Rat Run

by Gerald Seymour

  Malachy cut through the Green Street market, sidled past the stalls heavy with fruit and vegetables, thin clothing and tacky-bright toys; another plastic pistol was in the place where his had come from, good enough for a ten-year-old in daylight and good enough to scare the shit out of three gang youths at night. He glanced at his watch and quickened his stride. He saw ahead of him the traffic on Walworth Road, and the bus stop.

  'Think of it as a pyramid – that's what all the clever buggers at the Home Office do. Right down at the bottom are the vagrants, the addicts, who have to buy and have to thieve and have to ambush Millie Johnson. They're dross, not worth the sweat. Next up from them are the pushers, the High Fly Boys, and you wrecked them, which was well done and got you on the ladder. Keep climbing. Read this name, memorize this address. The dealer feeds the pushers.

  He is at the next level of the pyramid. If I wanted to crank it up I could say that he has Millie Johnson's blood under his dirty little fingernails. Got it in your memory? Good. I'll have the paper back. Look after yourself, Malachy, because no one else will, and a dealer fights dirtier than kids do.'

  He crossed then and looked up Walworth Road.

  Three buses came, in crocodile formation, towards him. They stopped, disgorged passengers and pulled away. He would wait till she came. More minutes and more buses. He idled. He knew what time she left work, and what time she would get the ride from Whitehall. She came off the bus.

  Dawn, the cleaning lady who was his neighbour and who was the friend of Millie Johnson, walked right past him. She saw him, recognized him and anger twitched at her mouth. She ignored him. He had a cavalcade of excuses to offer her – gone to sleep, dozed off – and a litany of apologies to make for leaving her last night to come into the estate alone, but the excuses and apologies went unsaid. As she crossed the road he watched the pride in her walk – she was not dependent on a man whose promise did not count. He followed her, but did not run to catch her; he hung back when she stopped in the market and bought fruit, which he knew she would later take to the hospital.

  He had a good life, well organized. Jason Penney, a month past his twenty-eighth birthday, lived in a ground-floor flat. The one-bedroom unit had been allocated by Housing to a pensioner and was suitable for a disabled person. Legally, Penney was disabled, and to prove it he had a doctor's certificate, stating his severe knee-ligament injuries, which had cost him ?250 in cash from a Ghanaian medic and entitled him to benefit. But the disability money was chicken-feed to his other earnings. Illegally, he had inserted himself, his partner, his baby and his dog into the pensioner's home. As a base of operations it was ideal.

  He sold class-A narcotics on the Amersham. What the customer wanted, the customer had – but only class A: he shunned cannabis and the derivatives as too bulky to handle and with insufficient profit margins. He dealt in heroin, cocaine powder, crack cocaine. Whatever the market demanded, he could get: MDMA tablets, made from a base of amphetamine, ketamine, 2C-B, and ephedrine or methylamphetamine. Where the market took him, he followed. A bad week gave him, clear, a thousand pounds; a good week, two thousand, but in a worst week, if he was arrested and nailed down with evidence, he faced seven years in prison. The money he made, and the risk of going to gaol, led Penney towards a life of exceptional caution.

  The caution dictated where he lived.

  His live-in partner, Aggie, had had his baby. Aggie had located the pensioner, and later, together and over three weeks, they had watched the block and the pensioner's door for suitability. That was eight months back. She had befriended the old man, a half-reformed alcoholic in his early seventies: meeting him, getting him into conversation at first, later, dropping off six-packs – 'You're my friend, aren't you? No problem'; later, getting inside, close to him on the sofa, cuddling him, touching him up – infatuating him; later, shopping for him – 'Don't thank me, it's for nothing, anything I can do to help'; later, moving in with the baby – 'Just while I sort myself out, and I'm ever so grateful'; later, Jason Penney's at the door, with his dog and his bag – 'He's ever so nice, you won't know he's here, and the dog's lovely. We'll all be company for you.'

  In a month, Aggie had given Penney what he most wanted. He had safe premises among the pensioners' units that were about at the bottom of police priority taskings for surveillance. Penney, his partner and the baby had taken the pensioner's bedroom, the dog had the hall, the old man spent his days in the kitchen and slept on the front-room sofa with receding memories of the cuddles and the affection. And how was the old beggar going to get rid of them? No way. Changes were made to the flat, discreetly, and unnoticeable from the outside. Steel sheeting covered the inside of the front and back doors. New locks, bolts and chains were fitted. A trellis of bars reinforced the windows.

  The pensioner's home, in which he stayed with an ever-open can from a six-pack, had become the fortress of the Amersham's premier dealer. The final touch: Penney had hired a welding torch for twenty-four hours, gone out on a wet November night and worked the flame over the manhole cover in the street in front of the flat, where the sewage went through. If they were serious, first thing the filth did when they raided was get the manhole cover up outside and slot a plastic sack over the pipe outlet into the main system. First thing a dealer did, when the sledgehammers hit the door, was flush what was in the house down the toilet. Jason Penney reckoned himself ahead of the game.

  Aggie collected for him from the supplier. Anything up to a full kilo of brown or white, up to a thousand tablets, was brought back to the estate by the pale-faced, unremarkable girl with her baby. Aggie moved the brown, the white and the tablets in the pram under the baby, with shit and piss in the nappy that hid the dull scent of heroin, cocaine or MDMA, from the house to the stash place that was a hollowed-out cavern behind a loose concrete block in a play-area corner where the lights did not reach. Jason Penney, with perfect security around him, was a king on the Amersham.

  The men and women in Housing, burdened by workloads and short staffing, had no interest in investigating areas from which no complaints came.

  The pensioner's neighbours, similarly elderly and cowed, who would have seen Penney's shaven head, his muscled, tattooed body and his Rottweiler, were not daft: they would not call any police hotline even if it claimed confidential response.

  He was irritable that day. He'd snapped at Aggie and bawled out the pensioner, had raised his fist to the dog so that it had backed off and crept to its corner. A little tremor of worry itched in him. He dealt with Danny Morris, Leroy Gates and Wilbur Sansom, had done ever since he'd set up in business on the estate, had found them good and reliable. He knew what had happened to them. He believed he felt the pulsebeat of the Amersham, but he could not have said who had left them suspended from a flat roof for most of a night.

  He kept her in an apartment at Chelsea Harbour. It had a small balcony that looked down on the river, a small living room, a small kitchen and a small bathroom, a big TV with video and DVD, and a big bed that fitted tightly into the small bedroom.

  She grunted hard.

  The apartment, across London from Bevin Close, with the girl in residence, was the greatest luxury in Ricky Capel's life. It was leased in her name, two years and renewable, but the girl was more complicated: she had been bought for cash, then the money had been paid back and she was a gift. Maria, twenty years old, from Romania, was smart, clever and long-legged, and had worked out of a brothel in King's Cross.

  The thong, suspenders and little lacy brassiere that she always wore when he arrived, the high-heeled shoes and the silk robe were scattered in a trail between the front door of the apartment and the bed.

  Maria was high luxury to Ricky Capel and high risk.

  The times he was able to get away from the cousins, and from Bevin Close, were luxury because then he thought he breathed freedom. He tried to come to Chelsea Harbour once a week, but if his life was complex and business burdened him, it was once a fortnight, which made for expensive luxury – with
the lease, her spending money and her presents. It was liberation when he shed his family. Free of Joanne, who did sex only when she reckoned she had to and was always bleating on about the thinness of the wall between their room and Wayne's, and refused straight-up to do anything beyond basic. The girl, Maria, rode him on the bed, and his hands reached up for the hang of her breasts, and she grunted louder as he pushed up into her and her head was back like it was ecstasy for her. Her fingernails, long and painted silver to match her lip gloss, caught in his chest hair and scratched at his skin. He let out sharp, stifled squeals, and her grunts came faster.

  But high risk. For Ricky Capel to have set up his girl at Chelsea Harbour opened little cracks in the defence wall built round his wealth and enterprises. He had met her in the hours after his first meeting with Enver, who hummed round King's Cross in a flash Ferrari Spider. Charlie had identified the business opportunity. Albanians ran girls into the country, but they hadn't the cover: Customs and Immigration had peeled eyes for Albanians driving white vans into Dover, Folkestone or Harwich. They were losing too many and too much cash, and they were operating on foreign territory. It was Charlie's proposition. Ricky should get himself up alongside the Albanians and take over the cross-border, cross-Channel runs. He had access to the drivers and to the lorries they brought back from the long overland European hauls.

  He would be paid up front by the Albanians for the transport, and take a cut from the brothel earnings where the new girls would work. The way Charlie told it, it was pretty straight, and Benji had suggested approaching Enver. He'd heard that Albanians stuck by their word, were professional, made good partners.

  They'd done the meeting, had shaken hands on a deal, and then there had been food in the club. The girl had stood at the back and her eyes had never been off him.

  Christ, he'd wanted her, like he'd never wanted anything. Bought her, hadn't he? Bought her for cash, peeled it out of his pocket, and told Enver that there'd be no more bloody customers for her, and he'd collect her when he'd got premises. In a careful life, it was the wildest thing that Ricky Capel had ever done – bought a tart out of a brothel off an Albanian.

  The way she grunted on him, the whole of that building at Chelsea Harbour, through concrete floors and concrete walls, would have heard her. Bloody, bloody – God – marvellous, and he clung to her breasts.

  In his third or fourth meeting with Enver, long after he'd taken delivery of her, Ricky had told him, sort of casual, that his grandfather had been in Albania in the war. What was his grandfather's name and where had his grandfather been? Percy Capel, up in the north and he'd struggled to pronounce the place name

  – with a Major Anstruther. Next time they'd met, him and Enver, Ricky had been given an envelope. In it was what he'd paid for the girl. Enver had giggled and told him why the money had come back. Enver's uncle was in Hamburg, Germany. The uncle's father was Mehmet Rahman, who had fought with Major Hugo Anstruther and Flight Sergeant Percy Capel against the Fascists in the mountains north of Shkodra. Small world, small bloody world.

  She was coming, crouched over him, bellowing, like he was the best shag she'd ever had.

  He did not rate the risk she represented. The Albanians, from that distant link between a grandfather and the father of an uncle, were his partners – well, not real partners because he controlled it all. He called the tune, Ricky did. He was never backed into a corner. He bought off them and used Harry's trawler to bring in the packages. He used his network of knowledge for haulage companies to help them get the girls, from Belarus, Ukraine, Bulgaria and Romania, into the country. He hired them – his cousin Benji called them 'the Merks', the mercenaries – for heavy punishment if a man showed him disrespect.

  He had no cause to sweat on the arrangement: he had not lost control, never would – and the money rolled in for Charlie to wash, rinse, scrub clean.

  She came, then him. Ricky sagged on the bed and she rolled off him. She peeled off the condom, and went to make him tea. Always tea, never alcohol.

  He lay back and gasped. She was his best, his most precious secret.

  Mikey Capel always watched little Wayne, Ricky's boy, play football for the under-nine team of the junior school, St Mary's.

  He was on the touchline in the park area. There were no trees to break the force of the wind and he was huddled among the young mums and other grandparents. In a mid-week afternoon there were few fathers. He was at ease, liked the gossip among the men of his own age and a quiet flirt with the mothers. He enjoyed those afternoons. Little Wayne wasn't good, only useful, and he was hidden away by the teacher in charge on the left side of midfield where the kid's shortcomings in talent had least effect on the side's efforts; little Wayne was always picked by the teacher because his father, Ricky, had provided the team's shirts, knicks and socks, the same colours as Charlton Athletic, who used the Valley down the road. Maybe 'useful' was putting it strong, but it was fun for Mikey to watch him… He knew, that afternoon, where Ricky was and with whom, why he wasn't on the touchline.

  Actually, the game against Brendon Road Junior was absorbing enough for him not to notice the powerfully built man, perhaps five years older than himself, with an erect bearing, sidle to his shoulder.

  The noise around him had reached fever pitch. The ball was with a little black kid, might have been the smallest on the pitch but tricky like a bloody eel, and he was wriggling down his team's right touchline and the St Mary's left side and was coming right up against the faded white markings of the penalty box. The black kid had skill.

  'Go on, Wayne, fix him!' Mikey yelled, through his cupped hands.

  The little black kid, the ball seeming stuck to his toe, danced round little Wayne.

  'Don't let him, Wayne! Block him!'

  Oh, Jesus! The ball was gone, and the kid nearly gone, when little Wayne shoved out his right boot – most expensive that Adidas made for that age group

  – hooked it round the kid's trailing leg and tripped him. Oh, Christ! The Brendon Road mums and grandfathers howled for blood – red-card blood – and the whistle shrieked. Oh, bloody hell. But the referee didn't send him off. He merely wagged his finger at the sour-faced child.

  A rich Welsh accent rang in Mikey's ear: 'I suppose his dad's bought the referee. Chip off the old block that one, vicious little sod – proud of him, Mikey? I expect you are.'

  He swung. Recognition came. 'It's Mr Marchant, isn't it?'

  'And that's Ricky Capel's brat, right?'

  'That is my grandson. I thought he tried to play the ball and – and was just a bit late in the tackle.'

  'About half an hour bloody late. Like father, like son. I always reckon you can tell them, those that are going to be scum.'

  'There's no call for that talk, Mr Marchant.' But there was no fight in Mikey's voice.

  His mind clattered through the arithmetic of it.

  Would have been nineteen years since he had last seen Gethin Marchant, detective sergeant, Flying Squad – a straight-up guy and civilized, never one to make a show. The Squad had come for Mikey, half six in the morning, and the afternoon before they'd done this factory pay-roll and all gone wrong because a delivery lorry had blocked in the get-away wheels and they'd done a run with nothing. Mr Marchant had led the arrest team, nothing fancy, and the door hadn't been sledgehammered off its hinges before Sharon had opened up. Even given him time to get out of his pyjamas and dressed. And allowed him to kiss Sharon in the hall so that the neighbours wouldn't have too much to tittle over, and Ricky had come out of his bedroom and down the stairs, like a bloody cyclone, and thrown himself at the arresting coppers. Barefoot but he'd kicked at shins and kneed balls, and then he'd jumped up more than his full height and head-butted a constable hard enough to split the man's lip, flailing with his fists. It had taken three of them, and his mum, to subdue the thirteen-year-old Ricky, and the girls at the top of the stairs had been weeping their bloody eyes o u t… Proper upsetting it had been.

  'Where's Ricky now? Doin
g his scum bit?' The Welshness lilted, but there was contempt in the hard voice of the retired detective sergeant. 'God, I'd hate to think I'd fathered that sort of creature, and that there was another coming along, same vein. What encourages me, it'll all end in tears because it always does… Sorry, sorry. Nice to have met up with you again, Mikey – got to go.'

  Mikey saw Gethin Marchant scurry, as best he could at his age, on to the pitch. The little black kid was down, in tears, and the foul had ended his afternoon's football. When the game restarted, while the detective sergeant held the little bundle of the boy on his shoulder on the far touchline, the Brendon Road kids scored, and then the referee blew his whistle for full time.

  Little Wayne came to him. 'We was bloody robbed.

  We-'

  'You were shit,' Mikey, the grandfather, snapped back. 'Next time your father can watch you. It won't be me.'

  No, Ricky wouldn't be there to watch little Wayne, because Ricky was screwing on those afternoons when St Mary's had matches. He had a good mate, been inside with him and shared a cell with him, who now drove a mini-cab for a company at the bottom end of the King's Road. They drank together some Tuesday nights. The mini-cab driver had been waiting for a fare at Chelsea Harbour when he'd seen Ricky with his bottle-blonde tart, her big boobs and long legs. Mikey had never cheated on Sharon. He remembered, looking down at little Wayne, what the retired detective had said.

  He grabbed the sulking child's hand. 'Come on, let's go home.'

  What had been said, which he believed: It'll all end in tears because it always does. He strode away across the grass and the mud, dragging the kid behind him.