Gilded Edge, The (45 page)

The player prodded the tip of his cue into Vince’s chest and asked, ‘The fuck d’you want, white boy?’

Vince looked down at the little round blue chalk mark on his shirt. The player prodded Vince again in the chest, and this time the chalk mark appeared on the narrow strip of his black knitted tie. It looked as though the pool player intended to make a habit of this and turn Vince’s shirt and tie into a matching polka-dot ensemble. Men were now laughing. It was clearly an appreciative audience. Encouraged, the pool player cued up again for another shot at Vince’s chest. Vince’s forearm shot up and carved the pool cue away with a circular sweep. By the time his hand had returned home he was holding the .38 snub-nosed revolver, which he stuck into the chest of the pool player. Realizing that little blue chalk marks were soon going to be replaced by big red bullet holes, the player dropped the pool cue to the floor. His partner followed suit.

Vince pulled the gun out of the pool player’s chest, took aim and fired a shot into the radio on the bar. The white noise died and the radio toppled off the counter. At this, there was some sucking of teeth, some muttered curses, but otherwise muted resignation ruled the roost. A gun going off in a joint like this wasn’t such a shock to the system; a poetry recital going off would have produced a more startled reaction. Vince then barked out simple instructions to these occupants of planet shit-hole:‘Get the fuck out of here and close the cellar door behind you!’

There was no immediate movement, just a bristling silence as everyone considered and weighed up the white boy (with the gun) in the room. Were they really going to stand for this in their own back yard? This moody-looking malcontent coming in for one of their own? These fleeting thoughts, these crossings of minds, didn’t last that long, and certainly not long enough for Vince to feel the need to repeat his instruction. Even with the maths stacked up against him, the .38 was always going to be the great equalizer in this equation. For those gathered in the Cellar Door, it was turning into a no-brainer. Maybe it was something in the intruder’s eyes, the bloody-minded intent evident there, but he certainly looked as though he’d take out at least three of them before they got near to him. There were no volunteers to be those first three. So the bottles and glasses that were about to be hurled at Vince were now put on the bar, pool balls were put back on the table, knives being thumbed in pockets were left safely sheathed. And up the stairs and out the cellar door they all trooped, the .38 tracking their movements every step of the way.

Vince then darted up the stairs and shifted the heavy bolt on the door securely into place. He knew he had to work fast, for they’d be back, bigger, uglier, angrier. And he knew that a gun set firmly against Lightly’s head would be his passport out of there.

Without its occupants, Vince got the true hellishness of the place. It was a brick cellar, with the walls painted a dull rusty red. Everything was painted this colour, including all the furniture, which looked like all the stuff they couldn’t sell in the secondhand shop upstairs. At one end of the room was the bar, and to the side of that bar was a door, which looked uncharacteristically closed. Vince had never been in this dive before but he’d have betted pound notes for peanuts that this door was usually left ajar. He went over and opened it with ease.

There was a bare brick passageway beyond, and Vince moved through it with the gun extended before him. To the left was another door, half open, exposing a toxic-looking toilet for catching dysentery on, and a small handbasin for contracting leprosy in. He moved further down the passageway that seemed to be looming into the black hole of a tunnel. Never a big fan of dark enclosed spaces that hid people who potentially wanted to kill you, as he edged forward his footsteps got increasingly timid. Further in, and the solid block of blackness ahead of him beat against his eyes. He half expected to hear a whistle and then see the bright headlights of a train getting bigger and bigger as it hurtled towards him.

He gingerly tapped away with his foot as if he might be at the edge of a precipice. He then felt a drop of a good . . . couple of inches, and stepped down into what he thought must be the widening expanse of another room beyond. Vince’s eyes adjusted enough for him to get some vague sense of his surroundings. His hand groped the wall alongside the entrance to this new room, and, on the black coalface it resembled, he struck gold – the light switch.

On the throwing of the switch he was faced with a wall of furniture. Stacks of chairs and tables and cupboards and wardrobes and filing cabinets, all piled up almost to the ceiling. This was obviously a storage room, or a burial ground, for the shop upstairs: a final resting place for all the old crap they couldn’t sell. And somewhere amid its wreckage, Vince reckoned, was Tyrell Lightly. A nice little hiding place, a needle in a haystack. Vince cocked the .38.

‘There’s only one way out, Lightly, so let’s get it over and done with, eh?’

Vince thought he heard the creak of wood nearby, something moving about, and it wasn’t woodworm. But he didn’t hear the words
I surrender
or see a white flag poking out from the top of the pile of furniture. So he took aim and sank his first slug into the centre of the heap. The shot echoed around the cavernous room.

‘Coming out now?’

It wasn’t so much a creak from the pile of furniture this time, more of a groan, as though it was a big sentient creature and Vince had just shot it in the gut. And there was movement too. He detected a slight swaying at the peak. But not so much as a squeak emerged from the real living organism hidden in its bowels.

Two more shots: one to the left of centre, one to the right. More groans from the woodpile that was now visibly shaking, and looked for all the world as if it had had enough and was about to up sticks and march on out of the place. But it wasn’t just the furniture that was making noises now. There was heavy breathing, then panting like a dog, a whinnying sound that grew and grew until it could be held no more and burst forth into a full-throttled cry of pain.

Then the furniture pile that had taken three slugs finally collapsed and came crashing down. Vince’s first reaction was to dive to the ground and make himself as small as possible as the whole shebang came tumbling down. It sounded a lot worse than it was, and he felt the first few bumps, but nothing major. It was like diving under the weight of a crashing wave, where all the mayhem was above.

But he did feel the footfalls of someone scampering over him. And he did feel a warm liquid drip down on to his cheek. He climbed out of the pile.

Once the dust had settled – and there was dust, eye-clogging, choking and coughing spitfuls of the stuff – he saw that the gun was no longer in his hand and Tyrell Lightly was no longer in the room. And there was a banging noise from outside – the sound of the cellar door being kicked in.

Vince made his way back through the darkness of the tunnel and into the light of the club itself. There were shiny studs of fresh blood against the dull red of the floor. He saw Tyrell Lightly crawling up the stairs. His eyes were wide open, his mouth was gaping, his nostrils flared, the combination forming perfectly rounded circles all over his face. His expression was that of a contortionist trying to turn his face inside out. And Vince saw why, and winced himself, for the bullet wound was located around the man’s crutch.

Tyrell Lightly was already halfway up the stairs as Vince grabbed him by the scruff of his purple velvet collar. He was about to drag him downstairs and throw him on to the pool table when the door burst open and half a ton of Brother Xs appeared at the entrance.

Michael X surveyed the scene, and saw Vince with his hands round the throat of Tyrell Lightly. Vince shook his head, because the scenario all seemed dreadfully familiar. He was half expecting to see the big black hooker rise up from the floor and smack him right in the mouth. It never happened.

Instead, Michael X added a new twist, by producing a sawn-off shotgun from the inside of his black leather coat. Then, without ceremony or commentary, he took aim and fired off a shot.

With a clothes brush in his hand, Vince stood before a full-length mirror in his bedroom, giving the pitch-black dinner jacket he was wearing the once-over. He looked the part, although he wasn’t certain what the part would be. But he knew it was his last roll of the dice, as far as this case was concerned, and he couldn’t think of a more apt place to roll it in than at the Montcler club.

When the intercom buzzed, he looked at his watch and saw that his ‘date’ was an hour early. No date in the history of the world has ever been
an hour
early. It was Mac, though, and Vince buzzed him up. Then he paced the hallway, waiting. It wasn’t like Mac to pay social calls on a Saturday night, and he’d never even been to his flat. When they did meet up outside office hours, it was usually somewhere neutral like the pub. But Vince had to remind himself that, now he was a civilian, the normal rules didn’t apply.

Mac looked grave. He did grave very well. With his pipe in his mouth, his penchant for grey flannel and the monochrome professorial look, he always had that air of late forties post-war austerity about him. He was definitely pre-rock and roll. There were no colourful frivolities about him, and he looked especially pre-Elvis tonight. He turned down the offer of a drink, and even of having his coat taken, and headed straight into the living room. There he did the very thing that Vince had been doing before he answered the door – he paced. Mac paced like a pro. There was a real determination in his pacing that made Vince look like a dilettante. He paced up and down on the Moroccan rug in the middle of the room. Vince feared for its voluptuous nap, which looked as if it was going to be trodden into the ground and reduced to tarmac.

‘What’s wrong, Mac?’

‘Two days ago a body was found on the sidings of the railway tracks going up to Wembley Central. Cause of death was immolation, they think.’

‘Wouldn’t they know for sure?’

‘The body was in a sack, and burned almost to a cinder. But there were puncture marks and deep cuts all over him. He was partially flayed, and he’d been castrated. Buckshot was found in his lower abdomen. Any one of those injuries could have killed him.’

‘Dental records?’

‘Very distinctive. Half his teeth had been removed. Worth their weight in gold if you get my drift?’

Vince got his drift, but still wasn’t volunteering. He looked at Mac with a gaze open to interpretation. Sort of blank, sort of knowing, sort of goading.

Mac got the goading part loud and clear, and said: ‘Last Sunday you were spotted in Notting Hill, running all over the place asking for Tyrell Lightly. You own a Colt .38?’

Dry as you like, Vince responded, ‘Give me a minute and I’ll check my receipts. Why do you ask?’

‘Because, along with all the other possible causes of death, they found a .38 slug in him.’

‘You think I did that, Mac?’

‘I think
someone
did. And I think you know who.’

Vince shot back with: ‘So I’m an accessory to torturing and murder?’

‘Well, let’s put it this way, I think you know a lot more about it than me and the rest of the
chumps
down in Scotland Yard.’

And Vince did. A lot more.

Michael X had taken aim. His target was laid out for him: the expanding mass of red oozing from Tyrell Lightly’s crutch area. And by the time Michael X had aimed the gun, Vince was pretty much using Lightly as a human shield. A cowardly act? The only other option was to put himself in front of Lightly, thus well and truly in the line of fire. You got medals for that kind of bravery, and one day Vince would like to step up on the podium and collect one. It’s what coppers dreamed of, it’s what most decent-minded people dreamed of, doing the right thing and getting a medal pinned on your chest for doing it. But not for Tyrell Lightly.

In the split seconds he had available, Vince had weighed it up and made a judgement call; and there was no way in the wide, wide world of unlikely scenarios that he was ever going to take a bullet for that lowlife. Vince was then pushed out of the way as about ten of the Brothers X clambered down the stairs and proceeded to jump all over Tyrell Lightly. When he was sufficiently flattened, they scraped the battered bantamweight gangster off the floor and on to the pool table. A blue-baize pool table that was about to run red and become an operating table. Already Tyrell Lightly looked as if he’d just had a bucket of blood and offal dropped into his lap. It was only after Michael X had taken off his leather jacket and rolled up his sleeves and had the thin paring knife in his hand that he remembered he was in the presence of one of Her Majesty’s police officers. Michael X said something about protecting his people and dispensing justice.

Vince looked at the butchery on the pool table (true to the rules of 8-ball, Michael X nominated the pockets they’d be going in) and realized it was too late to save Tyrell Lightly. His quick little eyes were already glazing over with death. A death Vince knew deep down he was complicit in; a death he had let them get on with. And, more importantly, a death he didn’t think would be discovered.
Fuck!
Just why the Morons X decided to leave the body to be discovered on a railway siding was anyone’s guess . . .

‘I don’t know who did it, Mac.’

Mac expelled, even for him, a ludicrously protracted ‘Mmmmmm’ before he said, ‘I wish you’d given that a little more thought before you answered. Because right now it doesn’t feel like I’m talking to a colleague. A partner. Or even a detective in the Metropolitan Police Force.’

‘Right now I don’t have a badge.’

‘You forced their hand, and you know it.’

There was a pause as Vince searched for an argument. But what was the point? He knew that Mac knew it as well as he did, so he let the silence serve its purpose.

Mac said, ‘You can get the badge back. It’s not over.’

‘So what do
they
want?’

‘They want Michael de Freitas. All this Malcolm X Black Power stuff getting exported from across the pond is making people nervous. To them it stinks of communism.’