It had taken me a month of hanging round the periphery of the north London underworld, drinking in grimy little backstreet pubs with small-time crims and putting my name about as Sean Tatelli, an ex-con on the lookout for decent work, before I got introduced to Tommy. That was three months ago now, and we’d spent a lot of time together since. For a while that had involved nothing more than going out drinking and shooting the breeze. Like a lot of criminals, Tommy was good company, with a wealth of amusing stories to tell. Slowly, though, he’d begun to take me into his confidence, giving me bits and pieces of work to do, always suggesting that something bigger would come along, until finally, today, he’d pulled up outside the flat I used for my undercover ops and told me that he had work for me. Real work this time.
‘Who’s it we’re meant to be snatching?’ I asked Tommy, keen to have something to go back to Captain Bob with.
‘I don’t know,’ he said, fixing me with deep-set eyes that always had a melancholy expression in them, even when he was telling a good story. ‘I don’t work with Wolfe as much as I used to these days. But you said he offered you a hundred grand. Well, he’s offered me one fifty, so I’m thinking him and Haddock must be making at least two apiece, maybe more, which means whoever it is we’re after’s worth a lot of money to someone. All I know is it’s one man, and his escort’s not going to be armed. That’s it. I don’t even know the location.’
‘Do you know how Wolfe got to hear of the job?’
He shook his head. ‘He’s keeping everything close to his chest, and he’s even more jumpy than usual about it. That’s why he’s being all cloak and dagger with you. He doesn’t like using people from outside the crew for work, but he needed a fourth man, and seeing as you and me are mates, and you need the work. .’
‘Thanks for thinking of me,’ I said, feeling an unusual twinge of guilt that I was going to betray him. Tommy Allen was a violent criminal, but I’d grown closer to him than I’d have liked. At forty-five, he was only twelve years older than me, but sometimes he acted as if I was the son he’d never had.
The car fell silent, and he lit a cigarette.
I looked at it longingly. I only allow myself two cigarettes per day, one after lunch, one after supper. It’s my routine, and I stick to it. But I was sorely tempted to make an exception now, knowing that I was heading out of the frying pan and possibly straight into the fire.
I stared out of the car window, trying hard to ignore the pounding of my heart as the hotels, theatres and pavement cafés of the West End gave way to the grand Victorian buildings of Lincoln’s Inn Fields and the legal quarter, and then the steel-and-glass high-rises of the City. Finally, the wealth slipped away and we were into the poorer tenements and terraced housing that was the sprawling East End. This area of London had suffered most under the bombardment of the Luftwaffe in the Second World War, and it showed in the slapdash nature of much of the architecture: Victorian tenements, 1950s terraces, 1960s tower blocks, all running into one another to the cheerful beats of Tommy’s Best of Level 42 CD.
Tommy, I’d found out in the time I’d known him, was a big fan of 1980s music, and particularly Level 42. He’d been singing along pretty much non-stop to the tracks throughout the journey, occasionally accompanied by Tommy Junior howling from the back seat, creating an out-of-tune cacophony that would have made me gouge out my own eyes if I hadn’t been so preoccupied. Finally, as one of the band’s lesser hits, ‘Microkid’, came on, Tommy seemed to notice for the first time that I wasn’t saying much.
He turned down the music. ‘Listen, Sean, you’re not scared, are you?’
‘No, I’ve just been struck dumb by the quality of your and Tommy Junior’s singing.’
He chuckled. ‘“Lessons in Love” is Tommy Junior’s favourite. He really catches the high notes on that one.’ He turned to me, his face growing serious again. ‘I can vouch for these blokes, you know. The ones you’re buying off. I’ve done stuff with them myself before. They’re reliable.’
Which was a refrain I’d heard plenty of times before about criminals. They’re reliable. The problem was, for the most part, they weren’t. They tended to be paranoid, highly strung, violent, and often drugged up, which was a pretty lethal combination. In the course of my career I’ve had two guns pulled on me, four knives, an axe, a tyre iron, baseball bats, even a fake medieval ball and chain. I’ve been held down by a gang of crazed thugs, flying on a diet of vodka and crack, who doused me in petrol and threatened to burn me alive unless I gave them the drugs I was supposed to be carrying (I didn’t, and they didn’t), and many’s the time I’ve woken up in the morning wondering when my luck’s going to run out.
But in spite of all that, I knew I could never give up the job. I was too much of a believer in the old adage: evil triumphs when good men do nothing. Evil was doing pretty well as it was these days, and there was no shortage of those doing nothing. When I was a young kid, I went to sleep at night thinking that there was a copper standing guard on the street outside my window, there to protect me from all the creatures who haunt the nightmares of children, and it always comforted me to believe he was there. Now I was that copper, and there were plenty of people out there relying on me.
It was just after one p.m. when Tommy pulled into a decrepit-looking street of pre-war terraced housing north of the Barking Road. One end of the terrace ended suddenly where part of the last house had collapsed into a pile of rubble, and was then replaced by a strip of uneven wasteland on which a burned-out car sat, missing its wheels. Forlorn pieces of litter scattered and drifted across the tarmac in the dusty breeze, and in the distance, red and blue tower cranes rose like mantises above the crumbling skyline. Facing the wasteland on the other side of the road was a line of cheap, windswept shops, the majority of which were either boarded up or had the shutters down.
‘There’s the place,’ said Tommy, parking up and motioning towards a takeaway restaurant called Zafiah’s Fine Jamaican Cuisine, which sat hunched and uninviting next to an empty unit with scorchmarks up its front, like it had been petrol-bombed. A couple of kids in hoodies, their faces hidden, sat on mountain bikes outside, sharing what looked like a joint.
‘It looks closed,’ I said.
‘It is, but they’re expecting us. Just go round to the side door and ask for Mitchell. And check the guns work before you give him any money. I’ll wait here for you.’
I stared at him. ‘You’re really not coming in with me?’
He gave me a regretful, hangdog look that made his fleshy jowls hang down. ‘I can’t, mate. Wolfe wants you to do this alone. It’s his orders. That way he knows he can definitely trust you.’
‘But Wolfe’s not here, Tommy. I don’t even know these guys. You’ve got to help me out here.’
‘There’ll be no problem, Sean. Honest. You’ll be all right.’
It was then that I realized Tommy didn’t trust me entirely either. That I was doing this to prove myself to him as well as to Wolfe. I was well and truly on my own.
‘Do me a favour,’ I said, opening the door. ‘If I’m not out in ten minutes, come and get me.’
He gave me a reassuring smile, said sure, no problem, there was nothing to worry about. But in my game there always is.
It had already been a bad morning, and I had to force myself to get out of the car. At that moment I felt like jacking the whole thing in and applying for desk duties at Scotland Yard, far away from all this crap. The envelope containing the five grand was tucked into the front of my jeans, with my shirt covering it, and even though it was out of sight, I knew I was still vulnerable.