For Jimmy
In memory
contents
prologue
one
two
three
four
five
six
seven
eight
nine
ten
eleven
twelve
thirteen
fourteen
fifteen
sixteen
seventeen
eighteen
nineteen
twenty
twenty-one
twenty-two
twenty-three
twenty-four
twenty-five
epilogue
prologue
Ingrid’s heart was singing as she walked up the Caledonian Road. Even the inconvenience caused her by the closure of King’s Cross Station due to a bomb scare could not dampen her spirits.
Security alerts of this kind were rare in London in the autumn of 1998. This was the year the Good Friday Agreement had more or less brought IRA terrorist attacks on the UK mainland to an end, and three years before 9/11 would herald a whole new era of al-Qaeda terrorism.
Ingrid had no idea just how unlucky she was to be caught up in one, any more than she realized that her luck was about to desert her completely. Her thoughts were full of the momentous decision she had made, and how her parents in Sweden would react when they received the letter she had finished that morning.
It was just gone 10 p.m. After completing her shift as a student nurse at University College Hospital thirty minutes earlier, Ingrid had as usual made her way to King’s Cross underground in order to board a Piccadilly Line train to Wood Green, where she was staying for the duration of her training with a cousin of her mother’s.
This accommodation arrangement had been a condition laid down by her parents when Ingrid had expressed a wish to come to London in order to gain what she felt was the best possible nursing training at one of the city’s great teaching hospitals. Most of the other young nurses shared flats or rooms, but Ingrid had been happy to conform with her parents’ wishes. She knew she wouldn’t have fitted in. Even in Sweden, she had always been different.
At nineteen she was still a virgin, with no interest in boys. Or girls. Her passion was the Lutheran Church, to which her mother had introduced her when she was a child. She now knew beyond a doubt that she wanted to make the ultimate commitment to her Church. She believed that was the way she could make best use of the nursing skills she was still in the process of acquiring.
And today she had written to tell her parents that when she finished her training she was going to become a Lutheran nun.
She knew that her parents would not be too surprised, although she suspected that her farmer father might regret that his clever only child would not now give him grandchildren. He would support her, though. He always did.
It was as if the act of posting the letter had made it official. Once she’d dropped it in the postbox opposite the station she was far too excited to join the other commuters milling around the bus stops and trying to hail taxis. Police manning hastily erected barriers at the station entrance were advising passengers that a limited underground service was still running from nearby stations, so Ingrid set off for Caledonian Road, the next stop on the Piccadilly Line heading towards Wood Green. She reckoned she could walk there in fifteen minutes.
The area immediately around the station was rapidly being shut off as police reinforcements arrived, so Ingrid got out her pocket A—Z and made a detour into Pentonville Road and along Northdown Street into the Caledonian Road. What Ingrid’s A—Z failed to tell her was that the Cally Road, as locals called it, was a notorious red light district. The regeneration of King’s Cross had begun a few years earlier, but much of the Cally Road remained a wasteland of derelict buildings and flattened empty ground awaiting redevelopment.
Ahead of her was a road junction known as Class A Corner. It was where the prostitutes met the drug dealers in order to exchange the proceeds of one vice for the product of another.
Ingrid wore her long white-blonde hair in a tight bun when she was on hospital duty. She never found this entirely comfortable. With one hand she released the constraints of the bun, as she often did on the way home, and allowed her hair to fall onto the shoulders of the black coat covering her nurse’s uniform.
Almost immediately a car pulled to a halt alongside her. The passenger window was lowered. A man’s head appeared.
‘Looking for business, darling?’ he enquired.
Ingrid was shocked. She knew exactly what was being suggested and what kind of woman the man had taken her for. She hadn’t led that sheltered a life, and she was Swedish, after all.
‘No, no,’ she replied, almost screaming the words, her voice sharp and high-pitched.
The man drove off at once.
Ingrid wrapped her coat tightly around herself. She was shivering. It was a cold damp November night, but she realized it was her sudden nerviness rather than the chill in the air that was causing her body to tremble.
She peered up and down the Caledonian Road. It wasn’t well lit in those days. However, in the glare of the headlamps of passing vehicles, she could clearly see a young woman on the opposite side of the road wearing an imitation fur coat pulled down off one shoulder to reveal bare flesh.
A saloon car stopped alongside. The woman opened the passenger door and climbed in.
Ingrid was well aware now of the kind of district she had unwittingly wandered into. There were shadowy figures gathered on a piece of wasteland to her left, and another in a doorway just ahead. She considered turning back. But there was a brightly lit stretch of road not far away. Desperate to get home, she hurried towards it.
The blow caught her on the side of her head. She registered that she had been hit by a heavy object before falling, partly concussed, to the pavement.
She felt herself being dragged by the shoulders, somewhere away from the main road to a place where there was even less light. Her whole body hurt already, and the rough ground beneath cut into her. But she did not cry out. She was dumb with fear.
Then her assailant let go of her, but remained, apparently caped and hooded, looming above her. She tried to make out a face. The light was not bright enough. But she could see the eyes shining through the gloom. There was not a trace of humanity in them.
Ingrid cowered before her attacker. She wanted to pray but was unable to. She tried to crawl away, even though she knew it was hopeless. Her body seemed incapable of movement. She tried to beg for mercy but could not speak. All she could do was wait for the inevitable.
And a few minutes later Ingrid was dead.
one
Fifteen years later
The early Sunday supper at Johnny’s Place in the heart of Covent Garden was a casual arrangement but a ritual nonetheless. Every week at five thirty the staff set up a long table along one wall at the back of the restaurant for the group that had become known as Sunday Club. As the evening wore on the friends would turn up as and when they could, with seating and table places readjusted as it eventually became apparent how many they would be.
Rather unusually, on this particular Sunday all ten of the group were present.
Tiny, a six-foot-six-inch man-mountain of West Indian descent, and his partner Billy were the first to arrive. As usual, Tiny gravitated to a place at one end of the table where his massive bulk would have room to spread. He had no hair at all on his head, which glistened like a large polished ebony orb resting atop broad shoulders, his jacket falling open to reveal an expansive chest, muscles bulging beneath his Gucci T-shirt. At a glance he looked thoroughly threatening, but his eyes were gentle.
> In the seat next to Tiny, one small white hand placed possessively on the big man’s denim-clad knee, sat Billy, a diminutive City lawyer in a business suit by day and a bit of a raver at night. With his free hand Billy stroked his neat brown moustache, making sure no hair was out of place. Everything about Billy was neat and organized, except perhaps his relationship with Tiny whom he’d met at Cloud Nine, the gay nightclub where Tiny worked as a bouncer, or door supervisor, the job description preferred by the Security Industry Association of which the big man was an active member.
George, an actor more often out of work than in, arrived next. He rarely missed the weekly gathering, except during the pantomime season when he was to be found at the seaside being Prince Charming. Having made his entrance, he invariably chose to sit with his back to the wall, which was lined with theatre bills and signed pictures of celebrity clientele. From there he could see and be seen. Johnny’s, a legendary basement restaurant selling extremely upmarket junk food alongside a range of rather more grown-up dishes, remained a haunt of the famous and feted, but rarely on a Sunday afternoon or evening when it more usually became the territory of weekend fathers spoiling the children they no longer saw enough of.
Tiny, Billy and George had got to know each other dog walking at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the biggest patch of green in the Covent Garden area, and the largest square in London, dating back to the seventeenth century. Tiny and Billy had a little chihuahua, Daisy, and George a Maltese terrier called Chump.
They had just ordered drinks – red wine for George, cosmopolitans for Tiny and Billy – when Michelle, a five-foot-nothing police constable, turned up. She’d met George at Shannon’s gym, and they’d become work-out buddies. Actually Michelle, a pretty twenty-nine-year-old blonde with a winsome smile, had at first rather hoped for more than that, and had certainly thought George might ask her out on a date. He hadn’t. Well, not exactly. But he had asked her if she’d like to join the group at Johnny’s.
The proprietor, Johnny himself, a small man with a big heart and a very determined all-year suntan, was, as usual, at the piano by the door. Marlena, who had been coming to the restaurant longer than any of the others, had once remarked that she thought Johnny probably lived in his piano, stretching out on the black and white keys and pulling the cover over himself before going to sleep at night. Certainly he played the old upright most evenings, and had done for as long as anyone could remember. He stood up to give Michelle a hug and she hugged him back. Johnny greeted many of the regulars at his restaurant more as friends than clients, but it was clear he had a special soft spot for the young policewoman.
Michelle eased herself into the chair opposite George and added her name to the red wine order.
‘No Carla then?’ she remarked to George. ‘Are we ever going to meet this paragon?’
Carla was the new girlfriend George had told them all about. Though his friends had listened to endless stories about how wonderful she was, how gorgeous, how adorable, they had yet to enjoy the pleasure of her company.
‘She wants nothing to do with you rabble,’ said George, grinning. His dark hair flopped Hugh Grant style over one side of his handsome forehead. His black silk shirt opened at the neck just enough to reveal a V of perfect tan. ‘Anyway, I’ve told you, Sunday is her family day.’
‘If you ask me, he’s ashamed of her,’ teased Billy.
‘Oh yes,’ responded George, pulling out his wallet and extracting the photograph they had all seen countless times: a stunning young woman with stylishly cropped peroxide white hair smiling for the camera. ‘Is she gorgeous or what?’ He returned the picture to his wallet with a shake of his head. ‘It’s you lot I’m bloody ashamed of.’
Greg and Karen, married thirty-somethings with two children, arrived next. They too were dog owners, and it was Karen, the principal dog walker, who had first met George, Tiny and Billy while exercising the family’s pair of Westies at Lincoln’s Inn. Nobody could remember who’d been first to suggest meeting at Johnny’s, but it had been between these four that Sunday Club had been conceived a few years previously. The early evening outings suited Greg and Karen well. Karen’s mum took the kids on Sunday afternoons to give the couple some time alone, and after leaving Johnny’s they could still pick them up in time to pack them off to bed not too late for next day’s school.
Johnny broke into a spirited rendition of ‘I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles’ as Greg, a dedicated West Ham supporter bustled in. Greg beamed.
‘Don’t you worry mate, the ’Ammers will ’ammer ’em,’ he said.
The next day would see a derby game with Spurs. It was somehow typical of Johnny, no way a football fan, to be aware of that. Greg wasn’t much taller than Johnny but had a big personality and walked with a swagger. He was a wheeler-dealer, a white van man who bought and sold, but his precise occupation was never entirely clear.
Karen, an inch or so taller, wore flat shoes and had a very slight stoop, no doubt caused by trying to ensure her husband didn’t look shorter than her. She always gave the impression that she was keeping a bit of an eye on Greg.
Hoping her husband wouldn’t pick up on her slightly wary tone, Karen greeted George. Earlier in the week there had been an incident between them which she hoped was now forgotten. Certainly George seemed the same as ever, smiling back at her with no hint of awkwardness in his response. Karen felt relieved.
‘No Carla then?’ remarked Greg.
‘For God’s sake,’ said George.
The others all seemed to arrive at once. There was olive-skinned Alfonso, with his hooded Mediterranean eyes and shiny black goatee beard, who could only be of Italian descent even though he’d been born and raised in Essex. Alfonso was a senior waiter at the Vine, arguably the most fashionable restaurant in London, and had been invited along to Sunday Club by Vine regulars Billy and Tiny.
Bob, in his fifties and the second oldest of the group, made a living as an inner-city gardener, watering and looking after other people’s terraces, balconies and window boxes. He had, rather to his surprise, found himself invited to join Sunday Club when he became chummy with Tiny and Billy after they’d called him in to plant out their roof terrace and put in an irrigation system.
Ari, at twenty-six the youngest and the richest of the friends, was the son of a wealthy Asian entrepreneur and his English wife. Billy had run into him at a few work-related events and found the ponytailed young man not only strikingly attractive but also highly entertaining, and in spite of loving Tiny to bits, had rather wished Ari were gay. Which he most certainly was not. Nonetheless it was Billy who’d suggested Ari may like to come along to Sunday Club.
Finally there was the Covent Garden legend known only as Marlena, a name the others suspected she had adopted in tribute to her heroine Marlene Dietrich, although she always maintained it was her given name. Marlena, probably in her late sixties but perhaps older, was never seen without stage makeup and a spectacular blonde wig. She invariably dressed entirely in black, enlivened occasionally by a mink wrap or a mock leopard-skin throw, and adorned to excess with an elaborate display of bling. Her exact age was a closely guarded secret, and everything about her exuded a certain air of mystery. She was another Vine regular, and had originally been invited to join the group by Alfonso, whom she’d always regarded more as a friend than a waiter.
More drinks were ordered as everyone bustled to sit. Bob, like George, manoeuvred to acquire a place that allowed him to have his back to the wall, but because he had a deaf ear rather than a burning desire to see and be seen. Alfonso fussed over Marlena, whom he worshipped. Ari, always in a hurry to do everything and anything, only narrowly avoided knocking over Tiny’s cosmo as he threw himself at a chair. There was Prosecco for Marlena, Hendricks with olives on the side for Ari, and a couple more carafes of red wine for the rest.
‘Marlena darling, you’ll never guess who we had in the restaurant yesterday,’ said Alfonso, when he’d eventually sat down.
‘Hey, Fonz, you soun
d like a bleeding cabbie,’ remarked Greg.
‘Just tell us, darling,’ said Marlena encouragingly.
‘Madonna, Madonna, my loves, and I poured her sparkling water,’ announced Alfonso, waving his arms triumphantly in the air.
‘Wonderful, darling,’ said Marlena.
She turned to George.
‘And what have you been up to this week, sweetheart?’ she asked. ‘Still no sign of that beautiful girl of yours, I see. What a pity!’
‘I don’t believe this,’ said George. ‘Look, I’ll see if I can persuade her to join us, OK? But I do know she’s with her family.’
He took his phone from his pocket and touched one key on the screen.
‘Voicemail,’ he muttered in an aside. Then he spoke into the phone.
‘Hi, Carla darling, it’s me. I’m calling from Johnny’s – I’m with the gang, Sunday Club. Like I told you about. Don’t suppose you can join us, can you? I’d love to see you and so would the rest of the bunch. If you can bear it, do come. Love you, baby. Kiss kiss.’
‘I think I’m going to throw up,’ said Ari.
‘Behave,’ said Marlena. ‘One day some girl will be monumentally stupid enough to let you fall in love with her.’
‘And when she does, I promise not to make all my friends feel sick.’ Ari turned away from the table and pretended to retch.
‘Oh, stop it, you’re disgusting,’ said Karen.
‘No I’m not,’ said Ari. ‘I’m handsome, charming and sophisticated. My mother told me so this morning. And for the record, Marlena, there’s always a queue of girls at my door and—’
‘If there’s any truth at all in that then they’re obviously only after your money!’ interrupted Michelle.
Marlena put a hand on Ari’s arm. ‘Do remember, darling, today’s cock of the walk is tomorrow’s feather duster,’ she said.
Everyone laughed, including Ari. The friends were all very much at ease in each other’s company, and with the banter, sometimes quite edgy, which was inclined to dominate their time together.
Friends to Die For Page 1
