The Edge

by Jessie Keane

  And Thomas Knox, who’d always been an ally of Kit’s, had been implicated. It was a dirty business. They were still trying to trace the two arseholes who’d been spotted on the day of the robbery – so far without success.

  ‘You want to watch yourself, Fats,’ said one of the restaurateurs as he handed over the wedge.

  ‘What?’ That sounded like a threat. Fats’ eyes narrowed. What the fuck . . . ?

  The owner quickly held his hands up. ‘Don’t misunderstand me. Just I had some blokes in here the other day, saying they could do the same job for less. I explained that we were very happy with Mr Miller. Which we are. Of course.’

  ‘You told them no,’ said Fats.

  ‘Damn sure!’

  ‘If they come in again, call the office. What did they look like?’

  The owner described them. But neither one of them sounded like runty blond, or the black guy.

  ‘You take care now,’ said the owner.

  ‘People see the warehouse getting done on our patch, they’ll chance their arm, see if they can move in,’ said Kit when Fats told him what had happened. They were sitting in the office behind Sheila’s restaurant an hour later.

  Sheila, who was long dead, had been gang lord Michael Ward’s wife. Michael used to run this manor; now it was Kit’s. Kit was sitting behind a tooled-leather desk where once Michael had sat.

  ‘Cheeky bastards been on our turf, suggesting they could cut the owners a better deal,’ said Fats.

  Kit nodded, glanced at Rob, his head man, who was, along with Fats and Ashok, sitting in the small nicotine-stained office with him. Michael had puffed on expensive Havana cigars and Dunhill cigarettes while doling out orders to his boys in here – the ceiling was still coffee-brown, but Kit hadn’t redecorated. The stains, the old furniture, everything in here reminded him of Michael, who had been like a father to him.

  Kit wasn’t a smoker. He wasn’t even a drinker, not any more. He’d been there, done that; now he liked to keep himself fit, do some boxing down the gym, a bit of weight training. Keep his levels up so that he stayed fast, stayed sharp. Once, he’d been Michael Ward’s chief breaker – just as Rob was now his – and he prided himself that he was no less fit now than he had been back then.

  ‘No mention of Knox, I suppose?’ asked Kit.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Owners turned them down?’ asked Kit. From out in the main body of the restaurant, there came the noises of the waiting staff, chatting, laughing, and of glassware and cutlery being laid out ready for lunch.

  ‘Too right,’ Fats leered. He wasn’t pretty, Fats. Lean as a whippet and wrinkled as a prune, he was fortyish and had never been a looker. But he was efficient and he was ferocious, which was all that Kit required. ‘Happy with our service, see?’

  Kit thought that they damned well ought to be. What his mob did was basically keep the peace on streets where the police were wary of treading. Around here, they were the law. Any hassle the owners got was instantly sorted out for them. Yes, they paid for the privilege – his boys collected from around forty restaurants and as many nightclubs and shops, plus ten snooker halls and a load of amusement arcades. But the deal cut both ways. What the owners of those places got in return was complete peace of mind, with robust help never more than a phone call away.

  The London underworld streets were run nowadays pretty much as they had been ever since the sixties when the Richardsons and the Frasers held the south, the Regans the west. The Foremans had held Battersea, the Nashes covered The Angel, the Carters held Bow and part of Limehouse, and the Krays had held Bethnal Green. Old orders had changed, people had come and gone, but the rules still applied. You didn’t piss around on someone else’s manor. It just wasn’t done.

  Recently, Kit had set up a limited company with himself and Ruby as co-directors, offering security services to VIPs. It had taken off nicely, having established a reputation for providing solid, hard men, reliable and fearless. Work was pouring in.

  So all was pretty much OK. Or it had been, up until the robbery. That had made him and his people look bad, and he was still fuming about it and wondering what the fucking hell was going on. And so far he wasn’t convinced, as Ruby seemed to be, of Knox’s innocence.

  ‘You found those two arseholes yet? The two that got spotted?’ he asked Fats. If they could track them down, maybe they could get answers instead of sitting here in the dark.

  ‘Still trying. Everyone’s on the lookout.’

  ‘Well try faster. Try harder,’ said Kit.

  There came a rap at the door and it opened. The bulky besuited boy outside on the door – Daniel, the eldest of Rob’s two younger brothers – let Ruby Darke and her daughter Daisy enter the office, then closed the door behind them. Both women were carrying a cluster of shopping bags and looked happy but exhausted.

  ‘It’s crazy out there,’ said Ruby, flopping into a chair.

  ‘We’re hoping for some lunch,’ said Daisy, dropping her bags and greeting Rob with a kiss.

  ‘Hiya, beautiful,’ he said. ‘Bought me something nice?’

  ‘It’s all wedding stuff,’ said Daisy. ‘I tried on twenty veils this morning. Or it felt like it, anyway.’ Kit rose to his feet, hugged his sister and kissed his mother’s cheek.

  ‘You OK?’ he asked Ruby.

  ‘Yeah, fine,’ she smiled. ‘Remind me why I bought that damned club though, will you?’

  ‘Because you missed the business,’ he said. ‘I told you that you would, remember?’

  ‘Yeah, well I must have been off my head to get into the clubland stuff. I’ve had nothing but trouble with that place. Mad chefs, demented brewers, and now a star turn that’s failed to show without a moment’s notice.’

  ‘I’ve never been inside a burlesque club,’ said Rob thoughtfully.

  ‘Whoa, tiger, don’t get too excited,’ said Daisy with a grin. ‘Burlesque is art. It’s dance.’

  ‘The fuck? It’s stripping,’ said Rob.

  ‘Well yes, granted, but it’s very subtle, very artistic.’

  ‘That’s right,’ chipped in Ashok. ‘I know about this. Each performer has her own particular set of moves. And if anyone else copies them, it’s handbags at dawn.’

  ‘So, not stripping?’ Rob looked disappointed.

  ‘Technically, yes, but . . .’ said Daisy.

  ‘Sounds bloody boring. Don’t think I’ll bother,’ said Rob.

  ‘Anything we can help with?’ Kit asked Ruby.

  ‘Yeah, find me another star like Crystal Rose by nine o’clock tonight.’

  ‘This the one who’s gone AWOL?’ asked Rob.

  ‘Without a word to me or her sisters, who help in her act. They showed up last night, thinking she’d follow on because she hooked up with some new bloke a couple of nights back. But she didn’t, so I had to get up onstage and cancel. People were disappointed and it’s a damned nuisance. Crystal’s a pain in the rear.’

  ‘An employee you can’t count on is a liability,’ said Rob, who was rock-solid dependable at all times and couldn’t understand anyone who wasn’t.

  Ruby smiled at him. Soon he was going to be her son-in-law and she couldn’t wait. He felt like family already, like a second son. He’d been her driver, and Daisy’s, when they needed his protection.

  You always felt safe with Rob. And best of all, he guarded Kit, stood by him, watched his back. Ruby felt that Rob would lay down his life for Kit; their friendship was that close.

  ‘It’ll all work out,’ said Daisy.

  ‘That’s it, though. The agency’s sending over a raft of performers this afternoon so I’m going to be knee-deep in interviews until six o’clock. It means a lot more work,’ complained Ruby. ‘Timing couldn’t be worse, what with the wedding on Saturday and so much still to do.’

  ‘You love it,’ laughed Kit.

  13

  It was a beautifully crafted precision instrument, the gun. The killer’d had it specially made for him quite a while ago. It all slotted t
ogether for ease of transport: the butt, the barrel, the trigger, the screw-on sights and even the silencer. The silencer was important, because he needed to practise, and he couldn’t do that down the club since the morons had chucked him out, so he had to do it in the woods, out of sight, and the silencer made it easy to do that quietly.

  He picked up some shopping, including a marrow. He’d already calculated the distance he needed to get the hit absolutely right, but he wanted to get his eye in. He paced it out now, through the nettles and the ferns and the brambles that tugged at his camouflage pants. Then he tied the marrow up – chest height – to the low-hanging bough of an oak tree.

  He went back to his shooting position, loaded the rifle, lined up and let off the first shot. It made a phut sound, with the silencer. Nice and quiet. But it missed the target, pulled to the right. He got a screwdriver from the toolkit in his pocket, adjusted the sights. Fired again. Missed. Again with the screwdriver. Took aim, exhaled slowly . . . and fired.

  PHUT!!

  The marrow flew apart like a grenade had gone off inside it. Splatters of pale vegetable and clumps of its striped green skin flew in all directions.

  Nice.

  The killer smiled to himself. Satisfied, he dismantled the rifle and packed it away, whistling under his breath. He carefully picked up the spent shell casings on the ground – a good habit learned at the club; they called it ‘policing one’s brass’. He now felt he knew everything there was to know about guns, and more. The primer ignited the powder and then the firing pin struck, so all the spent casings were, of course, dented. Those idiots down the club didn’t appreciate just how good he was. He was a Mozart, a Van Gogh – a genius in his field.

  Well, fuck them.

  Mission accomplished, he walked back to his car, surrounded by birdsong. Spring was coming, and primroses were coming up on the woodland banks, carpeting them in soft butter yellow.

  He reached the car, popped open the boot. Then his smile died as he went to put the gun bag in there. Another thing occupied the boot, black polythene swathing it, tied with ropes and fastened with gaffer tape. Fortunately, Crystal Rose was so petite, she didn’t take up much room. He squeezed the gun bag in beside her. Fucking inconvenient, she was. It had been the devil’s own job yesterday. He’d had to buy a big sports bag, the biggest he could find, and cram her into it, zip it closed, get it out of the hotel and into the hire car he’d acquired, again giving a false name and paying in cash. On top of that, he’d had the job of cleaning up all the dreadful mess she’d made. He’d had to dump his best jacket in a large waste container, ramming it down among a ton of disgusting restaurant leavings, five miles up the road. He shuddered to think of it. All that muck in there. All the mess. He hated mess.

  Now he had to dispose of the stupid nosy cow. Sighing, he wrestled the shovel he’d bought at a far distant DIY outlet from underneath her. Took out the pliers and the roll of tape. Then he stepped back, and slammed the boot closed once more.

  14

  Sometimes, Ruby Darke wondered how the hell she’d gotten into all this. The apple don’t fall far from the tree. That was what her dad, Ted, had always said, when he wasn’t running his corner shop, or belting her upside the head. Her mother had always been bad when you got right down to it, he said, and so was Ruby.

  Ruby’s two brothers, Charlie and Joe, had been crooks. They’d terrorized the workers down Smithfield meat market and dominated the post-war East End streets. While she – the one who was always sneered at and abused – had concentrated on the corner shop, turning it into a national chain. She’d been the straight one, the one who should have got the pat on the back.

  But she never did.

  Somehow, she had always felt the lure of crime. As a child, she’d been curious about the things her brothers got up to, and in adulthood there had been the men she’d taken up with. Michael Ward for one. And later, Thomas Knox.

  There was a sexiness to it, she thought, a palpable heat, when you lived close to the edge. Now she was a part of Kit’s organization, and money from the protection rackets was washed through this club and through many others that the company owned. She’d slipped into the life almost seamlessly, and now it was all she knew: sitting in on iffy deals, laundering dirty money, while all the time presenting a ‘clean’ image to the world, as she ran her Soho burlesque club, Ruby’s.

  Lately, however, she’d found herself wondering about the wisdom of being so involved in the day-to-day running of the club. This part – auditioning new acts – could easily be left to Laura the manageress, but no: Ruby had wanted to be the one choosing them, so here she was, running the auditions and bored out of her skull.

  Her afternoon passed slowly. She sat through a tattoo-covered woman gyrating suggestively, followed by a jokey one, covered in balloons which she proceeded to pop one by one with a hat pin. Next up were two handsome young men in skimpy red bondage gear with tassels hanging off their peachy arses, calling themselves Boylesque. Then a terrifyingly huge, masked fire-breathing woman; a woman in black, sporting devil horns and Dracula teeth; and a Georgian shepherdess. Last came a trio of saucy can-can dancers, who were the only ones who even came close, but not close enough.

  She was just packing up in her back office at the club, ready to go home, thinking with excitement that Daisy’s wedding was this Saturday. Months of preparation had gone into it. There’d been so much to do, to organize. But now everything was in place, and it was this Saturday. Her thoughts were interrupted by a knock at her office door. She sighed. It had been a long, wearying day. She’d had fun this morning with Daisy, but this afternoon had really dragged.

  ‘Yeah, come in. What is it? I’m finished for the day,’ she warned, snatching up her bag, hoping it wasn’t another act, turning up late on the off-chance. Or Laura with a problem. She wanted a hot bath and bed. Not much else.

  It was the Rosettes.

  ‘Can we have a word?’ asked one of Crystal Rose’s sisters.

  ‘Sure you can.’ Ruby suppressed a sigh, dumped her bag on the desk, and waited. ‘Jenny, isn’t it?’ Jenny was the slightly more talkative one; Aggie was the one who rarely said a word. They were pretty, the pair of them. Watered-down versions of their glamorous older sister.

  ‘That’s right. Crystal hasn’t called you, has she?’ said Jenny.

  Ruby shook her head. ‘No.’ She looked at the pair of them. ‘She hasn’t been in touch yet? Not with either of you?’

  ‘No, and it’s been three days,’ said Jenny.

  ‘Does she often do that? Go off with new men?’ asked Ruby.

  ‘A night, maybe. But not days,’ said Jenny, while Aggie stood there chewing on a hangnail. ‘And the thing is, you see, we phone each other all the time. Take turns. She’ll say, “It’s your turn tomorrow,” so we phone her. Every day. We’re always in touch.’

  Ruby searched her memory. ‘You don’t live with her, do you? She’s got her own place?’

  Jenny nodded. ‘We – Aggie and me – share a place in Earl’s Court, but Crystal’s got her own flat.’

  ‘Well, have you checked it out? She might be there. Maybe she’s too ill to phone.’

  ‘That’s why we wanted to talk to you,’ said Jenny. ‘To ask you. Would you come with us? I’ve got a key.’

  Shit, thought Ruby.

  Aggie, silent at the wheel, drove them to Crystal’s flat in Barnes after Ruby had phoned home and said she’d be late back. Crystal’s flat was the upper floor of a big Victorian house, reached by an exterior metal staircase. Ruby trudged up there after the Rosettes, cursing Crystal Rose for being a pain in the arse. She was probably up here in bed with her latest squeeze and would wonder what all the fuss was about. But no doubt she’d enjoy the attention; Crystal thrived on that.

  But . . . she hadn’t phoned her sisters, and she usually talked to them every day. Hadn’t turned in for work, and Ruby thought she’d been quite happy at the club. Always pushing for more wages, but that was par for the course. So it wa
s a little odd, all this. Slightly out of character.

  First, Jenny rang the doorbell. No answer. She rang it again. They stood there. It was starting to rain.

  ‘Got the key?’ prompted Ruby.

  Jenny nodded, produced it, put it in the lock. She opened the door.

  ‘Crystal?’ she called out.

  The flat was silent. Jenny, Aggie and Ruby stepped inside.

  ‘Crystal!’ called Ruby loudly. ‘You in here?’

  The thing that struck Ruby as they walked further into the flat was all the mirrors. Every wall bristled with them, in every conceivable shape and size. The three women walked along the hall, into the bathroom – Ruby touched the flannel, the towels, all bone dry – then the bedroom – the bed neatly made, unoccupied – finally the living room – empty of life. At every turn, they were constantly confronted with their own reflections. Ruby could easily picture Crystal in here, chatting on the phone to her sisters while admiring her own profile, her superb little body, and purring with satisfaction over her own attractiveness.

  ‘Doesn’t look like she’s been here for a while,’ she said to the Rosettes as they stood, at a loss, in the hallway once again. ‘Let’s ask downstairs, maybe they’ve seen her.’

  They relocked the flat and went back down the staircase and knocked at the flat below. The girl who lived there hadn’t seen Crystal Rose either, she was a long-haul air hostess and rarely at home.

  ‘She’s probably wrapped up in this new man and she’s lost track of time,’ said Ruby as they stood outside on the pavement.

  ‘You think we ought to tell the police?’ asked Jenny.

  ‘If she’s not back by the weekend, we will,’ said Aggie unexpectedly.

  They took Ruby back to the club in gloomy silence.

  ‘I’m sure she’ll turn up,’ said Ruby as she got out. She thought of the washout auditions this afternoon, then of Crystal wowing the crowds with her champagne-glass act. ‘Listen, why don’t you two step up, take over the act, just until she’s back?’