Gaslight (7 page)

“Talk is cheap, Mr. Sabini. How would you do that?”

If he was offended by Harry’s impudence then he did not show it. “I’ll pay you twenty pounds a day to maintain security at our courses. You’ll need a car, too––I’ll give you one, a new one, a Humber or a Wolseley or whatever you like. We have plenty of lads who see to our business on the courses––you’ll be put in control of them. It is an excellent opportunity for boys like you. You’ll make more in a month than you would in a year of breaking houses, without the risk.”

“The police?”

“I own the police, Harry.” He took his arm away and stepped back. “What do you say?”

Harry looked at George; it was habitual, but, at the same time, he knew his older brother would defer to him. Harry was the thinker and George had always been happiest when he made the decisions.

“Thirty,” he said.

Sabini laughed. “Twenty-five, Harry, and that is against my better judgment.”

“You have a deal.”

THEIR FIRST trip to the races was a month after they had spoken with Darby Sabini. They had been allowed to develop their career as burglars, their income supplemented now by regular strong-arm work for the Sabini gang. He had a bundle of five pound notes now which he stowed carefully away in cigarette tins and he had just put down a deposit on a new flat: a bedroom and sitting room and its own bathroom. Isabella had found it. They wouldn’t live together until they were married, but they were starting to plan that. A summer wedding, they thought. The Registry Office and then a little holiday somewhere. Harry liked the sound of Paris.

He had used the time to soak up the details of how the Sabini operation was run. He wanted to learn as much as he could and so he kept his eyes opened and asked careful questions of the other men with whom they worked. He built up a comprehensive and accurate picture: he learned how to run a protection racket, which police officers could be bought and for how much, the best ways to launder the proceeds of crime, a hundred and one ways to make money. It was the best education that he could have hoped for and he determined that he was going to put it to good use. It was all just a matter of timing.

On this particular day, they took the underground to Waterloo and then the train. They rode in a third class smoker, rolling out of the city, the anonymous grey streets of London giving way to a wilderness of narrow, sooty fields. The line cut arrow straight through beech woods, not a bough or blade stirring in the still air. They passed a huge house that sat in a bowl like depression; in the days of horse and carriage it had been an opulent country residence but now it was empty and unloved. Harry watched out for the few birds that were abroad: tits and starlings and sparrows, passing between the foliage with sharp, darting flight, and haughty pheasants that loitered at the edge of the rails with long tails trailing. He watched them, but not really. He was preoccupied with the plan that had started to form in his mind.

They were picked up outside Kempton Park station by Fred and Joe Sabini in a battered charabanc. The bus was full of young men, hard-eyed and beetle-browed, drinking bottles from the three crates of Bass that had been left on the back seats. Harry and George took bottles when they were offered and started to drink as the bus pulled out from the station. They sat at the front on the bench immediately behind the two Sabini men. Fred spoke to them to give them the lie of the land, and although Harry made the occasional affirmative noise he was not really listening. The words came through the rumble of the tyres and the squeaking of the suspension, the whole an annoying distraction that he tuned out to concentrate on the business at hand. This, he knew, was all part of the same big opportunity. He had not been able to get that out of his mind since they had started working for the Sabinis. His audacity with Scarpello and Benneworth had been rewarded and now he had to cash it in. He thought of his determination to improve his lot; it was like an invisible power working through him. It drove him relentlessly. He would have been unable to resist it, but, then, he didn’t want to resist. He wanted to surrender himself to it.

Joe Sabini ground the old gears as they headed south, passing through the rows of housing that had been built around the station. The traffic grew dense and cars were crammed tight: a pair of children sat on their on their mother’s lap in a taxicab, four beefy men crushed into the back of an Austin, another clung to the running board of a Wolseley as it cut a hazardous path down the median, bullying its way around the stalled line. Engines growled and horns sounded, the impatience of the drivers curdling into jealously for those who were already there and anger because they were not.

Eventually, they pulled up in a broad field that had been allocated for parking and disembarked. There were fifteen men, all big, most of them drunk, all ready for a fight. Harry jumped down and squinted into the sky. The winter sun had pierced the cloud and now the light came slanting and yellow across the park and the racecourse beyond; jockeys massed around an entrance, garish colours springing out vividly.

Harry waited for his brother and threw his arm around his shoulders as they set off for the gate.

“Alright?” he asked.

“Right as rain.”

Life was good, Harry thought.

Fred Sabini explained what they were going to do. Several of the bookies had changed sides, he said. They had shunned the Sabini’s protection and taken up with the Brummagem Boys. One of them was a man named Reynolds. He was the leader, a man who had always been difficult to deal with, truculent and ungrateful, and he had gathered the others to his standard. They would be making an example of him today.

They paid their entrance fee and passed through the turnstiles into the half-crown enclosure. They moved towards Reynold’s stand. An assistant, young and with Brylcream plastered on his hair, stood on a box paying out money. Another examined odds in the ten shilling enclosure through a pair of binoculars, the sun glittering against the lens. Reynold’s himself was taking a bet from another punter, tic-tacking fresh odds with a grubby hand against the skyline as he did so.

Harry felt venom in his veins, the thrill of violence straightening his body like lust.

“Ten to one, Freya’s Sunrise, ten to one,” Reynold’s assistant called, and “They’re off,” somebody else said. The crowd hurried from the refreshment tent and flexed towards the rails carrying glasses of ale and currant buns. The bookies wiped the odds from their boards, Reynolds still pressing for new action even as the horses pounded around the bend: ‘Twelve to one, Freya’s Sunrise”. The horses came by in a tight clutch, with a sharp sound like splintering wood, and then they were gone. The crowd, mostly disappointed, went back to the ale tents to refresh their glasses, and the bookies put up the runners in the next race and began to chalk up new odds.

Harry Costello’s thoughts floated back across the last year: trenches filled with blood and viscera, death and disease; bayonet charges across fields of mud; troopships clambering across mountainous seas; the grim return to London; the eternal grind of poverty.

Scarpello.

Benneworth.

A year bracketed by blood.

And then he thought of Isabella, beautiful Bella, and the way that she looked at him when he had proposed, and then the shout from Fred Sabini went up and the men charged, the bookies’ stands overturned and stomped underfoot, the first punches thrown, the first flashing of razors, and as Harry followed after his brother and flung himself into the fray, he knew––he was quite
certain
about it––that everything was going to be just fine.

SATURDAY NIGHT, three in the morning, and Billy Stavropoulos was making a hell of a racket, kicking and pounding like mad in the boot of the car. Edward Fabian ignored it––they were nearly there––and drove on. Rain lashed the streets, thundering against the roof. The area around the harbour had taken the brunt of a German raid seven years earlier. The rainwater that ran into the gutters was slurry-coloured from brick dust; the tarpaulins that had been nailed over vanished windows flapped incessantly; wild flowers sprouted amongst the ruins. The harbour itself was surrounded by derelict buildings, some of them flattened by the bombs, others looking like they ought to have been. Lines of boats were secured to the moorings, their rigging jangling and rattling as they rose and fell on the tide. There was a strong smell of fish on the wind. Grey streets, blotched and stippled with yellow light, led away into the murky distance.

Edward slowed the car to a stop. It had been given to him by detective inspector Murphy. It was new, probably impounded from some unlucky chap Murphy had arrested, and it still smelt fresh. It was a good car, not as impressive as Edward’s Triumph, but good nonetheless. It was almost a pity that Edward was going to have to torch it when he was finished, but there was no sense in leaving forensics that might lead back to him.

Jimmy Stern was sitting next to him in the passenger seat, staring ahead, impassive. Only the almost imperceptible grinding of his teeth revealed his nervousness. “Ready?” he said.

Edward breathed deeply, the cold damp air burning his lungs.

Jimmy put a hand on his arm. “Edward––we’ve got no choice. We’ve got to do it.”

The cabin’s courtesy light illuminated the ugly bruises on his uncle’s face. “I know we do,” he said.

He opened the car door. There was a dim and economical streetlight at the other end of the harbour but here it was black. It was closer to sleet than to rain, the edged drops seeming to slash their way through the buttonholes of his raincoat. It lashed into him and he was drenched in seconds. He went around to the back of the car and opened the boot. The light clicked on, illuminating the body inside. Billy was curled up in the narrow space, his wrists handcuffed, his knees against his chest, his ankles roped together and with a rough sack tied over his head. He started to moan, the rag that they had stuffed into his mouth turning his protests into an indecipherable mumbling.

Edward slid his hands beneath his shoulders, gripped hard and hauled him out.

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