A Darker Shade of Blue (33 page)

‘How in God's name,' I asked, ‘did you get involved in this?'

Anna lit a cigarette and wafted the smoke away from her face. ‘After Val died I went back to Amsterdam, where we'd been living. There was this guy – he'd been Val's supplier …'

‘I thought Val had gone straight,' I said.

‘There was this guy,' Anna said again, ‘we – well, we got sort of close. It was a bad time for me. I needed …' She glanced across and shook her head. ‘A girl's got to live, Jimmy. All Val had left behind was debts. This guy, he offered me a roof over my head. But there was a price.'

‘I'll bet.' Even I was surprised how bitter that sounded.

‘People he did business with, he wanted me to speak for him, take meetings. I used to fly to Belfast, then, after a while, it was Dublin.'

‘You were a courier,' I said. ‘A mule.'

‘No. I never carried the stuff myself. Once the deal was set up, I'd arrange shipments, make sure things ran smoothly.'

‘Patrick would be proud of you,' I said.

‘Leave Patrick out of this,' she said. ‘This has nothing to do with him.'

I levered myself up out of the seat; it wasn't as easy as it used to be. ‘Nor me.' I got as far as the door.

‘They think I double-crossed them,' Anna said. ‘They think it was me tipped off Customs; they think I cut the coke and kept back the rest so I could sell it myself.'

‘And did you?'

She didn't blink. ‘These people, Jimmy, they'll kill me. To make an example. I have to convince them it wasn't me; let them have back what they think's their due.'

‘A little difficult if you didn't take it in the first place.'

‘Will you help me, Jimmy, yes or no?'

‘Your pal in Amsterdam, what's wrong with him?'

‘He says it's my mess and I have to get myself out of it.'

‘Nice guy.'

She leaned towards me, trying for a look that once would have held me transfixed. ‘Jimmy, I'm asking. For old time's sake.'

‘Which old time is that, Anna?'

She smiled. ‘The first time you met me, Jimmy, you remember that? Leicester Square?'

Like yesterday, I thought.

‘You ever think about that? You ever think what it would have been like if we'd been together? Really together?'

I shook my head.

‘We don't always make the right choices,' she said.

‘Get somebody else to help you,' I said.

‘I don't want somebody else.'

‘Anna, look at me, for fuck's sake. What can I do? I'm an old man.'

‘You're not old. What are you? Sixty-odd? These days sixty's not old. Seventy-five. Eighty. That's old.'

‘Tell that to my body, Anna. I'm carrying at least a stone more than I ought to; the tendon at the back of my left ankle gives me gyp if ever I run for a bus and my right hip hurts like hell whenever I climb a flight of stairs. Find someone else, anyone.'

‘There's nobody else I can trust.'

*

I talked to Jack Kiley about it later; we were sitting in the Starbucks across the street, sunshine doing its wan best to shine through the clouds.

‘What do you know about these types?' Jack asked. ‘This new bunch of cocaine cowboys from over the old Irish Sea?'

‘Sod all,' I said.

‘Well, let me give you a bit of background. Ireland has the third-highest cocaine use in Europe and there's fifteen or twenty gangs and upwards beating the bollocks off one another to supply it. Some of them, the more established, have got links with the IRA, or did have, but it's the newer boys that take the pippin. Use the stuff themselves, jack up an Uzi or two and go shooting; a dozen murders in Dublin so far this year and most of the leaves still on the fucking trees.'

‘That's Dublin,' I said.

Jack cracked a smile. ‘And you think this old flame of yours'll be safe here in Belsize Park or back home in Amsterdam?'

I shrugged. I didn't know what to bloody think.

He leaned closer. ‘Just a few months back, a drug smuggler from Cork got into a thing with one of the Dublin gangs – a disagreement about some shipment bought and paid for. He thought he'd lay low till it blew over. Took a false name and passport and holed up in an apartment in the Algarve. They found his body in the freezer. Minus the head. Rumour is whoever carried out the contract on him had it shipped back as proof.'

Something was burning deep in my gut and I didn't think a couple of antacid tablets was going to set it right.

‘You want my advice, Jimmy?' he said, and gave it anyway. ‘Steer clear. Either that or get in touch with some of your old pals in the Met. Let them handle it.'

Do that, I thought, and there's no way of keeping Anna out of it; somehow I didn't fancy seeing her next when she was locked away on remand.

‘I don't suppose you fancy giving a hand?' I said.

Jack was still laughing as he crossed the street back towards his office.

*

At least I didn't have to travel far, just a couple of stops on the Northern Line. Anna had told me where to find them and given me their names. There was some kind of céilidh band playing in the main bar, the sound of the bodhrán tracing my footsteps up the stairs. And, yes, my hip did ache.

The Sweeney brothers were sitting at either end of a leather sofa that had seen better days, and Chris Boyle was standing with his back to a barred window facing down on to the street. Hip-hop was playing from a portable stereo at one side of the room, almost drowning out the traditional music from below. No one could accuse these boys of not keeping up with the times.

There was an almost full bottle of Bushmill's and some glasses on the desk, but I didn't think anyone was about to ask me if I wanted a drink.

One of the Sweeneys giggled when I stepped into the room and I could see the chemical glow in his eyes.

‘What the fuck you doin' here, old man?' the other one said. ‘You should be tucked up in the old folks' home with your fuckin' Ovaltine.'

‘Two minutes,' Chris Boyle said. ‘Say what you have to fuckin' say then get out.'

‘Supposin' we let you,' one of the brothers said and giggled some more. Neither of them looked a whole lot more than nineteen, twenty tops. Boyle was closer to thirty, nearing pensionable age where that crew was concerned. According to Jack, there was a rumour he wore a catheter bag on account of getting shot in the kidneys coming out from the rugby at Lansdowne Road.

‘First,' I said, ‘Anna knew nothing about either the doctoring of the shipment, nor the fact it was intercepted. You have to believe that.'

Boyle stared back at me, hard-faced.

One of the Sweeneys laughed.

‘Second, though she was in no way responsible, as a gesture of good faith, she's willing to hand over a quantity of cocaine, guaranteed at least eighty per cent pure, the amount equal to the original shipment. After that it's all quits, an even playing field, business as before.'

Boyle glanced across at the sofa then nodded agreement.

‘We pick the point and time of delivery,' I said. ‘Two days' time. I'll need a number on which I can reach you.'

Boyle wrote his mobile number on a scrap of paper and passed it across. ‘Now get the fuck out,' he said.

Down below, someone was playing a penny whistle, high-pitched and shrill. I could feel my pulse racing haphazardly and when I managed to get myself across the street, I had to take a grip on a railing and hold fast until my legs had stopped shaking.

*

When Jack learned I was going through with it, he offered to lend me a gun, a Smith & Wesson .38, but I declined. There was more chance of shooting myself in the foot than anything else.

I met Anna in the parking area behind Jack's office, barely light enough to make out the colour of her eyes. The cocaine was bubble-wrapped inside a blue canvas bag.

‘You always were good to me, Jimmy,' she said, and reaching up, she kissed me on the mouth. ‘Will I see you afterwards?'

‘No,' I said. ‘No, I don't think so.'

The shadows swallowed her as she walked towards the taxi waiting out on the street. I dropped the bag down beside the rear seat of the car, waited several minutes, then slipped the engine into gear.

The place I'd chosen was on Hampstead Heath, a makeshift soccer pitch shielded by lines of trees, a ramshackle wooden building off to one side, open to the weather; sometimes pick-up teams used it to get changed, or kids huddled there to feel one another up, smoke spliffs or sniff glue.

When Patrick, Val and I had been kids ourselves there was a body found close by, someone murdered and left, and the place took on a kind of awe for us, murder in those days being something more rare.

I'd left my car by a mansion block on Heath Road and walked in along a partly overgrown track. The moon was playing fast and loose with the clouds and the stars seemed almost as distant as they were. An earlier shower of rain had made the surface a little slippy and mud clung to the soles of my shoes. There was movement, low in the undergrowth to my right-hand side, and, for a moment, my heart stopped as an owl broke with a fell swoop through the trees above my head.

A dog barked and then was still.

I stepped off the path and into the clearing, the weight of the bag real in my left hand. I was perhaps a third of the way across the pitch before I saw them, three or four shapes massed near the hut at the far side and separating as I drew closer, fanning out. Four of them, faces unclear, but Boyle, I thought, at the centre, the Sweeneys to one side of him, another I didn't recognise hanging back. Behind them, behind the hut, the trees were broad and tall and close together, beeches I seemed to remember Val telling me once when I'd claimed them as oaks. ‘Beeches, for God's sake,' he'd said, laughing in that soft way of his. ‘You, Jimmy, you don't know your arse from your elbow, it's a fact.'

I stopped fifteen feet away and Boyle took a step forward. ‘You came alone,' he said.

‘That was the deal.'

‘He's stupider than I fuckin' thought,' said one or other of the Sweeneys and laughed a girlish little laugh.

‘The stuff's all there?' Boyle said, nodding towards the bag.

I walked a few more paces towards him, set the bag on the ground, and stepped back.

Boyle angled his head towards the Sweeneys and one of them went to the bag and pulled it open, slipping a knife from his pocket as he did so; he slit open the package, and, standing straight again, tasted the drug from the blade.

‘Well?' Boyle said.

Sweeney finished running his tongue around his teeth. ‘It's good,' he said.

‘Then we're set,' I said to Boyle.

‘Set?'

‘We're done here.'

‘Oh, yes, we're done.'

The man to Boyle's left, the one I didn't know, moved forward almost to his shoulder, letting his long coat fall open as he did so, and what light there was glinted dully off the barrels of the shotgun as he brought it to bear. It was almost level when a shot from the trees behind struck him high in the shoulder and spun him round so that the second shot tore through his neck and he fell to the ground as good as dead.

One of the Sweeneys cursed and started to run, while the other dropped to one knee and fumbled for the revolver inside his zip-up jacket.

With all the gunfire and the shouting I couldn't hear the words from Boyle's mouth, but I could lip-read well enough. ‘You're dead,' he said, and drew a pistol not much bigger than a child's hand from his side pocket and raised it towards my head. It was either bravery or stupidity or maybe fear that made me charge at him, unarmed, hands outstretched as if in some way to ward off the bullet; it was the muddied turf that made my feet slide away under me and sent me sprawling headlong, two shots sailing over my head before one of the men I'd last seen minding Patrick in Soho stepped up neatly behind Boyle, put the muzzle of a 9mm Beretta hard behind his ear and squeezed the trigger.

Both the Sweeneys had gone down without me noticing; one was already dead and the other had blood gurgling out of his airway and was not long for this world.

Patrick was standing back on the path, scraping flecks of mud from the edges of his soft leather shoes with a piece of stick.

‘Look at the state of you,' he said. ‘You look a fucking state. If I were you I should burn that lot when you get home, start again.'

I wiped the worst of the mess from the front of my coat and that was when I realised my hands were still shaking. ‘Thanks, Pat,' I said.

‘What are friends for?' he said.

Behind us his men were tidying up the scene a little, not too much. The later editions of the papers would be full of stories of how the Irish drug wars had come to London, the Celtic Tigers fighting it out on foreign soil.

‘You need a lift?' Patrick asked, as we made our way back towards the road.

‘No, thanks. I'm fine.'

‘Thank Christ for that. Last thing I need, mud all over the inside of the fucking Merc.'

When I got back to the flat I put one of Val's last recordings on the stereo, a session he'd made in Stockholm a few months before he died. Once or twice his fingers didn't match his imagination, and his breathing seemed to be giving him trouble, but his mind was clear. Beeches, I'll always remember that now, that part of the Heath. Beeches, not oaks.

MINOR KEY

It used to be there under ‘
Birthdays
', some years at least. The daily listing in the paper, the
Guardian,
occasionally the
Times.
September eighteenth. ‘
Valentine Collins, jazz musician
.' And then his age: twenty-seven, thirty-five, thirty-nine. Not forty. Val never reached forty.

He'd always look, Val, after the first time he was mentioned, made a point of it, checking to see if his name was there. ‘Never know,' he'd say, with that soft smile of his. ‘Never know if I'm meant to be alive or dead.'