The First Novels: Pay Off, the Fireman (2 page)

       
Laing slipped them the cash in used notes in a brown envelope and waited. Three days later Miller phoned to say that the job was off. Leonard had all but lost his leg slipping off a ladder while decorating his mum’s front room. He was in hospital, in pain and no way was the job going ahead with just the two of them. A hundred and eighty pounds was left in the kitty and Ronnie was welcome to that and the three sawn-off shotguns.

       
No chance, said Laing. Get someone else or all three of you will have broken legs. Like who? asked Miller. Like McKinley, said Laing, and now I’m in for sixty per cent of the action.

       
Twenty-four hours later McKinley, Miller and Wallace were sitting in a four-year-old Rover with Miller’s brother Tommy acting as driver, going over the plan for the last time. All three would go in carrying holdalls, put a few things in wire baskets, use three separate check-outs and then pull out the shooters. Miller would fire his, they’d get the girls to empty their cash registers while Wallace got the manager to empty his safe in the office. Simple. They’d already gone through it three times for McKinley as he sat in the back seat, his shotgun dwarfed by the fingernail-bitten hands in his lap.

       
They moved. Miller went in first, Wallace second. McKinley counted to fifty and followed. All the blue-handled wire baskets had gone so he grabbed a trolley and pushed. One of the rear wheels was sticking and it squeaked sideways along the tiled floor as he wandered down past the cereals picking up packets of Cornflakes and Frosties. He threw in a tin of dog food – he’d always wanted a dog – and by the time he got to the check-out Miller and Wallace were waiting, fuming silently. McKinley frowned an apology and Miller nodded twice. All three threw off their woolly caps, pulled down their stocking masks and brought out the guns. Miller pointed his at the ceiling and pulled the trigger. The noise was deafening, bits of the plasterboard ceiling fell around him in a cloud, sticking to his stocking like pieces of tissue paper to a cut chin.

       
‘Right, get down on the floor. Now!’ he yelled, but nobody moved. One of the young girls sitting in front of a cash register started to cry quietly. The manager came out of his office, stopped and raised his hands above his head. Still nobody moved. The fire sprinklers came on, a shower of cold water washed the pieces of plasterboard from Miller’s stocking mask and a trickle ran down the back of his neck. A couple of the girls held plastic bags over their heads and watched him anxiously.

       
‘Down on the floor. Everybody down on the floor. Now,’ he screamed and fired the gun again. This time everyone moved. ‘Oh Jesus, no. Get up, McKinley! Get up!’

       
They were all caught five minutes later in the carpark by a passing plain clothes police car packed with armed Flying Squad detectives just about to go off duty.

       
McKinley didn’t fare too badly in court. His gun hadn’t been loaded; Miller and Wallace reckoned he’d have sawn the wrong end off his shotgun given the chance and there was no way they were going to let him loose with a loaded gun. That, coupled with a surprising lack of previous convictions, kept the sentence down and he was out in seven years with a criminal record and a nickname that stuck.

       
A bit thinner now than he looked in the newspaper photograph, taken as he had left the Old Bailey handcuffed between two beefy police officers, McKinley was scowling in much the same way.

       
Eventually his patience snapped and he turned to his right, banging his glass down hard on the bar.

       
‘Why don’t you two twats just piss off?’ he thundered, but he didn’t wait for an answer, just drew back his massive fist and smacked the shorter one in the mouth, sending him spinning and staggering across the bar, blood streaming from his splattered lips.

       
His friend took a step back and put his hand inside his leather jacket, bringing out what looked to be a butcher’s knife wrapped in cardboard which he stripped off to reveal a polished steel blade. McKinley seemed not to notice and pulled back his fist again.

       
I thought the sound of the lemonade bottle in the barman’s hand would have made much more noise when it connected with the back of McKinley’s head, but it didn’t smash or even crack, it just went ‘thunk’ and McKinley’s legs folded up like a collapsing deck-chair and he slumped to the floor. The two lads decided that discretion was the better part of valour and made for the door.

       
‘Are you going to bar him?’ I asked the barman as together we helped the unconscious McKinley to an empty seat by the gents.

       
‘Are you joking?’ he replied. ‘Would you try to stop him coming in? Besides, he was provoked. McKinley’s OK so long as he’s left alone.’

       
The sleeping giant began growling and I didn’t want to be around when he woke up with a sore head, so I said I’d be back and walked out into the cold night air. One down, three to go.

Killers come in many forms. The old man going too fast in a car and mowing down a child on a zebra crossing. The thug with a knife who wants your wallet and doesn’t care what he does to get it. The pensioner who can’t stand to see his wife suffering from incurable arthritis any more and pushes a pillow against her face. The soldier firing his gun in the heat of battle.

       
The poisoner, the strangler, the axe murderer. There are men you can hire to kill, men who’ll beat in a man’s skull for a few hundred pounds. There are men whom you’ll never meet, who will kill for a six-figure sum paid into a Swiss bank account, half in advance, half on completion. The world is full of killers, and so are the prisons.

       
Me, I could never take a life. My father took me when I was twelve years old to his brother’s grouse moor near Inverness and helped me to fire his favourite twelve bore, rubbing my shoulder better when it hurt, kidding me for missing, not knowing that I didn’t want to hurt the birds or his feelings and pretending to be in pain was the only way to save both.

       
I guess he understood because the next time he tried was when I was fifteen, but I hadn’t changed and this time I was old enough to tell him so, to tell him that blasting birds with shotguns wasn’t my idea of fun and what was the point of raising birds just to shoot them out of the air and honest, father, I’d really rather not. It did hurt him, I know, but he didn’t say anything and the guns went back to his study and he never took them out of the guncase other than to clean them from that day on.

       
He was of the old school, my father, huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’, until a riding accident put paid to all but the fishing. Even that pleasure caused him pain, standing thigh high in fast flowing freezing water flicking flies at salmon, and his orthopaedic surgeon told him more than once that it was doing him no good. Humbug, my father told him, fishing and work are the only pleasures I’ve got left and I’m damned if you’re going to take either away from me. He reckoned that the only good advice the surgeon ever gave him was to lie on the floor if the pain got too bad. It seemed to work and I’d often go into his study and find him lying on his back with his ebony stick by his side, reading one of his leather-bound books or going over a balance sheet, Bach playing on the stereo.

       
I’d sit by him and he would explain things like shareholders’ funds, liabilities and provisions, loan capital; and by the time I was fourteen I could read a balance sheet and profit and loss account like a comic, understanding how a company operated just by looking at the figures. I was hooked faster than a careless salmon, which is exactly what he’d intended, because he had my career mapped out from the time I was born and there was no way on God’s earth that I wasn’t going to end up in my uncle’s merchant bank.

       
He was a gentle man, and a gentleman, and other than where foxes, grouse and salmon were concerned he lacked the killer instinct. I was the same. I might not have inherited his passion for country pursuits but he had taught me to be honourable in business, never to cheat or lie, and to feel guilty if I broke any of his rules and now that was holding me back, and I had to find a killer because I knew I wouldn’t be able to do the job myself.

       
Killers come in many forms but I wanted a professional, a mercenary. I’d arranged for a newsagent near my flat in Earl’s Court to get me a copy of
Professional Soldier
magazine. It took him two weeks to get hold of it, and by the time he gave it to me it was a month out of date. It’s one of the few places where mercenaries actually advertise their services between pages devoted to a thousand and one ways of killing silently and what’s new in portable rocket launchers. You can buy everything you need to start or fight a war through the adverts in
Professional Soldier
, from jungle clothing and survival rations to the latest military hardware. You can also buy men. I picked out three possibilities and circled them in blue Biro.

SAS-trained small-arms expert requires work, distance no object. Experience in explosives, anti-tank combat and hand-to-hand. Box No. 156.

Have gun, will travel. Does anyone out there need a combat vet who wants a piece of the action? London based. Box No. 324

Ex-para needs work. Anything considered. Box No. 512

       
I wrote the same letter to all three, telling them that I had an interesting proposition to put to them, that I’d pay well and that they were to phone me at the flat if they were interested. I stuck the envelopes down, put on first-class stamps and walked down the two flights of stairs to the street and put them in the nearest post box. The first call came two weeks later from mercenary number one, the SAS expert.

       
‘You the man with an interesting proposition?’ asked a rough Liverpool accent. ‘This is Box 156.’

       
‘You’ve got the right number,’ I said. ‘Who are you?’

       
‘First things first. What’s the job, where is it and how much are you paying?’

       
‘I’d rather meet you first, then we can go over the details.’

       
‘When and where?’

       
‘The American Bar at the Savoy Hotel, Wednesday lunchtime, say half past one. How will I recognize you?’

       
‘You won’t. I’ll find you. Carry a copy of
The Times
.’

       
‘I imagine most of the people in the Savoy would be reading
The Times
. Make it the
Mirror
. I’ll be wearing a dark blue suit and a red tie and I’ll be sitting at the bar.’

       
‘I’ll be there.’

Wednesday at one o’clock, I got out of a taxi on the Strand and walked past the Savoy Taylors Guild to the huge canopy that marks the entrance to the Savoy. Across the road stonecleaners were scouring the dirt off the National Westminster Bank, and a thin film of white dust settled on my shoes. Porters in the Savoy’s green and yellow livery were loading calfskin suitcases into a blue Daimler, while a suntanned executive sorted through his wallet. All were covered in white flecks of dust.

       
The foyer was almost deserted, so at least my friend Box 156 wouldn’t have any trouble recognizing me. I dropped the
Mirror
onto the bar and asked for a Tamdhu as I slipped onto the stool. Caricatures of Liza Minelli, Lauren Bacall, Ginger Rogers, Fred Astaire and Greta Garbo, all by Almud Bonhorst, glared down at me from the walls and I raised my glass to them. I was proud to be performing in front of Hollywood’s finest.

       
I spotted him as soon as he walked into the bar. He was impossible to miss: close cropped hair, a camouflage combat jacket and scruffy jeans. The boots were cherry red. He walked with his feet splayed outward, hands thrust deep into the pockets of his jacket as his head jerked left and right like a startled rabbit. Somehow I’d managed to lumber myself with a twenty-four carat headbanger, and if the only thing identifying me had been a copy of
The Times
I could have got rid of it and played innocent, but I was labelled as clearly as a jar of Nescafé at Sainsburys. Not only was I the only man in the Savoy carrying a copy of the
Mirror
and wearing a blue suit and red tie, but I was also the only person in the bar. All that was missing was a large neon sign above my head flashing the word ‘sucker’. Hell, hell, hell.

       
‘You the man with the mission?’ he asked from six feet away. No, son, I’m the Avon lady. The barman’s eyebrows shot up like clay pigeons, his chin dropped and my stomach turned over. Hell, hell, hell, should I bluff or run?

       
‘Could be,’ I said. ‘What can I get you?’

       
‘Guinness, a pint. And a packet of crisps. Salt and vinegar.’ The drink he got, the crisps were off. I took him over to a table by the baby grand piano where he could nibble at the stuffed olives and not be within earshot of the barman.

       
‘So what are you up to?’ he asked, a piece of olive stuck firmly in the gap between his front teeth. I leant back in the decidedly uncomfortable chair, crossed my legs and narrowed my eyes. Bluff or run? No question about it. I might as well enjoy myself.

       
‘First things first,’ I said. ‘Have you been in action before?’ He looked uncomfortable, shifting in his seat and rubbing his boots together.

       
‘Not as such, no, but I spent four years with an SAS territorial regiment, trained with them in Wales, live firing, explosives, the works.’