(2005) Rat Run (11 page)

Timo Rahman kissed the girls, told Alicia - not that it was her business - he would be late back.

The Bear, who would have died for him, drove him into the city.

'No, no, don't turn your back on me. I want to know.

How did you twist him?'

She was Tony Johnson's wife. Every senior officer at the National Crime Squad said she had had a better future than him, would at least have made inspector and might have gone as high as commander. But she'd jacked it in and now worked in an antiques shop and said it had taken years off her, getting out.

'Come on, come on. Spit it out.'

When he had come back last night she had been asleep, and had still been asleep when he had gone to work that morning. He'd done the day, then a crash conference had been called without notice in the evening on his specialist work area, organized-immigration crime. He hadn't had the car with him, and a points failure had held up the trains. They were in bed and he was desperate for sleep . . . No way he could treat her as Need To Know; if she hadn't packed it in he'd have been calling her 'ma'am' by now. She knew everything he did about the life and times of Malachy Kitchen. He told her what he'd said in the parking area.

'You never had a mate who fell through a roof and did his spine.'

He shrugged.

'You've never told me you'd been to Stoke

Mandeville hospital - have you?'

He shook his head.

'You invented the whole bloody thing - right?'

He nodded.

'Is he up for it? They're vicious little creatures. What is it they're called? Yes, right scumbags and you told me - the High Fly Boys. They'll be fine for a start. Can he do the business?'

He kissed her, reached over and switched off the light on her side, then swung himself away from her.

'All right, I haven't seen Millie and you have. But this is heavy stuff. I only hope you're comfortable with i t . . . '

The High Fly Boys ruled that corner of the estate.

Their territory was blocks eight, nine, ten and eleven.

The Rough Track Boys had different ground, over towards the Old Kent Road, and the Young Walworth Boys had the blocks on the west side of the

Amersham. The High Fly Boys kept to their own patch, which had fair pickings, and if there were no sales they could smash in a car window for its radio, or run keys down its side, then demand cash for its future protection, or break any sheet of glass that was not reinforced with mesh, or jostle a mother with her pram. The police never caught them. No one on the estate ever dared to inform on them. They ran free.

They pushed wraps of brown. They bought from the Amersham's main dealer, sold on to the vagrants, took their share and strutted the streets, alleys and walkways of the part of the estate that was theirs.

Their uniform, shoplifted or gained by threats from a store manager who didn't need hassle, was a sleek leisure suit, Adidas or Nike trainers that were top of the range, gold chains, and they talked a code patois that coppers couldn't crack. Each, in the High Fly Boys, had his own tag.

Danny Morris's was Cisco. He was mixed race, from a one-night stand between a white American USAF technician and his West Indian mother. He led the High Fly Boys. He rode a £550 mountain bike, stolen. If there was war he had access to a pistol, hired by the twenty-four hours. If it was normal he carried a switchblade knife. He had no fear of what police or the courts could do to him. He could barely read, but knew the telephone number of a solicitor, and understood enough arithmetic to work out his cut from what he sold. He knew by heart all of the regulations governing stop-and-search by police officers, all of the custody legislation. A probation officer had once told him he was 'arrogant and in denial of your unacceptable behaviour', and he had spat in the man's face. He was eighteen years old and had no comprehension of the next week's horizon. He took a pitch, each evening, near the door of the Pensioners' Association and waited for instructions from the dealer on the night's trading.

Already there, his bike against the wall, was Leroy Gates. Leroy's tag was Younger Cisco. His ethnic mix was Italian father, whereabouts unknown, and West Indian mother. He was sixteen, could neither read nor write, and stammered when stressed. Excluded from mainstream education at fourteen, after four suspensions, he was classified in a confidential social-services report as 'effectively outside parental and institutional control and . . . locked in a culture of despair, he refuses to believe that worthwhile opportunities other than petty criminality are open to him'.

His angelic face and sad eyes were hidden by a ski mask when he thieved. He was the hard one of the gang.

Last to the corner by the Pensioners' Association doorway, shuttered and locked, was Wilbur Sansom, aged fifteen, with the tag Younger Younger Cisco in the identifying style of the gangs roaming the estate. It was probable, from the colour of his skin and the structure of his face bones, that he was of north African and Arabic origin; it was not known. At a few weeks old, he had been dumped in a telephone box in Deptford, then fostered. For the courts, and in the past for school registers, he had the family name of the proxy parents, Sansom; his first name had been allocated to him by a nurse at the hospital he had been brought to from the telephone box. He was a disappointment to teachers, foster-parents, police and social workers. Younger Younger Cisco - he would not answer to anything else - could read well and write with a strong hand. A child psychiatrist had rated him as having above average intelligence. He was slight in build, and seemingly unthreatening, so the Sansoms had given him a mobile phone for his fourteenth birthday, so that he would feel more secure when he was crossing the estate to and from school or the youth club.

The Rough Track Boys had beaten him more than was necessary to steal his phone. It had been replaced by his foster-parents, but within a week he had come home, mouth bleeding, without the second phone, courtesy of the Young Walworth Boys. He had offered himself to Cisco's gang for protection. As a visible member of the High Fly Boys he was no longer a target for violence. He never went to school, was known to the police, had collected four court cautions and was threatened next with an Antisocial Behaviour Order. He cared nothing. With his gang he was safe. His value to Cisco and Younger Cisco was simple. He could read the instructions written on cigarette paper by the dealer for pick-ups and drop-offs; he was their eyes.

Later, as the night closed down on the Amersham, they would move to a black hole in a fence behind which block eight's big rubbish containers were stored, and shadowy figures would flit towards them

- the vagrants they despised, clutching money and ready to buy. Everyone who wanted wraps and craved brown knew where to find them. For the three teenagers it was a night the same as any other, and cold rain spattered the shoulders of their leisure suits as they waited for the early buyers.

It was like the first steps on an ice-covered pond.

Malachy laid out in front of him what he had bought: rope from the hardware shop on Walworth Road and a penknife to cut it, parcel-binding tape from the stationer's in the side-street off the market, and a plastic toy from a stall. He also had the clothes from the bin-liner that had been under the bed.

He checked the purchases and the clothing, as he had before. It might have been kit and weapons for an exercise on Salisbury Plain, the Northumbrian moors or a patrol in a sprawling Iraqi village. He went through each stage of the plan that had fastened in his mind.

He could rely on what he had seen done.

He had been at the depot for recruits, a week short of the end of fifty-six days' Basic Training. Before he had left home, his father had told him, 'You're pig stupid to have gone this route. I wash my hands of you. All I can say is, remember that a lion pride rejects a weak cub. Drop short of your platoon's standards and the rest of them will be merciless. The private soldier turns into a ruthless thug when punished collectively for the failure of one of their number . . .

but it's your choice.' He'd gone. No letters from the retired brigadier, and none written to him or to Malachy's mother. One recruit was useless - should have gone for premature voluntary release - but hadn't quit. That recruit had been half dragged and half carried, in full kit, on the half-mile road run. He had been covered-for when he had lost his beret. His final act had been the making of his barrack-room bed: wrinkles in the hospital corners of the blanket.

An officer doing the inspection with the platoon sergeant had commented on it snidely. After escorting the officer out of the barracks room, the sergeant had come back and gone nose to nose with that recruit and had bollocked him with a spittle-dense volley of obscenities, then barked the punishment: the sergeant had been shown up in front of the officer and had gone for the top-heavy punishment, collective. The platoon was 'confined to barracks' for five days, with extra duties and doubled inspections. Malachy had stood at the back, not spoken, not intervened and had not taken part when the platoon took its revenge on that recruit. In flat thirteen, on block nine of the Amersham, he remembered the revenge of the platoon.

It was what he would replicate, but he did not know whether it was for Millie Johnson's bruised face and broken arm or for himself.

When he had checked each item he would take with him for the third or fourth time, the rope had been cut into lengths and the plastic toy was out of its packaging, Malachy stripped off the clothes that had been bought for him at the charity shop. The trousers in the bin-liner stank, as did the shirt and socks. He dressed in the vagrant's clothes he had worn in the underpass at Elephant and Castle when he had begged, drunk, and slept. He put on his head the rolled-up woollen hat that had been pulled down over his face, with eye slits and a mouth hole, on the nights when it was cold enough for a pond to freeze.

Last out of the sack were the old shoes, and he slipped them on.

He locked the door behind him and went off along the walkway, paused for a moment at the top of the stairs, ground his nails into his palms, as if that would strengthen him, and joined the night's shadows moving on the Amersham.

On another morning, the sirens would have woken Malachy.

Dawn was breaking over the estate. He slept until full daylight. There was no reason for him to rouse himself, get up and wash, decide whether to shave with the blunt blade and dress in the charity-shop clothes. He had not been asleep when the sirens started, vague and distant at first, then clearer as they came closer. He had not slept because he had waited for the sirens, had lain in his bed, ears keen, through the long hours of darkness. When the sirens

approached, coming up the Old Kent Road, then swinging into the Amersham, he could have pushed himself off the bed, gone to the window and looked out over the plaza towards the flat roof of block eleven, but he did not. He knew what the ambulance-men, the fire brigade and the police would find.

It had rained in the night but with the dawn came a low sunshine that spilled through the window. He had not drawn the curtains. If he had slipped off the bed and looked out on to the far side of the plaza, the sun's weak light would have fastened on his work.

He had no need to see it.

The clothes from his work were now back in the bin-liner, with his shoes, the penknife, the remaining tape on the roll and the plastic toy. He did not know yet whether he felt satisfaction at what he had done.

He rubbed his cheek, and could feel the thin scratches from fingernails that had penetrated the woollen hat.

There was a bruise on his right shin where one had kicked him but it was only with a trainer and the bruise was little more than an irritant; nothing in comparison to those on the face of Millie Johnson.

He rolled over, turned his face to the wall and his eyes were locked shut. Others would come to stand and gawp, but Malachy had no need to.

A crowd gathered on the worn grass beside the kids'

swings and roundabouts in the plaza.

That morning, Dawn would be late for the ministry.

It was too good to miss: her supervisor always said that a watch could be set on Dawn's punctuality at work - even when she had had the flu she had been there with the mop and bucket and the vacuum cleaner. Not that early morning. She positioned herself at the edge of the crowd, did not reckon to use her bony elbows to force a way to the front. At the back she was closer to the parked fire engines, the two ambulances, the police cars and wagon. It was the best show she had seen in many years on the estate, better than any of the Christmas cabarets at the Pensioners'

Association or at the annual parties for the Tenants' Association. Two of them had been hoisted up on to the flat roof of block eleven and one still hung suspended from the rope. Where she was, Dawn could hear the conversations among the firemen, the ambulance teams and police officers, and it was good listening.

A fireman said to his senior, who had just reached the plaza, 'Never known anything like it, Chief, not on the Amersham. I suppose it's a feud between the low-lifes, what the army would call "blue on blue". Done a proper job, though. They're all taped up, ankles together and wrists behind their backs and they've gags in their mouths. Then rope was tied round the ankles and they were hung out over the edge of the roof with the rope fastened to the block's communal TV aerial. Been there half the night and they couldn't shout because of the gags in their mouths, and they wouldn't have wriggled around, would they? Bloody sure I wouldn't, not with more than a sixty-foot drop under me and my life depending on whether the rope's knot held. I'd have done what they did, stayed damn still. The word is that they're the kingpins of the local horror story, call themselves the High Fly Boys. Tell you what, Chief, they were that. They were high and they were flying, except for the rope. Must have been there for hours, and nobody saw them till the light came up. What I'm getting, they're right nasty scallys. They're the gang that push the class-A stuff round the estate. Last night, if you'd asked me, I'd have said - and sworn on it -