McBride nodded. ‘Not bad.’
‘How much would you make in a night?’
‘A couple of hundred on a good one.’
Berrin whistled through his lips. ‘That’s a lot of money, especially for the bloke taking the eighty per cent.’
‘Did all the doormen get an opportunity to make that much money?’
‘Yeah, we took it in turns to walk the club.’
I thought about this for a moment. If McBride was to be believed the club was turning over some serious drugs cash every night. I did the sums in my head. It was more than enough to kill for.
‘The Holtzes own the Arcadia, don’t they?’
McBride’s face experienced a passing shadow of fear. Quick, but noticeable. ‘It’s Roy Fowler, as far as I know.’
‘Who owns Elite A?’
‘Warren Case.’
I sighed. ‘You’re not really helping us very much, Mr McBride. I know that it’s Warren Case’s name on the company’s certificate of incorporation, but I want to know who really owns it. Who takes the profits.’
‘I honestly don’t know. I just work for them.’
Once again, my eyes drifted towards the drugs. ‘What is this stuff? Speed or coke?’
‘It’s speed.’
‘Looks like a fair amount of it.’
‘Drugs Squad’ll be interested,’ mused Berrin.
‘Very.’
McBride was sweating. It might have been a hot day but his nerves were unmistakable. He knew he had to talk but the prospect was scaring him. ‘Listen, I’ve told you the truth. I don’t know who owns it. A couple of times this geezer would turn up at Elite A and come in and talk to Case, and once I saw him leaving with this big holdall. I heard him say something to Case, you know just joking, saying that he must have done well that week.’
‘So it’s fair to assume that the holdall contained money?’ McBride nodded. ‘But I’m a bit confused here. You said Fowler made eighty per cent of the takings and the individual doormen made the other twenty per cent. So where did all these holdalls of cash at Elite come from?’
‘From what I’ve been told, Fowler took the money and checked it, but he didn’t keep it all. Most of it went back to Elite.’
‘Which means that Elite and Arcadia were very closely linked, wouldn’t you say?’ McBride gave a very reluctant nod. ‘This man you saw at Elite’s offices, who was he?’
‘Jack Merriweather.’
‘Well, well, well.’
Jack Merriweather. Better known, at least behind his back, as Jackie Slap, on account of his shiny Mekon- style bald pate, itself the result of a sudden teenage attack of alopecia. The story went that at the age of sixteen young Jackie had been forced to share a cell in a detention centre with a powerfully built homosexual named Lennie, and such had been the stress of having to fend off Lennie’s unwanted advances that he’d lost all his hair. At the time it had made the news, because there was a lot of controversy over the ‘short sharp shock’ method of teenage incarceration. One wag had suggested renaming it the ‘short sharp slap’, and for Jackie at least the name had stuck.
Nobody took the piss out of Jack Merriweather any more though. Not now he was a part of Stefan Holtz’s crime organization. It also answered at least one question about who really ran things at Arcadia. Merriweather worked directly for Neil Vamen, who was one of Holtz’s closest associates, in many ways his eyes and ears in the outside world now that the big boss had become something of a recluse. I’d met Vamen once a few months earlier when we’d interviewed him after his name had come up in connection with a box of twelve Kalashnikov rifles that had been discovered at Gatwick Airport. A short, barrel-bodied individual with thinning hair and striking turquoise eyes, he was good-looking in a thuggish sort of way. And very polite, too, I remember that. Someone in CID had once said that Neil Vamen put the manners back into murder, and, I had to admit, there was definitely something charismatic about him. But, like all these blokes, you had this feeling that if you crossed him you’d pay dearly for it, and he’d been linked to more than one murder, including that of a young female accountant who knew a little too much (nothing ever proved, of course, he was far too canny for that), which to me sort of took a bit of the gloss off the image of Raffles, the gentleman gangster. It fitted with his way of doing things that he used Merriweather to collect the money. The truly successful criminals never get their hands dirty.
‘I presume you’re aware that Jack Merriweather works for the Holtzes?’
‘I’ve heard that, yeah.’
‘So it’s probably safe to assume that the Holtzes own Elite A and therefore almost certainly own Arcadia, isn’t it?’
‘Are you asking me or telling me?’ he said, using the same phrase Elaine Toms had used the previous day.
‘Don’t fuck us about, McBride,’ I told him coldly. ‘We’re only talking in your front room because at the moment we’re giving you the benefit of the doubt. However, so far you’ve told us absolutely nothing that we didn’t know already, so you’re still looking at a nice long spell in the nick. Now, answer my question unless you want to continue this interview down the station.’
‘All right, yeah, I suppose it’s safe to assume. I didn’t know for sure he owned the place … both places … but there were rumours. I don’t like to ask too many questions about that sort of thing. You know, I don’t want to get on the wrong side of Stefan Holtz.’
I changed tack. ‘How well did you know Shaun Matthews? Honestly.’
‘I got on all right with him. I knew him a bit, you know.’
‘Did you ever socialize with him outside work?’
McBride paused before answering, at the same time breaking eye contact with me. ‘A couple of times, yeah,’ he said eventually. ‘We was both ex-army so I think he thought we had something in common. Most of the other blokes didn’t really like him much.’
‘Why not?’ asked Berrin.
‘Well, like I said, he rated himself. Threw his weight about a bit, and he could get nasty if he thought anyone was holding back on money owed to the club.’
‘Did he ever upset one particular person more than any of the others? Enough to give them a motive for killing him?’
‘He had a run-in with one geezer, one of the permanent doormen, John Harris. John was getting a blowjob in the bogs from one of the punters when he should have been out on the floor. I don’t think it would have mattered — you know, that sort of thing goes on a lot. The birds are attracted to door-men, aren’t they?’
‘I wouldn’t know,’ I said, hoping my daughter would never flutter her eyelashes at a lowlife like McBride.
‘But the thing was, he did it quite a lot. He was always poking the punters, sometimes two at a time, and the thing was he had, you know, staying power, so he could be at it for fifteen, twenty minutes, sometimes even longer. Which I suppose is why they liked him. Anyway, Shaun had just had enough that night so he went charging into the Gents, kicked open the door, and dragged John out by his dick. John didn’t know what had hit him — you know, element of surprise and all that — and he got a fair old slap. Broken nose, couple of black eyes. Nothing serious, but I think it was the humiliation of it. Shaun marched him through the whole club with his trousers still half hanging down, and booted him out the door. Told him to come back when he’d got his sex drive under control.’
‘And did he come back?’
‘Not after that. Well, you wouldn’t, would you? Not after someone’s taken those sort of liberties with you.’
‘When did this incident take place?’ asked Berrin.
McBride shrugged noncommittally. ‘A couple of months back. Something like that.’
Berrin and I looked at each other. We hadn’t heard about this run-in with John Harris, but then no one at Arcadia was going out of their way to be of help. Berrin made a note in his notebook. We’d track down the sexually energetic Mr Harris later.
‘Did Shaun Matthews ever discuss with you any problems he had with anyone, problems that might have
