Boyle wrote his mobile number on a scrap of paper and passed it across. ‘Now get the fuck out,’ he said.
Down below, someone was playing a penny whistle, high-pitched and shrill. I could feel my pulse racing haphazardly and when I managed to get myself across the street, I had to take a grip on a railing and hold fast until my legs had stopped shaking.
When Jack learned I was going through with it, he offered to lend me a gun, a Smith amp; Wesson. 38, but I declined. There was more chance of shooting myself in the foot than anything else.
I met Anna in the parking area behind Jack’s office, barely light enough to make out the colour of her eyes. The cocaine was bubble-wrapped inside a blue canvas bag.
‘You always were good to me, Jimmy,’ she said, and reaching up, she kissed me on the mouth. ‘Will I see you afterwards?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘No, I don’t think so.’
The shadows swallowed her as she walked towards the taxi waiting out on the street. I dropped the bag down beside the rear seat of the car, waited several minutes, then slipped the engine into gear.
The place I’d chosen was on Hampstead Heath, a makeshift soccer pitch shielded by lines of trees, a ramshackle wooden building off to one side, open to the weather; sometimes pick-up teams used it to get changed, or kids huddled there to feel one another up, smoke spliffs or sniff glue.
When Patrick, Val and I had been kids ourselves there was a body found close by, someone murdered and left, and the place took on a kind of awe for us, murder in those days being something more rare.
I’d left my car by a mansion block on Heath Road and walked in along a partly overgrown track. The moon was playing fast and loose with the clouds and the stars seemed almost as distant as they were. An earlier shower of rain had made the surface a little slippy and mud clung to the soles of my shoes. There was movement, low in the undergrowth to my right-hand side, and, for a moment, my heart stopped as an owl broke with a fell swoop through the trees above my head.
A dog barked and then was still.
I stepped off the path and into the clearing, the weight of the bag real in my left hand. I was perhaps a third of the way across the pitch before I saw them, three or four shapes massed near the hut at the far side and separating as I drew closer, fanning out. Four of them, faces unclear, but Boyle, I thought, at the centre, the Sweeneys to one side of him, another I didn’t recognise hanging back. Behind them, behind the hut, the trees were broad and tall and close together, beeches I seemed to remember Val telling me once when I’d claimed them as oaks. ‘Beeches, for God’s sake,’ he’d said, laughing in that soft way of his. ‘You, Jimmy, you don’t know your arse from your elbow, it’s a fact.’
I stopped fifteen feet away and Boyle took a step forward. ‘You came alone,’ he said.
‘That was the deal.’
‘He’s stupider than I fuckin’ thought,’ said one or other of the Sweeneys and laughed a girlish little laugh.
‘The stuff’s all there?’ Boyle said, nodding towards the bag.
I walked a few more paces towards him, set the bag on the ground, and stepped back.
Boyle angled his head towards the Sweeneys and one of them went to the bag and pulled it open, slipping a knife from his pocket as he did so; he slit open the package, and, standing straight again, tasted the drug from the blade.
‘Well?’ Boyle said.
Sweeney finished running his tongue around his teeth. ‘It’s good,’ he said.
‘Then we’re set,’ I said to Boyle.
‘Set?’
‘We’re done here.’
‘Oh, yes, we’re done.’
The man to Boyle’s left, the one I didn’t know, moved forward almost to his shoulder, letting his long coat fall open as he did so, and what light there was glinted dully off the barrels of the shotgun as he brought it to bear. It was almost level when a shot from the trees behind struck him high in the shoulder and spun him round so that the second shot tore through his neck and he fell to the ground as good as dead.
One of the Sweeneys cursed and started to run, while the other dropped to one knee and fumbled for the revolver inside his zip-up jacket.
With all the gunfire and the shouting I couldn’t hear the words from Boyle’s mouth, but I could lip-read well enough. ‘You’re dead,’ he said, and drew a pistol not much bigger than a child’s hand from his side pocket and raised it towards my head. It was either bravery or stupidity or maybe fear that made me charge at him, unarmed, hands outstretched as if in some way to ward off the bullet; it was the muddied turf that made my feet slide away under me and sent me sprawling headlong, two shots sailing over my head before one of the men I’d last seen minding Patrick in Soho stepped up neatly behind Boyle, put the muzzle of a 9mm Beretta hard behind his ear and squeezed the trigger.
Both the Sweeneys had gone down without me noticing; one was already dead and the other had blood gurgling out of his airway and was not long for this world.
Patrick was standing back on the path, scraping flecks of mud from the edges of his soft leather shoes with a piece of stick.
‘Look at the state of you,’ he said. ‘You look a fucking state. If I were you I should burn that lot when you get home, start again.’
I wiped the worst of the mess from the front of my coat and that was when I realised my hands were still shaking. ‘Thanks, Pat,’ I said.
‘What are friends for?’ he said.
Behind us his men were tidying up the scene a little, not too much. The later editions of the papers would be full of stories of how the Irish drug wars had come to London, the Celtic Tigers fighting it out on foreign soil.
‘You need a lift?’ Patrick asked, as we made our way back towards the road.
‘No, thanks. I’m fine.’
‘Thank Christ for that. Last thing I need, mud all over the inside of the fucking Merc.’
When I got back to the flat I put one of Val’s last recordings on the stereo, a session he’d made in Stockholm a few months before he died. Once or twice his fingers didn’t match his imagination, and his breathing seemed to be giving him trouble, but his mind was clear. Beeches, I’ll always remember that now, that part of the Heath. Beeches, not oaks.
MINOR KEY
It used to be there under ‘Birthdays’, some years at least. The daily listing in the paper, the Guardian, occasionally the Times. September eighteenth. ‘Valentine Collins, jazz musician.’ And then his age: twenty-seven, thirty-five, thirty-nine. Not forty. Val never reached forty.
He’d always look, Val, after the first time he was mentioned, made a point of it, checking to see if his name was there. ‘Never know,’ he’d say, with that soft smile of his. ‘Never know if I’m meant to be alive or dead.’
There were times when we all wondered; wondered what it was going to be. Times when he seemed to be chasing death so hard, he had to catch up. Times when he didn’t care.
Jimmy rang me this morning, not long after I’d got back from the shops. Bread, milk, eggs — the paper — gives me something to do, a little walk, reason to stretch my legs.
‘You all right?’ he says.
‘Of course I’m all right.’
‘You know what day it is?’
I hold my breath; there’s no point in shouting, losing my temper. ‘Yes, Jimmy, I know what day it is.’
There’s a silence and I can sense him reaching for the words, the thing to say — You don’t fancy meeting up later? A drink, maybe? Nice to have a chat. It’s been a while.
‘Okay, then, Anna,’ he says instead, and then he hangs up.
There was a time when we were inseparable, Jimmy, Val, Patrick and myself. Studio 51, the Downbeat Club, all-nighters at the Flamingo, coffee at the Bar Italia, spaghetti at the Amalfi. That place on Wardour Street where Patrick swore the cheese omelettes were the best he’d ever tasted and Val would always punch the same two buttons on the jukebox, B19 and 20, both sides of Ella Fitzgerald’s single, ‘Manhattan’ and ‘Every Time We Say Goodbye’.