London Large: Blood on the Streets (11 page)

The vans
pulled up outside their destination, in a no parking zone.

‘Put
Balaclavas on’, ordered Dragusha, ‘cameras everywhere here.’

Pete Abbot,
driver of one of the famous London black taxis that swarmed around this part of
London 24 hours a day, found himself trapped behind the vans and growled with
impatience.

‘Oi, what
you doing, you can’t park there…sort yourselves out.’

But Pete
looked on in transfixed disbelief as twenty men armed with automatic rifles
calmly exited the vans. He had been working the streets of London for twenty
years. But this was a first, an absolute stonker of a first. Being a clever man
he quickly realised that the gentlemen with the guns were not very concerned
about parking illegally and, if he kept his trap shut from this moment on they
might hopefully not be too concerned about him mouthing off his thoughts on the
quality of their parking choices.

‘Fuck me’,
he said as he rolled up his window, ‘these boys ain’t here to party.’

The music was too loud
for H, and too squawky, so they got a table at the back of the room. They’d been coming to Ronnie Scott’s for years now, for their annual
reunion. Since their paths had diverged - Ronnie’s into the aristocracy and the
world of high, global finance, H’s deeper into the same tough streets they’d
come up on - they always made a point of meeting here at least once a year,
partly to catch up, partly to relive their youth.

The room was hot, crowded and
smelled of wine, perfume and Italian food. The music pulsed and clattered.
Ronnie liked his jazz, had done since he was a kid and used to come here,
amongst other hotspots, to hear the funked-up jazz/disco stuff they all loved
‘back in the day’ - a phrase he did not use in H’s company. H himself was not
so keen on the improvised, difficult stuff, preferring to hear a crooner
working with the standards.

Like his father before him,
and as he still hoped his own son might one day become, H was a Sinatra man.
Through and through. End of.

Since the funeral they’d made their way, through Soho’s rainswept streets, around the old watering
holes. Or those of them that had not yet been turned into high-end apartments
or frothy-coffee outlets. Both of them were, by now, the worse for wear. Both
were hurting, and hurting bad.

They’d boozed and talked long
and hard, and were now almost talked out. How much grief, pain, anger, and
confusion can a man get through in one sitting? They settled into their chairs
and Ronnie ordered a bottle of wine that would have put a good-sized dent in
H’s weekly wages. H tried to move the conversation on a bit, to get on a more
normal
footing, and assailed Ronnie with some of his professional woes.

‘I’ll wring the soppy little
cunt’s neck one of these days. He ain’t half the copper I am, Ron. Not a
quarter. But he’s moving upwards like a rat up a drainpipe. Ten minutes out of
university and he’s already at my level. He’s got plenty of qualifications, and
he can Powerpoint you to death, but he couldn’t fight his way of a paper
fucking bag. That’s what they’re all like now…it’s a nightmare. All of a
sudden, I’m the dinosaur. They don’t want people like us no more Ron.’

‘Stop feeling sorry for
yourself H, you
are
a stroppy old bastard. In ain’t 1985 any more mate. You’ve
got to try and move with the times a bit.’

‘Move with the times? Move
with the fucking times?’

H was gearing up for another
rant. Ronnie slowed him down.

‘Anyway, all I care about is
the investigation. Why is this Miller-Marchant wanker in charge of it? I
understand why they haven’t put you on it, but is he really the best man for
the job?’

‘Well’, said H, ‘he’s what
there is now. If it wasn’t him it’d be someone like him. But he is out of his
depth; Lord Snooty and his pals are running rings round him. I don’t know how
you’ve put up with that shower of shit all these years. Something’s not right
with that lot mate, I’m telling you. Old Shitbreath’s got some wrong ‘uns round
him. They’re up to something.’

‘You say that, H, but that’s
just what they’re like. I think…’

H interrupted him.

‘Listen, Ron, it’s not just
that I’m too close to the case, it’s that…I went off my head in the park the
other day. When I saw Tara, I…’

‘I know H - I know.’

‘My guvnor thinks I’m
mentally unstable. She’s got me running round after all these fucking gangsters…but
she thinks I’m going off my head.’

‘You’ve been off your fucking
head for years, mate’, said Ronnie, kicking back in his chair, smiling broadly
and raising his glass. ‘Here’s to you, H.’

H was choked. He felt tears
welling up in his eyes. He was losing control of his emotions again.

‘I’ll get them, Ron. I swear
to God I’ll get them. Whoever did that to Tara is going to wish they’d never
been fucking born. I promise you that.’

The band was between sets
now, they noticed, and the place was relatively quiet. Just the hubbub of
conversation and clinking glasses.

And then all hell broke
loose. Burst after burst of fire from automatic weapons. They both knew the
sound well, and for a second the volume and intensity of it took them back to
that day in 1982.

‘Fuck me!’ said Ronnie.

Most of the other patrons
were now beneath their tables, hunkering down instinctively. But H was
concentrating.

‘Sounds like it’s coming from
Wardour Street, somewhere there.’

A two minute run from where
they were sitting, in Frith Street.

‘What the fuck’s going on,
H?’

‘I’ve got a fair idea mate.
Stay here…I mean it Ron.
Stay here.’

H hit Frith Street like a man
possessed and barrelled, along the glistening pavement, towards Wardour Street.

I’ve had just about enough
of these cunts.

H was gasping for air
as he trundled into Peter Street. The run from Ronnie Scott’s had winded him
severely; he was in worse shape than he’d realised. And clearly also becoming
more stupid - what was he doing running at full tilt towards bad men equipped
like a militia, by the sound of it, without so much as a water pistol in his
hand?

What the fuck am I doing?

Such were his thoughts as he
staggered towards what looked, as far as he could tell by the fleeing,
screaming crowd, like the site of the action. But the madness was only just
beginning.

The crowd thinned suddenly
and melted away, and in a chaos of driving rain and wailing alarms H made out a
gang of heavily armed men piling into two vans. One man was doing all the
barking and pointing, and H focused in on him. He recognised the face beneath
the balaclava, by the eyes; it had been all over the surveillance footage and
photos of The Island in Bermondsey since the shoot-up and head tossing. Basim
Dragusha. Amisha and a few of the others who’d been analysing the surveillance
data had him down as the No. 1 man on the firm. He certainly looked like a
handful now, calling the shots and getting his men the hell out of there. He
jumped into the front of the lead van, turned and met H’s eye as it pulled
away. H would remember the look in those eyes long after; it was mocking,
malicious, savage...and happy. Exultantly happy.

Gotcha, you bastard. I’m
going to bring your world down around your ears
.

H stood, unsteady on his
feet, and caught his breath. Before long the initial joy of putting a name to a
face gave way to reflection, as he calmed himself. Evil bastards had glared at
him before. But this one was special. This nutter was clearly capable of taking
violent chaos to a whole new level, in London terms. This wasn’t old school
gangsters with sawn-off shotguns having a pop at the odd bank - it was warfare,
Yugoslavia-style warfare. Did he and his firm have what it took to stop it? Did
they have the resources and the will, the fight, the balls? Would they have to
call the army in?

An image flashed across his
mind: Joey Jupiter, as exultant as Dragusha, stabbing gleefully with his two
thumbs at the tiny keypad of a little plastic phone...

Backup arrived: a couple of
squad cars and an armed response unit. Ambulance and fire engine sirens could
be heard in the distance. The epicentre of the chaos proved to be exactly where
H had expected it to be: the Russians’ night club. It was now a blown-out hole
in the wall, reminding H of those old photos of wrecked buildings during the
Blitz, and the bomb sites he grew up playing on, still there in the 1970s while
he was learning the ropes in Bermondsey.

Broken glass and chunks of
shattered masonry everywhere, alarms still wailing, smoke and dust filling the
air and...the smell. The smell of blood, an abattoir’s worth of blood, and
burning flesh.

He had been here before. He
turned on his feet and, without consulting anyone, headed towards the club. His
senses were working overtime, his whole body was zinging. But alongside this
was a sense of dread, which sharpened as he got closer. He gulped hard and took
a breath. Phrases he’d picked up as a boy, and hadn’t used in years, were
coming back to him:

Black Hole of Calcutta

Charnel House

H moved through the
entry-level reception area - all was shattered fragments; it was hard to make
much out apart from the remnants of coats strewn across the floor by what must
have been the cloakroom - and what was left of the staircase. He picked his way
up the steps carefully; there was not much left to hang on to.

Fuck me, these nutters
have been chucking grenades about like sweets at a kids’ party.

The place had taken a massive
hit; he was looking at major structural damage. He made it to the top of the
staircase and surveyed the scene, and retched. Small fires were still burning,
or smouldering, some of them in what had been until recently human beings. Dark
redness everywhere, visible in staccato bursts from a flickering lamp: from the
plush of the curtains, to the bits and pieces of flesh and intestine strewn
everywhere, to the bloodsoaked carpet. The air was thick with acrid smoke and
the butcher shop smell he’d caught outside.

Paramedics -
won’t be much
for them to do here
-, fellow officers and fire fighters followed him up
and began their grim work. He moved across the dancefloor, treading gingerly,
careful not to look too closely at everything he moved around, and
headed for the rooms at the back. He knew there had to be an inner sanctum,
where Agapov and his crew would hole up, do their business, have their charlie-and vodka-fuelled orgies.

Bingo. A reinforced steel
door blown off its hinges, bodies and body parts clustered around the
threshold, all the signs of a surprise attack with very, very heavy tools. H
imagined the scene. Agapov and his boys would have stood no chance. One minute
it would have been ‘hey, Maxim, you want another line?’ and ‘hey bitch, you
come here, now, you eat big Russian sausage’ and the next, BLAM! Uncle Basim
and his hillbilly army are at the door with a special-delivery Balkan
apocalypse.

H continued his musings. How
many people had been killed here tonight? That would be for entire teams of
highly trained experts to determine in the coming days and weeks. Clearly, a
lot of women will have been killed, and about that he felt sad. H would lose
not a wink of sleep, though, over these cruel thugs being dispatched to meet
their maker. They had all been gathered in now, by whomever is responsible for
the souls of ruthless gangsters, and H was of a mind to think Dragusha and his
little firm had done him a favour.

God knows what the payback
for this will be...but at least this bunch of horrible bastards is off my
plate.

He suddenly became aware of
movement in an adjacent room. He heard a door close and someone running down
stairs. A back door escape route. H tried two or three doors before he found
one that opened. ‘Outside! Quick!’, he bawled, ‘someone’s legging it!’ He
rushed to the window and saw, in profile, a man limping slightly but running at
speed and turning the corner into Berwick Street. It was Vladimir Agapov.

‘It’s good to talk.’ That’s
what the TV adverts for British Telecom used to say back in the eighties.

H was having none of it; not
then, and not now. He didn’t like the advert, and he’d watched the Oprah
Winfrey show a total of once, under duress. Not his sort of thing.

He might open up to Olivia
from time to time if something was really bothering him, but his motto had
always been more like ‘it’s good to drink.’ He belonged to the old school, and
felt no need to talk things out or develop in any way his ‘emotional
intelligence’, whatever that might be. Like many men of his generation, and
even more so his father’s, his touchstone was the great Bert Trautmann: breaking
his neck with seventeen minutes to go was no excuse for
him
to bail out
of the 1956 FA cup final. Bert had done what he was there to do.

And now they roll around
on the floor clutching their hairbands if someone so much as gives them a dirty
look.

What H wanted, standing in
Peter Street amid the shattered glass and wailing sirens with the stench of
blood in his nostrils and the image of a pile of ruined corpses still
fading from his eyes, was not counselling - if he had a quid for every time
Hilary had offered him that he’d be a rich man by now - but a good session.

He pulled out his phone and
hit Confident John’s number. Who else was there, now? Only Ronnie, once in a
blue moon. John, clearly already the worse for wear, or disturbed from a deep
sleep, or both, answered.

‘Hello John, you about? I
could strangle a light ale’, said H.

‘H? What time is it?’

‘About half past two, I
think.’