‘A diversionary tactic.’
‘He’s savage enough to have been responsible.’
‘The man’s not stupid. Antonescu and Becali, his two offsiders, are not too smart, and I reckon that Antonescu would have no compunction in shooting innocent people, nor would Becali, but this time I reckon that Cojocaru’s levelling with us.’
***
‘I don’t care who the bastard is, I want him dead,’ Cojocaru said as he stomped around the living room in his penthouse flat. Standing not far away, afraid to sit, were his two henchmen.
Crin Antonescu, the first of the two, a squat pug-faced man, a wrestler in his youth, enjoyed violence, although only if he was not on the receiving end. He still remembered the time when he had been, the result of not throwing a championship match on which a gambling syndicate had staked a fortune. Not only had they lost millions, but Antonescu had lost the full strength in his left arm after four men had gone to work on him for not following orders.
‘You live to tell others who may think that they are smarter than us,’ one of the four men had said, and now Antonescu sat in the room in Kensington listening to the man who had controlled that syndicate.
Antonescu hated Cojocaru, although the thought of betraying him brought the pug-faced man out in a cold sweat.
Cojocaru knew that fear brought with it respect and devotion, the same way a maltreated dog will continue to follow its master, even after it had been starved and beaten.
The second of the two men in Cojocaru's presence, a tall, slender man with wavy hair and a dark complexion, went by the name of Ion Becali. He did not fear Cojocaru, only loved the man for what he had done for his family when he had been desperate and struggling to make ends meet in Romania.
‘He’s not a local,’ Becali said, referring to the shooting at Briganti’s.
‘Ion, I’m not a fool,’ Cojocaru said.
‘Abano wasn’t much of a target,’ Antonescu said.
‘He may have fancied himself as an important man in the area, but he was just small time. What was he involved with?’
‘We used him a few times to sell drugs for us. We paid him well enough, and he kept his mouth shut.’
‘You two are my eyes on the street, but you’re coming up with nothing.’
‘Nobody knows, or else they’re clamming up.’
‘I don’t care what you do, who you hurt, but I need to know. If it’s someone from the old country we’d know by now. If it’s someone from elsewhere with fewer scruples than us, then it’s war. Are we ready?’
‘If it’s locals, then yes. We’ve got them under control, but if it’s unknowns from overseas, no chance,’ Antonescu said.
‘What are you suggesting? That we bring in more people to help?’
‘How many of the locals did we kill when we came to this country?’
‘You tell me.’
‘Over twenty, but most of them were Jamaicans, the rest Irish, some from Scotland, and a few English, but they weren’t used to our kind of violence. Or at least the English weren’t, lily-livered the lot of them.’
‘The police, any issues?’
‘A few uniforms can be paid to look the other way, or if they don't take money, they’ll respond to threats.’
‘What sort of country is this, where the police are honest, the villains are harmless?’ Becali said.
‘The sort of country that has made us rich and feared. The sort of country where we can hold our heads up high.’
Becali thought back to Romania and how he had scratched out an existence, stealing what he could, fencing what he couldn’t. And now he was living in an upmarket flat in Bayswater, a couple of women on tap, a cabinet full of drink, and the best hashish that money could buy. It had been a good eight years in a country that respected his right to be there, even paying him government money in the first few months while he established himself, while he and Antonescu with Cojocaru’s planning had methodically eliminated all opposition. If the authorities had known what atrocities they had committed, especially against those from the Caribbean, the police would have been more diligent.
Concern over gang warfare had been raised in parliament at the time, and in the media on occasions, but not much had come of it, just blustering and grandstanding by a few. Cojocaru knew, as he had back home in Romania, that society needs discipline, not vague rules and regulations. The area that he controlled was calmer than before; there was a lower level of street crime, and areas that had been no-goes late at night were now safe to walk in by the law-abiding majority.
The master gangster looked out of the window of his penthouse flat and surveyed his domain. He knew that the move to England had been right, as back in the old country there was a new government that had been elected on a platform of law and order. They weren’t achieving much of either, but they had become a nuisance.
In England, the presumption of innocence before guilt had served him well, and apart from a few attempts by the authorities to muscle him and his men out of the country in the early days, he had managed to stay. And those that had shown the possibility of securing his deportation were either in his pay now, or keeping out of the way, or dead. Of the three options, Cojocaru knew which he preferred.
‘The Russians would be capable of hitting Briganti’s,’ Cojocaru said, a shiver running down his spine.
‘But why? We take the heroin they ship out of Afghanistan, pay them plenty for it,’ Antonescu said.
Chapter 7
Detective Chief Superintendent Richard Goddard was not a happy man, Isaac knew that. The two had worked together since one had
