Susan finally said, “George is right. We can’t do it tonight”
*
George offered to drive her back but she told him she preferred to take a cab. She wound a scarf around her head until her face was all but covered. She hoped no newspaper reader would recognise her and claim their reward. Probably no-one would think anything except she was a lunatic, wrapped so tight in this city heat. She spent the journey turning things over. If she could have sent them all in against Frankie, maybe she would have. It might have worked. But there had to be a better way of doing it, a better readied plan—at least one where she wouldn’t have to make excuses for Hogie when she kept him at home.
She tried but failed to think of a different scheme. But even as she turned onto Manchester Street, she sensed new disturbances. She was too late.
The door to Maltese Rosa’s house was swinging open, outside groups of foreign language students from the local schools were standing, pointing down the hall. And mixed with them, a few brasses wearing their work clothes: basques, baby dolls or school-girl uniforms.
Susan told the driver to stop and wait. She grabbed hold of the nearest tom, “What happened.”
“I don’t know. I heard shooting.” The woman pointed down the road to where other women were peering out of a house window. “I work at one-eighty.”
“Is anyone hurt?”
The woman shrugged. “I think the place is empty now.”
Susan pushed through the chattering crowd. At the door, she looked down at the scuffled trash across the mat, minicab cards, free pizza deals and home delivered asthma cures. Her eyes travelled up, there was blood on the bannister rail. She walked in.
The door to the lower apartment was broken in but there was no one in the room. She started up the stairs, skirting around the patches of blood. At the halfway landing, she saw the bathroom door was also broken. The floor was swimming in water. There was a stainless steel enema prod attached to the bath taps. Now it was blasting water across the walls, writhing like a robotic snake. Susan looked away, up to the first floor landing. The door to her room was swinging free on its hinges.
The room was torn apart. Her clothes were everywhere, across the floor and bed, and her suitcase lying empty on the floor. Frankie had found the cocaine and Hogie together and took them both… it was clear. She pulled the clothes 011’ the bed, the dark and unclean bedsheets still carried an imprint of Hogie’s body—and a touch of his warmth. She ran a hand across the sheets to make the bed look decent, straightening out the creases and brushing the stray dust of cocaine onto the floor.
She made it back to the street while the police sirens were still a half street away. As she ran for her taxi, she snuggled with her scarf, trying to re-cover her face and soak up the tears she hadn’t noticed she was crying. She threw herself inside, saying Camden, and started hammering the buttons on Hogie’s mobile phone. One long ring and George’s voice floated through the microwaves: “Hello.”
“George. Where are you?”
“Susan? I’m still here. Putting Cheb to bed… What’s the matter with you? Are you okay?”
How was she? Broken down and homeless and that was the best thing she could say. This was the absolute worse. “He’s got Hogie.”
“Frankie? How?”
“I don’t know. They must have got to Rosa.” They both knew that Maltese Rosa would have to be in a very bad way before she’d open her mouth outside a confessional.
He said, “What do we do?”
“Get him back.” She paused, felt a bubble burst in the back of her throat. With a mouthful of fresh tears she said, ‘Please George, please.”
TWENTY FIVE
George Carmichael sat sweating in his overcoat on the hottest summer night of the year. The car air conditioning went off with the ignition and all they could do was leave the window open, watch for movement in the upper storey windows of the warehouse and listen to the music skimming across the water. Spin—drying their minds. When Cheb described the building to him, the first thing he thought was that Frankie had truly lost his mind. Who would hide out above a rave? Looking at it now, it seemed like a fortress. The moat kept them at a distance.
He said, “How’s everyone doing?”
Naz spoke from the back seat. “I could feel better. I’ll know I’m getting there when I’m stepping over bodies.” The shredded nerves rasped alongside his voice, he didn’t care who heard it. “We just follow Cheb’s plan, it’s sweet. One time, a fucking Jihad.”
George could have told him: there was no plan. Cheb virtually said as much. Lying there on his bed, beaten to a pulp and breathing through cracked ribs and a gut hernia, he basically said that Hogie was screwed and that was it.
Instead, George said, “Well, we know where Frankie’s staying so I guess we’ve got the element of surprise.”
Naz leaned forward again, speaking to the back of George’s head. “What kind of gat you want to go with?”
George turned and looked down into the bag Naz was holding open. It was some choice but George hadn’t touched any kind of firearm in almost thirty years and hadn’t fired one since Boy’s Brigade, 1958. “A rifle?”
Naz pulled the bag back onto his knee and started disentangling an assault rifle from the bottom.
George said, “What’s that?”
“A to the K.”
George thought maybe he recognised it now, it was the Commie-style of rifle, as opposed to the one the good guys carried in news footage and war films.
He took another look at his new partners, Naz in the back and Mannie at the wheel. It just wasn’t enough. Worse, only Naz looked as though he’d be any use. The other boy was so nervous that two fistfuls of beta-blockers couldn’t stop him shaking. He was sat with his head down, his hair in his eyes, fiddling with a gun in his lap. Maybe they should give him another beta-blocker, perhaps something stronger: Naz seemed to have brought a pharmacy with him, the different drugs neatly wrapped in a chemist’s little doggy bag.
George turned round and mouthed, “Is he going to be okay?” His head nodding over to Mannie.
“He’ll be fine. If he doesn’t stop shaking, I got some Librax that’ll bring him down.”
George thought he’d need more than that. From the start, the only job he trusted to Mannie was the driving and he wasn’t even sure about that alter the journey they’d just had. But the boy said he intended to fight He had an old sporting pistol in his lap and a clutch of bullets in his hand. He kept popping them in and out of the chambers. Naz had been telling him for hours to throw that piece of crap away but he refused. He said it was the only gun he knew how to work.
Naz took up most of the back seat, wrapped in his over- coat and hiding a selection of guns inside it. The coats had been Naz’s idem “When we pull out our pieces, we got to pull them out of something.”
George realised he’d never asked Naz how he got into this line of work. An important question like that, it made him wonder whether his interviewing technique needed some management focus. He clearly hadn’t asked Cheb enough fancy questions when he hired him for the restaurant.
He tried to think it through again, why was he here? He thought Hogie was a reasonable cook but he wasn’t worth dying for… in fact, the kid was probably overrated. So maybe the reason was guilt. Susan still didn’t know exactly where her son had died or how his body wound up nailed to a coach floor in Essex. If she ever found out, he wanted to have done something to square matters. Although, God willing, he would never have to explain it—he frankly had no idea how the body wound up nailed to the floor of a coach, either.
Naz was ready to leave. Still playing the role of coach and cheerleader, rasping out: “One time, just stick to Cheb’s plan.”
George could have screamed, what fucking plan? What makes you think there’s a fucking plan? Is it anything like Cheb’s last plan: how to dispose of a body? Because, from where he was sitting, that was beginning to look really pretty well thought-out and rational Sat i
nside a car alongside a psychotic and a terminal depressive, telling himself: yeah just beautiful, but I’m the one that needs his fucking head examining. So why was he here? There was only one reason: he loved Soho and what he’d done to it so much, if he lost it then life wasn’t worth living anyway.
Naz was out of the car, saying: “Right, let’s infiltrate.”
George didn’t make him wait As he stepped out behind Naz he said, “Just one thing, because this might be my last chance to ask. What does Naz stand for? Naseem?”
“No, Nasser.”
*
George had the number of Hogie’s mobile but he didn’t have Susan’s new address. Susan knew, it was a sensible precaution. The only reason she felt bad was that it was her idea rather than his—as though she was posting her vote of no confidence ahead of the election. Now she was sat in a suite in the Conan Doyle Hotel, occupying it in the name of Lee Meriwether. It was imperfect, purposeless, pseudonymously purportive. She felt like one drowned cat and all she could do was wait, alone in her Meriwether drag while she prayed for a quick widowhood. She had gin and TV to entertain her. Gin for the nerves, TV for news reports.
Maltese Rosa Mansif was second lead on the early evening news bulletin. By News at Ten she‘d been upgraded to the fourth or fifth victim of the presumed serial killer: the experts were divided over whether Callum’s heart attack counted as a clean kill or not. The hands on the clock crawled up towards midnight and gathered speed on their downhill run. The gin began to work.
When she caught sight of Hogie, she could not believe it. The DNA of a pure moron surrounded him like a halo as he diced a pound of chicken and grinned out of her TV screen. She jabbed at the remote control button, prodding up the volume. He was stood in a pastel-coloured bay, surrounded by his pots and pans and bowls of spices. The camera followed him to the gas hob and he began to jiggle a frying-pan over a medium flame, saying: “So now you’ve cut them into cuboids, you got to fire them up with a ton of butter for that all-over tan effect.”
Susan scrambled across the room to collect her handbag and Hogie’s phone. Clutching it to her ear, she couldn’t get the aerial up fast enough. Her fingers knotted together as she dialled and pulled and tried to smooth out the scrap of paper where she’d written George’s mobile number. Behind her, Hogie’s voice ran on, filling the room.
“What we’re doing, we’re going for a prime cajun experience. Anyone watching in smell-o-vision, you got to savour the aroma of Mississippi burning.”
She heard the presenter begin to thank him and invite him back to her couch for a live, on-air discussion. Susan turned back to the picture, the phone clamped to her ear, and watched as Hogie grinned and loped towards the stuffed velvet sofa. He was still carrying his pan of fried chicken. A headphoned technician had to run over and take it off his hands.
“Yeah, thanks mate.”
After five minutes with no reply she clicked off the phone and pressed redial, hoping that when George left, he remembered to pack his mobile. Back on-screen, Hogie was struggling to sit upright on the flop sofa. The presenter was saying how sorry she was to hear about the death of his friends. Hogie was saying, Yeah? The questions ticked on: How long had he known soap star Julie Manning? Wasn’t she staying with him the might she was abducted? How did he feel when he heard the news?
None of Hogie’s answers were too intelligible. He had a fillet of chicken on the end of a fork and was waving it as he spoke. All Susan could make out from his replies, was that the whole thing was doing his head in, you know. He looked no more dazed than usual.
Susan clicked off again, deciding to give George another few minutes. She stood there, helpless, watching as the presenter flicked another page over the top of her pad and began a fresh sheet of questions: His friend Jason Beddoes had also disappeared? Had Hogie given up all hope?
Hogie said, “Yeah, I guess. He was my best mate and all.”
He was still flicking the chicken chunk, pawing stupidly at every question but he had nothing to say. He’d been ebullient at the stove, he was a fluttering mess on the sofa.
Susan left him hanging, sidelined by the sudden ringing of the mobile phone. She grabbed for it and pressed for an answer. “George?”
The voice at the other end was slurred and swollen, “Nope. The troops have left the barracks.”
“Is that Cheb.”
“The Cheb Monster, the only brains of this organisation.”
“Do you know where Hogie is now?”
“Are you kidding‘? This is his big chance for TV stardom, he’s been looking forward to it an week. There was no way he was going to miss it.”
On-screen, the presenter was saying, And what’s your connection with the ex-stripper, Susan Ball? Do you know where she is? Do you know her husband?
TWENTY SIX
George kept step with Naz across the hump-backed bridge, over the river and onto the island. Mannie was more erratic, sometimes just ahead, sometimes lagging back but always twitching. George put it down to nerves but it may have been the music. With every step the beats just kept getting louder and louder. They were almost at the doors of the warehouse now and two of the security men had noticed them. Both of them were dressed in black, jogging pants and T-shirts. The shirts had lettering across the front, large enough for George to read without his glasses: London Rainforest.
Naz whispered, “We just walk past these guys. Cheb said we should go in the back way.”
When one of the security guys shouted, “Invite only”, George only nodded, vaguely, pretending that he couldn’t hear over the music. Naz wasn’t so subtle, shouting back, ‘Yeah? Is it any good in there, then?”
The two men just stood there, holding their poses and clutching their walkie talkies like a couple of body-builders playing at G-Men: “Invite only.”
Naz winked over at George, side-mouthing as they passed by, “Where’d they find these guys?”
George said, “What’s this rubbish about an invite?”
“You not heard of the Criminal Justice Bill. Raves are illegal now. This one’s probably down as some kind of charity event.”
George glanced back over his shoulder at the two security guys, “London Rainforest?”
Naz shrugged, “Well, it doesn’t have one yet.”
It was hot enough to grow one though. George wondered what the three of them looked like, walking around in overcoats. They would have made an odd threesome anyway, without the accoutrements. He could feel his rifle underneath his crombie, the magazine digging into his ribs and the strap biting on his shoulder: Naz was wearing an army great coat. Mannie had a plastic mac. He was bouncing ahead of them now, perhaps unnerved by the security team. As they followed him around the corner of the building, the mac flared out and George realised it was an A-line cut, the kid must be wearing his dead sister’s clothes.
Naz hissed, calling Mannie back. “Better let me go first.”
He had stopped outside a loading bay. A ramp led up to a platform and a pair of heavy warehouse doors. Through the doors, George could see a barrier, guarded by another couple of guys, and beyond the heads of dancers all jacking to the music. He was surprised that they’d left the doors open. On a night like this they would sell twice as many bottles of water if they kept the dancers cooped in the heat. Although he guessed even gangsters didn‘t want their punters dying on them.
He said, “There must be two thousand people in there.”
Naz didn’t think so, “More like fifteen hundred.” He swung ahead of them and walked up to the security men at their barrier. One guy came to meet him at the top of the ramp, his head bent forwards as he listened to what Naz had to say. After a moment, he looked up and beckoned his partner over. There wasn’t a hope of healing anything above the music but George thought it looked like a. negotiation. Naz was giving a pitch to the two men and they listened, occasionally nodding, sometimes putting a finger into the neck of their T-shirts and tugging slightly, as though they were letting off steam. f
inally, Naz handed them something and they unclipped their walkie talkies and gave them to Naz Then they turned and began to walk away.
They’d gone maybe three steps when Naz called them back. They listened again, looked at each other for some kind of mutual confirmation, then nodded and broke into a splint George watched as they leapt off the loading bay and headed full tilt for the water edge: amazed as they dived in and started swimming.
When he reached Naz, he said, “What did you do?”
“Paid them.”
George couldn’t imagine how much he’d need, before he’d do something like that. Naz said, “Most people would do it for a grand.”
George looked out to the water, he couldn’t even see their heads anymore. “Won’t the money get wet.”
“I also said I’d shoot them if they didn’t.”
Mannie was ahead of them again, already half way over the barrier. George was a step behind, wondering how he was going to climb with the weight of his crombie coat, not to mention the rifle and the two spare carbines. He didn’t need to think about it, Naz put a hand on his shoulder and told him to wait. A moment later, he’d pulled Mannie back over the barrier, saying: “We don’t get ahead of ourselves, bud.”
It suited George. His first full sight of the warehouse just stopped him dead. Now he stood back on the loading bay, hands resting on the barrier and his nose pressed against the wall of heat, sweat and noise-studded light.
There was no dancefloor, just rough poured cement scudded with sweat puddles. Along the back wall, the speaker stacks rose up like two sides of a triumphal arch, topped with an enormous lighting rig. Stuck up there, the rig looked like a battery position, blazing laser fire into the crowd below. And underneath, at the very centre of the arch, there was the DJ standing at his decks. The guy should have been dwarfed but the arch gave him a kind of grandeur. like Caesar or Stalin. Except this crowd was no disciplined mob—it was a giant insect culture brought out of a micro scope, an alien swarm on wings.
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