I left the restaurant at five past ten and headed round the corner to the Roving Wolf, a pub used by the station’s CID, to see if there was anyone in there. It was busy, but I spotted a couple of DCs I knew vaguely standing near the bar and joined them for a couple of pints. They were both interested in how the Matthews case was going but I couldn’t tell them a lot. Slowly was the word that about best described it. Conversation drifted on to other things and I left them at eleven, wandering down onto Upper Street in search of that elusive late-night creature, the black cab.
Upper Street was buzzing as usual, its constant stream of pavement cafés and trendy bistros bustling with custom as people of all ages, and pretty much every race under the sun, took advantage of the balmy evening. Strains of jazz, mamba, flamenco and half a dozen other musical styles drifted out of the open doors and windows of a dozen different establishments, giving the place a pleasant, continental feel. It almost felt like being on holiday and, for one who’d travelled up Upper Street a few times back in the 1980s, the transformation was incredible. Once a barren, dark place of nasty drinking hovels and little else where only the adventurous and the foolish came after dark, it had now become Islington’s version of Paris’s Left Bank. If you weren’t careful, you might even forget to watch your back.
Incredibly, I managed to hail a cab near Islington Green after only five minutes, which had to be some sort of record for that time of night. I thought about heading home but for some reason I wasn’t that tired. Instead, I asked the driver to take me to the Arcadia nightclub. He gave me a funny look in the mirror but did as he was told and we made our way in silence up to the Highbury Corner roundabout, and then left onto the less continental and more menacing Holloway Road. I was hoping to catch Roy Fowler in residence and collar him for a few minutes since I felt confident that if he didn’t have anything to hide, he’d return there sooner rather than later. If you’re in the nightclub business, you don’t trust other people to look after your investment for too long, not if you want anything left at the end of it.
Four hundred yards up the Holloway Road, just past the Liverpool Road turning, the traffic slowed right down as a large group of maybe twenty-five or thirty people standing outside a pub suddenly spilled out into the road. Seconds later there were shouts and the sound of glass smashing, and a group of five of them split off from the rest in what looked like a wild dance. Others ran over to pile in and the whole scrum of them lumbered into the middle of the road, breaking apart and reforming as half a dozen individual battles were fought, oblivious to the cars driving by. A bottle sailed lazily through the air, bouncing off the roof of the vehicle in front of us before ending up unbroken in the bus lane on the other side of the street.
‘Fucking kids,’ said the taxi driver in a voice that was half-snarl, half-sigh, as the group, most of whom looked no more than twenty, swirled back towards the pavement. One of them went down, putting up his arms in a vain effort to protect himself as he disappeared beneath a rapid-fire welter of kicks from at least three others. A girl screamed something unintelligible and rushed out of the watching crowd to intervene, wading into the kickers, handbag aloft. The one on the ground, sensing an opportunity, jumped to his feet and got out of the firing line. He was holding his head and bleeding from the nose.
The taxi driver accelerated and we left them behind to their fighting. ‘Fucking kids,’ he said again. ‘They get worse and worse.’ I nodded and mumbled something in reply, thinking that that was the thing with London. One minute you were drinking in the ambient atmosphere of a laid-back summer evening, the next you’d stepped unwittingly into an ugly battlezone. I suppose that’s why some people like it so much. The variety.
There was a long queue of revellers, mainly under-twenty-fives, snaking back along the street from the entrance to the Arcadia. I got the cab to stop directly outside, paid the driver in full, and tipped him a quid. ‘Enjoy yourself,’ he said, with a wave, as he drove off. Probably about ten years too late for that, I thought, but you never knew.
I walked to the head of the queue where a group of four male and one female door staff were frisking the waiting punters. One of them turned to me as I approached and gave me the same sort of funny look the cab driver had, like what on earth was a bloke in his mid-thirties in a suit he looked like he’d been wearing all day doing coming to a trendy joint such as this. ‘Yeah?’ he said, by way of greeting.
I produced my warrant card and thrust it in his face. ‘Police. I’m here to see Mr Fowler.’ I was getting déjà vu now.
He inspected the card, then looked back at me. ‘I don’t think he’s here tonight,’ he said.
‘Well, Miss Toms’ll do,’ I said, and walked past him.
There was a line of four further doormen in the foyer just inside the main entrance and I walked past them, showed my warrant card to a very thin young lady with big hair at the desk, and asked her to phone up to Fowler. She reiterated what the doorman had said about him not being in, but I insisted. She let the phone in his office ring for about thirty seconds before telling me he wasn’t there. Next she tried Elaine Toms, who apparently was in, but wasn’t answering either. I had no great desire to enter the club proper but it didn’t look like I was going to have any choice. I thanked her and headed through the door in front of me.
The place was heaving, as befitted a Friday night, with the majority of the youthful crowd packed onto the dance floor. The music was loud, repetitive and boring, the kind my daughter’s thankfully too young to like. At the bar at the far end, I noticed a few older people, mainly men in their thirties, and even one or two in their forties, clustered together against the noise. Some of them were wearing suits, though none of them looked like office workers, and I wondered who they were.
My eyes drifted along, then stopped dead. Someone looked familiar. I walked nearer, manoeuvring my way through the crowd until I was only about ten yards away. Now I was absolutely sure. No doubt about it. I’d seen his photograph four hours earlier, after it was faxed over by his old regiment. The man in front of me, drinking a bottle of Becks and looking like he owned the place, was Max Iversson, the fugitive half the station was looking for.
Iversson
There was no way I was queueing to get into Fowler’s place. There must have been two hundred people standing there like lemons while they waited for the doormen to give them the sort of attention my ex-missus used to give me when she’d drunk too many white wine spritzers. But who wants it off some bald bloke with no neck? Not me, that was for sure. I thought about heading straight to the front and saying I was mates with Elaine but, to tell you the truth, I didn’t really want to draw attention to myself, not now I’d suddenly turned into the Fugitive. So I headed round the back, jumped over the locked gate that led into the staff car park, and scanned the deserted rear of the building for any sign of an entrance. It took all of about three seconds for me to spot a window slightly open on the ground floor, about a foot above head height. It wasn’t much of a size but I’m quite a slim lad so I was confident I was going to get in. I hauled myself up with one hand while using the other to flick off the latch and open the window up fully. At the same time, I heard the unmistakable sound of piss hitting urinals and, as I poked my head inside, I saw a row of three blokes staring up at me as they deflated their bladders.
‘Evening,’ I said with a ready smile, trying hard to wriggle through the gap. ‘You couldn’t give us a hand, could you?’
The bloke nearest me, a young student type about twenty or so, looked shocked but nodded anyway, re-deposited himself in his trousers, and grabbed hold of my nearest hand, giving it a feeble tug.
‘Come on, boy, put some welly into it. You couldn’t even give yourself a hard-on with a grip like that.’
He tried again and, after a few grunts and groans of effort, managed to pull me in, with me landing on him a fair bit harder than I think he was expecting. I thanked him as he got unsteadily to his feet and, ignoring the strange looks coming from th
e other blokes in there, headed out of the door and into the club, recoiling momentarily from the wall of sound that hit me.
I scanned the room for Elaine, not sure I’d even recognize her after all this time, but couldn’t see any sign of her. Mind you, I couldn’t see a great deal among the buzzing crowd. I took a brief moment to admire a few of the scantily clad young females who seemed to be in abundance, then fought my way to the bar and waited for a space to open up, before ordering myself a beer from one of the harassed-looking bar staff. When it came about two minutes later, it cost me three quid. Three quid for a lousy bottle of Becks. If it was true that people were fighting for ownership of this place then it was no wonder. The money being turned over must have been incredible. I took a sip from the bottle and turned away from the bar, finding myself some space near the dance floor.
Which was when I saw her, walking purposefully in my direction while talking to one of the doormen, a stocky bloke who was striding fast just to keep up with her. I recognized her instantly. She’d changed quite a lot from school, as you’d imagine – I mean, it had been a long time – but it wasn’t so much in the look. It was more the poise, the way she carried herself. Back then she’d been attractive, with lovely big brown eyes and a good body, but she’d never really made the best of it, probably because she hadn’t really needed to. Now she looked hot, the type of woman most blokes are immediately attracted to because they know without a second’s doubt that she’ll be a demon between the sheets. She was wearing a black cocktail dress which matched her long curly hair and high-heeled court shoes. I wondered then whether that hound Johnny had slept with her more recently than school. If he had then he’d been a lucky man.
She turned away from the doorman as the two of them reached the bar and our eyes briefly met. Although she was still a few feet away and there were a number of people in between us, I saw an immediate flicker of recognition pass across her face. She stopped for a moment, then looked at me quizzically before approaching.
‘Max? Max Iversson?’ she shouted above the noise, walking up to me.
I got a glorious scent of musky perfume and warmth as she came up close. I tell you this, I wanted to have this woman before I’d even opened my mouth. She might have started off the chain of events that had almost had me killed but I’d suddenly become a man who was willing to forgive and forget.
‘Hello, Elaine,’ I said as coolly as I could manage. ‘Long time no see. How are you? You look good.’ I gave her a smile.
She smiled back. ‘I’m well. You?’
‘Yeah, not bad, not bad,’ I said, my mouth almost in her ear. I was only going to be able to keep up a conversation with this amount of background noise for so long.
‘Christ, it’s a bit weird running into you like this. The last I heard you was in the army.’
‘I did ten years, but I finished a long time back. You know how time flies.’
‘Too right. So you’re still local, then? I haven’t seen you in here before.’
‘No, it’s a little bit young for me, to be honest. It’s my first time.’ And my last at these prices, I thought.
‘So what brings you in here? On the pull, are you?’ She grinned.
‘Well, I came to see you, actually.’ She looked surprised. ‘It’s about Johnny Hexham.’
The surprise turned to concern. ‘Johnny? What about him? He’s all right, isn’t he?’
‘Oh yeah, he’s fine.’ That bastard was always fine. ‘At least he was when I left him earlier. Look, Elaine, I know it’s an odd request, but I need to talk to you fairly urgently and it would be a lot easier if it wasn’t here.’
The concern now turned to suspicion. This was a woman with a speedy turn in facial expressions. ‘Look, Max, I’m running this place pretty much on my own tonight, so if you’ve got something to say—’
‘I own a company that provides security. A few days ago you asked Johnny to put someone you know in touch with a company like that.’
She clicked. ‘Oh shit. And yours was the company?’
‘Correct.’
‘So where’s Roy? I haven’t seen him all day. Do you know what’s happened to him?’
‘That’s what I’ve got to talk to you about. But I don’t want to do it in here. Is there any way you can get out and we can go somewhere a little more private? And a bit quieter?’
She thought about it for a moment, then nodded. ‘I’ll see what I can do. Wait here. I’ll be back in a minute.’
I nodded and stayed where I was as she turned and disappeared into the crowd. While she was gone, a kid of no more than eighteen, out of his head on something, walked into one of the pillars that bordered the dance floor and knocked himself out. I watched as people stepped over him like he wasn’t there until eventually a couple of his mates turned up and, laughing, dragged him away. Then, a few yards beyond them, I saw a bloke who looked well out of place. Mid to late thirties, scruffy suit, thick black hair; to be honest with you, he looked a lot like Columbo in his early days and, like Columbo, I knew straight off he was a copper. He was talking into a mobile phone and watching me at the same time. Our eyes met and I knew he was on to me, though Christ knows how. It was time once again for quick thinking. If he was in here, there could be more of them out front, making it too risky to go out that way.
I turned and, as casually as possible, headed back in the direction of the toilet, speeding up the moment I’d pushed through a large group of girls out on a hen night.
Gallan
As soon as I saw him, I knew I had to act fast. I didn’t have a clue what he was doing there but he didn’t look like he fitted in, and he was on his own. All that, however, was by the by. The most important thing was that he stayed put until reinforcements arrived. I pulled the mobile from my jacket pocket and called the station, at the same time moving slowly towards a pillar by the dance floor where I could keep an eye on him without attracting attention. I was bumped by a young bloke pushing past me and I turned and gave him a look, not that he even saw it. He was already ten yards further on. Cheeky little bastard. Dispatch picked up and I informed them loudly of my position and the fact that I was within thirty feet of a wanted man and needed back-up. I needed to repeat myself twice above the noise, and when I looked back towards Iversson I saw that he’d spotted me. He turned and walked away and I followed rapidly, telling Dispatch that he was on the move. ‘Get here fast, I don’t fancy tackling him on my own. Not after what happened this afternoon.’
Iversson disappeared into the toilet and I broke into as close a run as the crowds would allow, unsure how I was going to handle this. I didn’t want to corner an ex-para in an enclosed place and present him with no option but to fight. I’m not as young as I used to be, or as fit, and the reason I’m a detective is that I like to detect rather than get involved with all the physical stuff. Plus, I knew I’d lose. But I wasn’t going to let him go either. Not after he’d put two of our uniforms on the sicklist.
I pulled open the door to the toilets four seconds after he’d gone inside, turned left, and headed into the urinals area. There were half a dozen people in the place, all relieving themselves, while at the far end of the room in front of an open window was Iversson. He looked like he was just about to jump up and try to get out through it. Eight yards separated us.
He turned and saw me and I put my hands up to indicate that I wanted things to end peacefully, which I did. ‘All right, police. Come along now, Max.’ And then, of course, the standard police cliché: ‘You’re in enough trouble as it is without adding resisting arrest to the charges.’ I took a couple of slow steps forward, careful not to agitate him.
Iversson nodded and added his own cliché: ‘It’s a fair cop, guv,’ he said, taking a step towards me. Then, without warning, he grabbed an unlucky punter by the back of his shirt and flung him bodily in my direction. The poor sod was still in the process of taking a leak and I had to jump out of the way to avoid the spray, sliding over in a suspect-looking puddle as I did so
. I banged my right knee jarringly hard and the mobile flew out of my hand. Iversson immediately turned, heaved himself up to the window with an agility that made me look even more like a Keystone Kop, and began squeezing himself through.
The bloke he’d pushed at me was first to react. Putting himself away amid a welter of curses, he turned, ran up to the window, and grabbed one of Iversson’s flailing legs with both hands. It was a stupid move. The other leg bent, tensed, then lashed out, all in one split-second movement, striking the bloke in the side of the temple and sending him crashing into the communal urinal. His head hit the wall with an angry thud. Iversson’s legs then began to disappear like spaghetti being dragged into a giant mouth. Ignoring the mobile phone, I jumped to my feet and ran towards them, managing to grab hold of one of his shoes just as it started to go out of the window. It came off in my hand and I was suddenly left standing looking at a fashionable-looking khaki moccasin while he made good his escape. I heard him land on the other side, then get to his feet and start running, impaired but hardly disabled by the fact that he now only had one item of footwear.
I looked at the semi-conscious bloke moaning on the floor, then at the handful of other punters who stood watching me in slightly amused silence, then finally at my watch.
It was twenty to twelve. Way past my bedtime.
Iversson
I was waiting when she arrived back at her Clerkenwell apartment. I watched her get out of the taxi and pay the driver from across the street, then as he pulled away and she turned towards the entrance, I crossed the road and jogged up behind her.
‘Elaine.’
She turned round quickly, saw it was me, and narrowed her eyes. ‘Well, well, well. The wanderer returns. What happened back there? You didn’t tell me the police were after you.’
The Murder Exchange Page 7
