Nobody else spoke.
A few minutes later, Rentners returned carrying a huge pot. A big, blonde-haired woman in a kitchen apron came in behind him. She was carrying bowls which she put down in front of everyone without speaking. Stegs thanked her but she ignored him, not even looking his way.
‘Spaghetti al araba,’ said Rentners, who must have thought he was John Gotti or Tony Soprano, lifting the lid off the pot. ‘I hope you all like chilli.’ He then doled out a portion of spaghetti in a tomatoey sauce to each and every one of them while the blonde came back several times bringing salad and garlic bread. ‘Bon appetit,’ he growled when he’d finished, before sitting down at the head of the table and proceeding to stuff his demonic face.
As they ate (and Stegs would always remember that the food was excellent), Rentners asked the two of them questions. What sort of quantity of gear were they after? How were they raising the funds needed? Where’d they done time? Did they know so and so? The questions were probing but nothing unusual, and the two of them answered confidently and without hesitation. Only once did Rentners speak to Brewster, to ask him if he knew how a mutual acquaintance of theirs was doing. Brewster, between sizeable mouthfuls of spaghetti, said he hadn’t seen the bloke for ages. Rentners nodded, as if accepting the answer, and carried on talking to the two SO10 men. Vokes did most of the talking, but Stegs had entered the discussion where necessary, and he remembered thinking, as he poured himself a second glass of the Chateauneuf du Pape, that it wouldn’t take more than a few meetings to reel in Rentners. He obviously rated himself very highly, and they’re always the easiest to bring down because they never see it coming.
Rentners was the first to finish. As he did so, he gave his belly a satisfying rub and raised his glass. ‘To crime,’ he chuckled.
‘To crime,’ said everyone else with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Stegs even raised his glass.
Then Rentners lifted up the empty bottle of white wine and smashed it over Brewster’s head. Brewster didn’t even know what had hit him, he simply slid off the chair and fell to the floor. Stegs and Vokes stared at Rentners, wondering whether they’d missed something. Vokes began to speak, but their host stood up and pulled a long-barrelled Browning from the waistband of his black jeans and pointed it at him.
‘Shut the fuck up, cunt!’ he hissed, his face dissolving into a malevolent glare, which hadn’t required much of a transformation.
At the same time, Stegs felt something warm and metallic being pushed against his temple as the bloke next to him — the one who’d driven them down there — produced his own gun. Stegs carried on chewing. When he’d finished, he turned to Rentners and glared right back. ‘What the fuck is this? What are you trying to do?’
‘Shut your fucking mouth, copper!’ snarled Rentners, moving the gun round so it was pointed right between Stegs’s eyes.
Stegs felt his heart shoot up to his mouth and he silently thanked God that he had Vokes with him because he knew his partner was experienced enough to handle this sort of situation.
‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ he yelled, indignant. ‘Who the fuck’s a copper? How do I even know you’re not a fucking copper?’ He stood up, flinging his serviette onto the table and ignoring the gun to his head, a picture of righteous anger.
Bluff, bluff — it’s always bluff.
‘Get fucking down!’ roared Rentners, his gun hand shaking with rage.
‘All right, Steve,’ said Vokes. ‘Sit down and take it easy.’ Stegs slowly sat back down while Vokes turned to Rentners and spoke calmly but with barely suppressed irritation. ‘What the fuck is this, Mr Rentners? We came here to do business. We don’t like having weapons pointed at us, and having accusations made that are, quite frankly, fucking insulting.’
‘Don’t fucking try that one. You’re coppers. I know you are. And him’ — he motioned with the Browning towards the prone form of Brewster — ‘he’s a fucking grass. You’re here to fucking set me up.’
‘Bollocks!’ yelled Stegs. ‘I can’t believe you’re doing this to us.’
‘Is this the way you treat all your customers, Frank? Because if it is-’
‘SHUT THAT FUCKING MOUTH!’ roared Rentners. ‘NOW! BOTH OF YOU! YOU HEAR ME? NOW!’
The whole world had probably heard that. It left Stegs’s ears ringing, and he knew that this was serious. Very serious. Rentners had killed before. Knifed a man in the heart over an alleged drugs debt. He’d got off on manslaughter charges because the bloke had also slept with his missus, which meant extenuating circumstances. Nineteen times he’d stabbed him, the defence barrister at his trial describing it as a passionate rage in search of an outlet, which seemed a very generous way of looking at it. Some fucking outlet. The point was, though, that this was a bad situation. Rentners was unpredictable, he was violent, and he had a gun. Stegs was as scared as he’d ever been, but he knew it would be fatal to show it. He gave Rentners a look that said that he wouldn’t forget this sort of treatment.
‘Get ’em in the weights room,’ said Rentners, ignoring him, ‘and wake that cunt up. I don’t want him missing all the fun.’
Vokes started to tell him that he was making a big mistake but never finished the sentence as Rentners let fly with a wicked right hook that sent him stumbling back into the wall. Vokes was a big lad, six two and about fifteen stone, but he was left dazed by the ex-boxer’s blow, and offered little resistance as Rentners grabbed his shirt and pulled him back out into the hallway. At the same time, the one with the gun against Stegs’s head hauled him to his feet and led him out the same way, keeping the weapon in position. ‘Make a wrong fucking move and you die,’ he told Stegs helpfully.
The weights room took up the whole of the basement. It was even more sparsely furnished than the rest of the house and, being windowless, was brightly lit by strip lights on the ceiling. It was also carpetless, and consequently quite cold. At one end of the room were two racks of weights, a treadmill, and several other exercise machines. A single leather sofa was at the other end, about thirty feet away, facing this makeshift gymnasium.
Rentners shoved Vokes onto the sofa, and Stegs followed a couple of seconds later. Their hands were then forced behind their backs by one of Rentner’s gunmen, and amid continued protestations they were tied with duct tape. While this was going on, Brewster was dumped unceremoniously onto the stone floor halfway between the sofa and the nearest rack of weights. For the first time Stegs noticed a steam iron plugged into one of the mains sockets a few feet away from him.
‘This is fucking ridiculous,’ he told Rentners, trying hard not to look at the iron. ‘We’re here offering you money for your merchandise, and you’re treating us like shit. If I’m a fucking copper, why aren’t I wearing a wire, then? Come on, search me. See if I’m fucking wearing one.’
A tiny glimmer of doubt crossed Rentners’ features, then disappeared. ‘Tape their fucking traps up, Tone,’ he told the gunman.
Tone stuffed the gun in his waistband and took the duct tape back out of his jacket.
‘He’s right, Frank,’ said Vokes, trying hard to keep the nerves out of his voice. ‘Search us if you don’t believe us. Don’t fucking do business with us if you don’t trust us, but tying us up and doing all this is just going to make your reputation-’
He was forced to stop when Tone pulled the tape round his mouth several times over, before biting the end off it.
‘You’d better make sure you never run into me again, Tone, you cunt!’ snarled Stegs, as Tone prepared to do the same thing to him. When he’d finished, he punched Stegs in the side of the head, knocking him into Vokes. Their eyes met for a second, before they were pulled apart. Stegs thought that Vokes was more nervous than he’d ever seen him.
Brewster was taking his time coming round, so one of the other men disappeared into an alcove round the corner. The sound of running water followed and then he returned with a full bucket. He chucked it over Brewster, and now Stegs realized why the room wasn’t carpeted.