Read The First Novels: Pay Off, the Fireman Online

Authors: Stephen Leather

Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Action & Adventure, #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Crime, #Thriller & Suspense, #Thrillers & Suspense, #Suspense, #Thriller, #Crime Fiction

The First Novels: Pay Off, the Fireman (4 page)

BOOK: The First Novels: Pay Off, the Fireman
4.5Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

       
It’s easy money, too. Step one, take an advance order from South Africa, Hong Kong, Australia, anywhere where they drive on the left is best. It’s not too vital, though. If some Saudi prince wants to jump the queue for a Rolls it will be his chauffeur who’ll be driving, so he’s not going to be too bothered about which side the steering wheel is on. Step two, select your car. In London that’s no great problem: stand in the Strand with your eyes shut and throw a spanner – chances are that it will bounce off a Porsche or a Rolls or a BMW. Find the car you want and break in, then drive it to the sort of garage where nobody is going to ask any awkward questions. That’s the difficult part over.

       
The next step is to open the bonnet and get the chassis, frame and vehicle identification numbers and stroll along to any main Post Office and fill in Form V62 – it’ll set you back all of two pounds. You’ll have to sign a declaration that the original registration document hasn’t been passed on by the previous owner or been lost, destroyed, mutilated or accidentally defaced. OK, so strictly speaking you are telling a lie but then you did steal the car in the first place so that shouldn’t keep you awake at night.

       
Two weeks later, three at the most, your new registration documents arrive from DVLC Swansea – isn’t new technology wonderful? They handle more than a thousand of the V62 forms every week and they don’t bother checking – they haven’t the time or the resources.

       
You, sir, are now the proud owner of a luxury car complete with relevant documents. Drive it into a crate or container and deliver it to the nearest docks. Simple. It’s big business – in Britain alone a car is stolen every six minutes and never recovered. Right now Scotland Yard’s C10 Stolen Vehicle Investigation Branch is looking internationally for more than twelve hundred Mercedes, a thousand Jaguars, two hundred and fifty Porsches and a hundred Rolls-Royces. They’ve more chance of finding Lord Lucan than of turning them up.

       
The hardest part of the whole operation is actually getting inside the car, and for that you need a professional. I don’t know how to do it, you probably don’t, you need someone with experience, someone who can deal with central locking systems, and who won’t panic when a policeman taps him on the shoulder and says, ‘Having trouble getting into your car, sir? Can I be of help?’

       
The trouble is car thieves don’t advertise, you only hear about the amateurs who get caught and appear in the magistrates’ courts, and I wasn’t after an amateur.

       
I’d rented a lock-up garage a couple of hundred yards from my flat, and the morning after I’d met Iwanek in the Savoy I picked up the keys off the lounge table and walked down the two flights of stairs and into the early sun. It was a short walk to the garage and I unlocked the up-and-over door and went inside, pulling it closed behind me.

       
I switched on the light and it gleamed off a brand new red Porsche 911, well, almost brand new, anyway. I’d bought it nine months ago as a present to myself after handling the flotation of a local radio station. The fee I earned for placing the shares on the Unlisted Securities Market was more than enough to pay for the Porsche, and what the hell, you only live once. That was before my mother died in a car accident, though; that had taken most of the pleasure out of driving.

       
In the corner was a second-hand blue and white Honda 70cc that I’d picked up for £120 through an advert in the London
Standard
, and a full set of mechanics’ tools that had set me back five times that figure. I took off my pullover and jeans and slipped on a pair of brand new green overalls and got down to what I knew was going to be several days of hard work.

       
It took me a full day to get the head off the engine, and two hours to mangle the insides of the cylinders and give it the sort of treatment it wouldn’t have had with twenty-five years of constant use – Mr  Porsche would have cried his eyes out, and to be honest I felt pretty bad at ruining one of the best cars I’d ever driven.

       
A Porsche mechanic could have done the job a lot quicker but that would have been like asking a plastic surgeon to amputate a leg, and besides, no mechanic in his right mind would cripple a car without wondering why. It took me another day and a half to put the bits back together again; I only went back to the flat to eat and sleep and I eventually emerged from the garage with an aching back, my skin and hair dirty and oily and my hands covered in cuts and bruises, but the Porsche was well and truly knackered.

       
Back in the flat, after showering and throwing away the stained overalls, I rang up a Porsche dealer and asked for the price of a new engine. Ouch. I spent the next week driving around as many backstreet garages as I could find, tucked away in unfashionable mews, hidden under railway arches and behind blocks of rundown flats in areas which were in no danger of ever becoming gentrified.

       
Most of the mechanics just sucked their teeth and said they couldn’t even begin to tackle a masterpiece of Teutonic engineering that was obviously on its last legs, several suggested I tried a Porsche dealer and a couple quoted a price which wasn’t far off the official cost and told me it would take weeks, if not months, to get a new engine.

       
Eventually I struck gold. His name was Bert Cook and his lock-up garage in Camden wasn’t much bigger than mine. He was bent over a yellow Jag which had seen better times when I drove up, and he waited until the Porsche juddered to a halt before he came over, rubbing greasy hands on a piece of grey cloth hanging out of his overall pocket.

       
‘Sounds rough,’ he said, rubbing his pencil-thin moustache below a mottled, bulbous nose. ‘Very rough. Cylinders are definitely on their way out, you’re kicking out a lot of smoke.’ He wiped his nose on the greasy cloth.

       
‘Performance is right down, too,’ I said. ‘It used to kick you in the pants when you put your foot down, but now it’s worse than a twelve-year-old Cortina. Haven’t had it that long either.’

       
‘Should still be under warranty, then?’ he said, putting the cloth back in his pocket, grease smeared over his nose.

       
I tried to look sheepish, a guilty schoolboy caught with his pockets full of stolen apples. ‘I’d rather get it done on the QT, actually.’

       
‘Ah,’ he sighed, and winked. ‘I get your drift. Well, I might be able to help. Hang on while I make a call.’

       
He busied off to the back of his lock-up, keen to help now that he reckoned he knew the score. When somebody wants to pay good money to fix a car that’s still under warranty that can mean only one thing. And if he thought my pride and joy was stolen, who was I to put him right?

       
He came back after five minutes, a grin on his oil-stained face. Bert just happened to have a friend who had a friend who could get me a complete Porsche engine for half the price the dealer had wanted, including fitting, no questions asked.

       
‘Have to be a cash deal, though,’ he said. ‘You bring her in Saturday morning and she’ll be back with you by Sunday night.’ I tried to look relieved and grateful, shook Bert by the greasy hand and drove back to Earl’s Court and parked my battered Porsche.

       
An hour later I was back in Camden, this time on the Honda in a massive black anorak, red crash helmet and yellow plastic trousers, a clipboard pinned to the handle-bars, just one of the hundreds of would-be cabbies doing the Knowledge in London.

       
It was four o’clock, Thursday afternoon, and if Bert wanted my Porsche in on Saturday morning the chances were that he’d be going off for the engine tonight or tomorrow. I felt lucky, and an hour after I arrived back at his garage he locked up and walked over to a battered red pick-up. I was about a hundred yards down the road so he didn’t hear me start up the bike. He pulled out from the pavement, grey smoke belching from the exhaust, and I followed as he turned into Camden High Street and down past Euston Station and its throngs of home-going commuters.

       
There was no problem at all in keeping up with him, in the rush hour traffic the Honda was much faster than his truck and it was so distinctive I could hang well back.

       
He drove through Bloomsbury, and before long we were over the Thames and heading for Battersea. I felt luckier and fifteen minutes later he pulled up in front of another lock-up garage, much the same as his own except this one had the legend ‘Kleen Karparts’ above the brown-painted twin doors.

       
Bert wiped his nose again on the dirty cloth and sounded his horn three times. A door opened and he disappeared inside. Kleen Karparts was in the middle of a row of small businesses, a bathroom shop with suites for £199, a bookmakers, three or four shops with shutters down and ‘For Sale’ signs up and a couple which were open for business but with nothing in the windows to give a clue as to what they sold.

       
At the end of the road was a narrow passage which led to a muddy track behind the backyards of the shops. Karparts was fourth from the end and set into the wall there was a weatherbeaten door painted the same dirty brown as the front entrance. The door had warped badly and by pressing against it I could get a pretty clear view of what was going on inside.

       
A man wearing dark blue overalls and a welding visor was cutting away at what appeared to be a brand new Mercedes, and as I watched he pulled away the rear wing in a clatter of metal. At the front of the car a young lad, sixteen or seventeen at the most, was using a winch to take out the engine. There were two or three other cars in the back yard in various stages of being stripped, and one of them looked like a Porsche, but as there was virtually just a chassis left it was difficult to tell. Lying around were piles of electric wiring, headlamps, carbs, bumpers, enough parts to build yourself several complete cars if only you could work out how to put them back together again.

       
Another youth came into view, small and dark and wearing a black leather motorcycle jacket, laughing with Bert who was wiping his nose yet again. They walked up to the man in the welding visor who had now moved over to the driver’s side. He noticed the two of them, switched off his cylinders and pulled away his visor revealing a crop of purple hair and three gold earrings in one ear.

       
‘Dinah,’ said Bert. ‘How’s it going?’

       
‘Triffic,’ replied Dinah as he pulled at his virgin ear. ‘Should have these done by tonight and then I’ll start cutting up the chassis for scrap. I can’t strip them fast enough, we’ve done two Mercs this week and I’ve got a backlog of orders for Jags, BMWs, the lot. I might even have to go legit.’

       
‘I bet,’ said Bert. ‘The Porsche ready?’

       
‘It’s inside. Can I do you for anything else, body panels, lights, windows?’

       
‘No thanks, Dinah, just the engine, that’s all I need for this job. I’ll tell you what, though. I’m going to be needing a rear axle for a Merc 500 SL some time in the next couple of weeks, maybe a gearbox too. I’ll give you a bell.’

       
‘Consider it done, there’s always a market for Merc parts. Not the easiest cars to get hold of, though, but I’m working on it.’

       
‘Yes, well, you know what they say, Dinah, practice makes perfect, and when it comes to getting hold of cars there’s no one getting more practice than you.’

       
‘Nice of you to say so, Bert, but I’m still not going to give you a discount. Harry, give Bert a hand with the Porsche engine and for God’s sake count the money first.’ He reached up and pulled the visor down and turned back to the Mercedes, laughing as the two men walked back towards the garage.

       
I crept back down the passage and waited at the entrance to the road until the two men came into view, pushing a mobile winch which they used to load what seemed to be a brand new engine onto Bert’s pick-up. He pulled himself into the driver’s cab, started it with a shudder and drove off, smoke still pouring from the rusty exhaust.

       
There was a pub opposite Karparts, a run-down drinking man’s den, the varnish on the windows cracking with age and the rough-cast stained where rainwater had flooded down from a blocked gutter. I stripped off my waterproof gear and pushed it into the carrier on the back of the bike and walked inside the gloomy bar.

       
The ex-boxer of a barman asked, ‘What can I get you, chief?’ and I paid for a whisky and sat at a creaky circular table circa 1950 in the corner facing the door. Twenty minutes later Dinah came in, his overalls swapped for jeans and a grubby green sweater which clashed perfectly with his purple hair. With him were the two youngsters from Karparts, and Dinah brought out a wad of five-pound notes from his back pocket to pay for a round. At the back of the pub was a pool table and after a few minutes Dinah’s companions walked over, pushed in two ten-pence pieces and started to play. I picked up my glass and went over to Dinah, sitting alone at the bar.

       
‘How’s it going, Dinah?’ I asked.

       
He turned from his glass and looked me up and down. ‘Do I know you?’ he asked.

       
‘Not yet, Dinah, but you will, you will. I need a car and I think you’re just the chap to help me get it.’

       
He shook his head. ‘Try a garage, mate – I deal in parts and spares.’

       
‘Second-hand parts by the look of it, and most of them hot enough to cook sausages on.’

       
‘What are you getting at? You the law?’

BOOK: The First Novels: Pay Off, the Fireman
4.5Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Testing Kate by Whitney Gaskell
The Frog Princess by E. D. Baker
Starting from Square Two by Caren Lissner
This Earl Is on Fire by Vivienne Lorret
Get Wallace! by Alexander Wilson
Ordinary Heroes by Scott Turow
Tough Love by Cullinan, Heidi