Toots and the Maytals were on the sound system singing of young Trenchtown rude boys fifty years in the grave and up on the giant TV screen the first fight between Micky Ward and Arturo Gatti was playing with the sound turned off.
Fred counted out the reps of ten as I rose from a bench on one leg, held it, and sat down again still using the same leg. We did it until my quad muscles were burning.
With my knee still healing, my exercise regime at Fred’s was all about my quads – squats, lunges, step-ups and, most of all, the torture of standing up and sitting down using just one leg. Whenever I felt like I couldn’t go on, when my leg muscles were stiff with lactic acid, when my quads were alive with pain, I looked up at Micky Ward and Arturo Gatti knocking lumps out of each other.
And I carried on.
And then Jackson Rose walked into the gym.
He nodded at us as Fred strapped some ankle weights on me and counted out five reps of ten as I forced out fifty burpies.
The regular in the London Marathon T-shirt walked off to the lockers and Jackson stood before the heavy bag, contemplating it for a moment before stepping back, bending his body so that his torso was at right angles to the ground and then kicking it where the head of a very tall man would be.
He did it gently at first, finding his range, and then he did it much harder. And then he did it harder still, twice, the kicks coming so close together that the sound of his instep repeatedly striking the bag seemed to become one unbroken sound, like hailstones. Then he stood back, bouncing up and down on the soles of his feet, his hands loose at his side, a thin film of sweat on his face.
Fred and I were grinning at him.
‘Oy, Conor McGregor,’ Fred said. ‘You training or dancing?’
Jackson showed us his gap-tooth grin.
‘Got some spare kit?’ he said.
So Jackson and I trained together on one of Fred’s famous circuits. A dozen three-minute rounds on the speed ball, the uppercut bag, the heavy bag and the super heavyweight bag, that long two-metre slab of hard leather that drained every ounce of energy out of you, a one-minute break between rounds filled with ten burpies and ten press-ups. Forty-eight minutes with no breaks. Recover while you work.
‘You’ll sleep well tonight,’ Fred said as the final buzzer went after the last press-up, when we were on our hands and knees and the tank was empty for both of us. Jackson smiled at me and I saw that he was full of that exhausted happiness that only comes on the far side of hard exercise.
After we were showered and dressed, Jackson said we should get a beer in one of the many pubs around Smithfield that cater to all manner of night owls, including the club kids at Fabric on Charterhouse Street and the night shifters from the meat market that has stood on this spot for a thousand years.
He could tell I was not keen.
‘I know you want to get back to Scout. But have just one beer, Max. It’s been a long day for all of us.’
I waited for the real reason.
‘We need to get our story straight,’ he said.
We sat at a corner table of one of those legendary Smithfield boozers that roar while the city sleeps, and we were the only men in there who were not wearing white coats, the only men in there who were not splattered with blood. I watched Jackson sip his San Pellegrino. It took some nerve ordering a sparkling mineral water in here, but Jackson Rose had never lacked nerve.
‘Are you in trouble, Jackson?’
‘Me? Trouble? No. I’m suspended, of course. Automatic suspension pending the Standard Operating Procedures enquiry because I fired two rounds from my weapon. And because I killed Asad Khan. But I’m not going to be in trouble. I followed SOP to the letter. I shouted a warning at the armed man who had just murdered DS Stone and who would have murdered again if he had the chance. I did what I’m trained to do. I even did my best to avoid over-penetration.’
He smiled at me, happy to be beyond the reach of those who would prosecute policemen for murder.
‘Over-penetration is when a bullet goes into someone and straight out the other side,’ he explained. ‘Best way to avoid over-penetration is to shoot the target when they’re flat on the ground. And that’s what I did with my second shot. And that’s what I told them. And that’s what everyone saw – including you, right?’
I nodded. ‘That’s what I saw,’ I confirmed. ‘I’m glad you’re in the clear, Jackson.’
‘I fired two shots – a double tap – and then I stopped,’ he said. ‘SFOs need to know two things – when to start firing and when to stop. So I’m not in trouble, Max. You don’t have to worry about me. I’m all right. It’s the other part of the story we have to get straight.’
I looked around the pub.
Many of the men had plastic bags at their feet, full of pork chops, beef ribs, legs of lamb. And I saw now that though the men all wore white coats, and they were all smeared with blood, they were all smeared with different measures of blood.
Some of their coats were almost pristine white, flecked with a few discreet little Jackson Pollock flourishes. These were the wholesalers. And some of the men had been cutting up pigs, which are carved while hanging up, reducing the blood splatter. These had only modest amounts of blood on their coats. And then there were the men whose white coats were stained deep red with blood. They had been cutting lamb – meaning they had been cutting towards themselves, as lambs are cut on blocks. So they were all marked with different kinds of blood.
But every one of them wore a sky-blue ribbon on his white coat, as they remembered the forty-five innocent souls who had died when that helicopter came down.
I looked back at Jackson. He had not stopped staring at me.
‘They will ask you about when DS Stone was murdered, but we don’t have to worry about that,’ he said. ‘What we have to work out is what you tell them about what happened in the basement.’
‘We don’t have to work it out, Jackson. There’s nothing to work out.’ I leaned closer to him. ‘You talk to your friend DC Vann?’
‘I wouldn’t call him a friend, Max. But he doesn’t need to be my friend. Ray Vann’s part of our mob. And this mob, Max, they remind me of the mob I was with in Afghanistan. You know what we fought for in Afghanistan? It wasn’t freedom. It wasn’t democracy. It wasn’t Queen and country. It was each other. And it’s the same here. We fight for each other.’
‘Did Vann ask you to come and see me?’
‘He didn’t have to.’
‘Why did Stone speak to him?’
‘When?’
‘In the jump-off van on our way to Borodino Street. Vann was the only member of the team that Alice Stone spoke to. “You OK, Raymond?” As if she was worried about him. As if she was concerned about – I don’t know – his mental state, his stability. She didn’t speak to anyone else. Why did she speak to Vann?’
Jackson sipped his sparkling mineral water, looking away.
‘I didn’t clock it. Must have been checking my kit. Getting in the zone.’
‘What’s Vann’s background?’
‘Shots tend to come from two places, as you know. You’ve got the country boys – and girls – who grew up with guns, shooting clay pigeons, pheasants and peasants. All those rural pursuits. And then you’ve got the ex-servicemen. The ones who got their training in the military. In a different sort of field from the ones they shoot pheasants in. And that was Ray Vann. He was in Iraq. Did well under fire, apparently.’
‘So he was highly trained and he knew what he was doing?’
‘Yeah.’ His eyes slipped away from mine again. ‘But to be honest, you never know.’
‘What does that mean, Jackson?’
‘The ones that grew up with guns – like Alice Stone, for starters – have not had the same life experiences as the ones who served. Ex-servicemen – we’re like rescue dogs, Max. You never know exactly what we have been through. And what it did to us.’