(2005) Rat Run

by Gerald Seymour

  'I don't think I can.'

  'You please yourself . . . I don't support what happened to the boys or the dealer, no sympathy for it from me. A gesture, but it's the way to anarchy. Where did the spark for it come from?'

  'Nothing for me to say that would help you.'

  The big man went back to the door, opened it, and his smile beamed white teeth at Malachy. 'Get on the road, man. You done your time here. Get walking in those fancy shoes. You need your life back, and sitting like a cat in a cage won't do it for you. Do it soon. Each day you're here - whatever was in your past - that's a wasted day. I'm offering advice and it's meant kindly.

  You should feed off that little woman's courage. Get living again.'

  'Thank you for calling by - I'll go when I'm ready.'

  He closed the door after the social worker, locked it and pushed up the bolt.

  Chapter Eight

  The train rattled across country on a slow, stopping line.

  In a few days the clocks would go forward and the evenings would stay brighter. Dusk hovered over the carriages and the track, and weak pinpricks of light marked remote homes set among the grey of the fields, hedges and woodlands. It was a complicated journey for Malachy, the longest he had made since coming to London: one leg from the Amersham estate to Victoria, by bus, the next on a fast train south to Redhill and the last on the line that stopped every-where, at Marlpit Hill, Penshurst, Paddock Wood, Mardon and Headcorn. His journey was nearly

  complete.

  The carriages were filled with schoolchildren, their bags and noise, with shop workers and shoppers, with the first of the office commuters to get away from their desks. He wore the old clothes and his shoes were caked with mud from a litter-strewn garden in the play area. He stood in the rocking space between two of the carriages - he smelt and knew it. His woollen hat was low on his head and the collar of his coat was turned up to mask his face. As passengers passed him, to board the train or get off it, they hurried by because of the smell that came from the plastic bag gripped in his fist. He never put the bag down but kept it tight against his leg. Malachy knew that at every station there were cameras, and that cameras were now routinely fitted inside train compartments. An old world returned to him: he recalled lectures from long ago. Care ruled him, and he had regained a long-lost cunning. His ticket, expensive but not wasted money, was for Folkestone, far beyond his destination; it would act as a confusion if his route was traced. The clatter of the train soothed him and the map given him and memorized, then destroyed, was loose in his mind. In a few minutes, as dusk fell, he would reach the stop they had chosen.

  There had been money with the map. Without it he would not have been able to buy the ticket and fill the canister in the bag that smelt.

  The train had begun to slow and a remote voice announced the approach of the next station, Pluckley.

  Now the lights, set back among bare trees and behind cut hedges, shone more fiercely.

  In his mind, with the map, was the quiet rasp of the voice from the darkened interior of the car, from a face he could not see.

  'You've done better than I thought you would, a hell of a sight better. Nothing more is asked of you. All I can do is tell you what's at the next stage upwards of the pyramid. You hit the bottom level, the pushers, but they're just low-life scum. Above them is the dealer and you took him out and he won't be back, but he's only a vile little creature. It's your decision.

  Who feeds the dealer so that he can sell to the pushers? You may say, and you've the right to, that you went far enough . . . Trouble is, what I'm thinking, all you've done is disrupt temporarily the trade on the Amersham, and that may not be enough to help you where you want to be. Up the ladder, right? You want to be able to look in a mirror, see your face and not cringe in disgust - am I there? Are the dealer and the pushers sufficient to get you as high up the ladder as you need to be if the mirror's showing you your face?

  But, like I say, it's your decision. You can walk away, or you can ask the question and I'll answer it.'

  The train jerked, slowed some more, shook as the brakes were applied, began to crawl. He pulled the wool hat lower and lifted the collar-flaps higher. Kids, shoppers and commuters gathered around him, but he turned away his face as their lips curled in disgust at the smell.

  'I thought you would. You were right to ask the question - well done. It's an easy one to answer. It would put you right up the ladder, high up it, if that's where you want to be. Me, I can't do it. I work at a desk, I'm ring-fenced with regulations, I'm going through the motions - like the people round me, and the people above me. Yes, we look busy, we're good at that. We pump out the spin about the success of what we do, get it into glossy brochures, and when I go home at night I can honestly say to myself, total honesty, that I have achieved less than nothing.

  They're cleverer than us, sharper and smarter. When my pension's ticking over nicely, building,

  why should I care? I saw Millie, got me? My aunt, my blood, and I saw her. You are on her doorstep and you are there and you are available.'

  The train lurched to a stop. Others pushed past him and hurried off down the gloomy platform. With the wool hat down and the collar up, Malachy followed them. If a camera found and tracked him, he offered it little for identification.

  'A dealer needs a supplier. That's the stage up the pyramid, a supplier. Way over the level of the Amersham. He's big, big, and ugly. He lives fat and well. You knock over a supplier and that will send a shockwave - not an earthquake, but a real good tremor. Shakes the room, swings the light, moves the furniture, brings the plaster down. That gets noticed

  . . . I never met you here. People will swear on a Bible that I was never, late at night, in a parking bay, on the Amersham. We never talked. You are on your own and I will disown you, your word against mine. The word of a man labelled a coward against the word of a police officer with twenty-six years' service and not a blemish on his record. Sorry about that, but it's worth the reminder. How you do it is your business.

  He's the supplier.'

  Malachy came out of the station and down a street, then left the high lights and the memory of the map brought him to darkness and on to lanes hemmed in by hedges; his lustreless shoes splashed in puddles.

  He stepped out. Occasionally cars swept by him, accelerating and spraying him as if he had no right to be there. The plastic bag, weighed down by the canister, thumped against his thigh. He remembered everything said to him, of him and overheard - what it had done to him, and what had been taken from him. He saw in front of him, clearer than the trees, hedges and homes up long, curving gravel drives, the ladder and the steps on it. He walked for nearly an hour before the twinkling lights of a remote building, set back from the lane, confirmed the map and showed him the supplier's home.

  'Come on, girls. Hurry up, for God's sake. You're beautiful enough already. Move it, please.'

  Laughter rang through the panelled hall and spilled from two of the bedrooms up the wide sweep of the stairs.

  He needed laughter, had been short of it that day.

  George Wright needed laughter and a good party to get him past the aggravation of the morning. The scumbag, Penney, off the Amersham up in south-east London, was a broken stick - taken out, humiliated on his patch and now in a police cell. The scumbag had just taken delivery and not paid up. Should have paid up that morning, with fifteen thousand in used notes.

  All about cash-flow. The cash-flow of a dozen dealers, after George Wright had taken his cut, was needed to pay the importer. It was all tight - money in and money out - and when the money coming in was short there'd be a problem with the money o u t . . . and that was what was owed to the little bastard with the baby face, Ricky Capel.

  He had a good coat, Armani, hitched on his

  shoulder, and the tie of Friends of Kent County Cricket Club loose at his throat, and he was waiting for his 'girls'.

  The party was at Fortescue's place. There would be people there from all the vil
lages between Hothfield and Bethersden. Fortescue always threw the best parties

  - live music, caterers in from Royal Tunbridge Wells, and a cabaret turn down from London - and the cream came from the villages, commerce and the professions.

  It was the mark of George Wright's acceptance into the community as a respected and admired businessman that he always received the embossed invitation to Fortescue's spring thrash, and the autumn one.

  He had a reputation for success. Fortescue, and the others who sent invitations to the Wright family, believed he dealt in quality cars. Bread and butter, so they believed, was in the Mercedes top-of-the-range models or BMWs, and also in Ferraris, Lamborghinis, and Morgans with no waiting time for delivery. The private-clinic consultants, legal senior partners, farmers with a thousand acres of prime land, the chief executive officers and their wives would have gone puce and needed resuscitation if they had known that their neighbour, friend and sometimes guest dealt in the class-A drugs they whinged about at parties. His trade and the source of his wealth were well hidden, tucked away under the floorboards of his office off the living room.

  God, would they never come? 'Hurry up, girls, do me a favour, shift it.'

  George Wright sweated. Not on the delayed

  appearance of his 'girls', but on the problem of cash-flow if a dealer defaulted. He took no exercise, was plump to the border of obesity. Sweat pooled at the back of his neck and on his balding forehead. He needed the party, needed it bad. The thought of Ricky Capel made him sweat, even if the shortfall was only fifteen thousand, less his own cut. Last year a dealer in Croydon had done a runner after taking delivery, and not paid up. George Wright had gone to his bank in the centre of Ashford, drawn the necessary cash out of his deposit account and used it to make up what he owed. He'd told Ricky Capel of his problem. 'Glad you did that, Georgie,' Ricky had said, grinning, snake eyes flashing. 'Wouldn't want you, whatever the reason, to see me short, wouldn't want that. Who was it turned you over?' A week later he had read in the evening paper - and found it hard to hold the page steady - that the dealer's body had been located in Ashdown Forest; the police were quoted as saying he had been tortured, then garotted with cheese wire. He hadn't seen Ricky Capel since: communication was by mobile phone, pay as you go, with number changes every two weeks, and drop-offs and pickups. Wouldn't want you, whatever the reason, to see me short... Hadn't forgotten that.

  They came down the stairs. Melanie in a little black dress and Hannah in an off-the-shoulder scarlet number, both a picture.

  Melanie knew what he did - knew but did not ask details. Hannah was wrapped up in her pony and her gymkhana rosettes, didn't know, and thought money grew on the orchard's trees.

  He was on a treadmill from which there was no exit point. Everything he owned came from supplying class-A narcotics. The house, a mock-Tudor pile with mock-Tudor panelling - worth a million at least, maybe one point two, and no mortgage on it - was from heroin and cocaine. The landscaped gardens, the paddock and the stable block for the pony were from heroin and cocaine. The friendship of the neighbours and party hosts was from a social position based on heroin and cocaine. Without it he had nothing, would be back to door-to-door insurance-selling, where he had been before brown powder and white powder had intruded into his life and he'd snatched at it.

  'You're both a bloody treat. Fantastic.'

  There was no sharp step off the treadmill - he knew too much about too many. If he grassed he had the certainty that no gaol was safe for him. And no safety for Melanie and Hannah . . . He helped his wife and daughter into their coats, shrugged into his jacket and paused in front of the mirror to lift his tie. He collected his keys.

  His own vehicle was a scarlet-bodied vintage Jaguar. His 'girls' followed him out to it and closed the door, mock old timbers, behind them.

  He drove away, left lights blazing behind him. He went down the tarmacadam drive, past the post-and-rail fencing of the paddock, flicked the sensor that opened the outer iron gates and turned into the lane.

  Their chatter was vivid around him - who would be there, what the cabaret turn would be, what they'd eat. The foreboding fled him. In his compart-mentalized life, George Wright could usually slip without effort from the world of supplying heroin and cocaine, sold to him by Ricky Capel, into that of one more successful and legitimate businessman resident in the Kent countryside.

  Melanie was saying what she'd heard - it was supposed to be a secret worth taking to the grave - about the identity and the act of the cabaret from London.

  Hannah shrieked: 'Watch out, Daddy!'

  Hadn't seen the man. He swerved to the right side of the lane, then corrected. Only a glimpse. A man, a dosser, vagrant or tinker, stood blinded by the Jaguar's lights, pressed himself into the hedge and averted his face. He was clutching a plastic bag. They were past him. He swung his head, looked back into the darkness beyond the glow of his tail-lights, saw nothing. 'Bloody hell! Never seen him before.

  Where does he think he's going? You did the alarm?'

  'Of course I did,' his wife answered. 'Relax, George.

  We're going to a party. Forgotten that?'

  It was another half-mile down the road to the party's fairy-lights and the thud of music.

  They had done an hour at the Fortescues' house of drinks, nibbles and conversations yelled to be heard above the four-man, striped-waistcoat-and-bowler-hat jazz band when his host loomed at George Wright's side. 'You see that?'

  'See what?'

  'Didn't you hear them?'

  'Hear what?'

  'God, George, are you deaf or pissed? Two fire engines going up the lane like bats out of hell. What's up past you? Only the Gutheridges' place, but that's two miles, then the Blakes' market garden, then the cottages, but if they were going to any of them I'd have thought, coming from Ashford, they'd have used the Tenterden road . . . know what I mean?'

  George Wright broke away, ran up the stairs, headed for the side bedroom where the Fortescues'

  boy, Giles, slept when he was home from school. He blundered through a room filled with books, hi-fi equipment, hockey sticks and tennis racquets and dragged aside the curtains. He pressed his face against the mullion lead and the glass - real, not mock like the windows of his home - and saw the glow in the sky and sparks climbing like they were fireworks, and fancied he could make out through the screen of trees what seemed to be the licking tongues of flames . . . He sank to his knees and the sweat ran to his stomach bulge and he seemed to hear laughter, like Ricky Capel's, that billowed up the stairs with the music.

  'Don't mind my asking, Ricky - where's your

  necklace?'

  'Round my throat. Where else would it be?'

  'Not that one, not your mum's. The one I gave you.

  Why aren't you wearing it?'

  His hand went up to his throat. He felt the thin chain - Sharon's present to him for his twenty-first -

  and touched the crucifix that hung from it. 'Don't know,' he said. 'Don't rightly know. Somewhere.'

  She was paring her fingernails, had her head down as she sat in the easy chair and the TV prattled with a game show, worked hard with the file, did it with the same intensity with which she cleaned the house.

  'You said you liked it. Why've you taken it off? Cost ever so much.'

  Ricky had said he liked the heavy gold chain from a Bond Street store. He had not taken it off. It had cost a little more than three thousand pounds, and that was with the discount for cash - his money. 'It's somewhere.'

  'Of course it's somewhere . . . '

  She must have been satisfied with her fingers. She kicked off her slippers and started on the toenails, scraping at them like it mattered. 'Have you lost it?

  Don't tell me you've lost it. Did you?'

  He had not known that he wasn't wearing it. She had bought it for him last Christmas and he had worn it every day, every night since then.

  'I don't know where it is.'

  'You have lost it?'

&nb
sp; 'Maybe I have, maybe I haven't.'

  'You got to know whether you lost it or not. You got to know whether you didn't like it and took it off.'

  'I don't.' There was a snarl in his voice but with her head bent over her toenails she would not have seen it. 'Well, have you looked for it? Yes? Where have you looked for it?'

  'I didn't know it wasn't on.'

  'Oh, that's great. I buy you a necklace, big money.

  You say you like it. You promise me you do. You lose it and you don't even know.'

  Her voice had a chisel rasp. Seemed like the beat of a dripping tap, had that rhythm and persistence.

  'I'll look for it.'

  'I hope you will...' Right foot done, she started on the toes of the left. 'I'd say that looking for it is the first thing you should do. That necklace, Ricky, was supposed to be important.'

  'I said I'd look for it, all right?'

  'Where? Where are you going to look for it?'

  'I don't know. If I bloody knew it wouldn't be lost.'

  'No call for you to swear at me, Ricky. I just gave it you, I didn't lose it.'

  He had been so tired that evening. What he'd wanted was to be quiet at home. She'd cooked him a good spaghetti, with meat sauce, and had not burdened him with talk. He needed, that evening, to think through the implications of the instructions he'd given to the cousins. Both of them, they both come first.

  Getting stuff into the gaols and into the City, two priorities to run together. Maybe Benji should run the gaols and maybe Charlie should aim himself at the City and the tossers there. Maybe he should bring in Enver Rahman and get his people to handle the distribution to a prison employee - whoever Benji could bend to carry the stuff inside - and maybe his people could sit in a sandwich bar in the City and trade stuff there. All to be worked out, all to be turned over in his mind . . . not the loss of a necklace.