(2005) Rat Run

by Gerald Seymour

  They're scum when they're on heroin. The brown destroys them. They'll steal from their only friend to get the hit, think nothing of stealing from family. They inject, and they chuck the syringes away even when there's a council-provided needle exchange - and kids find them. They got hepatitis A or B or C. They got tuberculosis, they're going to get thrombosis. They thieve - anything they can sell on, but best is a purse or a wallet. The cops all wear stab-proof vests because a used needle is a weapon for the vagrants. They are dangerous, and don't ever forget it, and you go carefully when it's dark on the Amersham.'

  Back in the autumn, Ivanhoe Manners had walked him by the shoebox-shaped flat-roofed public toilets.

  'They had to close them, the council did. A

  pensioner, male, goes inside, and a girl follows him.

  She's offering a blow for fifty pence. He's in the cubicle, panting, gasping, she's doing it. What else is she doing? Doesn't need her hands for a blow, her hands are on his wallet, inside his coat. She's got it, she's off and running, and his trousers and his pants are down round his ankles. He's too embarrassed, poor sod, to come charging out and chase her - if he could. The council closed the toilets.'

  And after they'd done their walking, Ivanhoe Manners would come back with him to flat thirteen on level three and they'd use the chess set that the social worker had given him. And with the chess games came the monologues that Malachy seldom interrupted.

  'This is where the real war is, a war worth fighting.

  I never been to Afghanistan and I'm not going to Iraq.

  But they don't seem to me as places that matter, not to me. Maybe, just possible, we can win a war in Afghanistan or in Iraq, but sure as hell we're losing the war at our doorstep. You go up to the top of block nine and look all around you. From that roof, you'll see wealth and power and Parliament, you'll see where all the big people make their money. You'll see the City - banks and insurance, you'll see the ministries, fat cats running your life - but if you look down by your feet, you'll see where the war is. The Amersham is a dump ground for dysfunctionals. You shouldn't be here, Malachy. No, you shouldn't.'

  It was seven weeks now since Ivanhoe Manners had last called by.

  Days slipped away in which Malachy went

  nowhere, spoke to no one. What drove him from flat thirteen most often was that the fridge was empty - no bread, no milk, no coffee, no meals for one. But every fourteen days, regular, the first and third Thursday of each month, he was invited next door for tea.

  That Thursday morning, Malachy Kitchen dressed in the best of the clothes bought for him at the charity shop seven months earlier, kicked off the trainers and wiped the brogues with a cloth so that their old brightness returned. He would while away the hours, lost in thoughts and pitying himself, till he heard the faint knock on the common wall. He had little else to live for.

  He washed himself. In the shower, piping-hot water cascaded down on him. Ricky Capel always had the lever turned high in the hot sector when he sluiced his body, always washed well, and the suds of liquid soap rolled from his face and chest and down his groin. His short dark hair plastered his scalp. Joanne never had the shower water turned that high: it scalded his skin, reddened it, but he had no fear of pain. Each time he took a shower, it was as if he needed to test his ability to withstand pain . . . That morning he had seen pain, another man's, and it mattered little to him. Above the shower's hiss, he heard Joanne's shout: when was he going to be ready? He did not answer. He would be ready when he cared to be ready.

  The overalls he had worn that morning, and

  Davey's, had gone into the petrol drum at the back of the warehouse, where the fire was lit so that no trace of his visit to the cavernous, derelict unit remained.

  But he always washed afterwards, and so thoroughly, because he knew of the skills of the forensic experts.

  With a towel loose round him and water dripping down, he stood in front of the full-length mirror beside the cubicle. He glowed and that brought a smirk to his rounded, child-like face. No one, not any of them in his circle, would have dared to suggest it was a baby's face, but it was untouched by lines of worry, anxiety, stress. Self-respect was everything to Ricky Capel, and respect was what he demanded. He had burned his overalls because a man had denied him respect. The man who had made that mistake was now on the road south of the capital and heading for the coast.

  He was thirty-four years old, though his complexion put him younger. He had married Joanne in 1996, and had the one child - Wayne. One of the few decisions he had allowed her was to give him that name. The boy was now seven and an overfed lump, without his father's sleek stomach line. The man who'd denied him respect was the eighth to have died under the supervision of Ricky Capel. At that young age, he controlled an area of the capital running from Bermondsey and Woolwich in the north, Eltham in the east, Catford in the south and Lambeth in the west.

  Inside that box he had authority over all matters of business he chased after. But, on Benji's advice, he had gone into the City of London at the start of the year.

  Across the river big money was to be made from the kids who worked in front of the banks' computers, who traded the high numbers and who snorted

  'white' to keep themselves alive, alert and awake.

  The man who was now bumping in the back of a van and going south towards the cliffs had done the trade in the City, had taken the white, and had pleaded a cash-flow crisis. He had promised that last week an outstanding payment would be made. The promise was not kept. Cocaine to a street value of five hundred and sixty thousand pounds had been given over on trust, and had not been paid for. That was a denial of respect for Ricky Capel. Go soft on one, and word would spread, like the smell of old shit.

  Every last trace of the warehouse was gone by the time he was dressed, and little memory of it remained in his mind. The man had been blindfolded when he was brought to the warehouse, still in his pyjamas, and he'd been alternately blustering protests at this

  'fucking liberty' and whimpering certainties of finding what was owed by that night, 'on my mum's life, I swear it'. Too late, friend, too bloody late. The bluster and the whimper had gone on right through the moments that the man had been tied down on to a chair, with wide sheets of plastic under it.

  'Right, boys, get on with it,' Ricky had said. He needn't have spoken, needn't have declared he was there and, lounging against a rusted pillar, need not have identified his presence. He had spoken so that the man would know who had had him brought to the warehouse, and his voice would have been recognized. In those seconds the man would have realized he was condemned. Suddenly, there was a stain on the pyjamas and the stink of him, because he knew he was dead. Ricky's life was all about sending messages. It would go clear through the rumour mill that a big boss had been cheated, and the message of the penalty for that would run crystal sharp to others who did business with him.

  The Merks, that was what Benji called the guys with the pickaxe handles. They were small, muscled, swarthy, had the faces of gypsies, and were hard little bastards. They'd brought cheap sports bags with them so that afterwards they'd have clean clothes to change into. They wore plastic gloves, like a butcher would use, and stockings over their faces so that the drops of blood couldn't mark them. The man had kicked with his tied feet and the chair had toppled. He'd tried to heave himself away, frantic, his bare feet slithering on the plastic sheets, and then he'd screamed. The first blow from a pickaxe handle had battered across his lower face. Blood and teeth had spewed out. The blows broke his legs, arms and ribs, then fractured his skull. He was hit until he died and then some more.

  Afterwards, while Ricky watched the man's body trussed up in the plastic sheeting, Davey lit the fire for the clothing. Charlie checked the floor, went down on his hands and knees to be certain that nothing remained.

  Ricky Capel liked to keep business inside the family. He had three cousins: Davey was the enforcer and did security, Benji did thinking and what he liked to call 'strategy
', and Charlie had the books, the organized mind and knew how to move money. He'd have trusted each of them with his life. The Merks were no problem, good as gold, reliable as the watch on Ricky's wrist. Charlie drove him back from the warehouse to Bevin Close and dropped him off for his shower. It had all gone well, and he would not be late lor lunch.

  He put on a clean white shirt, well ironed by Joanne, and a sober lie. It was right to dress smart for a birthday celebration.

  While he dressed, and selected well-polished shoes, the body was in a plain white van, driven by Davey who had Benji with him. They'd get near to the coast, park up till it was.dark, then drive on to Beachy Head.

  From the cliffs there, which fell 530 feet to the seashore, they would tip the body over. The tide, Benji had said, would carry it out to sea, but in a couple of days or a week, the plastic-wrapped bundle would be washed up on the rocks, as intended, the police would be called, statements made, and then the rumours would eddy round the pubs and clubs that a man who supplied cocaine in the City had been mercilessly, brutally, viciously put to death. It would be assumed he had failed to make a payment and that this was retribution. The name of Ricky Capel might figure in the rumours - loud enough to make certain that no other bastard was late with payments.

  Scented with talc and aftershave, Ricky led Joanne and Wayne, who carried the present, next door to celebrate his grandfather's birthday, the eighty-second.

  Bevin Close was where he had spent his whole life.

  In early 1945, a V2 flying bomb had destroyed the lower end of a Lewisham street, between Loampit Vale and Ladywell Road. After the war, the gap had been filled with a cul-de-sac of council-built houses.

  Grandfather Percy lived with his son and daughter-in-law, Mikey and Sharon, in number eight, while Ricky, Joanne and Wayne were next door in number nine.

  Eighteen years back, Mikey had bought his council house, freehold, and been able - after a choice day's work with a wages delivery truck - to buy the property alongside it. Ricky liked Bevin Close. He could have bought the whole cul-de-sac, or a penthouse overlooking the river, or a bloody manor house down in Kent, but Bevin Close suited him. Only what Ricky called the 'fucking idiots' went for penthouses and manor houses. Everything about him was

  discreet.

  Rumour would spread, but rumour was not

  evidence.

  He breezed in next door. Wayne ran past him with Grandfather Percy's present.

  He called, 'Happy birthday, Granddad . . . How you doing, Dad? Hi, Mum, what we got?'

  The voice came from the kitchen: 'Your favourite, what else? Lamb and three veg, and then the lemon gateau . . . Oh, Harry's missus rang - he can't make it.'

  'Expect he's out pulling cod up - what a way to earn a living. Poor old Harry.'

  He would never let on to his mum, Sharon, that her brother was important to him. Uncle Harry was integral to his network of power and wealth.

  They were making good time, more than eight knots.

  Against them was a gathering south-westerly, but they would be in an hour after dusk and before the swell came up.

  March always brought unpredictable weather and poor fishing, but on board the Annaliese Royal was a good catch, as good as it ever was.

  Harry Rogers was in the wheelhouse of the beam trawler, and about as far from his mind as it could get, wiped to extinction, was the thought that he had missed the birthday lunch of his sister's father-in-law.

  The family that Sharon had married into was, in his opinion - and he would never have said it to her - a snake's nest... but they owned him. Ricky Capel had him by the balls: any moment he wanted, Ricky Capel could squeeze and twist, and Harry would dance.

  Ahead, the cloud line settled on a darker seam, the division between sky and sea. The deeper grey strip was the Norfolk coast, and the town of Lowestoft where the Ness marked Britain's most easterly point in the North Sea. The Annaliese Royal was listed as coming from Dartmouth, on the south Devon coast, but she worked the North Sea. She could have fished in the Western Approaches of the Channel or in the Irish Sea or around Rockall off Ulster's coast, and had the navigation equipment to go up off Scandinavia or towards Scotland's waters, or the Faroe Islands - but the catches for which he was a prisoner were in the north, off the German port of Cuxhaven and

  the island of Helgoland. He had no choice.

  He had been a freelance skipper, sometimes out of Brixham, more often out of Penzance, in truth out of anywhere that he could find a desperate owner with a mortgage on a boat and a regular skipper laid low with illness. He would work a deep-sea trawler heading for the Atlantic, a beam trawler in the North Sea, even a crabber off the south Devon coast. The sea was in his mind, body and heritage - but it was damn hard to get employment from it. Then had come the offer

  . . . He'd talked often to Sharon on the phone, kept in touch even when she had married into that family, and had stayed in contact when the husband, Mikey, was 'away': she always called his time - three years, five, a maximum of eight - 'away', didn't seem able to say down the telephone that her man had been sent to gaol. It was the summer of '98, and if there had been work on a construction site in Plymouth, and his boy Billy worked on one, installing central-heating systems, then he would have chucked in the sea as a life, closed it down as a profession and learned to be a labourer. He'd poured it out to Sharon. In an hour on the phone, he had told her more about the dark moods than he would have spoken of to his own Annie, and also that the dream of his retirement was wrecked. Got it off his chest, like a man had to and could do best on a telephone. Two days later, his phone had rung.

  He couldn't have said, back then, that he knew much of Sharon's son, Ricky. What little he did know made bad listening. Now, the girls were grand and they'd gone as soon as they were old enough to quit, but what he knew of Ricky was poison.

  Ricky on the phone. All sweetness. 'I think I might be able to help you, Uncle Harry. Always best to keep money in the family. I've been lucky with business, and I'd like to share that luck. What I understand from Mum is that you're short of a boat. I've this cousin, Charlie - you probably don't know him because he's Dad's side of the family. Well, Charlie did some work on it - would it be a beam trawler you need? There's one for sale in Jersey. Doesn't seem a bad price, a hundred and fifty tons, eight years old, and they're looking for a cash sale. I think we can do that for you.

  Don't go worrying about the finance, just get yourself over there next week and meet up with Charlie. That going to be all right, Uncle Harry?' Charlie had called him and they'd arranged to fly to the Channel Islands.

  At £275,000, the boat was dirt cheap and when he'd met Charlie at the airport, the cousin had been lugging a suitcase . . . and he didn't need that many clothes for a twenty-four-hour stopover.

  He'd named her, with Annie's input and her

  blushes, the Anneliese Royal, and she was best quality from a renowned Dutch yard. His dream of life after retirement was reborn: Billy, his boy, came off the building sites and with his knowledge of central-heating systems was able to learn the engineering. His grandson, Paul, left school, and had started eighteen months back to sail with them. He had a year of happiness and dumb innocence. Then . . .

  'Hello, Uncle Harry, it's Ricky here. I'd like to come down and see your boat. When do you suggest? Like, tomorrow.'

  One sailing in three, he would receive a short, coded note. Where, when, a GPS number, and the port he was to return to with the catch. Sometimes he had a hold full of plaice and sole to bring ashore, and sometimes the hold was bloody near empty. The big catch, from one sailing in three, was off the north German coast. He'd be guided on to a buoy by a GPS

  reference and, attached to the buoy's anchoring chain, the package would be wrapped in tight oilskin. This one, which he was now bringing towards the fishing harbour of Lowestoft, had weighed real heavy. Billy and he had struggled to drag it up over the gunwale on the port side. He reckoned it twenty-five kilos in weight. Harry read the papers, and coul
d do sums. At street value, he'd read that heroin sold at sixty thousand pounds a kilo. Arithmetic told him that down below, stashed in the fish hold, he had a package valued at £1.5 million, give or take.

  He was brought his mug of tea, and snapped at his grandson, who fled below.

  Always a foul temper when they came into port, because that was where he'd see the police wagon or the Customs Land-Rover parked and waiting. They used five of the North Sea ports, varied it, never regular enough for the law and the harbour masters to know too much about them, never infrequent enough for them to stand out and attract suspicion. In two years he would retire, he had Ricky Capel's promise, and then he could live his dream . . . but not yet.

  He didn't talk about it to Billy, just gave him his cut and turned away. He thought he might be destroying the life of Paul, his grandson, but there had never been a right time to jump off the treadmill.

  In the middle afternoon, as the wind force grew, the shoreline came clearer.

  Billy would have finished gutting, would be breaking up the package and dividing it between rubbish sacks and their own kitbags. They would take it onshore, then in his car he would reassemble the twenty-five kilos and drive it, alone, to the drop-off point. Afterwards Harry would take himself to the Long Bar in town, drink till he staggered off to the B-and-B where he had a front-door key. By midnight, Ricky's cousin would have done the collection and Harry would be snoring drunk and asleep.

  He was ashamed that he had shouted at his grandson, but the tension was always bad when they were within sight of shore and had a package on board.

  The trail started in the foothills of northern Afghanistan.

  Far into remote mountains, in little irrigated fields, farmers grew the poppies and were the first to take the cut; it was subsistence farming, and without the poppy crop they would have starved. For the farmers, the recent American-led invasion of their country had been a gift from God: their previous rulers had reduced, on pain of death, the growing and harvesting of the poppies, but now no government writ reached them.