Angel on the Inside

 

 

 

ANGEL ON THE INSIDE

 

 

Mike Ripley

 

 

 

 

Telos Publishing Ltd

17 Pendre Avenue, Prestatyn,

Denbighshire, LL19 9SH

www.telos.co.uk

 

Digital edition converted and published by

Andrews UK Limited 2010

www.andrewsuk.com

 

Angel on the Inside
© 2003, 2008 Mike Ripley

Author's introduction © Mike Ripley

 

Cover by Gwyn Jeffers, David J Howe

 

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

 

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

 

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

 

 

 

 

One day, God is walking the boundaries of Heaven when

he comes to a section of fence which has fallen down. On

one side are the green fields and sweet air of Heaven, on

the other are the sharp red rocks and sulphurous clouds

of Hell. God is furious at the broken fence and shouts for

Satan to get his arse up here quick. When Satan appears, God

tells him that the upkeep of the boundary fence is his problem

and he'd better get it repaired quick. Satan just laughs and

says ‘Or else what?' and God fumes: ‘Or else I'll get my

solicitor on to it.' Satan really laughs this time.

‘Where are you gonna find a solicitor?'

– Anon, HMP Belmarsh.

 

 

So there's this Good Ole Boy Texan out riding in the

desert and suddenly he's confronted with a rattlesnake ready to strike,

Osama Bin Laden with an AK47 and a lawyer. But he's got only two

bullets left in his trusty Colt Peacemaker. What does he do?

Shoots the lawyer twice.

Just to be sure.

– Anon, San Quentin.

 

 

 

 

This one is for a lot of people: Stephen Habgood of HM Prison Service; the Governor and staff of HMP Belmarsh; John Hopes of Essex Police; Margaret and Joe Maron, my spies on the London Eye; Michael at Gerry's Club; Tim Coles (again) whose book
A Beginner's Guide to Model Steam Locomotives
was an eye-opener; Frankie Fyfield for dubious legal advice; George Rivers of the Association of British Investigators; Sian Best-Harding for vital research beyond the frontier; and especially Amanda ‘Quisling' Stebbings for cultural advice above and beyond the call of duty. Oh, and for Jessamy for use of the tattoo. Sorry about that.

 

MR

 

 

 

 

 

Angel on the Inside
began life in a maximum security prison and almost died less than a year later in a hospital stroke unit.

In 2002, I had published the eleventh
Angel
tale –
Angel Underground
– and a non-series comic thriller entitled
Double Take
, which had started life as a film script – my attempt at an Ealing comedy for 21
st
Century multi-cultural London. Two earlier
Angel
titles, both out of print for over five years, were being reissued in paperback, and after a long and frustrating wait, I had finally reclaimed the film and TV rights to my books. I had taken on the monthly
Crime File
review column on the
Birmingham Post
following the death of F E (Bill) Pardoe, agreed to serve for three years as a judge for the Crime Writers' Association's Gold and Silver Dagger awards and, as a day job, I was working for the Essex Field Archaeology Unit on a large Romano-British site in Witham, less than a mile from the house where Dorothy L Sayers had lived and worked up to her death in 1957.

Angel Underground
had left my main characters with some back issues to be resolved, especially Angel's soul mate Amy, who had revealed the existence of a previous husband recently released from prison. A vague idea for the next book crystallised into a plotline on the day I was sent to prison with Lindsey Davis!

To be honest, Lindsey (author of the outstanding ‘Falco' series of Roman private eye mysteries) and I, along with Ruth Dudley Edwards and Paul Charles, were in HMP Belmarsh to give a talk about crime fiction and writing in general. It was a fascinating and rewarding event – for me, if not for the poor inmates who had to sit through it. Sadly, we missed (by a week) meeting one of Belmarsh's most high-profile guests, Jeffrey Archer, who had just been transferred to another of Her Majesty's Prisons (or ‘Windsor Hotels' as one prison officer called them).

I knew Angel had a fan-base in British prisons, and not just among the lads on D Wing in HMP Chelmsford (keep reading, guys), but also among senior HMP staff even at Governor level, where I knew that my books were exchanged and discussed. I had even helped one ex-Governor with his MA thesis on the portrayal of prison and rehabilitation in crime fiction, agreeing to be interviewed and arranging meetings with fellow crime writers.

As a
quid pro quo
for my help, he arranged an appointment with the Governor of Belmarsh, and the deluxe guided tour I was taken on (the ‘deluxe' bit being that they let you out at the end of the day) provided me with a shed-load of ideas.

Around the same time, I was contacted by a fan from South Wales who had written to the
Daily Telegraph
wanting to know where my crime review column had gone. I wrote back to him and told him that the
Daily Telegraph
had dispensed
with my services as a critic, but the
Birmingham Post
had taken them up. That led to a long correspondence with Len Taylor of Port Talbot and my decision to include warring Welsh gangsters in the plot, with Len as a family ‘boss'.

On a visit to London and to an educational charity where I was doing some mentoring in creative writing, I watched the London Eye directly across the river and thought that had to feature too, if only in homage to the famous scene on the Viennese Ferris wheel with Orson Welles in
The Third Man
.

I had long wanted to write a scene set in the legendary Gerry's Club on Dean Street, of which I am still proud to be a member, if only a ‘country member' these days, so that went into the mix (see Chapters 8 and 9). And the final scenes in Wales, despite all the Welsh jokes, were based on numerous happy trips there in an earlier life to Brain's breweries (Old and New) in Cardiff and on family holidays in Tregaron in a cottage loaned to us by that shy and retiring, but incredibly generous, book dealer, George Harding.

With everything in place, I wrote
Angel on the Inside
in just under three months, delivering the manuscript before Christmas 2002 and completing the copy-editing in early January 2003 with a view to publication of the hardback in March.

 

And then everything went a bit strange.

With one of those masterly ironies that life throws up, I suffered a stroke just at a time when I was losing weight, drinking less, smoking less and doing a demanding, outdoor, physical job that had all resulted in me being leaner and fitter than at any time in the previous 25 years.

Initially paralysed down the left side and unable to speak, I was not in any sort of shape to worry about the book's launch, which was just as well, as it seemed to pass totally unnoticed. I had no idea that my then publishers had suddenly decided to drop the Angel books completely, not even producing a paperback edition of this latest title as they had with previous ones.

Consequently,
Angel on the Inside
appeared with no promotional fanfare and garnered only three or four reviews, although Peter Guttridge (
Observer
), Philip Oakes (
Literary Review
) and Professor Bernard Knight, despite being Welsh, were all particularly kind.

It was not until some six months later that I learned that the book was not to be paperbacked, by reading the publisher's catalogue for 2004 and discovering I was not in it!

But now, finally, the twelfth novel in the series, often referred to in hushed tones wherever book dealers meet as ‘the missing Angel', makes it into paperback for the very first time, almost exactly 20 years after
Just Another Angel
(Telos Publishing) appeared and alongside the latest instalment in the saga,
Angels Unaware
(Allison & Busby), which may just be the old rogue's swan song.

You never know.

 

Mike Ripley

Colchester, August 2008

 

 

 

What was your approximate speed when the accident happened?

That was easy enough: 15 mph.

Bulldozers don't do more than 15 mph flat out.

Position of other vehicle(s) involved. Use sketch plan if necessary.

Bang in front of me, side-on, to begin with. Through 90 degrees and up on its side after I hit it.

Speed of other vehicle(s) involved.

Nil. After I'd hit it, though I nudged it sideways for a bit with the bulldozer.

Road conditions at the time of the accident.

Not on a road. In somebody's front garden, actually.

Place and location of accident.

Lat 52'22' N; Long 0'58' W. (Approx.)

Were occupants of other vehicle injured?

Sole purpose of exercise.

Were the emergency services called to the scene?

You bet.

Which ones?

All of them.

 

‘You can't send that in,' said Amy. ‘They'll think you're a nutter.'

‘I was hoping they'd reserve judgement on that until they got to the bit where I told them that it was our car I trashed with the ‘dozer,' I said reasonably.

‘
My
car,' Amy pointed out.

‘So why am I the one filling out all the forms, then?'

God, she could be really childish at times.

‘Because you think you were put on Earth to make life hell for insurance claims assessors.'

‘It's a calling. Of sorts.'

 

Of course I wasn't doing any of this just to annoy the insurance company, though that was an added incentive, nor to prove a point about the vulnerability of BMW Series 7s when hit broadside by 17 tons of bulldozer just because it's the one test they
don't
do in the wind tunnels over in Munich. (Actually, knowing BMW, they probably do.)

It was, after all, a pretty straightforward case. The car had been stolen from our – Amy's – house in Hampstead and later used, miles away up in Suffolk, in the commission of a crime, as they say. Crime in question: abduction of said Amy at gunpoint. All I had been doing was preventing a getaway by using whatever means were at hand and, I think the jury will agree with me on this, the minimum of force necessary. I put it to you: it is impossible to stop a BMW 7 when it gets up to speed with simply the use of harsh language.

You could, of course, if you wanted to be pedantic, mention the fact that I must have known full well that the driver could be injured during such action. Too bloody right, I say. After all, he had just tried to abduct Amy and he'd pinched the car in the first place – it was almost the first thing he'd done after getting out of prison, after buying a gun that is.

Oh yes, he was a villain. A right jailbird. He had form, a record. He was also totally psychotic. I knew all that.

What I hadn't known was that he was Amy's husband.

Well, her first one.

So all this fun I was having filling in whacky insurance claims was a way of getting Amy to talk about it, because everything else I had tried had failed. (Threats, anger, sulking, more threats, bribery, offers of counselling, romantic restaurants, a few more threats, the silent treatment, the going-on-and-on-about-it treatment, double sulking.)

‘I'm not signing the claim and it is my insurance, so why don't you just let it lie,' she said. ‘The warranty will cover it.'

‘I don't think so. I think it becomes invalid if you deliberately remove mechanical parts from their factory mountings,' I said, pretending to read the small print on the claim form.

‘What, you mean like a wiper blade or something?'

‘I was thinking of the engine.'

‘Oh fuck it, just get rid of it, sell it for scrap. I don't want to know.'

‘Amy, dearest, that's 35 grand's worth of car you're writing off.'

‘We can afford it.'

‘We
can
?' I hadn't meant to shout.

‘
I
can,' she said icily.

‘Look, we've got to talk about it some time,' I pleaded, all the time thinking about how many accounts she must have hidden away.

‘Why?'

‘Well, what if there's a hearing or something? I mean, there could be.'

Even as I said it, I knew it sounded lame.

‘So there's a hearing; so there's a trial at the Old Bailey; so there's a Royal-fucking-Commission. What? You stopped my car getting stolen. Rather violently, admitted, but that's all you did. Why do you have to know anything about ... him? Let it go. Move on.'

It wasn't me who couldn't say his name. Why was I the one who needed to move on?

‘If there is a hearing or an enquiry or whatever,' I tried gently, ‘won't it sound strange that I didn't know you'd been married before? I mean, I'd look a right div.'

She seemed to think this over.

‘Wouldn't be a first,' she said.

 

It had been a month since it had happened, but time just flies when you're answering police enquiries.

I had been involved in an archaeological dig in Suffolk – well, not so much involved as
supervising
, actually – though I'm not really an archaeologist, I just know how to look like one. I drive a delicensed black Austin Fairway cab, but it doesn't mean I'm a London taxi driver who has done the Knowledge, which just goes to prove that appearances are deceptive. At least I hope they are.

The weird thing was not me wielding a trowel in anger for the first time since I was a student – or the other off-the-wall things going on at the dig – but the fact that Amy had insisted on coming with me. What I hadn't known at the time, though I should have suspected, was that Amy wanted to get out of London for a while. That alone should have set off car alarms in Dulwich. Amy never left London except to go to Paris or Milan or wherever the next fashion show was. Amy never left Zone 1 unless one of her customers was having a crisis and there was a need for a rapid-response fashion adviser. She was not the sort of woman – she was the last woman on Earth – you could imagine exchanging a designer frock for breathable Gortex combat trousers in Desert Storm camouflage and forsaking her Jimmy Choo shoes for steel-capped rigger boots. (Actually, she took the Jimmys along just in case.) But there she was, digging with the best of them, hardly noticing there wasn't any room service.

Of course, as I discovered, she'd been hiding; and, to be honest, an archaeological dig in East Anglia is a pretty good place to hide. Martin Bormann could have been digging in the next ditch and nobody would have thought to ask.

She was hiding from a man who had been out of prison for just a month but had used the time wisely to track down his ex-wife at her Oxford Street office, find out where we lived, break into our (Amy's) house, steal our (Amy's) new BMW, buy a gun, discover we were in Suffolk and decide to abduct Amy.

The only thing Anthony Keith Flowers hadn't bargained for was what happens when a bulldozer meets a BMW at right angles.

What I hadn't bargained for was that there was an Anthony Keith Flowers
at all
.

Life's just full of surprises.

I hate surprises.

 

Amy and I had been an item for about three years. No, at least three years, as I distinctly remember missing three anniversaries.

When we met, Amy was the leading player in a creative trio breaking into the High Street fashion market with a well designed, well researched and well affordable multipurpose blouse known as a TALtop after the triumvirate's initials of Thalia, Amy and Lyn. Within a few weeks, Amy was the sole player in the partnership thanks to a combination of criminal proceedings and an unfortunate traffic accident down the Columbia Road Sunday flower market in Hackney. Within a year, she had franchised the TALtop and herself to a national chain of clothing shops, become seriously rich and moved her manufacturing base from a sweatshop off Brick Lane to the side streets off the Via Monte Napoleone in Milan. It seemed a good time to move into her house in Hampstead, as my one-bedroomed flat in Hackney wouldn't have cut the mustard if
OK!
magazine came calling – as they did.

There was also the small matter that my flat at Number 9 Stuart Street wasn't big enough for three of us, for I had a sitting tenant in the shape of an irritable black cat called Springsteen. I use the term ‘irritable' in its broadest sense: homicidal, sociopathic and possessed have all been bandied about in the past, and Stuart Street was declared a no-go area by the RSPCA many years ago. It just wouldn't have been fair to uproot a cat with an established territory and move him across London to upmarket Hampstead where the natural game reserves weren't enough to support his lifestyle. And anyway, I valued my skin too much to be the one to break the news to him. So I compromised and kept the flat on. The rent was a peppercorn thanks to an understanding I had with the landlord of the house, I'd invested in a cat flap, and the other residents regarded him as better than a Neighbourhood Watch, burglar alarms and a minefield when it came to deterring intruders. So everybody was happy and, as an added bonus, I had a crash pad I could use in case of emergency. And let's face it, there always are emergencies when it comes to relationships. So many, that I'm beginning to think the two things are mystically connected. Maybe I was just getting old.

Flat 3 at Number 9 Stuart Street also, I felt, kept me in touch with my people. Not ‘my people' in any sort of religious or political sense; nor, for that matter, in any sense of class, intellectual, educational, occupational, sociological, sexual or genetic compatibility. In fact, thinking about it, I didn't really know why I liked them, but I did. It was probably because they didn't
bother
me.

In the flat above mine were Inverness Doogie and his girlfriend Miranda. He was a budding chef who was destined to have his own restaurant and probably TV series one day if only he could find the right gimmick, preferably one that did not involve fighting on the terraces at football matches, the third real love of his life after cooking and Miranda. Actually, as the terraces in football stadia had gone all-seater, most of the fun of starting a ruck with visiting fans had gone too, so Doogie was in danger of calming down. Maybe it was Miranda who was softening his natural tendency to exuberant outbursts of violence. She was Welsh, which meant she knew that all silver linings had clouds, Rome wasn't burned in a day and these days the Good Samaritan would get mugged for his mobile phone. She had a powerful dampening effect on any free spirit, even Doogie's, and he had inherited his from a family tree that stretched back to the time when painted Pictish warriors headbutted Hadrian's Wall just for the hell of it.

In Flat 2 lived Fenella and Lisabeth, who were just about the longest-together couple I knew. But then, they didn't get out much. I could always rely on Fenella to put food out for Springsteen (as long as it didn't look too much like meat), make sure he could get in and out, pass on the rent money and take messages and deliveries for me. Lisabeth I could rely on to be Lisabeth, and even though she now referred to herself as a Woman of Size and couldn't move as fast as she once could, she was still my first choice for the person I'd want to walk in front down a dark alley.

On the ground floor was the unassuming Mr Goodson, whom we saw rarely and who was something in local government but no-one knew quite what, though he must surely be approaching retirement from it. Then again, he could be one of those men who were born at the age of 42 and spend their lives growing into the part. He kept himself to himself, put up with a lot and seemed happy to have the camouflage of the rest of the house around him, the house in its turn being camouflaged by the rest of Hackney – one of London's best kept secrets.

Despite its history of extremist politics, its reputation for lousy educational achievement, pockets of severe poverty and the fact that nobody ever admits to coming from there, it is not that bad a place to live. People are always willing to talk to you there, in any of 17 languages, even while stealing your car. In Hampstead, as I had found, hearing a neighbour's car alarm going off felt like you were intruding on their privacy. In Hampstead no-one can be bothered to hear you scream. In Hackney they at least tell you to put a sock in it.

 

‘So you feel there is a part of Amy's life to which she has denied you access?'

‘Well, yes, obviously,' I said.

‘Yet you live in different worlds, so there must be areas you keep apart.'

‘I wouldn't say that. We rub along quite nicely.'

‘Despite the fact that she earns so much more than you?'

‘Trust me, that's not a problem,' I said truthfully. ‘It's not for her and it certainly isn't for me.'

‘It must have come as a shock, though – finding out she'd been married before.'