Contents
Cover
Also available from Nick Setchfield and Titan Books
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
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Acknowledgments
About the Author
Coming Soon from Titan Books
THE SPIDER DANCE
Also available from Nick Setchfield and Titan Books
The War in the Dark
NICK SETCHFIELD
THE SPIDER
DANCE
TITAN BOOKS
The Spider Dance
Print edition ISBN: 9781785657115
E-book edition ISBN: 9781785657122
Published by Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd
144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP
First edition: July 2019
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Copyright © 2019 Nick Setchfield. All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
For Mum
1
JUNE 1965
There was a human heart in a locker at St Pancras station.
Christopher Winter came to collect it on a Thursday afternoon in early summer. London felt listless; cranes idled on the heat-blurred horizon, ready to peck at the new tower blocks sprouting to the north of the city. There was no wind and the weathervane that topped the gothic spire of the grand Victorian building did not tilt or turn.
The heart cared little for London and even less for the living.
Winter strode through the redbrick arch on Euston Road, into the main concourse, scattering sickly-grey pigeons. The birds took to the roof, settling on its wrought-iron ribs. The station clock hung like a glass moon above the locomotives. It was almost five.
The heart had outlasted centuries. The heart could wait forever.
Destination boards clattered, place names spinning in the slats. St Albans. Kettering. Melton Mowbray. There was the promise of more exotic departures too: Liverpool, Manchester, Edinburgh Waverley.
The heart had known many lands.
Winter kept walking, past the walls of diesel-blackened bricks. It was hot inside and this gutter-stained cathedral smelt of soot and engine oil. Soon, he suspected, they would take a wrecking ball to St Pancras. Build something new, streamlined and modern, fit for the times.
The left luggage lockers were ahead of him, bookended by posters for Pall Mall cigarettes and cheap breaks on the Spanish coast. He located his locker and inspected the edges of the door for signs of disturbance. The pinch of gum he had wedged in the crack was intact, his pencil-tip indentations preserved. Standard operational practice in the field. He rather missed it.
A Salvation Army band had gathered outside the ticket office. They began to play ‘The Well is Deep’, the sound of the brass incongruously mournful on such a sultry afternoon. Winter let his gaze skim the concourse, his face blank. Good. He was unobserved.
He took a small key from his shirt pocket. It was wet from the sweat that had seeped into the nylon. The serrated silver slid into the lock. The key turned.
The package was there, just as he had left it. It had arrived in the post two days before, tied with sturdy bows of string and plastered with colourful Ecuadorian stamps. Where to store it? Not at his damp-riddled room in Battersea, that was for sure. His landlady had the infiltration skills of the KGB’s finest. No, far safer to keep it here, concealed behind this anonymous wall of lockers, safe among the suitcases and the hat boxes and the pills and the guns and all the other secrets London banked when no one was looking.
He pulled the parcel from its aluminium nest. It was Karina who had addressed the label, her handwriting as sleek and contained as he remembered her physical presence (those upward slashes, so like the movement of a blade…). She had sourced the heart for him, drawing on her network of contacts who traded in the unobtainable. It was a favour. He tried not to think of it as a final gift.
Winter placed the parcel under his arm and closed the locker door. As he stepped away one of the station’s rat-catchers passed behind him. The man had an inky bottle of poison in his hand and a small but belligerent dog on a leash. The terrier snarled, springing at Winter’s legs and leaving two grimy paw prints on the knees of his suit. The man pulled the dog back with a jerk of the strap. The animal whined, straining to reach the package, half curious, half anxious. It continued to stare as the rat-catcher hauled it towards the goods yard. ‘Get away, boy! Daft thing, you are!’
Winter strode out of the station, the clipped tones of the tannoy fading behind him. He flagged down a black cab at the kerbside.
‘Camden Town. Betting shop on Chalk Farm Road.’
He eased himself onto the seat behind the driver, the parcel balanced on his lap. Stealing a look in the rear-view mirror he saw the spires of St Pancras retreat, the late afternoon sunlight striking the sandstone bricks. Picking up speed, the taxi trundled north along the Euston Road, the traffic a drowsy hum outside the windows.
Sat there in the back of the cab Winter imagined he could hear the faintest throb of a heartbeat. A muffled but insistent drumming, coming from inside the parcel. Tiny, determined, impossible. Once he would have crushed such a thought. He knew better now. He knew that magic was the hidden pulse of this world.
Winter extracted a pack of Woodbines from his jacket pocket. He placed one between his lips, poking the tip into the flame of his gunmetal lighter. He clearly wasn’t about to make conversation and so the driver spun the radio dial. On Radio London Sandie Shaw was singing about waiting a long, long time for love.
The heart had the patience of a dead thing.
* * *
Tommy the Face admired himself in the nicotine-clouded mirror that hung in the hot, boxy room behind the betting shop. His new three-button Anthony Sinclair suit was perfect. The lines were lean, the cut trim, the fit modishly tapered. He particularly savoured the way the fine Italian wool clung to his own sharp and flawless angles. Inspecting his sleek, snow-blond fringe he idly adjusted his cuffs, allowing a glimpse of coral cufflink at the edge of each sleeve. He was, he knew, the business.
Tommy saw Winter’s reflection enter the room. ‘Alright, Frosty?’
As ever there was a detectable hint of needle in the young man’s voice. Winter had known him for two months now, ever since the Southwark job, and they tolerated each other’s company like wary cats.
‘J
ust call me Winter, Tommy. Christopher if you must.’
Tommy smirked, returning to the lure of his reflection. ‘Your call, mate. Just being friendly.’ And then he turned, smiling just a little too much. ‘Tell me, what do you reckon to the suit? It’s a corker, right? I reckon I’ll slay the birds up West in this.’
Winter gave him a weary, dead-eyed look. ‘If I had an opinion on your suit I’d kill myself.’
There was a grunt of a laugh from the armchair, where a doleful, balding man in his late fifties was slicing a pomegranate with a switchblade. This was Albert White, more commonly known as Sparkling.
Tommy nodded, his smile dropping at the edges. ‘Is that so? Well, that’s no surprise, buttercup. Look at the bloody threads you’re wearing.’
He stepped closer and smoothed the lapels of Winter’s rumpled seersucker suit. ‘I can’t tell if this is a fashion statement or a suicide note.’
Sparkling grunted again then fell back into his customary lugubrious silence. Gathering pomegranate seeds on the edge of the blade he flicked them at a bin full of betting slips.
‘I mean, who are you?’ baited Tommy, as if spoiling for a fight in this cramped, windowless room. ‘You turn up one day, no references, no rep. Just a blank little bastard from nowhere.’
He moved an inch closer, making his wiry, well-tailored frame as intimidating as he could. ‘Who’s to say you’re not undercover filth?’
Winter’s bright green eyes matched Tommy’s gaze. ‘Get out of my face, son. Or you won’t be so pretty for much longer.’
‘Is that a threat?’
‘More a statistical probability.’
Tommy pushed it. ‘Based on?’
‘Years of research,’ said Winter, evenly.
Tommy weighed his response. And then he flashed his cocky, livewire grin. ‘Well, at least we know your suit’s criminal.’ He turned to Sparkling, expecting a laugh. Sparkling had a mouthful of pomegranate.
Winter sat down on a baggy, cigarette-scorched leather sofa. He tossed a copy of The Sporting Life to the carpet, where it joined an empty bottle of Johnnie Walker and a scattering of playing cards. Next to him was another man, thick-set but matinee handsome in an entirely oblivious way, as if perpetually surprised by his own good looks. Winter had never heard his real name but knew that he was Italian. Naturally he was known to the others as Spanish. That was the private logic of the world he now found himself in.
‘It is not a bad suit, really, Signor Winter,’ said Spanish, with a clumsy sweetness. ‘I’ve seen people buried in worse.’
Winter smiled. ‘Thank you, Spanish. I appreciate the sentiment.’
Ten minutes passed in an itchy silence. Tommy continued to preen like a mod Narcissus in the mirror while Winter found himself examining every last detail of the stamps stuck to the package. If the heartbeat had ever been there it was gone now. Finally the door opened and a pre-emptive fug of cigar smoke and peppery aftershave declared the arrival of Jack Creadley.
The room changed in his presence. There was a sullen charisma to the man that assumed and won respect. Winter estimated Creadley must have been in his early sixties – the black hair was neatly clipped and parted with pomade, the face pocked like animal hide – but he carried the ghost of his younger self, the lad who had flashed knives in Thameside dockyards, the boy who had earned the wide, pale scar at his throat, curved like a smile.
‘Checked the merchandise?’ he asked, indicating the parcel on Winter’s lap.
‘Of course,’ said Winter, tetchily. And then, more gently, because Creadley had the temper of a landmine, ‘It’s exactly what they’re looking for.’
Creadley exhaled cigar smoke between his teeth. ‘Good. I hate to disappoint a client. Especially one with real money. Alright, Winter. You’re staying on the payroll.’
He turned to address the room. ‘The trade’s at four am. We leave at three. Get some food down your gullets. No booze. And I mean no booze. If there’s booze I slice you.’ He nodded to a small trestle table in the corner. It was stacked with firearms. ‘Let’s be professional about it.’
And with that commandment Jack Creadley left the room. Sparkling sighed and reached for the copy of The Sporting Life that Winter had flung to the floor. ‘Nine bleedin’ hours.’
Tommy consulted his watch, hitching his shirt-cuff so that the elegant dial was fully exposed, the light from the room’s lone, bare bulb bouncing off the glass. He stepped nearer to the sofa, making a concerted attempt to snag Winter’s attention.
‘Like the watch? It’s new.’
Winter peered at Tommy’s wrist. ‘You know,’ he said, with a dark little smile, ‘I don’t think that’s how you spell Cartier…’
* * *
The North Circular had a profound emptiness at three in the morning. There were other people on the road, to be sure – black cabs, transit vans, the occasional greaser on a twin-cylinder Triton – but to Winter they were all complicit, part of an unspoken fraternity in these dead hours. Ghost traffic, anonymous and slippery.
He sat in the back of Jack Creadley’s Jaguar saloon, wedged like a kid between Sparkling and Spanish, the package on his lap. Tommy the Face was driving. Creadley was in the passenger seat upfront, a fresh cigar on the go. No one spoke but the bass growl of the Jag’s engine thrummed through the upholstery.
As they powered along the dual carriageway Winter considered just how many bodies might be buried in the tarmac beneath them. Creadley had doubtlessly put some of those bodies there himself. Snitches, competitors, former business partners. Perhaps the man who had slashed his throat. Christ, the company Winter was keeping these days. He turned to the window, peering past Spanish, trying to tune out his own disquiet.
He needed a job. This was a job. It was that simple.
The road took them past garage forecourts and transport cafés, sleeping industrial estates and unlit factories, the bright hub of London retreating as the asphalt snaked toward Watford and beyond. Winter watched as the roadside landscape became bleaker, more derelict, husks of buildings consumed by countryside. These were the abandoned edges, the outermost margins of the capital, where an alliance of rot and wild shrubs claimed the city for itself.
Maybe it was the hour but this part of London felt liminal, a shadowy threshold between the lawful world and everything that lay outside it. No wonder a man like Creadley favoured such a location. Home turf, thought Winter.
Creadley glanced in the wing mirror. He was convinced they had been tailed ever since they left Camden. A gangster’s instinct. ‘We shaken it?’
‘Nothing there,’ Tommy reassured him. ‘We’re clean, I told you.’
‘We better be, son. Keep an eye out.’
The Jaguar took a side road, following a half-obscured signpost for Scratch Hill Junction. Ahead of them lay a deserted car park, its concrete walls choked by briars. A wasteground now, it sat beneath a brambled railway cutting, close to the black maw of a foot tunnel. Beyond the embankment rose a viaduct, spanning a straggly width of river.
The saloon edged into the car park, its headlamps dimming as it crawled to a stop. The men got out, buttoning jackets, smoothing the outlines of guns. The breeze was surprisingly warm ahead of the dawn. There was already a chorus of blackbirds in the trees.
‘We’ll wait for them inside,’ said Creadley. ‘Let’s see them arrive.’
They walked in lockstep to the shell of the station. It had been bombed in the war, clipped by the tail end of a raid on a local munitions factory. The remaining structure was officially condemned but the money or the will had never been there to demolish it. And so Scratch Hill had been left to decay, saving a not inconsiderable amount of paperwork. Over the years the land had gradually clawed the area back. Nature was vengeful, but she was patient, too.
Inside, wartime propaganda posters peeled from the walls. Dig For Victory. Hitler Will Send No Warning. Keep It To Yourself – War’s Not A Family Matter. Someone had taken a Stanley knife to the last one, blinding
the eyes of the handsome, apple-cheeked brood until only jagged white shreds remained.
The men moved into the shadows of the waiting room, fragments of timber and glass splintering beneath their shoes.
‘I’m not happy with any of this,’ said Sparkling, his voice a dry whisper. ‘What do they want with this thing? It’s obscene…’
Creadley was patient. ‘It’s fine. It’s a trade. Just a bit of unusual merchandise, that’s all.’
‘We’ve never dealt with these people before,’ Sparkling persisted. ‘They’re a breed apart, by the sounds of it.’
‘They’re clients, same as anyone. If they try to stiff us, they’ll soon know about it, believe me.’
The thought of imminent violence – as close as Jack Creadley came to a personal guarantee – seemed to mollify Sparkling. He lapsed into a glum silence, staring out through the shards of glass that hung like icicles in the window frames.
At a little after four a glare of headlights swept the room. A fin-tailed Mercedes-Benz slid into the car park, a milky smear of moonlight on its gleaming black bodywork. As the engine died the driver’s door opened and a man in a chauffeur’s cap and breeches exited the vehicle. He glanced impassively at the ruined building then strode to the rear door of the Mercedes, opening it with a slick twist of the handle.
A woman climbed out of the car. She was dressed in a crisp, dark business suit and wore her silver-blonde hair in an ornately braided bun. There was a sinuous elegance to her, noted Winter, almost like Shrimpton or one of those other bony wonders who were forever in the fashion pages of the Sunday supplements. She looked, in truth, like the last person who belonged in this place.
The woman strode towards the station entrance, the driver a discreet number of paces behind. There was a trim black attaché case in her hand, swinging on a leather handle.
The pair entered the waiting room, prompting Creadley and his men to step from the shadows. The two parties exchanged nods. There were no introductions, no pleasantries, but the edges of the woman’s mouth danced as Tommy emerged from the gloom. She put a hand to the young gangster’s face and let it glide across his cheek, the motion unmistakably sensual.
The Spider Dance Page 1
