Hard Place (2 page)

Hampstead, North London

Around the time Ratso Holtom had been leading Nadine out of the kebab house on King Street in Hammersmith, Boris Zandro was only a few miles away in distance but light-years away in circumstances.

His palatial North London home was all white with a massive portico and pillars; the upstairs rooms commanded extensive views over the Heath and the mansion boasted twelve bedrooms and garaging for six. Tonight, as he did regularly, Zandro was entertaining guests for dinner. As he looked down the table at the assembled company, he came close to despising the lot of them. He had no interest in them as people. To him, they were a useful part of his sugar-coated public image. The parties helped him appear in gossip columns for all the right reasons. His patronage of the arts and charitable works were other shields. He feigned interest in the bores he met over canapés at Royal Academy functions or in Mayfair’s private galleries. He struggled to stay awake at the Royal Opera House. But the cultured image and generous donations were invaluable. Sometimes while quaffing champagne on these occasions he could exchange an urgent message with a lieutenant.

Tonight’s eclectic mix was typical and included a Conservative Cabinet Minister, a Spurs footballer, a svelte TV presenter, a hedgefund manager and the chair of the local arts group. He always selected the invitees but it was his second wife, Sophia who handled the details. The guests soaked up the Grand Cru pampering but better still for them was rubbing shoulders with other celebrities or persons with the power that money or politics delivered. The politicians welcomed his support for party funds while never questioning the spin: that Boris Zandro had made his millions from a serious stake in an African iron-ore discovery. With the ten-bagger gains, he had ploughed that windfall into an oil exploration company that had struck it big in Uganda. End of story. But as he spooned up some Grand Marnier soufflé he fought not to frown as his thoughts drifted to the balls-aching delays at the shipyard. That Lance Ruthven guy had screwed things up big time.

After emigrating from Albania in the early 1980s, Zandro had opened a small travel agency near Wembley. Long hours, hard work and living frugally had enabled him to rent more shops around the North London fringe. Some of the cash he had invested in small drug deals—low profile but with tidy profits. Gradually, with ever bigger deals, he had distanced himself from the sharp end. In quiet moments, Zandro knew he had been lucky. Back then, the Met Police had poor technology, weak laws and money-laundering was as easy as dropping by a Jersey bank with a suitcase crammed with cash. Now, cleaning money was tougher, much, much tougher. As he pretended to listen to Mandy, the woman prattling away on his left, he was rehearsing methods and contacts to shift the millions for his current deal. Twenty years ago, investing the profits of cocaine, cannabis and heroin into iron-ore shares had been a doddle. “Just changing one commodity for another,” he had joked to himself at the time—not that his stockbrokers knew or cared about source of funds back then.

His gaze wandered to the portrait of himself in a regal posture, his hands clasped. It was a far cry from the ragged-arsed urchin who had played in the narrow streets of Tirana. Quite deliberately, his clothes this evening were the very ones in the portrait. The Russian artist had captured his cultivated look of intense sincerity. The eyes showed warmth and the artist had even made his lips seem less mean by emphasising the thick graying moustache that dominated his upper lip. With his plentiful, swept black hair turning slightly gray, he looked patrician—like a prime minister or captain of industry.

But without my street-smart cunning? My tenacity. For sure, I’d still be a market trader, selling fruit and vegetables in the poorest part of Tirana. He finished the last morsel of dessert, almost licking the plate, a habit from those days when his empty stomach had rumbled. No. Nothing—and certainly not the Metropolitan Police—will stop this deal. But … Oh God! He turned to his neighbour with a forced smile as Mandy, the footballer’s WAG interrupted his line of thought wanting to share the latest episode of I’m a Celebrity.

Down the table, Sophia looked stunning, head cocked, her beautiful teeth sparkling. She was twenty-six years Zandro’s junior and reckoned that at fifty-four, it was time for him to relax on the yacht or, as he saw it, to fool around with as many young women as he could. But retirement was not yet an option. Sophia knew nothing of his plans for the biggest drug deal ever in Europe but with the aggro in the Bahamas and from Kabul, he sometimes wondered whether the deal was worth the bother. Absentmindedly, he nodded towards Mandy but more because he was thinking of well-placed friends, especially in the Home Office. Befriending a Scotland Yard Commander and a former Home Secretary had been useful. Now the cops were picking off the small guys and targeting the Hogan crowd from South London. It was good being below the radar for a change.

The first Mrs Zandro, from peasant stock in Albania, had been a millstone, out of her depth in North London. She would have been happier shouting abuse in a Tirana fish market than making conversation with an American hedgefund manager. Though he tried to see her right in a friendly divorce settlement, her greedy lawyer pushed too far and Mrs Dafina Zandro had mysteriously fallen overboard from the deck of his yacht, the Tirana Queen while cruising the Greek Islands. Boris himself had been thousands of miles away and had suitably grieved at her tragic death.

He stifled a yawn. Dear God! This Mandy woman is asking me something. “Sorry, you were asking how far Albania was?” He saw her nod. “Under three hours by air.”

“Oh! I thought it was sort of close by—just up the M1.”

“You must be confusing it with St Albans, my dear.”

“Oh, blimey! So it’s foreign like? Do they like speak English there?”

He gave her a thirty-second geography lesson but even that was beyond her attention span. Zandro turned away to the blue-rinse wife of the Tory party grandee on his right. She too was heavy going but worth it because of her loose tongue and her husband’s recent role as Foreign Secretary. He could learn so much from boastful politicians and their wives without even asking any questions: they all loved to yak on after a few glasses of Petrus or Romanée Conti. Especially the wives.

But his top henchmen on whom his empire depended, his two lieutenants, would never grace Wisteria Lodge. Sup with a long spoon. Wasn’t that an expression he’d picked up from Baroness Chestercorn? What in hell’s name was happening in the shipyard? It was screwing up everything. Maybe it was job for Bardici. His hammer could sort out the shipyard, no sweat. As his mobile vibrated in his pocket, he knew it was urgent and excused himself, promising to be back a few moments. But he had no intention of speaking on the phone. The vibration was all the message he needed to know what to do next.

Clapham, South London

Only a couple hundred meters and Ratso would be there. Perhaps they had information. Neil’s last text had been at 2 a.m.—five hours ago. Since then, zilch. Neil had gone to ground. Silent as the grave. Ratso dodged round the back of a red Routemaster, knowing Neil would have loved the gallows humor. It came with the territory. No disrespect, mate.

He saw the block ahead, saw his unlit office window on the first floor. The building gave no hint it was a police station: no blue lamp or grimy red brickwork. It was brick shithouse ugly but without the bricks. It was a conflation of concrete slabs and identical, grimy windows about twenty meters off the busy road near Clapham Common. The automatic red-and-white barrier was no real giveaway either. Plenty of office blocks now had that type of precaution to prevent illegal parking.

As he gazed up at his tiny office, he reckoned passersby would assume the five-story block housed several hundred civil servants. It was easy to imagine gray men in gray suits or patterned pullovers pushing paper and pencils around their plastic teacups till it was time to rush for the exit. It was the sort of building where you expected to find clerks sorting Incapacity Claims or debating whether ladders should have a warning on the top rung that read STOP HERE. Ratso’s pet hate, one of many, was the Nanny State getting in the way of common sense. Damned Health and Safety officials! Effing human rights campaigners. Brussels bureaucrats! Pinko liberal judges, mindless social workers and brain-dead jurors.

Yeah, put like that I’ve a few pet hates.

But he loved his work. Loved every minute. Hated every minute. Didn’t mean he loved his boss: DCI Arthur Tennant, that complacent time-server. He doubted anybody in any job loved their boss unless nookie was involved and that was usually lust and not love. As he turned off the music and slipped the MP3 into his jacket pocket, he knew he could never ever respect Arthur Tennant. He’d often wondered how that clown won a transfer to the elite Serious and Organised Crime team. Probably covered a superior’s arse after a botched job.

He crossed the car park, a touch of drizzle falling on the anonymous staff cars that filled one or two of the bays. The good stuff used by his team for surveillance or for Ops was round the back, pool cars for every occasion: a dented Ford for Merton High Street or a dark red BMW for cruising in leafy Hampstead. His hands clenched unwittingly as he thought again of Tennant. Tennant, the master of the soft option. Lazy bastard Tennant. Take-no-chance Tennant. Play-it-by-the-book Tennant. Count-the-days-till-retirement Tennant. That was why Neil’s little trip last night had to go up to the assistant commissioner at Scotland Yard. It was off balance-sheet work, outside Tennant’s comfort zone.

If it went wrong, no shit would stick to Arthur bloody Tennant. Tennant, the nit-picker, the fault-finder whose main hobbies were picking his nose while picking winners at Wimbledon dog track.

Forget sodding Tennant. The runt’ll be gone soon. Early retirement if he can fix it.

But if bugging Bardici had gone wrong, would the shit stick to Todd Ratso Holtom?

Perhaps.

His jaw tightened as he entered the building, its familiar smells the welcome mat for another day. The harsh austerity of the place got to him, wrapping around him like wet mist on Dartmoor. Now he had to face the unthinkable, the uncertainty that had dogged him since dawn. Neil must have run into a problem. But then, Neil had always been unpredictable.

“Morning, sir,” the uniformed security officer called as Ratso breezed through the ugly glassed reception area. In their functional zone, the two security personnel could watch the surrounds on closed-circuit monitors. Functional. Yeah. That just about described it. Effing dysfunctional sometimes.

Think of the positives. Arresting those Jamaican Yardies and that West African lot. Watching them being taken down, their eyes filled with hate and menace. But now the Albanian thugs were his daily diet. He’d spent hours on the web learning about them and their country. He’d romp it on that TV programme. Welcome to Mastermind, Mr Holtom. And your special subject is Albanian crime in the UK. Right, you have two minutes … starting now.

Two minutes? He could answer questions for two hours—and then some.

He swung into the featureless yellow corridor leading to his office. I’d go a storm on Mastermind. But the general knowledge questions? Questions about ballet, longest bleedin’ rivers, works of Picasso, Jung’s theory, or similar crap? Forget it, mate! Now, if it was how many wickets Jim Laker took in the Fourth Test at Old Trafford in 1956, or did Fulham ever win the FA Cup—now you’re talking.

He switched on his office light. Barely bigger than a shoebox, it wasn’t difficult to light every corner. Two’s company, three’s a squash. His small personal whiteboard no longer displayed a map of Albania, the secretive, dangerous Mediterranean enclave. He had returned from Tirana couple of months back, lucky not to come back in a box.

Back in the eighties, Albania had exported too many of its worst to the UK. Albanian families had abandoned the hot summers in Tirana and headed to London in droves. Ever since, day by day, their power and control of the drug scene became stronger. The toughest and most ruthless had risen by fear and intimidation to become the bosses. Bastards like Boris Zandro had grown tax-free rich. It was cat-and-mouse stuff. Ratso knew every one of them from old files and the well-collated material on the database, even shirt size and name of their favourite tailors—but making something stick? That was the challenge.

These thugs had been destroying British families for profit—dividing parents from kids, undermining and abusing the inherent values of decent folk. Destroying kids like Freddie, his brother’s son. Last seen alive snivelling in a doorway off the Edgware Road. Later found dead in a bus shelter on the Kilburn High Road two weeks back. Aged just nineteen.

Destroyed by a drug cartel, probably Zandro’s.

At a Home Office briefing, he’d learned how the Albanians had brought heroin, cocaine and pills into City bars, London discos, clubs and hangouts at every level of society. From that base, with mounting brutality, they had won turf wars, extending their power through the nation’s arteries until their evil was everywhere. Places better known for genteel respectability like Canterbury, Chester, Tavistock and Tunbridge Wells, had fallen into their clutches. Nowhere was immune. And it wasn’t just drugs. Ratso flung his jacket onto a visitor’s chair and scowled as he considered how these gangsters had muscled their way into every criminal racket: brothels, sex trafficking, cigarette smuggling, counterfeiting, immigration and arms dealing. Murder and torture were weapons of choice for Erlis Bardici as he kept the foot soldiers in line.

The great British public still remembered the Krays, the Richardson gang or talked in pubs about killers like Fred West but few were aware of the fierce grip of the Albanians. Now, they dominated the length and breadth of the British Isles.

The Yardies? The Krays? The Richardsons? Pussycats compared to this lot. These Albanians had started a nationwide war. And the bastards were winning.

As a detective inspector fronting operations, there was little time for fear—during the day, anyway. But nights were different. In quiet moments, he relived running for his life through the narrow alleys of Tirana, the machine gun firing, bullets ricocheting off the walls, his weary legs screaming for relief. Hiding beneath a truck. Heart pounding, the black night his only friend.

Every day was about joining the dots. He knew Erlis Bardici was the enforcer, a murderer at least twelve times over. He knew Zandro and his cousins but there were still big gaps, the missing dots between Zandro and the engine room of the trafficking empire. Putting them all away would be beyond pleasure. It was even beyond obsession. It was a way of life. He owed it to Freddie—mouth open, emaciated, filthy T-shirt and no shoes—found next to the fast-food cartons in a stinking bus shelter. Wasted to a frazzle by drugs and starvation.

Futile, really. You nail the Zandro gang. You even jail Boris Zandro. Cut off one head, there’ll be another tomorrow. Relentless. Bring down Zandro and another clone would move in. The Drug King is dead. Long live the Drug King.

But Boris Zandro, I’m coming anyway. Operation Clam is gathering speed. I’m coming to get you, Boris, if it’s the last thing I do.

As he was about to ease into his seat, he saw a yellow Post-It pinned to his computer screen. It was Jock Strang’s writing. See me, boss. Urgent. Without even booting up the computer, he edged back round his desk and headed downstairs to the Cauldron.

When he saw the machine, he debated whether to risk a cup of coffee. Had the pipes been cleaned recently? Probably not. He decided to leave it. An espresso at Caffé Nero across the road was a better option. And maybe a toasted panini. He’d skipped breakfast, eager to get to base as soon as Nadine’s taxi sped off to Dollis Hill.

As he passed the men’s bog, the solid bulk of Detective Sergeant Tosh Watson emerged, as it often did. Ratso reckoned Tosh must have had the weakest, smallest bladder ever to come off the production line. His face was well-shaven as far as his well-trimmed goatee, while the top of his head was a burr cut with a number-one blade, a dark veneer of growth covering most of it. Watson was not obese, though the way he put away fast food, he deserved to be. But he was overweight, decidedly so for someone aged early thirties. Keeping fit was not his style—he rarely lifted anything heavier than a pint glass or a dart. “If you were paid for pissing against a wall, you’d be a rich man, Tosh, retired probably.”

Ratso was rewarded with a nod and a forced grin. Tosh had heard it before, lots of times. But he usually reacted with a quip or jibe of his own. Not today. It was a bad sign. Ratso tapped in the code and entered the Cauldron.

One look at the faces staring at him from around the central bank of desks and he knew Neil Shalford was dead. But of the two or three officers gathered, only his two trusted sergeants knew the truth; the rest would only know that a drinking mate of Ratso’s had probably been murdered. On a need-to-know basis, only Ratso, Tosh Watson and Jock Strang were aware of the plan. After the right balls-up following Health and Safety rules last time, it had been Jock Strang who suggested Neil work off the books.

Ratso trusted Neil to the nth degree, even though he was sometimes paid by drug gangs for snooping on rivals. But the Irishman’s chameleon quality, fitting in with whoever paid, was his strength. He picked up the gossip, knew where the hard guys hung out and so had eventually agreed to become Ratso’s snout. Better still, he knew Erlis Bardici well enough to despise him. More than once, he had told Ratso that the cocksucker baboon made his flesh creep.

On a needs must basis, Ratso had taken Jock’s idea to the AC. Ratso had felt sure he’d get the yes. When he had been Detective Chief superintendent, Wensley Hughes’ had been seen off by Zandro and the taste of defeat was still bitter years later. The AC had agreed but his pointed warning had made Ratso’s scrotum shrink as if he’d been doused in freezing water.

“I feel pretty relaxed about that, sir,” Ratso had deluded himself, desperate for anything that might achieve the big break. But now the AC’s words rang fresh in his ears as he saw the worried look on Strang’s face.

“Morning, boss. Let’s use your room,” volunteered the Scot, nodding for Tosh to follow.

In his late forties and ten years older than Ratso, Strang’s gruff voice evoked images of meat pies, the Ibrox terracing, Irn-Bru and whisky chasers. He had the frame of a Gorbals copper—around five foot nine but every inch packed with hard experience from Glasgow’s violent underbelly. His physique shouted I take no shit. Of the three, Ratso was the tallest and fittest and for Jock, losing a few pounds round his midriff would have been an improvement. “It’s no the whisky or the fish suppers, boss,” he would often protest. “It’s ma knees. Cartilage damage playing fitba.” Ratso had bought the explanation. Cricket had played hell with his own joints.

“A report in ten minutes ago. There’s a body. Small park, top of the Fulham Palace Road. Hammersmith.” The trio were crammed into Ratso’s airless office.

It was Jock Strang who broke the news. Ratso looked into Jock’s eyes, burning now with anger, his cheeks reddened from late nights and booze. Somewhere along the way, something had happened to leave Jock’s right eye lower than his left. Jock had never volunteered an explanation and nobody seemed inclined to ask. The dour, unhealthy face beneath iron-gray hair cropped short matched his voice.

“A body? Hammersmith? Happens all the time,” Ratso deliberately exaggerated. He was perched on the edge of his desk and swung a long leg as if he had no cares. “Nasty area at night.”

“Tossed over the railings into Frank Banfield Park. Naked. Small build. Aged about fifty. Nearly bald. Tattoo on his left buttock.”

Ratso said nothing.

“Widna be needing nail polish for Christmas.”

Ratso rose slowly to his full height, couldn’t take the news sitting down.

“Nor condoms, neither.”

Shit! Tortured! That bastard Bardici. What had Neil revealed?

Ratso nodded but said nothing as he weighed the implications. “We’d better take a look. Pick me up outside Nero’s. It’s going to be a long morning.”