I Am Gold

by Bill James

  i

  am

  Gold

  Also by Bill James in the Harpur and

  Iles series:

  You’d Better Believe It

  The Lolita Man

  Halo Parade

  Protection (TV tie-in version, Harpur

  and Iles)

  Come Clean

  Take

  Club

  Astride a Grave

  Gospel

  Roses, Roses

  In Good Hands

  The Detective is Dead

  Top Banana

  Panicking Ralph

  Eton Crop

  Lovely Mover

  Kill Me

  Pay Days

  Naked at the Window

  The Girl with the Long Back

  Easy Streets

  Wolves of Memory

  Girls

  Pix

  In the Absence of Iles

  Hotbed

  Other novels by Bill James:

  The Last Enemy

  Split

  Middleman

  A Man’s Enemies

  Between Lives

  Making Stuff Up

  Letters from Carthage

  Off-street Parking

  Full of Money

  Short stories:

  The Sixth Man and other stories

  By the same author writing as

  David Craig:

  The Brade and Jenkins series:

  Forget It

  The Tattooed Detective

  Torch

  Bay City

  Other novels by David Craig:

  The Alias Man

  Message Ends

  Contact Lost

  Young Men May Die

  A Walk at Night

  Up from the Grave

  Double Take

  Bolthole

  Whose Little Girl Are You?

  (filmed as The Squeeze)

  A Dead Liberty

  The Albion Case

  Faith, Hope and Death

  Hear Me Talking to You

  Tip Top

  Writing as James Tucker:

  Equal Partners

  The Right Hand Man

  Burster

  Blaze of Riot

  The King’s Friends (reissued as by

  Bill James)

  Non-fiction:

  Honourable Estates

  The Novels of Anthony Powell

  Copyright © 2010 by Bill James

  First American edition, 2011

  First published in Great Britain by Constable and Robinson Ltd.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any

  form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information

  storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the

  publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages.

  ISBN 978-0-88150-951-9

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  has been applied for.

  Published by The Countryman Press,

  43 Lincoln Corners Way, Woodstock, VT 05091

  Distributed by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.,

  500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter One

  2009

  One of the notable things about Iles was he’d get very upset at the death of any child, but especially a child who’d been shot. He gazed at this lad on the floor of the Jaguar, and Harpur could read the self-blame, anguish and despair in Iles’s face. It had happened on his territory, and in daylight – that’s how he would think: a damned affront, a stain; someone, or more than one, monkeying with him, with him, Desmond Iles.

  Usually, the Assistant Chief’s face didn’t say much at all. He could do terrific, almighty, disturbing blankness, except, of course, when he went into one of those twitching, loud, lips-froth fits about his wife and Harpur, though that had finished aeons ago. Looking in at the riddled boy through the gap where the window should have been, Iles seemed near to weeping. The boy’s stepmother, dead in the driver’s seat, would also register with him, certainly, but his main reactions and grief were for the child, Laurent.

  Sometimes – not now, no, not now – Iles had quoted to Harpur a saying from one of his famous literary figures in the past: ‘Grief is a species of idleness.’ Very snappy and cool and clever-clever, but wrong for Iles today, wasn’t it, sir? The ACC did a lot of heavy reading and came out with plenty of quotes, now and then fairly sane.

  Detective Chief Superintendent Colin Harpur reached the scene at about the same time as the first armed response car and an ambulance. Iles arrived a couple of minutes later. It was the kind of incident the ACC would want to attend personally. He’d find it symbolic, foully symbolic, a sign of possible general breakdown, and on his plate. Laurent Shale’s sister who’d been with him in the back of the car seemed unhurt, though her school clothes, forehead and hair were splashed with his blood. Harpur had opened a rear door of the Jaguar and lifted her off the floor and out. Ambulance people declared Laurent and his stepmother dead at the scene, or they’d have been removed at once, too.

  A woman paramedic had taken the girl from Harpur and sat with her on the low front-garden wall of a house alongside the Jaguar. She wiped the girl’s face with a dressing pad and tried to talk some comfort. ‘Her name’s Matilda,’ Harpur called.

  ‘Is it a mistake, Col?’ Iles said.

  ‘In what sense, sir?’ Harpur said.

  ‘Did they expect Mansel Shale to be driving?’

  ‘We do know he generally did the school run.’

  ‘And the car’s recognized everywhere,’ Iles said.

  ‘It’s the kind of school where parents are expected to roll up in at least a Jaguar. Manse is hot on that kind of thing – attention to tone.’

  ‘So, Shale must be away talking to an importer, or getting shriven at some abbey, and the wife deputizes,’ Iles said. ‘Hasn’t this family heard about not sticking to the same route? Manse is not in some ordinary, safe career, after all.’

  The ACC and Harpur spoke across Laurent’s body. Harpur stood in the road. He hadn’t closed the Jaguar rear door after bringing Matilda Shale out and he bent now towards the interior of the car and Iles. The Assistant Chief was on the pavement. The near-side rear window had been shattered by a bullet and he crouched with his head through the space. He was in uniform. He’d reverted lately to that en brosse cut for his grey hair, copied from Jean Gabin in an old film on TV. His admiration for Gabin came and went. There weren’t many people Iles admired non-stop – the poet, Alfred Lord Tennyson, the French revolutionary politician, Robespierre, and the ancient, toughie British queen, Boudicca, sometimes called Boadicea, though not by Iles.

&nbs
p; ‘The second wife of Mansel? A wedding not long ago?’ Iles said.

  ‘Naomi. The first one – Sybil – cut loose.’

  ‘They can do that, Harpur.’ But, perhaps because of the special situation, Iles didn’t turn mad or high-decibelled this time.

  ‘Well, yes, I’ve heard something along those lines,’ Harpur said.

  Chapter Two

  Of course, there’d been a build-up to all this. It began just over a month ago. One point about Mansel Shale was he knew nobody could see the future, including him, but back then – say more like five or six weeks than a month – yes, back then he’d had this strong idea he’d get killed soon: like shot in the head, most probably, though maybe garrotted.

  But, he also had to think, perhaps that’s all it was, a strong idea. A strong idea could be a stupid idea. Strong didn’t mean sensible. Some madmen became very strong because they was mad, requiring straitjackets. It might be the same with certain ideas: powerful but crazy.

  As a matter of fact, one evening around that time his son, Laurent, had been told at school to study an old poem about this sort of topic and they talked it over. The poem had a dog in it, and showed people could make a total mistake when guessing who’d die. In many ways Shale regarded poetry as quite worthwhile. Undoubtedly, all sorts liked it, with or without rhymes, stiff covers or paperback. Poetry could tell you things. Manse would not deny this.

  But, naturally, he’d realized that if he spoke to other experienced folk in the substances trade about his fear of getting killed they’d say immediately, ‘So, hire a bodyguard, or bodyguards.’ It would be their reply even if Manse admitted his worry could be foolish and panicky. However, people in the dog poem had turned out to be foolish and panicky, and Manse would hate to look the same. That was not right for someone in his position at the head of a top-class firm.

  The poem had mentioned that a very good man, but not named, got bitten by a mad dog in Islington, London. Most probably in them historical days Islington had all sorts. Anyway, neighbours and friends went into a true flutter, because they believed the man would die of them bites. No. The complete opposite. The last line of the poem stuck hard in Manse’s head. ‘The dog it was that died.’

  And this was the thing, wasn’t it – there might be a lot of doubts about who was actually going to get it? Manse could guess that if he used these arguments with others in the trade they wouldn’t listen, they’d just say again, ‘Get a bodyguard.’ Here’s how they’d see it:

  (a) in the snort, smoke and mainline trade, slaughter was always a danger for the boss of a rich, pusher company such as Manse’s, so maximum self-protection made sense. And,

  (b) a business leader like Shale, who knew the scene and its vibes so well, could somehow feel if special peril was around, even though out of sight. That being so, to take notice of such signals also made sense.

  Therefore (a) and (b) together said, Pay a heavy, or heavies, to keep you safe. That sounded simple. Bodyguards had been trained to wipe out all who tried to attack their chief and, in any case, to put theirselves between him and the bullets or garrotting or Samurai sword. This was what bodyguarding meant: you guarded someone else’s body – such as, say, Manse’s – not your own. Good fees covered this fine flair. You could either pick someone or more than one from your private organization to become a bodyguard, or bodyguards, or you could go to an agency. Almost all bodyguards was men, many black. Sex equality hoopla didn’t seem to work in this occupation yet. Nobody said it was not fair to women that only men could get murdered guarding someone else, male or female: think of the Queen or Madonna.

  Laurent said the final words in that poem, ‘The dog it was that died’, came in this strange order so the dog arrived bang at the start and gave a terrific shock. Ordinary language wouldn’t do. For instance, if the poem ended with, ‘But, to everybody’s astonishment, it was not the man who died but the dog’, we’d have to wait until word number fourteen for ‘dog’. But the poem put ‘The dog’ right up front, to really hit you, when you’d reckoned the man would die from the very serious fangness of them bites, most likely causing rabies or fatal rips.

  This was what Laurent thought, or what his teacher had told him to think. Manse wondered. The poem had a title, ‘Elegy on the death of a mad dog’, so you knew where the story would go. ‘Elegy’ and ‘death’ – a doubler. He was pretty sure only deads got elegies. How could you be surprised? Did the dog get poisoned by biting the man, regardless of him being so good? Did he have something rather murky in his blood that killed dogs? There would of been plenty of blood, some swallowed by the animal, probably. Manse felt confused, especially when he tried to get some message from that poem for the present. And what good was poems if they didn’t help us now?

  Way back, he’d had a great bodyguard, Neville Greenage, black, late twenties, but he went to Yorkshire or Austria, somewhere like that, to start his own operation. Later came Denzil Lake, originally from Hackney, London, white, dead now, owing to extensive gunshot damage to his mouth-throat-skull area, with suicide a possible, no question.* No question. Denzil had some stress. Well, he had a lot of stress. Understandable. Eventually understandable. He turned out to have been, for God knew how long, one of the most heartfelt and treacherous sods in ongoing commerce, and some thought the two-timing needed for this wore the rat right down, destroyed him. Manse had trusted Denz. Mistake, soft mistake. Deeper checks should of been done. His parents and family in Hackney didn’t seem very much at all.

  * See Easy Streets

  In the homework poem, perhaps the dog knew it would die of big madness soon and wanted to show it still had life and could do the kind of thing dogs did because they was dogs, and which made them dogs, like biting people – the way someone with a weak heart might go skiing or running the marathon to prove they could, though they couldn’t, and dropped dead on the slopes or track. Many questions regarding this poem did trouble Mansel, but, just the same, people could mess up when forecasting a death, and he thought he probably had it wrong about what would shortly happen to him. He must not give in to madness and shadows. He still worried, though. Garrotting he regarded as deeply Continental and sick.

  It delighted Manse to find Laurent studied ancient, truly useless stuff like that infection poem. If you paid the rosy fees charged by private schools, recession or not, you’d hope for far-out items like aged poetry and similar. Ordinary lessons, such as the multiplication tables, or mortise joints in a woodwork class, you could get anywhere. Manse had both the children, Laurent and Matilda. Clearly, their mother didn’t want them hanging about her when she did any of her flits. Sybil was more or less settled in North Wales the last he heard with a roofer or optician or snooker table salesman or vet – that kind of employment. Of course, quite often Syb wanted to come back, but after the divorce he’d married again, and this made a definite difference. He had to consider Naomi and would of considered her even if he didn’t have to. Manse hated casualness towards people – some people.

  After Denzil Lake, he had felt nervous about employing anyone else in that bodyguard job. Manse tried Eldon Dane for a while, but he didn’t seem right, and Eldon went back to selling, especially at discos and raves. He had a grand gift for discos and raves, perhaps inherited and in the genes, though there wouldn’t of been many discos and raves in his father’s time, and none in his grandfather’s. Bodyguards kept very close to you. Well, obviously – their bodies had to be in place to guard yours. That might be OK, if you could totally believe in their loyalty. If you couldn’t, though … If you couldn’t, if they’d been worked on and turned by some smart and filthy enemy, they was in a great spot to do damage. The greatest. Didn’t an Indian politician get assassinated by her own bodyguards? As a matter of fact, Manse could not speak Hindi, but he fancied he heard her yelling in the local language, ‘You are paid to look after me, not this!’ And they’d reply with some big-time political statement, probably, and cry, ‘Nothing personal!’ So, Manse hesitated to replace Dane,
drove the Jaguar himself, went without a holstered chaperon, thank you.

  Not just the Jaguar. The car was pretty well known on this territory. He’d use one of the smaller vehicles sometimes, including a van, hoping to stay unnoticed: a very basic ploy he’d adopted for years, even when Denzil drove, and not something new, because of the recent death fear. Taking the children to Bracken Collegiate, and bringing them home, gave him the most worries, of course. He could not use a van or dinky car for that kind of trip. This was a school where parents came in the big BMW, or a Mercedes or Lexus or 4×4, the 4×4s with mud streaks on them to show the family had paddocks. Matilda and Laurent would be ashamed if they had to climb out of or into the back of a beige van, however new. They’d never said so, but he thought they might of already been on the end of some snoot and snidenesses from other kids, and even the staff at Bracken, because of Manse’s particular career. He knew unholy rumour about his firm drifted around the town, not all of it fully correct, and none of it provable in court, even with witness protection.

  If you picked private education you had to put up with occasional shit. Mostly, it was envy, especially now. The teachers and the pupils saw that Laurent and Matilda had big, steady money behind them. A recession couldn’t hurt Manse, not badly. The opposite. The 50 per cent tax on high earnings wouldn’t touch him because he didn’t pay tax, except on minor income from a next-to-nothing, legal, cover business he owned – haulage and scrap, the usual folderol. How could he pay tax on his chief business earnings when they didn’t exist, not officially?

  On account of that 50 per cent, several big companies had shifted their headquarters overseas where tax was lower, so they could attract better staff. Manse didn’t need to go abroad either to recruit or sell. Some commodities people had to have regardless of a slump, people in this city like all others. For such troublesome days they might even need more help to relax. He felt bound to supply. A mission and duty. Manse had brought some prices down, but only by 5 per cent maximum. The result? Turnover up. Profits in line.

  Laurent and Matilda said some children had been moved from Bracken and sent to state comps because daddy, the estate agent or accountant or advertising exec, was having it grim, such as out on his one-time moneybags earhole and down the Jobcentre. The big BMWs and Mercedes and Lexuses and 4×4s still rolled up, though not so many of them now: doctors, dentists, undertakers, cut-price clothes shop directors, MPs, car-boot sales landlords, Tesco management, takeaway owners, still did all right. They kept their kids at Bracken so they could become doctors, dentists, undertakers, cut-price shop directors, MPs, car-boot sales landlords, Tesco managers, takeaway owners one day, and get through the next crisis – or maybe this one if it dawdled.