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CHAPTER FOUR

The next morning I passed on the gym, stayed in bed longer than usual and wondered if the activities of the night before had been a dream. McCallen’s anarchic reappearance had awoken long-dead emotions and knocked me off balance. Made me consider what the German had that I didn’t. I let out a sigh and pressed my head deeper into the pillows in a futile effort to evade the simple truth. Lars Pallenberg had not spent fifteen years of his sorry existence knocking people off.

She had nerve, I was forced to give her that. And she knew how to get to me, the ‘personal threat’ argument a blinder.

I finally dislodged myself from my cosy pity, got up, showered and shaved and stared at my reflection. You’re looking good. More rested, McCallen had remarked. My normally cropped dark hair could do with a cut. The rest of me appeared much the same: blue eyes, wide nose, high Slavic cheekbones, but I got what she meant. I’d lost the hunted look.

I dressed in a pair of jeans, open-neck shirt and sweater, black loafers. Standing in the kitchen, eating a solitary piece of toast, I looked around me. I hadn’t really got the hang of homemaking. I had all the right kit, furniture in the rooms, plantation shutters on the windows, yet the deliberate absence of personal touches, anything that could betray my true identity, gave it a slightly sterile air. Occasionally I’d buy flowers – freesias, my mother’s favourite – but that was about as far as my interior design went.

I gazed out of the window at a grey, wet January day that was already dark before it got going. Miserable summed it up and it reflected my mood. I might have committed to a home and car and gainful employment, but I had nobody with whom to share my life because I could never reveal my past. McCallen was the only woman who knew me well, understood the way I ticked, and McCallen was off-limits and unattainable. I was the equivalent of a city after a bomb has been dropped on it – ruined and empty.

With no particular place to be that morning, I pulled on a leather jacket and let myself out onto a street of terraced houses. Collar up, I walked with a brisk step past the watchmaker’s, nodding good morning to the guy inside, and round the corner to a short row of shops, my destination the newsagents. Perhaps McCallen had a point, I reasoned, as I picked up copies of the local newspaper and a couple of broadsheets with my standard pint of milk. I couldn’t keep running away from the world now that I’d made a conscious decision to reclaim it. With a particular eye for any development opportunities, I did a quick browse of the window of an estate agent. Nothing grabbing me, I went back home and soon had a mug of fresh coffee and newspapers spread out at the breakfast bar like recently received gifts.

Confronted by the usual suspects: war, economic woes, the Eurozone crisis and failures in various institutions, little seemed to have changed since I’d tuned in last. Marginally bored and about to flick to the business section, a face suddenly stared out that made me skid to attention.

Smoothing out the page, I looked into the dark, heartless eyes of the man I’d known as The Surgeon, the soubriquet earned because Chester Phipps was as physically strong as an orthopaedic surgeon and as skilled at exploring human anatomy in spite of his skinny physique. It was a good picture, one of which he’d have been proud had he been alive to see it. Taken a couple of years ago, it showed him wearing an elegant navy pin-striped suit, shirt loosely open at the neck. He was seated, cigarette rakishly held between his thin fingers, legs louchely crossed, his grizzled, moustachioed features gathered tightly beneath a mane of long grey hair. Staring directly at the camera, thin and intense, he could have been an art connoisseur rather than a crime lord whose interests included, to quote the man himself, ‘cocaine, crack and cunts’. A headline accompanied the photograph: ‘New Killing as Turf War Escalates’.

Phipps had exited the way most bosses meet their maker, his death part of the unseemly scrabble for power in the wake of the vacuum left by Billy Squeeze, a man who once retained a formidable hold on the drugs trade, a man whose ambitions had extended to genocide, a man who had done his best to stitch me up. While alive, Billy’s vicious reputation ensured that nobody dared to piss on his patch or cross him, making the ensuing jockeying for power and subsequent all-out war inevitable. I’d witnessed the destructive power of fear at close quarters. Uncertainty spawns violence. Loose associations, once tolerated, shatter into a maelstrom of killing until a new natural order is established. But The Surgeon’s death had me troubled for two reasons: I’d killed Billy, and Phipps had pointed me in the right direction to enable me to carry it out.

The phone saved me from further brooding. I looked at the number and groaned.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Is that Joe?’

I scratched my head. ‘Yes, Dan, it’s Joe.’

‘We’ve got a problem. The toilet’s blocked.’

‘Again?’

‘The toilet’s blocked.’

‘No, you dope, I meant not again.’

‘Erm … yeah. We’ve tried to sort it, but –’

‘Don’t touch anything. I’ll be round in ten.’

I took my shit-busting kit from the garden shed and walked out of the rear gate to where I parked my Z4. Having never owned a vehicle before – cars were a perk that usually wound up crushed or destroyed – it represented one of the pleasurable upsides of going straight. Opening the boot, I threw in a beast of a plunger, a drain snake, thick rubber gloves and a pair of waterproof trousers and Wellingtons. I couldn’t help but grimly observe that clearing up other people’s shit, of one kind or another, was a constant refrain in my life.

My student let was in St Paul’s, close to the university. As this was my third visit in as many months, I was beginning to realise that renting out property to three young men was a ridiculous idea. They had no sense of hygiene, cleanliness or financial responsibility. Without a parent in tow, they reverted to the behaviour of toddlers. Both species were messy and had a habit of staying up half the night, Dan, the eldest of the trio, being a typical specimen. Likeable, smart and easy-going, he was also an accomplished liar. The rent money was never quite available or where it should be – in my bank account – and yet he always had an entirely plausible reason for delay. I’d once facetiously suggested to him that he would make a good addition to the security services.

As soon as Dan opened the door, I was assailed by the heavy aroma of curry and body odour. Upstairs had its own peculiarly vile tang.

‘It’s a bit of a mess,’ Dan said, as I squeezed into the narrow hall and manoeuvred my paraphernalia past a bike with a puncture in the rear wheel, a skateboard and a full-size supermarket shopping trolley. The open door to the lounge revealed upended furniture. I gingerly peeked inside and saw that one curtain was seemingly held in place by fresh air, the other lying in an exhausted heap on the floor. Carpet and every available surface lay coated in empty cans of lager, cheap cider and overflowing ashtrays. I grunted disapproval and made the mistake of walking into the kitchen.

‘Jesus, when did you last wash up?’

Dan peered through a curtain of dark hair and stroked a fledgling attempt at a beard. ‘I was about to start on it.’

‘And the rubbish?’ I stared out of the window onto a vista of bulging and split bin liners. ‘We have fortnightly bin collections,’ I added, piercing Dan with a look that used to reduce grown men to tears.

Dan beamed and idly scratched his rear in the region where the top of his boxers conspired with his jeans. ‘No stress, Joe. Take a chill pill. Jack and Gonzo are loading all the shit up and taking it to Kingsditch later.’ Kingsditch was the recycling centre.

‘How? On the bus?’

‘Gonzo’s mum is driving down for a few days. She’ll do it.’

I didn’t bother to ask whether or not Gonzo’s mother had been warned of the treat that lay in store on her arrival. I had a feeling that this was another product of Dan’s ripe imagination. Last time they’d vacated for the holidays, I’d removed twenty-four bags of rubbish from the yard and six from an upstairs bedroom. Students.

Dan loped upstairs behind me and hovered on the landing as I pulled on my shit-clearing gear. ‘It’s been a bit iffy for a couple of days,’ he said. ‘Then it overflowed.’

I said nothing. I was busy trying to prevent my gag reflex from going into overdrive. The bathroom floor was covered with filthy water, loo roll and stools the size of elephant shit. Iffy for a couple of days was code for a week. It also told me something else. Nobody could have taken a bath or shower in that time.

‘Where’s Gonzo and Jack?’ I snapped as I waded in.

‘In bed.’

‘Get them up.’

The note of warning in my voice had the required effect. Startled, Dan disappeared as I pushed a plunger into the toilet bowl and created a seal. Working it gently up and down to start with, I then tried a more vigorous approach, pushing the plunger and letting it suck back up in a monumental effort to dislodge whatever was causing the obstruction.

Two sets of sleepy eyes appeared at the doorway, a general fug of unwashed youth melding with the odour of faeces. Nice.

‘Man,’ Jack said, lazily scratching an armpit. Gonzo didn’t say a word, just stood slack-jawed, as though an alien had appeared in his midst.

‘Go to the kitchen,’ I said. ‘Fill up a bucket of hot water and put two parts disinfectant in it. Bring it back with a mop. Either of you own a pair of flip-flops?’ Of course they did. Teenage boys spent their entire lives in them even when it was snowing.

‘Yeah. And?’

Gonzo’s upward inflexion and dismissive delivery suggested that he thought me cracked. I fixed him with a particularly menacing expression from my repertoire. ‘Get them.’

Both lads gawped at each other and shambled off. I continued working the plunger. Nothing budged. Time for the snake.

Dan had reappeared at the doorway and I asked him to pass me the drain snake, a wire coil with a corkscrew tip. On a previous occasion, I’d used a wire coat hanger and dislodged a hairbrush. If the snake failed, I’d have to remove the toilet, not something I was keen to do.

Feeding the snake into the opening, I wiggled it around the S-bend, the place where most blockages occur. Sure enough, and with a sense of eureka, I bumped up against something spongy, like a cushion or piece of foam rubber. Twisting the coil, I drilled in, gained purchase and yanked, the accompanying sound of water draining assuring me I’d literally hit pay dirt.

A plunge bra with enough padding to guarantee the appearance of a 38DD clung to the end of the snake. ‘Yours?’ I said, looking at all three youths.

‘Fuck,’ Dan said, clearly lost for a more articulate response.

‘Must be Mandy’s,’ Gonzo said.

‘Yeah, but how did it get there?’ Jack laughed, the others joining in, doubled up and helpless.

I didn’t see the funny side. ‘Perhaps you’d like to tell her that real tits are nicer than fake.’ With this, I sloshed out of the bathroom. ‘Over to you, big man,’ I told Gonzo as I pulled off my boots. ‘In there with the mop and bucket.’

‘Aw shit, man.’

Resisting the temptation to come back with a laconic response, I threw my next order at Dan and Jack. ‘And you two needn’t stand around pissing yourselves. You’re on washing-up duty.’

It took them the best part of two and a half hours, and only because Gonzo’s mother turned up and helped. Wondering about what my life had become, I drove back home feeling grim and flat, like a puppet with its strings cut. In an attempt to bat off a fresh wave of utter pointlessness, I took another shower, cracked open a cheeky beer, and resumed reading. Big mistake. Everything about Chester Phipps’s death bothered me.

In common with most ‘big men’, Phipps was into security. He had a couple of bodyguards with him at all times. He rarely drove, preferring a trusted driver. His food was checked. He never went anywhere without having the location swept for listening devices, weapons or explosives. A man rarely alone, the only exception was when he was screwing, which Phipps, again in common with the breed, did quite a lot. He oozed a rare, potent mix of sexuality and intelligence that women found bewitching. The fact he was also extremely dangerous added to the allure. Notwithstanding this, he always had a man posted outside the door of every place where he hung his hat. So how come he’d wound up alone in his car with a bullet in his temple? Surely, in the wake of Billy’s demise, a guy like Phipps would take special measures? The more I thought about it, the less sense it made. In the old days, I’d have asked around, but that time was past and I couldn’t afford to take a risk. And that was the problem with my life. Deprived of danger, I ceased to be.

I made myself a sandwich and ate it while reading the business section. I washed up the plate, set it on the drainer and considered any number of tasks that could gainfully engage my time. Maybe I’d go for a walk, catch a film, prop up any one of a number of bars and play anonymous.

I did none of these things.

I picked up the phone and punched in McCallen’s number.