Costain allowed himself another minute after Quill had left. He splashed freezing water on his face. It made him start panting. Quill had set him up to fail. He needed a sacrifice, letting Costain burn. No, no, keep going. Get through it. Work it out.
He walked out on to the freezing forecourt, the warm breath billowing out of his mouth, to the sound of the convoy of SUVs revving their engines. UK Grime beats were pumping out through their open doors. A sample of the Clash looped in and out: ‘London Calling’. The Asian blokes at the tills were staring worriedly out at them.
Rob Toshack stepped out of the lead car, holding a pistol in his hand. He was beyond caring who saw it.
The Asian blokes dived for cover.
Toshack was red-faced and sweating. He was shivering like an old horse. For a second, Costain wondered if he would find Quill’s corpse lying somewhere out here.
No fear, now. Fear will kill you. Costain made himself become not the hiding, shameful traitor but the star of this picture. With a dirty great supportive soundtrack blasting from those cars, and now this guy with a gun, eyeing him worriedly, not betrayed — nowhere near it — just impatient, and a bit lost, high for the first time in his hard protective old life. . This guy hadn’t just shot anyone.
‘I was getting worried, Tony,’ Rob Toshack explained. ‘We’re running out of time.’
‘What?’ Costain went over to the door of the lead vehicle and grinned at his boss. The star of this picture, yes, but never appearing melodramatic. Always the class joker, always relieving the tension that might one day kill him. ‘I was only having a shit.’
They raced through the London night, heading for somewhere on the North Circular, up near Neasden. Mick had to swing the car back and forth, every now and then, to avoid the potholes. Not much traffic this late on New Year’s Eve. Rob was keeping the SUV so hot inside that everyone was now in shirt-sleeves. Sefton had somehow managed to move himself up into the lead car, and was now sitting beside Costain. Which was just fucking perfect. The second UC was looking pretend-concerned for Rob, with that round, frigging black children’s television-presenter face of his. Chill out everybody; let’s all be friends and play a rap music game!
Costain made grudging eye contact with him. He held on to it a moment too long, taking some small pleasure in making Sefton start to react. What? Costain turned back to glance at Rob, at that worried drinker’s face, with something weak and unused about the muscles with which normal folk smiled. That lack of tension connected his loose jowls to those lost eyes. The king of London, the first ever. Even gangsters of old, like the Krays and the Richardsons, had had to deal with rivals. Toshack had made his money on drugs and brass, miraculous warehouse and container robbery and high-performance car theft. He was the man for whom it had fallen off the back of that lorry. Or, rather, just vanished from it. It was usually Toshack kit that got auctioned out of cardboard boxes in empty storefronts in the dead-eyed towns of the south coast.
In the last ten years or so, he’d seen off all his rivals or, more often than not, absorbed them. He held actual territory in the thirty-three boroughs, in an age when most Organized Criminal Networks found that much too stressful. He regularly had soldiers coming to him, ratting out their bosses, saying where the money bunched in market folds would be counted tonight. Because everyone knew that in the Toshack OCN you got to do all the posing and none of the getting shot at. It was at that point that Rob would make their bosses a peaceable offer, backed up by some sort of threat, the details but not the results of which were kept from his own inner circle of soldiers. The smaller boss then took the offer and vanished. Always.
Those incredibly efficient freelancers of his.
It made it doubly strange that tonight Rob was out on the warpath with his own people right beside him.
Absorbing soldiers from so many different gangs was how the Toshack set had come to be different from most OCNs, composed of people who’d known each other in the schoolyard, but diverse, like on TV where the producers could imply that these guys dealt heroin but not that they might be a tiny bit racist with it. Costain and Sefton had come aboard when Toshack had taken over the Toil to join Shiv and Mick and Lazlo, the League of Nations. Rob had looked after them, with so many loans and smoothings of the way, and also the taking asides for a little chat that started out with terror, then became about whisky and good advice from this man who looked at you with eyes that said he’d been there.
Costain liked to feel free. ‘I’m this guy who’s got no karma,’ he’d once said to Rob during one of those whisky conversations. ‘Half of what people think there are laws about, there really aren’t. You can do what you like, but people are just afraid.’
‘Amen to that, Blakey,’ Rob had said, clinking glasses with him.
He loved the freedom Rob gave him. The freedom of someone who could still afford the diesel for a fleet of SUVs. The freedom of someone who was not a victim. Only now he was carrying a burden in the middle of his back that could bring them both down. One way or the other, this free lunch looked likely to end tonight. Costain glanced at his watch. His tape was going to last up to, what. . midnight? What was he going to do? He’d put a certain something aside for when he got out of this, and he hoped to God that neither side had discovered that. Was now the time for him to cash in and run?
‘What goes around comes around,’ declared Rob. Then he turned to look at Costain and Sefton. ‘Well, that’s not always true, is it? Not necessarily.’
Costain pursed his lips. A sudden memory had been set off by those words, but Quill had planted it in him. Why he always thought he was going to get burned. Because he was the bad guy. The memory went like this: he was leaning closer to one Sammy Cliff, taking him into his confidence after the informer had again ranted on about how he felt about himself, describing himself in the most derogatory terms. ‘But it’s not about what you are, is it?’ Costain had said, making his tone sound like the sort of kindly teacher he’d seen in old movies. ‘It’s about what you could be. One of the good guys — one of us — fighting the good fight against gang culture. I think it’s time I assigned you a code name, mate. I have been given five randomly generated subject names to pick from, so do you want to choose?’
Sammy had shaken his head, unable to stop himself from looking eager, he’d so wanted to be named.
‘I think,’ Costain had said, ‘I’m going to call you Tiger Feet.’
And then he remembered what had happened soon after that: Sammy Cliff hanging there, the burned remains of his feet, of his face.
Costain shoved that memory down again. ‘Nah,’ he said, ‘you’re right there, Rob.’
‘Depends,’ said Sefton. ‘Depends on what he means. What exactly do you mean, chief?’ Costain wondered if Sefton knew about the Nagra, if his fucking brilliant strategy now was going to be to ask loads of bloody questions. Like UCs never normally did.
‘I mean that, for the last ten years, what goes around hasn’t come around for me. And it won’t come around now, Blakey, Kev, Mick. I’m going to get out of it this time too, like every other time.’
‘Sure you are, Rob.’
‘I got all of this ’cos of my brother. All down to him, oh yes.’ He laughed gently, as if at some irony that Costain himself wasn’t aware of. ‘I’m not going to let it go.’ He hit the button to lower the window, inviting a freezing blast of air in, and shoved the gun out. He fired it in the air and kept firing, with an absurdly precise gap between each shot, as if he was waving a flag that fired bullets. Maybe he expected similar from the convoy behind him, but Costain heard nothing. He imagined bullets falling into the streets of semis standing below the underpass. That demonstrated real freedom, but he could sense Sefton having the temerity to worry and fear and bridle at it.