down the pavement on the opposite side to his garage and came into Bevin Close. Didn't stop, didn't look around him, went on as if he knew where to go.
Davey heard the shout from inside: his meal was on the table. He called back that he would be a moment, not long. He was now on the step and there was the scent of cooked food from the kitchen, but he hesitated.
The voice bit behind him: 'Come on, Davey, or it'll be cold.'
'Be a second, just a second.'
He saw the dosser stop in front of a door and peer past the gate and up the little pathway, as if he looked for a number, then briskly head on. He was supposed to know of everything that moved on Bevin Close. It was his work to maintain a constant watch for Crime Squad surveillance and the Criminal Intelligence Service's bugs. He knew every delivery van that called regularly, and the faces of relations who came often to visit. There had never before been a dosser in the cul-de-sac. If it had not been for his. blood link to Ricky Capel, Davey would have been small- time – perhaps a thief and dreaming of one big pay-out job, perhaps a mini-cab driver doing eighty hours a week. One day, and he had no idea of how far away it was, he would be able to buy an apartment or a little villa on the Spanish coast, with a patio and a pool. Or, one day, if he was not always careful, he would be in the Central Criminal Court hearing a judge slag him off and send him down. The dosser had slowed, was outside number eight, Ricky's place, and seemed to stare inside. Joanne – God, he didn't know why – never pulled the curtains after dark.
'You coming or not?'
'Just a moment.'
He went out through his own gate and started to stride to the corner junction. He looked both ways, raked over what was parked there, and saw nothing that alarmed him. Then he swung back and headed down Bevin Close. He recognized all the cars parked on the kerb, either side of those numbers that did not have garages. The figure of the dosser was lit by the brightness spilling out from the window. He was confused, could admit it. Benji and Charlie had the brains, did the thinking, but they all depended on Davey's nose for danger. A dosser had no call to be in the cul-de-sac. If the dosser was some fancy caper from the Crime Squad or the Criminal Intelligence Service he would have back-up in a van or a car close by, and there was no vehicle that fitted on the main road or in Bevin Close. So what the hell was he doing there?
The shout carried in the evening to him. 'You please yourself. It's in the oven, I'm starting.'
He yelled, not over his shoulder but ahead: 'Hey, you. What's the game? What do you want?'
The dosser didn't turn. If he'd been Crime Squad or Intelligence, he would now – challenged – be lifting his arm or ducking his head sideways and speaking urgently into his wrist microphone or the one on his collar. But the dosser just stared ahead at the window where the curtains weren't drawn.
'Hey, I'm talking to you – what you doing?'
No movement, no motion. Davey started to run. He could see the torn dank clothes of the dosser. He was panting, didn't do much running. He'd used to box in Peckham, super middle-weight, but that was way back. No call for him to run once he'd joined up with Ricky Capel. He came up behind the dosser, and the smells of the man were in his nose, but he hadn't turned – like it didn't matter that Davey had come down, fast, the length of the close and had yelled at him. That he was Ricky's man, his enforcer, was known through Lewisham, Peckham, Camberwell and Catford: in a pub he was bought drinks, in the betting shop he was allowed without fuss to the queue's front, in the street people moved out of his way. Davey was never ignored. He had stature as Ricky Capel's minder. He came up behind the dosser.
'Don't you bloody listen? I was speaking to you.
What's your business?'
The shoulders, sagging, stayed in his face. Davey was a short-fuse man. The nearest place where dossers hung out, where they begged or slept or drank, was the underpass at Elephant and Castle, but that was up past Rotherhithe and over the Old Kent Road, not here. He grabbed the shoulder. No resistance. The stink seemed to billow over him. Davey boiled. He had the man's coat in his fist and swung his body round to face him. There was no fight in the man, but no fear. Davey was used to fear, inflicting it.
Used to men cowering from him, cringing away.
'Who are you? What you doing?'
Not a quiver from the lips. Davey did not know whether it was dumb insolence or dumb stupidity. If the dosser had shown the fear then he might have frogmarched him up the length of Bevin Close and kicked his arse back on to the main road's pavement, and watched him go, then gone inside to get the supper out of the oven. The eyes stared back into his.
Was the man mental? One of those Care in the Community people? Didn't seem that way to Davey.
No madness in the eyes.
He was not sure if the eyes laughed at him. They were bright and big and close. The dosser's hand reached up, not to strike but to release Davey's grip on the shoulder; like it shouldn't have been there. The hand tried to prise the shoulder free and the weight of the dosser's body was against him, as if the man had done the business that had brought him to Bevin Close and was now ready to leave… No bloody way.
There was another rattle of questions in his throat – waste of time asking them. He used a knee into the groin, hard. The dosser was going down and Davey was shouting, couldn't hear himself, as he put in the southpaw short hook to the chin. The dosser was down. Davey readied himself for the kick to the head.
'What we got here, Davey boy?'
His breath coming in spurts, he looked up. Ricky leaned casually on the closed front gate, had a good shirt on as if he was dressing to go out and had been interrupted. The shape, like a rag bundle and like the men under the cardboard at the underpass by
Elephant and Castle, lay in front of him.
'Some bloody vagrant scum, Ricky. Outside your house. Looking at it. I've asked him what he was doing, who he was, why… Didn't get an answer.
Didn't get nothing. I belted him, Ricky.'
'Did you?'
'I don't reckon he's Crime Squad, just some loony that needed teaching.'
'You reckon.'
'Teaching respect.'
'Maybe you haven't taught him well enough.'
There was that quietness in Ricky's voice. It marked times when Davey knew better than to speak further.
He came through the gate and looked down at the dosser. The eyes in the head on the pavement were unwavering and steady. If he had been on the ground and Ricky's shoes had come close, Davey would have wrapped his arms round his head and curled up the better to protect himself; it was what men did when they were to be kicked, he'd seen it too many times to remember. The head jerked back from the impact of Ricky's shoe.
The cry was urgent: 'Don't be a bloody fool, Ricky.'
Mikey was out of his house, stumbling – like he was half-cut – towards them, and put himself between Ricky and the man on the ground, then turned on his son and pushed him away.
'What do you want – the bloody police down here?'
Ricky said, 'There's no call for the police, Dad.
Didn't you see? He fell over. Probably pissed up. He fell over and hit his head. You weren't looking, Dad.
You got to know what you're talking about when you call your son a bloody fool. Isn't that right, Dad?'
'If you say so, Ricky.'
'I say so, Dad… Get rid of him, Davey. We don't want people like that in our close. I'm surprised you let him get this far.'
Davey shivered – always did when criticized by Ricky Capel. It was big of Mikey, and not usual, to stand against his son and call him a bloody fool.
Davey wouldn't have done it, wouldn't ever. He pulled the dosser up by the shoulders of his overcoat, then dragged and half carried him away up the length of Bevin Close. It was only when he reached the junction with the main road, stood the dosser up and pushed him towards the line of steel-shuttered shopfronts that Davey realized what the smells were.
Above the stink of the clothes was the stench of petrol.
