(2005) Rat Run (14 page)

It was a gesture, covert or obvious, and one to be ignored. Lesser men than Timo Rahman were in the maximum-security wing of the gaol at Fuhlsbuttel.

Other than to visit a blood relation eleven years back he had never been there, and such visits were now inappropriate and beneath his stature.

He did not remark on the Passat, two cars back in the traffic behind them, neither did the Bear.

It was the assumption of Timo Rahman that every remark he made - in his bedroom, his kitchen, his car, at a business meeting - was overheard by audio devices. He had been told that the police of the Organisierte Kriminalitat boasted to favoured politicians that the equipment available to them was the best in Europe. Nothing that incriminated him ever passed his lips and those he dealt with were schooled at the same desk. He discussed with the Bear, as the VW Passat followed them, the weather forecast for that day in northern Germany, as any of his neighbours would have.

Inside the speed limit, the Bear drove down

Elbchaussee. Set back from the wide road, which wound down from the high ground above the river, were the great mansions where the elite of the city's commerce and banking had made their homes, with views across the estuary to the Airbus factory. He could have lived there, could have moved Alicia and the girls into an Elbchaussee home, but it would have drawn attention to him. Timo lived in Blankenese, without the views, among the chief executives and principal department heads, and did not draw comment. But his financial empire, always moving on a steady path to greater legitimacy, based on stocks and bonds, property holdings and aircraft leasings, could have bought him the best.

Fewer than a dozen men - and the woman whose face had been at the upper window of his home

- could have brought down the empire of the
pate,
could have consigned Timo Rahman to the

Fuhlsbuttel gaol by their testimony He had no fear of them. Alicia, watched by her aunt in all her waking hours at the villa, was incapable of action. The Bear could have sent him to the prison they called 'Santa-Fu', but the idea was ludicrous. The net of loyalty around Timo - of which the Bear was part - was the same in Hamburg as it was in the mountains of Albania. It was based on the centuries-old diktats laid out in the
Canun
of Lek Dukagjen, was based on the
besa,
which was a man's word of honour - and violation created an inevitable
hakmarrje,
the blood feud. As his father had in Albania, Timo Rahman sat at the head of a clan, a
fis,
in Hamburg. He had brought with him the disciplines of the
Canun
from the village north of Shkodra to the richest of German cities, and with his baggage had been the im-penetrable strength of the
fis.

The route the Bear took him that day was past the old fish market, where he had been shot by a Russian in the right side of his upper chest. It was when the Russians had come, refugees, into the city, sensed the wealth of the pickings - narcotics, weapons, girls

- and sought to muscle aside the power in place. Some of the Russian groups had been 'persuaded' at gunpoint to go elsewhere; some had laughed at the advice and had fought for territory. Timo's way had sent the message five times. Russians dead, packed like herrings into ice boxes, then dumped in the boots of cars, which were pushed off the quay of the fish market car park into the waters of the Elbe. The man who had shot him, spitting through his gag,

struggling to break the rope on his elbows, had gone into the boot of his Mercedes and he - Timo - had slammed down the lid. All the way to the quay's edge there had been kicking inside the b o o t . . . and he had helped to push the car over the edge. He had had no more difficulties with Russians. Three or four of the men who had helped him in those days, twelve years before, could have put him with their testimony into a cell at the Santa-Fu, but they were all the gjak, blood relations, who would not have contemplated betrayal.

The Passat remained behind them, and took the same turn away from the fish market. Political friends, men bought with money, told him of the director of the unit that dealt with what they designated organized crime. The pinnacle of the director's police career would be the conviction of Timo Rahman, but he would never reach it.

The Bear headed for the Reeperbahn. It was where Timo had begun, where he had been knifed. He took the narrow cut through and they were held up behind a tourist bus that paused for photographs of the street with the high wall at its end and the gap through which only pedestrians could go to the brothels. At the police station, high and brickbuilt on the corner of the Reeperbahn, where the detectives had always failed to link him to ownership and 'immoral earnings', the Bear swung right and into the wide street.

Young, fresh from Albania, he had dismissed the Germans who ran the Reeperbahn, fought them and overwhelmed them. Three or four of those who had been at his side in that little war of guns and knives, all Albanians from the northern mountains, could have sworn evidence and imprisoned him, but they were miqs, relatives by marriage, and would have died rather than be accused of treachery against him.

Now, increasingly, he was clean. His business activities were distant from the wars on which he had built his empire. The Bear brought him to

Schauenburgstrasse and the premises of one of the oldest and most respected legal companies in Hamburg. A fellow guest, but arriving by a different doorway off the street, would be a city politician against whom no stigma of corruption existed. In a private room, over lunch, there would be discussion on the development funds necessary for the building of high-quality offices on one of the few bombsites remaining from the
Feuersturm
; minor investment and major profit in return for development permission being nodded through Planning. Neither the

politician nor the lawyer who would chair the discussion, knew of the
Canun
or of the
fis,
had little comprehension of the reach of a blood feud and the vicious reprisals that could be brought down on them and their families, but they understood the threat of public disgrace that an appearance in court would bring them and those they loved, and they would not have lasted a sentence of imprisonment in the Fuhlsbuttel gaol. He was safe from them.

For Timo Rahman the meeting was routine. A

matter of greater complexity was nagging in his mind as he took the lift to the upper floor where the lawyer practised hospitality. That matter, the rewards for which were great and the challenge huge, would take him to the western coastline. It excited him because the ground to be covered and the cargo to be delivered were new to him, and the risk to his security was devastating. He shook the lawyer's hand and was ushered inside. What nagged at him was his feeling of certainty that the man he must rely on was a foreigner with no understanding of the loyalties of Timo's people, the grandson of his father's comrade in war, Ricky Capel. The coded name Timo had given him, spoken with contempt, was 'Mouseboy'.

Rubbish day, and from the window Sharon Capel, matriarch certainly of number eight and probably of all Bevin Close, saw the bin lorry edge into the top of the cul-de-sac. Her own wheelie was outside her front gate, on the pavement, but her daughter-in-law next door received better treatment because the boys came down the side of that house to collect her wheelie, then put it back by the kitchen door. Joanne had that small luxury because nothing that concerned her husband, Ricky, was too much trouble for the bin-boys.

Sharon had lost track of time. If she had realized how late it was in the morning she would not have been dusting in the front room. She kept the house spotlessly clean because there was little else for her to do. It hadn't always been that way. She had been in Men's Underwear at British Home Stores for most of Ricky's childhood, and spent evenings washing up in a cafe, all the years that Mikey was 'away' doing bird and his share of what had not been retrieved by the Old Bill was running down. Mikey had been in Brixton, Wandsworth and Pentonville too long and too often . . . and when he was out she had kept up the jobs because the big one that he was going to retire on always fucked up. Mikey had been between release and rearrest on a day when the bin lorry had come into Bevin Close. That same day, Ricky had been a month past his twelfth birthday - and from that day his sisters, Therese and Rachel, had detested him.

Small wonder that Therese now lived in Australia and didn't write, and Rachel was in Canada and didn't ring. They should have beaten him that day, made a

line and queued up to thrash the little sod - but none of them had. He had stood by the door with his fists clenched and no one had dared face him down when the bin lorry had come along Bevin Close.

It was the day she had realized the nature of her son.

The cat was a coal-black neutered torn and the family called it Soot. It was worshipped by the girls and however many bloody years Mikey had been inside it always greeted him when he came out, like he was Soot's favourite. The cat was old and could be

'caught short'. That morning, wheelie-bin day, Soot had been shut inside little Ricky's room - probably an open window downstairs had slammed the door.

Ricky had gone to his room and found that it had crapped right in the middle of his bed. He'd brought the cat down, holding it helpless by the neck, and before any of them could intervene, he had wrung the cat's neck, then smiled, like it was nothing, and taken it outside the front, where the wheelie was waiting for the bin lorry. He had lifted the lid, dropped the cat inside, then gone straight back upstairs, brought down his bedding and dumped that in the wheelie too. He'd come back in, had stood by the door and had dared them, his grandad and his nan, his mum, dad and sisters, to do something. If he had screamed abuse at them, they would have done 'something'.

Not like that... calm as anything, a little smile at the side of his mouth and no creases on his face. His eyes

- Christ, his eyes - had been so bloody cold that they'd terrified her. Not just her: Mikey, who had been a quality get-away driver for wages snatches, and Percy, who had been a one-man crime wave in

burglary after his demob. All of them frightened by a boy of twelve because of what was in his eyes.

She went on with the dusting and cleaning. Because of the money her son gave Mikey, she didn't have to work, didn't have to do anything but keep the house clean and cook his favourite meals, and she doubted he even remembered killing the cat.

That day there was a harsher atmosphere on the Amersham. Malachy sensed it.

Not a new dawn, but more a day clouded with

uncertainty. He walked.

Old ladies did not linger to gossip with friends as they would usually have done during the daylight hours, kids were not on the soccer spaces, young mothers stampeded with their prams, and the

vagrants had disappeared, as if they were fearful of taking the blame for what had happened.

He went right round the perimeter of the area that had been, until the early hours of that morning, the territory of the High Fly Boys. He passed doorways of flats that had been deserted since they'd been torched in disputes, past windows that were boarded up because residents had fled, and along the walkways until he reached the steel barricades erected by police to prevent the pushers having free run. He walked by the empty shopfronts and the closed-down daycare centre. Ivanhoe Manners had told him, months before, that more than fifty million pounds for the New Deal for the Community programme had been swallowed by the estate. He could see no evidence of its value. He strode past the never-used garage with parking bay 286. Fear of the unknown blanketed the estate, and it was because of him.

He did his circuit and when he came back to the main entrance of the stairwell of block nine, he stopped, turned and leaned against the concrete.

Had he concern for the estate? Did he care about Millie Johnson? Was he now self-obsessed? No answers. The estate was in shock because the order of its life was altered. Millie Johnson, waiting for the anaesthetist, wouldn't have cared, not a damn. Just self-centred crap to make him, Malachy Kitchen, feel better, think he was taking a worthwhile step on the ladder.

Nothing achieved, nothing changed for the better.

As self-centred, as self-indulgent as when he had been asked to screen suspects from a lift operation and he had remarked to the battalion's adjutant: 'Be happy to - if your Jocks haven't beaten them all half insensible.' Hadn't told the adjutant, or Cherie who shared the Portakabin with him, of the email that had come in that morning. Not from Roz - he hadn't heard from her for three weeks. The email was from Major Arnold - decent Brian Arnold who might have

qualified for the title of kindest old guy at Chicksands.

Hoped he was well, hoped his work was interesting, hoped he'd fitted in, hoped he would note 'There's a lot of bicycling these days round Alamein Drive. One cycle is most popular. Cheers and good wishes from all of us deskbound warriors, Brian.' It meant, in code, that Roz was the base bicycle: the Chicksands honey-pot was his home, halfway down the left-hand side of Alamein Drive. So self-centred that he had snapped the sarcasm at the adjutant, and so self-indulgent that his mind had been a country away from the village street when the ambush had been sprung and the RPG