Shadow Box Read online

  Table of Contents

  PROLOGUE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THIRTY-SIX

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  THIRTY-NINE

  FORTY

  FORTY-ONE

  FORTY-TWO

  FORTY-THREE

  FORTY-FOUR

  FORTY-FIVE

  FORTY-SIX

  FORTY-SEVEN

  FORTY-EIGHT

  FORTY-NINE

  FIFTY

  FIFTY-ONE

  FIFTY-TWO

  FIFTY-THREE

  FIFTY-FOUR

  FIFTY-FIVE

  FIFTY-SIX

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  FIFTY-NINE

  SIXTY

  SIXTY-ONE

  SIXTY-TWO

  SIXTY-THREE

  SIXTY-FOUR

  SIXTY-FIVE

  SIXTY-SIX

  EPILOGUE

  This one is for the tattooed lady PC

  “I don’t need a friend who changes when I change and who nods when I nod; my shadow does that much better.” Plutarch

  Brockley was the last place Donnie had expected to wind up.

  He’d known the suburb by name most of his life, it being only ten minutes by car from where he’d spent his childhood – a childhood punctuated by thick ears, bloody noses and petty theft. Brockley had always sounded rural to his ears, and compared to the Docklands, it was. It was a steep climb up the hill from New Cross, past a park with a view across London and through a few leafy streets. But Brockley was a place no one of his acquaintance ever went; you just drove through it, cutting up through Lewisham or New Cross with a view to ducking down to Peckham or Forest Hill to do a deal. A late-night route through anonymous backstreets of terraced houses, where you could be almost sure you wouldn’t get a tug when you were driving with a skinful. There were no pubs in Brockley. Actually, that was an exaggeration. There were one or two; the kind of places populated by builders covered in plaster dust discussing the price of copper pipe with plumbers who tutted and sucked their teeth between gulps of lager. And there was a new one he’d seen, they called it a microbrewery, full of tits eating “pulled pork” off a plank of wood. But there were no destination boozers where you would bump into a face or two.

  Really, that had been the trouble since he’d got back from Spain. With his payoff from the Spanish job, he’d found a riverside flat in Woolwich, not far from Dave Slaughter. Everywhere he went he’d bump into old muckers who had known him long enough to recognize him beneath the tan and the moustache. He couldn’t go into the Plume of Feathers on the side of Greenwich Park without someone slapping him on the shoulder, buying him a vodka and asking, “Awight, Don?” or “Back from the old Espanol, then?”

  From their admiring looks, it was clear to him that the rumour that he had done the big hit on the Costa had spread.

  When he’d tried to stay in Eltham for a while, it was worse. The wannabe hoodlums had tugged their forelocks in respect to the man who was reputed to have assassinated Patsy Kelly in Spain.

  On the orders of Patsy’s own brother, Tommy.

  A major betrayal of one Kelly brother to prove his loyalty to the other.

  Donnie never acknowledged the rumour. To be known as a Kelly hitman, as he had been for years, gave him kudos enough.

  Pulling off a big hit on someone within the family elevated him to legendary level – but it was not something for which Donnie wanted to be famous.

  So Dave had found him this new place in Brockley, a modern development two minutes from the station. And as soon as his tan had begun to fade, Donnie grew back some short grey hair and a stubbly beard, ditched the earring and wore a Baker Boy cap whenever he left the flat.

  The place had changed since he’d last been here: a couple of delis and coffee shops signalled a new kind of inhabitant, drawn by cheapish housing and the overground line to the trendy bits of Dalston and Shoreditch.

  Trendy? Donnie didn’t get it. Both places were shitholes, to his knowledge. Neither did he get the wispy blokes – dressed like bent lumberjacks with bushy beards, armfuls of tats, big specs, skinny trousers and handbags – who walked past his apartment to get the train every day. What did they do? They all seemed to have money. Computers, Donnie guessed. Internet stuff.

  No job for a man.

  Since he’d been back, Donnie hadn’t done much work as such. He’d banked a bit of money from the Spanish job, though not as much as he’d have liked. The big payoff always seemed to elude him.

  There was the little hit he had done the other day, of course. Nothing challenging: a simple gun to the back of the head on the doorstep. A Russian geezer, tailed to a posh house in St John’s Wood, silenced Beretta slipped out of his holdall, tap on the shoulder…

  Bang.

  Job done, then home in time for lunch.

  5 k in the bank. Not enough to retire on, but kushti.

  A good freelancer, ex-SAS or whatever, could probably demand 10 k, but Donnie now felt he had a little more job security: the flat, the firm behind him again.

  5 k was fine for a killing, with fringe benefits.

  Today was shaping up like most days. He smoked a fag and drained several mugs of strong tea while reading The Sun and flicking between daytime TV programmes. The news passed him by unless it was to do with armed robbery, and there wasn’t much of that any more. Most crime was on an industrial scale now, or done on the money markets with a computer. Donnie had never had any need for a computer; he used his phone for the little contact he made with others. He’d had almost no concern at all for the outside world since he’d come back from Spain.

  He had mixed emotions about his time over there. It had started off all right; he’d met a decent bird and that. But then, as these things had a habit of doing, it all went tits-up. Donnie acknowledged to himself that he’d lost the plot a bit. He’d been overcooking it on the nose candy, which always made you a bit mental. Sure, he was under pressure from the firm to choose sides and, first up, he’d gone the wrong way.

  It was not a mistake he would make again.

  Now it was not so much a case of staying on the straight and narrow, it was more about keeping his nose clean and doing what he was told, following orders, leading more of a regular life. Apart from anything else, Donnie was tired of racing around.

  At 12 p.m. he stretched a black leather jacket over his bulky shoulders, pulled the cap down over his forehead and walked down to the station. Five minutes and one stop later, he was out in the familiar smog of New Cross, feeling more at home among the traffic and chaos, enjoying the stale beer smell as he swung open the door to the pub.

  He was sipping the top of his second lager and watching the racing results when his phone rang.

  “R. Swipe,” Donnie said.

  “Don?” the voice replied.

  “Dave?”

  The ritual was a familiar one, played out whatever self-in
vented alias Donnie came up with, most of them well tried and tested.

  Half a minute later Donnie finished the call. He sighed inwardly at Dave’s command and within five minutes he’d necked the rest of his lager, flagged down a cab and was on his way up to Greenwich Park.

  He found Dave Slaughter in the car park, sitting in a shiny navy Mercedes looking out across the panorama: the O2, the river, the tangle of cranes and new developments. Donnie got into the passenger seat and inhaled the leathery smell of the spotless interior.

  “It’s all changed, innit?” Dave observed, looking at the oddly shaped towers and spires that had replaced former London badlands.

  “All changed,” Donnie concurred. “So, wassup, Dave?” he asked, though he didn’t really want to know the answer.

  Dave turned and looked at him. “You know Paul Dolan’s case’s gone to the High Court?”

  Donnie’s mind clunked into gear: Dolan, another Kelly family hitman, had been nabbed when Tommy Kelly had been arrested.

  “What’s ’is chances?”

  “None. Irish prick,” Dave said.

  “Good,” Donnie said. Neither of them liked Dolan. “So?”

  “Guvnor wants to see you,” Dave replied.

  “Thought I was on light duties.” Donnie sighed. A prison visit to Tommy Kelly didn’t bode well.

  “No such thing on this firm, Don.”

  Donnie had kidded himself that after the big one on Patsy Kelly he would be put out to pasture for a while. He looked out of the steamy car window, his clear view of the panorama now blurred.

  “Two words, Don,” Dave said. “Eddie Savage.”

  Bollocks, Donnie thought.

  The smack in the mouth came from nowhere.

  I saw stars and tasted blood.

  The sensation was a familiar one. I steadied myself and, blinking through the tears that had sprung to my eyes from my flattened nose, launched myself off the back foot, throwing a right at the coked-up Essex boy who thought he’d have a go. My fist connected with cheekbone and my opponent staggered back. I used my advantage to leap forward and throw another punch, hard on the jaw, twisting his head round and dropping him to the wet pavement. I jumped on top of him and grabbed a handful of Superdry, pulling his head up, fist poised for another punch to his face.

  “You had enough?” I shouted.

  A small group had gathered around us outside the pub.

  “Leave it, mate,” a voice came nervously, stopping just short of pulling me off. “Leave it.”

  I dropped Essex Boy’s head back onto the ground, climbed off him and wiped the blood and snot from my nose.

  “He hit me first,” I pleaded with the crowd, noting the expressions on the faces of two girls who had stopped to watch. I realized how alien this casual brutality was to the average passer-by, and how horrifying.

  The man who had spoken helped my attacker to his feet and propped him against the lit window of the pub. He was groggy; drunk, or woozy from my assault. I looked from face to face, friendless. I had nothing to explain, so I turned and walked away.

  I dabbed my bleeding nose as I trudged through the drizzle, wondering why it had happened again. I was getting into situations like this far too often. Several times in the last few months, scraps like this had kicked off in or outside pubs in the back streets of London’s West End, my night-time stomping ground. Every night seemed to be a bad dream of dark bars and clubs, of shots that tasted like cough medicine, girls the colour of furniture polish with boyfriends who looked like gay cage-fighters, snorting coke in the bogs and getting lairy to the constant thud of machine-like dance music.

  It was driving me mad. Perhaps it was my moody swagger as I walked into places where I knew nobody; I rarely went to the same place twice to avoid familiarity. Perhaps it was my dead-eyed stare as I drank lager and people-watched. Whatever it was, my mood seemed to bring out the aggression in others, who thought I was staring at them, their orange girlfriends or their pints. Enough to make them confront me, or follow me out and have a pop.

  Then there were the trendier places, full of posher, hipper kids, smiling inanely and dancing like sweaty puppets to endless House tracks, gobbling up Es like sweets. The drugs were everywhere I went, and given that my brother had died an addict and my last girlfriend had been killed as a result of a bad cocaine deal, I was still totally anti-narcotics. I don’t know why I even went out – I was always out of sync wherever I was – but of the two, I preferred the prickly tension of the Essex boy clubs to the goony ambience of the ecstasy bunnies.

  Really, I knew what it was. I felt dead inside; the lager and the buzz of aggression were the only things that made me feel alive. I was drinking too much, from boredom and to blot out the events that still scarred my mind.

  I didn’t like being Eddie Savage. I was getting out of control. I needed help.

  Tony Morris became a regular visitor to my flat.

  I knew what he was trying to do. After my experiences in Spain I had hidden myself away: attempting to overcome the trauma of the car bomb that had been meant for me and had killed my girlfriend; trying to rewire my memory and lose the character of Pedro Garcia, my cover identity over there.

  Tony was hoping to rehabilitate me. I had refused therapy – I felt I’d had enough to last me a lifetime. I knew what was wrong with me, anyway; I had been scarred and traumatized by getting involved in organized crime while working undercover for Tony’s – and, I suppose, my – legit organization.

  I’d nearly been killed twice in as many years, and I was still in my teens.

  In my view, the best way to recover was not to do it any more.

  But Tony had different ideas.

  “You can be helpful, mate,” he said. “Just by keeping your eyes open when you’re out, seeing who’s selling what to who.”

  “You never see anyone dealing cocaine, Tony. It’s all done quietly in bashed-up Beemers in supermarket car parks.”

  “Not so much the coke these days. It’s the synthetics we’re bothered about, the Es and MDMA. Any spod with a chemistry degree can knock out pills in a garage. Volume, low risk, high profit: that’s where the organized firms get interested.”

  “What firms?”

  “Eastern Europeans working over here, Russians, Irish. Most of them are already shifting moody fags through corner shops. Knocking out pills is an easy and more lucrative step up.”

  Tony was always casting me nuggets of information, to see if I’d take the bait. To get me back to work. Usually, I wasn’t interested. But he also told me that Tommy Kelly wanted to see me. As bait goes, Tommy Kelly was quite a fat maggot. I gave it a millisecond’s consideration, but … no.

  “What good could it do me?” I asked. The head of the Kelly crime family had liked me and, as far as he was concerned, I’d turned him in. I’d got close to his daughter, his pride and joy, just to be able to spy on him. I’d nailed his son and got them both a life stretch. Tommy Kelly was hardly going to greet me with open arms and let bygones be bygones. So I continued to say no to Tony, and after a while he stopped asking.

  But Tony was a sneaky bugger. It was part of his job. He would drop by in the evening with a couple of cold beers and reminisce about the work I’d done for the organization. He would praise me and big up my results, reminding me how close they’d got to cracking the cocaine syndicate in Spain on my intel. Although whatever he said, there seemed to still be tons of it in London, as well as plenty of E, so the gear was obviously still getting through.

  But, Tony pointed out, good intel is never wasted. It joins up other dots.

  Other times he’d call round in the morning. “Let’s get you out in the fresh air,” he’d say. We would walk through the central London parks, stopping for lattes, watching girls go by. Tony would give them marks out of ten, but I’d lost interest. We’d talk about this and that, and nothing in particular. Gradually, I began to feel a little more normal. It was like having a dad; someone who made me feel safe again. I got to know
Tony, who had never given much of himself away, a little more. He had been in the background in my life for as long as I could remember, an old family friend. I never knew quite what his connection to us was.

  He told me he had joined the army when he was about my age and had done a tour of Northern Ireland, where he had become involved in military intelligence. His fleshy face and indistinct looks meant that he rarely stood out, which was useful. I have never known anyone less conspicuous than Tony Morris. I would quite often lose him when we were out and about, unable to see him in a group of three or so people in Regent Street. Tony could disappear in an empty room.

  A useful skill in this line of work.

  “What did you do in Ireland?” I asked.

  “Counter-terrorism,” he said. “The IRA was powerful back then, and political. Now it’s more or less another organized crime gang: they’re not so bothered about religion and politics, more about trading arms and controlling drugs. Back then they were passionate about the cause. They’d blow up a town full of people to make their point … and they did, in Birmingham, Manchester, London – even Ireland itself.”

  Tony had explained the backdrop to the Troubles to me before. Of course, I’d known from the news for as long as I could remember that there had been things going on in Ireland, but the details, the fact that the Catholics wanted an independent republic while the Protestants were loyal to the Queen, seemed almost lost in the mists of time.

  “Steve went over there, right?” I asked. Tony nodded.

  I remembered hearing some of my brother’s debriefings after his death. Steve had been over there a few years before, trying to infiltrate an IRA cell. Before me, Steve had been recruited by Tony in a deal to get him off a drug rap. He had ended up dead at the hands of the Kellys.

  “So what did you actually do there?”

  I was straying into an uncomfortable area for Tony. He was naturally secretive. He scratched his head and looked at the ceiling.

  “I managed to stop a big bombing in central London,” he said finally. “Rush hour, Kings Cross tube, would have killed hundreds and trapped hundreds more. Not only would the body count have been the biggest London had seen, but the city would have ground to a halt. Total chaos was what the IRA planned.”