London Large: Blood on the Streets (15 page)

Absolute fucking zero.

He flinched as the quack
pulled the last of the bullets embedded in his right calf muscle.

‘Sir,’ the doctor said to
Kuznetsov, ‘should I seal wounds now?’

‘No.’

Kuznetsov took a seat.

‘Explain, now. Include all
the details of this feud.’

Agapov’s breaths become short
and sharp. His eyelids were getting heavy. He wasn’t sure how long he’d spent
in hiding before Kuznetsov’s men had picked him up. He’d lost a lot of blood.
He felt he couldn’t last much longer.

The top man administered
another slap.

‘Talk, Vladimir. Now.’

Agapov came around once more
and did his best to recount the details of the last few months. Just a few fist
fights over control of a couple of clubs south of the river at first. Then a
murder, then another in retribution. The cycle of revenge had got out of
control faster than the anger of a spoilt brat who doesn’t get the right toy.

Agapov gave him everything he
knew about their enemy, which was actually very little. He knew where they
lived; he knew, or thought he knew, what their capabilities were. But he had to
confess, he had no idea they were capable of pulling off so devastating an
attack.

‘You lost control, my
friend,’ said Kuznetsov. ‘Too much arrogance, I think. The organisation does
not work well with too much arrogance. And now we have half of the fucking
world crawling all over us.’

Agapov’s breathing stopped.
This sounded like a death sentence.

‘I take care of business
boss?’ said the lead henchman.

‘Not yet. We have two
choices. Bring in a small army from the mother country to destroy the
opposition, or negotiate a settlement. I prefer to negotiate. Vladimir here may
have some use as a sacrificial lamb; these peasants would love to torture him.
But bring our men in anyway, in case the negotiations fail.’

Kuznetsov turned to the
doctor.

‘Give him a blood transfusion
and fix his wounds. Keep him alive. For now.’

‘He’s in interview room
three guv’, said the desk sergeant.

‘How’s he performing?’, asked
H.

‘Keeping schtum. We haven’t
had a peep out of him.’

H barrelled into the room,
alone at his own insistence and in contravention of all the rules, blustering
hard to prevent Dragusha sensing his unease. He was more nervous than he’d ever
been going into an interview with a villain. He wasn’t afraid of Dragusha as
such - he felt confident that in an old school straightener, one on one, no
weapons, he’d be able to handle him. It wasn’t that; it was that he feared what
this sort of man might be capable of, and what that would mean for the
metropolis if he and his kind really gained a foothold.

‘These gangsters don’t follow
any rules at all H’, Confident John had told him a few days before, halfway
through their second day on the scotch All they care about is getting hold of
money, getting control any way they can and going mental, really mental, if
anyone fucks with one of their own. “An eye-for-an-eye” don’t come into it
mate. They’ll chop your bollocks off and feed them to you. Then they’ll go out
and do the same to your brother, or your son, or anyone else they can find.
These are the worst nutters I’ve ever seen. I am absolutely fucked if I know
what you’re going to do with them.’

‘Alright, silly bollocks’, H
began with gusto, ‘let’s not fuck about.’

Dragusha raised his head from
where it had been resting on his forearms and looked H in the eye; his own were
cold and blank as a shark’s. He said nothing, communicated nothing but mute
indifference.

‘Well I know who you are son.
I know who you are and I know what you’ve been up to.’

Nothing. And then nothing.
And then more nothing. This guy was giving him nothing squared.

On and on it went. H gave it
all he had, from all angles, for an hour. He understood, finally, that he would
get nowhere with this, and changed tack.

‘What do you know about Tara
Ruddock? Why were you reading about her?’

At last Dragusha stirred. His
demeanour changed; he swivelled and shimmied in his chair; he was transformed,
from dead-eyed shark to leering wolf.

‘You mean this posh pussy?
Very nice, very nice indeed. Where I come from we know what to do with pussy
like this. She too good for this Russian scum.’

‘What are you talking about?
What Russian scum? Tell me now, or sitting in this nick will be the least of
your fucking problems.’

‘This Agapov’ said Dragusha,
spitting onto the floor, ‘she his whore. She
was
his whore - scum is in
his Russian hell now. Too bad she dead, I would show her good time. I give her
good Albanian sausage.’

H went blank, and lost a few
seconds; when he came to he found himself behind Dragusha’s chair, with the
Albanian’s head in a lock and going hard at his windpipe, running now on pure,
instinctive, vengeful hate, when the door burst open. The desk Sergeant, backed
up by a posse of London’s finest, immobilized his arms and shouted into his
ear ‘H! H! he’s not worth it. Let him go, H!’

H drove back to
Scotland Yard way past the speed limit. His head was spinning. He needed to get
into the surveillance stuff they had on the Russians as soon as possible.

What is this Dragusha
fucker on about? He’s got to be winding me up. How could Tara possibly have
known, let alone been involved with, a piece of shit like Agapov?

These thoughts were
scrambling around the inside of H’s head like lobotomised rats chasing their
tails in a laboratory. None of it made any sense. Tara and Agapov lived their
lives in different social circles, different parts of town, different
worlds
.
Didn’t they? What was this Albanian up to?

Amisha met him in the car
park. She was shocked at how dishevelled, how disordered he looked. He had a
look in his eye she hadn’t seen in him before. Pushed to describe it, she might
have said he was ‘manically confused’ or somesuch; she was concerned that he
might be on the verge of dissociating again.

How can he go on like
this? Sooner or later he’s got to snap. Snap completely, in a way that would
mean we might never get him back.

‘What’s happening guv? I…’

But the big man was not in
listening mode. He swarmed past her, breathless and unsteady, with ‘Upstairs
Ames, now! Incident room. Get me everything we’ve got on the Russian firm -
CCTV, photos, phone records, the fucking lot. All of it. Get it all set out.
Now!’

‘What are we looking for
guv?’

But H still wasn’t listening.
He headed for the lift, jaw working, eyes glazed over, fizzing like a Catherine
Wheel, like a man possessed… but with what? He burst out of the lift at speed,
Amisha struggling to keep up with him. She had seen this before, of course, but
it never ceased to surprise her.

How can a lump like this
move so fast?

She was beginning even to
think in the argot she’d learned from him and his Bermondsey cronies, she
reflected. Was she becoming more like them, more like H himself? Was she
crossing a line? Had she crossed it already, by covering for him so doggedly
while he was out on the piss? She was beginning to understand him better now,
beginning even to feel his pain.

How much pressure can one
make take? How does he manage to deal with it all?

She snapped out of here
mini-reverie as they reached the incident room: ‘What do you want to start with
then guv?’

‘CCTV. From the beginning.’

The surveillance unit
monitoring the comings and goings in Peter Street, Berwick Street and Wardour
Street had been up and running now for weeks. That meant a lot of footage to
wade through. But it was no good telling H that. He was clearly on a mission
that he would not be diverted from, and with which he required no assistance.

He got himself a coffee from
the machine and settled down into the chair in front of the monitor.

‘Alright Ames, I can deal
with this. Get yourself home now, if you like.’

She knew better than to argue
with him in this mood. Whatever this mood was.

Alone now, the big man
surveyed the list of files Amisha had set up for him and clicked on the first.
Like the others he was to watch that evening, and through the long night, it
showed what seemed like an infinity of murky images of people walking in and
out of doors and getting in and out of cars.

He recognized some of the
men, mostly gone now from this world. Dispatched to their ‘Russian Hell’ by the
man whose windpipe he’d tried to crush earlier. They got in and out, and came
and went, with their molls. Their endless strings of molls, their property.
Poor
girls.
Coming and going. Going and coming.

By 2 am H’s brain was as numb
as his backside, and he broke for a hot dog from the stall by St James’ Park.
He washed it down with a snifter of scotch on the walk back to the Yard. Bleary
eyed, he entered the building, rode up in the lift, slumped back into position
and started clicking.

He moved down the list.
Vladimir Agapov himself was beginning to feature more prominently, getting
singled out for more and more attention by his watchers; standing around in the
street like he owned it, barking commands at his guys, sharing jokes with his
guys. Taking his ladies by the arm. H began to count them: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6…7.
There was something about 7. But he was struggling to stay awake.

He went to the bathroom and
sluiced his face with cold water. He made a note of the file he’d seen moll 7
in and kept looking. There she was again a little later on, her face concealed
as before by a wide brimmed hat. And again, on a windswept Berwick Street. And
then the moment he’d been waiting for, but hoped would never come: the wind
lifted the brim of her hat. H recognized her at once. It was Tara, being led
along the street by Agapov. They were laughing like teenagers in love; she was
practically skipping along.

Boom! Looks like it’s time
for another rollercoaster ride through another fucking shitstorm.

What does this mean? What on
earth could it mean? His head began to spin, again - he was starting to get
used to this now, these last few weeks. His heart was pounding and he couldn’t
think straight. He was filled with murderous rage, desperate sadness and utter
confusion. He wanted to kill someone; he wanted to cry.

How the fuck did she get
mixed up with these bastards?

What does this mean? What
on God’s fucking earth does this mean?

What’ll I tell Ronnie?

Graham sat in his car
and geared himself up for his approach to
Brown’s.
One of those iconic
gentlemen’s clubs with its roots in the eighteenth century, in which his own
grandmother would have struggled to get a job as a cleaner. The fact was, his
double-barrelled name was a product of his wife’s refusal to simply take his
name, and not high breeding. Graham Miller’s father had been the owner of a
hardware shop in Peterborough. What Hawkins called his ‘poncey Oxbridge drawl’
had been picked up at Cambridge, where as a provincial scholarship boy he had
been desperate to fit in.

And now here he was, at, or
very near, the top of the tree, among some of the most condescendingly superior
people on the face of the earth. Coming to this place had triggered all his old
class insecurities, and they were threatening to suffocate him; he was
literally struggling for breath as he moved past the mock-imposing comedy
doorman, up the stairs and through the club’s gilded doorway. He took a deep
breath and hit the reception desk.

‘Detective Inspector Graham
Miller-Marchant, to see Sir Basil Fortescue-Smythe’.

He was led into the dining
room. Sir Basil, he saw, was seated at a large mahogany table with half a dozen
other old buffers, tucking heartily into the kind of full English breakfast
that Graham himself might take on once or twice a year, if that. He was looking
at the ‘kippers and custard’ syndrome he’d first encountered among the older
Dons at Cambridge; the tendency of the sons of the old establishment to stick,
for all their lives, with the dishes they’d learned to love as public school
boys. Back in the days when an Englishman was proud of his disinterest in fine
food. That could be left to the French.

Never come between a man
and his full English. Best leave him to it.

‘On second thoughts, please
let Sir Basil know I’ll be waiting for him in the lounge’, he said to the
underling who was leading him in.

So he waited in the big
leather chair in the lounge, with its rows of leather-bound but largely unread
books and tables stacked with the Daily Telegraph. He rustled through a copy of
one of these without interest, and waited some more.

Finally Sir Basil processed
into the lounge. Graham rose to meet him, but was motioned to stay seated, and
Sir Basil took up position in an adjoining chair.

‘I am very sorry for your
loss, sir’, said Graham.

Sir Basil did not reply, but
stared at him stonily.

‘Sir, as you are aware I am
in charge of the investigation into the death of your daughters. I would like
to speak to you about this at a time of your convenience. Is it convenient
now?’

‘No, it is not.’

A pregnant pause.

‘I am grieving for the death
of my children. I keep to my routines, but I am grieving for the death of my
children. And you have the presumption to come here, tell me you are “sorry for
my loss”, and want to ask me questions about them? No, it is not convenient.
Remind me, who is your commanding officer?’

‘Chief Inspector Hilary
Stone, sir.’

‘Please inform her she will
be hearing from me in due course. Good day to you, Detective Inspector.’