Death is the New Black

by Dominic Piper

  He’s wearing a black suit with a white shirt open at the neck and a handkerchief poking out of the top pocket of his jacket. Sara’s description of him was pretty good, but she missed one thing: his build. This guy is muscle and no monkey suit can disguise it.

  ‘Have you got a suite or a room?’

  ‘A suite. We wanted the Empire Suite, but it was fully booked. We’re in the Celestine Suite. My husband wasn’t that bothered, really. He’s in Edinburgh for five days from tomorrow, but I do like the Empire. My name’s Doroteia, by the way. Doroteia Vasconselos. Mrs Doroteia Vasconselos.’

  ‘I’m Daniel Beckett. Please to meet you, Doroteia.’

  ‘It is my pleasure, Daniel.’

  We shake hands. I keep eyes on my man, who’s still loitering uncertainly. He’s at a disadvantage in that he doesn’t know the precise time that Sara will appear, and doesn’t want to wander far in case he misses her. He looks around innocently, but his acting is poor. For a second, he’s looking directly at me, but looks away again. Nothing to see, just a man and a woman talking in front of Fortnum’s.

  ‘Well, we may bump into each other tomorrow, Doroteia. I often come here at around three.’

  ‘I hope so. I would like that. I have booked a fitting at Rigby & Peller later in the afternoon. Perhaps you could accompany me. It can be useful to have a man’s opinion when one is buying undergarments.’

  ‘That’s so true. Well, let’s hope our visits here tomorrow coincide.’

  ‘Yes. Let us hope they do. I must leave now. My husband will be wondering where I am.’

  ‘Tomorrow, then.’

  ‘Yes. Good evening, Mr Beckett.’

  ‘Good evening, Mrs Vasconselos.’

  I watch her as she strolls slowly towards Piccadilly Circus. Her ass is swaying a little more than might be usual and she slowly runs a hand through her hair. Well, that should be interesting if I can get here.

  When I look across the road at the jeweller’s again, my man is gone and I get a brief surge of adrenalin, but then I spot him walking past the entrance of Burlington House and as he passes it he takes a conspicuous look into the courtyard. Fuckin’ amateur.

  I remain on my side of the road and track him, keeping about thirty feet back. He turns into the Burlington Arcade and pretends to look at some of the shops, all the while looking over his shoulder in the direction he’s just come from. It’s close on eleven now and he’s unsure what to do. He doesn’t want to get too far away, but at the same time he doesn’t want to loiter directly outside.

  He crosses the road and strolls past Piccadilly Arcade, stopping, lighting a cigarette and keeping his eyes on Burlington House. I walk straight past him without giving him a glance and stop about half a dozen shops away, looking at some souvenirs while keeping him in my peripheral vision.

  He’s still not moving and I suspect he’s just waiting now. I’d identified the entrance to Piccadilly Arcade as being a good observation point when I was here this afternoon and he obviously feels the same way.

  I feel uncomfortable standing still, so I keep moving, cross over Arlington Street and walk past The Ritz once more. I’m getting bored with this now, so I cross over to the north side yet again and slowly walk towards the Burlington House entrance, where I hope to see Sara at any moment, unless there’s been a major frenzy at the cloakroom.

  My guy is focussed on spotting Sara and I’m betting he’s not switched on enough to notice me, even if he was looking.

  A hundred yards ahead of me, about eight or nine people come out of the Burlington House entrance. They’re all laughing and talking and in the middle of them I see Sara in the light turquoise dress she described. In one hand she’s holding a clutch bag and in the other a kind of black wrap. I slow down and watch.

  My man has seen her, too. He throws his cigarette into the gutter and walks towards Fortnum’s, never taking his eyes off her and her little crowd. The expression on his face is stern and full of concentration, rather like some predator that’s waiting for the weakest antelope to get separated from the herd. I’ve never seen Sara in high heels and get momentarily distracted by the sight and the effect they have on her bottom.

  I can see Gaige, who towers above everyone else. He laughs at something, wags his finger at one of the other women and walks into the road to flag down a cab. When it stops, he and three others get in, leaving Sara a little more exposed on the pavement. She looks around nervously. Is she looking for me, I wonder?

  Now there’s Sara, two older looking women and a guy in a yellow ochre suit. There’s a lot of hugging and air kissing. Yellow Suit runs across the road, is almost mown down by a cyclist and narrowly misses bumping into my man. I can see now that Sara is holding a brightly coloured bag with something big and rectangular inside. Presumably, this is a copy of Dania Gamble’s hefty magazine.

  She hands this bag to the taller of the two women, who says something and laughs, kissing Sara on both cheeks. Sara, of course, would already have a copy of this from the US launch party and is doubtless giving hers to this woman. After another monumental session of kisses and hugs, these two women turn and start walking towards me.

  I don’t look at them as they pass by and keep my eyes on Sara. She looks from left to right as if she’s looking for a cab, then decides to walk down towards Piccadilly Circus. She slings her wrap over the bare shoulder that doesn’t have the bow on it. It’s a little chillier now and I can feel a cool wind on my face. It’s suddenly much busier on this side of the road.

  I’m probably a hundred yards behind her, but there’s a big crowd of people milling around and sometimes my view of her is blocked. I quicken my pace and keep my eyes on my guy, who has just crossed the road and dropped in behind Sara. I wonder what he’s going to do?

  He’s keeping about ten feet behind her and is looking around, checking out what sort of people are nearby and how near they are to her. She has two guys in their twenties walking fairly close behind her. They’re looking at her body and talking about her.

  It would be a mistake for him to try anything while they’re around as they’d probably do something about it, particularly as they look a bit pissed. He keeps following her and I keep following him.

  I’m also keeping an eye out for an accomplice, even though I’m pretty sure he’s working alone. As we cross over Sackville Street, the two guys cross over the road and are gone.

  I’m keeping a small group of tourists between my guy and myself as I close in on him. He looks quickly over his shoulder, but his gaze is on the tourists, not me; I’m making myself invisible.

  He takes a look across the road as we approach Swallow Street, glances over his shoulder once more, then moves in for the kill. He’s about four feet behind Sara before he starts talking to her. She doesn’t react at first; presumably thinking he’s talking to someone else.

  ‘Hey! Darlin’! Aren’t you a bit far away from Shepherd Market?’

  This is a well-known upmarket prostitute hangout about half a mile away. He’s calling her a prostitute, in effect. Not a very nice introductory gambit and one that might offend if you were hoping to ask her on a date and then get married and raise a family.

  ‘Hey! You fuckin’ tart. Look at me.’

  He’s right up behind her now. He rams his shoulder into her back, making her stagger forward. She turns to look at him and recognises him, alarm appearing on her face. The tourists are still in front of me, but they’re oblivious, looking at the sights and laughing at something.

  He grabs the back of her dress.

  ‘What sort of fuckin’ thing d’you call this? What’s this?’

  He pulls her black wrap away and grabs the bow on her right shoulder. I’ve no idea how designs like this work, and I’m wondering if the bow is a real one and will undo the dress if it’s pulled hard enough. I suspect that’s what he’s trying to do. I remember she said she wasn’t wearing a bra with it.

  We’re feet away from a small alley called Piccadilly Place. It leads int
o Vine Street, which is a sort of nowhere area. Sara tries to grab his hand. She sounds frightened when she speaks.

  ‘What are you doing? What are you doing? Get away from me.’

  ‘You fuckin’, stinking whore.’

  He tugs at the bow and laughs. The road is suddenly filled with taxis. Lots of diesel engine noise. Car horns. Kids screaming and laughing somewhere. Thumping music from a club. I pass through the family of tourists and I’m right behind him.

  This has to be fast. I grab his shirt and jacket collar in one hand and tug down. Just as his balance is going and he starts to fall backwards, I spin around to face him and hit him hard in the base of the windpipe with a fast, powerful, open hand punch.

  I can see the panic in his eyes as he realises he can’t breathe and the pain has made his eyes bloodshot. His mouth is open and he croaks as he attempts to inhale. He looks stupid. I smile quickly at Sara to reassure her that it’s me, then drag him into Piccadilly Place, out of sight of the public.

  He’s still choking as I push him against the bricks and administer the first of two swift punches to his nose, breaking it and spattering his face in a fair amount of blood. I just hope Sara didn’t hear the splinter of cartilage and bone. I give him a testicle-crusher with my knee, belt him just once in the guts and let him drop to the floor. Sara is standing on the pavement in shock.

  ‘Listen. Sara. It’s OK now. This guy was on his own. I’m going to have to get a cab straight away. You get the next one and take it right to your front door. I’ll arrange for you to be met when you arrive. I’ll give you a call as soon as I can.’

  She nods dumbly and tries to look behind me at what’s happened. She looks incredibly sexy in that dress and those heels. I flag down a cab and explain to the driver that my dad’s been mugged and I need to get him home as soon as possible.

  He’s dubious at first, but after I’ve hit him with the facts that tonight was my dad’s seventieth and that he’s been boozing and that he used to play for Stoke City and that I’m a male nurse and can look after him and here’s a hundred for the fare, he agrees, and I go in the alley, get this fucker up to his feet and push him in the back of the cab. His face is red, he looks like shit, his breathing is ragged and he’s shaking. Fuckin’, stinking whore indeed.

  I manhandle him into the back seat and close the door. He moans. Through the back window I can see Sara getting into another cab.

  ‘Where to, mate?’

  ‘Alaska Street, Waterloo.’

  The meter goes on and off we go.

  14

  FOOTBALLER DAD

  ‘On his fuckin’ birthday, as well,’ says the driver, as we head along the Victoria Embankment on our way to Waterloo Bridge. He’s a tad younger than my Footballer Dad and has a strong Glaswegian accent. ‘How many of them were there?’

  ‘He said there were four. It happened really fast. We were in the pub and he wanted to go outside and have a fag. He’d only been out there for about a minute when I heard all this noise and went to have a look and they’d already done it and were running away. I only saw two of them, mind. I wish I’d got my fuckin’ hands on them, but I had to see he was alright.’

  ‘How much did they get?’

  ‘Well, we’d been in the boozer all night so it can’t have been that much. A tenner, maybe? Ridiculous, innit.’

  ‘Jesus. What position did he play?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your dad. In Stoke City.’

  ‘Left wing.’

  ‘If he’s seventy, he must have known Stanley Matthews during his comeback days. He might have even played with him! Bloody hell!’

  My Footballer Dad starts to moan. He’s coming round, which I don’t want.

  ‘Are you OK, Dad? We’ll be home soon.’

  I take his head in my hands as if I’m examining him, and with the ring finger of my left hand, press a point just below the ear, near the angle of the jaw. He passes out in two seconds. Next, I text John Kimmons and ask him to get someone to wait for Sara outside the entrance to the flats and to accompany her inside.

  ‘I think he may have been lucky he’d had a skinful,’ says the driver. ‘Numbs the pain a bit. He’ll feel it all when he wakes up tomorrow morning, though.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re right, mate.’

  ‘I got mugged in 1986. Three of the bastards. I can still remember it like it was yesterday.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  Kimmons returns my text. He’s not on duty, but has called someone called Kevin Jenkins who is. Kevin is, as we text, waiting outside the entrance to the block for Sara’s cab to arrive and will personally see that she gets to her room OK. I text Sara with the news and tell her I’ll give her a call tomorrow morning. She texts back: ‘bLoOdY hElL!!’. Well, at least her spirits are high.

  We arrive at our destination and after another bout of sports banter with the driver, I help my Footballer Dad out of the cab and onto the pavement. He’s a heavy bastard and is difficult to manipulate, but he looks like a convincing drunk/mugging victim. The cab driver is looking around for a house, but he won’t find one, and luckily Alaska Street is blocked to traffic by half a dozen sturdy metal bollards.

  This is a crowded area, directly beneath a low railway bridge that runs from Waterloo Station and it’s become home to a number of restaurants and pubs as gentrification creeps in.

  The combination of railway noise and milling crowds make it an easy and inconspicuous place to manhandle someone like Footballer Dad and I’m lucky I don’t have to go too far, as I don’t think I have the strength. I chat encouragingly to Footballer Dad to avoid causing suspicion. He doesn’t respond.

  After a few yards, I turn right into Brad Street. On one side there are a load of garages belonging to the houses on the next street along and on the side I’m staggering along, there’s a long sequence of railway arches that have been converted into a variety of formats; there’s a rehearsal studio, two car repair shops, a small wholesaler of shop mannequins, a gym, a club and four lock-up garages, one of which is mine.

  Driving around in London actually slows you down, particularly in my line of work. There’s never anywhere to park and whenever there is, there’s a queue. It’s much quicker and less stressful to take the tube, take a cab or take to the pavement; sometimes a combination of all three.

  I do have a car, though. It’s a 2001 black Maserati Coupé that I acquired about five years ago. It has a V8 fuel injection engine (built by Ferrari), does 0 – 60 in 4.9 seconds and has a top speed of 177 mph. I know all of this thanks to Mr Ralph Blake, who owns the lock-up garage next to mine.

  When Mr Blake first saw me reverse the Maserati into my lock-up, I had a friend for life. He’s about eighty and is an Italian car nut. He currently owns a Rococo Red Alfa Romeo Giulietta and a blue and white Bugatti Veyron Vitesse. Needless to say, the security he has is the best, as is mine. It’s also a plus that he spends most of his time here, fiddling with the engines of both cars. Luckily, he’s never here this late.

  I press the password codes on two separate keypads before I hear the heavy, grinding clicks that tell me both inertia tube locks are open. I push the door with my shoulder, drag Footballer Dad in with me and close it behind us.

  I’m greeted by the familiar smell of petrol, oil, plastic, leather and cold concrete. Straight away, I notice I’m shivering slightly. This place never catches the sun, so it always feels like it’s winter in here. I turn a switch and the neon strips flicker into life. My Footballer Dad groans.

  To my left is the Maserati, protected by a dark blue made-to-measure car cover. On the right is a small metal table and some rusty metal shelves, which are home to a half empty tin of oil, a few basic car tools and spares, a kettle, two mugs, coffee stuff and a battery charger. There’s a sink with hot and cold taps and a couple of filthy hand towels hanging off the side. There are two rusty metal dining chairs and there’s a grey plastic bucket underneath one of them.

  I dump Footballer Dad onto the floor a
nd he grunts. It’s a relief to be able to let go of him; I would guess he weighs about fifteen stone or more. I take the car cover off and take a look at the car. While I’m here, I decide to charge the battery, so I open the bonnet and set up the CTEK charger.

  In the boot, there’s a small toolkit full of car stuff and, innocently circling a can of WD40, are a dozen plastic zip ties, which could look like something you might use to connect pipes and cables in the engine.

  I drag Footballer Dad up to his feet, remove his jacket and shirt, and sit him down on one of the metal chairs, which I’ve placed right up against one of the brick walls so he can’t rock the chair forward. I take his shoes and socks off and use the zip ties to connect his ankles to the front legs of the chair.

  Using the same method, I tie his wrists to the mid rail across the back. I know that when he wakes up, the stretching sensation that this will produce will be extremely painful, but that’s just tough.

  I check his trouser pockets first, but there’s nothing in them apart from a single spent match, a small amount of loose change and a crumpled mint wrapper. His jacket doesn’t yield much; a mini spirit level key ring with two Yale keys, a Chubb mortice key and a Volkswagen car key.

  In the inside pocket, there’s a beer mat which has eighty pounds in ten pound notes carefully folded and attached to it with an elastic band. I take the money and put it in my pocket. I may buy Sara some flowers with it when all this is over. I’m a big fan of poetic justice.

  No wallet, no ID of any kind. There’s no way of telling whether this is an intentional thing or just the way he rolls.

  He’s still pretty out of it and his head hangs down against his chest. His nose has started bleeding again and blood drips down over his fat belly and his crotch. I take my jacket and my shirt off and put them on the roof of the car.

  I go to the sink and fill up the grey plastic bucket with water. The bucket is slightly too big for the sink, which I’ve always found a little annoying, but it’s a cross I have to bear. I place a hand under the tap. The water is so cold it numbs my skin almost immediately. This’ll do fine.