She turned round quickly, saw it was me, and narrowed her eyes. ‘Well, well, well. The wanderer returns. What happened back there? You didn’t tell me the police were after you.’
I stopped in front of her. ‘I couldn’t tell you anything in there. It was too bloody loud.’
‘You’d better come in,’ she said, fishing in her handbag for a key. ‘I think we’ve got a fair bit to talk about, don’t you?’
‘You can say that again.’
‘How did you find out where I lived?’ she asked when we were inside her first-floor apartment.
‘You’re in the phone book,’ I told her.
‘So are plenty of other people with the name Toms,’ she said, leading me through to a nicely furnished lounge with comfy-looking black leather chairs. She slung her jacket over one of the chairs and turned to me, waiting for an answer.
‘Not as many as you’d think. I narrowed it down to five, then phoned Johnny Hexham. He said he thought you lived in Clerkenwell and there was only one E. Toms in Clerkenwell. Maybe you should think about being ex- directory.’
‘I’ll bear it in mind.’ She looked down at my dirty sock. ‘I won’t ask,’ she said.
‘The police. They don’t just want collars any more. They want everything.’
She smiled. ‘Do you want a coffee?’
‘Yeah, please.’
Five minutes later, when we were sitting in the leather chairs facing each other, she asked me what had happened with Fowler, and how come the police were after me. There was no point holding back, not if I wanted her to open up to me, so I told her everything, bar the bit where I shot Tony, which she didn’t really need to know. In the account I gave Tony escaped and I never saw what happened to him.
She sat back in her chair and rubbed her hand across her temple. It was a gesture vaguely similar to one of Fowler’s. ‘Shit,’ she said, which just about summed it up. ‘I can’t believe it. Dead. Poor old Roy.’ Which I thought was a bit rich. Fowler had asked for it, I hadn’t.
‘What happened after I got out tonight?’
‘Two vanloads of Plod turned up, and this detective who was already in there, the one chasing you, he started asking me a load of questions about what you were doing there.’
‘What did you tell him?’
‘I said I didn’t have a clue who he was talking about. He didn’t push things.’
‘So, who are the people Fowler was having trouble with? I think I owe them after what they’ve done to me and one of my best employees.’
She leant forward and gave me a cold stare. ‘Max, I’m telling you now. Do not get involved. Consider yourself lucky you’re still in one piece and leave it at that.’
‘Just tell me, Elaine.’
‘You don’t want to know. Honestly.’
‘I’ll be the judge of that.’
She paused, then, seeing that I wasn’t going to give up, started talking. ‘Roy’s been under a lot of pressure lately and he’s fallen in with some of the wrong people. He was getting into debt with the club.’
‘How did he manage that with those prices? I’d have thought he’d be a millionaire.’
‘He’s a big spender and he’s got a nasty coke habit that’s been eating away at his finances. Anyway, he started borrowing money from people he should have kept well away from, and it didn’t take long for them to start calling for their money back. And that’s when he really fucked up. He allowed them to start dictating to him how he should do business. They wanted to sell their drugs in Arcadia with Roy overseeing things.’
‘From what I hear the club’s always had a drugs problem.’
‘There’s always been some dealing there, yeah, but not as much as some people seem to think. The place got raided a couple of times before I joined but that was a long time back and they never found nothing. But this was different. This was organized dealing.’
‘When did it start?’
‘I don’t know exactly. At the time Roy didn’t say anything to me about it. He was done in the past for importing gear, back in the eighties, and he was inside for four years, so it wasn’t something he wanted to repeat. The dealing was all very underhand and if you’d come in there any night, like you did tonight, you wouldn’t have seen it going on.’ I nodded. That was true enough, although plenty of people had been off their faces. ‘But there was stuff in there and if you’d asked the right people you’d have got coke, E, whatever you wanted. There’s a few who do the deals, mainly the doormen, and they’ve never got much on them at any one time, so even if you were an undercover copper, you could only do them for possession. They never deal in big quantities. Roy kept the bulk of the stuff hidden in the place but I never knew where.
‘Anyway, a week or two back, Roy starts acting really strange. Turning up late, shutting himself in his office, not getting involved in the running of the business. I asked him what was wrong but he just brushed me off. Then a few days back our chief doorman dropped dead, and it turns out he was poisoned.’
‘Poisoned? I’d forgotten you killed people like that.’
‘That’s what the law said. And when Roy heard about it, it really set him off. He was jittery enough before, but after that he was all over the place, like he was next or something. But still he didn’t want to talk about it.
‘Then one night after we’d shut, I found him in his office, drunk or coked up or something. I told him he was going to have to tell me what was wrong, that he couldn’t carry on like he was, and that’s when I think he realized he was going to have to say something to someone. So he told me. He told me all about the dealing, how it was organized, what was going on. He sounded really gutted, like he didn’t want to be involved.’ Lying bastard, I thought, but didn’t say anything. ‘But the thing was, that wasn’t the worst of it. He was skimming them. These associates of his. Taking more than his cut of the profits. A lot more.’
‘How the hell did he think he was going to get away with that?’
She shook her head. ‘He told me he was using the money to invest in something — and he wouldn’t tell me what that something was — that would double or triple the cash he put in. Then, with that other cash he’d made from it, he’d pay these people what he owed them and get them out of his hair for ever.’
‘Except it didn’t work.’
‘No. The investment never came through and they found out about the skimming before Roy made his cash. On the night I talked to him in his office, he’d been told by them that they knew what he’d been doing and that they wanted the money back with a hundred per cent interest, or they wanted the club. Roy was scared shitless. He didn’t have the readies and he didn’t want to give up the club. It would have left him with nothing. He’d asked them for an extension on the debt so that he could get himself sorted out, but they weren’t interested. They’re not the sort of people who specialize in being helpful.’
‘I bet they’re not.’
‘When he talked to me he said they’d given him three days to come up with one or the other. The club or the money. He told me that even if he handed over the deeds to Arcadia, he still reckoned there was no guarantee they wouldn’t break his legs for fucking them about. Or even kill him. He said that if he was going to go and see them, then he wanted back-up, but didn’t know where he was going to get it from. He didn’t know who out of the door staff would stand up for him and wasn’t going to count on any of them. So he asked me if I knew of anyone independent, some security company who could be relied upon to provide him with a decent escort.’
‘Why did he ask you?’
She shrugged. ‘I don’t think he knew where else to turn. We’ve worked together a while and I think he trusted me.’
I finished my coffee and put it on the glass coffee table next to me. ‘And you said you’d see what you could do?’
She took a pack of cigarettes out of her handbag and offered me one. It had been a month since I’d quit but for the last few hours I’d known it was never going to last. The way things were going, living to a ripe old age with healthy lungs was the least of my concerns.
‘Cheers,’ I said, and took one.
She lit it for me with a thin black lighter, then lit her own and sat back in her seat, crossing her shapely legs and blowing smoke towards the ceiling. The dress rode up provocatively and I tried hard, but without much success, to ignore it. ‘What choice did I have?’ she asked. ‘I didn’t want to get involved, course I didn’t, but he’s been good
