Max Wolfe 02.5 - Fresh Blood (2 page)

‘Is this where you give me the pep talk about living a full life despite not being able to feel anything from the waist down?’ he said.

‘No,’ I said. ‘You’ve heard it all before.’

There was a soft knock on the door. I was expecting it and opened it to let the woman in. A pretty girl with bad skin and a kind smile. Quite short, a shade over five feet, but her heels were high. She clutched her handbag as though it contained something of huge value as she came into the room.

‘Jana?’ I said. ‘I’m Max. And this is my friend Curtis.’

Jana slowly approached the bed, still with that kind smile on her face.

‘I’m pleased to meet you, Curtis.’

‘I can’t do anything,’ he said, his voice thick with shame.

‘That’s fine,’ she said. ‘Totally fine. We can just talk. And we can just hold each other.’

She sat on the edge of his bed, holding both of his hands in her own. His voice stopped me at the door and at that moment I believed he had come to truly hate me.

‘This is your answer, is it, Max?’ he said. ‘Hire me a girl when I can’t do the one thing she gets paid for.’

‘I can’t think of anything else,’ I said, quietly closing the door behind me.

I walked down to the hospital canteen and turned on my laptop.

It was close enough to dawn for the cleaners to be rattling around with their mops and buckets, but not early enough for the canteen to be serving breakfast. So I sipped scalding hot coffee from a vending machine, very black and very bad, and the sun came up over the rooftops of East London. Like all good gangsters, Vic Masters had his own page on Wikipedia. Dreaming of a triple espresso from the Bar Italia in Soho, I began to read.

VIC MASTERS

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Victor Winston Masters, also known as ‘Mad Vic’, was an English career criminal and an associate of the Kray Twins, the Richardsons and the Warboys. He was murdered on Hampstead Heath, north London, while walking his dog.

There was more.

It was a sorry tale of Borstal and the Old Bailey, of botched crimes and years behind bars for arson, burglary, GBH and finally murder. Vic Masters had been a low-level enforcer – hired muscle sent in to break bones, pull teeth and attach testicles to car batteries.

Unlike most of those old-school gangsters, Vic had been freelance with no particular allegiance north or south of the river. According to his Wikipedia entry, he had worked for the Krays, the Richardsons, the Warboys and anyone who would have him. He had somehow avoided the great gangland purges of the sixties that did for the Krays and the Richardsons, but his career had effectively ended in the eighties when he was jailed for the murder of a young Jamaican drug dealer on the behest of another young Jamaican drug dealer.

By the time he was released it was a new century and Vic Masters was a dinosaur with five dots tattooed on his hand. No doubt Vic had made a lot of enemies over the years, although it was reasonable to assume that most of them had long ago died of old age.

These Wikipedia entries usually have a paragraph on the subject’s personal life, but there was nothing. Perhaps there was no Mrs Mad Vic. I closed my laptop and yawned. Although it would all change later, at that moment I didn’t really give a damn who had topped Mad Vic Masters. I just wanted to know what I was supposed to do with his dog.

Jana came to find me after exactly ninety minutes. I had an airmail envelope with cash inside and I slid it across the canteen table. She picked it up and I saw that there was a real sadness behind her kind smile.

‘That Curtis,’ she said. ‘He must have been quite a guy. You know – before.’

The sun was up when I got back to Curtis’ room, and his mother and brother were there. Mrs Gane was an elderly West Indian lady who wore the kind of hat that the Queen might wear, a warm, cheerful woman with an accent that was still more Trinidad than London after fifty years in town. And Curtis’ big brother, Marvin, was a priest – a giant of a man in a shiny dark suit and a frayed clerical collar, a man of the cloth who looked like he lifted serious weights. They were unfailingly polite people, making more of a fuss of me than Curtis, who watched them with eyes that were beyond exhaustion.

‘And how’s your beautiful little girl?’ said Mrs Gane. ‘Is she growing up fast? You’ll be amazed how quickly the time goes.’

‘We know you’re a busy man, Max,’ Marvin said, gripping my arm in one of his powerful hands. ‘But will you join us in prayer before you leave?’

I glanced at my watch, embarrassed by the thought that I was going to have to get down on my knees and put my hands together, but I didn’t have the will to refuse. So I nodded meekly and the three of us stood around the foot of the bed and bowed our heads, holding hands as Marvin said the words. Curtis had folded his arms across his chest, wanting no part of it. But it wasn’t as bad as I had imagined. In fact it made me feel something that might even have been hope.

‘Dear God, give Curtis the strength he needs and the peace he deserves,’ said Marvin. ‘Stand by us, oh Lord, in these dark days and endless nights. Let us know, dear God, that we are never alone with you by our side.’

When I looked up I saw that Curtis had closed his eyes and was shaking his head, laughing silently to himself, and I felt the panic rise up in me as his mother and brother seemed to grip my hands ever more tightly.

‘Sit, Bullseye!’ Scout said, and that was always the cue for Bullseye to do a runner.

The English Bull Terrier gave Scout’s face a quick lick before bounding off across the wide-open space of our loft, chased by my daughter and our dog. I had draped my leather jacket on the back of a chair and Bullseye tore it off, dragging it with him to the far corner of the room where he dropped it and began attempting to dig a hole in the bare wooden floorboards.

‘I think he wants to bury it, Daddy,’ Scout said, chewing her bottom lip.

‘I think you’re right.’

We were not used to a dog like Bullseye.

Stan was a typical Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, a chilled-out, peace-loving hippy of a dog who was eager to please, happy to go on long muddy walks but just as happy sitting in a café or curled up next to some human body warmth. Stan wanted what you wanted.

Bullseye did what he felt like.

But we liked him. Despite his appearance – and that long sloping forehead gave him the aura of a dangerous weapon – Bullseye was an affectionate dog, endlessly gentle with both Scout and Stan. The dogs had spent a night curled up together at the end of Scout’s bed. But during the day, Bullseye’s restless spirit craved distraction and destruction, and already he had left his teeth marks all over our loft. Perhaps he missed his master. Perhaps he was always a handful. It was probably a bit of both.

I retrieved my leather jacket and Scout knelt beside Bullseye, scratching him behind his ears. Stan watched her anxiously with his huge round eyes.

‘Can we keep him, Daddy?’ she said.

Stan whimpered as if to say – Yes, he’s cute, but you’ve already got a dog, right?

‘We can keep him until we find him a good home,’ I said.

There was a mobile number on the back of Bullseye’s nametag and I tried calling it again. But just like all the other times, it went straight to the answer machine. Nobody picked up and nobody ever would.

‘Thank you for calling,’ the dead man said in a voice that was full of old London. ‘Please leave a message after the beep.’

In a corner of the Black Museum of New Scotland Yard, I stared at a display of black and white photographs of London gangland in the sixties. Hard, unsmiling white men in dark suits and ties, smoking fags and drinking tea, often in the company of men who looked exactly like them.

Reggie and Ronnie Kray from the East End. Charlie and Eddie Richardson from south London. Paul and Danny Warboys from west London.

And all the supporting actors like Mad Frankie Fraser and George Cornell and the ones whose names were never known or instantly forgotten. Here was the other side of the sixties. The world outside was growing hair and dropping acid, but the Krays and the Richardsons and the Warboys still wore their neat suits and ties and had their hair cut in short back and sides.

There were splashes of colour in the display – the lavish funeral of one of the Krays, and a holiday snap of one of the Richardsons on the run in Spain – but it was mostly a black and white world, the very last time that London gangsters were celebrities.

‘I think Vic Masters appears in a few of these,’ said Sergeant John Caine, the keeper of the Black Museum, the Met’s repository of 150 years of criminal activity. ‘Yes, there he is.’

And there he was – Vic Masters, still a teenager in the early sixties, in the saloon bar of legendary East End pub the Saucy Leper with the Krays and a few of their flat-nosed henchmen, the boy was almost visibly swelling with pride in the presence of his heroes. And again a few years later, at some black-tie event with the Richardsons, standing behind their table, everyone raising a glass to the camera, a boxing ring just visible in the background.

‘Vic Masters was a kid when the Krays and the Richardsons were the Beatles and the Stones of gangland,’ John Caine said. ‘He was never affiliated, south or north of the river. Mad Vic did the heavy lifting. He tried to get noticed. He made a living doing the dirty work – pulling the teeth of an informer, cutting off toes with bolt pliers. And then everyone got sent down. The Richardsons in 1966. The Krays in 1968. The Warboys a bit later. Long, long sentences – Charlie Richardson got twenty-five years. The Krays got thirty years – the longest sentence ever passed at the Old Bailey. Paul and Danny Warboys got twenty years for pulling out the tongue of a grass. And as you know, Vic Masters got life for slotting some Jamaican drug baron. I say “baron” – but we are talking about the aristocracy of the gutter. And then it was over. They either died inside or came out as very old men. Into a different world.’

‘Vic Masters had no wife? No children?’

‘There was a wife who died when Vic was doing life for murder,’ John Caine said. ‘No children, as far as I know.’

I looked at the display.

‘Who hated Vic Masters?’

‘I imagine there are a few members of the Jamaican drugs industry who were not too keen,’ John chuckled. He pointed to a hard white face among that world of hard white faces. ‘But Mad Vic’s big beef was with this guy – Mad Alfie Bloom.’

There was another youth in the two photographs of Vic Masters. They were next to each other in the picture with the Krays, and at either end of the frame in the shot with the Richardsons. Vic Masters and Alfie Bloom were as alike as Reggie and Ronnie Kray, as alike as Charlie and Eddie Richardson. They looked like more than brothers. They could have been twins.

‘Mad Vic Masters and Mad Alfie Bloom were cocky kids who hung around these firms,’ John said. ‘They were like – what do you call it? – the interns of gangland.’

‘Fighting over the same few scraps.’

‘Exactly. They never liked each other much. Mostly because they always ploughed the same fields. One of them chucked a fish tank at the other.’

‘A fish tank?’

‘Yeah, you know – a big glass tank with tropical fish. In the Saucy Leper. The landlord was trying to give it a bit of class with a fish tank. And then Mad Vic threw the fish tank at Mad Alfie. Or it might have been the other way round. And about five years ago it all flared up again when they both published their memoirs.’

‘Vic Masters and Alfie Bloom wrote books?’

‘Or had them ghostwritten. Vic’s memoir was called
The Original Gangster
and Alfie’s was – if I’m not mistaken –
The Last True Gangster
.

‘Mad Alfie Bloom and Mad Vic Masters had – what? – a literary feud?’

‘Yeah – like that. A literary feud. And you know what it’s like these days with all the social media. Vic was tweeting about Alfie being a fake. Alfie would put something on Facebook about Vic telling fibs to big himself up. It can get very nasty on those social media platforms. It can be very hurtful when the trolling starts.’

‘Is Alfie still alive?’

‘As far as I know.’

The shrine to that lost British gangland was made up mostly of photographs. At the start of the sixties they had been taken by David Bailey. By the time it was over, they were being taken in police custody.

But in front of it there was a dusty table with a few primitive weapons placed on top. A pair of pliers. A claw hammer. A sawn-off 12 bore shotgun. And one of those broad, curved pirate’s swords with an elaborate basket-shaped guard. A cutlass.

I looked at John Caine for permission.

‘Be my guest,’ he said.

I picked up the cutlass. It was heavy, unwieldy but undoubtedly dramatic – like a child’s idea of a deadly weapon. I almost laughed out loud.

‘What drama queen did this belong to?’ I smiled.

‘Reggie or Ronnie,’ John said. ‘I can’t remember. One of the Kray twins.’

I felt the weight of it in my hands.

‘Not easy to fight with one of these,’ I said.

‘But you wouldn’t want it across your throat,’ John said.

‘No,’ I said, and I realised that I had stopped smiling. ‘Or across your mouth.’

The woman who runs the most exclusive prostitution ring in London has tattoos on her arms that run from the inside of her elbow to the edge of her palms.

I got to know Ginger Gonzalez during the winter months when she helped my Murder Investigation Team with our enquiries, but it was only now, with spring coming on and the days getting warmer and her change of wardrobe, that I noticed the tattoos.

Never for money, said the tattoo on her right arm.

Always for love, said the tattoo on her left.

I stood in the open doorway of her one-room office above a Peking duck restaurant in Chinatown and she looked up from a brand new 27-inch iMac as I tapped my knuckles on the sign that said ‘Sampaguita – Social Introduction Agency’. She was a studious-looking Philippina in black-rimmed glasses, more school ma’am than madam, but I suspected the lenses in her spectacles were clear glass. Sampaguita is the national flower of the Philippines, although she had left her homeland when she was sixteen.