The pub’s owner came out again, this time with a couple of other men, one carrying a snooker cue. I told them all to fuck off. They looked at me and then at Bowker. The owner dithered and said something to the others. He turned to me and said, ‘I don’t want no trouble.’
They turned slowly and went back inside. I didn’t think they’d call the law.
Bowker was sweating now, and his hands kept coming up and holding onto my jacket and tugging it. He was looking up at me and what he saw made him hold on tighter.
I was tired of his hands on me. They were dirty and sweating and gnarled and they’d touched Brenda up. They clung to me and tugged weakly and I didn’t want those hands to ever touch me again. I swiped them away and he staggered and I straightened him up.
‘You killed Brenda.’
‘You can’t hurt me, Joe, there are witnesses. They’ve seen you. You’re not that stupid.’
My hand was around his throat before I knew it. He gasped and struggled, but there was nothing in him, no leverage, no strength. I raised him off the ground and pushed my face into his so that I could watch his eyes as he tried to hang onto life. His face was red, his eyes bulging, his mouth twisted. His hands scrambled against my arm. There was a crackling sound coming from him. I wanted to crush his throat. I wanted to destroy him.
I didn’t kill him. I should have done, but he was right, there’d been too many witnesses. And I had other things to do. I could kill Bowker later. Maybe it was a greater punishment to let him live, to let him go back to his prison flat, and to a fat wife with swollen legs who didn’t care if some thug was out to get her husband, and to his lifelong losing streak.
‘You grass me up to Paget about tonight and I’ll know, and I’ll come back for you.’
I dropped him and left him on the ground, his face in his own vomit.
I’d thought about holding onto him, using him as bait for when Paget showed up, but it was too long to wait and I didn’t want him jamming up the works or delaying me. I wasn’t thinking straight, I suppose. My head hurt, as it often did these days, a throbbing in the back of my skull that stretched through to my forehead and into the backs of my eyes.
I drove back to Browne’s. When he saw me, he said, ‘Your head again?’
‘Yeah.’
He went to the kitchen and came back with a couple of pills. I wouldn’t have bothered, but I had to be alert that night. I knocked them back and they wiped me out and I had to go lie down for a while.
I woke once. At least, I thought I’d woken. The girl was standing by my bed, her arms by her side and her hair hanging down in plaits. She didn’t move, but stared with those large eyes. I reached out for her and touched Brenda.
CHAPTER SIX
The Lee Valley Centre had a sports complex; indoor courts and outdoor five-a-side pitches. It was on an industrial estate in Ponders End. At that time of night it was dark and deserted. There were no cameras. It wasn’t near any residential areas, not overlooked by offices or anything like that, and the nearest blocks of flats were way over the other side of the train line. It was the best I could do.
It was nearing 2 a.m., there was no cloud cover and the air was thin and biting. I was wearing my heavy coat and a woollen hat and thick leather gloves. I knew from experience how hard it was to operate a hand-held weapon when your fingers were stiff with cold.
I stood at the back of a bank of spectators’ benches. From there, I had a good view of the only road into the centre and of the car park at the back of the cinema. The films had finished an hour earlier. I’d checked on that. I’d parked my car on the other side of the cinema, out of sight. I knew I might have made a mistake by not holding onto Bowker and using him as bait. The way I’d planned it, though, I wouldn’t need him.
In the distance, a mile away, I could hear the whirr of traffic along the A10. Now and then, a truck would grind along Meridian Way, but there was no reason why anything other than Paget’s car would turn into the centre.
I had an old Enfield L42A1 sniper rifle. I was used to the design, so I didn’t have to accustom myself to it. I’d picked it up earlier, from that bloke I’d been to see in Romford. They weren’t too difficult to come by. This one was an old no. 4 that had been converted, re-barrelled to take 7.62 mil rounds. I’d test-fired it and it had worked fine. I had a full mag, and one in the chamber.
I had a large canvas bag nearby with some extra magazines. I’d put a beanbag on the bench in front of me and rested the rifle on it. It was a clear night, with quarter moonlight, and I hadn’t bothered to attach a night sight, though I had one in the bag. It was still and I hadn’t had to make adjustments for wind. It wasn’t a great distance anyway, only about two hundred yards. I also had the Makarov in my coat pocket.
I was all set.
I waited.
My head was fuzzy, thoughts clouding over and mixing together. I still wasn’t thinking clearly and that bothered me. I’d taken some heavy blows to the head in the last week or so. I’d spent a lifetime taking blows to the head, and things had been getting worse for years, but now they were worse than worse. Browne thought I might’ve had some swelling on the brain, and he kept a close eye on me, always asking me questions, who was the prime minister, what month was it, that sort of thing. I didn’t know what pills he was giving me, but they were strong and left me dazed and unable to concentrate properly.
‘Poor old Joe,’ Brenda used to say, ‘heading for the breaker’s yard.’
She’d said that a lot. It was a kind of joke of hers; that I was like the ship in that print on her wall – the Fighting Temeraire, that old warrior being dragged to its death.
She’d smiled weakly this time, so that I knew she was trying to make light of it and not quite getting there.
For a moment I had my old SMG in my grip, not the Enfield, and I was holding it with freezing hands while my clothes were damp and heavy with sweat and wet mud. I was holding the SMG, but when I sighted along it, I saw Brenda’s face staring back at me with half-closed eyes and mouth open and I knew she was dead.
They were becoming more common, these hallucinations or dreams or whatever the fuck they were. I saw Brenda and Kid, at night, in the shadows. I saw that dead Argentinean conscript staring at me with his teeth bared and the skin about his face tight and sunken. I didn’t know if it was the pills Browne was giving me, or if it was something to do with the scarring on my brain. I wouldn’t tell Browne, he’d only worry and fuss and I didn’t need that shit.
I heard a car change down gear. I shook my head, trying to clear it, and flexed my hands. A black saloon turned off Meridian Way and drove slowly up towards me, and then made a left towards the cinema. It cruised into the car park and moved towards the back door.
I took the leather gloves off, moved forward, took a hold of the Enfield and viewed the car through the scope.
There were two men in the car: the driver plus one in the passenger seat. The driver was lean and black, the other man was stocky and white with a shaved head. Neither of them was Paget. If I’d been thinking more clearly, I’d have realized he wouldn’t come himself. I’d been so hell-bent on cornering him and gutting him that I hadn’t given the plan enough thought. It was a stupid fucking mistake.
I looked through the sight and put a round in the car’s rear window. The glass splintered around the hole and the car lurched right and sped up, then spun in a one-eighty and came straight back towards me. I put another few rounds in the windscreen and the car lurched again and crunched into the rear wall of the cinema.
The man on the passenger’s side kicked the door open and scrambled out. He started running towards the far end of the cinema. I let off a few rounds, but he was moving all over the place and I couldn’t get a bead on him. I fired a few times and missed by a mile. The first thing he was going to do when he got clear was call Paget and tell him it had been a set-up. Wherever Paget was, he would get out quick. I’d fucked the whole thing up.
I stashed the gun and beanbag in the canvas grip, sl
ung it over my shoulder and pulled out my Makarov. I walked over to the smashed car. By the time I got there, the driver had opened his door and was stumbling away, a ragged hole in the back of his denim jacket. He was leaking blood. When I got near, he turned sharply. My Makarov was up and ready, but he wasn’t armed, and the action of turning made him stagger and he crashed backwards. He yelled out in pain. His white T-shirt was soaked red from the chest down. I’d hit him high, left of his right shoulder. It looked like his collarbone was smashed. Blood was gushing out, but I didn’t think he’d die just yet. He tried to get up, and managed to prop himself up on his good arm. He saw the gun.
‘Don’t,’ he said.
‘Where’s Paget?’
‘I don’t know.’
He winced in pain.
‘Don’t fuck about.’
‘Paget would fucking kill me.’
‘You’re dying now.’
He looked down at his bloody shirt and looked up at me with eyes wide. The idea that he might be dying hadn’t occurred to him.
‘I need an ambulance.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Fuck.’
His right arm was useless and he tried to get a mobile phone from his pocket with his left hand, but without that to hold him up, he fell back and the phone fell from his grasp. I stooped down and picked it up and pocketed it.
‘Get me an ambulance.’
‘Where’s Paget?’
‘Loughton.’
I could be there in ten minutes, maybe fifteen. Not enough time to try and find an address, though.
‘Take me there.’
‘I’m fucking bleeding to death.’
‘You’ll live long enough.’
‘It hurts.’
‘Yeah.’
I grabbed a hold of the front of his shirt and jacket and hoisted him up. I turned him round, keeping the Makarov in the small of his back, and walked him to my car. He stumbled a couple of times and I wondered if we could get to Loughton before he lost too much blood. We got into the car and I started it up and spun the wheels and fishtailed onto Meridian Way.
They hit us from three directions.
The first car came straight at us. I slammed my foot on the brakes. The second had screeched to a stop alongside, boxing us in. I threw the car into reverse and piled into the third. The impact threw me forward. My head smashed the steering wheel column. The Makarov flew from my hand. Next to me, Paget’s man had bashed his head into the windscreen and shattered the glass. He fell back, blood lacing his forehead. He sat for a moment, dazed, mouth open with shock. When he saw what was happening, he woke up, fumbled with the door and managed to get it open. He fell out and two men out there grabbed him and hoisted him up and bundled him into the waiting car.
The cars reversed. They burned rubber and straightened up and drove off with squealing tires. The whole thing had taken seconds. I was seeing double after that blow on my head. I groped for the car keys and got the car started, but I stalled it. When I got it started again, I couldn’t see the cars and I knew for sure I’d fucked it all up.
I’d recognized the men, though.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Cole lived in Chigwell, in one of those mock Tudor jobs with a lawn the size of a football pitch. It was close to 4 a.m. by the time I got there, but there were lights on in the downstairs rooms. His driveway was full of cars, one of them with a bashed-in front.
I stashed the Makarov. I wasn’t at war with Cole and he would’ve had the advantage on me anyway. There must’ve been a dozen guns in that house.
There was a brick wall where his property met the pavement, and a large cast iron gate with security number pad. I jumped over the wall and clumped up his driveway, all the time feeling that I wasn’t in control of things, all the time feeling that I was a fucking idiot.
I banged on the front door. The door opened and a small bald man peered up at me. He hobbled forward, one leg stiffer than the other as if it had been injured somehow. I pushed him aside and walked in. I could hear men chattering away and laughing. I followed the sound and stepped into a huge lounge, warm and thick with smoke, decked out with expensive reproductions of expensive antique furniture and cheap ornaments and messy abstract paintings that looked cheap and probably cost a fortune.
There were eight or so men sitting around the place. It looked like one of them soirees; a nice evening at the Coles’, weapons optional. They turned as one when I entered, drinks and smokes in their hands, and sneers and aggression on their faces, and thin knowing eyes. The laughter dropped away.
At the far end, behind a built-in bar, was Bobby Cole, a short man, heavy and muscular but moving towards fatness with neatly cut dark hair and sharp eyes. But, in spite of all the power and wealth he showed, I thought I saw strain in the way he slumped a bit, and tiredness in the lines under his eyes and in the colour of his skin, which had lost its tanned glow.
He was mixing a drink for some thin dried-up blonde who sat slouched on the barstool before him. He didn’t bat an eye when he saw me.
He raised the glass and said, ‘Drink?’
‘Where is he?’
‘You tooled up?’
‘No. Where is he?’
The men shuffled a bit and looked at their drinks and pulled on their fags and that sort of thing. Conversation confused them and, besides, they didn’t know what my place in things was. Cole could see that and I knew he was going to have to play with me a bit, just to show everyone that he didn’t answer to monsters who plunged into his house in the middle of the night. Regardless of what he owed me, he had to show who was boss.
‘My wife,’ Cole said, raising his chin towards the woman. ‘Marjorie.’
The woman looked at me. Her skin was a sort of orange colour, her hair was a yellow, her nails red, her dress short and green. She was drinking some kind of blue stuff. She looked like one of the abstract paintings, only not as expensive. Whatever the blue stuff was it was alcoholic. She was sloshed and trying not to show it. Her eyelids drooped and she slumped on the seat, but every now and then a hand went up to straighten her hair, as if neat hair would make her sober and twenty years younger and happy.
When I’d had my fill of the woman, I turned to Cole and said, ‘Paget’s man. You took him.’
‘The boys kicked him out in Epping Forest.’
They couldn’t know where Paget was or they wouldn’t have been here. I wondered if that was the reason for the strain I’d seen in Cole. He must’ve thought he was onto something but it must’ve turned out to go nowhere.
‘He tell you anything?’
Cole added a couple of things to the drink he was mixing. He was taking his time, playing up for his wife and his monkeys. When he’d prepared them enough, he looked at me and said, ‘You must really think I’m some kind of cunt.’
The blonde shrank away from him for an instant, but when she saw that he wasn’t going to get heavy, she relaxed. She even forced a smile. It was an effort. She didn’t want to be here. Cole must have been getting some kick out of it. It occurred to me then that Cole had known all along that I’d show up. All of this – his men, his wife, his fancy drinks at the bar – all of it was for my benefit.
The thing was, Cole was up against the wall. He’d been in over his head with this Albanian mob, taking their smack in exchange for money he didn’t have. When he was supposed to get the money, Paget and Marriot ripped it off him. I got it back, so Cole owed me plenty. But someone like Cole couldn’t be seen to need anyone, especially someone like me.
So, he was showing everyone that he was in charge, that he still had a hold on things. But he was trying too hard. I could see it, and I had a feeling his men could see it too.
And seeing this performance, I got the feeling that things were worse for him than I’d realized. He still hadn’t got his heroin back from Paget and maybe that was causing a problem.
He was still a big name, still had clout, power, but a lot of that was based on his reputation. If people knew he w
as in trouble, Cole’s name wouldn’t be so big and others would start to take away his empire. His was an animal world of blood where the most powerful had to fight always for that place, and when he showed any weakness, the pack would attack him. And there were plenty of scavengers waiting to pick the flesh from his corpse.
‘You didn’t tell me about your plan to meet Paget,’ he was saying. ‘You go to a meeting armed with a rifle and you don’t invite me. I call that bad manners.’
A couple of his men laughed at that. Cole’s eyes roamed the room, enjoying the reaction. Then he fixed me with a stare and said, ‘You know he owes me a million quid’s worth of junk.’
I didn’t say anything. What was there to say? I didn’t care about his junk, and he knew it. He wanted me to ask how he’d known about my plan to get Paget. He wanted to watch me run around in circles. This was his revenge, small as it was, for not telling him about my plan. I didn’t need to ask him, though. There was only one way he could’ve known.
‘You had me under surveillance,’ I said. ‘Very clever.’
I felt more stupid than ever. He smiled, as much as he could smile.
‘You led us straight to Bowker. I squeezed him a bit and he told me about your plan. The boys here did the rest.’
‘Now we’ve sorted out who did what and why, tell me where Paget was hiding out.’
‘Won’t do you any good.’
‘Where?’
‘Some pokey old house on a council estate, apparently. Not his style. He wasn’t there.’
‘Go on.’
‘Place was owned by some bird. Turns out she was an old girlfriend of Paget’s. Did you know he had an old girlfriend?’
‘Does she know where he is?’
‘No.’
‘Sure?’
‘Oh, yes. I’m sure.’
A couple of the men chuckled. I glanced round at them. I noticed that some of the men, the older ones, didn’t look amused by all this. They mostly looked away from me, down at the floor or at their drinks or at the lousy fucking abstract paintings. I turned back to Cole.
To Kill For Page 3