Jackie Slap’s lip curled in an expression of distaste, as if the very presence of police officers caused him to experience an allergic reaction, which it probably did. Vamen, meanwhile, eyed me with a mixture of mild contempt and idle curiosity, his turquoise eyes twinkling playfully. I could almost feel the stares of every other person in the place on my back, and I hoped Berrin didn’t do anything stupid, like faint.
‘Hello, Mr Vamen. My name’s DS Gallan and this is DC Berrin.’ I produced my warrant card and saw out of the corner of my eye Berrin produce his. ‘I believe we’ve met before.’
Vamen made a casual gesture. ‘I don’t remember.’
‘We’d like a word with you in private, if we may.’
‘No.’
And that was that. The word wasn’t delivered rudely but there was a finality about it I really should have expected. Behind me, I heard one of the pneumatic blondes snigger.
‘Any particular reason why not?’
He smiled. ‘Because I’ve got nothing to say to you.’
It’s difficult when you rely on the authority that comes with your position to coerce people into doing things, and then come up against someone who has no fear of it or you. Particularly when they’re on their home territory and you’re a long way from yours.
‘If you don’t talk to me, I might have to conclude that you’ve got something to hide,’ I told him, meeting his gaze.
That made him laugh. ‘Your lot have been concluding that for the past twenty years.’ Further laughter reverberated around the bar, and someone shouted, ‘You tell him, Neil.’
‘Ain’t you got nothing better to do?’ sneered the Slap. He was wearing a black New York Yankees baseball cap to cover up what he hadn’t got. I ignored him. At that point, I didn’t have to be told that I was losing this one.
‘Fine. We’ll talk here, then. Your girlfriend, Jean Tanner. We found a man dead in her apartment and we want to know where she is. Any ideas?’
Vamen’s face hardened and his eyes lost their playfulness. For two, maybe three seconds the silence was deafening. When he spoke next, his voice was calm and slow, but dripping with menace. ‘I don’t know what you’re fucking talking about, or where you’re getting your information from, but I’m telling you this: it’s bollocks. Now, you want to discuss anything with me, you go through my lawyer. His name’s Melvyn Carroll. You might have heard of him.’ I had. The Holtz family brief. As crooked as a busted rib. ‘Otherwise, unless you’re arresting me — which you’re not, are you?’ He paused for a moment to let me answer.
‘Not at the moment.’
‘Well, then, unless you’re arresting me, you can fuck off out of here and leave me alone. And if you don’t, DS Gallan … is that right? Gall-an?’
‘Gallon of what?’ some wag called out.
‘That’s right, John Gallan,’ I said, determined to hold my own.
‘And what’s your name again, sonny?’ He aimed the full force of his personality at Berrin, who was probably now wishing he’d taken the advice of his university careers adviser and joined an insurance company.
‘We’ve already told you who we are,’ I said.
‘Berrin, wasn’t it?’ he said, ignoring me and eyeing him closely, like he was probing for signs of weakness, and doubtless unearthing many. ‘Well, DS John Gallan and DC Berrin, if you harass me like this again with no good reason, and I can tell you now you do not have a good fucking reason, then my brief will be paying your superior a visit, and he will then be kicking your flimsy little arses for upsetting a well-established local businessman instead of doing what you’re paid to do, which is catching fucking criminals, of whom there are plenty a-fucking-bout. Do I make myself clear?’
‘That you don’t want to co-operate with us? Yes, you do. Crystal.’
He gave me a look like I was something annoying stuck between his teeth, then turned his back. At the same time one of his bodyguards, who was a good four inches taller and probably a foot wider than me, stepped between us and stared blankly down at the top of my head. The other one then joined him, forming a wall that effectively blocked off all contact. Jackie Slap stayed where he was, a nasty grin on his face. I could have tried to push them out of the way, hassle Vamen a bit more, let him know I wasn’t fazed, but in the end there was no point. He had the run of me and he knew it. I knew it, too. The important thing now was to find Jean. Then, possibly, we could move forward. For now, the meeting was over and I had to work hard to overcome the sense of impotence I felt in the sure knowledge that Neil Vamen was a criminal and a murderer who’d become rich by ignoring the laws I was supposed to uphold, who could pay my mortgage off a hundred times over, and yet, when it came to a confrontation between the two of us, he was the one who held all the cards. Some people say there’s no justice in the world. If they say it in front of me, I tell them they’re wrong, that the bad almost always get what they deserve in the end, even if the wait’s long. But at that moment in time, standing in a room where everyone was revelling in our powerlessness, I didn’t really believe it.
‘Gentleman gangster, my arse,’ I said in Vamen’s general direction. I looked up at the wall of flesh in front of me. ‘And you need to change your aftershave, mate.’ Puerile, but at least it made me feel a bit better. Like I’d salvaged something from the wreckage of this meeting.
Jackie Slap continued to grin, but I resisted addressing him by the name he allegedly hated. It would have reeked too much of desperation. Instead, I turned on my heel and motioned for Berrin to lead us out of there. He bumped into one of the blondes who’d deliberately positioned herself in front of him, and mumbled some sort of apology. She, for her own part, made some snide comment regarding the poor quality of his eyesight, which he ignored. She started to say something to me but I told her not to bother and kept walking, trying hard to ignore the catcalls and victory whoops that accompanied our exit.
On the four-hundred-yard walk back to the car through the terraced backstreets of Barnsbury, we didn’t speak once. When we finally reached it, I looked across at Berrin, who still didn’t look too good. I couldn’t blame him. It had been a shit day all round. ‘Are you all right?’ I asked him.
‘I don’t know,’ he said, leaning against the bonnet. ‘I think I might be coming down with something.’
Berrin wasn’t the hardest worker in the world and he’d already had several short bouts of sick leave in the few months he’d been with CID, but this time I wasn’t going to begrudge him. ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘I’ll take you home.’
He didn’t argue.
Two hours later I was still trying hard to keep a lid on my frustration but it wasn’t working. The humiliation of the meeting with Vamen, combined with the heat and the knowledge that nothing about the Shaun Matthews case was going right, including the way I was handling it, was serving to sever the last threads of my patience. I just knew that right now my ex-wife would be sat in the garden, the one I’d helped pay for, soaking up some rays alongside the man who had gone out of his way to wreck my life, while my daughter played happily in front of them, maybe even fetching him a nice cool beer to enjoy while he worked out whose balloon he was going to burst next. And the thing was, I could have handled it. I could have handled pretty much anything if I’d thought that by putting in all these extra hours on the job, hours I’d been putting in since I was eighteen years old, I was actually getting somewhere. But it just wasn’t happening. For every weak, staggering step forward we took, there always seemed to be a larger, more confident one backwards. And now I had to deal with an idiot like Capper, who seemed incapable of providing the remotest bit of help.
‘We need to be involved, sir. We interviewed the dead man yesterday and it was his testimony that led us to the flat today.’
Capper sat back in his chair, trying hard to look like he was sympathetic to my plight. The act didn’t work. ‘I’ll have to talk to the DCI about it, John, and that’s going to be tomorrow now. I don’t want to bother him at home. Not over this.’
‘With due respect, I think it’s important. I feel certain that this man’s death is linked to that of Shaun Matthews, and therefore-’
Capper raised his arms and waved them from side to side like opposing windscreen wipers, an annoying habit of his indicating silence to the individual being gestured at, in this case me. I forced myself to fall silent. ‘John, it’s DI Burley’s patch, so at the moment it’s his investigation. There’s nothing I can do about that. We’ll certainly be able to liaise with them if there’s a consensus that the two cases are linked.’
‘Which they’ve basically got to be.’
