As soon as the show ended, Dave’s mobile phone rang. The number on the screen was Stevie’s. Dave didn’t answer the call; instead he finished off the beer he’d been drinking and pulled a bottle of Highland Park single malt out of the cupboard. A Christmas present from Al last year. He poured himself a healthy dose, adding a dribble of water, the way Al had shown him. He drank to his dead friend, letting the fire and honey slide down his throat. “You bastard, Al. What the fuck have you landed me in?”
When he’d finished the whisky, he listened to Stevie’s voicemail message.
“Dave? Where are you? Did you hear what they’re saying about Dad? About the gold? About England? Fuck, Dave, what are we going to do?”
Dave knew what he was going to do. He took his mobile phone out to his workshop, cut up the SIM card with a pair of wire cutters, and smashed the phone to pieces with a hammer. Later that night, he went for a walk. While trucks roared by on the freeway behind him, he dropped all the phone pieces into the Brunswick River, watching them disappear into the black water that was being twisted and bent by the ebb currents swirling around the bridge piles.
Chapter 5
North Circular
The fine rain drifting over Camden Lock Market was only visible in the yellow glare coming off the word Fallen, wrought in bright-yellow neon and reflected in the water pooling between the cobblestones on the street. Fallen was the name of a North London nightclub, one of Manny Wexler’s regular jobs. Tonight he was outside, working the door with Staf, an old-school bouncer, as wide as he was tall: ex-army, ex-rugby player. He was now sporting a slick ponytail, pulled back to reveal a pair of thickened, scarred ears. Although Staf could be a complete nob, Manny knew he’d have his back if anything kicked off.
Manny wasn’t as big as Staf, but he was fit enough. Dressed in a black suit and overcoat, he looked like he could handle himself. And he could.
It was Sunday night and December cold. The gut-level beat of music, mixed with shrill excited voices, leaked out into the night every time the club’s door opened. Even in the rain, the pedestrianised street between the Chalk Farm Tube station and the lock was full of people. The crowd was mostly young and dressed for the weather, milling about in brightly coloured down jackets, talking, smoking. A lot of foreign languages. Spanish and Italian, bits of Polish, and others Manny didn’t recognise.
He felt his phone vibrate in his pocket and checked the screen. “HER” glowed white on the dark screen. Manny nodded to Staf and stepped away from the door. “What’s up, Ruthie?” he said into the phone. “I’m working.” He held his free hand up to his other ear, trying to keep out the deep bass thump of the dance music.
“I’ve found him. The bastard was in Australia.”
“Who? What are you talking about?” Ruth was his aunt, his only close relative.
“Stewart Finch, the gang. He was in Sydney, probably been hiding there all along. Changed his name probably.”
“Finch?” Finch was the last of the gang who’d hit the Heathrow warehouse along with his father back in 1979. “How do you know?”
“It’s all over the news. He’s dead, shot trying to pull off a bank robbery in Sydney. The bloody fool. What was he thinking, at his age.”
The crowd on the pavement expanded as the people coming out of the club were joined by a group arriving from the Tube station. Staf gave Manny a meaningful look and raised his eyebrows. Manny nodded back. “So if he’s dead…”
“We have to get to Sydney. Right away. There’s a flight tomorrow night. From Heathrow.”
“What? Why? It’s over, Ruthie. If he’s dead, it’s over. He’s the last one, yeah? That’s what you said, and now he’s dead.” He looked up to see Staf glaring at him again. “Listen, I’m working. I’ve got to go. We can talk when I get home.”
“What are you on about? We have to get out there now.”
“You said he’s dead. So the gold’s gone. It’s over. It probably always was over. The cops took it, like Ron said.”
“It’s not over. He’s got a son.”
“A son?”
“Yes. Finch has a son, a year or two older than you. Little Stevie Munro.”
Manny felt a hand on his shoulder. “You working or what?” Staf growled.
Manny shrugged off the hand and turned to face him. Silver drops glistened on the black wool covering the bouncer’s enormous shoulders.
“Piss off,” Manny mouthed, but Staf was already turning away to deal with a group of drunk women who had just piled out of a black cab on Chalk Farm Road.
Manny watched them tottering across the shiny cobbles on their stilettos, as Ruth went on. “He’s our last chance, the son is. But we have to be quick, before he disappears on us.”
“All right, but there’s nothing we can do till tomorrow anyway. Let’s talk when I get home.” He disconnected the call before Ruth could say anything more and joined Staf at the door, unclipping a rope barrier and guiding the group of women through, towards the pounding music.
“What the fuck’s going on?” Staf barked.
Manny shrugged. “Nothing. Family stuff.”
“Well, do it on your own time, mate.”
Manny ignored him, turning away to check the ID of a young woman with most of her tits hanging out despite the cold weather. The license had obviously been changed, a new photo glued over the original. Manny waved her through anyway. He didn’t give a fuck; he was thinking about Sydney.
It was after 3:00 a.m. when Manny got home to the flat he shared with his aunt, Ruth. They lived in the top floor of what had once been an Edwardian house on the North Circular. The yellow glare of streetlights lit up the hardstand out front. It had once been the house’s front garden, but now it was paved, and full of cars and rubbish bins. Manny bumped his VW Golf up across the cracked path and pulled in next to Ruth’s old Ford.
He peeled off his damp overcoat as he climbed the stairs, the familiar odor of Ruth’s cigarettes greeting him as he opened the door. The nicotine smell was right through the place; Ruth always had a fag going, first thing in the morning to last thing at night. Manny had been breathing her secondhand smoke for most of his life.
A twenty-four-hour news channel was playing on the television as Ruth stubbed out her cigarette and muted the sound. She looked more excited and expectant than what seemed reasonable for someone dressed in a blue terry dressing gown and fluffy pink slippers. Manny gave her a quick nod and went to his bedroom, where he ditched his coat and suit jacket and pulled off his boots. Back out in the kitchen, he put the kettle on and grabbed his Arsenal football mug from its hook.
Lighting up another cigarette, Ruth watched him make the tea. She was impatient but knew to wait. Not talking was always a challenge for her. Manny had lived with his aunt for most of his life. She had taken him in after his father had been killed in prison and his mother had committed suicide. He was only three then. Ron Wexler’s cellmate had stabbed him in the neck; everyone said it had to do with the gold Ron’s gang had stolen. Nineteen million quids’ worth.
A week later, Manny’s mother had run a bath, swallowed a bottle of sleeping tablets, then made sure by using a razor blade on her wrists.
When Manny was a bit older, Ruth had told him about finding her like that, all blond and grey in the crimson bathwater. “Couldn’t take the strain, love. Your mum, she was always a bit…vulnerable.”
His aunt, Ruthie, had been his real mother. She’d insisted he stay with her, his closest living relative. Everyone else was dead or didn’t want to know about him. She took him in, raised him. Just the two of them. “We’re a team, you and me,” she used to say when he was little, holding him tight, planting red lipstick kisses on him. “We’ve got to stick together, mate; look out for each other. No other bastard is going to.” Ruthie had lost the brother she adored, and Manny had lost both his parents before he’d even had a chance to know them.
When Manny had a mug of tea warming his hands, he sat down and turned to Ruth. “All rig
ht, tell me about this son of Finch’s then.”
“Stevie? What do you want to know?”
“How old is he?”
“Bit older than you. Would have been just a baby when they did the Heathrow job.”
“You knew him?”
“I went out with Stewart Finch for about a year before the bastard dumped me for a Canadian girl. He was a smart arse, but he was fun. Wicked sense of humour. Anyway, Jean Munro, she was a stupid young tart who didn’t know better than to get knocked up. They called the little boy Stephen, after Stewart’s father, I think. Little Stevie. He was a very cute baby; I’ll give him that. It was all a bit of a to-do, Jean being Canadian and being so young, but Finchy stuck by her, married her even.”
When Manny was growing up, his aunt had talked about the old days a lot—when Ruth and Ron were young and on the make. She’d been a looker in those days, judging from the washed-out colour photos she had, stuck neatly into big photo albums. All miniskirts and red lips, usually posing in the middle of a group of men, her arm looped through her brother’s. It was the same way she’d held Manny’s arm when he was a kid. An old-fashioned thing. When he got older and she kept doing it, he found it a bit embarrassing, but when he was a boy, walking down to the high street with Ruth on his arm felt good. He’d watched the men glancing at her; some did more than glancing, but she only had eyes for him. Ruth always seemed to have plenty of men around in those old photos. Mates of Ron’s, she said. Not many women. There was only one photo of his mother, Monica, in Ruth’s albums. A woman with dark eyes, holding baby Manny tight; there was something scared and defiant in the way she looked at the camera. All the rest of the photos featured Ruth and Ron. And their gang.
Manny picked up the remote and turned the sound up. The newsreader was going through the headline stories. “And in Sydney, a bank robber fatally shot by a security guard has been identified as one of the infamous Heathrow Torch gang.”
They had to wait for some bollocks about a review of the NHS and Eurozone regulations before they got to the story. “A bank robber killed in Sydney has been identified as one of the infamous Heathrow Torch gang. On Friday, the unidentified man was fatally shot by a guard during a bungled bank raid. Two other men, both guards, were also killed in what witnesses described as a bloodbath on the busy suburban high street.” The image on the screen showed an aerial view of a security van, its back door wide open and two bodies on the road behind it. “A spokesman for the New South Wales Police Service said they are on the hunt for two members of the Sydney gang who escaped and that they would be working closely with Scotland Yard to identify the dead man. Moving to sport now, the Chelsea manager today denied claims…”
Manny muted the sound. The Heathrow Torch Gang—it had been a long time since Manny had heard it called that. His father, Ron, had received a twenty-five year sentence for his part in the robbery. Him and Frank Worthing had been picked up a week after they’d hit the warehouse at Heathrow. It was all over the papers at the time. Years later, Manny had looked it up in the local library. The gang had gotten away with nineteen million in gold, but the inside man had been caught and grassed up Ron and Frank. The rest of the gang had gotten away and most of the gold was never recovered.
Ruth always said the gang hadn’t expected to get that much. It was just a fluke, three shipments of gold in one place at one time. That was why things had gone wrong. They weren’t prepared for that much gold, having to move it—and the effect it would have on everyone who heard about it.
The job itself had gone like clockwork, according to what Ron had told his little sister. After that, though, things went to shit. George Barnsley and Eric Matthews, the gang’s leaders, took the gold after the raid. They were supposed to see to it, melt it down, get rid of the markings, get it out of the country. The rest of the gang scattered, went home, got their alibis straight. Some even went back to their jobs. They were all supposed to meet up two days later, but Barnsley and Matthews never showed. Some builders found their bodies in a skip the next day, tortured, shot in the back of the head. The police found some of the gold in a lockup, where it looked like someone had been melting down the bullion. Half a million’s worth. No sign of the rest.
There was nothing the other five could do; the police were all over the case now. One of the guards identified Barnsley from a tattoo on his arm. The rest of the gang scattered; some went to Spain. Ron had stayed in London and was nabbed after the police got the guard to talk. Ruth always said her brother only stayed because of Manny and Monica.
“It has to be Finch,” Ruth said
“They said they don’t know who it is.”
“No, but it’s Finch,” Ruth said. “Has to be.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“He’s the only one left.” She stood up and rubbed her arm. “Manny, we’re close now.”
“What do you mean, close? He’s in Australia. And he’s dead.” He finished his tea and flipped through the channels, looking for more news.
“Ha! Australia, that bastard,” Ruth said. “I thought he might have gone to Canada. Jean took the boy back there after the robbery, when Finch and the others went to ground.” “Ah, Stewart, we’ve got you now, mate.”
“He’s dead, Aunty.”
“His boy’s not, though, is he? And he’ll have the gold.”
“What makes you think Stevie’s in Australia? You said he went to Canada.”
His aunt looked at him blankly. “He has to be. Stewart doted on that boy; I’m sure they’d be together.”
There was nothing on any of the other channels. Manny turned off the television and picked up his phone. The story was on the BBC website: “Torch Gang Member Dead.” Manny looked up. “It says they don’t have a name for the dead man.”
“It’s Finch. Has to be.” She grabbed his arm. “Stewart bloody Finch.”
Manny found the website of a Sydney newspaper that had an image of the dead bank robber. He held the phone out to Ruth. “Looks pretty bloody old to be pulling a bank job.”
Ruth took the phone and looked closely at the image. “That’s him. He’d be sixty five at least.”
“What was he still doing robbing banks then?”
“Stewart always thought he was smarter than everyone else.”
Manny kept reading. Two other members of the Sydney gang had gotten away, a young white male driving the getaway car and an older white gunman. They had killed two of the three guards after dousing one with petrol and threatening to set him on fire. It was the same thing the gang had done at Heathrow. According to the Sydney newspaper article, Scotland Yard had linked the dead man’s prints to unidentified prints found on some gold recovered from the warehouse. But no one knew what had happened to the rest of the gold.
That had always been the question. For years, Manny and Ruth had been trying to find out where the gold had gone. After Kovacs, Finch was the last member of the original gang. The only one they hadn’t been able to find. Ruth had been trying to get a line on him for decades. Now it looked like they were too late. Everyone in the gang was dead. Manny suddenly realised he felt relieved. The gold was gone. Now maybe he could get on with his life, stop chasing Ruth’s dream. Stop living in the past.
There was the son, though. Manny wondered if Stevie could have been the driver, the younger of the two who’d gotten away. And Ruth was right—he might know something. If he was working with his father, they had to have been close. Manny often wondered what his life would have been like if his father had lived—if they would’ve been close, been mates. Gone to the football together, met up for a drink on the weekend. He wouldn’t be living with his aunt; that was certain. And what if he and Ruthie did find the gold?
He supposed they could go to Sydney to look for the son. It was a bloody long way, but they could do it. They’d gone to Budapest for Kovacs and gotten a decent return out of it. He hadn’t had the gold, but he’d had plenty of other money. At least in Australia they’d be able to speak the langua
ge.
Manny had liked Budapest. It was the sort of place you could have a good time without spending a fortune. All the old spring-fed public baths the place was famous for had been turned into discos at night during the summer. It was something to see, all the pools lit up with fog and lasers, full of half-naked men and women, a lot of them doing a lot more than just dance in the water. Ruth said he’d be crazy to go in there; the water likely was an STD soup. Manny thought it looked like it would be worth undergoing a course of penicillin when he got home.
They’d had to go to Szechenyi Baths to meet a woman who might know about Kovacs. She was the cousin of a bloke Ruth knew from the old days. Stefan something, a kid from Ruth and Ron’s school, another Hungarian refugee like Kovacs.
“Why here?” Manny had shouted, as they sat on a terrace overlooking the pools, watching the crowds bounce and sway to the music.
“This is where she works. Didn’t want us coming to her home.” She shrugged. “Don’t know why.”
Not that Manny minded. It was a better place for a meeting than some Soviet-era apartment block. That was what he’d expected when Ruth said she’d tracked Kovacs to Budapest.
The scene below them looked surreal: the water glowing blue, seething with women in bikinis and bare-chested men, all clutching drinks, all bouncing to the music. The ornate tiled walls surrounding the baths were awash with blue, pink, and yellow lights. Flickering coloured lasers flashed through the fog floating on the water’s surface. Manny wondered if it was possible to buy or rent a swimsuit here. After they talked to this woman, he could stick around, see who he bumped into. Ruth could make her own way back to the hotel. It felt good to be out of London, like he was on holiday. He wanted to party.
“Bloody hell. Why does the music have to be so loud?” Ruth shouted.
“Loud is the whole point. Immersive.”
“What do you mean? The water?”
Tunnel Vision Page 6