Rat Run Page 12

  She waited, with Ludvik, to be called forward, and wondered how it had been for the two men in the top-floor apartment during the last moments of their lives.

  Flush against the road, bright as a temple of light, was the gaol wall. They cruised down Artillery Lane.

  Ricky Capel did not know how many hundreds of men were held in HMP Wormwood Scrubs. Truth was, he knew little about the prison. He knew about HMP Brixton, about Pentonville and Wandsworth because – as a kid, with his sisters – his mother had dragged him to them and in through the big gates to see his father. What he could remember was that he had screamed and fought and she had held his arm, vice-like, and each time he had seen his father brought through a far door into the visits area, with the screws pressed round him, he had gone quiet and buried his head in his mother's shoulder. He had never looked into his father's face, had never spoken. Out of the big gates, each time, he had run like the wind to the bus stop and not looked back at the walls. But he didn't know Wormwood Scrubs because his father had never done time there.. . He thought his grandfather had, but that was before he was born.

  'Go right,' Ricky said, from the back seat.

  His cousin Davey drove, and his cousin Benji was beside him. His cousin Charlie was next to Ricky in the back. They turned into Ducane Road. Davey was a harder enforcer than Ricky, didn't care a fuck about the blood he drew and the pain he inflicted. Benji was a clearer thinker than Ricky, scratched at an idea till there was a plan to execute it. Charlie had more comprehension of money and how to move it than Ricky, how to wash and rinse and scrub it clean. But the decision-taking was Ricky's, and he brought together their differing talents. When Ricky, the youngest of them by five clear years, said what would happen there was no disagreement. His leadership was accepted.

  The gaol, brilliant under the high arc-lights, fascinated Ricky. He had never been in prison. Few secrets existed between Ricky and the cousins; but his fear of prison was one of them. It was not something he would confide to them, to Joanne, his parents or his grandfather. He kept the secret close, but it lurked in his mind as he peered up at the height of the walls.

  Only the top floor of the nearest wing was visible, lights behind small barred windows, some of which had washing draped outside. Inside the car, even with the window down and straining to listen, he heard nothing. However many hundreds of men were there, and staff, and however many barred gates there were to slam shut, no sounds came from the place.

  'Go right again.'

  'There's cameras on us,' Benji murmured.

  'I said, go right again.'

  'Sure thing, Ricky.' Davey eased the wheel, took them into Wulfstan Street, and past the quarters for prison staff. A curl of contempt licked at the side of Ricky's mouth. Two screws were walking on the pavement, anoraks over their uniform shirts, each carrying a plastic supermarket bag with the possessions they took home from their shift.

  'Then right again – isn't this the place, Benji, what you were talking about?'

  'Braybrook Street, spot on, Ricky.'

  'Tell me about it, like you did.'

  They left behind the north-west corner of the prison's perimeter and Davey slowed to a crawl.

  Behind them were the walls, the lights, the wire and hundreds of men – Ricky twisted a last time to see – then, to the right, was a great open mass of darkness, football pitches, open parkland and the floodlights of a running stadium. On the left, behind a line of parked cars, were semi-detached homes like the one where Ricky lived with Joanne and Wayne.

  'It's Braybrook Street, late sixties, sixty-six or

  – seven. There's three guys in a car and they've got shooters and they're parked up and killing time before a job's ready. A police car, three blokes in it, comes by and doesn't like them sitting there. They're going to do a check on the vehicle.'

  'Like it will be if we don't keep moving. Go on, Benji.' It was as if Ricky were an addict, needed the fix of hearing the story again now that he was here, a gawper in the shadows between the street's lights and half hidden by the parked cars.

  'One of them in the vehicle's Roberts, Harry Roberts. The first copper leans through the window and starts with his questions. Roberts shoots him, then gets out, shoots the second copper in the street. I think that's the story, and the third one's shot in the police wheels. Two of them's gone, but Roberts is still inside, or was last time I read about him. Thirty-some-thing years he's done.'

  'Mad, wasn't he?'

  'It was just after they'd finished with the rope. A few months earlier and they'd all have hanged.

  Roberts didn't get hanged but he's done thirty-eight years and-'

  'OK, OK, I heard you.' Ricky didn't need the story any more. 'Wasn't smart, was it?' In unison, the cousins nodded agreement. 'Right, let's get on back – what's the business?'

  They drove away from the gaol. •

  Charlie said, 'The big new growth area is behind that wall and behind that wire. Class-A stuff is what they want when they're banged up. They want brown and they want coke, and I reckon it's Es as well. What I hear, eight out of ten who go down are showing traces of class-A stuff when they have the check on arrival. That's a heavy market, which is not tapped into. There's no organization for regular supply and that presents an opportunity too good to miss out on.

  The key thing is "regular", and there's no exploitation of the market yet. There's useful money to be had and it's where we should be.'

  Ricky sniggered. 'What you'd call a captive market…'

  The cousins all laughed, always did at Ricky's humour.

  'How do we get it in?'

  Benji said, 'Three ways I've identified. First, quite simply, you chuck it over the wall. The price is going down, the street price is depressed because of supply and demand – supply's terrific – and you get some joker with a good arm and he lobs the packets over, and you accept the screws'll find two out of every three, but if you time it for exercise hours the chance is that you'll win with thirty-three and a third per cent. Tennis balls are good, split open, stuff inside, then taped up, and they're fine for chucking. They do that up in Manchester I've heard. Second, you use visitors. Do all the orifices, know what I mean? If there were proper detailed searches on visits there'd be uproar, a mutiny, and not half the people would get inside to see the people. But that's getting harder because there are more dogs and more scanners that sniff the class-A stuff. It's also dispersal of effort. To get good quantities in you have to use too many mules who're swallowing and stuffing – and clogging up the visitors' toilets. Third, you find a screw with a problem – debt, sick kiddie, girlfriend who likes the good life. One screw for one gaol, and he goes in once a week and he has one distributor on the inside.

  The screw's not going to turn himself in, and the distributor doesn't have to know where it's coming from – so there's a cut-out.'

  'How do you get the payback?'

  Davey said, 'That's the distributor's problem whichever way you go, Ricky. It's for him to organize.

  Every taker he sells to has to make the arrangements for payment outside, and the distributor's responsible for getting the cash together. If he's messing you, Ricky, then he's walking a fine line. Bad things can happen to him inside. And bad things can happen to his family outside, and he knows that.'

  He had the outline for the enterprise from his cousins. His decision. None of them would have presumed to tell him what that decision should be. They were in the late-evening traffic on the Harrow Road, heading for London's central streets.

  'We'll set up the Scrubs first, and if that works we'll go for Wandsworth – I'm not touching Pentonville or Brixton. We'll create a weekly guaranteed supply to one distributor. We find a screw, or a workshops-supervisor guy to take it in. That's how it's going to be.'

  Davey grunted assent.

  'Good thinking, Ricky,' Charlie said.

  A little irritant anxiety broke in Ricky Capel. Would they ever tell him he was wrong? Then a mirthless chuckle came into his throat and
a smile cracked the smoothness of his face. He was never wrong. His father had been, not Ricky, and his grandfather had made enough mistakes to get himself inside more than he was out. Davey would drive them across London and they'd pick up the old man, who'd have had a gut full, and bring him home.

  ***

  In a corner far from the bar, Percy Capel sat with his cronies. The British Legion, its members former servicemen, was home from home. He was a legend there and he bathed in the glory of the story, which was enhanced by his refusal to talk detail.

  Inside the Legion building, tucked away from the bar – to which he seldom went for drinks but allowed others to fill his glass – it was well known that he had been behind enemy lines in the Second World War for months, and should have had a medal for it.

  At those November ceremonies in front of rain-swept memorials – as the retired squadron leader, their chairman, intoned his address – he and the others present, at awkward attention, wore the medals given them. Percy Capel should have had the Military Medal for his service in Albania: Major Anstruther had been given the Military Cross. What they all knew in the Legion bar was that Percy had been flown back to Alexandria, and the medal citation had gone up to the Gods for ratification – and that Percy had then been nicked by the Redcaps for stealing the petty cash out of a staff officer's bedroom while the bugger slept there. The way he told it, Percy had the cash off the dressing-table and was on his way out when the bedroom rug had gone walkabout under his weight, slid on the polished marble floor, and he'd gone arse over tit and wrecked his ankle. He'd scarpered down a drainpipe and been lifted while he was limping back to barracks. Two years in the glass-house at Shepton Mallet after repatriation in close arrest. When he told that story and the refills of his glass came thick and fast – 'Oh, don't mind if I do' – laughter bellowed the length and width of the bar. But he never talked, for a pint or a laugh, about Albania.

  Some tried and failed.

  His reply was always the same: 'Saw things done there, my friend, that would make your hair stand-not things for talking of in company.'

  Could have talked about the major, the greatest man he'd ever known. Major Hugo Anstruther, who was lined up to inherit thousands of Highland acres, and a titled wife, had taught Percy Capel – his batman, handyman and donkey-minder – everything a man needed to know in the arts of safe-blowing and burglary, and everything a man did not need to know, except in Albania, about how to slit a sentry's throat silently and plant explosives on a bridge that would be detonated under a convoy, sending men, screaming, to death. On the flight out, after the Huns' surrender, Major Anstruther had said to him, 'I think, Percy, you'd be wise to forget most of what you learned with me or at best you'll spend most of the rest of your life locked up and at worst you'll go to the gallows.' He'd seen the death notice for the major, nine years ago, in a newspaper. That night he'd gone on the overnight sleeper to Fort William, taken a bus, then walked four miles and reached a little stone church as they were lifting the major's coffin from the hearse. He'd stood at the back. Anstruther had had the full works: medals on the coffin, piper to play him out, estate workers in their best clothes and enough children and grandchildren to fill a charabanc.

  Nobody had spoken to Percy. They'd just walked by him like he was a dog turd. Rain coming down heavy, and him in his one suit that he'd wear next at Winifred's funeral, and then at his own.

  When they'd all left, just the gravedigger left to smack his spade into the lumps of sodden clay and fill the pit, he'd gone close. The gravedigger had been young and a self-rolled fag hung on his lip. Percy, drenched, had said that he had fought with the major in Albania. 'Where's that?' Water streaming down his face and through his suit jacket, Percy had said he and the major had been comrades in arms. 'When was that?' He'd walked back four miles, had waited two hours for a bus, and caught the night sleeper to London. He had a week in bed with the shivers from his soaking.

  They didn't need to know, in the Legion bar, about Major Anstruther and the gang in the cave led by Mehmet Rahman.

  Percy Capel didn't buy drinks. Could have done.

  He had his war pension and his old-age pension, and he lived for free with his son and daughter-in-law and wanted for nothing, and he had the hundred a week in cash that Ricky gave him. Ricky knew about Albania and Mehmet Rahman, and had traded on his grandfather's war. Percy hated his grandson but still took his money.

  He was in full flight. 'I was doing this job, a real big property down in Esher – that's a bit off my beat but I'd read in the paper who these folk were – and I'm upstairs and pocketing the stuff and a bloody dog, sounding like a wolf, is up and roaring at the closed door. I'm doing a double-fast runner, down the drainpipe, when…'

  Ricky stood at the far end of the bar. Hand up, finger beckoning.

  'Sorry, guys. Got to go. My round next time. Doesn't like to be kept waiting.'

  He shuffled towards the door, leaving the laughter stifled and his drink unfinished. The talk at home, over the years, about Major Hugo Anstruther and Mehmet Rahman, the little case of mementoes under his bed, had launched the little piece of vermin. He was responsible in part for the empire of his grandson

  … God, it weighed on him.

  'Coming, Ricky. Good of you to collect me.'

  Everyone danced to Ricky, just as Percy Capel did.

  Harry, who was Sharon Capel's brother, danced any way that Ricky wanted him to dance. By dancing, he kept the dream alive.

  He was in the wheelhouse and rocked gently in the skipper's seat as the Anneliese Royal swayed at its mooring ropes. She was ready to sail, except for the ice. Before dawn they would be gone. In an hour Billy and young Paul would drive up to the quay, the ice would be loaded, they would slip the ropes and be gone into the night. Billy had monitored the forecast and told him that for this week weather conditions were predicted as good, not the week after.

  He read and he dreamed, and the dream was his sole escape from Ricky Capel.

  The dream was of finding a Brixham-built trawler, a boat from the south Devon yards of eighty years ago.

  It might be up a creek in the south-west, or tied up and forgotten on the Hamble, or left to rot on the mudflats outside a port in Scotland or on the Isle of Man. If after all those years of inactivity – because the diesel engine had taken over from sail power by the late 1940s, which had dictated the dumping of the old trawler fleet – he could discover a trawler with a sound hull and a good keel, Harry's dream would be launched. In his retirement, free of Ricky Capel, he would potter on the carcass of the boat and hope that, before his death, he would have resurrected it, placed in it a new mast, scrubbed the decks and varnished them till they shone, and could put to sea, move across the water at a crisp seven or eight knots in a south-westerly with the full red sails that were the colour of Devon earth – and be in heaven.

  He had an hour to read before they brought the ice on board.

  But dreams needed paying for. Without Ricky's money, the dream would die.

  The book – reminiscences and anecdotes of life on the old powered trawlers – was faded, frayed and had stains on the pages from fingers that had dripped with the fluid of fish stomachs.

  When he finished a favourite passage, he locked away the book and waited for the pickup's headlights to spear across the quay. They would fish for five days

  – without having to navigate towards a marker buoy off Cuxhaven or the rock outcrop of Helgoland to collect a waterproof package – then come back and moor in harbour during the length of the forecast storm, and maybe go to the west and home.

  Finally, she had been permitted inside.

  Past midnight, and Polly had climbed the stone staircase and had allowed Ludvik's hand to remain on her arm as she stepped over the debris left by the firemen.

  A mass of floodlights used by the police and men of the BIS played over the interior. The rain came through the ceiling where the fire had destroyed the roof and pattered on her head. From the doorway, four ladd
ers were laid out over the exposed floor beams because the planks had gone. Two had been placed so that they gave access to either side of the charred heap that had been left untouched by the fire crew.

  She shuddered. The smell of the burning, which had been doused by the hoses, then damped by the rain, caught in her nose, but overriding it was a stronger stench, sweet and sickly. She had never been close up to it before, but instinctively she knew it.

  Quite deliberately, not brooking argument, she pushed Ludvik aside, then sharply tapped the shoulder of a man in front of her and gestured for him to move out of her path. He shifted, and the lights dazzled her through her steel-rimmed, unfashionable spectacles. She shoved her hair out of her face and hitched her skirt high over her knees; if her tights laddered that was of no importance. She slipped plastic gloves over her hands. She had authority because the BIS, the successor to the former Communist regime's StB, had been trained in modern counter-intelligence techniques by agencies from the United Kingdom. She knelt on the ladder to the left of the heap, steeled herself, then reached for a further rung and began to edge out over the open beams.

  She was slight but the ladder creaked under her weight, and the cold snatched at her bared legs. She came closer to the source of the stench, and called over her shoulder: 'Has anything here been touched or moved?'

  Ludvik answered her: 'Only by the fire, not by us.'

  The lights stayed on the heap and the stench drew her forward. She reached out towards the growing clarity of the shapes. Nearest to her was the machine pistol, scorched and lying among burned bedding. At the Fort, above the coast outside Portsmouth, she had done weapons training with the bland instructors who thought all recruits were idiots. Polly had been one of the few who had listened… She lifted the barrel, held it pointing to the rainclouds between the beams and passed it behind her, careful that the trigger did not snag. It was taken. She found five blackened magazines and knew from their weight that their bullets had been exhausted. As her hands groped closer to the largest unrecognizable shape in the pile, a sharp, wounding little memory came back to her. She had been driving with Dominic to Scotland for their first week away after they had met. They had been near the border and had stopped to picnic but a cloud had come dark over them from Longtown, made by the funeral pyre of the animals slaughtered to contain the epidemic of foot-and-mouth. They had hurried on but the stench had stayed in the car, even with all the windows open. Dominic was gone, but not the memory of the stench.