The Outsiders (14 page)

His life now was on the move. A cargo ship was ploughing across the Atlantic and the old days of poverty were behind him. A loan would be repaid in full. It seemed good, the prospect. He would go to see his uncle, architect of the loan – a dinosaur who had performed one useful function.

He dropped the post into Myrtle’s lap and went to the toilet. There was not much left in Mikey Fanning’s life, but he enjoyed the hour each morning when he trudged up the hill in San Pedro to the concrete centre of the village where he’d sit with Izzy Jacobs. They’d have a coffee, then a small beer, which was about all the old bladder would take. His and Myrtle’s future depended on a last chance, and the coming to Cádiz harbour of a rust-bucket out of the Venezuelan port of Maracaibo. The ship was not yet in and Mikey had had to grovel with Izzy. His long-standing friend – the most reliable fence he knew – had stood him his coffee and the beer.

He was heavily built and walked badly from the old wound – he’d never had a proper course of physiotherapy or gone to a fitness trainer. If he had to go right into the centre of San Pedro he’d use a stick, and if he was on his way to Puerto Banus or Estepona he’d take the bus – Mikey and Myrtle could no longer afford taxis. After a fashion, they were prisoners in San Pedro, which was back from the sea and downmarket from about everywhere else around them. There were plenty like them, with the pound collapsed, prices soaring and properties that couldn’t be sold. There had been better times. He’d owned a villa and a club, and if the Russians hadn’t arrived he’d still be running the joint.

Trouble was, they had come. The club had gone, sold at a knock-down price. The villa had gone. The Jaguar XJ had gone, and all Myrtle’s jewels, other than what she wore day in and day out. There was no going back to south-east London, and the likes of Mikey Fanning could hardly send distress-call letters via the consul in Málaga to UK pensions. A career as a blagger and professional armed robber, whose most frequent home address in the UK was c/o Her Majesty’s Prisons, failed to qualify for a pension right. If Myrtle’s family hadn’t helped, they might have been sleeping rough or in a fucking caravan.

Anyway, going home wasn’t an option. There was a modern eight-storey apartment block, overlooking the Thames, on the site of the Bermondsey street where Mikey had been brought up. Myrtle’s road was now a shopping precinct.

He shook himself. He needed the goddamn boat that was coming into Cádiz. It had been a big thing to involve that smarmy lawyer – Mikey had put business his way twenty years ago when the guy was broke and hadn’t a peseta to his name. And then there had been the meeting: he had scared the shit out of the Spaniard, with the introduction: ‘My nephew, Tommy, a very good young man, utterly professional and trustworthy, don’t come any better, and I promise that on my mother’s grave.’

He came back into the living room – in truth, it was a living room, dining room and hallway, just about everything, except bedroom, bathroom and kitchenette. That was what they were reduced to. Others like them had ended up old and marooned, dreaming of something turning up. In Mikey Fanning’s case it was the MV
Santa Maria
. He had said, and thought, ‘There’ll be a drink in this for me,’ and the ship with its cargo was at sea. He’d never counted on the future being gold-plated. He’d bust open a bottle when the ship was docked, the cargo off it and his share in his hip pocket –
when
– and then it would be a bottle for himself and Myrtle and one for Izzy. Mikey believed in nothing until it happened, and there’d been guys with him on that last hit, the wages van, who had already spent in their minds every last cent of the money coming to them – cars, homes in Kent, a place for the totty on the side – and they’d died in the street or been on their faces with a Smith & Wesson against their neck and the handcuffs on them.

Myrtle was a rock. Ugly as sin, big as a bloody whale, wonderful woman. She’d done the post: there was a pile of brochures and pamphlets beside her for one of the recycle bins on the street and a smaller pile for the shredder. Good old Myrtle – like, who’d want to nick their identity? She held up a sheet of paper for him to look at. She had two good rings on her right hand and the stones glittered in the sunlight.

It was from a department of the medical school at the university in Alicante.

Mikey and Myrtle Fanning – he in his seventy-second year and she in her seventy-first – were not the first and wouldn’t be the last to write off for an application form, fill it in, post it and receive the acceptance letter. It was all done in English, by an ex-pat employed at the hospital because Mikey only had the Spanish to order a meal, and Myrtle if a local plumber was needed or an electrician. Neither could have managed a formal document. In a way this was their biggest involvement in the life of their adopted country.

‘Fuck me,’ he said. He read it again. Well, they were both overweight and out of condition, breathless on the stairs. Neither liked salads or health-food. Izzy had said – he’d read it in the local newspaper for the British – that seven out of every ten corpses ‘donated for science’ to the Miguel Hernandez University were British-born.

She said, ‘More forms to be filled in, and they have to be witnessed.’

‘Izzy would do that.’

‘And we have to state we’ve nothing wrong with us.’

‘Nothing a bloody drink wouldn’t fix.’

‘And when they’ve finished with us, cut out all they need, we get cremated.’

He tried to smile. ‘Just what the doctor ordered.’

‘And scattered somewhere.’

It would cost nothing. Wouldn’t cost Mikey anything if Myrtle went first, and wouldn’t cost her anything if it was him. They didn’t have the money to pay for a decent funeral for either of them, let alone both. He told her everything, always had. She had known the detail of every job he’d been on and had spent almost as much time as he had in the interview rooms of Shoreditch, Southwark or Tower Bridge police stations. She knew about the loan, and the containers on the deck of the MV
Santa Maria
.

He said, ‘Well, let’s hope, love, that the bloody boat turns up.’

The bell rang. His nephew often called round. Mikey hated him, Myrtle said he was poison – but Tommy King had done the deal to bring the stuff out of Maracaibo on the Atlantic coast of Venezuela; Mikey had spat the introduction through gritted teeth. And the deal was money. With money it might be possible to bin the papers from the medical school at Alicante. Then there wouldn’t be a load of kids, bloody foreigners, staring at them – stark bollock bare – on a slab in a lecture hall. They knew, Mikey and Myrtle, that Tommy’d had an Irishman killed, which had made waves, attracted attention and was just bloody stupid. Mikey set the smile on his face and went to open the door.

She had not come out, had left Jonno to prowl the boundaries. Posie had not been outside since she’d gone in with a bundle of wet clothes covering her while the water dripped from her hair. He hadn’t argued, had given her space. They had about cleared the fridge, found some old bottles of wine on a rack, had read vintage magazines and glanced at books. He’d learned about the RAF and its veterans’ association, and she had leafed through dog-eared copies of
Country Life
and the
Lady
. He’d allowed her to go to bed on her own in the master bedroom and she’d seemed asleep when he’d come in.

In the morning, after what he considered a bloody grim night, he’d gone into the garden and learned the ground. The sun was climbing. She’d made him coffee.

Jonno said, ‘I was a miserable prat, getting here. All changed now, won’t happen again. Party time, sort of, starts now. We’ll get the car going. God knows how, but we will. Then we’ll hit town. It’s going to be all right. Believe me.’

She lifted her head and he kissed her.

5

Jonno swore. Not that he liked bad language. He’d walk out of a pub if a loudmouth was yapping obscenities.

His mother said he was a good driver. He didn’t have a car in London – didn’t need one. When he took Posie out of town, they’d hire one for a weekend – go dutch on it, but he’d drive – and if it was a long journey and late, or a dawn start, she would often sleep. He could pilot a car, head it down the road and do useful parking in narrow spaces, but he wasn’t a mechanic. The car’s engine had refused stubbornly to fire. He faced disaster. He couldn’t fulfil his promise.

Behind him, in the garage doorway, was Posie, legs apart, arms folded, with a halo of sunlight around her. A scowl ruined her face. Jonno had checked the petrol and the oil, which were good, so the difficulty was likely the battery.

It would have been better if she’d helped. She didn’t because she’d made a friend. The collar round the cat’s throat gave his name as Thomas. He was thin and bony, tortoiseshell and small, but had a big purr. He had found her and they had bonded. She held him comfortably and watched Jonno.

He didn’t know what she might have done but she could have done
something
, not just stood there. She might have helped by saying she didn’t want to go out in the car, that they could walk down the hill, two miles, then get a bus, do some shopping and lug the bags back on the bus – or splash out on a taxi. She didn’t. The car was maybe fifteen years old, an Austin but with Spanish plates so he couldn’t date it exactly. It was clean, had a nearly new sunhat tossed on the back seat and there was a shopping list in the footwell of the front passenger sear. He thought it might not have been used for a month, but it hadn’t been abandoned. He knew about push starts. Jonno released the handbrake and started to push.

When he had the car half out of the garage he stopped. It was hot and he was sweating. Posie stood cool and clean, watching. The cat glowered at him, as if he was a rival.

Jonno swore again, silently, then said, ‘I’m going to put it in gear. I want you in it, foot on the clutch. I’ll push, then let the clutch out quick with the ignition turned on. I think that’s how you do it.’

She came slowly, didn’t hurry. She put the cat down carefully. Jonno bit his tongue, kept silent. He went to the boot and started to push. The bloody thing moved. He was getting the speed up and shouted at her. There was the choke, the shudder and a half-cough. It failed. He reckoned they could have two more goes before they reached the closed front gate.

They tried again.

And failed. He pushed it once more – and they screwed it once more.

‘We’ll do it again.’

‘Why?’

‘Because we want to get the bloody car started – why else?’

‘No need to shout, Jonno – I’m not deaf.’

‘I didn’t say you were.’

‘And the more you shout, the less you’ll be able to push.’

He buttoned his lip, breathed hard and gathered his strength. She raised her hand to show she was ready.

He bellowed, let out a yell, and pushed. He had the car moving, its speed increasing, when he slipped and fell on his face in the gravel. The car shuddered. The cat watched him, contemptuous. The car juddered to a halt near the gates. Posie climbed out, showed a bucketful of leg, and locked the door – as if the vehicle was in Ealing Broadway not in a garden a bloody mile from civilisation. She came to him, reached down and let him heave himself up using her hand as a lever. Jonno thought he might throw up.

She had a headache. There would have been one glass, or two, too many.

She had not reached her bed so Winnie Monks had slept on the sofa. Small mercy – the bottle had been on the low table that was covered with yesterday’s newspapers. The glass had been wedged between her legs so the dregs had not spilled. The alarm had woken her. By the time she’d reached the bathroom the pain had started. She’d stripped and indulged in a half-minute of self-loathing, then showered, dried and dressed.

A horn had sounded in the street. The car was waiting for her. It was not yet six, but another day in the life of Winnie Monks had started. She didn’t know what it would be like, as a mature woman, to wake in a bed and have the warmth of a similarly mature man beside her.

It was raining, a gentle pattering on the pavement as she’d hurried to the car, and Kenny was shrouded in a mackintosh as he’d held the back door open. Xavier had wriggled across the back seat to make room for her. They’d hammered for Heathrow.

By the time they’d reached the Pyrenees the rain had given way to storm turbulence. The captain’s advice had been for passengers to stay in their seats and keep their belts fastened. She hadn’t talked on the flight but had done her face – round the eyes, tricky when they were the teeth of the wind. Xavier had been on her right, holding the bag that contained the gear, and Kenny on the left, holding the mirror for her. It was not a great job, but it would do. It was years since Winnie Monks had done her face in front of a mirror and really cared about the effect she created: she had done it for an inspector from Special Branch, a corporate lawyer in the City, who had seemed worth the effort for a week . . ., and for a boy in Sarajevo. Each time she thought of him a little smile cracked her face. It was so long ago, too bloody long . . . a lifetime before Damian Fenby had spent time on her sofa. Xavier had said she looked ‘great’, and Kenny had said she looked ‘brilliant’ – and she’d realised that a button on her jacket was only held by a single thread. She’d spent the descent to the airport with a cotton reel that did not match and a needle, and had made a good enough temporary repair. Xavier had said no one would notice and Kenny remarked that the colour was pretty similar. She felt good with them – with any of her Graveyard Team.