Umar raised his eyes to the heavens.
‘It’s really Sergeant Shames you should be talking to.’ Carlyle smiled at the girl. ‘He’s a very nice man.’
‘I needed to pee,’ Melissa said, ‘so Umar brought me back here.’
Umar, is it?
The sergeant shrugged. ‘All part of the service.’
‘Very good.’ The inspector stepped forward, half-turning so that he could better look his colleague in the face. ‘Anyway, Umar, we’d better get going.’ He smiled maliciously. ‘You don’t want to be late for your date with your wife.’
Steve Metcalf dropped the last of the lamb kebab into his gaping maw and wiped his hands on the front of his faded T-shirt. Washing it down with the last dregs from a half-litre bottle of Kingfisher lager, he looked expectantly across the table at Calvin Safi.
‘You shouldn’t be drinking that in here,’ Safi pointed out. ‘You know I don’t have a licence.’
‘Calvin, old son, relax. Why do you let yourself get so wound up about shit?’
‘I could get shut down,’ Safi grumbled.
‘Ha.’ Metcalf let out a ferocious belch. ‘Who’s gonna complain?’ With the empty bottle, he gestured round the almost empty kebab shop. Aside from Aqib and his mate Rasheed, sitting near the counter, their faces a study in concentration as they wolfed down a couple of hamburgers, there were no other customers.
God knows how anyone is supposed to make money selling fast food, Calvin thought unhappily. If he’d taken £200 so far today, it would be a miracle. There was no way he could cover his costs simply by selling kebabs. He watched Metcalf wipe some brown sauce from his chin and wished that he’d never come across the sick bastard. As usual, the whole thing was Aqib’s fault; the idiot wanting to look good in front of one of his Chelsea mates. Calvin knew that they should never have let white guys in on their little scheme. White guys always fucked things up.
Why had he gone along with it? Basically, Aqib had whined like a child – well, he was a child, more or less – but still, he had moaned endlessly and Calvin had given in. It had been a big mistake, even before all this stuff with Taimur had brought the police round. Now he felt very nervous about the whole thing. But stopping it seemed impossible, particularly now that this stupid sod had discovered how to get laid by someone other than his wife.
‘So,’ Metcalf sat back in his chair, scratching his balls through the dirty denim of his trousers, ‘what have you got for me tonight?’
Calvin felt sick. ‘I thought Aqib told you,’ he replied, trying to sound as forceful as possible, ‘we need to quieten things down for a while.’
Metcalf glanced over at the other two, still chomping away on their burgers. ‘Aqib din’ tell me nuffink,’ he asserted, turning on the hard mockney accent to remind the foreigner who was the bloody boss here. ‘And I want a shag.’
Gritting his teeth, Calvin tried to stand his ground. ‘After the last time . . .’
‘After the last time, nuthin’.’ Flinging the bottle past Calvin’s head, Metcalf watched with grim satisfaction as it smashed against the wall, sending pieces of brown glass scattering across the dirty floor. Calvin flinched. Stuffing the last of the bun into his mouth, Aqib looked up at Calvin and laughed, giving him a look that said don’t pretend you can fuck with Steve – you’re not in charge any more.
‘It was a one off and we dealt with it,’ Metcalf said cockily. ‘It’s history.’
Calvin nodded, not believing a word of it.
‘There’s nuthin’ that can come back to any of us.’
‘Let’s hope not.’
‘Why do you say that?’ Metcalf’s eyes widened. ‘Has anyone come sniffin’ round?’
‘No. But-’
‘But nothin’.’ Debate over, the fat man folded his arms. ‘So it’s business as usual, my friend.’
‘Sure, Steve.’
‘And who’s this new girl Aqib’s told me about?’ Metcalf enquired eagerly. ‘I hear she’s a right slag.’
TWENTY-SIX
After maybe three hours adrift in the orange gloom, Taimur Rage realized that the shouts and the screams from the other cells were not going to stop. They would go on all night. He was in a loony bin.
At least the guy he’d been put in with wasn’t a nutter. Lying back in his bed, Taimur listened to the snoring coming from the bunk above him – his cellmate was some foreign bloke who’d been fighting deportation for more than a year – and felt the pills in the palm of his hand. He had been expecting to get a visit from his mum, or at least his lawyer. Instead, it was Aqib who turned up at visiting time. He had a girl in tow that Taimur had never seen before. She was wearing a flimsy T-shirt and no bra. The warders certainly couldn’t get enough of her; when Aqib had passed him the pills no one was paying a blind bit of attention.
‘Your dad would’ve come,’ Aqib sniffed as he watched Taimur slip the small clingfilm packet into his boxers, ‘but he’s got the shop and that.’
‘Yeah.’
Aqib tugged at his hoodie. ‘That’s a 24-7 operation right there. You know the chavs working the till will rob him blind if he leaves them alone for a minute.’
Taimur shrugged. He glanced at the girl across the table. She was grinning aimlessly at a monster bloke with a tattoo – some kind of snake that went all the way up his left arm – who was sitting at the next table. Tattoo Man was so taken by Taimur’s visitor that he barely acknowledged the woman who was sitting opposite him. She was a hard-looking bottle blonde with a baby on her lap and an unlit cigarette between her fingers. Yammering away at great speed, the blonde was laying in to Tattoo Man, complaining about money or something. She didn’t seem to notice that her man wasn’t listening.
‘Anyway,’ Aqib continued, lowering his voice theatrically as he gestured across the table, ‘those are good stuff.’ He whispered a designer-sounding name that Taimur didn’t recognize. ‘Got ’em wholesale from my man Steve.’
The pills were probably aspirin or some shit like that, Taimur thought. Aqib was such a dick.
‘They’ll help take the edge off in here,’ Aqib explained, mistaking the amusement in Taimur’s face for enthusiasm. ‘Keep you mellow.’ He allowed himself a sneaky peek down the top of the girl’s T-shirt, licking his lips as he did so. ‘Or you can trade ’em with your mates, or whatever.’
What mates? Taimur wondered.
Without warning, the girl pitched forward in her chair. Showing decent reflexes, Aqib grabbed her arm, pulling her towards him before she could hit her head on the table. The blonde woman at the next table turned to see what was going on and gave the three of them a nasty grin.
‘Fuck, Nat!’ Aqib shrieked. ‘What you doing?’
The girl started to giggle as a pair of guards watched them suspiciously.
‘C’mon. We need to walk.’ Getting up, Aqib dragged her to her feet. ‘Sorry, man, we better get outta here before someone decides she needs a drugs test. Be strong, hear?’ He waved his free hand in the air. ‘You a big man now, in here. Maximum security. Enjoy it.’
His mind blank, Taimur watched the pair of them stumble towards the exit. The blonde woman at the next table went back to her complaint, and Tattoo Man tried to find something else to stare at. When the guard came to take Taimur back to his cell, he was already on his feet, good to go.
The sound of footsteps on the landing outside died away as the warder continued his rounds. Above his head, his cellmate mumbled something in a language that he didn’t recognize and then promptly went back to sleep. As the man’s snoring resumed, Taimur reached down for the bottle of water he had placed on the floor. Propping himself up on his elbows, he pulled Aqib’s gift from inside his boxer shorts and carefully unwrapped the cling-fim. Inside it were six unmarked white tablets. Knowing Aqib, they were probably useless, but it was worth a go. Dropping them into his mouth, Taimur unscrewed the top of the bottle and took a long swig.