Bootlegged Angel (2 page)

To be fair, their main product, the TALtop itself, was a good product, an all-purpose top which by pulling the drawstrings around the neck could turn from long-sleeved to short-sleeved,
round-neck to plunging V-neck. And the beauty of the deal was that they all came individually tailored with a very flattering label denoting the size. A size 10 TALtop mysteriously fitted a woman
who could have sworn she was a size 12. A size 12 TALtop would mould perfectly around a woman who knew she was a size 14, even if she wouldn’t admit it. In fact, ninety per cent of the
production of TALtops were actually size 12, whatever they said inside the neckline. Once Amy moved production out of a Brick Lane sweatshop and discovered colour dyes which didn’t run and
stain the upper body parts in a light shower, then she was ripe for the big time.

She had promptly sold out to a big retail chain, though she retained various patents and rights and secured herself a position of power and a neat line in royalties.

Of course, having one of her original partners in jail and the other dead helped smooth the deal through, but she was never one to sit back on her laurels, take it easy and see out the century
counting her money. Oh no, innovate and upwards was her motto, that’s what she said. A pox on Chinese restaurants who gave out fortune cookies was what I said.

The latest must-have designer concept she had cooked up followed her discovery that there was now the technology to produce a silver thread – real silver – fine enough and strong
enough for use with an industrial sewing machine. A nifty bit of designing ensured a single silver motif on the left breast of a black TALtop which gave the garment a uniqueness as no two motifs
were exactly alike thanks to human error on the sewing machines. Amy swore this was the cleverness of a deliberately vague original design concept for the motif which allowed a certain amount of
self-expression on the part of whoever was sewing it on. Not too much variation, though, this was real silver after all, just enough to give it a USP (unique selling point) and, naturally, a
premium price. In fact the silver thread added less than a pound to the wholesale unit price, so it must have been Amy’s design genius which accounted for the other £15 added to the
retail price compared to a bog-standard TALtop.

Amy didn’t see all of that extra margin of course, as she was always telling me, but she did get a percentage and as British women spent £1.002 billions a year on blouses and tops (I
loved the ‘.002’), which was twice as much as they spent on tights and stockings, though less than they spent on shoes, even a small percentage was worth having. I had to agree there,
saying I would drink to that – and I had.

The silver TALs were destined to hit the High Street shops in the autumn but to cater for the Sunday newspaper magazine supplements and their long lead times, the publicity photographs had to be
taken now. It had been my idea to stage them in the Silver Vaults down Southampton Row.

I don’t claim any divine flash of inspiration, in fact I was watching football on Amy’s 48-inch flat-screen wall-mounted television (the ones that cost so much the BBC has to rent
them) at the time. Amy had arrived home late, as was usual these days, from a high-powered planning meeting in Milan or Tooting or somewhere, and before I could ask her if she had remembered to
pick up some more lager on the way back, she had started to moan and gripe and kick the furniture, growling a rosary of obscenities in the middle of which I managed to identify the words
‘Bank of England’.

For a moment I thought she was improvising her own rhyming slang but when she calmed down to half speed I worked out that the Bank of England had actually refused permission for her to use it as
a venue for her fashion shoot. So why not try the Silver Vaults, I’d said casually, without taking my eyes off the giant screen where a corner kick was about to be taken. And she’d
asked me if I knew the place and I said I’d been there and, like most casual visitors, had spent a happy hour or two dreaming of how you could rob it – not because I wanted three tons
of silver tankards, cutlery, plates, you name it, but just to see if it could be done.

‘Does it have silver on show?’ she had asked.

‘Your photographer won’t need a flash,’ I had said, stifling a groan as eight million quid’s worth of striker missed an open goal.

‘Get it sorted for me, darling. A week Tuesday. There’ll be six girls.’

‘Why me?’ I had shouted over my shoulder as she headed for the kitchen.

‘Because that’s your job,’ she had shouted back.

So
that
was what I did to earn my wages as a ‘management consultant’. I had often wondered.

Fixing up the gig at the Silver Vaults was easier than I had dared to hope. Having opened my big mouth and suggested it, I just knew it would be all my fault if anything went wrong but as it
turned out, it couldn’t have gone smoother. If anything, everyone I dealt with down there was glad to see me and fell over themselves to be helpful. Perhaps they just didn’t get as many
visitors as they used to and more than one of the dealers mentioned that silver ‘wasn’t sexy’ any more, so the prospect of half a dozen nubile young ladies modelling lingerie
(okay, so I blagged it up a bit) in and out of the silverware, seemed to go down well. The female dealers thought it would be good for the Vaults’ image. The male dealers tried not to look
excited and thought it would be cool.

For all their maximum security trappings, and the fact that they are underground, the Vaults have the atmosphere and layout of an indoor market just like you could find in Oxford or Leicester or
Huddersfield or a hundred other places. The difference was that instead of the aisles and cross-streets being lined with open stalls, the Silver Vaults boasted closed-in shops each with more locks,
alarms and closed circuit cameras than the average off-licence in Hackney. There was another difference, of course, as in most indoor markets you can buy fresh fruit and vegetables, fish, meat,
second-hand books, clothes, hardware, offcuts of carpet, you name it. Here you could buy silver; that was it.

You could buy silver in any form imaginable short of pieces-of-eight with genuine pirate’s teeth marks, though I never actually checked that you couldn’t. I had no idea that there
were so many things you could have made in silver, from a toothpick to a football trophy as well as a host of items you probably wouldn’t give house room to. I knew that the old liveried
guild halls in the City – Ironmongers’ Hall, Saddlemakers’ Hall, Brewers’ Hall and so on – always produced their silverware for formal dinners. This was indeed
‘the family silver’ amassed over the centuries and you were expected to look at it and be impressed by the antique wealth of the sugar shakers and the mustard bowls and the things
nobody was sure quite what they were for. You could look and admire and even have a guess at the value, but the one thing you could never do was touch.

I had gone down there to scope the place for Amy’s photographic session and homed in on one of the shops in the centre of the Vaults which had ‘Sloman and Son’ stencilled ever
so discreetly on its bulletproof glass door. The reason it caught my eye was that it was the only shop manned (and I do mean ‘manned’ as there wasn’t a female in sight) by anyone
under the age of sixty-five.

His name was Reuben and he was about forty-five years under sixty-five and looked like a computer nerd rather than the great-grandson of a skilled silversmith.

‘Models? Girls modelling clothes? Here?’ he had said when I broached the idea with him. ‘Oh, I don’t know whether we do things like that down here in the
Vaults.’

‘A shame,’ I had said, ‘because it is all about promoting silver. The girls are really only there to show off the silver thread sewing. They just . . . fill things
out.’

He had paused at that and his eyes had wandered to a small office, no bigger than a cupboard, at the end of the shop. The door was open and I could see a small desk and a high stool and on the
desk were a pile of magazines, a can of Diet Pepsi and a packet of sandwiches wrapped in greaseproof paper. I could hear his mind working.

‘They’ll need somewhere to change, won’t they?’ he had said and at that moment he was mine.

When I got back to the Silver Vaults from Stuart Street, Reuben Sloman should have been cursing the day I had wandered into his shop. Half his stock had been piled in cardboard
boxes and pushed to one side, Amy’s photographer had set up lights which made the temperature in the place almost unbearable and there were a dozen people in a space where normally three
customers would be a crowd. Amy was using a solid silver tulip vase as an ashtray and having a row with Nigel, her art director.

The six models stood around looking bored, but they were models so it came to them naturally. They were dressed uniformly in short houndstooth check skirts, black shiny tights and black shoes.
They were also undressed uniformly in that above their skirts, they wore only their bras – two black, four white, one of them an uplift.

‘Can I get anyone another drink?’ Reuben was asking, moving in and out of the models like a bemused sheepdog. ‘Hi again, Angel. It’s going great.’

He seemed genuinely pleased to see me, not to mention grateful. It was nice to be appreciated.

‘This is a farce,’ hissed Amy, switching her venom from Nigel to me just because I was nearer. ‘You never said it was this small.’

‘I did. Well, “cosy” was probably the word I used.’

‘Cosy is right. We could sell tickets.’

She was right about that. Most of the dealers from the other shops, several legitimate customers and a couple of security guards were loitering in the aisles outside trying to get a peek into
the shop.

‘Why the strip show? The tops not arrived?’ I asked her, trying to show an interest in her career.

‘No.’ Her voice went down a half-octave, which meant sarcasm was coming. ‘They’re all allowed thirty minutes free boob-tanning under the lights before we shoot.
It’s in their contracts.’

‘That’s nice. Can I check, see if they’re done?’

‘Don’t even think it. They can’t wear them until we’re ready to go because the lights make them sweat like pigs. Not the look we’re after and Nigel’s been
having the vapours about it for the last hour.’

‘He’s not the only one,’ I said, looking at Reuben, who gave me a big, cheesy grin in return.

‘Yeah,’ drawled Amy, ‘I think we’ve got a hormone overload on our hands.’

‘Don’t even think it, darling,’ I said sweetly. ‘He’s far too young for you.’

She flashed me a killer look so I tried to be helpful.

‘Why not kill the lights? Use fast film and a flash?’

‘Because,’ she said slowly in full patronise mode, ‘all this fucking silver bounces the flash and reflects everywhere. We took some Polaroids and it looked like the girls were
standing in the Planetarium boldly going through hyperspace.’

‘So why not go for that? Really do it. Get him to put two or three remote flashes on so you get a reflection in every piece of silver in the place. “All that sparkles really is
silver.” Something like that as a theme. Could work.’

She thought about this for all of five seconds but I knew it was going down well from the way the little vein in her neck throbbed.

‘You might have half an idea there,’ she said quietly. ‘But I’ll have to get Nigel to think of it.’

‘Is that a problem for you?’

She grinned at that, looking at the back of Nigel’s head as if it had a bull’s-eye target painted on it.

‘Nope. He won’t feel a thing. Where’ve you been anyway?’

‘Just popped over to Hackney, collect the junk mail, see if anyone was around.’

‘And was anyone?’

‘No, not a soul, but I did get a message.’

She gave me one of those looks which suggested that she still didn’t trust me for some reason.

‘From whom?’ she asked primly.

‘A woman called Veronica Blugden. I used to know her a couple of years ago.’

The
before I met you
hung in the sticky air along with the smell of sweat, tobacco and silver polish.

‘She wants to see me and pick my brains on something.’

‘Just your brains?’

‘You don’t know Veronica.’

‘Yeah, well, get your appetite where you can, just remember you eat at home.’

‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’ I’d heard that one before. ‘It’s purely professional. She just wants my help with a job she’s got.’

‘What does she do?’

‘She’s a private detective.’

Amy threw back her head and roared with laughter.

‘
You
? A private detective?’

Suddenly I burst out laughing as well.

‘You think that’s funny? You should see Veronica!’

When I had talked to Veronica from Stuart Street, I had established two things before agreeing to meet her. Firstly, that she was still based in Shepherd’s Bush in the
office she shared with Stella Rudgard and secondly, that Stella wasn’t around when I planned to call. I didn’t mind Amy having suspicious thoughts about Veronica; all she had to do was
see her and they would disappear immediately. Thirty seconds with Stella, on the other hand, would put the hairs on the back of her neck up and I could live without that.

Veronica had sort of inherited the detective agency from an ex-policeman called Albert Block who, if he hadn’t exactly broken the law on occasion, had certainly bent it. I had met her on
her first solo case when she attempted to hijack the cab I was driving.

Admittedly, ‘hijack’ is a bit strong. I was driving an Armstrong in those days, a black Austin FX4S London taxi; the sort you see on hundreds of postcards, tins of toffees and
calendars issued by the London Tourist Board. That was the original Armstrong. Nowadays I drove Armstrong II (when I was allowed), a Fairway, though only experts could tell them apart unless they
noticed the word ‘Fairway’ in red script on the boot. Suffice it to say that the Fairway, with its improved engine, was the last in the line of the classic black cabs. Shortly after it
appeared, we had the ugly and angular Metrocab and now the streets are crawling with the new generation of smaller, rounder TXs or ‘Tixilicks’ as they are referred to – though
always behind the driver’s back.