The pensioner's home, in which he stayed with an ever-open can from a six-pack, had become the fortress of the Amersham's premier dealer. The final touch: Penney had hired a welding torch for twenty-four hours, gone out on a wet November night and worked the flame over the manhole cover in the street in front of the flat, where the sewage went through. If they were serious, first thing the filth did when they raided was get the manhole cover up outside and slot a plastic sack over the pipe outlet into the main system. First thing a dealer did, when the sledgehammers hit the door, was flush what was in the house down the toilet. Jason Penney reckoned himself ahead of the game.
Aggie collected for him from the supplier. Anything up to a full kilo of brown or white, up to a thousand tablets, was brought back to the estate by the pale-faced, unremarkable girl with her baby. Aggie moved the brown, the white and the tablets in the pram under the baby, with shit and piss in the nappy that hid the dull scent of heroin, cocaine or MDMA, from the house to the stash place that was a hollowed-out cavern behind a loose concrete block in a play-area corner where the lights did not reach. Jason Penney, with perfect security around him, was a king on the Amersham.
The men and women in Housing, burdened by workloads and short staffing, had no interest in investigating areas from which no complaints came.
The pensioner's neighbours, similarly elderly and cowed, who would have seen Penney's shaven head, his muscled, tattooed body and his Rottweiler, were not daft: they would not call any police hotline even if it claimed confidential response.
He was irritable that day. He'd snapped at Aggie and bawled out the pensioner, had raised his fist to the dog so that it had backed off and crept to its corner. A little tremor of worry itched in him. He dealt with Danny Morris, Leroy Gates and Wilbur Sansom, had done ever since he'd set up in business on the estate, had found them good and reliable. He knew what had happened to them. He believed he felt the pulsebeat of the Amersham, but he could not have said who had left them suspended from a flat roof for most of a night.
He kept her in an apartment at Chelsea Harbour. It had a small balcony that looked down on the river, a small living room, a small kitchen and a small bathroom, a big TV with video and DVD, and a big bed that fitted tightly into the small bedroom.
She grunted hard.
The apartment, across London from Bevin Close, with the girl in residence, was the greatest luxury in Ricky Capel's life. It was leased in her name, two years and renewable, but the girl was more complicated: she had been bought for cash, then the money had been paid back and she was a gift. Maria, twenty years old, from Romania, was smart, clever and long-legged, and had worked out of a brothel in King's Cross.
The thong, suspenders and little lacy brassiere that she always wore when he arrived, the high-heeled shoes and the silk robe were scattered in a trail between the front door of the apartment and the bed.
Maria was high luxury to Ricky Capel and high risk.
The times he was able to get away from the cousins, and from Bevin Close, were luxury because then he thought he breathed freedom. He tried to come to Chelsea Harbour once a week, but if his life was complex and business burdened him, it was once a fortnight, which made for expensive luxury – with the lease, her spending money and her presents. It was liberation when he shed his family. Free of Joanne, who did sex only when she reckoned she had to and was always bleating on about the thinness of the wall between their room and Wayne's, and refused straight-up to do anything beyond basic. The girl, Maria, rode him on the bed, and his hands reached up for the hang of her breasts, and she grunted louder as he pushed up into her and her head was back like it was ecstasy for her. Her fingernails, long and painted silver to match her lip gloss, caught in his chest hair and scratched at his skin. He let out sharp, stifled squeals, and her grunts came faster.
But high risk. For Ricky Capel to have set up his girl at Chelsea Harbour opened little cracks in the defence wall built round his wealth and enterprises. He had met her in the hours after his first meeting with Enver, who hummed round King's Cross in a flash Ferrari Spider. Charlie had identified the business opportunity. Albanians ran girls into the country, but they hadn't the cover: Customs and Immigration had peeled eyes for Albanians driving white vans into Dover, Folkestone or Harwich. They were losing too many and too much cash, and they were operating on foreign territory. It was Charlie's proposition. Ricky should get himself up alongside the Albanians and take over the cross-border, cross-Channel runs. He had access to the drivers and to the lorries they brought back from the long overland European hauls.
He would be paid up front by the Albanians for the transport, and take a cut from the brothel earnings where the new girls would work. The way Charlie told it, it was pretty straight, and Benji had suggested approaching Enver. He'd heard that Albanians stuck by their word, were professional, made good partners.
They'd done the meeting, had shaken hands on a deal, and then there had been food in the club. The girl had stood at the back and her eyes had never been off him.
Christ, he'd wanted her, like he'd never wanted anything. Bought her, hadn't he? Bought her for cash, peeled it out of his pocket, and told Enver that there'd be no more bloody customers for her, and he'd collect her when he'd got premises. In a careful life, it was the wildest thing that Ricky Capel had ever done – bought a tart out of a brothel off an Albanian.
The way she grunted on him, the whole of that building at Chelsea Harbour, through concrete floors and concrete walls, would have heard her. Bloody, bloody – God – marvellous, and he clung to her breasts.
In his third or fourth meeting with Enver, long after he'd taken delivery of her, Ricky had told him, sort of casual, that his grandfather had been in Albania in the war. What was his grandfather's name and where had his grandfather been? Percy Capel, up in the north and he'd struggled to pronounce the place name
– with a Major Anstruther. Next time they'd met, him and Enver, Ricky had been given an envelope. In it was what he'd paid for the girl. Enver had giggled and told him why the money had come back. Enver's uncle was in Hamburg, Germany. The uncle's father was Mehmet Rahman, who had fought with Major Hugo Anstruther and Flight Sergeant Percy Capel against the Fascists in the mountains north of Shkodra. Small world, small bloody world.
She was coming, crouched over him, bellowing, like he was the best shag she'd ever had.
He did not rate the risk she represented. The Albanians, from that distant link between a grandfather and the father of an uncle, were his partners – well, not real partners because he controlled it all. He called the tune, Ricky did. He was never backed into a corner. He bought off them and used Harry's trawler to bring in the packages. He used his network of knowledge for haulage companies to help them get the girls, from Belarus, Ukraine, Bulgaria and Romania, into the country. He hired them – his cousin Benji called them 'the Merks', the mercenaries – for heavy punishment if a man showed him disrespect.
He had no cause to sweat on the arrangement: he had not lost control, never would – and the money rolled in for Charlie to wash, rinse, scrub clean.
She came, then him. Ricky sagged on the bed and she rolled off him. She peeled off the condom, and went to make him tea. Always tea, never alcohol.
He lay back and gasped. She was his best, his most precious secret.
Mikey Capel always watched little Wayne, Ricky's boy, play football for the under-nine team of the junior school, St Mary's.