Shadow Box (2 page)

“You had enough?” I shouted.

A small group had gathered around us outside the pub.

“Leave it, mate,” a voice came nervously, stopping just short of pulling me off. “Leave it.”

I dropped Essex Boy’s head back onto the ground, climbed off him and wiped the blood and snot from my nose.

“He hit me first,” I pleaded with the crowd, noting the expressions on the faces of two girls who had stopped to watch. I realized how alien this casual brutality was to the average passer-by, and how horrifying.

The man who had spoken helped my attacker to his feet and propped him against the lit window of the pub. He was groggy; drunk, or woozy from my assault. I looked from face to face, friendless. I had nothing to explain, so I turned and walked away.

I dabbed my bleeding nose as I trudged through the drizzle, wondering why it had happened again. I was getting into situations like this far too often. Several times in the last few months, scraps like this had kicked off in or outside pubs in the back streets of London’s West End, my night-time stomping ground. Every night seemed to be a bad dream of dark bars and clubs, of shots that tasted like cough medicine, girls the colour of furniture polish with boyfriends who looked like gay cage-fighters, snorting coke in the bogs and getting lairy to the constant thud of machine-like dance music.

It was driving me mad. Perhaps it was my moody swagger as I walked into places where I knew nobody; I rarely went to the same place twice to avoid familiarity. Perhaps it was my dead-eyed stare as I drank lager and people-watched. Whatever it was, my mood seemed to bring out the aggression in others, who thought I was staring at them, their orange girlfriends or their pints. Enough to make them confront me, or follow me out and have a pop.

Then there were the trendier places, full of posher, hipper kids, smiling inanely and dancing like sweaty puppets to endless House tracks, gobbling up Es like sweets. The drugs were everywhere I went, and given that my brother had died an addict and my last girlfriend had been killed as a result of a bad cocaine deal, I was still totally anti-narcotics. I don’t know why I even went out – I was always out of sync wherever I was – but of the two, I preferred the prickly tension of the Essex boy clubs to the goony ambience of the ecstasy bunnies.

Really, I knew what it was. I felt dead inside; the lager and the buzz of aggression were the only things that made me feel alive. I was drinking too much, from boredom and to blot out the events that still scarred my mind.

I didn’t like being Eddie Savage. I was getting out of control. I needed help.

Tony Morris became a regular visitor to my flat.

I knew what he was trying to do. After my experiences in Spain I had hidden myself away: attempting to overcome the trauma of the car bomb that had been meant for me and had killed my girlfriend; trying to rewire my memory and lose the character of Pedro Garcia, my cover identity over there.

Tony was hoping to rehabilitate me. I had refused therapy – I felt I’d had enough to last me a lifetime. I knew what was wrong with me, anyway; I had been scarred and traumatized by getting involved in organized crime while working undercover for Tony’s – and, I suppose, my – legit organization.

I’d nearly been killed twice in as many years, and I was still in my teens.

In my view, the best way to recover was not to do it any more.

But Tony had different ideas.

“You can be helpful, mate,” he said. “Just by keeping your eyes open when you’re out, seeing who’s selling what to who.”

“You never see anyone dealing cocaine, Tony. It’s all done quietly in bashed-up Beemers in supermarket car parks.”

“Not so much the coke these days. It’s the synthetics we’re bothered about, the Es and MDMA. Any spod with a chemistry degree can knock out pills in a garage. Volume, low risk, high profit: that’s where the organized firms get interested.”

“What firms?”

“Eastern Europeans working over here, Russians, Irish. Most of them are already shifting moody fags through corner shops. Knocking out pills is an easy and more lucrative step up.”

Tony was always casting me nuggets of information, to see if I’d take the bait. To get me back to work. Usually, I wasn’t interested. But he also told me that Tommy Kelly wanted to see me. As bait goes, Tommy Kelly was quite a fat maggot. I gave it a millisecond’s consideration, but … no.

“What good could it do me?” I asked. The head of the Kelly crime family had liked me and, as far as he was concerned, I’d turned him in. I’d got close to his daughter, his pride and joy, just to be able to spy on him. I’d nailed his son and got them both a life stretch. Tommy Kelly was hardly going to greet me with open arms and let bygones be bygones. So I continued to say no to Tony, and after a while he stopped asking.

But Tony was a sneaky bugger. It was part of his job. He would drop by in the evening with a couple of cold beers and reminisce about the work I’d done for the organization. He would praise me and big up my results, reminding me how close they’d got to cracking the cocaine syndicate in Spain on my intel. Although whatever he said, there seemed to still be tons of it in London, as well as plenty of E, so the gear was obviously still getting through.

But, Tony pointed out, good intel is never wasted. It joins up other dots.

Other times he’d call round in the morning. “Let’s get you out in the fresh air,” he’d say. We would walk through the central London parks, stopping for lattes, watching girls go by. Tony would give them marks out of ten, but I’d lost interest. We’d talk about this and that, and nothing in particular. Gradually, I began to feel a little more normal. It was like having a dad; someone who made me feel safe again. I got to know Tony, who had never given much of himself away, a little more. He had been in the background in my life for as long as I could remember, an old family friend. I never knew quite what his connection to us was.

He told me he had joined the army when he was about my age and had done a tour of Northern Ireland, where he had become involved in military intelligence. His fleshy face and indistinct looks meant that he rarely stood out, which was useful. I have never known anyone less conspicuous than Tony Morris. I would quite often lose him when we were out and about, unable to see him in a group of three or so people in Regent Street. Tony could disappear in an empty room.

A useful skill in this line of work.

“What did you do in Ireland?” I asked.

“Counter-terrorism,” he said. “The IRA was powerful back then, and political. Now it’s more or less another organized crime gang: they’re not so bothered about religion and politics, more about trading arms and controlling drugs. Back then they were passionate about the cause. They’d blow up a town full of people to make their point … and they did, in Birmingham, Manchester, London – even Ireland itself.”

Tony had explained the backdrop to the Troubles to me before. Of course, I’d known from the news for as long as I could remember that there had been things going on in Ireland, but the details, the fact that the Catholics wanted an independent republic while the Protestants were loyal to the Queen, seemed almost lost in the mists of time.

“Steve went over there, right?” I asked. Tony nodded.

I remembered hearing some of my brother’s debriefings after his death. Steve had been over there a few years before, trying to infiltrate an IRA cell. Before me, Steve had been recruited by Tony in a deal to get him off a drug rap. He had ended up dead at the hands of the Kellys.

“So what did
you
actually do there?”

I was straying into an uncomfortable area for Tony. He was naturally secretive. He scratched his head and looked at the ceiling.

“I managed to stop a big bombing in central London,” he said finally. “Rush hour, Kings Cross tube, would have killed hundreds and trapped hundreds more. Not only would the body count have been the biggest London had seen, but the city would have ground to a halt. Total chaos was what the IRA planned.”

“Nicely done.”

“Thank you,” Tony said. “I nearly got caught, though. I had to be spirited out of Northern Ireland overnight. I was becoming a bit conspicuous. We were deeply embedded in the IRA and I became a suspect.”

“So what happened?”

“I knew the IRA had their suspicions about me and I was asked to go and see a bloke called Padraigh Lynch. He was in charge of their punishment squads.”

“Punishment squads?”

“Yeah, they would dish out retribution to anyone they felt wasn’t following the rules. They would kneecap a fourteen-year-old for shoplifting, fire a 9 mm into a kid’s ankles for breaking into a pub.”

“Rough justice,” I said.

“It got rougher,” Tony said. “The last IRA informer on my watch was hung upside down in a garage, beaten, burned with fags and had his shins smashed with iron bars until the bones poked through…”

I winced. “Shit.”

“They kept him like that until he confessed. When the police – the RUC – eventually found his shallow grave, his captors had finally executed him with two bullets to the back of the head. And do you know the worst thing? He was no informer. He was innocent, an IRA man through and through, and just a kid.” Tony paused, shut his eyes momentarily. “And it was me who dobbed him in to Lynch to divert attention from myself.”

He opened his eyes and a change of expression came over Tony’s face.

“’Dere was no way Michael O’Neill could stay in the old country.”

It was as if Tony, boring, featureless Tony, had channelled a different personality. A convincing one at that.

“That was your cover? Michael O’Neill?”

He laughed, shrugged. There really was more to Tony than met the eye.

“So, when I started with the service back here, I was kept on the Northern Ireland case as it was my area of expertise. And when Steve started to work for us, I trained him up to pick up some of the pieces.”

I did a mental calculation. “That must have been a few years later?”

“A few,” Tony agreed. “But all the leads were still up and running, a couple were brown bread but I was able to place Steve right where all the action was. And by that time, Tommy Kelly was helping out the IRA too. Steve hooked up with the Kelly firm through the Irish connection, and as you know, the rest is history.”

“Steve did well, didn’t he?” I wanted to hear good of my brother, who I had worshipped for so much of my childhood – before he lost the plot.

Tony nodded. “Yeah. He did some good work, but you know Steve, he was a bit of a wild card. The Irish began to suspect quite quickly, so we pulled him out.”

“And that’s when he started working on the Kelly business?”

Tony nodded again. He looked me.

“I know you think the sun shone out of Steve’s arse, mate. But you’re the better agent.”

I shook my head. “I cock up all the time, Tony.”

“We all cock up,” he said. “It’s not an exact science. Your cock-ups are as useful as a lot of other people’s successes.” Tony had the knack of making me feel that everything I’d done so far was child’s play in terms of the big picture, but that at the same time I was useful and doing well. He gave me a sideways glance.

“So what about going to see Tommy?”

“I’ve told you I am not going to visit Tommy Kelly,” I said. “No way.”

A week or so later, I found myself in the back of a darkened car with my new case officer, Simon Sharp, headed towards Belmarsh high security prison.

Sharp was in his late twenties, with cropped blond hair and a face that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a boy band. He was a little taller than me, but wiry.

I looked out of the window at the familiar puzzle of roads that formed the Blackwall Tunnel approach.

“Nervous?” Sharp asked.

I would have been lying if I’d said no: my mouth was bone dry and my stomach was in a tight knot. If I’d eaten, I would probably have vomited.

“A bit,” I said. I looked at his knee jigging up and down, and guessed that he wasn’t exactly relaxed either. But as far as I knew, he didn’t have history with the man I was about to visit.

“Did Tony tell you Paul Dolan’s appeal has come up?”

He hadn’t. The last time I’d seen Dolan was a couple of years ago on the Thames, the night they arrested him and Tommy Kelly on my tip-off.

“He hasn’t got a hope in hell,” I said.

“You never know, if Tommy Kelly’s pulling the strings.”

“Even if he could pull strings from inside, I think he’d be pulling them for himself, not Dolan. Have
you
met Tommy?” I asked.

He shook his head. “No, but I’ve done my homework, and pretty hairy reading it makes. They reckon you’re the expert in the field.”

I shrugged, flattered that my case officer was deferring to me. “I guess I got closer than most.”

He paused. “What’s he actually like?” Sharp looked at me. The enquiring note in his voice revealed a trace of an accent that had otherwise been carefully concealed.

I tried to recall Tommy Kelly. It had been a while. “If you forget everything you know about him, you could mistake him for a prosperous builder or a car dealer,” I said, then reconsidered. “No, actually that makes him sound naff. He’s classier than that, knows all about art. Dresses well. In person he’s warm, good manners…”