that Golden, an accountant, had been managing the accounts of a string of clubs and pubs connected to Reilly. But they couldn’t prove much else.

  Golden had been siphoning off funds when Reilly invited him to an emergency meeting at the Good Intent pub in Upshire. Golden brought Marlene along, believing this would protect him from any extreme censure, at least for now.

  Reilly waited for the couple in the pub car park, climbed into the back seat and directed them to the spot on a lover’s lane where they were later found riddled with lead. Apparently, Golden had protested: ‘You can’t shoot me in front of my girlfriend.’ So Reilly shot her first and said, ‘Well, you’re not going to die in front of her now.’

  But the most infamous example of his pitiless streak took place three years ago when he learned that an old associate, Bobby Atkins, had been a police informer.

  Reilly instructed his son and daughter, aged 11 and 15, to invite Bobby’s unwitting nine-year-old girl Amy over for a party at their outdoor swimming pool. Later that sunny afternoon, medics found Amy on the second step down to the wading pool, arse clamped to an uncovered suction drain so powerful that it had already caused a two-inch full rectal tear and drawn out a foot-long section of small intestine. Trans-anal intestinal evisceration is the technical term. Loss of blood caused her to go into hypovolemic shock. Paramedics performed a blood transfusion at the scene.

  Over the following weeks, she underwent small bowel, liver and pancreas transplants. Her body rejected one of these imposters and she died.

  When questioned by police, Jimmy blamed the ‘accident’ on a Portugese pool attendant who’d removed the drain cover to carry out general maintenance and had failed to replace it. Officers didn’t get a chance to quiz 19-year-old Christiano before he vanished. Most suspected he ended up at Jimmy’s waste recycling plant in Dagenham, incinerated with the rest of his rubbish.

  Reilly topped it with a typically twisted touch. He had the drain cover turned into a wreath and delivered to Amy’s funeral.

  ‘He has an especially psychotic hatred for two types of people,’ one of the spooks had explained, ‘grasses and sex offenders, and has no qualms about killing anyone he even suspects of being either.’

  Fintan returned with pints and whiskey chasers. I downed my Jameson in one.

  ‘So let me get this straight,’ I said, still reeling, ‘we’re going to a strip joint owned by London’s most notorious gangland psychopath to ask questions about a girl he’s probably just whacked.’

  ‘Jesus, don’t make it sound so formal.’ Fintan laughed, a little nervously, gnashing away on his scratchings. ‘We’re just a couple of punters asking after our favourite dancer. You never know what one of the girls might let slip, especially after a few cheap champagnes. I’ve looked at every facet of Liz’s life today. Her death has to be connected to that club.’

  ‘But what if one of the girls cottons on and tells Jimmy’s apes? Jesus, imagine what they’d do to a prying cop?’

  ‘Knowing Jimmy, he’d put you on the payroll with all the others. Look, the girls don’t even know she’s dead yet, do they? Why would they find it suspicious? But this is our only window. Once our first edition drops then everything changes. There’ll be journos swarming all over the story. But it isn’t even news yet …’

  ‘Journos swarming all over a dead hooker? Why will Liz’s murder be such a big deal?’

  ‘Let’s just say I’ve uncovered a few juicy angles …’

  ‘Don’t tell me, you managed to get a clip of her from The Bill?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Much of a role?’

  ‘Blink and you’d miss it. Well, that would be my advice anyway.’

  ‘Not very convincing?’

  ‘Let me put it this way, Donal, you won’t see more wood in the Florentine tonight. But this makes her a celeb, so that makes the story upmarket sleaze and the advertisers get a real stiffie over that, not to mention our porn-mag reading, woman-hating demographic. The Daily Mail will go crazy for it Monday, their lower-middle class readership loves a good hate. This one could run and run.’

  As Fintan devoured his third pint, my eyes seized upon the last few pork scratchings in the bottom of the bowl. I’d never noticed before how these leathery, wrinkled circular snacks look like mummified arseholes. I couldn’t stop myself imagining my insides being sucked through one of them and shuddered.

  ‘Jesus, Fint, I don’t know. It feels like we’re walking right into trouble. What if we’re rumbled …’

  ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake Donal, you’ve been banging on at me for months about having no excitement in your life and not being “a proper detective”. I’m telling you now, this is going to be a massive case. It might be the best chance the cops ever have of taking down a major league villain like Reilly. You didn’t choose this job to act like a fucking politician. You need to take risks. One break tonight – a lead, a potential informant – and you’re in the box seat, indispensable to the murder squad. They’ll be practically begging you to join.’

  He scooped up the last scratchings, shovelled them into his mouth and crunched: ‘I mean really, what have you got to lose?’

  Chapter 7

  Soho, London

  Saturday, April 3, 1993; 21.40

  As we set off up Greek Street, I felt instantly reassured by Soho’s drunken school-playground vibe. Outside the pokey, sticky-carpeted pubs, drinkers clumped obediently between territory-marking velvet ropes; hemmed-in lives cutting loose, drinking, smoking, talking and laughing too hard.

  It all happened here. We were just another pair of pissheads who’d run out of pleasure, innocently seeking more.

  As we turned left into Old Compton Street, Fintan pointed out a semi-derelict three-storey building on the corner.

  ‘Reilly owns that place now. A few months back, he sent his heavies in, demanded the deeds, got the deeds. A year or so ago, a similar place on Berwick Street resisted his approaches and got burned to the ground.

  ‘A turf war, over a cattle shed like that?’

  ‘If you look closer, there’s a clip joint in the basement, an unlicensed sex shop on the
ground floor and three or four prostitutes on the first and second floors.’

  I turned to see a red door open to a bare wooden staircase. On the flaky wall, a garish square of pink card announced ‘Models’ in black marker pen.

  I couldn’t imagine how any man could take that stairway to farmyard sex with a spent, cowed slave. The very existence of these fleshy wank stations had to be about male power and control: a King Kong, chest-beating, ‘me Tarzan’ fleeting reassertion of authority for men emasculated by modern life and equality. Or maybe they were just horny as hell and this had to do.

  Either way, Soho had dozens of these so-called ‘walk ups’. It would be the ‘walking back down again’ I couldn’t handle. Maybe it was the Catholic in me, but how could you face the outside world again after your sordid deed, burning with guilt and shame? What if – blinking into the sun, sticky and dishevelled – you bumped into someone you knew? How could you ever explain away your behaviour? And Soho really is that small.

  ‘Talk about putting yourself in a vulnerable position,’ I said. ‘Presumably as soon as your keks hit the floor, some muscle jumps out of the wardrobe and robs you.’

  ‘No, those girls are the real deal,’ he said, and who was I to argue with the Vice Admiral.

  ‘There’s a menu of services on the wall,’ he went on. ‘You get what you pay for, albeit with varying degrees of skill and enthusiasm.’

  ‘You seem to know an awful lot about this, Fintan.’

  ‘I’ve very good contacts in the Vice Squad. And they maintain good relationships with the pimps and the girls, mostly. The cops know they’re never going to get rid of it so they try to make it as safe as possible for all involved. Most of these places have CCTV in the hallways now and covert cameras in the bedrooms. They set it up to protect the girls but it’s helped them in all sorts of ways that they hadn’t bargained for.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Let’s just say men of influence don’t like being caught with their trousers round their ankles. Especially married ones.’

  ‘I trust a thorough, conscientious journalist like you has insisted on seeing this footage.’

  He laughed: ‘Let’s just say it made me feel very conventional. Boring almost.’

  ‘I don’t understand why a multi-millionaire, semi-legit gangster like Reilly would get involved in something so … tawdry.’

  ‘According to my snouts in Vice, two reasons. His place back there pulls in two grand cash a week, and he gets to road test all the fresh meat.’

  ‘Sounds like a fucking animal,’ I said.

  The seedy, decrepit underground sex hovels soon gave way to Old Compton Street’s colourful gay sex shops, pubs and clubs – so clean, overt and unashamed. I wondered what this contrast revealed about male sexuality.

  We stomped on through more neon-lit alleyways, past joints promising peeps and teasing strips. Under the archway announcing Raymond’s Revue bar in Walker’s Court, a dreadlocked man mumbled offers of crack, his hamster-like cheeks storing the rocks, ready to swallow if police swooped.

  Brewer Street’s porn cinemas, weirdo publishing outlets and sex shops eventually gave way to the innocent white-bulb signs of legitimate theatre, and to the trendy restaurants of Glasshouse Street – bouncers on the door, celebrities inside, paparazzi on the pavement.

  Finally, we crossed the grand, sweeping, traffic-heaving Victorian vista of Regent’s Street.

  ‘Okay, don’t stare, next street on the left, four or five doors down, red canopy. That’s our place.’

  ‘Aren’t we going in now?’

  ‘For God’s sake, Donal, we’re high rollers! We don’t go anywhere on foot. We’ll hail a black cab.’

  ‘Damn, if only you’d brought your Hot Rod Mondeo. They’d be laying their black bomber jackets over the puddles …’

  ‘Shut up and stick this on.’

  I felt something pushing into my hand, opened my fingers to find a silver watch with a comedy-large red face. Fintan was already strapping what looked like an alarm clock to his wrist.

  ‘That,’ he said, nodding over to my scarlet arm-candy, ‘is a Paul Newman Rolex Daytona 6565, worth 200 grand. I’m letting you have the flashiest watch because you’re most in need of sprucing up.’

  ‘Gee, thanks … 200 grand? For a watch?’

  ‘Yeah, bonkers, isn’t it? Then they have the gall to complain when they get mugged. Only Father fucking Time himself knows these are fakes, so make sure you flash yours towards the apes on the door. And, later, at the mutton inside. They’re experts at wheedling out real money from time wasters. So keep your sleeve high and the hoes will come a running. It’ll be no change for you really, will it?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Relying on your right wrist for sex!’

  He hailed a black cab and we dived in.

  ‘Here,’ he said to the driver, handing him a tenner, ‘take a loop round the block, then drop us outside the Florentine. Keep the change.’

  I could never summon up the chutzpah for an enterprise like this alone. But Fintan thrived upon it. Although this probably confirmed my long-held suspicion that he was a fantasist, it also made him an ideal wingman. He didn’t so much get into character as transmogrify. Like that time he posed as a restaurant critic for the Irish Times, earning us a three-course meal at the trendy new Atlantic Bar and Grill in Piccadilly. He’d even insisted on inspecting the kitchens.

  ‘Hey,’ smiled the scoop monger, mission-high, ‘this’ll be the closest you’ve got to a piece of female ass since, ooh let me think, your actual birth?’

  ‘Very good, Fint. I must tell that one to Mam. She’s so proud of you already. You know she’s stopped going to the local shop altogether now? Too embarrassed by all your sordid “bonking bishop” exposés.’

  That wiped the smirk off his face.

  ‘Imagine,’ he said, shaking his head sadly, ‘there’s men of the cloth out there who are getting more sex than you.’

  The taxi driver pulled up a door down from the Florentine. A sudden twang of dread strummed my nerve endings. I’d confidently pictured myself inside the club, talking the talk. After all, how intimidating could these hostesses-cum-hookers be? And they didn’t even know that their colleague Liz had been murdered. Not yet.

  What I hadn’t prepared for was ‘walking the walk’ past the leering row of bouncers outside. This small army of enormous dead-eyed Slavs had probably disposed of Liz’s body earlier today. What if they guessed from my haircut that I’m a cop? What if, while I’m inside asking awkward questions, they found a way to confirm I’m a cop?

  ‘Get out of the fucking car,’ hissed Fintan from the pavement.

  I let him lead. Fintan’s streetwise swagger imbued him with confidence, whereas my metronomic stomp screamed farm labourer or escaped village idiot.

  The bouncers’ pitiless eyes had already fastened upon us, seeking out hidden truths. I imagined them with Predator-style infrared vision, peering into our very souls. I wondered suddenly what I’d say if they stopped me. We hadn’t made any plans for that. And I’d always been hopeless at lying.

  I took a quick scan of their faces: glum, hateful, exhausted. Small wonder; it can be wearing work halving, disemboweling and draining a hooker. Terrible hours.

  I’d heard about these Eastern European muscle men, how easily they could make people disappear before vanishing themselves. I pictured their homelands brimming with gaunt, ravenous, psychotic replacements.

  I thought about spinning on my heels and fleeing. They’d never catch me. But Fintan was already level with the first two members of our unwelcoming committee. This was it.

  As I winced through their glowering death stares, I couldn’t help bracing myself for unexpected impact – as you might walking through an open gate at an automatic tube ticket barrier.

  I checked my ‘millionaire alert’ timepiece more often than a Chechen suicide bomber, but none of the goons clocked it. Surely just one well-aimed shimmer of Rolex w
ould mark me out as a youthful captain of industry ‘slumming it’ incognito for the night. In desperation, I faked an itchy forearm and wafted it in front of their faces, back and forth, like a lighter at an Aerosmith concert.

  ‘Excuse me, sir?’ came the gruff Soviet-baddie command and I leapt fully four inches off the red carpet. I landed but my heart remained lodged somewhere around my Adam’s apple, beating so hard that I couldn’t speak. I nodded, mouth open, like a halfwit.

  ‘We will need to see ID, proof of age.’

  Fintan turned back, a well-rehearsed picture of surprised innocence, while my mind performed a rapid-fire inventory of everything on my person that proved my 23 years.

  ‘As you can probably tell, gentlemen,’ Fintan gushed, ‘we’re on a very low-key night out. Neither of us expected this to happen. Though I can tell my 23-year-old friend over there is absolutely thrilled.’

  Fintan threw me a look that said: ‘Snap out of it now. TALK!’

  ‘You are both Irish?’ asked the Russian.

  Fintan nodded.

  ‘Then we require ID for you too,’ he said, his darkening eyes letting Fintan know he wasn’t swallowing any of his old blarney, ‘and we must frisk you.’

  ‘May I ask why?’ Fintan laughed, a little too desperately.

  ‘Oh, let me see,’ said Russki, his heavy-lidded, hateful eyes somehow managing to convey both tired boredom and latent violence, ‘last October you blow up Sussex Arms in Covent Garden; last November, Canary Wharf; last December, the city centre of Manchester …’

  ‘Say no more,’ said Fintan, reaching into an inside jacket pocket and producing his driving licence. Russki barked something at his underlings. One began writing down the licence details while the other introduced Fintan’s inside legs to what looked like a black table tennis bat with lights.

  My insides collapsed in horrible realisation. I had only one piece of picture ID on me. And I didn’t want any of these men to know I was a cop.

  ‘I haven’t brought any ID,’ I announced flatly.

  Russki looked at me balefully. ‘Close up, you look older. We just search you.’