Nobody Walks (12 page)

Coe tried not to react. He sat, hands on knees, his gaze directed at a group of Japanese holidaymakers photographing each other against the backdrop of the fourth plinth.

“So Vincent Driscoll’s an untouchable. That’s the message you’re delivering.”

“Vincent Driscoll’s uninvolved. That’s all.”

“And you don’t trust me to work that out for myself?”

“We thought it might be simpler if we helped you cut to the chase.”

Bettany shook his head.

“You’re going to help,” he said. “Why doesn’t that fill me with confidence?”

“Why, what’s your plan? You’re going to leave spatter marks everywhere anyone’s selling dope?”

“I’m sensing aggression.”

“If Dame Ingrid wants to help, it’s because she doesn’t want an ex-agent running rampage through London. Not even the bad parts. You plan to leave the country when you’re finished, right?”

“What’s it to you?”

“It will be all round tidier.” Coe reached inside his coat. Bettany’s hand caught him by the elbow.

Coe said, “Please. Be my guest.”

Bettany’s hand eased into his pocket, and relieved him of the envelope he’d been about to produce.

“You want me to précis?”

“Is it in code?”

“No.”

“Then I expect I’ll manage.”

He stood to go. As he did so the police officers clop-clopped by once more, the blonde one regarding them with that impassive curiosity police cultivate. Bettany responded in kind and once they’d passed turned to Coe again.

“What’s your name?”

Coe told him.

Bettany nodded, and left.

Alone on the steps Coe inhaled deeply, finding the air colder, as if he’d been sucking on a mint.
He needs to know Vincent Driscoll’s out of bounds. Has a Do Not Disturb notice round his neck.

But Coe wasn’t sure whether he’d warned Bettany off or tied a firework to his tail.

PART THREE

Leaving the National, Bettany
headed west, into the maze of Soho’s skinnier streets. Twice he changed direction abruptly, causing no giveaway ripple. This didn’t mean he wasn’t under surveillance—cameras brooded over every last alley of the capital—but the lack of hard bodies rendered it unlikely. If he warranted serious coverage, they’d not have sent a featherweight like Coe.

Satisfied, he slipped out of the byways, and on a bus heading along High Holborn made some calls.

Bad Sam Chapman had been Head Dog until leaving the Service under a cloud, a cloud the shape of the huge sum of money that went walkabout on his watch. These days he worked for an agency, tracing runaways and bad debts. The Chapman Bettany remembered must have had to make serious adjustments, among them getting used to being easier to find.

He didn’t sound different. A tightly wrapped bundle of irritation back in the day, civilian life hadn’t cheered him up any.

“I heard you’d dropped off the map,” he said, without sounding surprised Bettany had dropped back onto it.

“Miss me?”

“No.”

“I need a favour.”

“And I need a pension and a hair transplant.”

“You always did,” Bettany said. “Griping about it now won’t help.”

Chapman hung up.

Bettany waited a minute then rang again.

“I don’t do favours,” Chapman said, “and I don’t do memory lane.”

“Liam died.”

Chapman said, “Shit.”

Then, after a moment’s shared silence, said, “What kind of favour?”

A bull
terrier was going apeshit near the railings, racing around under trees in which two, no, three crows were flapping about and cawing. The crows were messing with its head, taking it in turns to dip close before flapping upwards again and settling in branches while the dog tore circles, one tree to the next, barking like its heart would burst.

Bettany had taken up station here, half a mile or so from Liam’s flat. He found it easier to think in the open air. Distractions like the dog stirred up thoughts as busily as it scattered leaves and dirt.

The crows laughing. The dog near exploding with rage.

Bettany’s phone rang.

“Marten Saar,” Chapman said.

This was the name in Coe’s envelope.

Chapman said, “There’s a new strain of weed on the market, they call it—”

“Muskrat.”

“And Saar has a lock on it. Give it four months, six tops, it’ll be everywhere, but right now, buy any round these parts, you’re putting money in his pocket.”

“And nobody’s shut him down?”

“Shocking, isn’t it? You think he’s paying someone off?”

“I was thinking more of the competition.”

A crow screamed from the safety of a branch.

“He’s Estonian. Showed up here in the ’90s, probably because of turf wars. Been a mid-level player since ’06, but this muskrat business has him on the upswing. Rumour says he’s in talks with the Russian mafia.”

“ ‘Talks.’ ”

“Yeah. They wear suits and everything. Second banana’s also from the old country, one Oskar Kask. The whisper is Kask’s the brains, but he moonlights nicely as a thug. He’s the reason the competition have held off. Nobody wants to cross Kask.”

“Record?”

“Kask was picked up after a Hackney wannabe called Baker died of a hole in the head last year. Released without charge. But …”

His voice trailed off.

“But he did it,” Bettany finished.

“Well obviously he did it, but the CPS passed. Either he’s got a hell of a lawyer or …”

Bettany filled in the blanks. Or Kask, or Saar, or both, had Plod connections.

“Where are you now?” Bad Sam asked.

Bettany’s reply adjusted his actual location by a mile.

“You can probably see Saar’s house from there. I say house. Tower block. Lives up on the top floor like a king in his castle. And,” Bad Sam Chapman said, “you’ll have to get past his pitbulls.”

“Actual? Or are you being picturesque?”

“Picturesque.”

The real-life dog was approaching a canine aneurysm.

“What about that other address?”

Sam read it out, while Bettany listened. Notes were for amateurs. Clues waiting to happen.

Finishing, Chapman said, “I wasn’t kidding about Kask. He’s vicious.”

“Noted.”

“Be careful.”

“On that subject …”

“No.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You were going to ask if I can get you a gun. The answer’s no.”

“It was worth a try.”

“You’ve been away a while. Things aren’t like they used to be. The stakes are higher. Those Russians I mentioned? Word is, they’re the Cousins’ Circle.”

The Cousins’ Circle was high-calibre all right. The Amazon of the drug-trafficking world.

“So what are you planning?”

“Bit of light shopping.”

“Seriously.”

“Seriously, I’m not planning anything,” Bettany said. “Not until I’ve verified some stuff.”

Putting his phone away, he left the park.

The dog’s mad barking rattled in his ears for blocks.

In a
cycling-supplies shop off Old Street he found a long-sleeved high-vis tabard with silver shoulder-banding. At the till he was asked if he’d thought about upgrading his machine, and truthfully
responded that he hadn’t. In a stationer’s he bought a clipboard, an A–Z and some parcel tape, then cleaned the next-door supermarket out of thick black plastic binliners.

His phone rang again as he was leaving.

Flea Pointer.

“I can’t believe you asked if he was gay.”

He negotiated his way around a pair of young mothers, double-pramming the pavement.

“He told you that?”

“I was next door.”

A clock above a jeweller’s told Bettany it was after two.

“Are you finished now?”

“Finished what?”

“Asking questions.”

“Not yet,” he said.

“Only I was a bit worried. The way Boo walked you out yesterday?”

Boo. Bettany still couldn’t get his head round that.

“Vincent’s just a softie. But Boo used to be some kind of fighter? Olympic standard, someone said. And he’s very loyal to Vincent.”

“You like him, don’t you?” he asked.

“Boo?”

“Driscoll.”

“Yes.
No.
I mean yes, I like him, but not like that …”

“Is he gay?”

“I don’t know.”

“Was Liam?”

“No. I don’t know. What difference would it make?”

“None.”

She fell silent.

“My turn to ask,” he said. “Are you finished now?”

“You can be quite hateful, you know.”

She ended the call.

Next stop was a hardware store, where he bought a small toolkit and a length of clothesline.

The days of the A–Z were numbered now people had Google maps on their phones, but phones left digital footprints while a paperback stayed dumb. Studying it, Bettany felt London’s geography returning to him. Unless it had never gone away but just been overlaid by other cities, whose shapes were fading now, the way architecture dims at twilight.

He’d been aimed and pointed, which was nothing new. For years that’s what he’d been, what he’d done. It was since he’d been cut loose that everything fell apart.

Some rules still held good, though.

When given a free steer, verify.
That was one.

Also,
When pushed, push back.

Tucking the A–Z away, he headed for the tube.

There was no sense
having a car in London. This was received wisdom, undermined only by the number of cars there were here, there, everywhere in London. JK Coe had identified the unspoken codicil, that there was no sense having a car in London unless you had a parking space. Then there was every sense having a car in London, even if you had to leave it in your parking space, to stop anyone else parking there.

That wasn’t going to happen to JK Coe. His parking space was underneath his building, with his flat number posted to the wall above it, and the white lines marking its dimensions touched up every year. It had added more than a few K to the price of the flat but that was fine, because sensible or not, there were never going to be fewer cars in London, and when it came to selling up, he’d at least double the more-than-few K he’d shelled out, back when he was earning big bucks in banking. This thought, or something like it, went through his mind pretty much every time he parked his car. He’d got it down to a moment of mental shorthand.
Car/space
, he’d think. And the ghost of a smile would tickle his lips, as much a part of the process as locking the doors.

There was a lift and an emergency staircase. He always intended to take the stairs, and always didn’t.

Today, on his way up to the fifth, his mind was on the evening ahead. He liked being at home in the city, glass of wine in hand, looking out at the lights of London, tracing in their winkings and blinkings thousands of stories he’d never know. It made him feel like a poet, if not the kind who ever wrote a poem.

But when the lift reached his floor, he stepped out into darkness. This was odd because the maintenance charge was steep, and any lapse in the facilities leapt on sharply by the residents’ committee, but Coe didn’t dwell on it because the dark of the hallway was instantly matched by an equal darkness inside his head. There was no warning. One moment he was in the dark, and the next in a deeper dark. The opportunity to comment was denied him.

Time passed. When he opened his eyes, he couldn’t be sure where he was. The immediate sensations were localised—pain, cold and fear. The pain was a dull throbbing behind his right ear, from the blow that had rendered him unconscious. The cold was because he was naked. And the fear …

The fear was because he was bound to a chair, his wrists lashed to its arms, his feet to its legs. A cloth plugged his mouth. Everything in sight—the floor, walls, curtains, the strange shapes that were presumably furniture—had been draped in black plastic. Binbags, whole rolls of them, taped together and plastered across everything. There was only one reason anybody would do such a thing. Coe felt the fear plummet through his body, invading his stomach, his bowels. It fogged his vision, and as a further realisation stuck him—that this was his own sitting room, rendered dungeon-like by black plastic sheeting—it grew wings, as if he were carrying inside him a giant bat, which was even now clawing its way free.

Then Tom Bettany appeared, stepping through the doorway that led from Coe’s kitchen. He too was naked, apart from a pair of latex gloves. In his hands, Coe’s own electric carving knife.

JK Coe fainted as his bowels let slip.

More time
passed. Probably only moments. His own stink had filled the room, and Bettany had plugged in the carving knife, making a small hole in the black plastic through which to thread the flex. He measured its length, then placed the knife on the floor. Coe spoke, or tried to.
Mmmpff mmmpff mmmp.
Bettany passed behind him and Coe felt the chair being shunted nearer the knife, to within its reach.
Mmmpff.
A liquid slap was his own shit hitting plastic.

That was what the binbags were for. To leave no marks, to make no mess.