by Tom Trott
I stepped out of my door, into the circus. The cloud had cleared from the sky and it seemed that there was nothing but distance separating me from the stars. The wind whipped in. It was coming in over the sea, and I could taste the salt. Whenever I left Brighton on my bike, heading north to Ditchling or wherever, when I came back over the Downs and the cold sea air caught me on my neck I knew I was home.
I wandered down London road. There are no clubs and it was past pub closing time so the only lights on were from the various late-night kebab joints, and the only people those staring vacantly from behind the counters. By day, London Road is slowly becoming more gentrified, filling with independent coffee-houses and delis, but by night it is still the same old shithole it always was.
I made it past the Old Steine, where there was more life; zombies dribbling from the centre, trudging their way home to the suburbs. Then I made it into the now pitch-black twittens of the Lanes, and there was only one man around.
Lenny. He looked half frozen, despite his hat. I was sure he would die if he stayed there tonight.
‘Why aren’t you at the shelter, Lenny!?’
It was insanely cold, especially now that I had stopped moving.
‘No beds.’
‘Seriously?’
‘Plus they don’t let you in if you’ve been drinking.’
‘Chrissakes, Lenny! There’s a storm coming.’
‘Storm Joseph.’
‘What?’
‘Storm Joseph. That’s what the Met Office named it.’
‘Well, Storm Joseph is going to kill you if you don’t get inside.’
‘Where?’
That was a good question. There was only one good answer.
‘Fine. You can sleep on my stairs.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘I’m sure. At the bottom though, I don’t want you making a habit of it.’
It sounds harsh, but technically they’re not mine, they’re not part of the lease.
I unlocked the outside door and let us both into the warm. Well, not into the warm, but at least out of the cold. Lenny started to set up camp just inside the door, there’s not even a square-metre there, it really was pitiful.
‘Come on, Lenny, you can sleep on the landing.’
‘No, no, chief. Here’s just fine.’
I sighed. ‘The door’s on the latch if you need to go out for a piss. Just don’t let it shut behind you or you’ll be stuck out there.’
‘Thanks, boss.’
‘I’d ask you up for a drink but you’ve had enough.’
Once up into my office I tried to coax the boiler into life, it would be even worse if Lenny died after I’d let him in. Then it really would be my fault.
I didn’t bother to turn on the lights, the yellow street lamps and the blue moonlight filtered through the blinds was enough.
For the first time, I spotted quite how dead the pot plant was. I touched a leaf and it came off in my hand, turning to mulch. There was a stale bottle of water on the floor from god-knows-when. I poured it into the soil.
The evening edition had been left outside my door, I picked up it and the unopened court summons as I passed the unused desk, taking both into my back office.
The headline was “GRUESOME BODY FOUND ON BEACH” and the article was by new-boy Jordan. It was fairly good, except it played down the drug angle, no one cared about a dead drug dealer, but if he could be anyone then they cared. It could be them. There was no mention of me anywhere in it, and I was only a silhouette in the photos.
I leant back into my chair. My office was supposed to look reassuring. When I started the business I furnished everything as best I could, doing all the work myself. I could imagine rich older women with cigarettes in cigarette holders sitting opposite me as I leant forward to light them. My secretary would show them in, take all the calls, and perhaps be my little bit on the side. But things hadn’t gone that way. Instead I had to work every hour I had just to scrape a living. And a combination of having no time and no one to look after the office meant that nothing was fixed, repaired, or repainted. Sure, I had worked a few times with the police, which is a real validation for a shamus, and meant that I felt I was actually doing something useful, but that was over now too. This office was all I really had, and if I couldn’t pay the rent I wouldn’t have that soon either.
I needed to stop feeling sorry for myself so I picked up the phone on my desk and dialled the one true friend I had made at the force.
Andy Watson has always been fascinated by criminal systems. The organisation behind organised crime. A few years ago he took it on himself to begin mapping local crime connections. First as a web, and later as a pyramid: we soon discovered that there had always been one man at the top.
Because of his undying devotion to good work he had long been banished to a basement office. But despite being shunned by his superiors, Andy is perpetually relaxed. He once told me he prefers the basement: he’s left to do what he’s good at, and people always come knocking eventually.
When you look at him he could be a surfer dude or a hippy, with his beard and his top-knot, but instead he’s the best crime analyst I’ve ever met. Sure, it was late, but he was a workaholic.
It rang for some time, and for a moment I thought he was either still out or actually asleep for once.
‘Hello?’ His voice always had a smile in it, no matter the time, no matter the circumstances.
‘Hi, Andy.’
‘Trust you to be calling me so late.’
Maybe the smile faded just a bit when he knew it was me. Just a bit though, that was all he could manage. I could hear from the sounds on the other end that he had just got in the door. He was wandering around his flat, probably getting ready for bed whilst we talked.
‘How are you doing?’ I asked
‘A lot better than you, I hear.’
Ouch. He could tease me because we both knew he cared.
‘It’s late, what do you want?’
‘I want to know about drugs.’
He chuckled, ‘Are you sure you’ve dialled the right number, Joe?’
‘Starz. I want to know who the supplier is.’
‘You’re the second person tonight to ask me that.’
‘Who was the first?’
‘Pistol Penny.’
‘Pistol Penny?’ I sat up straight.
I had heard all about her. A Detective Sergeant in South London. According to the news she was part of a long-running task force working to take down a group of top-level drug dealers known as “the Brixton six”. They all controlled different territories but worked in collaboration to try and minimise interference from the police and maximise profits. It was every police officer's nightmare, that drug dealers might actually get intelligent.
One day, they were attempting to run surveillance on an unprecedented meeting of all six. Gunshots were heard, people scattered, and the small unit of officers were all heading in different directions. The Met had not released the exact details of what had happened, but what was known to journalists was that DS Penny Price had taken it on herself to enter the building during this chaos. Then more gunshots were heard.
When armed officers arrived they found DS Price alive, and the Brixton six dead. Hence the nickname, Pistol Penny. She had been cleared of any wrongdoing, but what really happened inside that building was something only she knew.
‘She took down the Brixton six,’ Andy explained.
‘I know who she is, why did she get hold of you?’
‘She’s our newest DCI.’
It took a moment for the penny to drop. Shit.
‘What did you tell her?’
‘What do you mean, what did I tell her?’
Once a week, Andy’s dad, a truly lovely man, comes and sits with him whilst they talk things over. This evening, during one of these sessions, sitting alone in the dark of the basement, well past leaving time, sharing a drink and stories, they heard an announcing cough from behind them.
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‘DS Watson?’
Andy turned around in mild surprise, ‘Yes? What can I do for you?’
‘Erm… I was looking for the Organised Crime Database?’
‘That’s me.’
The woman visitor raised her eyebrows and stayed standing to attention.
‘You’re DCI Price.’ He smiled, as he always does, ‘I remember seeing your photo on the news.’
‘If one more person congratulates me—’ she started.
‘I don’t think that’s appropriate,’ he interrupted.
‘Thank you.’
‘It’s a shame that had to end the way it did.’
‘Yes,’ she said genuinely, ‘It is.’
Andy has a huge, warm smile, and I’m sure he would have deployed it at this moment. ‘You need help with something?’
She stood back to attention. ‘I was hoping you could brief me.’
‘Sure thing, take a seat.’
‘I’m ok,’ normally she would have ended it there, but apparently his smile earnt him some courtesy, ‘Thank you.’
‘Whatever’s comfortable.’ He gestured to his dad, ‘This is Harry, by the way.’
Harry, ever the gentleman, stood up to shake her hand.
‘Lovely to meet you.’
When stood up, he has a bit of belly, but only because he loves his food and his wine a bit too much. I’d like to get that old and that happy one day. If I end up like Harry I’ll know I’ve made the right decisions in life.
‘Yes, you too,’ she replied, ‘Are you… sorry, I don’t know who you are.’
‘He’s just my dad, it’s alright.’
‘Your dad?’
‘Yeah, he comes down each week and I just run things by him.’
‘I see, old hand, are you, Harry?’
‘Christ no, he’s a jeweller.’
‘Down the Lanes,’ added Harry, breaking out his warm smile too. He must be where Andy gets it from.
Price couldn’t help being won over by their relaxed charm. Apparently she even smiled a bit herself.
‘Come on, sit down,’ Andy insisted.
With a sigh, and a reluctant smile, she took a seat next to him. He poured a glass of Cointreau and offered it to her.
‘I’m carefully ignoring the fact that you’re drinking.’
‘I clocked off hours ago.’
‘Seems everyone did,’ she retorted.
He poured the drink into Harry’s glass and addressed the issue at hand.
‘What is it you want to know?’
What she wanted to know was everything about starz.
‘Starz,’ he sighed.
He had given the speech a few times now, which made it easy for him to tell me exactly what he told her.
‘It’s unbelievable, you change the chemical makeup of a drug and you’ve got a completely different drug: not covered by current legislation. The formula is similar to amphetamines, so the best guess is it’s supposed to be a cheap ADHD drug. Outside of current patents. But instead it’s popular with clubbers.’
‘That’s it?’ Price butt in, ‘A party drug?’
‘The trouble is that if you change the makeup of a drug it most often does something completely different,’ he explained. ‘In one-out-of-a-hundred cases, if you take more than two, and especially if you’re taking some brands of birth control, it leads to internal haemorrhaging. Not pretty. Twenty-three deaths in just the last few months. That constitutes a killing spree. The biggest serial killer the city has ever seen. But instead they call it misadventure. A killer pill. But the people who sell them to teenagers are the real killers.’
Price sat and chewed this over.
He continued, ‘One of the first cases was a young girl Joe Grabarz was hired to find. He found her alright.’
‘How much did he charge for that pleasure?’
Andy assured me that he gave her a disapproving look. ‘Legal highs are a bitch.’
‘Are you sure you want to say that out loud?’
‘To you? To dad? I think I’ll risk it. In sensible countries they blanket ban any psychoactive substances and make exceptions for alcohol and nicotine. Either that or they legalise everything and then you can regulate the market. Here we just ban specific chemical formulas, meaning that we’re always chasing to catch up.’
‘You make it sound worse than it is.’
‘For a few months, or even years, depending on the size of the problem or how slowly the Home Office works, a new drug is legal, and can even be sold on the high street. In Brighton it’s usually Kemptown or North Laine. Legislation hasn’t caught up with starz yet. If it becomes a national problem then the government will start to deal with it, but at the moment it’s just a Brighton problem, which means we have to deal with it.’
She didn’t say what she thought about it, she just studied him. Who knows what she thought.
‘Don’t get me wrong,’ he added, ‘I’ll defend the law however stupid it is, we’re the police, that’s what we do.’ They should put that on the badge, I thought.
‘I would drink to that,’ she finally responded.
The next question on both of our lips was who had the supply. Who was the bastard behind it all? ‘The answer is the same for any drug,’ Andy answered, ‘Robert Coward. He’s a bad bastard, make no mistake. He’s more murders to his name than even the pills.’
‘Then why haven’t you put him away?’ she asked.
‘Because I can’t prove it.’
‘Why not?’
‘I haven’t got any bodies. This poor bastard on the beach is the first one. One shot, so good luck with it.’
‘Tell me about him.’
‘Dad can probably tell you more than I can.’
‘Started as a barrow boy,’ Harry spoke for the first time in a while.
‘Selling fruit and veg,’ Andy explained.
‘Not just. If you dug under the runner beans or lifted up the marrows you’d find all sorts. And if you weren’t in when they came knocking you’d find half your stuff missing.’ He finished and took a sip of Cointreau.
‘Keep going,’ Price said.
I got the story separately from Harry later on, and below is how he told it to me.
‘Bobby is, from the way people talk about him, a real bastard. Pardon my French. A ruthless, old-fashioned gangster. But in all my life I’ve never crossed paths with gangsters, thankfully. I knew him long before all that. But even then he was an evil sod.
‘Now, people usually exaggerate when they use the word evil. But I mean cold, calculated, pure evil.
‘During the war my dad had a greengrocers in Kemptown. When I wasn’t in the shop we were all out in the street. Children in them days could run around wherever they wanted. We must have been ten or twelve or thereabouts. It was a strange time. All the young men were slowly disappearing. The older boys at school. Older brothers. The streets were far more empty than they are today. Some people still made deliveries with horse and cart.
‘We had a good bunch of friends. We were all the sons of the shop owners. The butcher’s son, the baker’s son. But not the son of the candlestick maker!’
He laughed a throaty laugh that soon became a cough.
‘Our favourite place was down under the arches by the seafront,’ he continued. ‘During the war they stopped running the Volks Railway partly because some legislation put all public transport into city ownership, which took it out of the original owner’s hands, and partly because they were fortifying the beaches in case the Germans crossed the channel. That meant the carriages had to be stored away, and they were stored away under the arches. The Volk’s carriages are smaller than a normal carriage as I’m sure you know. But in our games that made us grown-up size. We would be cowboys like in The Great Train Robbery, or Buster Keaton in The General, always climbing on the roof, almost falling off whilst the train careered out of control across some perilously high bridge over a huge canyon. It was a giant playground where we could spend entire day
s in our own fantasies.
‘My dad was happy to keep me there. He was busy trying to shelter me from the news. The slow realisation that some people were never coming home. He lost a brother. I know now, but I have no memory of ever being told.
‘I do have one strong memory that still sticks with me. Our shop was right near the entrance to the tunnels that run all under Kemptown. I mean, they’re cellars really, but loads of them connect. I probably remember them bigger than they were. Opposite us was Finlater’s the wine merchants, corner of Upper Rock Gardens and St. James Street. It was a lot of people’s designated entrance when the bombers came over toward London. You had to have a designated entrance so that you were counted in correctly. We knew we had an hour, maybe an hour and half, before the spitfires and hurricanes would rout them from the London skies and they would head back, dropping anything they had left on us.
‘It had hit all the parents pretty hard when those children died in the Odeon bombing, but us children would just run through the tunnels raising hell until we got tired. Some nights the all clear wouldn’t sound for hours and we young ones would sleep on the few bunks that were around. I remember one night, pretending to be asleep, watching my father’s face as he listened for the low hum of approaching aircraft. With me asleep he didn’t have to pretend that everything was alright. I’ve never forgotten his face like that. I never got to see it again as he died before I got the chance to really know him as an adult.’
At this point Harry took a sip of some very specific Bordeaux he was having. He didn’t speak for a few moments.
I steered him back on track: ‘Robert Coward?’
He continued, ‘One day, when we headed down to the arches we found some other boys playing on the carriages. The oldest of them, a boy my age, was called Bobby. We were happy to share, but Bobby’s idea of fun wasn’t fun for us. Once too many of us had got hurt, someone suggested that we should play for the rights to the carriages and everyone agreed.
