The Sunshine Cruise Company (26 page)

‘Just under four million pounds,’ Susan said miserably.

Tamalov clicked his finger at the other heavy and, not without difficulty, he leaned down, grabbed a handle and swung the holdall up onto his shoulders. ‘No!’ Vanessa shouted. She launched herself at Tamalov, but Benny caught her a good backhanded slap, sending her tumbling onto one of the beds.

Jill was crying. Ethel stared straight at Tamalov.

‘Please,’ Julie said, fighting her own tears. ‘Don’t take all our money. We have nowhere to go.’

‘Don’t take it so bad,’ Tamalov said. ‘These things happen in business. You did well to get this far. Besides, I’m saving you a lot of headaches, ladies – you could never launder all of this anyway. Or you’d get caught trying to take it out of the country.’

‘Why?’ Susan said, standing quite close to Tamalov. ‘Why are you doing this to us?’

Tamalov shrugged. ‘Come on. You know the old Russian story. There was a frog sitting by the river. A scorpion came along and said, “Give me a ride to the other side.” “But you’ll sting me,” said the frog. “I won’t,” said the scorpion, “I promise!” So the frog gave him a ride on his back. Just as they reached the other side the scorpion stung the frog. As the frog lay dying he said, “Why?” The scorpion said, “I’m a scorpion. It’s in my nature.”’ He looked around the room at the crying, broken women. ‘Hey, cheer up. We’ll let you keep the car, eh? We are not total animals.
Au revoir
, ladies.’

SATURDAY NIGHT IN
Marseilles – a party town.

Boscombe and Wesley sat in the back. Dumas and one of his men were in the front. They had been opposite and down the road from Le Punisher for over two hours now. Outside, in the dark, the streets were beginning to come to life: young men in lurid shirts, girls in micro miniskirts and spiked heels tottering from bar to bar, music booming out from various doorways. The queue to get into Le Punisher was starting to snake along the block, the entrance to the nightclub guarded by two headset-wearing security men and a girl wielding a clipboard, deciding who was fashionable enough to cross the threshold. During the two hours they’d sat there, troubling news continued to come over the radio. The two English ladies had entered the nightclub hours ago, around 6 p.m. They had yet to come out. (Of course. Although they were watching both the back and front entrances, it was impossible for Interpol to know that Tamalov’s service entrance to the nighclub utilised part of the old warren of catacombs that ran under much of Marseilles. A door in his basement led to a tunnel that brought you out in an alleyway five hundred yards along the street. Tamalov had already been, gone and returned right under the noses of the surveillance team.)

‘How long are we going to sit here?’ Boscombe asked.

This guy, Dumas thought. He was like a child on a trip.
Are we there yet? Are we there yet?
‘I told you, Sergeant,’ Dumas sighed. ‘We can’t just burst in there. We’re going to wait until your ladies emerge with the documents and then we’re going to arrest them and they will give us Tamalov.’

‘In return for what?’ Wesley asked, winding his window down. He was pretty sure that Boscombe, the animal, had been releasing a couple of stealth farts. He’d seen him shifting uncomfortably now and then, had caught the slight reek. At one point he thought he’d seen a frown cross Dumas’s face in the front passenger seat.

‘Well, we will have to cut a deal.’

‘Oh yeah?’ Boscombe said. ‘Our collars get off with a slap on the wrist as long as they send your boy down? That’s the deal, is it?’

‘Collars?’ Dumas said.

‘Our arrests,’ Wesley said.

‘Alexei Tamalov is responsible for untold misery, gentlemen. He has had men killed. Your ladies are not exactly career criminals, are they? From everything I’ve read it seems to be a one-off crime with much in the way of mitigating circumstances. I am simply concerned with the greater good here.’

‘Yeah, we’ll see,’ Boscombe said. He was sitting right behind Dumas, so he couldn’t catch the slight smile playing across the man’s face, but Wesley did. The cause of the smile was the fact that Dumas knew exactly why Boscombe was taking it so personally with these women. Earlier, at the station, one of the junior officers had shown Dumas a clip on YouTube: CCTV footage showing Boscombe screaming his head off while being dragged behind a minivan by his very balls.

Boscombe sighed and looked across the street, at people drinking at tables. Christ, he could murder a pint.

WHAT WOULD THE
collective noun for tears be? Ethel wondered. A meddle of tears? A dragoon of tears? A filibuster of tears? Whichever way, there was a festival of salty crying going on in room 38 of the lowly three-star Hotel Splendid right now.

Vanessa was weeping hard as she cradled Julie, who was making no sound, just big fat drops rolling down her cheeks. Susan was sitting with her head in her hands, rocking back and forth gently, interspersing her sobs with the words, ‘Idiot, idiot … I’m such a bloody idiot.’ Jill? Jill was something else. She was like fifteen old village ladies at a funeral: pacing back and forth, wailing, howling uncontrollably and occasionally uttering a piercing cry of ‘Oh Jamie! JAMIE!’ She was one notch off rending her garments. Even Ethel was dabbing at her eyes repeatedly.

Susan and Julie caught each other’s numbed gaze now and then, neither of them quite able to categorise the panic, the terror sweeping over them. Or better to say ‘the horror’, for terror is the apprehension of the awful. They were beholding it. They were in the midst of it. They couldn’t even pay the hotel bill.

What now? With no money and no life to return to?

What now?

After it had all gone on for a few minutes, Ethel let out a deep sigh, blew her nose, and said, ‘Oh, that’s better. Right, so what are we going to do?’

Julie said, ‘Eh?’

‘We’ve had a good cry. Fine. What’s our next move?’ Ethel wheeled herself into the middle of the room.

‘Move?’ Susan said, having to raise her voice to be heard over Jill’s wailing.

‘Yeah,’ Ethel said, then added, ‘Jill? JILL? Shut up, love. That’s enough.’ Jill looked like she’d been slapped. She shut up. Vanessa sniffed and quietened down. The room was suddenly as silent as it had been loud.

‘We don’t have a move, Ethel. What move?’ Julie wiped her face with the back of her hand. ‘We can’t go to the police. We can’t go back home. We’re finished.’ Her lip started to quiver again.

Ethel took a long breath and shook her head as she considered her words very carefully before saying slowly and deliberately …

‘You. Fucking. Bunch. Of. Pussies.’

Everyone looked at her.

She took a moment before continuing sarcastically, ‘
Boo-hoo. The bad men took our money, Ethel! What’s going to happen to us now? We’re finished, Ethel!
Are you telling me that this is it?
This
is our next move? FUCKING BALLS IS IT!’

She turned to Vanessa and, in a calm, conversational aside, said, ‘Vanessa, be a darling and run next door and fetch the bag that’s under my bed, would you?’ before turning back to the others.

‘They’re
gangsters
, Ethel!’ Jill screeched.

‘BALLS!’ Ethel replied. ‘BIG GIANT HAIRY BALLS! Gangsters?’ She snorted so hard Susan feared the top of her head might explode. ‘I was fighting fascists in the East End of London when these Russian cock-munchers were just a faint pulse in some Bolshevik rapist’s pants. So who’s for crying and who’s for fighting? Eh? Because if you think I’m going to quietly wheel myself off to prison while these vodka-swilling …’ Vanessa ran back in and slammed the heavy bag on the bed next to Ethel. ‘… borscht-munching, Trabant-driving, Cossack-dancing toerags tool about spending our hard-stolen cash then you’re out of your bloody minds.’ Ethel reached into the bag and pulled out Nails’s sawn-off shotgun.

‘But wha … what are we going to do?’ Jill asked.

‘Well, we know where he fucking lives, don’t we?’ Ethel said.

‘But they know our faces, Ethel!’ Julie said.

‘They won’t when I’m finished …’

Everyone turned.

Susan was standing by the dressing table. She had popped open the latches on her new make up-case. Susan had stopped crying. She was wearing a very different expression to the one she’d had a few moments ago. The eyes, the set of the jaw, she looked … she looked like Ethel. ‘Ethel’s right,’ Susan said. ‘Fuck this.’

Another voice piped up. ‘Fuck this!’

They all looked at Jill, who even now was clamping a hand over her own mouth, astonished at herself. Vanessa gasped as Ethel racked the slide on the shotgun, chambering a round. She looked up at the old watermarked ceiling and, in a voice that put concentric circles in the glasses of water on the chest of drawers, that shook the very plasterwork, screamed to the heavens:
‘I’M COMING HOME, MA!’

‘
JUST ’CAUSE SHE
DANCE THE GO-GO, IT DON’T MAKE HER A HO, NO!’

Wyclef Jean blared from the walls of speakers, the dance floor starting to come to life now. Tamalov sniffed – the cocaine sharpening his sexual appetite even as it shrivelled his penis – as he surveyed the action from his perch in the VIP booth and found life to be good.
Nearly six million in euros.
He could take the rest of the year off. Hell, he could take the next decade off. Robbing robbers: the perfect crime. The VIP area was a small room with half a dozen big plush couches, roped off from the rest of the club by velvet ropes spanning an entrance through which the VIPs could survey the action on the floor, the ropes guarded tonight by Benny, who allowed only the closest friends or the choicest girls to pass. Benny was grinning from ear to ear – the thousand-euro bonus wad stuffed in his hip pocket, a thank-you for his help earlier. Spread the wealth, Tamalov believed.

The
CRACK
of another champagne cork caused him to turn and grin. Franco and Rolf and Harry, celebrating their good fortune, already with a few girls hanging off them, already doing blow right there on the table.

Tamalov, full of joy, full of magnanimousness, wanted to do something for Franco. It’d been worth handing Benny that thousand just to see the way his dark face lit up. Franco’s finished passports had been masterpieces, not that they’d been needed in the end of course, but they might yet be resold with the photographs changed. They were safely tucked in the vault at home, along with the English money. Good old sterling: usually so solid. That was it – he’d come good on his word and find Franco a real peach tonight. A young honey to party with, to dance the go-go with them. He loved bringing young girls back to the house, the way they strode around his pool in their bikinis or their underwear, coltish, unsteady on their heels, their sexual characteristics sometimes freakishly pronounced, the breasts, butts and boxes almost too much for their undeveloped frames to handle. They all acted so cocksure and confident, as though this was the life they were used to at sixteen or seventeen, strutting around millionaires’ homes full of coke and liquor. But, the best part, the most fun, was how, now and then, you’d see fear and uncertainty flickering in their faces, the sense of being truly out of their depth. Life was
good.

YES, SUSAN HAD
worked hard with make-up before, performing many reversals of age and sex that had proved undeniably convincing to the good people of Wroxham. There had been the hours transforming Mr Collins the butcher into a convincing alehouse hostess when they’d been short-handed for
The Taming of the Shrew
. There’d been the summer when she’d made Mr Wintergreen the convincing recipient of the love of Deborah Foster in
South Pacific
. Their ages had been sixty-one and twenty-three respectively. Or the time illness had forced her to transform Justin Bates (the understudy), nineteen at the time, into a passable Richard III.

But here and now, in the midnight hour in this cheap French flophouse, it could well be argued that she had accomplished her greatest work. If the reaction of her tiny audience of two was anything to go by anyway …

When Vanessa stepped through the doorway from the bathroom Jill’s hand had gone to her throat and she’d sighed. ‘Oh, Vanessa darling, you look absolutely beautiful.’

Vanessa wore a red wrap dress they’d bought her as a treat in Diane von Furstenberg in Cannes. Her hair had been cut into a sharp bob and her make-up brought out her lips and cheekbones making her look easily twenty-one years old.

Ethel contented herself with a more straightforward response: she nodded in approval and said, ‘They’ll be eating chips out of your knickers, love.’ This was not entirely true. As Vanessa twirled for the ladies and the tightness of the dress across her rump was displayed, it became apparent that she wasn’t (indeed that she couldn’t be) wearing any knickers.

‘Oh dear,’ Jill cut in. ‘Isn’t that a bit on the raunchy side?’

‘You look gorgeous, Vanessa,’ Susan said, admiring her own work.

‘Right,’ Ethel barked, putting the handgun she’d been cleaning in her lap, clapping her hands together, ‘we’ve had Beauty. Let’s have the Beast!’

A muffled ‘Piss off, Ethel’ came through the thin wall to the bathroom, there was some shuffling and cursing, and then the door burst open and true silence descended upon the room.

Julie was backlit by the stronger light from the bathroom. She was striking a self-conscious pose in the door frame, pouting a little. The first thing that was apparent was the degree to which she’d kept her figure over the years. Generally, more recently, it had been hidden away in sweats or in the sexless uniform of the care home. Here it was encased in a tight black velvet dress, another purchase on the Cannes shopping spree. Susan had hitched the hemline up another three inches, displaying more of Julie’s legs than had been seen for many years. But it was the hair and make-up that really did it, that really made Jill gasp and Ethel say, ‘Holy. Fucking. Shit.’ For Julie seemed to have halved in age in the last hour. Her hair had grown in volume and was spilling down her neck and into her cleavage. There were no discernible lines on her face, her eyes looked clear and unwrinkled, the eyes of a woman of twenty-eight or twenty-nine.