… and with the money, as a bonus, was the constant offer of muscle to enforce Capel's own dealings. He allowed himself to be rated as a fool because that was what his uncle, Timo Rahman, had ordered.
He had rung that evening, on his mobile, from Maria's bed, and asked for the meeting. The video-cassette was locked in the glove compartment. He hooted, long enough for a barman to come out of the pub. He said his Ferrari Spider was to be watched.
Enver walked into the pub, and slipped the slight weight from his pocket into the palm of his hand.
The mouseboy and the mouseboy's wife were sitting at a far table, away from the drinkers. It amused him to see her. Plump, pasty, if she had been his she would have worked in a brothel and not been one of the special girls for businessmen in hotels.
The mouseboy looked down at his watch and the frown slashed his forehead, then noticed Enver's arrival. He was an hour late. The mouseboy half stood and the woman turned to face him. Enver saw the bruise on her cheek and the cake of cosmetics over it.
He apologized, as if he were just a humble immigrant from Albania in the presence of a man of stature.
'I am grateful you could meet me, Ricky.'
'You were lucky I was free – I'm not often free.'
'And again I regret my lateness, unavoidable business.'
He thought the bruise on her cheek had come from a hard blow.
'So, what is it that couldn't wait? I mean, I'm out with Joanne.'
'I had a call from Timo, from my uncle.'
'So?'
'Timo Rahman requests your company in Hamburg
– to discuss a matter of mutual interest.'
'When?'
'Within two days or three, that is what my uncle requests.'
'I don't think I can do that. I've a heavy diary.
Maybe in a week or two.'
He leaned forward. The wife watched him. She would have known that Enver Rahman, associate of her husband, ran brothels in north Haringey, Soho and behind King's Cross. She would have realized that he had noted the bruise on her face. She watched him and he thought she loathed him. Enver took the mouseboy's hand, opened it, laid it against his own palm. The hand snapped shut on the gold chain. It had been on the bed – the clasp had broken open while the girl had grunted and faked.
'Maybe I can rework my diary. I've never been to Germany.'
'I will book the tickets and I will accompany you.
The day after tomorrow.'
Ricky Capel's fist was clenched tight. 'Yes, I can do that. It will be good to meet your uncle.'
'My uncle will hope that he has not inconvenienced your diary, Ricky. He will be most grateful to you. My apologies, Mrs Capel, for disturbing the enjoyment of your evening. I will ring you, Ricky, with the flight.'
He gave a last subservient smile, that of a lesser man, and worked his way out through the tables and past the drinkers. Outside, he tipped the barman another of his twenty-pound notes for watching the car, and drove away.
Late, near to midnight, the Anneliese Royal docked. A poor catch. Hardly enough in the fish room, boxed in ice, to pay for the engine's diesel, and little enough for his son and for the boy's wage. For himself, there would be no money.
Skilfully, Harry nudged the beam trawler alongside the floodlit quay. Beyond the harbour the bars of the east-coast port town were chucking out. When his boat was unloaded and he walked towards the gate, if he met other skippers he would be asked how his catch had gone. For an answer he would shrug and shake his head. If the Anneliese Royal had been bought with a bank loan or a mortgage, had not been given to him, he would have gone to the wall with what the catch paid him. He would have been another swamped by the quotas, the lack of fish, the cost of diesel and the wages bill. But Ricky Capel had given him the trawler and often enough there were packages to be hooked up from buoys off the German and Dutch coasts, and Harry Rogers survived as a fraud. The ropes were made fast and the boy had started to put the few boxes on the conveyor-belt.
Harry said to Billy, 'Can't see any point hanging about this dump, not with the weather turning. No sense being here. I fancy home, going down west, till the storms are blown out.'
'You been in a war, Chief?'
'I'm fine, thank you.'
'I don't wish to interfere, but you don't look all right, Chief.'
'Very fine – never been better.'
'Have you been robbed?'
There was, and Malachy recognized it, genuine concern in her voice. It was an effort for him but he turned to the woman driver, took the change and the ticket that she dropped into the tray. Through the glass that protected her he saw the way she squinted at him.
He grimaced, which hurt his chin. 'I don't have anything to steal.'
'You should get them washed, those cuts.' She engaged the gears. 'Right now, get yourself a seat. On the night bus we go like the wind.'
He clung to the pole, steadied himself as she pulled away from the stop, then lurched for the nearest seat.
He heard her voice behind him: 'Him what done that to you, did he get pain?'
'Not yet.'
She giggled raucously, then accelerated, and Malachy slumped down. The bus raced through empty streets, took him home to the Amersham.
Bruised and bloodied, he felt the first welling of respect for himself, after so long. Like he had climbed a ladder or scaled the terraced wall of the pyramid. He was too tired, too battered, to know how Ricky Capel would 'get pain', but he promised it.
Chapter Ten
He sat on the floor. Round him were the sheets of paper torn off his notepad, and on the sheets were pencil lines, and he did it as he had been taught. The lines on the paper were maps, as he remembered them, of the main road and the junction, the length of Bevin Close and the street behind it where the gardens shared the common fence with those of the cul-de-sac, and of the house, number eight. He searched deep in his memory for exact recall of everything he had seen under the street-lights.
He heard the tap on the wall.
The house had surprised him. He had expected that Lewisham's roads would open – without warning – into a closed suburb of high walls, high gates, with mansions set behind them, the equivalent of the supplier's place in the country. What he had found, its ordinariness, had wrecked his concentration: he had spent too long down the cul-de-sac after going into its mouth. It was clever, having a place so unremarkable, which could only be reached by going into the mouth and down the throat of Bevin Close.
The tap came louder on the wall behind him, and its persistence grew.
That very ordinariness helped him. Over London, over the country, there were three-bedroomed semi-detached homes, all built to a common design. He knew it by heart – as an officer, he had had one. His rank at Chicksands was assigned homes of that status in Alamein Drive – into a hall with a living room off it, then another door opposite the staircase into a dining room, a kitchen at the end of the hall; up the stairs and four doors, to two double bedrooms, a single and a bathroom; a garden at the back. In Alamein Drive, Roz had kept the second double bedroom empty and ready for the once-a-year visit of her parents, and he had used the single bedroom as an office bolt-hole.
When he had been dragged along by the hair and the shoulder of his overcoat, in Bevin Close, he had seen a woman at the window of number eight – she had hung on to a child, as if to prevent him coming out and joining in the beating and kicking.