‘You’re wrong about AA membership,’ says Ron. ‘You save more money by –’
But the rest of Ron’s defence is drowned out by the sound of the windscreen being repeatedly smashed by a Liverpudlian with a golf club and a grudge.
Further up the lay-by, a motorcycle courier looks over at the scene, as he buys a burger from a roadside van.
18
Here’s the thing. It is a great deal easier being interviewed by the police than by another criminal. Mitch Maxwell has been interviewed by the police many times, and their resources and opportunities are limited. Everything is on tape, your overpaid solicitor gets to sit next to you shaking her head at the questions, and, by law, they have to make you a cup of tea.
Doesn’t matter what you’ve done – set fire to a factory, kidnapped a business associate, flown a drone full of cannabis into a prison – and it doesn’t matter what evidence they have – ‘You would agree that this CCTV shows you, Mr Maxwell, running from the scene with a petrol can’ – you can just sit there in peace, say, ‘No comment,’ every time you notice a silence and wait twenty-four hours until they have to let you go.
A police interview can be an inconvenience, sure. Perhaps you had planned a round of golf with the boys, perhaps you are due to collect a suitcase full of cash from the toilets of a motorway service station. But, so long as you are not a fool, and Mitch Maxwell is no fool, then no one is going to charge you with anything.
So, while, ideally, Mitch would rather not be questioned at all, he would always choose to be questioned by the police rather than by, say, the taxman, a journalist or, as the pool cue swings towards his head once more, by his good friend and business partner Luca Buttaci.
‘If you’re lying to me,’ screams Luca, as the cue connects with Mitch’s skull, ‘I will kill you.’ Mitch has been hit many times before. This is OK. It’ll be sore, but he’ll live. If Luca was really serious, it would be a baseball bat.
‘Luca, mate,’ says Mitch.
‘A hundred grand’s worth of heroin goes missing, and we’re mates, are we?’ shouts Luca, and throws the cue against a concrete wall. Mitch wonders again where they are. Nice set-up Luca’s got here. Spacious, pool table in the corner, lots of broken cues, clearly sound-proofed. Strictly speaking, Luca is taking a liberty here. Mitch is too senior for this sort of treatment; the two men are equals. Luca’s been in the business a bit longer, Mitch will grant the guy that, but their houses have both got a pool, a tennis court and stables. You know? Equals.
Besides, Luca knows the troubles they’ve been having just as well as Mitch does. It has affected them both.
They usually have a neat division of labour. Mitch does the hard work of importing drugs into the country. Luca does the hard work of distributing them when they’re here. Neither needs to know the first thing about how the other goes about his business.
But between the two of them is a very simple but crucial mechanism. The exact details change, but it usually comes down to something like this: somebody Mitch trusts will take a terracotta box filled to the brim with heroin into an antiques shop and, the following day, somebody Luca trusts will go into the same shop and buy that box. That is the moment when Mitch’s job ends and Luca’s job begins.
But, in this instance, there was, let’s say, a hiccup. The heroin was delivered to the antiques shop. Tick. But, come the next morning, the shop was shut, and the box was gone. Somewhere, overnight, a hundred grand’s worth of heroin had gone missing, and Luca is, understandably, frustrated by this. Especially after all the other problems they’ve been having, shipments being intercepted, profits collapsing.
‘You understand why I have to do this?’ says Luca, calming down a little.
‘Of course,’ says Mitch. ‘I’d be doing the same. Dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s.’
Luca nods. ‘That box is somewhere, innit? Someone’s got it?’
Mitch knows what Luca is thinking. Either Mitch’s courier, Dom, stole it; or the antiques guy stole it; or Luca’s courier stole it. It should be the simplest of riddles to solve, and, yet, there is still no box.
Therefore Luca must at least also be entertaining the possibility that Mitch himself is behind the theft. Which is why Mitch is currently tied to a chair, bleeding from the temple, while Celebrity Antiques Road Trip plays loudly on a big-screen TV on a far wall. No complaints from Mitch.
‘For sure, someone’s got it,’ agrees Mitch. On Celebrity Antiques Road Trip an eighties pop singer is buying an ill-advised tankard.
Luca nods again. ‘It’s not the hundred grand, you know that. It’s the future of the whole business. We’re leaking to death.’
‘I get it,’ says Mitch. This little arrangement, between Mitch and Luca, has been enormously profitable for them both. There had been bumps in the road, but nothing like this. And, as Luca says, the money is not really the main thing. The whole relationship, this business, is built on the bedrock of trust. If Luca can’t trust Mitch, the whole enterprise collapses.
‘While I’ve got you here,’ says Luca, ‘there’s a guy on a motorbike I’ve seen hanging around a few times. He one of yours?’
‘Nah,’ says Mitch. ‘Police?’
‘Nah,’ says Luca. ‘Not police.’
As Luca starts to untie him, Mitch gets a better look around.
‘Nice place, Luca,’ he says. ‘Where are we?’
‘Under an IKEA,’ says Luca. ‘If you can believe that?’
Well, that certainly explains why all the guns are on wooden shelving units.
Mitch knows that, although he and Luca are old friends, very old friends, it will all count for nothing if Luca stops trusting him.
Luca helps him to his feet and shakes his hand. But, as Mitch looks into the eyes of his old mate – just plain John-Luke Butterworth when they first met at the Young Offender Institution, Luca Buttaci when he felt he needed something more fearsome – he knows this whole situation could well end up with one of them killing the other. Tensions being high and what have you.
The best thing to do, all round, would be to find that heroin. That’ll settle everyone. He and Dom had absolutely taken the shop apart, and found nothing. It must be somewhere. More to the point, someone must have it.
It’s about four a.m., and he has to take his daughter ice skating at seven a.m. That’s when the rink opens for serious practice.
‘Are we done?’ Mitch asks.
‘For now,’ says Luca. ‘One of the boys will give you a lift home.’
Mitch stretches his shoulders. He needs to take some Nurofen, watch some ice skating, and then find a box full of heroin.
As it happens, he already has an unlikely lead. Dom says a group of pensioners had been hanging around, asking questions. One of them works for Connie Johnson. Mitch will find out where they live, and pay them a little visit.
No rest for the wicked.
19
‘I wish I had gone to university,’ says Joyce, as they wait outside Nina Mishra’s office.
Elizabeth knew the effect that Canterbury would have. Medieval walls, cobblestones, tea shops called ‘tea shoppes’. It was absolute catnip to Joyce. She has been in a trance since they got off the train.
‘What would you have studied?’ Elizabeth asks.
‘Oh, I don’t know about studying,’ says Joyce. ‘I just would have liked to have swanned about on a bicycle, with a scarf. Did you enjoy it?’
‘As much as I ever enjoy anything,’ says Elizabeth.
‘Did you have love affairs with older men?’
‘Not everything is about sex, Joyce,’ says Elizabeth. There had been older men, of course, and one or two younger ones. Not so much ‘love affairs’ as ‘occupational hazards’. There had been twelve women at her college, and around two hundred men. Which had very neatly prepared her for the world of espionage. Elizabeth had long told herself that she preferred the company of men, though it has occurred to her more recently that she’d had very little choice in the matter. She was happy, as they’d walked through the University of Kent campus earlier, to see there were as many young women as men.