Body Blow

by Peter Cocks

  My pumped-up courage soon deflated when Gadd answered the door.

  “Why do you want to see him?” he asked.

  “I’ve got some information I think he’ll be interested in.”

  “You talk to me, winkle. I talk to Patsy.”

  “What if I said it was about Gav Taylor?” I asked. “I expect you’re wondering where he is.”

  Gadd looked at me for a moment and narrowed his eyes, then stepped back and let me in.

  A couple of Patsy’s heavies were hanging around reading English red tops and smoking while Patsy sat through in the big white lounge with the view over the Costa. There were lines of cocaine chopped out on the glass-topped table, which surprised me. I thought rule number one was never to touch the gear.

  “To what do I owe the pleasure?” Patsy asked. His eyes had lost some of their aggression and he looked at me flatly, gesturing for me to sit down. I sat on the armchair to his right, and as soon as I could I slipped the small transmitter I’d palmed between the cushion and the arm as if it was a lost coin.

  “Er, you—” I nodded to Terry Gadd— “asked me to keep an eye on the stuff in my cellar. So I have.”

  “And?” Patsy said.

  “Well, I heard something the other night, so I went down there and found that guy with the limp … Gav Taylor, is it?”

  “What about him?”

  “Well, he was helping himself to the, er, merchandise you have down there.”

  “How do you know he wasn’t just keeping an eye on it, like you?” Gadd asked.

  “If carving chunks out of it counts as keeping an eye, then he was keeping an eye,” I said. I took my iPhone out of my pocket and Patsy Kelly flinched slightly. It was beginning to feel like he was as jumpy as I was. I called up the camera roll on the phone and scrolled through. I had already downloaded the scene-of-crime pictures of Gav’s dead body onto a portable hard drive back at the apartment. I didn’t want them to see those.

  I found the picture of Gav up to his elbows in cocaine and gave it to Patsy Kelly. He looked at it, studied it carefully and handed it to Terry Gadd. Gadd spat out the C-word.

  “Where is he now? The effing…” Gadd spat a few more choice anatomical terms.

  “He took a big chunk and did a runner,” I said. “I tried to stop him, but he cut up rough.” I pointed at the yellowing bruise beneath my eye.

  “Do you know where he’s gone?” Patsy asked.

  “No.” I shrugged, played dumb. “England?”

  “Doubt it,” Gadd said.

  “But he said something about a Serbian … I don’t know if that means anything to you?” Anna had primed me to spin them a line, tell them something that would unsettle them. Patsy and Terry Gadd exchanged glances. I had clearly hit the right spot.

  “Can you leave us alone for a minute?” Patsy said.

  I got up and left the room. I walked outside and sat on a recliner by the pool, out of sight of the main house. Checking around me, I plugged a small earpiece into my ear. One that connected to the transmitter I’d put in the armchair minutes before.

  “I told you!” I heard Patsy shout. “He was your bitch.”

  Gadd mumbled some excuses about Gav Taylor. How he’d come recommended. Patsy raised his voice. He sounded emotional.

  “I’ve never seen you like this. This is no time to lose your bottle, Patsy,” I heard Gadd say. “We’ve almost got it tied up. You can’t roll over now.”

  “This Serbian fucker’s running rings around us, whoever he is. It’s getting to me, Terry. If he’s everything I’ve heard about him, we need to cut a deal.”

  Terry Gadd grumbled some more, his hoarse voice mostly too low for the transmitter to pick up, then I heard him tell Patsy he thought he was frightened.

  A few minutes later Gadd called me back inside.

  “Why did you come up here?” Patsy asked.

  “I thought you’d want to know,” I said. “You asked me to keep an eye out. If I hadn’t come and told you, you’d have blamed me if gear went missing.”

  “Are you bent, Pedro?” Patsy asked.

  I paused. “I’ve been done for attempting to smuggle charlie, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Yes, that’s the kind of form I was thinking about…”

  “More to you than meets the eye,” Gadd said.

  “We’ve got another shipment arriving shortly,” Patsy told me. “Then we need to start moving the stuff around sharpish. We need someone on the spot. Will you help?”

  I felt uneasy, but I knew that I had convinced them – that I had just crossed the line into their territory.

  “Do I have a choice?” I asked.

  “No,” Patsy said.

  FORTY-FIVE

  The next consignment was due to arrive sometime later that week.

  I realized that now, whether I liked it or not, I was guilty by association. I knew too much. I had become Gav Taylor’s replacement as runner or overseer or whatever, and Patsy Kelly knew I wouldn’t put a foot wrong for fear of my life.

  He was right.

  I began to regret my bold step. Terry Gadd would as soon kill me as look at me if there was even a whiff of my being up to something. And of course I was up to something. I’d have to be very careful about feeding back intel to Anna.

  I also wanted to protect Juana from the knowledge that I was working closer to the villains, and I couldn’t tell her about Gav Taylor. I’d been honest with her up to a point, but even so I was adding on so many layers of lies that I could hardly remember what the truth was myself.

  I became edgy all the time we were at Jubarry’s, then when we went back to the apartment I couldn’t sleep. I’d have a few beers and Juana would watch TV, looking at me disapprovingly.

  “You drink too much.”

  “I’m sorry, babe, I’m just jumpy.”

  I really appreciated her caring about me and couldn’t imagine my life without her. She had become my emotional bedrock. She was the most beautiful girl, and when we were together I would be totally distracted: absorbed by her face, her hair and her body, but then my mind would drift back to the bad stuff. When I did get to sleep, images of Gav Taylor would appear, spewing garbage from his dead mouth, surrounded by a cloud of black blowflies. I could hear the buzzing in my sleep, smell the filth and the rot and the blood.

  The smells of death.

  I would wake up pouring with sweat and cling to Juana, burying my face in her hair. In my waking mind I thought I was protecting her, but at night it was she who made me feel safe. I wanted to disappear into her curls; to pull the duvet over us and stay there for ever.

  She burst into tears one morning before we headed off for Jubarry’s. It had been a restless night. I’d been shouting out in my sleep.

  “I don’t know how much more of this I can stand,” she told me.

  “I’m sorry,” I said guiltily. “I didn’t mean to get us in this mess.”

  “I feel sick all the time, like something bad is always about to happen.”

  I felt it too, but didn’t say. Juana didn’t know quite how bad things already were. I tried to smile and convince her, and myself, of Anna’s half promise.

  “I’ll get you away from here soon,” I said. I tried to believe my own promise. I had a vague notion of us back in England, somewhere green and leafy: secure, away from the heat and the red earth of the Costa.

  As soon as we got in to work that morning, I had a call from Terry Gadd, summoning me to Casa Pampas after the lunchtime shift.

  He was really getting his two pennyworth out of me, getting me to fetch this and fetch that, check out certain boats in the harbour. Keeping me on the run, keeping me on edge, so that I felt he was watching me all the time and that I was at his beck and call 24/7.

  Gadd would even send me out for packets of cigarettes if Patsy ran out. They had me by the short and curlies, and of course the London office wanted me dug in there as deep as possible. I had no room for manoeuvre, but despite the pressure I began
to take it in my stride. Soon, working with them felt completely normal, as if it had never been any other way.

  “D’you get seasick?” Gadd asked me when I arrived. He snorted a line of cocaine from a mirror.

  “No,” I said. I had sailed with Tommy Kelly, although nothing too rough.

  “Good,” Gadd said. “Because the shipment’s due in at the weekend. And you’re going to get it.”

  “Where from?” I asked. “I can’t really sail.”

  “Don’t panic,” Patsy Kelly said. He thumbed his nose and sniffed, his eyes darting around edgily. “You won’t have to control the boat yourself. You’ll just have the navigation coordinates for the pickup. I need someone I can trust.”

  I must have looked very blank, scared or both.

  “I can trust you, can’t I?” Patsy asked.

  “Sure.” I nodded. “Of course you can.”

  “If I can’t trust you, you’re dead in the water anyway. So, let me tell you how it all works,” Terry Gadd said. The charlie was making them both far more talkative than usual. “In the old days, when we was working more out of London, we’d have to deal with a load of middle men and the gear would take about five stops on its way over. Trouble with middle men is they put their mark-up on it, and price goes sky-high. So what we’ve done down here is create a direct relationship with one or two Colombian growers who airdrop it somewhere in the Moroccan desert just over the water.”

  “Then we got plenty cheap labour over there who drive it to the coast in bashed-up vegetable trucks,” Patsy continued. “Out to Casablanca or a bit further up, where there are no coastguards, then onto a fishing boat – which we meet on a nice, anonymous charter boat just outside Spanish waters.”

  “Cut out the middle men,” Gadd said. “And now we’re into such big quantities, we can bring the price down further, widen the user base, do wholesale deals, monopolize the trade. Bish, bash, bosh.”

  “Very tidy,” I said.

  “But it makes people jealous,” Gadd said.

  “The Spanish?” I asked, innocent.

  “Albanians, Romanians, the young Spanish kids who think they can have a go…”

  “Serbians?” I chanced. Patsy Kelly banged the glass table with his fist.

  “I don’t want to hear another fucking word about the Serbians!” he shouted.

  Then, right on cue, Terry Gadd’s phone rang.

  “What?” he yelled. “When?” He looked at Patsy. He looked worried. Threw me some car keys. “Drive,” he said.

  FORTY-SIX

  The bar was a couple of kilometres further up into the hills. You could hardly tell it was a bar from the outside. The windows were barred and the building itself wasn’t much more than a concrete bunker. It had a small sign on the front that read FLANAGAN’S. There were a couple of anxious-looking blokes and a woman hanging around outside. Expats.

  It was hot, and when I braked into the small car park, a cloud of reddish dust hung in the air.

  Patsy and Terry Gadd got out. They hadn’t spoken on the way other than to give me the merest grunt of an instruction.

  One of the men gestured to a black Range Rover parked over in the corner. Gadd walked across to it and looked in through the window. I watched his expression change, saw the expletives form on his lips.

  Patsy followed him, and out of curiosity, so did I.

  The side window was open, and inside, a man lay back in his seat, looking like he was having a rest. At least you could tell it was a man by his unshaved lower jaw and the stray teeth that hung from it. Most of the rest of his head was missing: there was a huge hole where the ear should have been and a great spray of blood and bits across the windscreen. Laying across him, as if cosying up, was another man. I could only just see him through the window, but his face was twisted and contorted, as if he was pressing his face against glass. Black hair glued with blood stood in spikes around a hole in his head, and a milky eye, almost hanging out, stared blankly at me. Dead bodies don’t look at peace, with their eyes shut like they’re having sweet dreams, they look twisted and tortured as if they’re still in pain. A big green fly landed in the gore.

  I felt nauseous and turned away.

  Patsy was holding his head in his hands, like he was going mad; two more of his men down. Gadd walked back to the group.

  “We didn’t hear nothing, Terry,” one of the men said.

  “Curtis and Tony often came up here at dinner time,” the other said. “Someone must have been waiting for them.”

  “We didn’t see no one,” the woman said.

  “Some people are saying the Serbians—” the first man started.

  “Shut the fuck up,” Patsy snapped. “Just get it sorted.”

  We drove back in silence.

  When we arrived at Casa Pampas, another car was waiting. An official-looking blue Mercedes. A short Spanish man with a moustache and a comb-over got out, followed by his driver. I recognized him from Patsy’s birthday party. I heard Patsy let out a deep sigh, as if his troubles would never end.

  “Buenas dias, Señor Kelly,” the man said.

  “Señor Dominguez,” Kelly said. “Please…”

  He ushered the man in through the gate, and offered him a seat in the shade around the pool.

  “Señor Dominguez is the mayor,” Patsy told me. I nodded and we shook hands. “Get him a drink, will you.”

  The mayor and his driver refused anything other than water, which I brought as quickly as I could, not to miss anything.

  “My nephew’s life support was switched off yesterday,” I heard the mayor say. “It appears that it was one of your men who put him in hospital in the first place.”

  “I’ll find out who and deal with it,” Patsy assured him. “If it was one of ours, you have my sincere apologies and you must let me know how much—” The mayor waved Patsy’s offer away.

  “It’s not quite so simple, Señor Kelly. It means that I am finding it hard to protect you. My brother-in-law, Jesus Ybarra – his father – is district commissioner in Mijas, very important. You and I have always had a good understanding, but you must realize that the English are not quite the force they once were here.”

  “That’s about to change,” Patsy said, wrong-footed.

  “We are building relationships with some of the new arrivals. We can do deals. They are keen,” the mayor added.

  “’Course they’re keen,” Patsy said, beginning to sound rattled, “because they want a piece of my action.”

  “I’m not talking about the small-timers, Mr Kelly. There are some very big businessmen already investing in the area. They are helping to build the town’s economy back up.”

  “Like we’ve done,” Patsy said.

  “With respect, although you have contributed in the past, very little has gone back into the local economy recently.”

  Patsy Kelly was fuming. He clearly wasn’t used to being talked to like this. Terry Gadd kept it shut.

  “Who are these people?” Patsy asked.

  “There is a Russian company building the new marina just along the coast,” the mayor said.

  “We know about them. All financed by a load of arms sales and Es.”

  Señor Dominguez shrugged. “As you know to your advantage, I don’t look too closely at the source of the money. My brother-in-law has just been approached by a Serbian organization keen to do business here.”

  Patsy looked mad. If the mayor had been anyone else, I was sure he’d have killed him. “I’ve heard enough about these Serbians to last me a lifetime,” he spat.

  “All I’m saying, Mr Kelly, is that there’s been a lot of bloodshed these past few months and now I think it is time to make a truce and share some of the business. Work together, no?”

  “Let them come and talk to me if they want to know what’s what,” Patsy said sharply.

  “I think it may be more a case of you talking to them, Mr Kelly.”

  Patsy didn’t say anything.

  “You will come to
the corrida at the weekend, as my guest?”

  The mayor’s driver produced a stiff envelope and handed it to Patsy, who opened it and took out an invitation to the bullfight. It was part of Benalmádena’s fiesta of the Virgen del Carmen, one of several festivals that went on during the summer months.

  “You will meet the Serbians then,” Señor Dominguez said. “I will introduce you and we can talk business.” He stood up.

  I escorted the mayor and his driver back to the gate and closed it behind them. When I arrived back at the poolside Terry Gadd was on the phone.

  “Stav, you testicle!” he shouted. “Did you put that Spanish kid in a coma?” He listened. “Why am I not surprised?” He finished the call. “It was that slab of shit Mulvaney.”

  Gadd looked at me as if he’d just realized I was still there. “What are you doing here?” he asked. “Piss off! I’ll tell you when we need you.”

  I did as I was told, and as I shut the gate I heard Patsy Kelly put his boot through a glass-topped table, sending shattered glass all across the poolside.

  He wasn’t having a good day.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  “Looks like the next shipment’s coming in over the weekend,” I said. “I’m totally bricking it.”

  “Isn’t there some kind of festival going on?” Anna asked. It was late in the evening and I’d nipped out to make the call.

  Garlands of white paper fluttered above the square. Several doughnut stalls and stands selling deep-fried churros and caramelized peanuts had begun to line the pavement.

  “Yeah, it’s this weekend,” I said. “It’s called the Virgen del Carmen. They take the statue from one of the churches down to the port. It’s supposed to protect people at sea.”

  “Hope it works for you,” Anna commented. “Funny time to pick for a drop.”

  “Makes sense to me,” I said. “The whole procession goes down to the port then out towards Malapasquera beach, then there’s fireworks. Everyone will be focused on that.”