London Large: Blood on the Streets (10 page)

‘What if, what if I buy you a
nice cup of tea and a doughnut will you get the printouts for me?’

She laughed out loud as she
agreed to meet him for lunch, the wry humour signifying to her that he was starting
to refocus on the case. Truth was, the investigation team were starting to
gather some sound evidence and develop a detailed knowledge of the new eastern
European firm on the block. But they needed H. They needed H to get in amongst
it, to get amongst the dirt and dig around in it the way only H knew how.

As he sat waiting for Ronnie
he opened the file and took out its contents. Amisha had put the pictures of
the top two protagonists at the front. He studied the pictures of Basim
Dragusha and Vladimir Agapov and read the basic notes. As far as they could
tell Dragusha had arrived in London about six months before. Not long after,
the violence had escalated. H didn’t believe in coincidences.

Dragusha had taken up
residence on The Island, which was now under 24 hour surveillance. He was
ruthless, yes, but also smart and ambitious. He was no thug sent by his masters
to manage low level gangster business. He was here to get a firm foothold, no
doubt about it. H flicked through an assortment of photographs of Dragusha’s
more recently arrived strength, read what information Amisha and the team had
amassed on them and committed it all to memory.

He then turned to Agapov, who
had been a player in London for some time and was already well known to H. Him
and his small army had taken control of significant parts of the London
underworld and, in particular, cornered the market in people trafficking. For H
this was truly the vilest of all gangland activities, a modern slave trade at
the heart of the capital. He was determined to bust the thing wide open.

I’ll give these bastards
what they deserve.

Various parts of Agapov’s
organisation had been under surveillance for months. No arrests had been made
so far. H had wanted to move on their setup in Peter Street and take Agapov out
of the picture, but Hilary insisted on playing the long game. She had an
inkling there were bigger fish to fry so H was told to wait it out and gather
evidence.

He then turned to the
pictures of the two headless bodies that had been washed up in the Thames, in
Deptford; bodies that fitted perfectly with the two heads the Russians had
tossed into the mix in Bermondsey. It had taken a while but both men had been
formally identified as being known associates of Dragusha.

Ouch! Must be some serious
revenge being planned. Surprised it hasn’t happened already.

H read through the rest of
the notes. It seemed Amisha had been very thorough in gathering evidence and
perhaps soon some major police assault and arrests would be prepared, hopefully
before it all kicked off again. He wanted to get back to work, to make sure he
was involved in whatever was being planned.

Good girl Ames, good work.

He turned to the second file
on his lap. Amisha had taken a big personal risk in doing what he asked but the
update on the Tara case sat before him. He opened the file and started reading.
His mood worsened. It was clear that there had been no progress. No progress
whatsoever. Nish. Nada. Nic.

There was no information on
the identity of the nutter in the park. No connection to the gangland war
ravaging London’s streets. In all his years of coppering H had never known
anything like it. A murderer is taken out at the scene of the crime and six
days later not a single thing about him or his motives is known. Had it really
been just a random act of violence? An indiscriminate killing by a lone wolf, a
solitary, highly trained killer who had sprung organically from the St James’s
Park undergrowth?

Not fucking likely.

Sir Basil, drowning in grief,
was all but unapproachable. And despite the grand public shows of support from
Old Shitbreath’s friends, they appeared to be treating the hapless
Miller-Marchant with utter contempt. He seemed incapable of penetrating their
clique in order to garner even elementary facts about Tara’s personal life.
Anything that might provide the most basic of clues seemed beyond him. Rather
surprisingly H felt a ripple of sympathy for Little Manbot. H knew these
people, with their private clubs and associations, their old school ties, their
walls of silence.

He knew these people alright;
and he knew he didn’t like them. He hated them.

H’s anger was about to
burst out of his chest when Ronnie appeared from his flat. He suppressed it,
knowing that today, of all days, he had to keep it together.

‘Ready son?’ H said as Ronnie
clambered in.

Ronnie said nothing, just
exhaled massively and shook his head. No. Not ready. Not ready for this.

They drove down in near
silence. Ronnie could not have looked so forlorn and lost, H thought, since
Goose Green.

Poor fucker. He’s in bits.
Don’t feel all that clever myself
.

The miles rolled on - Ronnie
mute, H in the kind of agitated state he couldn’t put a name to - until eighty
or so of them had passed. The old house came into view. H pulled up next to the
high Cotswold Stone wall. Ronnie, in the passenger seat, was staring ahead and
gulping hard. H touched him on the shoulder; out they got. Through the gate and
into the grounds, and there was the clan, and its hangers on, in full array.

‘Stay close H’, said Ronnie.

‘Count on it, son.’

Ronnie led the way in, moving
slowly and nodding to people as he went. He stationed himself just outside the
chapel, on the opposite side of the door to the rest. He did not look at them.
But H did. He saw a fair bit of private muttering as they entered and plenty of
side-of-the-mouth stuff going on among the cliques. H found himself back in the
zone, itching and twitching.

What is it with these
people?

They were summoned inside;
Tara and Jemima were already there.

Sir Basil - looking haggard, hunched
and a hundred years old, and dressed, indeed, in some sort of Edwardian funeral
getup - delivered the eulogy. He extolled his daughters’ virtues, their beauty,
their achievements, and tried to say something about the family’s sense of
loss. He was having a hard time bearing up, an impossible time, and H felt a
pang of sympathy for him. The sight of the
two
coffins, side by side at
the front of the chapel, was overwhelming everybody. This was too much to take
in.

Ronnie sat still throughout,
staring at the ground, sobbing quietly. H, from time to time, put his arm
around Ronnie’s silently heaving shoulders, and had to bite down hard to
prevent himself from losing it.

Outside, the gloom had
deepened; the sky had moved from slate grey to near black. H and Ronnie could
see it as they processed down the aisle, hard by Sir Basil and Jemima’s husband
Oliver (a
gormless lump
, as Ronnie had him, who was ‘something in the
city’). Only nods were exchanged. Along with these two, they would be last out.

People had arranged
themselves around the garden in a semi-circle, waiting for the coffins to
emerge. The wind howled and the sky threatened rain. H was struck by the extent
to which Ronnie was keeping his distance from Tara’s family. He was polite to
condolence-bearers when they approached him, but made no effort to go beyond
himself and engage other people. To Sir Basil he had not said a single word.

‘How’s it going Ron?’

‘I can’t have a lot more of
this H. I want to do the off at the earliest available, alright?’

‘Yep, no argument from me on
that score son. Ready when you are.’

The coffins came, and H saw
Ronnie set his feet far apart and dig them in. To stop his legs from buckling.
This, H understood, was to be an orgy of old-school, stiff upper lipped
Englishness. No wailing or moaning or gnashing of teeth for these paragons of
rectitude. H respected them for it. Better that way.

It was only as the coffins
were loaded into the hearse that a few little moans and sobs could be heard.
But Ronnie stood firm as they pulled away, and out of sight. Out of sight
forever.

He exhaled. ‘Get me the fuck
out of here, H.’

‘On our way son’, said H,
taking him by the arm.

They moved towards the gate
with as much speed as propriety would allow. They heard whispering and
muttering behind them, but they did not look back.

It had been a
boneshaker of a ride across Eastern Europe, through Germany and the
Netherlands, followed by the small fishing boat to an inlet on the Suffolk
coast, and thereafter the ride south-westward.

The two battered transit vans
pulled up to their clandestine location, a private garage just off of
Camberwell Green, in the early hours of the morning. If anyone had been around
to see its fatal cargo they would have marvelled at how much you can fit into a
couple of vans. If the twenty silent men of serious intent were not enough, the
heavy crates that followed them seemed to defy the physics of available space.

One by one Dragusha greeted
the new arrivals with a hug, making sure he paid individual attention to every
one of them, looking each of them in the eye. His fierce eyes were discernible
in the half light of the single faint bulb that illuminated the garage, and his
stare held each of them in turn, like mice frozen under the fierce gaze of a
marauding cat. He knew most of the men, and trusted them. But the bosses had
sent some new recruits. In the battle to come he needed to know the men he
stood with would hold firm under fire and assure them, without words, that the
consequences of letting him down were worse than anything the Russians could
serve them up with. The boxes were cracked open to reveal an arsenal of
automatic rifles, handguns and some hand grenades thrown in for good measure.
Dragusha rallied the troops and dished out the weaponry.

‘Welcome to London. You
travel many miles, and must be tired. I understand. But we have problems that
must be dealt with quickly. Take rest but soon we move. Take strength and
courage from knowing we will soon avenge our brothers.’

He rolled out a blown up map
of the location the small army had come to obliterate - a certain private
members club in Peter Street - and went through the plan, if a plan it could be
called. Paraphrased, in its essentials it was pretty much ‘rock up, kick the
doors in and annihilate everything that moves.’

‘Make no mistake. No one
leaves club alive.’

When it comes to putting your
life on the line most men, if given a choice, will sooner run for cover than
face a bullet. But Dragusha was a rare creature - he was excited by danger and
the thought of the ensuing battle filled him with rampant expectation. His will
to succeed, to persevere in the face of the odds stacked against him would not
be cowed by a couple of severed heads thrown into a shithole of a caravan site
on the wrong side of London.

The men ate sandwiches and
sipped on water. One of Dragusha’s rules was no alcohol before a slaughter – it
took the edge off too much and led to a sloppy and inefficient kind of courage.
He was happy for his men to drink, but rakia and vodka were for after the
battle. Celebrate the victory and lament the dead. And dead there would be - no
question about that.

They
clambered back into the vans. Dragusha
rode shotgun in the lead vehicle. As they pulled
out into the back streets of south east London an eerie silence saturated the
world. It was the time of night by which most people had locked themselves into
the relative safety of their homes, the time of night when the city is
transformed into a different place, where different characters populate the
streets.

This was a desperate
area - one half of the populace were unemployed and the other half were under-employed,
scraping a living below the radar. Dull concrete flanked them on both sides;
boarded windows and vandalised doors offered an insight into a world where
burglary and petty crime were a standard part of everyday existence.

The convoy
emerged into Camberwell New Road and then left towards the Elephant and Castle.
A group of foxes that had migrated deep into the heart of the city
criss-crossed the deserted roads with impunity, feeding on the scraps that even
the tenants of the decimated concrete jungles had seen fit to discard.

The van
snaked its way past Camberwell and into the Walworth Road. Dragusha looked on
with indifference at two lost souls huddled by a shop window - frozen,
vanished, undead - and listened with indifference as a far off scream broke the
silence. He had seen and heard much worse in his time, back in the old country.
A rare walker crossed in front of them accompanied by three Pitbull Terriers,
the attack dog of choice of the denizens of this shattered dump - best not to
go out without your bodyguards this time of night.

The convoy
rolled on, right at the Elephant roundabout and then left towards Westminster.
Halfway there. You could cut the tension inside the vans with a knife. The
ever-present curls of cigarette smoke hung thick and impenetrable, making the
atmosphere as claustrophobic as a coffin.

Dragusha
broke the silence.

‘London is
shithole, yeah? But shithole with money.’

The men
laughed. The tension eased a little.

Even after
six months in the city he could barely differentiate one south east London
concrete housing estate from another. But as they approached Westminster Bridge
the city started to come to life. This was 24 hour London, the London the
tourist board sold to the globe, the London of iconic landmarks seen on
websites and picture postcards everywhere. Landmarks that were known all over
the world passed by them, half-noticed by the rows of sombre men sat in the
rear of the vans. Westminster Bridge, The Houses of Parliament, Trafalgar
Square, that monument to a deadly battle several lifetimes ago, remembered now
just as an innocent fable, distant and unreal. But the battle about to erupt on
London’s streets would be in the present, in the now, and, in its own way, as
bloody and as deadly as anything that happened in a far off time on a far off
sea.