Nobody Walks (15 page)

Mose had lost Martin Boyd around the Embankment, which meant the Embankment was nowhere near Boyd’s hidey hole. But that was okay. Where Boyd’s hidey hole was was somebody else’s problem. The fact that he had one was all Dancer was currently selling.

Someone like Martin Boyd, you didn’t expect a second crack at. He was Security, or from one of those police squads sounded like a postcode or a junk-food additive. S06, EC11, whatever. They came in undercover and did their job, and your window for wreaking personal justice upon them was brief, because after your arrest you couldn’t mess with them. For a start they’d generally vanished off the face of the earth. But even if they hadn’t, targeting them was an act of war. Might as well dig your own hole, plant a headstone, and wait. Because undercover types didn’t play by their own rules, they played by yours. And you didn’t want a level playing field when the opposition
were trained in use of weapons, rather than just in possession of a hooky firearm.

What was interesting about Boyd, though, was a hooky firearm was exactly what he’d been after.

Dancer spat noisily into, very nearly, his wastepaper basket.

Not that Martin Boyd was his real name.

The possibility was, of course, that Boyd was just bread on the water, deliberately giving the impression he was out of the game. There were some sharp buggers out there, and Dancer wouldn’t put it past them to use an old hand as bait, see who came to the surface. If that was what was happening things were likely to get noisy, and it might be sound politics to take an early break, Portugal or somewhere, until the dust settled.

Boyd hadn’t smelled like Job, though.

On the other hand, if he’d smelled like Job last time round, the Brothers McGarry wouldn’t be out of the picture.

Dancer killed his cigarette.

Bottom line was, what Boyd had done to the Brothers McGarry would have happened sooner or later anyway—it, or something like. They’d have been picked up for a dodgy tail light in a van match-ready for D-Day, or hosed out of their cars by a rival on the fringes of Epping Forest. Six of one and the same of the other, far as Dancer was concerned. Because if it wasn’t the Brothers McGarry it would be someone else, and here was your proof—the brothers were banged up, and guess what? Gun crime hadn’t gone anywhere. Gun crime was still edging up the charts, gaining on Possession With Intent, and muttering dark nothings about Grievous Bodily Harm.

So no, Dancer didn’t care what Boyd had done, and wasn’t even especially aggrieved that the man had threatened him, here in his own office. Threats, actual pummellings even, went with
the territory. You simply made a mental note, and waited for the wheel to turn. It wasn’t personal. It was just the way business was done.

In this particular instance, the wheel was turning faster than usual, of course.

The phone rang, and Dancer uncradled the receiver.

Sometimes you made people up. Sometimes you sold them.

Either way, the wheel kept turning.

He said, “You’ll never guess who I just had in the shop.”

The man Dancer Blaine
had called The Man otherwise went by Bishop. He too had known Martin Boyd in a previous life, and even if he hadn’t would have been keen to hear of his reappearance, the way any local businessman might rub his hands on hearing word of a tourist.

Tourists were there to be fleeced.

When this happened to tourists, it was often a metaphor.

On the table in front of Bishop was a photograph, one from that previous life. These days you’d do it on a phone, but not so many phones had cameras back then, and he’d used one of those yellow disposables. The occasion had been a party, everyone drunk, Bishop included, which must have been why he’d thought photos a good idea. Photography was generally frowned on in these circles, photos being not so much keepsakes as evidence.

The party had been for the Brothers McGarry and Bishop’s picture showed the pair of them, each with an arm round the man in the middle, Martin Boyd, friend, trusted lieutenant, who’d personally sourced a bent quartermaster in Herefordshire, a triumph netting a supply of weaponry officially destined for destruction, so
more than deserving of the man-hug he was enjoying. Bishop did a quick mental calculation, and as it was one he’d made before, was reasonably sure his answer was accurate. Four months and seventeen days. The picture had been taken four months and seventeen days before the Brothers McGarry, along with everyone who’d ever so much as passed them the salt, had been arrested.

Trusted lieutenant. Snake in the grass.

Bishop himself had gone down for five, been out in three and a half. As for the Brothers McGarry, they were walled up for a sizeable chunk of forever, but that didn’t mean they lacked influence.

More importantly, it didn’t mean they’d run out of money.

And they had some very specific ideas about how they’d like it spent.

With a pair of scissors Bishop carefully cut the photograph into three strips, and held the middle section up for a better look.

He’d be older now. He’d have a new name. But what was interesting was he didn’t seem to have changed his appearance—hadn’t changed his hair, wasn’t using coloured contacts. Had wandered into Dancer Blaine’s place as if he didn’t give a damn.

What was even more interesting was that he was out on his own.

Back in the day, Bishop reckoned, Boyd had been MI5—not an organisation to get messy with. If he was still with them, the Brothers McGarry’s money was likely to remain unspent. Because if you tried to collect on the head of a cop you were looking to get dead, no two ways about it, but do the same with a spook, and dead might look an attractive option. Those guys could disappear you. But if Dancer Blaine was right, Boyd was not only back on the streets but unprotected.

Bad news for him. The Brothers McGarry had had years to think up what needed doing to Boyd—they hadn’t so much put a price on his head as itemised his body. There were strict instructions about getting it on film. They’d watch it on phones, in their cells. Help pass the time.

One little strip of photo.

Bishop would have two thousand copies on the street inside the hour.

Bettany thought
of heading home, but only long enough that the word flared brightly for half a second—
home
—before burning into darkness, like a filament briefly glanced at, and scorched into the retina. Liam’s home. Not his.

Not Liam’s either now, though Liam was still in occupation. Bettany had left the urn of ashes on the kitchen table, like an item of shopping waiting to be packed away. Because where did you put something like that? Anywhere you put it, it felt like you carried it still.

Same weight, different burden.

He’d ditched the shoebox, and carried the gun in his coat pocket. It gave him the kind of lopsided look policemen were trained to watch for, but that couldn’t be helped. The rain had eased and he was crossing the river again, not because he needed to but because he had to keep moving. That was the current plan. He couldn’t go back to the flat. He didn’t think Coe would have sounded the alarm, but if he had, that was the first place the Dogs would look.

Lights flickered up and down the Thames. A small boat’s cabin was lit like a candle in the dark.

He thought,
I need to eat.
See the evening out—it was barely nine. Then find somewhere to put his head down for a few hours.

Tomorrow, he’d start putting things straight.

Hands in pockets, he headed for Waterloo.

“The railway
stations. No, not the stations themselves, the dosshouses round them. Yes, and the hostels. King’s Cross especially. And Paddington, and right, yeah, Liverpool Street. Waterloo. Other than that, you know the score. The usual bars, west and east. Anywhere there’s a good evening crowd, but one with regulars, get me? Don’t bother with the tourist haunts. Round Hoxton way, yeah, course. You going to just run through the bloody A to Z, wait for me to say yeah, no? You’ve done this before, right? … Yes, it’s important. Would I be wasting my time if it wasn’t? Swear to God, I sometimes wonder why I don’t just swap you for a trained … iguana. What? Iguana. It’s a kind of lizard—look, just get it done. I want the city papered, and I want this bleeder traced. And I want it soon. I want you ringing back so fast you’re on call waiting before I’ve hung up. Got it?”

Bishop ended the call and took a deep breath.

Then he made another one.

There are a lot
of threads in the city. Pull enough of them and you can see the pavements twitch.

In his cubbyhole of an office even Dancer Blaine knew that. Part of it was the still-fizzing energy of having had the actual walking Martin Boyd in his shop, and part of it was knowing that by calling Bishop, he’d set wheels in motion no bugger could halt.

While another part, only just starting to bite, was the awareness that if Boyd disappeared without trace now, if he sank from view like a stone in the Thames, then he, Dancer, was going to be facing some very awkward questions …

And Bishop himself could feel it, but then he was doing the pulling—all those copies of that celluloid strip, a phone number printed beneath, had come rolling out of a copier, stacking up in reams that were dispatched as soon as ready, finding their way into the hands of dozens of boys, dozens of girls, rounded up by what was left of the Brothers McGarry’s network. And meanwhile the same image was bouncing through the ether, jumping from iPhone to iPhone, every contact reached for, thread linking to thread, knotting together, forming a net to drop over London’s nightlife.

The railway stations. King’s Cross especially. And Paddington, and right, yeah, Liverpool Street. Waterloo.

And the clubs and bars, though nowhere Boyd had ever hung in the old days, nowhere the Brothers McGarry were still mourned or celebrated, which ruled out the further reaches of the East End …

See? Already the city was growing smaller, as if these threads Bishop was pulling were attached to London’s corners, so everything not nailed down tumbled into one small area where the searchers waited, the searchers being anyone who could look at a photo, recognise a face, and dial a number.

Next to which Bishop had printed, in bold,
££££.

In a
hard-luck café, one of those linoleum-floored check-table-clothed outfits that were rarer by the year, Tom Bettany had gone to ground. Cup of tea in front of him, empty plate with its sheen of congealing grease pushed to one side.

He’d had a sudden memory of an evening in a café not unlike this, back in Marseilles. With Majeed and a few others, and there’d been wine and beer of course, not cups of tea, and the food hadn’t come swaddled in grease, and there hadn’t been tomato-shaped plastic bottles on the table … Come to think of it, it had been nothing like this, except inasmuch as it had been near a travellers’ hub, with long-distance coaches growling past the window every few minutes.

Bettany waited, but nothing more of that memory came back. It was simply a flash from the past, a light switched on and off in another room. And it troubled him that there was no less weight to this random slice of his history than there was to any other memory he had, of Liam, of Hannah, or of edgier times, times when he’d had to suppress his real self … His past
was a collage of different identities, none of them realer than any other.

And none, in the end, walked away from.

What was real, what had weight, was what he had to do tomorrow.

A boy walked past the window, bobble hat lopsided on his head, a sheet of paper scrolled in his hand, his face a brief smudge against a noisy background. Homeless, Bettany could tell. There was always something in the face. He’d seemed in a hurry, headed towards Waterloo. Everyone had a mission. Everyone had somewhere they needed to be, an undercover self, urging them on.

Bettany paid for his meal and left, had a quick internal debate about heading for the station himself and hopping on a tube, and decided not to. Railway stations were best avoided.

On foot, he headed for the bridge.

The weary
expression Ralph wore wasn’t exclusive to the small hours, but by the time they rolled around he had an excuse. In old-time songs, bartenders wiped glasses while listening to a man in a hat pour his sorrows out. They’d dispense wisdom in return for a mighty tip. The worst they’d suffer was an out-of-tune piano scoring the heartbreak.

In real life, the nearest Ralph got to dispensing wisdom was explaining where the toilets were to the same drunk for the third time. And that you couldn’t smoke in here. By two he’d have sold a kidney to hear an accordion, let alone a piano. Anything to put an end to the pitiless club beat, the sound of meat being tenderised. Some mornings, lying in bed, he could feel it in the soles of his feet. It didn’t make him want to dance. It made him want to saw himself off at the ankles.

There must be easier ways to make a living.

Tonight there was a healthy crowd, if “healthy” suited a mass of kids so bent on self-destruction. The amount of booze they put away would shame a Catholic priest. Ralph had a headache from the noise and what felt like tendon damage from pouring drinks, the repetitive strain of jamming glass against optic, twisting cap from bottle. No one was telling him sorrows, but everyone was giving him grief. Nearest he’d had to a break tonight was a single smoke round back, resting against the wall.

Someone was waving something at him down the bar.

Like any good barman Ralph had the ability to make a queue in his head from the crowd in front of him, so he served three others before he reached that part of the bar, and the waving girl had disappeared by then. Where she’d been standing was a sheet of paper, a flyer it looked like, with a narrow strip of photograph copied onto it.

Underneath that a phone number, and underneath that
££££.

Some new form of stealth advertising, he thought. An on-the-fly way of attracting punters. Tell ’em there’s money in it, because that always works. But there was always money in it and the money never materialised, that was the mystery. And even when it did it was gone in the morning, like something from a fairytale.