Max Wolfe 02.5 - Fresh Blood

by Tony Parsons

  They looked at each other. Then Oscar Burns stepped into my face. He smelled of e-cigarettes and too much cologne.

  ‘Why don’t you sit down and shut your cakehole?’ he hissed.

  ‘Why don’t I show you my trick first?’ I said. ‘Excuse me.’

  I stepped around him so that I was facing the one called Big Muff. Everything stopped for a second.

  And then I punched Big Muff in the heart as hard as I could.

  He was wearing a little snatch of red silk in his jacket pocket and that was what I aimed for with a punch that started down in my feet and came up through my legs and my back and my shoulders as I twisted into it, the force coming from the pivot of my body, so that all of my body strength exploded in the first two knuckles of my right fist as they crashed into the red silk handkerchief he wore as if to mark his heart.

  He reeled backwards, shocked more than hurt, although the sudden pain gave him something to think about, and I stepped forwards, maintaining the distance between us.

  And I punched his heart again.

  He had his back against the wall, nowhere to move back to now, and I did it again. And again. Repeatedly punching his heart with my right fist. Not winding up as well as I did for the first punch, but still getting plenty of weight behind it, still hitting his heart with as much force as I could summon. And I knew that whatever happened next, this wouldn’t last very long. It is only in movies and on TV that fights go on and on. This would all be over in sixty seconds at the outside.

  I kept punching him in the heart. Waiting for his friend, Oscar Burns, to attack me from behind. But he didn’t.

  So I grabbed Big Muff by the skinny lapels of his tight grey suit and dragged him towards the door. You would have to be made of strong stuff to withstand being repeatedly punched in the heart. Big Muff wasn’t made of that strong stuff. It is a shock to the system to be punched in the heart, it creates the trauma of chest compression – quite literally a shock to the heart. The repeated blows had collapsed Big Muff’s sternum just enough to induce tachycardia, an abrupt increase in the heart rate that makes you feel as if you are dying.

  ‘He’s killing me!’ Big Muff screamed.

  I dragged him out of Sampaguita and positioned him at the top of the rickety Chinatown staircase. Then my right fist smashed into the silk handkerchief for one last time.

  Gravity did the rest.

  He went down like a Greek bank.

  I moved quickly down the stairs, all the while expecting something to crack across the back of my head or stab into my back. It did not happen. A street fight is not really about who hits the hardest. It’s about who hits first and then has the nerve to keep on hitting.

  Big Muff was flat on his back at the bottom of the stairs. I placed my heel on the silk handkerchief. Oscar Burns was standing beside me, his hands in his pockets, and he seemed to be looking at me for the first time.

  ‘But what are you doing here?’ he said. ‘I don’t get it. Why does a pig help a pimp? Friends with benefits, are you, mate?’

  ‘I’m not your mate,’ I told him.

  Big Muff grunted under the weight of my heel.

  Oscar chuckled to himself.

  ‘You going to arrest me, copper?’ he said.

  He saw my hesitation and he laughed again.

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ he said. ‘You’re protecting a whore.’

  ‘She’s not a whore.’

  ‘How about pimp? That a fair job description?’

  I said nothing.

  ‘You’re protecting her,’ he said. ‘I don’t know why but I can guess. Toss you the odd freebie, does she, just to keep the Chinks with the machetes from the door? And what I reckon, pig, is that it’s all off the book. It’s unofficial. You’re a policeman who – for whatever reason – has placed a dirty pimp under your protection. And I think that if your superiors learned about you protecting a pimp then your career would be down the toilet in a Chinatown second. And you know what that means?’

  ‘Why don’t you tell me?’ I said.

  ‘It means I can do whatever I like to her,’ Oscar Burns said, his eyes shining with violence. ‘And you can’t do a thing about it.’

  5

  Hospital Food

  ‘Jana can’t come tonight,’ I said and Curtis threw the TV’s remote control at the wall.

  Then he leaned back in his bed and closed his eyes, his mouth twisting with emotions I could not even guess at.

  ‘I’m going to sort another visit soon.’

  No response.

  ‘Okay, Curtis?’

  ‘Yeah, I bet she can’t wait to come back to cuddle a cripple,’ he said.

  I picked up the remote from the floor and gently placed it on his lap, in case he needed it later.

  ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘She liked you. You liked her.’

  ‘She liked getting paid.’ He laughed, choked and bitter. ‘She didn’t even have to have sex with me. Nice work if you can get it. Let’s stop this farce, Max. I know you’re trying to be kind. But I would rather be alone. I mean, exactly how pathetic am I? That you have to pay hookers to come and hold my hand!’

  I sat on his bed.

  Somebody had given him a shave, someone who wasn’t very good at it, and his handsome face was marked with bloody little shaving nicks.

  ‘When you’re up for it, we could get out of this place for a day.’

  He looked at me as if I was insane. ‘And what would we do?’

  I shrugged. ‘It’s London. We can do anything you want. We could go look at the Turners in the Tate.’

  He frowned at me, as if I was speaking a language he had never learned.

  ‘The Turners in the Tate,’ I repeated.

  ‘What? Paintings?’

  ‘More than just paintings.’ I didn’t have the words to explain them to him. ‘Great torrents of light and colour that make you look at the world in a new way. I go there sometimes and look at the Turners when my head’s full.’

  He laughed at me.

  ‘My head’s not full, Max. It’s fucking exploding. I don’t want a day out in some museum. And I don’t want some high-end hooker pretending she can see into my soul. I just want to be left alone. I just want it to be over. I just want to die, Max. That’s all. It doesn’t seem like much to ask.’

  ‘Curtis—’

  ‘Are you going to tell me you know how I feel? Nobody knows how I feel. All I’ve got waiting for me is a wheelchair and fifty years of having my bottom wiped for me.’

  ‘I’m just trying—’

  ‘You know what I want!’

  So we were back to that. It always came back to that. I got up off the bed and crossed the tiny room to the chair in the corner.

  ‘I’ll stay until your family gets here,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t bother,’ he said. ‘I don’t want you to stay. Why are you here anyway? Were we friends when we worked together? We weren’t, were we? Not really. We were just colleagues. Nothing more. So why are you even here?’

  I wanted to be honest with him.

  ‘We were becoming friends,’ I said. ‘Real friends, Curtis. But there wasn’t enough time.’

  ‘Shall I tell you why you’re here, Max? Because you know it could be you in this bed. I fell two storeys and landed on my back and you got a blade in your belly. You walked away and I never will. Could just have easily been the other way round, right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And deep down inside, you’re wondering if it’s worth it. If the job is worth putting your hide on the line every day of your life; risking seeing a lifetime of pity in your daughter’s eyes as she washes you; risking getting crippled or killed because of all the evil bastards that are always going to be out there, no matter what mugs like us do, no matter how hard we try, no matter how many of us get hurt. Is it worth it? Doing this job when it could put you in a wheelchair or a coffin? The answer to your question is – no, Max. It’s definitely not worth it. All right? You can stop wondering. And
you can go now.’

  So I went.

  His voice stopped me at the door. I didn’t turn to look at him because I could hear him quietly crying and I knew he would not want me to see his face.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  I nodded without turning round.

  ‘Me too, Curtis. I’m sorry about everything.’

  Then I left him alone.

  Two floors down, Ali was in a crowded public ward, hidden from view by screens like shower curtains. The young Somalian security guard was a shocking sight. His jaw was wired up and his face had ballooned to the size of a lumpy football. The bruising was coming out now, a lavish flowering of dark yellow, purple and black, and it covered the bottom half of his face. He was snoring so they must have pumped him full of painkillers and sleeping pills. There was one chair pressed up against the bed and Ginger Gonzalez was sitting in it.

  ‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ she said.

  ‘What are you talking about?

  ‘Throwing those guys out of Sampaguita. Punching that big one in the chest.’

  ‘The heart.’

  ‘Whatever. It’s easier to pay them. Do you really think that’s the first time I’ve ever had a shakedown? I’ve been out on my own since I was sixteen, Max. I’ve been running Sampaguita for ten years. The way it works is that you give goons like that a few bucks and then you find out who’s higher up on the food chain.’

  ‘And you pay them, too?’

  ‘No – you pay them instead. Death and taxes and somebody wanting something for nothing, Max. That’s all we can expect.’

  ‘But not necessarily in that order. I can’t believe what I’m hearing.’

  She laughed. ‘Did you think I’d be grateful?’ She leaned back in the cheap little hospital chair and I saw the tattoos on her arms. Never for money. Always for love.

  ‘I was just trying to protect you,’ I said.

  ‘I know. And I appreciate it. But you were also in a pissing contest. Men always are. And I’m the one who has to clean up the mess while you run off home for your tea. I deal with the consequences while you’re back in Smithfield with your daughter and your dog. Why do you think Jana can’t come here tonight? My girls are terrified. The word’s been put about that Oscar and Big Muff are going to start cutting faces open.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Cutting faces open. That’s what they’re threatening. What do they call it when they cut someone’s mouth at the sides? There’s a name for it.’

  ‘Chelsea smile,’ I said.

  I was silent, thinking of Vic Masters in a ditch on Hampstead Heath, his face sliced open in a Chelsea smile. Maybe DCI Flashman was wrong. Maybe it wasn’t the result of an old beef with another fading old face.

  Maybe this was fresh blood.

  ‘You’ve got to go to the law, Ginger. For your sake and for the sake of your girls. I honestly don’t know how dangerous these guys are.’

  She laughed. ‘I’ll go to Dubai before I go to the law,’ she said. ‘Somewhere the sex industry is appreciated. There are plenty of possibilities in the big hotels there. And I know exactly how dangerous they are, Max.’ She nodded at the unconscious young Somalian with his jaw wired up. ‘Look what they did to Ali just for a laugh.’

  And then Ali’s family arrived, three generations of Somalians squeezing into that tiny space around his bed, an old man and woman and a boy around Scout’s age and a young mother with her head covered holding a baby – Ali’s wife. She began to sob silently at the sight of her husband’s poor battered face. In broken English, the old man thanked Ginger for giving Ali a career opportunity, as though she was Bill Gates rather than the owner of a prostitution ring.

  Finally, a short, sturdy-looking Somalian in his mid-twenties came into the room. He stared with eyes blazing at the broken young man in the bed. And then he looked at me, nodded briefly, and we stepped to the other side of the curtains. He had the blackest eyes I have ever seen.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘For helping my brother.’

  I felt a flood of shame. If I had really been helping his brother, Ali wouldn’t be eating his dinner through a straw.

  Curtis’ mother and brother were in the hospital canteen. I got myself a triple espresso and joined them.

  ‘He’s sleeping,’ the old lady said.

  ‘Or pretending to sleep,’ said Marvin.

  The mother was suddenly furious. I had never seen her angry before. ‘Why would he pretend to be sleeping?’

  Father Marvin Gane shook his head. ‘I don’t know, Mum.’ His mother’s accent was still full of the Caribbean but in Father Marvin’s voice there was nothing but the streets of south London. ‘Perhaps he’s tired of talking about it all. Oh – I don’t know why he would pretend. I’m sure you’re right. I’m sure he’s not pretending.’ He reached across the table and cupped his mother’s hands in his own and she smiled, as if it was the only apology she needed.

  ‘We’re all tired,’ she told me. ‘May I ask you a question, Max?’

  I nodded. ‘Of course.’

  She took a deep breath. Behind her sensible spectacles, her eyes were shining with tears.

  ‘Does my son ever talk to you about dying?’ she said.

  I looked at their faces. I wanted to do the right thing. I wanted to tell them the truth. I wanted them to know everything. But I couldn’t break their hearts.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  6

  Young Offenders

  Deep in the bowels of the Iain West Forensic Suite in the Westminster Public Mortuary on Horseferry Road, the corpse of Mad Vic Masters lay on its stainless steel bed.

  The blood that had masked his face when I found him in a ditch had all been swabbed away. Somehow that made him look even worse.

  The hideous wounds of his Chelsea smile made Mad Vic look as though he was desperately attempting to see the funny side.

  Four murder detectives in blue scrubs and hairnets gathered around the body but Elsa Olsen, forensic pathologist, was addressing herself to their leader, the large man with the shock of white-blond hair. In his blue scrubs and hairnet, DCI Flashman of New Scotland Yard looked like a rugby player impersonating a dinner lady.

  I pulled on my own scrubs and hairnet, quickly washed my hands and joined them in the chilled air of the viewing room.

  Elsa smiled at me, and two of Flashman’s Detective Inspectors gave me a neutral look, but the Senior Investigating Officer ignored me. I shivered. The room was kept permanently just above freezing to make it possible for the living to stand in such close proximity to the dead. Elsa Olsen indicated the cadaver with a slight lift of her chin.

  ‘No defensive wounds on the hands and arms,’ she said. ‘No cuts to the hands and arms. Some bruising on the neck and upper arms, indicating he was forced on his back before the chop wound was inflicted.’ The tall Norwegian frowned at the twin black scars of Vic’s rictus grin. ‘Because the chop wounds on either side of his mouth are visible, it looks like two separate blows. But the roof of his mouth was almost cut open so we can say with some degree of certainty that the mechanism of death was a single chop from a long, sharp, heavy blade.’

  ‘Not a knife?’ Flashman said.

  Elsa shook her head. ‘That’s a twelve-inch wound.’

  ‘So we’re looking at a meat cleaver or some sort of sword,’ Flashman said.

  ‘Like a cutlass,’ I said.

  ‘That’s a possibility,’ Elsa said. ‘A cut that deep would need to have some weight behind it.’

  There was silence in that freezing room.

  ‘You’re on leave,’ Flashman finally said, not looking at me. ‘I’m sorry about this intrusion, Dr Olsen.’ Elsa shrugged and smiled. Flashman still didn’t look at me. ‘And this is not your investigation, DC Wolfe. You were walking your dog and you found the body and that’s where your involvement begins and ends.’ Finally he looked at me. ‘So what are you doing here?’

  ‘I have a lead, sir.’

  He nodded
. ‘Dog lead, is it?’

  His MIT chuckled with the ingratiating canned laughter of a studio audience.

  ‘I apologise – again – for the interruption, Dr Olsen,’ Flashman told Elsa. ‘Please carry on.’

  ‘The facial wound didn’t kill him,’ Elsa said. ‘It caused a massive haemorrhage but he never had the chance to bleed to death.’

  She had opened the dead man’s ribs with the kind of pruning shears that you can buy in any garden centre and now she pointed at the Y-shaped incision that started at his shoulders. ‘Cause of death was a myocardial infarction,’ she said.

  ‘A heart attack,’ I said. ‘They scared him to death.’

  DCI Flashman did not look at me or speak to me or show any sign that he knew of my existence until we were back in the changing room, taking off our scrubs. And that was when he gripped me by the shoulders of my blue scrubs and slammed me hard against a metal locker.

  His face beneath his hairnet was red with fury.

  ‘Don’t you ever embarrass me like that again, Wolfe.’

  He was far bigger and stronger than me. But I brought my hands up between his arms and then out and over, and his grip fell away easily. He didn’t try to grab me again.

  ‘I’m not trying to embarrass you, sir.’

  He ripped off his hairnet. His MIT stood behind him, ready for the word to chuck me out. But Flashman inhaled deeply.

  ‘Let’s have it,’ he said. ‘Your lead.’

  ‘There’s a new little team who have been waving around a cutlass in Chinatown.’

  Flashman nodded. ‘And you think they might have topped Vic Masters?’

  ‘I don’t know. But I think it’s far more likely than the lead you’re pursuing. This old beef Vic Masters had with Alfie Bloom. He’s a sick old man. I looked him up.’

  ‘On Facebook? Twitter?’

  ‘On the Police National Computer, sir. Alfie Bloom’s in a care home.’

  One of Flashman’s DIs bristled. ‘Leafy Lanes is a retirement community!’

  Flashman placed a big meaty paw on my shoulder.

  ‘Alfie Bloom is not a sweet little old man, Wolfe. He has a history of extreme violence. He did a life sentence for murder. And he might be in a retirement community but he’s been known to go for a bit of a wander. And Alfie Bloom detested Vic Masters. So I wouldn’t rule him out, Sherlock.’