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 t
o 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.’
I stopped in front of her. ‘I couldn’t tell you anything in there. It was too bloody loud.’
‘You’d better come in,’ she said, fishing in her handbag for a key. ‘I think we’ve got a fair bit to talk about, don’t you?’
‘You can say that again.’
‘How did you find out where I lived?’ she asked when we were inside her first-floor apartment.
‘You’re in the phone book,’ I told her.
‘So are plenty of other people with the name Toms,’ she said, leading me through to a nicely furnished lounge with comfy-looking black leather chairs. She slung her jacket over one of the chairs and turned to me, waiting for an answer.
‘Not as many as you’d think. I narrowed it down to five, then phoned Johnny Hexham. He said he thought you lived in Clerkenwell and there was only one E. Toms in Clerkenwell. Maybe you should think about being ex-directory.’
‘I’ll bear it in mind.’ She looked down at my dirty sock. ‘I won’t ask,’ she said.
‘The police. They don’t just want collars any more. They want everything.’
She smiled. ‘Do you want a coffee?’
‘Yeah, please.’
Five minutes later, when we were sitting in the leather chairs facing each other, she asked me what had happened with Fowler, and how come the police were after me. There was no point holding back, not if I wanted her to open up to me, so I told her everything, bar the bit where I shot Tony, which she didn’t really need to know. In the account I gave Tony escaped and I never saw what happened to him.
She sat back in her chair and rubbed her hand across her temple. It was a gesture vaguely similar to one of Fowler’s. ‘Shit,’ she said, which just about summed it up. ‘I can’t believe it. Dead. Poor old Roy.’ Which I thought was a bit rich. Fowler had asked for it, I hadn’t.
‘What happened after I got out tonight?’
‘Two vanloads of Plod turned up, and this detective who was already in there, the one chasing you, he started asking me a load of questions about what you were doing there.’
‘What did you tell him?’
‘I said I didn’t have a clue who he was talking about. He didn’t push things.’
‘So, who are the people Fowler was having trouble with? I think I owe them after what they’ve done to me and one of my best employees.’
She leant forward and gave me a cold stare. ‘Max, I’m telling you now. Do not get involved. Consider yourself lucky you’re still in one piece and leave it at that.’
‘Just tell me, Elaine.’
‘You don’t want to know. Honestly.’
‘I’ll be the judge of that.’
She paused, then, seeing that I wasn’t going to give up, started talking. ‘Roy’s been under a lot of pressure lately and he’s fallen in with some of the wrong people. He was getting into debt with the club.’
‘How did he manage that with those prices? I’d have thought he’d be a millionaire.’
‘He’s a big spender and he’s got a nasty coke habit that’s been eating away at his finances. Anyway, he started borrowing money from people he should have kept well away from, and it didn’t take long for them to start calling for their money back. And that’s when he really fucked up. He allowed them to start dictating to him how he should do business. They wanted to sell their drugs in Arcadia with Roy overseeing things.’
‘From what I hear the club’s always had a drugs problem.’
‘There’s always been some dealing there, yeah, but not as much as some people seem to think. The place got raided a couple of times before I joined but that was a long time back and they never found nothing. But this was different. This was organized dealing.’
‘When did it start?’
‘I don’t know exactly. At the time Roy didn’t say anything to me about it. He was done in the past for importing gear, back in the eighties, and he was inside for four years, so it wasn’t something he wanted to repeat. The dealing was all very underhand and if you’d come in there any night, like you did tonight, you wouldn’t have seen it going on.’ I nodded. That was true enough, although plenty of people had been off their faces. ‘But there was stuff in there and if you’d asked the right people you’d have got coke, E, whatever you wanted. There’s a few who do the deals, mainly the doormen, and they’ve never got much on them at any one time, so even if you were an undercover copper, you could only do them for possession. They never deal in big quantities. Roy kept the bulk of the stuff hidden in the place but I never knew where.
‘Anyway, a week or two back, Roy starts acting really strange. Turning up late, shutting himself in his office, not getting involved in the running of the business. I asked him what was wrong but he just brushed me off. Then a few days back our chief doorman dropped dead, and it turns out he was poisoned.’
‘Poisoned? I’d forgotten you killed people like that.’
‘That’s what the law said. And when Roy heard about it, it really set him off. He was jittery enough before, but after that he was all over the place, like he was next or something. But still he didn’t want to talk about it.
‘Then one night after we’d shut, I found him in his office, drunk or coked up or something. I told him he was going to have to tell me what was wrong, that he couldn’t carry on like he was, and that’s when I think he realized he was going to have to say something to someone. So he told me. He told me all about the dealing, how it was organized, what was going on. He sounded really gutted, like he didn’t want to be involved.’ Lying bastard, I thought, but didn’t say anything. ‘But the thing was, that wasn’t the worst of it. He was skimming them. These associates of his. Taking more than his cut of the profits. A lot more.’
‘How the hell did he think he was going to get away with that?’
She shook her head. ‘He told me he was using the money to invest in something – and he wouldn’t tell me what that something was – that would double or triple the cash he put in. Then, with that other cash he’d made from it, he’d pay these people what he owed them and get them out of his hair for ever.’
‘Except it didn’t work.’
‘No. The investment never came through and they found out about the skimming before Roy made his cash. On the night I talked to him in his office, he’d been told by them that they knew
what he’d been doing and that they wanted the money back with a hundred per cent interest, or they wanted the club. Roy was scared shitless. He didn’t have the readies and he didn’t want to give up the club. It would have left him with nothing. He’d asked them for an extension on the debt so that he could get himself sorted out, but they weren’t interested. They’re not the sort of people who specialize in being helpful.’
‘I bet they’re not.’
‘When he talked to me he said they’d given him three days to come up with one or the other. The club or the money. He told me that even if he handed over the deeds to Arcadia, he still reckoned there was no guarantee they wouldn’t break his legs for fucking them about. Or even kill him. He said that if he was going to go and see them, then he wanted back-up, but didn’t know where he was going to get it from. He didn’t know who out of the door staff would stand up for him and wasn’t going to count on any of them. So he asked me if I knew of anyone independent, some security company who could be relied upon to provide him with a decent escort.’
‘Why did he ask you?’
She shrugged. ‘I don’t think he knew where else to turn. We’ve worked together a while and I think he trusted me.’
I finished my coffee and put it on the glass coffee table next to me. ‘And you said you’d see what you could do?’
She took a pack of cigarettes out of her handbag and offered me one. It had been a month since I’d quit but for the last few hours I’d known it was never going to last. The way things were going, living to a ripe old age with healthy lungs was the least of my concerns.
‘Cheers,’ I said, and took one.
She lit it for me with a thin black lighter, then lit her own and sat back in her seat, crossing her shapely legs and blowing smoke towards the ceiling. The dress rode up provocatively and I tried hard, but without much success, to ignore it. ‘What choice did I have?’ she asked. ‘I didn’t want to get involved, course I didn’t, but he’s been good to me since I’ve been working for him, and the least I could do was try to help out. So I spoke to Johnny and he spoke to Roy and it sounds like he put Roy in touch with you. I’m sorry about what happened but, you know, I had no idea it would end like this.’
Die Twice Page 37
