The Garden Party (11 page)

Harry Vicary stood, tearing off the top page from his notepad as he did so, and strode down the CID corridor to the office occupied by DS Victor Swannell. He stood in the doorway of Swannell's office. ‘Busy, Victor?'

Victor Swannell looked up at Vicary and then indicated the mass of paper on his desktop, ‘Me, sir? Always busy, that's me, boss. Never enough hours in the day,' Swannell replied with a broad grin. ‘But for you, boss, I am at your service, ready, willing and able.'

‘Good man, Victor.' Vicary held up the sheet of paper he had torn from his notepad. ‘Name and address of a lady who has just phoned, she seems to think that she might recognize the two E-fits in today's
Standard
.'

‘The
Evening Standard
which comes out in the morning?' Swannell stood as Vicary approached his desk and handed him the sheet of paper.

‘Yes, as you say,' Vicary replied, ‘they don't hang about; they like to hit the street as soon as. But this lady sounds promising; she sounds very interesting indeed. If she is right, at least one of the bodies was that of a jailbird; he's got form, and one had a scar which will probably help aid identification. Anyway, Penny Yewdall and Tom Ainsclough are chasing up a lead; they're south of the river in Brixton Prison. Can you visit this address and talk to this lady, Mrs Mayfield? Take Frankie Brunnie with you.'

‘Yes, boss.'

‘See what you see.' Vicary smiled. ‘Find what you find.'

‘Yes, boss.' Swannell reached for his jacket. ‘I'm on it.'

‘You know that he's still on a life-support machine, Charlie. You know the sketch; breathing and gurgling into tubes, wired up to a monitor, his face still looking like a massive beetroot. You know, don't you?' Penny Yewdall spoke calmly but looked intently at Charlie Magg.

‘And that, Charlie,' Tom Ainsclough added, ‘is after ten weeks, still no improvement. It's touch and go, Charlie, touch and go, and you know very well what that means.' Charlie Magg remained steadfastly silent. His face and eyes were devoid of any emotion that either Ainsclough or Yewdall could detect. Charlie Magg eyed Ainsclough and Yewdall with cold, steely blue eyes. He had a narrow face, with long, golden hair combed back over his head down to the collar of the blue-and-white striped, prison issue shirt he wore. The sleeves of his shirt were rolled up neatly, cuff over cuff, thus revealing massively tattooed and powerfully muscular forearms. The back of his hands and his fingers were stained with clumsy, self-inflicted tattoos which spoke of borstal training before he was twenty-one years old, and before he graduated to adult prisons. He was strongly built and stood about six feet tall, so far as Ainsclough could estimate, and was not the sort of man anyone with any sense, he thought, would want to get into a rumble with. It was, Ainsclough pondered, little wonder that his victim, his latest known victim, was still in a coma, with his face looking like a large beetroot, two and a half months after Charlie Magg had ‘given him a little slap for being out of order'.

‘So, with that in mind, we thought we'd pay a call on you, Charlie,' Yewdall continued, ‘see if we can work something out for you. You help us, we help you.'

Charlie Magg still remained silent. He smelled strongly of body odour, clearly indicating his weekly shower and change of clothing was due. He fixed Yewdall with expressionless eye contact. He wasn't going to give anything away.

‘If the hospital . . . if the doctors switch off the life-support machine the Crown Prosecution Service will be charging you with murder, Charlie,' Ainsclough quietly explained, ‘and I can tell you that they want to do that, they badly want to do that, they really want you put away for a very long time. Not just for this of course, but for other things they haven't been able to pin on you. The CPS want you away for twenty years . . . at least. If the life-support machine is unplugged . . . and your victim begins the big sleep . . .' Ainsclough shrugged. ‘Well, that is a mandatory life sentence for you, Charlie. You won't get out for at least twenty years and no one can survive more than ten years in maximum security. After ten years in a Category A prison institutionalization sets in. After ten years of high security life you get more comfortable on the inside and you get frightened of the outside. But you don't need me to tell you that, Charlie, you've seen broken blaggers struggling to get by after ten or fifteen years inside; their way of calling everybody “sir” and wanting to be told which brand of toothpaste to buy.'

Still Magg remained silent. Both officers thought that his massive, brooding presence made the agent's room in Brixton Prison seem small, cramped and overcrowded. Then, just then, there was a brief flicker of Magg's eyelids; his defences were weakening; what Tom Ainsclough had just said appeared to have reached him.

‘We are in a position to help you, Charlie.' Yewdall was quick to exploit the apparent evaporating of Charlie Magg's resolve. ‘That's why we are here, like we said. You know, Charlie, looking at you I can see you're a manly man,' Yewdall continued, ‘you like the ladies; you've got an eye for the ladies, I'll bet. I'll lay good money that you have got a good eye for all those young female joggers in tight pants that jog round the parks in fair London Town, all those slender young things that sun themselves in their bikinis on the beaches on the south coast . . . or in the London parks. Those decorative girls who can brighten any man's day. You think, Charlie, if they take your victim off life support, and not because he's recovering, but because he's in a persistent vegetative state, then there won't be any eye feasting for you for twenty years. You'll see females during visiting hours and they won't be young and fit and there'll be no touching . . . and the young cons you see in the showers, well they will begin to look inviting.'

Charlie Magg's head sagged slightly.

‘That's not a clever prospect, Charlie,' Tom Ainsclough promptly added, ‘that's not a clever prospect at all.' Ainsclough glanced round the agent's room: plaster over brick walls, painted in two shades of blue, light above dark. A massive lump of opaque glass set high in the wall provided the only source of natural light; the illumination of the room being that from a filament bulb behind a Perspex cover attached to the ceiling. The white-painted metal door was fastened shut, but behind it, in the corridor, stood two prison officers, for whose presence both officers were deeply grateful, because Charlie Magg was known to be prone to ‘kicking off' at any time.

‘So . . .' Yewdall smiled and spoke softly. ‘How does an easily survivable ten stretch for manslaughter sound? You'll be out in five if you keep your nose clean and behave yourself. You can do that on your back, Charlie.'

‘Ten?' Charlie Magg spoke for the first time. ‘You can fix that?' he growled. ‘I mean, straight up. Ten, out in five?'

‘We can't promise anything, Charlie,' Penny Yewdall replied, ‘but we can put in a word to the CPS, in fact we already have. You see, Charlie, the guy you rolled, Terry “Stepney” Stevenson—'

‘He had it coming, well overdue for a kicking he was . . . well overdue.' Magg spoke in a low, menacing voice. ‘I mean, well overdue.'

‘Yes, well that's as may be, Charlie, but the point in your favour,' Ainsclough explained, ‘the big point in your favour is that Stevenson is no friend of the CPS either. They have wanted him inside for as long as they have wanted you inside, Charlie, and it is not causing a great deal of distress to the civil servants of the CPS that he is very possibly about to become life extinct.'

‘Life extinct,' Magg echoed, ‘that's a new one on me.'

‘Not new, though,' Yewdall explained. ‘The lawyers and medics use the term, but it's not as though your victim was a man of the cloth or a doctor on his rounds. For that sort of victim there would be no deals . . . no mercy.'

‘Do me a favour.' Magg glared at Yewdall. ‘I know the rules; I wouldn't roll anyone like that. I know the rules, all right. I mean, I practically wrote them, but Stevenson was a blagger, and he helped himself to money that wasn't his. He was skimming . . . very naughty . . . he should've known better.'

‘Probably it didn't belong to the person he stole it from,' Yewdall commented, ‘or else it was bent money, proceeds of crime.'

‘Both really.' Magg shrugged. ‘There was some trading in white stuff, all got fairly divvied up and then Stevenson goes and sticks his paw in the pot and helps himself to thirty large . . . he'd already been given twenty large but that wasn't enough for him. He reckoned he was owed the rest so he took it. So I was given five large to recover the thirty and give “Stepney” Stevenson a good hiding; a right good kicking so he'd learn.'

‘You did that all right,' Ainsclough sighed. ‘You earned your money that day.'

‘They wanted me to learn him not to do it again,' Magg replied. ‘So I earned my money. So what?'

‘It's highly likely he won't be doing anything again.'

‘So I've got five thousand pounds in the Post Office to come out to.'

‘Which brings us very neatly back to why we are here, Charlie,' Yewdall leaned back in her chair. ‘Are you going to spend it in twenty years' time or in five years' time?'

Magg looked at Yewdall. ‘Five years?'

‘It's possible.' Yewdall nodded. ‘It's on the table as a possibility.'

‘But no guarantees,' Ainsclough emphasized. ‘If you put your hand up to involuntary manslaughter, collect ten years, play the game, you could be out in five . . . and that's if we put in a good word for you; tell the CPS how cooperative you were with a major investigation. The CPS will inform the judge and request leniency, so a ten stretch with the possibility of parole is a real possibility.'

Magg relaxed his posture, also leaned back in his chair, folded his arms and said, ‘So what is it you want to know about?'

‘Tell us about Arnie Rainbird, Charlie,' Yewdall asked. ‘We know a little about him but we sense there is much, much more we don't know. He seems a bit of a shadowy figure, iceberg-like, most of him is hidden from view, but his bulk is massive.'

Charlie Magg drew a deep breath.

‘Do you have problems with that, Charlie?' Tom Ainsclough leaned forward. ‘Do you have problems telling us about Arnie Rainbird?'

Charlie Magg nodded. ‘Too right I do, I reckon that I'm a bit of a “life's worth” when it comes to grassing up Arnie Rainbird; too right I am worried.'

‘More than your life is worth, you mean?' Again Penny Yewdall absent-mindedly chewed the plastic cover of the tip of her ballpoint pen.

‘Yes.' Charlie Magg raised his head. ‘That's exactly what I mean. Arnie Rainbird is heap bad medicine and he has long, long tentacles, I won't be safe anywhere. He has eyes and ears everywhere.'

‘Witness protection, Charlie.' Yewdall placed her pen on her notepad. ‘It's a possibility, new life, new ID. It works and the offer is there.'

‘Won't work for me.' Charlie Magg raised his eyebrows. ‘It won't work for me if Arnie Rainbird is after me. I haven't seen Arnie in years but he knows me, I know him. I don't work for him any more, not on a permanent basis, but he can still use me for jobs.'

‘Like turning “Stepney” Stevenson's face into a pulp?'

Magg shrugged. ‘Maybe . . . occasional work like that.'

‘A lot of blaggers find the thought of a new life appealing, Charlie,' Ainsclough prompted. ‘Surprised you don't.'

Charlie Magg remained silent.

‘We've talked about a twenty stretch being reduced to ten and out in five. The whole lot could be made to go away . . . all of it,' Penny Yewdall pressed, ‘all of it, if you'll sign a statement and clamber into the witness box.'

‘It's not so simple.' Charlie Magg smiled. ‘I mean, I wish it was, I really wish I could sign a statement and climb into the witness box but Arnie Rainbird . . . he's part Italian despite his English name, got family in Italy . . . Milan, I think, and by family I don't mean regular Italians, I mean
Cosa Nostra
.'

‘The Mafia!' Ainsclough gasped.

‘You got it right, the Italian Mafia; so he's connected, but it's not just that, it's also that he cut his teeth in Italy. He learned a few things, like if you want to take revenge you ice the target's family, not the target.'

‘Oh . . .' Penny Yewdall put her hand to her mouth.

‘You see my problem?' Charlie Magg appealed to the two officers. ‘I have three brothers and a sister, both my parents had six brothers and sisters, all of them married, and each had two or three children; I have about thirty cousins and one will be iced if I grass on Rainbird and go into witness protection and if not iced, then ruined in some other way.' Charlie Magg paused. ‘I mean, my little sister, she works in a bank believe it or not, she doesn't know what I got up to. She suspects but she doesn't know. If I grass on Arnie Rainbird he'll have her tongue cut out to learn me for grassing him up, that's Arnie Rainbird. So if you offer me witness protection you have to offer it to an entire tribe and that's if they'll all agree to it.'

‘Fair enough, Charlie,' Ainsclough replied softly, ‘I see your problem.'

‘So, supposing I do help you, like off the record.' Charlie Magg laid his two massive, nicotine-stained paws on the highly polished table top. ‘No statements, just talk within these four walls; could you still help me? I mean, look at me, I am fifty years old, I'll be seventy when I get out.'

‘It's a possibility,' Penny Yewdall replied, ‘basic physics: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The more you help us, the more we can help you.'

‘Yes . . . yes . . . I understand that and, at my age, you wonder how much time you've got left.' Charlie Magg shook his head. ‘I can't spend the last years of my life on the inside; I should be making the most of it down the boozer, playing darts, spending the occasional day in Ramsgate, getting some sea air into my bellows.'