Used to men cowering from him, cringing away.
'Who are you? What you doing?'
Not a quiver from the lips. Davey did not know whether it was dumb insolence or dumb stupidity. If the dosser had shown the fear then he might have frogmarched him up the length of Bevin Close and kicked his arse back on to the main road's pavement, and watched him go, then gone inside to get the supper out of the oven. The eyes stared back into his.
Was the man mental? One of those Care in the Community people? Didn't seem that way to Davey.
No madness in the eyes.
He was not sure if the eyes laughed at him. They were bright and big and close. The dosser's hand reached up, not to strike but to release Davey's grip on the shoulder; like it shouldn't have been there. The hand tried to prise the shoulder free and the weight of the dosser's body was against him, as if the man had done the business that had brought him to Bevin Close and was now ready to leave… No bloody way.
There was another rattle of questions in his throat – waste of time asking them. He used a knee into the groin, hard. The dosser was going down and Davey was shouting, couldn't hear himself, as he put in the southpaw short hook to the chin. The dosser was down. Davey readied himself for the kick to the head.
'What we got here, Davey boy?'
His breath coming in spurts, he looked up. Ricky leaned casually on the closed front gate, had a good shirt on as if he was dressing to go out and had been interrupted. The shape, like a rag bundle and like the men under the cardboard at the underpass by
Elephant and Castle, lay in front of him.
'Some bloody vagrant scum, Ricky. Outside your house. Looking at it. I've asked him what he was doing, who he was, why… Didn't get an answer.
Didn't get nothing. I belted him, Ricky.'
'Did you?'
'I don't reckon he's Crime Squad, just some loony that needed teaching.'
'You reckon.'
'Teaching respect.'
'Maybe you haven't taught him well enough.'
There was that quietness in Ricky's voice. It marked times when Davey knew better than to speak further.
He came through the gate and looked down at the dosser. The eyes in the head on the pavement were unwavering and steady. If he had been on the ground and Ricky's shoes had come close, Davey would have wrapped his arms round his head and curled up the better to protect himself; it was what men did when they were to be kicked, he'd seen it too many times to remember. The head jerked back from the impact of Ricky's shoe.
The cry was urgent: 'Don't be a bloody fool, Ricky.'
Mikey was out of his house, stumbling – like he was half-cut – towards them, and put himself between Ricky and the man on the ground, then turned on his son and pushed him away.
'What do you want – the bloody police down here?'
Ricky said, 'There's no call for the police, Dad.
Didn't you see? He fell over. Probably pissed up. He fell over and hit his head. You weren't looking, Dad.
You got to know what you're talking about when you call your son a bloody fool. Isn't that right, Dad?'
'If you say so, Ricky.'
'I say so, Dad… Get rid of him, Davey. We don't want people like that in our close. I'm surprised you let him get this far.'
Davey shivered – always did when criticized by Ricky Capel. It was big of Mikey, and not usual, to stand against his son and call him a bloody fool.
Davey wouldn't have done it, wouldn't ever. He pulled the dosser up by the shoulders of his overcoat, then dragged and half carried him away up the length of Bevin Close. It was only when he reached the junction with the main road, stood the dosser up and pushed him towards the line of steel-shuttered shopfronts that Davey realized what the smells were.
Above the stink of the clothes was the stench of petrol.
One more thing he didn't understand.
He saw the man shamble away, lean on a lamp post and grip it for support, then move on. Davey went to rescue his meal from the oven.
Still damp from the shower, he was as sleek as the Ferrari Spider towards which he walked.
As a regular visitor he received an obligatory ducked bow of respect from the doorman who watched over entry and exit at the block. The mouseboy, as his uncle called him, might come once a week to Chelsea Harbour or once in two weeks, but Enver Rahman came three times a week. It was the great laugh between him and Maria that the besotted mouseboy had no idea that she was serviced three times more often, minimum, by him. There was a slight weight in his jacket pocket and he carried the video-cassette in his hand. She did not grunt, did not fake it, for Enver.
There was always a tip, peeled from his wallet, of a twenty-pound note for the doorman, gratefully received. By now, the note would have been slipped into an inner pocket.
Enver was late for the meeting. It did not concern him. He strode into the evening air and saw people back away from the Ferrari. Always it attracted attention, which he liked.
Of course, as the nephew of Timo Rahman, Enver was expected to succeed. He had. He owned nine brothels spread through north Haringey, Soho and the area behind King's Cross railway station. They were for the ordinary girls with flat chests, gross hips or dirty complexions; they were paid a hundred pounds an hour by clients and were given five for themselves.
Special girls, booked by telephone from hall porters' desks, were driven by Enver's people to the better hotels and they were paid two hundred pounds an hour, non-negotiable, and were allowed five to slide into their purses. His girls, from Bulgaria, Ukraine, Poland and Lithuania, worked seven days a week and the money cascaded into his lap. If the girls broke the rules, Enver had men to beat them – beat them so they were unable to work, unpresentable, for a week.
He drove across the city. It was his habit never to exceed the speed limit, never to crash a red light, never to overtake across a double white line – never to give a policeman, racked with envy, the chance to wave down the Ferrari Spider.
More for fun and less for cash, Enver oversaw – and took the major cut – from kidnapping. Most he liked what they called the 'bomb burst'. An Albanian, in Brent, Colindale or Green Lanes, would have opened up a small business – a plumber, a carpenter, a bespoke shirt-maker. Taken into a car, his mobile phone would be lifted from his pocket. The 'bomb burst' was to ring every stored number and demand a hundred pounds within an hour from each number, and let them hear the screams of the man. The 'bomb burst' could make a thousand pounds in an hour… It was fun, entertainment, for Enver, as was the second way. Snatch a man as he came home at the end of his day's work, back to Brent, Colindale or Green Lanes, drive him the rest of the way, and keep him in the car as the door was banged at his home. Let his family see him in the car, and his terror. A thousand pounds to be collected in an hour, or two thousand, or the man would be taken to Epping Forest and killed. They always paid. It amused him to see the panic on the faces of others… Useful also. The 'bomb bursts' and the lifts were a way for him to evaluate the determination of potential recruits. Albanians and Kosovar Albanians, without money, picked out from the lines of immigrants at Lunar House, were desperate to prove themselves reliable. From kidnaps he could choose them, find the ones with skill. More money spilled into his lap and victims, like the girls in the brothels, would never talk to the police.
He travelled along the embankment, then took a bridge over the river.
The money from his lap went out of the country in suitcases and in vehicle hideaways to be driven home to Albania where he already had a villa – decently smaller – near to the older one built by his uncle. More money went to bureau-de-change outlets for changing into high-value euro notes. More went into the casino in which he had an interest, for laundering, and into three Albanian cafes of which he was part-owner; he paid tax from the casino and the cafes and made the money legitimate. A little was paid to Ricky Capel, at extortionate rates, to reward him for brokering the transport that brought in new girls. He thought the mouseboy rated him as a fool for paying too much