But high risk. For Ricky Capel to have set up his girl at Chelsea Harbour opened little cracks in the defence wall built round his wealth and enterprises. He had met her in the hours after his first meeting with Enver, who hummed round King's Cross in a flash Ferrari Spider. Charlie had identified the business opportunity. Albanians ran girls into the country, but they hadn't the cover: Customs and Immigration had peeled eyes for Albanians driving white vans into Dover, Folkestone or Harwich. They were losing too many and too much cash, and they were operating on foreign territory. It was Charlie's proposition. Ricky should get himself up alongside the Albanians and take over the cross-border, cross-Channel runs. He had access to the drivers and to the lorries they brought back from the long overland European hauls.
He would be paid up front by the Albanians for the transport, and take a cut from the brothel earnings where the new girls would work. The way Charlie told it, it was pretty straight, and Benji had suggested approaching Enver. He'd heard that Albanians stuck by their word, were professional, made good partners.
They'd done the meeting, had shaken hands on a deal, and then there had been food in the club. The girl had stood at the back and her eyes had never been off him.
Christ, he'd wanted her, like he'd never wanted anything. Bought her, hadn't he? Bought her for cash, peeled it out of his pocket, and told Enver that there'd be no more bloody customers for her, and he'd collect her when he'd got premises. In a careful life, it was the wildest thing that Ricky Capel had ever done – bought a tart out of a brothel off an Albanian.
The way she grunted on him, the whole of that building at Chelsea Harbour, through concrete floors and concrete walls, would have heard her. Bloody, bloody – God – marvellous, and he clung to her breasts.
In his third or fourth meeting with Enver, long after he'd taken delivery of her, Ricky had told him, sort of casual, that his grandfather had been in Albania in the war. What was his grandfather's name and where had his grandfather been? Percy Capel, up in the north and he'd struggled to pronounce the place name
– with a Major Anstruther. Next time they'd met, him and Enver, Ricky had been given an envelope. In it was what he'd paid for the girl. Enver had giggled and told him why the money had come back. Enver's uncle was in Hamburg, Germany. The uncle's father was Mehmet Rahman, who had fought with Major Hugo Anstruther and Flight Sergeant Percy Capel against the Fascists in the mountains north of Shkodra. Small world, small bloody world.
She was coming, crouched over him, bellowing, like he was the best shag she'd ever had.
He did not rate the risk she represented. The Albanians, from that distant link between a grandfather and the father of an uncle, were his partners – well, not real partners because he controlled it all. He called the tune, Ricky did. He was never backed into a corner. He bought off them and used Harry's trawler to bring in the packages. He used his network of knowledge for haulage companies to help them get the girls, from Belarus, Ukraine, Bulgaria and Romania, into the country. He hired them – his cousin Benji called them 'the Merks', the mercenaries – for heavy punishment if a man showed him disrespect.
He had no cause to sweat on the arrangement: he had not lost control, never would – and the money rolled in for Charlie to wash, rinse, scrub clean.
She came, then him. Ricky sagged on the bed and she rolled off him. She peeled off the condom, and went to make him tea. Always tea, never alcohol.
He lay back and gasped. She was his best, his most precious secret.
Mikey Capel always watched little Wayne, Ricky's boy, play football for the under-nine team of the junior school, St Mary's.
He was on the touchline in the park area. There were no trees to break the force of the wind and he was huddled among the young mums and other grandparents. In a mid-week afternoon there were few fathers. He was at ease, liked the gossip among the men of his own age and a quiet flirt with the mothers. He enjoyed those afternoons. Little Wayne wasn't good, only useful, and he was hidden away by the teacher in charge on the left side of midfield where the kid's shortcomings in talent had least effect on the side's efforts; little Wayne was always picked by the teacher because his father, Ricky, had provided the team's shirts, knicks and socks, the same colours as Charlton Athletic, who used the Valley down the road. Maybe 'useful' was putting it strong, but it was fun for Mikey to watch him… He knew, that afternoon, where Ricky was and with whom, why he wasn't on the touchline.
Actually, the game against Brendon Road Junior was absorbing enough for him not to notice the powerfully built man, perhaps five years older than himself, with an erect bearing, sidle to his shoulder.
The noise around him had reached fever pitch. The ball was with a little black kid, might have been the smallest on the pitch but tricky like a bloody eel, and he was wriggling down his team's right touchline and the St Mary's left side and was coming right up against the faded white markings of the penalty box. The black kid had skill.
'Go on, Wayne, fix him!' Mikey yelled, through his cupped hands.
The little black kid, the ball seeming stuck to his toe, danced round little Wayne.
'Don't let him, Wayne! Block him!'
Oh, Jesus! The ball was gone, and the kid nearly gone, when little Wayne shoved out his right boot – most expensive that Adidas made for that age group
– hooked it round the kid's trailing leg and tripped him. Oh, Christ! The Brendon Road mums and grandfathers howled for blood – red-card blood – and the whistle shrieked. Oh, bloody hell. But the referee didn't send him off. He merely wagged his finger at the sour-faced child.
A rich Welsh accent rang in Mikey's ear: 'I suppose his dad's bought the referee. Chip off the old block that one, vicious little sod – proud of him, Mikey? I expect you are.'
He swung. Recognition came. 'It's Mr Marchant, isn't it?'
'And that's Ricky Capel's brat, right?'
'That is my grandson. I thought he tried to play the ball and – and was just a bit late in the tackle.'
'About half an hour bloody late. Like father, like son. I always reckon you can tell them, those that are going to be scum.'
'There's no call for that talk, Mr Marchant.' But there was no fight in Mikey's voice.
His mind clattered through the arithmetic of it.
Would have been nineteen years since he had last seen Gethin Marchant, detective sergeant, Flying Squad – a straight-up guy and civilized, never one to make a show. The Squad had come for Mikey, half six in the morning, and the afternoon before they'd done this factory pay-roll and all gone wrong because a delivery lorry had blocked in the get-away wheels and they'd done a run with nothing. Mr Marchant had led the arrest team, nothing fancy, and the door hadn't been sledgehammered off its hinges before Sharon had opened up. Even given him time to get out of his pyjamas and dressed. And allowed him to kiss Sharon in the hall so that the neighbours wouldn't have too much to tittle over, and Ricky had come out of his bedroom and down the stairs, like a bloody cyclone, and thrown himself at the arresting coppers. Barefoot but he'd kicked at shins and kneed balls, and then he'd jumped up more than his full height and head-butted a constable hard enough to split the man's lip, flailing with his fists. It had taken three of them, and his mum, to subdue the thirteen-year-old Ricky, and the girls at the top of the stairs had been weeping their bloody eyes o u t… Proper upsetting it had been.
'Where's Ricky now? Doing his scum bit?' The Welshness lilted, but there was contempt in the hard voice of the retired detective sergeant. 'God, I'd hate to think I'd fathered that sort of creature, and that there was another coming along, same vein. What encourages me, it'll all end in tears because it always does… Sorry, sorry. Nice to have met up with you again, Mikey – got to go.'
Mikey saw Gethin Marchant scurry, as best he could at his age, on to the pitch. The little black kid was down, in tears, and the foul had ended his afternoon's football. When the game restarted, while the detective sergeant held the little bundle of the boy on his shoulder on the far touchline, the Brendon Road kids scored, and then the referee blew his whistle for full time.
Little Wayne came to him. 'We was bloody robbed.
We-'
'You were shit,' Mikey, the grandfather, snapped back. 'Next time your father can watch you. It won't be me.'
No, Ricky wouldn't be there to watch little Wayne, because Ricky was screwing on those afternoons when St Mary's had matches. He had a good mate, been inside with him and shared a cell with him, who now drove a mini- cab for a company at the bottom end of the King's Road. They drank together some Tuesday nights. The mini-cab
