are buried, but witness protection works. If anyone in witness protection gets chilled, it’s always because they blew their own cover. Believe me, it’s the real deal. . the full monty. . new identity, new place to live, new National Insurance number, new passport. How old are you now Clive?’
‘Thirty-two.’
‘Still a youth — time to start again, settle in a new city, forget all this.’
‘How far away? I don’t want to be too far from London.’
‘To be safe, it has to be north of Watford and west of Swindon. We avoid the south coast — too many blaggers take their girls to Brighton for a weekend — you run the risk of being bumped into and then bumped off.’
‘Plymouth?’
‘Yes, possible. . so’s Portsmouth and Southampton, but avoid the holiday resorts.’
‘You’ve set me to thinking.’
‘You won’t do well in the pokey, Clive. You’re a big lad but you’re too soft inside. So I am glad I’ve got you thinking, it’s what I intended to do.’
‘I’ll have to give evidence?’
‘Possibly.’ Brunnie opened his right hand. ‘But if you tell us where we can find evidence that will convict Yates. . a smoking gun with his prints on it.’
‘He doesn’t like shooters, too messy, he says.’
‘It was just an expression. . just another expression.’
‘Yates once told me that only cowboys use shooters — you don’t need shooters to off some old geezer.’
‘It’s really time to start working for yourself, Clive. . help us get Yates off the street, help us seize his assets.’
‘Assets?’
‘Possessions. . like his house in Virginia Water.’
‘He won’t be happy about losing that.’
‘If he can’t prove he bought it with honest cash. .’ Brunnie shrugged. ‘That’s what really hurts them — loss of their houses, all the money they’ve got stashed away. We put the forensic accountants to work under the proceeds of crime legislation. . and they do fifteen to twenty years, and come out to the queue at the Sally Army soup kitchen. That’s some drop.’
Sherwin gasped. ‘I’ve seen what happens to grasses. If I grass Yates up, I know what will happen to me. I need to think.’
‘No worries, think all you like, but if we arrest him without your help, you go down with him. . the clock’s ticking, Clive. If you want to turn Queen’s evidence, all you need to do is to walk into a police station, any police station.’
‘They watch police stations. They’ll have seen me being brought in.’
‘So take a train to somewhere outside the smoke.’
‘I need to think.’
‘So think, Clive. I’d like to say take your time, but I can’t. . because you can’t.’
Penny Yewdall had survived for forty-eight hours, and sat on the steps of the underground at Piccadilly Circus with a small white plastic beaker resting on the ground in front of her. An occasional coin was dropped therein, but for the most part, almost the whole part, people passed her in their hundreds, if not thousands, and spared her not a glance. She slept in doorways and spent what money she had on fast food from street vendors. On the morning of the third day she walked from Piccadilly Circus to Kilburn and entered the premises of WLM Rents. She approached the man at the desk hesitantly; she felt unkempt, unwashed. ‘Posh in here,’ she said looking about her.
‘Too posh for you, darling.’ The man in his thirties behind the desk avoided eye contact.
‘Well they say out there that you have rooms for dossers. . just askin’. .’
The man sat back in his chair and looked at her. He had a hard face, the face of an ex-con. If he did posses a sense of humour, Yewdall felt that it must live deep within his psyche.
‘Is that what is said?’
‘Yes.’
‘Word gets round.’ He paused. ‘What else is said?’
‘That it’s not free. You have to work.’
The hard man gave a very slight nod of his head. ‘How old are you?’
‘Old enough.’
‘That’s not what I asked.’
‘Twenty-four. . but I’m not working the street. Not for anything, not for anyone.’
‘What’s the accent?’
‘Potteries. . Stoke-on-Trent way.’
‘Got a name and an address up there?’
‘Penelope Lawrence, Two-one-four Rutland Street, Hanley.’
‘I’ll make a phone call. Come back in a couple of days Penelope Lawrence, but you’ll have to work. We don’t carry passengers.’
‘Two days?’
‘Two days.’ He lowered his head and wrote her name and address on his notepad.
The man and the woman sat contentedly side by side in the living room of their house in east London. The man turned to the woman and asked, ‘Cocoa?’
Kathleen Vicary smiled. ‘Yes, please. . it will help us sleep.’
SIX
The hugely built West Indian male seemed to Penny Yewdall to appear from nowhere, emerging out of the throng that negotiated the steps from Piccadilly Circus underground station to Regent Street. Gold rings adorned his fingers, his shoes were of crocodile skin, and he wore a full-length leather coat with an expensive looking suit beneath it. He towered over her and she caught a powerful scent of aftershave. They made eye contact. ‘Pretty chick,’ he sneered.
Penny Yewdall ignored him and glanced away.
‘Pretty chick, pretty white chick. . pretty honky chick. . little snowdrop chick. Come with me girl, I can show you how to make some real money. . real bread.’
She still ignored him.
‘Real soft bed, chick. . warm bed, clean sheets, better than this cold and damp stairway, pretty chick.’ The man’s harassment of her was public, naked, yet not one person intervened on her behalf. ‘Good clothes, new clothes.’
She continued to ignore him.
‘Real money, chick,’ he chanted, ‘jewellery, good clothes.’ Then he bent further towards her, hinging at the waist with powerful stomach muscles, so close that Yewdall smelled his minty breath through the fog of aftershave, and then the man said, ‘Harry Vicary says to be careful of a geezer called “Mongoose Charlie”, he offs people for Yates.’ Then he melted away into the crowd, leaving her alone once more, sitting in the drizzle with one or two very low denomination coins of the realm in her little plastic beaker, but comforted by the realization that she was being monitored. The crowd had hidden eyes.
She left the stairs at dusk having developed a strange trance-like detachment from the world, which she realized is the norm for down-and-outs — it was evidently the way they survived, mind and body separated from each other. They spent the days lost in their thoughts and memories and fantasies, and the nights lost in their dreams. Again she ate takeaway food from stalls in the street, curled up in doorways snatching sleep — occasionally she was moved on by a uniformed police officer but somehow survived until she felt it was time to go and sit on the stairs at the ‘Dilly Lady’ for another day. On the third day, in the forenoon, she walked to Kilburn and entered the premises of WLM Rents.
‘I expected you yesterday,’ the man said coldly as she approached.
