Bombproof (3 page)

Sixty-two. When you reach such an age, you don’t so much stop counting birthdays as
lose
count of them. Does that make him old or is he still middle-aged?

Most people can remember their childhoods with great clarity and later in life entire decades disappear into the ether. Ruiz is different. For him there has never been such a thing as forgetting. Nothing is hazy or vague or frayed at the edges. He hoards memories like a miser counts gold - names, dates, places, witnesses, suspects and victims.

He doesn’t see things photographically. Instead he makes connections, spinning them together like a spider weaving a web, threading one strand into the next. That’s why he can reach back and pluck details of criminal cases from five, ten, fifteen years ago and remember them as if they happened only yesterday. He can conjure up crime scenes, recreate conversations and hear the same lies.

He looks out the window. It’s raining. Water ripples across the Thames, which is slick with leaves and debris. He has lived by the river for twenty-five years and it’s still a mystery to him. Rivers are like that.

Maybe the post won’t arrive if it’s raining. The postman will stay at the sorting office. Keep dry. In which case the card from Ray Garza will come tomorrow. He’ll have another night of waiting. Dreaming.

Darcy comes downstairs when the coffee is done. She must be able to smell it. She’s dressed for college, in dance trousers, trainers, a sweater and sleeveless ski jacket.

‘Happy birthday, old man.’

‘Piss off.’

‘Don’t you like birthdays?’

‘I don’t like teenagers.’

‘But we’re the future.’

‘God help us.’

Darcy isn’t his daughter or his granddaughter. She’s a lodger. It’s a long story. Her mother is dead and her father has known her for less time than Ruiz. She’s eighteen and studying at the Royal Ballet School.

She sits on a chair, crosses her legs and holds her coffee with both hands on the mug. She can bend like a reed and move without making a sound.

‘I’m going to bake you a cake,’ she announces.

‘You don’t have to do that.’

‘What sort do you want? Do you like chocolate? Everyone likes chocolate. How old are you?’

‘Sixty-two.’

‘That’s old.’

‘You don’t count the years, you count the mileage.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

She has found a piece of fruit. Breakfast. There’s nothing of her.

‘Are you ever going to get married again?’ she asks.

‘Never.’

‘Why not?’

‘It’s an expensive way to get my laundry done.’

Darcy doesn’t find him funny.

‘How many times have you been married?’

‘Haven’t you got classes to go to, stretches to do, pirouettes? ’

‘You’re embarrassed?’

‘No.’

‘Well, tell me. I’m interested.’

‘My first wife died of cancer and my second wife left me for an Argentine polo player.’

‘There were more?’

‘My third wife doesn’t seem to remember that we’re divorced.’

‘You mean she’s a friend with benefits.’

‘A what?’

‘A friend who lets you sleep with her.’

‘Christ! How old are you?’

Darcy doesn’t answer. She sips her coffee. Ruiz starts thinking about sleeping with Miranda. It’s a nice idea. She’s still a fine looking woman and if memory serves they used to tear up the sheets. The sex was so good even the neighbours had a cigarette afterwards.

They divorced five years ago but stay in touch. And the intervening period hasn’t been benefit-free. They had a steamy weekend in Scotland when one of her nephews got married, and had another brief fling when Ruiz got stabbed in Amsterdam and Miranda looked after him for a couple of days.

Friends with benefits - the idea could grow on him.

‘What are you smiling about?’ asks Darcy.

‘Nothing.’

A metal clang echoes from the front hall. The post. Ruiz feels hollow inside. Darcy springs up and fetches the envelopes, counting out the birthday cards and putting them on the table.

‘Aren’t you going to open them?’

‘Later.’

‘Oh, come on.’

Michael has sent a postcard from Bermuda. He’s sailing charter yachts. Claire’s card has a portrait of a bulldog, all jowls and slobber. She’s going to call and arrange lunch. She has a boyfriend now - a barrister, who knows all the scurrilous gossip and rumour. Ruiz suspects he’s a Tory.

Miranda’s card has a cartoon of a naked woman wearing an astronaut’s helmet. The pay-off line is: ‘Very funny, Scotty, now beam down my clothes.’

There is another envelope. Square. White.

‘This one now,’ says Darcy, handing it to him.

Ruiz slides his thumb under the flap. Tears it open. The front has a photograph of a kitten playing with a ball of wool.

‘Many happy returns,’ it says. Ray Garza has signed his initials and written a postscript.

She’s still the best fuck I ever had.

Ruiz closes the card. His hands are shaking.

‘Who is it from?’ asks Darcy.

‘Moriarty.’

3

Sami Macbeth got sent down for the Hampstead jewellery robbery, which isn’t the whole story. He got sent down because a mate with a van ran across six lanes of motorway and got cleaned up by a German lorry carrying eighteen tons of pig iron.

Andy Palmer wasn’t even a proper mate. He was a man with a van who used to take their gear to gigs; the amps, leads, mikes and drums. He was a roadie. A muppet. A hanger-on. Andy couldn’t play an instrument, he could barely drive, but he loved bands and he loved live music.

This particular Saturday afternoon he and Sami were heading to Oxford to set up for a gig. They stopped at a motorway service area because Andy had turned one on the night before and needed one of those high-energy caffeine drinks and Tic Tacs. Sami waited in the van, listening to Nirvana and doing his Kurt Cobain impersonation.

A police car pulled up alongside the van. One of the officers nodded to Sami. Sami’s eyes were closed, but his head was rocking back and forth.

Just then Andy came out of the automatic doors, sucking on a can of Red Bull. He spied the police car next to the van and took off, legging it past the pumps and sliding down the embankment. He sprinted across three lanes of westbound motorway and barely broke stride as he hurtled the crash barrier.

By then the rozzers were chasing him but Andy didn’t stop. He sidestepped a BMW, dodged a caravan, slid between a transit van and an Audi station wagon and just beat a dual rig with a soft top that swerved to avoid him.

The rozzers were still stuck on the central reserve, trying to make the traffic slow down. Andy thought he was away. Six lanes. He’d crossed them all. Sad fucker didn’t bank on the motorway exit, which is why a German truck driver turned him into a speed bump six times over. Bump. Bump. Bump. Bump. Bump. Bump.

Sami watched it happen. Nirvana was still playing. The guitars were screaming just like the truck tyres.

What Sami didn’t know was that Andy Palmer had a bit of extra kit in the van. Tucked into one of the amplifiers was a diamond the size of a quail’s egg and a dozen emeralds, all of them linked together.

The necklace belonged to a rich widow in Hampstead whose hubby used to be a diamond dealer in Antwerp. She wasn’t some doddery old dear who put baubles in a pillowcase. She had a state-of-the-art, dog’s-bollocks safe, imported from America, with motion sensors and alarms. It was fireproof, earthquake proof, bomb proof, but for some reason it wasn’t Andy Palmer proof.

Sami found this hard to believe. The same Andy Palmer who couldn’t find his arse with both hands, had broken into the most sophisticated safe in the world. It was beyond comprehension - a mystery for the ages.

Sami’s lawyer could see the funny side of it. His client was sitting in a van playing air guitar when he got nicked for the biggest jewellery robbery of the decade. Meanwhile Andy Palmer - the world’s most unlikely safebreaker - became a skid-mark on a motorway off-ramp.

The trial was a farce. The arresting officer testified that Sami had been pursued on foot for a quarter of a mile before being crash tackled and apprehended. The fat fucker must have weighed two fifty pounds. He couldn’t have run down a traffic cone.

The CPS offered Sami a deal. If he pleaded guilty to possession they’d drop the robbery charge. Sami’s lawyer thought it was a good offer. Sami’s lawyer had a villa in Tuscany and plans for the long weekend.

‘You do believe I’m innocent, don’t you?’ Sami asked him.

‘Mr Macbeth, I’d still believe in Santa Claus if he hadn’t stopped leaving me presents.’

‘Can’t you plead it down?’

‘What would you like - pissing in a phone box?’

‘Can you do that?’

‘I’m being sarcastic, Mr Macbeth. Take the deal.’

‘I didn’t steal anything.’

‘Possessing stolen property is a serious offence.’

‘I didn’t possess the stuff. I didn’t even know it was in the van.’

‘Then it’s another shining example of you being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Take the deal.’

The courtroom was Victorian, huge, high-ceilinged and panelled with wood. The wigged judge told Sami to stand. Then he started talking about how society had to be protected from miscreants like the accused.

He can’t mean me, thought Sami.

Nadia was crying in the public gallery.

Five years. Sami felt numb. They led him downstairs, handcuffed to a policeman. Outside there was a coach waiting to take him to jail. He had a number. He was in the computer. He was part of the vast human cargo system, silent and unseen, shuffling men around Britain, from one prison to the next. First it was Wormwood Scrubs, then Parklea, then Leicester before going back to the Scrubs.

Sami was scared that first night. He knew all the stories about prison bullying and the gangs; the prison sisters, the bikers, the sadistic screws.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the exercise yard. Sami was minding his own business, trying not to make eye contact with anyone, when a big fucker approached and offered him a cigarette.

The guy called him ‘Sparkles’. It became Sami’s nickname.

Sami had a rep. The cons thought he was a jewel thief. Not just any jewel thief, but the man who had broken into the biggest, baddest safe in the world. He had peeled it like a banana, stripped it like an engine, opened it like a tin of sardines.

And that’s how Sami managed nearly three years inside without getting any aggro or becoming someone’s bitch. Other newbies were worried about lights out or bending over for the soap, but not Sami; he was treated as an equal by geezers who would normally have kicked his body around the yard for the fun of it.

In spite of his newfound reputation, Sami learned there was nothing fraternal about the criminal fraternity. The only thing that mattered was the fear you engendered or the respect you were given. Either you were a ruthless fucker or you had a skill.

Sami unwittingly, accidentally, fraudulently, had a skill. He was a cat burglar, a safe breaker, a master craftsman, one of the elite.

Even so, he made sure he played down this talent. He did his time as quiet as possible. Kept away from the sex cases and nonces. Didn’t associate with any of the serious heavies or complete nutjobs. Ninety five per cent of all cons were complete morons with IQs that didn’t match their shoe sizes, which is why they were always getting caught.

Sami is out. Free. ‘Sparkles’ is deader than Andy Palmer. And no matter what else happens in his life, he’s never going back inside. You can bank on it.

Sami walks out of the Underground and looks for the familiar. Ton-of-Brix is not a place you fall in love with, it’s a place you survive. That’s what his father used to say, which is ironic since he’s dead now.

Nothing much has changed about Brixton, as far as Sami can tell. It’s still full of two-up two-down terraces, in narrow streets that are grim and grey and devoid of colour. The corner shops are bolted with steel shutters, padlocked and alarmed, with razor wire on the rooftops.

Middle-class mortgage slaves who couldn’t afford Balham and Clapham have tarted up some streets, planting flower boxes and painting terraces in pastel colours so that local teenagers with spray cans have a better canvas.

Sami used to love the place - just like he loved London. Not any more. It reminds him too much of a prison without the walls and the lousy food.

When he gets to Nadia’s flat, he checks his reflection in a neighbour’s window, wishing he could have cut his hair. A woman answers when he knocks. She is mid-thirties with a pie-plate face. Sami looks past her, expecting to see Nadia.

‘Who are you?’

‘I live here,’ she says. ‘Who are you?’

Sami looks at the number on the door.

‘Where’s Nadia?’

‘Who?’

‘My sister.’

‘How would I know?’ She tries to close the door. Sami spots cardboard packing crates and bulging plastic bags in the hallway behind her. She’s just moved in.

‘The woman who was here - did she leave a forwarding address?’

‘No.’

‘Did she say where she was going?’

She tries to stop Sami looking past her.

‘I had some stuff here,’ he says. ‘Clothes, CDs, a TV.’

‘Place was empty.’

‘I had a guitar.’

‘Ain’t seen no guitar.’

‘A Gibson Fender.’

‘Who’s he?’

Sami can hear Oprah in the background. He pushes past the woman into the living room. She’s not happy. Screaming. Hurling abuse. Says she’s going to call the police, the landlord, the social …

‘That’s my TV,’ says Sami.

‘Prove it!’

‘How do I do that?’

‘I bought it off the landlord,’ she says, defensively. ‘It was confiscated. Unpaid rent.’

Sami looks at her hands, which are twisted with arthritis. He’s on shaky ground. Two hours out of prison and he’s already breached parole.

Nadia has lost the flat. She wouldn’t move without telling him. She’d leave word.

4

Ruiz settles onto a tube from Baron’s Court. He never drives into Central London these days - not since the congestion charge. He’s not opposed to road tolls or traffic fines as long as someone else is paying them.