by Peter Boland
“I don’t like it.”
“Aw, you gonna miss me?”
“I am actually.”
Savage narrowed his eyes. “Seriously, this is the only way, if nobody’s talking. I need to be on the inside. Become one of the tenants. Do a few good deeds, gain their trust, be accepted by them. Then tongues will wag. And if not, I can observe. Things will start emerging sooner or later.”
“How long will that be?”
“As long as it takes.”
Tannaz smoked her cigarette down to the butt then flicked it away. “Okay I’ll do it, but I don’t like it.”
Back in Savage’s hotel room, Tannaz plugged in her laptop, sat on the end of the bed and cracked her knuckles like a concert pianist about to play. “Okay, here goes.”
“I’ll put the kettle on,” said Savage.
“Black coffee, two sugars. And I’ll have a couple of those complimentary biscuits.”
“Right you are,” Savage said, filling up the tiny kettle. It was barely big enough to make two measly cups.
Four hours later, Savage had to physically stop Tannaz throwing her laptop out of the window like a rock star throwing out a TV. She’d wouldn’t have got very far as the windows didn’t open. Failing that, she would have most certainly thrown it against the wall. The benefits system was proving a lot more difficult to crack than she thought.
Savage wrestled the laptop out of her hands to prevent her doing any damage to it. Tannaz dropped a few f-bombs and kicked the wall.
“Okay, calm down,” he said.
“That’s easy for you to say.”
“Answer me this,” said Savage. “Is what you’re doing possible or not.”
“Yes, but—”
“Okay, what is the obstacle you’re facing?”
“It’s taking too long.”
“That doesn’t matter, Tannaz. We’re not on a deadline.”
“That asshole Wellington is out there swanning around while we’ve got two dead people, no three if you count poor Jenny’s daughter…”
“If he’s responsible, we’ll catch him. Whether we do it today or tomorrow or in a month or a year’s time doesn’t matter, okay. Time is not a factor here. Don’t be so hard on yourself. Just focus on what you need to do, regardless of how long it takes.”
Tannaz nodded. Savage handed her back her laptop.
Two hours later, Tannaz was in the system, and Savage was on benefits.
Hacking into Wellington’s systems was a far easier affair. Getting access to a database of grotty, barely habitable social housing wasn’t exactly high priority to the hackers of the world. Security wasn’t tight.
Tannaz looked at Savage and smiled. “Where would you like to live, sir?”
Savage rubbed his chin. “Maybe somewhere with a view of the sea, an infinity pool, concierge and walking distance to the beach, oh and a spa—one where they serve a decent cup of tea.”
“Well, I can’t get you that, but I can get you Dave’s old room—it’s still free. Actually, it seems like no one wants it.”
“I’ll take it.”
Chapter 18
People weren’t exactly queuing up to be accommodated at Tivoli Gardens, even people who really didn’t have a choice. According to the database, Dave’s room had been vacant ever since he supposedly committed suicide. Not many people, even someone without a roof over their head wanted to move into a room where the previous occupant had taken his own life.
“Are you sure it’s a good idea putting you in Dave’s room?” asked Tannaz.
“Why not?”
“You’ve been there before. Won’t that blow your cover?”
“The only person who saw us there was the big guy with the beard.”
“Fat Gandalf.”
“Yeah, I think the only thing he was interested in was food. And he didn’t seem like the brightest spark.”
“He could say he’s seen you hanging around.”
“It’s fine, I can just say I was having a look before I moved in. And is anyone going to really worry or take any notice? Plus, I’ll be right where it all happened. If something went down there, someone might still live there who knows something. It’s too good an opportunity to pass up.”
“And the drug dealers outside, won’t they recognise you?”
“We scared them off, took their gun. Their boss wouldn’t have been happy. Probably replaced them with someone else, like he did with the three junior drug dealers. Or they’d have just moved their pitch somewhere else. Remember, Wellington has loads of properties in Thornhill and all over Southampton, plenty of places to set up shop.”
“Well, if you’re sure.”
“I am.”
“Okay, here goes.” Tannaz punched a load of code into her screen. “You are now a resident of Tivoli Gardens. The minute the first housing-benefit cheque goes into Wellington’s business account, you can move in.”
“How long will that take?”
“A month.”
“A month!”
“I thought you said we weren’t in a hurry.”
“We’re not but I didn’t think it’d be that long.”
Tannaz closed her laptop. “Listen. I did that on purpose not to arouse any suspicion. One month is the average length of time it takes for a benefits claim to be processed. I could have done it quicker, got you on benefit payments instantly. That runs the risk of flagging up you’ve jumped the queue, and then someone at the benefits office might start taking an interest in you, which we definitely don’t want.”
“Okay, fair enough,” Savage replied. “In the meantime, maybe I should shop for some crappier clothes so I blend in with the residents.”
Tannaz eyed Savage up and down. He was wearing an old polo shirt with fledgling sweat patches under the arms, shapeless jeans and shoes that were designed for comfort rather than fashion. “Nah, I think you’ll be alright.”
One month later, April commenced. It should have felt like spring. The temperature didn’t seem to agree. It wouldn’t budge and firmly stayed a shade above freezing.
Savage called the office of Wellington Properties and arranged a time when he had to be outside his new accommodation to get given his keys. Thankfully, Vicky the receptionist did not seem to recognise his voice, and if she did, she probably wouldn’t have cared anyway.
Tannaz drove Savage back towards Thornhill in his van. She dropped him off in a side road just outside the housing estate. He climbed out of the vehicle and Tannaz handed him a bulging black bin liner containing a few clothes and other bits and bobs. Savage figured someone on benefits wouldn’t have luggage or matching rolling holdalls. He needed to look like someone down on his luck and nothing said that more than a bin bag full of possessions. He grasped the bag in his fist and waved Tannaz goodbye.
“Remember to update me,” Tannaz said. “And if you need the cavalry to come, just call me and I’ll be there.”
“Certainly will,” Savage replied. “Now you better leave, I need to be there by eight a.m.”
“Be careful, Savage,” Tannaz said.
Savage watched her drive off, back to the hotel room at Southampton Airport. Did Savage detect a modicum of sadness in her eyes? Surely not.
Throwing the bin liner over his back, he walked towards Thornhill. As he entered the estate, hordes of school kids were coming towards him, on their way to sit in stuffy overcrowded classrooms in an underfunded school full of overworked and underpaid teachers who couldn’t control them. Dressed in identical scruffy uniforms, the kids looked tough and unforgiving, older than their years. Savage got jostled as he walked past them. One spat at him, another threw a stone. They all shouted expletives at him.
Normally, this would have had Savage ready to give them a piece of his mind. Not today. To all intents and purposes, he was undercover—a man rely
ing on the state to support him, downtrodden and lacking confidence. From now on Savage would adopt a technique that he’d been trained to use, and had to rely on when he’d been captured and tortured in Iraq. He would become the ‘grey man’. A persona the SAS had taught him when undergoing interrogation, when the enemy wanted information. Being the ‘grey man’ meant becoming bland and uninteresting, a person of no value whatsoever, with no information or opinion to offer. A nobody. A monosyllabic man of few words.
This time, once inside his new accommodation, the objective wasn’t to persuade an enemy that he had no information to offer, it was to fade into the background. To be dull, boring and unremarkable. He could do dull, boring and unremarkable. All he had to do was talk about DIY and Tannaz’s eyes would glaze over. He just had to crank it up a bit, or down to be more precise. He had to treat his new home like an observation post. Sit and watch. To see but not be seen.
He passed the convenience store, under siege with more school children milling around outside. They were only being let in one at a time, presumably to minimise shoplifting. Savage gave them a wide berth, crossed over to the other side of the road and kept his head down. A man who wanted to avoid trouble.
Five minutes later he stood outside Tivoli Gardens, waiting for someone from Wellington Properties to let him in. The time was eight o’clock exactly.
Twenty minutes later, Savage was still waiting outside on the pavement.
Behind him, the stiff front door opened, and out stepped a pretty young school girl about fourteen or fifteen. Dressed in uniform she had thick yellow hair tied back into a ponytail. Her worried mother swiftly followed behind, cautiously looking left and right. Never leaving her daughter’s side, she hurried her along, almost as if she were trying to avoid a sniper on the roof.
Savage didn’t blame her. Even though her daughter was old enough to walk to school on her own, he could tell there was no way she was letting her walk alone in a neighbourhood like this. Savage would have done the same, even though his daughter would’ve protested and got fed up with him for being so lame.
The woman didn’t make eye contact with Savage as she passed him. She was a young mum, young enough to be her daughter’s oldest sister. She was blonde too, but the years of living on an estate like this, in constant fear, had sent streaks of grey through her hair and left worry lines scarring her face.
Her daughter dawdled along behind in a dream world. Savage noticed the girl didn’t have a phone. Every teenager he saw these days had a phone, and used every available moment to study them, even on the walk to school. He guessed her mum probably couldn’t afford one, especially not the smart phones that chewed up expensive data by the second, and a cheap push-button phone would only invite ridicule. Better not to have one at all.
“Grace,” she called to her daughter. “You’re going to be late if we don’t hurry.”
Savage watched them disappear up the road.
It was now eight forty. Savage was worried he may have missed the person he was supposed to meet. Perhaps they had already been and left.
He knocked on the door of Tivoli Gardens. The front still a mess of dirt, old rubbish, beer bottles and rusting bikes. The discarded needles around the drain still hadn’t been cleared up; in fact, there were more.
Savage knocked again and waited. No answer. He shrugged and walked back down to wait on the pavement.
The mother who had taken her daughter to school was now returning, only slightly less worried.
“Excuse me,” said Savage. “I’m supposed to meet some people here from Wellington Properties…”
“Sorry, I can’t help you,” she said without breaking her stride. Just at that moment a dented red van pulled up with ‘Simon Wellington Properties’ written along the side. The woman saw it and almost sprinted towards the door. She pushed her key in the lock, but the stiff door impeded her progress.
A wiry guy with limp black hair got out the passenger side of the van. Savage noticed his long, hooked nose had been broken in two places giving it the appearance of a winding country lane. He ignored Savage and called out to the woman at the door. “Hey, Rosie. You’re in a hurry. Aren’t you going to say hello.”
Clearly Rosie did not want to stop and say hello.
“We come and say hello to you later, Rosie, yes,” he said with a distinctive eastern European accent. Rosie managed to shove the door open and disappeared inside.
He turned to Savage and said, “Women, eh? I am Vlad. To you, I am God around here, okay? You must do as I say. Otherwise, big trouble for you.”
Savage guessed Vlad’s accent was Romanian, possibly from the region of Transylvania.
Savage had an ear for accents. During his time as a soldier he’d worked with so many people from so many different countries in so many different regions that he’d built up a database of them in his head. Every twang, burr and inflection had been tagged and logged in his brain to the point where spotting accents had become a hobby of his, like collecting stamps.
Vlad’s double broken nose wheezed and whistled every time he breathed in and out. With his Transylvanian accent, Savage decided to call him Vlad the Inhaler, but not to his face, of course.
From out of the driver’s side of the van stepped an altogether scarier figure. He walked around the van and stood beside Vlad, staring blankly. About a head taller than Savage, the guy had a solid square physique with a military buzz cut, bald round the sides and about a quarter inch on top. His monobrow was in desperate need of a pair of tweezers, making his eyebrows look like two ends of a bridge attempting to meet in the middle. Though it was a chilly April morning, he wore a vest and had a St George’s cross tattooed on his hairy forearm. His limbs and joints had a thickness to them, like the branches of an oak tree, apart from his neck because he didn’t have one—his shoulders seemed to connect straight to his head. He too had a broken nose. This one had been really broken, pummelled flat. Savage couldn’t decide whether he was an ex-boxer or an ex-rugby player. Either way, it looked like it would take a dozen men to wrestle him to the ground.
“Know who I am?” said No Neck.
Savage shook his head.
“Truck,” he replied.
Savage stood there nonplussed, wondering if this was some sort of wind up or test. “Sorry?”
“Truck from Gladiators, the TV series. You know, Saturday nights on ITV.”
“Er, I never watched it,” said Savage.
“Course you did, everyone used to watch it.” He went into a truck-driving pose, as if he had one hand on an imaginary steering wheel, and the other above his head pulling down on an air horn. “Parp! Parp!” he shouted. “That’s my signature move.” He did it again and again, his bulging midriff wobbling beneath his tight vest. Too many pies had taken their toll. “I fought with the best of them. Defeated them all. No one could beat me. Now you recognise me, right?”
Savage shrugged.
“He doesn’t recognise you because you were only in it for one episode,” said Vlad. “Stood in for Hunter who twisted his ankle in the last show. Then it got axed. That’s why you’ve never heard of him.”
“Hey, shut up,” said Truck giving Vlad an almighty shove, sending him smashing into the side of the van. He grabbed him in a headlock, clamping Vlad around the neck so he couldn’t breathe.
“Okay, I’m sorry,” Vlad managed to splutter. Truck let go. Vlad straightened out his clothes and hair, nose whistling in and out. “Man, you are so sensitive.”
Savage thought of about a million sarcastic remarks to say about men in fluorescent Lycra underpants who ran around TV studios play-fighting with foam bow staffs. He bit his tongue. Despite the ridiculous images of Truck forming in his head, and that he was the kind of guy who would only watch a movie if Jason Statham was in it, Truck’s name suited him well. He’d be a hard guy to stop.
“I’m John Savage.” Savage held
out his hand for a shake, neither of them reciprocated.
“Don’t care,” said Truck.
“Rules here are simple,” said Vlad. “You behave, you’ll be fine. You do as you’re told, you’ll be fine. You look after us, you’ll be fine. If not…”
“Section twenty-one,” said Truck, grinning wickedly.
Savage looked at them blankly.
Vlad the Inhaler wheezed heavily through his nose. “You don’t know what section twenty-one is, do you, dumbass?”
Savage shook his head.
Vlad continued, “Section twenty-one is law. We throw you out, whenever we like. We don’t need reason. You could be on the street again like that.” He clicked his long fingers. “And there’s nothing you can do, because it is law.”
“This means we own you,” Truck added, laughing manically.
“That’s right. We own you and every loser in Wellington’s properties. So you better keep us happy. Give us what we want.” Vlad prodded him hard in the chest.
“We prefer cash,” Truck added, rubbing his fingers together.
“I don’t have any money. I’m on benefits,” Savage said weakly, even though his bank balance was more than healthy, he had to play the part of a penniless no-hoper.
Truck tucked his hands into the sides of his vest. “Not our problem.”
“Then we find other ways you can pay us, little tasks you do for us,” Vlad said. “Otherwise, you’re back on the streets. Understand?”
Savage nodded his head. He understood, all too well.
Chapter 19
As Savage followed the two men up to the front door of Tivoli Gardens, he wondered if they were the ones who took Dave’s records. They were chancers. Parasites and scavengers. Opportunists, out to see what they could get. Preying on people who didn’t have a leg to stand on. Were they also responsible for Dave’s death, and Luke’s? Possibly. Or maybe they carried it out, taking orders from above. Savage wasn’t sure whether they were smart enough to pull off something like that. He would bide his time and find out.
