– seven. There's three guys in a car and they've got shooters and they're parked up and killing time before a job's ready. A police car, three blokes in it, comes by and doesn't like them sitting there. They're going to do a check on the vehicle.'
'Like it will be if we don't keep moving. Go on, Benji.' It was as if Ricky were an addict, needed the fix of hearing the story again now that he was here, a gawper in the shadows between the street's lights and half hidden by the parked cars.
'One of them in the vehicle's Roberts, Harry Roberts. The first copper leans through the window and starts with his questions. Roberts shoots him, then gets out, shoots the second copper in the street. I think that's the story, and the third one's shot in the police wheels. Two of them's gone, but Roberts is still inside, or was last time I read about him. Thirty-some-thing years he's done.'
'Mad, wasn't he?'
'It was just after they'd finished with the rope. A few months earlier and they'd all have hanged.
Roberts didn't get hanged but he's done thirty-eight years and-'
'OK, OK, I heard you.' Ricky didn't need the story any more. 'Wasn't smart, was it?' In unison, the cousins nodded agreement. 'Right, let's get on back – what's the business?'
They drove away from the gaol. •
Charlie said, 'The big new growth area is behind that wall and behind that wire. Class-A stuff is what they want when they're banged up. They want brown and they want coke, and I reckon it's Es as well. What I hear, eight out of ten who go down are showing traces of class-A stuff when they have the check on arrival. That's a heavy market, which is not tapped into. There's no organization for regular supply and that presents an opportunity too good to miss out on.
The key thing is 'regular', and there's no exploitation of the market yet. There's useful money to be had and it's where we should be.'
Ricky sniggered. 'What you'd call a captive market…'
The cousins all laughed, always did at Ricky's humour.
'How do we get it in?'
Benji said, 'Three ways I've identified. First, quite simply, you chuck it over the wall. The price is going down, the street price is depressed because of supply and demand – supply's terrific – and you get some joker with a good arm and he lobs the packets over, and you accept the screws'll find two out of every three, but if you time it for exercise hours the chance is that you'll win with thirty-three and a third per cent. Tennis balls are good, split open, stuff inside, then taped up, and they're fine for chucking. They do that up in Manchester I've heard. Second, you use visitors. Do all the orifices, know what I mean? If there were proper detailed searches on visits there'd be uproar, a mutiny, and not half the people would get inside to see the people. But that's getting harder because there are more dogs and more scanners that sniff the class-A stuff. It's also dispersal of effort. To get good quantities in you have to use too many mules who're swallowing and stuffing – and clogging up the visitors' toilets. Third, you find a screw with a problem – debt, sick kiddie, girlfriend who likes the good life. One screw for one gaol, and he goes in once a week and he has one distributor on the inside.
The screw's not going to turn himself in, and the distributor doesn't have to know where it's coming from – so there's a cut-out.'
'How do you get the payback?'
Davey said, 'That's the distributor's problem whichever way you go, Ricky. It's for him to organize.
Every taker he sells to has to make the arrangements for payment outside, and the distributor's responsible for getting the cash together. If he's messing you, Ricky, then he's walking a fine line. Bad things can happen to him inside. And bad things can happen to his family outside, and he knows that.'
He had the outline for the enterprise from his cousins. His decision. None of them would have presumed to tell him what that decision should be. They were in the late-evening traffic on the Harrow Road, heading for London's central streets.
'We'll set up the Scrubs first, and if that works we'll go for Wandsworth – I'm not touching Pentonville or Brixton. We'll create a weekly guaranteed supply to one distributor. We find a screw, or a workshops-supervisor guy to take it in. That's how it's going to be.'
Davey grunted assent.
'Good thinking, Ricky,' Charlie said.
A little irritant anxiety broke in Ricky Capel. Would they ever tell him he was wrong? Then a mirthless chuckle came into his throat and a smile cracked the smoothness of his face. He was never wrong. His father had been, not Ricky, and his grandfather had made enough mistakes to get himself inside more than he was out. Davey would drive them across London and they'd pick up the old man, who'd have had a gut full, and bring him home.
In a corner far from the bar, Percy Capel sat with his cronies. The British Legion, its members former servicemen, was home from home. He was a legend there and he bathed in the glory of the story, which was enhanced by his refusal to talk detail.
Inside the Legion building, tucked away from the bar – to which he seldom went for drinks but allowed others to fill his glass – it was well known that he had been behind enemy lines in the Second World War for months, and should have had a medal for it.
At those November ceremonies in front of rain-swept memorials – as the retired squadron leader, their chairman, intoned his address – he and the others present, at awkward attention, wore the medals given them. Percy Capel should have had the Military Medal for his service in Albania: Major Anstruther had been given the Military Cross. What they all knew in the Legion bar was that Percy had been flown back to Alexandria, and the medal citation had gone up to the Gods for ratification – and that Percy had then been nicked by the Redcaps for stealing the petty cash out of a staff officer's bedroom while the bugger slept there. The way he told it, Percy had the cash off the dressing-table and was on his way out when the bedroom rug had gone walkabout under his weight, slid on the polished marble floor, and he'd gone arse over tit and wrecked his ankle. He'd scarpered down a drainpipe and been lifted while he was limping back to barracks. Two years in the glass-house at Shepton Mallet after repatriation in close arrest. When he told that story and the refills of his glass came thick and fast – 'Oh, don't mind if I do' – laughter bellowed the length and width of the bar. But he never talked, for a pint or a laugh, about Albania.
Some tried and failed.
His reply was always the same: 'Saw things done there, my friend, that would make your hair stand-not things for talking of in company.'
Could have talked about the major, the greatest man he'd ever known. Major Hugo Anstruther, who was lined up to inherit thousands of Highland acres, and a titled wife, had taught Percy Capel – his batman, handyman and donkey-minder – everything a man needed to know in the arts of safe-blowing and burglary, and everything a man did not need to know, except in Albania, about how to slit a sentry's throat silently and plant explosives on a bridge that would be detonated under a convoy, sending men, screaming, to death. On the flight out, after the Huns' surrender, Major Anstruther had said to him, 'I think, Percy, you'd be wise to forget most of what you learned with me or at best you'll spend most of the rest of your life locked up and at worst you'll go to the gallows.' He'd seen the death notice for the major, nine years ago, in a newspaper. That night he'd gone on the overnight sleeper to Fort William, taken a bus, then walked four miles and reached a little stone church as they were lifting the major's coffin from the hearse. He'd stood at the back. Anstruther had had the full works: medals on the coffin, piper to play him out, estate workers in their best clothes and enough children and grandchildren to fill a charabanc.
Nobody had spoken to Percy. They'd just walked by him like he was a dog turd. Rain coming down heavy, and him in his one suit that he'd wear next at Winifred's funeral, and then at his own.
When they'd all left, just the gravedigger left to smack his spade into the lumps of sodden clay and fill the pit, he'd gone close. The gravedigger had been young and a self-rolled fag hung on his lip. Percy, drenched, had said that he had fought with the major in Albania. 'Where's that?' Water streaming down his face and through his suit jacket, Percy had said he and the major had been comrades in arms. 'When was that?' He'd walked back four miles, had waited two hours for a bus, and caught the night sleeper to London. He had a week in bed with the shivers from his soaking.
