journalist were now shacked up together and my daughter even claimed that she quite liked him), but things could always have been worse. I still had a job and, against all the odds, I still got something out of it.
I left the restaurant at five past ten and headed round the corner to the Roving Wolf, a pub used by the station’s CID, to see if there was anyone in there. It was busy, but I spotted a couple of DCs I knew vaguely standing near the bar and joined them for a couple of pints. They were both interested in how the Matthews case was going but I couldn’t tell them a lot. Slowly was the word that about best described it. Conversation drifted on to other things and I left them at eleven, wandering down onto Upper Street in search of that elusive late-night creature, the black cab.
Upper Street was buzzing as usual, its constant stream of pavement cafes and trendy bistros bustling with custom as people of all ages, and pretty much every race under the sun, took advantage of the balmy evening. Strains of jazz, mamba, flamenco and half a dozen other musical styles drifted out of the open doors and windows of a dozen different establishments, giving the place a pleasant, continental feel. It almost felt like being on holiday and, for one who’d travelled up Upper Street a few times back in the 1980s, the transformation was incredible. Once a barren, dark place of nasty drinking hovels and little else where only the adventurous and the foolish came after dark, it had now become Islington’s version of Paris’s Left Bank. If you weren’t careful, you might even forget to watch your back.
Incredibly, I managed to hail a cab near Islington Green after only five minutes, which had to be some sort of record for that time of night. I thought about heading home but for some reason I wasn’t that tired. Instead, I asked the driver to take me to the Arcadia nightclub. He gave me a funny look in the mirror but did as he was told and we made our way in silence up to the Highbury Corner roundabout, and then left onto the less continental and more menacing Holloway Road. I was hoping to catch Roy Fowler in residence and collar him for a few minutes since I felt confident that if he didn’t have anything to hide, he’d return there sooner rather than later. If you’re in the nightclub business, you don’t trust other people to look after your investment for too long, not if you want anything left at the end of it.
Four hundred yards up the Holloway Road, just past the Liverpool Road turning, the traffic slowed right down as a large group of maybe twenty-five or thirty people standing outside a pub suddenly spilled out into the road. Seconds later there were shouts and the sound of glass smashing, and a group of five of them split off from the rest in what looked like a wild dance. Others ran over to pile in and the whole scrum of them lumbered into the middle of the road, breaking apart and reforming as half a dozen individual battles were fought, oblivious to the cars driving by. A bottle sailed lazily through the air, bouncing off the roof of the vehicle in front of us before ending up unbroken in the bus lane on the other side of the street.
‘Fucking kids,’ said the taxi driver in a voice that was half-snarl, half-sigh, as the group, most of whom looked no more than twenty, swirled back towards the pavement. One of them went down, putting up his arms in a vain effort to protect himself as he disappeared beneath a rapid-fire welter of kicks from at least three others. A girl screamed something unintelligible and rushed out of the watching crowd to intervene, wading into the kickers, handbag aloft. The one on the ground, sensing an opportunity, jumped to his feet and got out of the firing line. He was holding his head and bleeding from the nose.
The taxi driver accelerated and we left them behind to their fighting. ‘Fucking kids,’ he said again. ‘They get worse and worse.’ I nodded and mumbled something in reply, thinking that that was the thing with London. One minute you were drinking in the ambient atmosphere of a laid-back summer evening, the next you’d stepped unwittingly into an ugly battlezone. I suppose that’s why some people like it so much. The variety.
There was a long queue of revellers, mainly under-twenty-fives, snaking back along the street from the entrance to the Arcadia. I got the cab to stop directly outside, paid the driver in full, and tipped him a quid. ‘Enjoy yourself,’ he said, with a wave, as he drove off. Probably about ten years too late for that, I thought, but you never knew.
I walked to the head of the queue where a group of four male and one female door staff were frisking the waiting punters. One of them turned to me as I approached and gave me the same sort of funny look the cab driver had, like what on earth was a bloke in his mid-thirties in a suit he looked like he’d been wearing all day doing coming to a trendy joint such as this. ‘Yeah?’ he said, by way of greeting.
I produced my warrant card and thrust it in his face. ‘Police. I’m here to see Mr Fowler.’ I was getting
He inspected the card, then looked back at me. ‘I don’t think he’s here tonight,’ he said.
‘Well, Miss Toms’ll do,’ I said, and walked past him.
There was a line of four further doormen in the foyer just inside the main entrance and I walked past them, showed my warrant card to a very thin young lady with big hair at the desk, and asked her to phone up to Fowler. She reiterated what the doorman had said about him not being in, but I insisted. She let the phone in his office ring for about thirty seconds before telling me he wasn’t there. Next she tried Elaine Toms, who apparently was in, but wasn’t answering either. I had no great desire to enter the club proper but it didn’t look like I was going to have any choice. I thanked her and headed through the door in front of me.
The place was heaving, as befitted a Friday night, with the majority of the youthful crowd packed onto the dance floor. The music was loud, repetitive and boring, the kind my daughter’s thankfully too young to like. At the bar at the far end, I noticed a few older people, mainly men in their thirties, and even one or two in their forties, clustered together against the noise. Some of them were wearing suits, though none of them looked like office workers, and I wondered who they were.
My eyes drifted along, then stopped dead. Someone looked familiar. I walked nearer, manoeuvring my way through the crowd until I was only about ten yards away. Now I was absolutely sure. No doubt about it. I’d seen his photograph four hours earlier, after it was faxed over by his old regiment. The man in front of me, drinking a bottle of Becks and looking like he owned the place, was Max Iversson, the fugitive half the station was looking for.
Iversson
There was no way I was queueing to get into Fowler’s place. There must have been two hundred people standing there like lemons while they waited for the doormen to give them the sort of attention my ex-missus used to give me when she’d drunk too many white wine spritzers. But who wants it off some bald bloke with no neck? Not me, that was for sure. I thought about heading straight to the front and saying I was mates with Elaine but, to tell you the truth, I didn’t really want to draw attention to myself, not now I’d suddenly turned into the Fugitive. So I headed round the back, jumped over the locked gate that led into the staff car park, and scanned the deserted rear of the building for any sign of an entrance. It took all of about three seconds for me to spot a window slightly open on the ground floor, about a foot above head height. It wasn’t much of a size but I’m quite a slim lad so I was confident I was going to get in. I hauled myself up with one hand while using the other to flick off the latch and open the window up fully. At the same time, I heard the unmistakable sound of piss hitting urinals and, as I poked my head inside, I saw a row of three blokes staring up at me as they deflated their bladders.
‘Evening,’ I said with a ready smile, trying hard to wriggle through the gap. ‘You couldn’t give us a hand, could you?’
The bloke nearest me, a young student type about twenty or so, looked shocked but nodded anyway, re- deposited himself in his trousers, and grabbed hold of my nearest hand, giving it a feeble tug.
‘Come on, boy, put some welly into it. You couldn’t even give yourself a hard-on with a grip like that.’
He tried again and, after a few grunts and groans of effort, managed to pull me in, with me landing on him a fair bit harder than I think he was expecting. I thanked him as he got unsteadily to his feet and, ignoring the strange looks coming from the other blokes in there, headed out of the door and into the club, recoiling momentarily from the wall of sound that hit me.
I scanned the room for Elaine, not sure I’d even recognize her after all this time, but couldn’t see any sign of her. Mind you, I couldn’t see a great deal among the buzzing crowd. I took a brief moment to admire a few of the scantily clad young females who seemed to be in abundance, then fought my way to the bar and waited for a space to open up, before ordering myself a beer from one of the harassed-looking bar staff. When it came about two minutes later, it cost me three quid. Three quid for a lousy bottle of Becks. If it was true that people were fighting for ownership of this place then it was no wonder. The money being turned over must have been incredible. I took a sip from the bottle and turned away from the bar, finding myself some space near the dance floor.
Which was when I saw her, walking purposefully in my direction while talking to one of the doormen, a stocky bloke who was striding fast just to keep up with her. I recognized her instantly. She’d changed quite a lot from
