by Mike Ripley
‘Lloyd, it’s Angel.’
‘My man. Did your scam go down?’
‘Partly, but I need more help from our motorbike friend.’
‘Lewis Luther is yours to command. For a fee, that is,’ he added.
‘Agreed. You might also tell him to scout around for a new job. He shouldn’t have a problem. And I’m going to need some muscular help for about an hour on Friday.’
‘What d’you mean, man? Anything heavy and you should talk to the Yardies, not me.’
I had no intention of talking to the Yardies full stop. Never would be too soon. Their homespun Jamaican blend of violence, thuggery, extortion and more violence for good measure made the Triads who now ran Chinatown look like graduate social workers.
‘I want a few lads to cause a diversion, that’s all. A bit of steaming, but innocent like. Definitely not World War III, okay?’
‘In dat case, honey –’ Lloyd laid it on – ‘I can offer you the Dennison boys. Three for the price of four.’
‘Sounds reasonable. Where can I reach them tomorrow afternoon?’
‘Here, if that’s where you want ‘em, my man.’
‘Good enough. Oh, and Lloyd ...’
‘Yes ...’
‘There’s something else.’
‘With you, my man, there usually is.’
I did one more thing before I soaked under the shower and slept the sleep of the truly shattered. I checked my personal war chest for cash and liquid assets and made sure my passport (well, one of them) was in order. You never know.
The first thing I did on the Thursday morning was get up. As stiff and bruised as I was after the Exhilarator, that was no mean feat. I vowed that I would get myself back into shape, and even thought about rejoining the Gym ‘n’ Tonic club again. They should have got over the incident in the ladies’ jacuzzi by now.
I was nosing Armstrong through the City by 8.00, and even with stopping off to leave the film from my Olympus at a quick-photo booth, I was outside PKB by half past.
Patterson was emerging from his early morning conference by the time I’d blagged my way past Purvis. He didn’t exactly welcome me with open arms. I couldn’t think why.
‘What do you want?’
‘Cup of coffee and a minute of your time.’
He thought about this, but not for long.
‘In here.’ He nodded towards his office and led the way. I closed the door after me.
‘I know you’re bursting to ask, so I’ll tell you now; Salome’s vastly improved. There, I knew you’d feel better.’
‘Is that it?’
I do hate it when people get overemotional.
‘No. I want you to get me an Airborne bike to deliver something this morning.’
‘What?’
‘An envelope.’
He snorted at that.
‘To whom?’
‘You don’t wanna know.’
‘Then no bike.’
I took McInnes’s envelope from my jacket and showed him the address label. His eyebrows shot up and he reached for it but I leaned back. I can do that quite well since Springsteen taught me.
‘What’s in there?’ Tel licked his lips.
‘A leak.’
‘About what?’
‘You don’t want to know,’ I said slowly. ‘Watch my lips: you do not want to know.’
He narrowed his eyes.
‘Did you bodge something together? You know bugger-all about how things happen.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that, Tel. I know you shouldn’t wear Argyll socks with a dinner jacket, you should never tell an Irishman that Guinness is exactly the same over here, and you shouldn’t listen to Leonard Cohen if you’re anywhere near a razor.’
‘I meant about the City,’ he said nastily. ‘You’re clueless.’
‘Oh yeah, I admit that, but he isn’t.’
I pointed to Innes McInnes’s name on the envelope.
‘What’s that got to do with it?’
‘He wrote what’s inside.’
‘To himself?’
I nodded.
‘Then I don’t want to know.’
‘Knew you’d see it my way, Tel,’ I beamed.
Anna was on duty in the postroom, and she phoned for Airborne to collect the envelope. I had been a bit worried, because McInnes’s office wasn’t more than a brisk stroll from Gresham Street, but nobody in the City worried about biking stuff next door.
‘It sounded as if Tel was giving you a rough time,’ said Anna as she handed me coffee.
‘Aw no. He’s a pussycat,’ I said. Then I thought about Springsteen and realised that was a stupid thing to say.
‘He’s about as threatening as a Chris de Burgh LP.’
That was better.
The rider wasn’t Lewis Luther. I couldn’t see him because of the riding gear and the helmet, but he was much shorter than Lewis. Perhaps it was the Lenny Emerson that Lewis had mentioned and that Lloyd had said had just come out of chokey. What the hell, I didn’t want to meet him, I just wanted to be sure that he did the usual dishonest thing. It would be a real pain if this one turned out to be a legitimate messenger.
He wasn’t. He pulled in near Liverpool Street station behind the red Transit and Sorley’s hand came out of the back to do the business. The envelope, resealed, was delivered to McInnes’s office no more than a minute or so later than you could have reasonably expected.
The scam was rolling. It was also more or less out of my hands now.
I collected my photographs on the way back from following the despatch rider. I’d asked for enlargements, and they’d obviously had two or three goes trying to get the quality better, but for me they did just fine.
A pleasant young lady with her hair ponytailed with a rubber band to keep it out of the machinery, apologised like mad and charged me half-price.
Back at Pretty Keen Bastards, I played around with a couple of prints on the Xerox machine until I had A4-size paper copies. By that time, the grainy prints were even grainier, but one of the shots I’d taken inside the pillbox was still detailed enough, if you knew what it was.
I kept the photocopy and the negatives, but put the prints in an envelope for Patterson, then took Anna out to lunch and bent the Amex card some more.
It’s all go in the City.
I called in to see Salome again in the afternoon and, I have to admit, was relieved to find she was asleep. Still, Lucy the administrator and I got on famously. I think she was flattered that I took such an interest in medical working conditions, such as how long the shifts were and when did they finish, whereas most men would just have tried to chat her up.
Before I drove down to Brixton to see Lloyd that evening, I rang McInnes at his office and told him things were moving.
‘If you can get to a Topic screen tomorrow morning, you’ll see if he’s taken the bait,’ he said.
‘That quickly?’
‘He won’t be able to resist it. He just can’t. And if he thinks he’s stuffing me, so much the better. He’ll go for a dawn raid before the market opens tomorrow.’
I thought he was winding me up.
‘A what?’
‘A dawn raid – that’s what it’s called. A Monday would be better, but he won’t dare leave it that late, and from what I’ve heard about Linton’s business, the sooner the better. There’s one thing we should take into consideration.’
‘Somebody else catching on and getting drawn into the con?’
‘So you had thought about that?’
Yes. Just then.
‘Is it likely?’
‘Well, I think Sir Frederick Linton will jump in and stop things if he sees innocent money going after bad. You see, he’s basically a very honest man.’
‘I guessed that.’
He must be. He was the one going bust.
When it happened, it was with a whimper.
Nobody opened champagne or jumped off a skyscraper. No one dipped their Vick inhaler in neat coke, no one rushed out to order a Porsche. By City standards it was probably chicken feed. It made a few paragraphs in the papers but nobody yelled, ‘Hold the financial page!’
I arrived at PKB before 8.00 on the Friday and, as I was wearing the suit, I walked straight in. I put on Fly’s clear-glass specs and straightened my tie and became totally invisible.
Patterson said he hadn’t time to mess around with me, and I told him all I wanted to do was watch the market. Despite the suit, he didn’t trust me with PKB equipment, so he called Howard Golding – the fax expert – to sit with me and press buttons.
‘What are we looking for?’ asked Howard, as we sat on swivel chairs near a terminal.
‘Linton Plc. I want to see if there are any movements.’
He made a ‘What the hell for?’ sort of face but began to whistle up the details on the screen.
The dealing room was the busiest I’d seen it, and by quarter past 8.00 most of the guys were in shirtsleeves and the empty coffee cups were piling up.
‘There’s nothing much going on,’ Howard told me. Then he yelled across the room. ‘Hey, Sean, anything doing on Linton?’
I flapped at him to keep his voice down.
‘Not a lot,’ yelled back Sean. ‘Somebody bought small yesterday. Price rose on spec to 119 but fell back to 116 at day-end. First movement for ages. I’d class it as moribund stock if you’re asking.’
Sean yelled all this back without looking up from what he was doing.
Howard shrugged. Then he picked up a phone. ‘Let’s see if we can get one of the dealers. What are you after?’
‘Just interested,’ I said dismissively as he dialled.
‘That’s funny,’ he said, puzzled. ‘I can’t get through.’
That was the start of it.
As soon as the Exchange opened proper, there was a public announcement that Pegasus Investments had acquired over five percent of the stock of Linton Plc and was still buying, though by then the price had gone up to 280p. By mid-morning, Howard estimated that nearly 15 percent of Linton shares had changed hands.
He had a furtive meeting with Tel-boy and I distinctly heard ‘Somebody took out the market-makers in a dawn raid ...’
Patterson looked worried for a second, then shut himself in his office.
What did cause a stir in the dealing room was the announcement at 11.00 by Sir Frederick Linton, or rather a financial PR company acting for him.
Basically, through the jargon, it said that because of untoward speculation in Linton shares, Sir Frederick had advanced the news (scheduled for Monday morning anyway) that he was seeking a suspension of his company listing on the Exchange prior to calling in the receivers.
‘There is, as we say around here,’ confided Howard, ‘a distinct smell of burnt fingers in the air.’
I was whistling to myself – maybe ‘Satin Doll’, but something jolly – as I sneaked out of the dealing room and took the lift down to meet the Dennison boys.
I had primed Anna to send for an Airborne messenger when I tipped her the wink (okay, so I hadn’t mentioned that Patterson knew nothing about this one), and Lloyd had primed Lewis Luther to make sure he was the Airborne rider in the area.
That was the chancy bit, of course, as I hadn’t been able to specify a time exactly.
The Dennison boys were in place, in the sandwich bar round the corner, pigging out on Danish pastries. I paid their bill for them, although Sel – but it could have been Mel – insisted on a tea to go. I told him not to spill it over Armstrong as they piled into the back.
I moved Armstrong to the front of the PKB building, and we had only a minute or so to wait before Lewis Luther pulled up, parked the Kawasaki and dismounted.
I called him over before he got to the entrance.
‘There’s nothing for you to collect, Lewis.’
He stopped in his tracks, then sauntered over to the passenger window I’d pulled down. I wouldn’t need the Dennisons for Lewis, but it didn’t hurt to let him see them.
‘But I got the call ...’ he mumbled through his helmet.
‘I know, Lewis, relax. Get on the radio and fix a rendezvous. Here you are.’
I handed him an empty envelope on which I’d written McInnes’s name and office address.
‘Then what?’ asked Lewis, though it came out as ‘En ot?’
‘Then tell us where it is and go home, put your feet up.’
Lewis sighed. He was probably wondering if there was time to get down the Jobcentre that afternoon, but he removed his helmet and activated his collar radio.
‘Liverpool Street,’ he said after getting the reply, ‘just round the corner from Blomfield Street.’
I nodded. The same place as the other messenger checked in yesterday.
Lewis put a gauntlet on the window.
‘Hang about,’ he said, as he unclipped his radio. ‘You’d better give this back to Sorley. Don’t want anybody saying I tea-leafed the office equipment.’
I took it from him.
‘Lloyd’ll see you right, Lewis. Thanks.’
Mrs Luther would have been proud of him.
I briefed the Dennison boys as I drove. All I wanted was a bit of steaming in the back of Sorley’s van: lots of bodies, noise and confusion. I did not want Sorley putting in hospital.
‘But I thought somebody needed a good seeing-to,’ moaned Del, or maybe Sel.
‘Not today, lads. We just get in there, out of sight of Joe Public and Mr Plod, and you lot sit on the guy until I’ve done my bit of business.’
By the time they’d finished grumbling and rapping among themselves, we were turning into Liverpool Street.
The red Transit was parked near a bus stop opposite the Railway Tavern, on the Broadgate side of the street. They were still building the Broadgate development, so there were cranes and trucks around and it wasn’t the sort of place you’d get a ticket or get clamped for dodgy parking.
I nosed Armstrong to within a yard of the back of the van, and the Dennison boys were out on the street before I’d killed the engine.
Poor Sorley never knew what hit him. One of the boys knocked on the van door and as it opened, the other two piled in. By the time I got there, Del and Sel (I think) had him pinned against the shelves where he stacked spare envelopes. I climbed in and Mel (possibly) closed the door, staying outside to keep guard.
‘Just what ...’ Sorley began to bluster.
He was wearing khaki slacks and desert boots and an army-style pullover with patches everywhere. The Dennisons had an arm each, freezing him in the crucifix position.
‘Is your fax on?’ I asked, reasonably enough.
‘What? Now look here ...’
I ignored him and examined the fax. A red light glowed in one corner, so I assumed it was ready to go. There was a digital dial pad and then buttons marked ‘send’ and ‘recall’ and ‘auto.’ I guessed that it was automatically programmed to go through to Pegasus Farm. But, better be sure.
‘Do I just press “send” to get through to Cawthorne?’ I asked him, though I didn’t look at him. We all had to bend our heads because of the van roof, and you can’t be threatening from a crouched position. Well, I couldn’t. The Dennison’s could.
‘Answer the man!’ shouted one of them, and then the other one butted him on the upper arm, on the muscles below the shoulder.
He yelped at that. So would I.
‘What are you doing? Who ...’
Young Sel made ready for another headbutt, and Sorley saw the better part of valour, though his arm was probably quite numb by now and the second wouldn’t have hurt so much.
&nb
sp; ‘It’s “auto” – the “auto” button. That’s all you need do.’
‘Thank you.’
I opened the A4 envelope I’d brought with me and slid out the Xerox of the photo I’d taken of Cawthorne’s pillbox headquarters. I slid it into the fax’s feed tray and pressed “auto.” It hummed, then whirred, then beeped and clicked, and then the sheet began to move through.
It took only a few seconds, and I left the Xerox in the out tray of the machine, placing Lewis’s radio on it.
‘Just serving notice, Mr Sorley.’ I looked at him over the top of my fake specs. ‘You’re going out of business. Now just sit down on the floor and be quiet and we’ll be on our way. Get his keys.’
I’m almost positive it was Sel who dug his keys out of his trouser pocket, none too gently, then twisted the arm he was holding up Sorley’s back to force him to the floor of the van.
I knocked on the back window, and Mel let us out; me first, then his brothers. Sel gave me the keys, and I locked Sorley in there without saying anything else. He had the look of a man trying to remember where he’d seen someone before. And that always makes me nervous.
I threw the keys inside the front of the van, through the driver’s window. Let him work that one out.
He could look on it as an initiative test.
Chapter Fourteen
Friday night. Party night.
Frank was hospital visiting, Werewolf was across the sea in Ireland, Sorrel wasn’t answering the phone (well, you never know till you try) and I couldn’t think of anyone I particularly wanted to get drunk with, so I went out on the town with Lloyd and the lads.
The Dennison boys came with us and so did Beeby. One of the brothers – I forget which – said he wanted to be a Moslem when he grew up, so he’d given up booze, which made him the driver for the night. Lloyd may walk more on the narrow than the strait but he wasn’t daft enough to go pub crawling in a pink ‘64 Zephyr without a sober pilot.
