‘Please, Mr Gates, tell me what you want and I swear on me mother’s eyes I’ll tell you what you want to know.’ He had his feet exposed now and the smell was ripe in the cloying heat of the room.
‘Jesus Christ, the hum of your feet is enough to make me scald the fuckers anyway! Don’t you ever wash, Flinty?’
He shook his head. ‘Where would I wash here? The bathroom’s like a fucking war zone most of the time. The bath’s filthy. I get by. Sometimes I bath at a friend’s.’
‘Sit yourself down and stick out your plates.’ Flinty hesitated and Gates rolled his eyes to the ceiling. ‘I’m getting annoyed now, Flinty. Just do as I ask and tell me what I want to know and you’ll be OK.’
Flinty sat in the chair, his face a study of fear. Gates picked up the kettle once more and went to him, saying with a laugh: ‘Sad little faces cut no ice with me, you cretin. I know what you are and you know that I know. You’re a fucking nonce, mate. You prefer little boys to grown men. I know all about you so don’t come the old soldier with me.’
Flinty dropped his gaze and stared instead at the steaming kettle of water hovering over his feet. Gates let a few drops escape and land on his legs. Even the thickness of his trousers, a tweed pair he had picked up from a second-hand stall in Camden, didn’t prevent him from burning.
‘Sorry, mate, bit of an accident there. I meant to hit your feet, see.’
Flinty closed his eyes. He was a coward. In his life he had been banged up many times and had endured humiliation after humiliation rather than have any pain inflicted on him. Now he resigned himself to his fate.
‘What I want to know is, where can I get my hands on Derrick O’Hare?’ Gates saw Flinty’s face go even whiter and grinned. He had the little fucker; if anyone knew the whereabouts of the Liverpool lout, Flinty would.
The grass had tears in his eyes as he answered: ‘Burn me now, Mr Gates. That’s more than my life’s worth.’
Gates let half the kettle of water land on the man’s feet, and watched in fascination as blisters appeared like magic. Then, placing the kettle back on the gas ring, he proceeded to tie the weeping Flinty’s hands behind his back with his own tie.
‘Look, mate, I know this is painful and I’m sorry about that, but I
have
to know where the cunt is. If I have to, I shall pour all this water over your genitals. Now that
is
painful . . .’
Flinty went quiet and for a few seconds Gates thought he had died of fright. Looking into the man’s face, he saw he was gritting his teeth, eyes tightly closed. He was willing to let Gates burn him rather than face O’Hare.
Putting the boiling kettle back on the hob and turning off the gas, he sighed heavily. Flinty’s feet looked like two red pieces of meat, and Gates felt a moment’s sorrow for what he had done. It was blanked out almost immediately by the knowledge that O’Hare could easily get away with anything while people were this frightened of him. Not since the Krays had Gates seen such a wall of silence.
It seemed no one wanted to fall foul of the Scouser and no one seemed able to persuade them otherwise.
Picking up the kettle once more, Gates tipped some over the man’s genitalia. Flinty screamed, and Gates slammed the kettle on to the table. Knocking the Chinese to the floor, and opening the bottle of Scotch, he said quietly: ‘You writhe in agony, you bastard, and remember - this is nothing to what I’m going to do to you in a few minutes, all right? I’ll fucking torture you all night if I have to but I’ll find out what I want to know, OK?’
Flinty was traumatised, his face white, his lips blue. The hands trembling with shock behind his back made him look as if he were dancing in the chair. Spittle hung from his lips as he whispered: ‘Please, Mr Gates, please stop hurting me.’
Gates took a deep drink from the bottle of Scotch and said reasonably: ‘Tell me what I want to know, Flinty, and I’ll see you get to a hospital, I can’t be no fairer than that. I’ll never let on where I got my information, you know that.’
Flinty shook his head and muttered, ‘He’s madder than you, he’s madder than anyone. Untie me and I’ll tell you his latest escapade.’
Richard untied the man’s hands and Flinty lay back in the chair, panting. The pain must have been excruciating and Gates felt a sneaking admiration for the man’s ability to keep quiet after all he had done to him. He gave Flinty the whisky and the man drank deeply.
‘A few weeks ago, O’Hare tortured to death Billy Wright. You know old Billy, the tramp from Berwick Street?’
Gates nodded, not sure where this conversation was leading. Groaning now, Flinty began to talk once more.
‘O’Hare bought him a drink and put him in his car. I was with them - I went along for the ride. O’Hare said we’d get a good drink and all he wanted was a bit of info. I do the same for faces as I do for the filth, you know that. They skinned him alive, Mr Gates, old Billy Wright. In front of me eyes like. He honestly didn’t know what they wanted from him, he’d have told them else. But that man O’Hare, he skinned him anyway. It was terrible, he’s a fucking nutter. So, Mr Gates, I’d rather be tortured by you than him any day of the fucking week. Burn me, stab me - fuckin’ shoot me, I don’t give a toss. But keep me away from him.’
He took another long pull from the whisky bottle and Gates looked at him in silence for a while.
‘I take it
you
had the information he wanted, Flinty. After all, you’re still here to tell the tale, ain’t you?’
‘Too right I told him, Mr Gates, you’d have told him anything an’ all but it didn’t stop the cunt from starting in on poor old Billy Wright. I tried to save the poor old git, I swear on my daughter’s he—’
‘You ain’t got a daughter, Flinty - she’s dead, remember? Overdose, if I recall.’
Flinty ignored him. ‘On her grave then, wherever that is, but I tell you now, Mr Gates, he’s a fucking lunatic. I told him where that brown hatter Pasquale hung out because it’s common knowledge. Joey was good to me over the years, but I’d have told O’Hare anything. Yes, even you, Mr Gates, would have shit it with him and his Bowie knife looming over your face. Now leave me alone.’ He began to cry then in earnest.
Gates stared down at the man and spoke through gritted teeth. ‘I’m not leaving till I get what I want, and believe me, Flinty, that ponce won’t have nothing on me if I lose my temper. I think you should consider that, don’t you?’
He refilled the kettle, saying as he did so: ‘Next time I’ll pour this in your mouth, and then, mate, you won’t ever be telling anyone anything again, will you?’
Flinty put his head into his hands and said brokenly: ‘He drinks in a spieler off Camden Market. It’s the meeting place for his men. That’s all I know, I swear.’
Gates smiled then, one of the lightning smiles that made him look almost handsome. ‘See how easy it was? All you had to do was tell me that, and me and you would never have fallen out, would we? I’ll phone an ambulance for you now, OK?’
With that he left the flat, Flinty already gone from his mind. It was all in a day’s work for Gates.
Half an hour later, he picked up two brothers from Tottenham - two black men called Lincoln and Roosevelt. The brothers were heavies for a price and every now and then Gates used them for ‘persuasive’ duties.
Both would kill their own grannies for a few quid - perfect credentials as far as Gates was concerned.
Tooled up with ‘squirts’ - ammonia in washing-up liquid bottles - knuckledusters and small telescopic coshes, they all wore Crombie overcoats with special poacher’s pockets inside to house their baseball bats and pickaxe handles. Lincoln always used a baseball bat with eight-inch nails through the tip, for maximum damage.
As they arrived at the small spieler in Camden, they were all hyped up.
Lincoln turned to Gates and said cheerily: ‘Five hundred, yeah?’
Gates nodded.
‘Right then, who’s the mark?’
The policeman had been dreading this and as he said, ‘Derrick O’Hare,’ waited for a refusal. He didn’t get one.
‘The Scouser, is it? What a touch! I hate fucking northerners. ’ Roosevelt’s voice was jovial and Gates grinned.
‘Let’s go get them, shall we?’
The two men nodded.
As they walked inside the music hit them. It was Gilbert O’Sullivan singing
Clare
and the two black men mimed being sick, much to Gates’s amusement. The doorman stared at them. Taking out a twenty-pound note, Gates tucked it into the man’s breast pocket. He smiled and waved them through.
All dressed in Crombies, they looked just like any other lags on a night out. Gates had taken the precaution of wearing a black Homburg to hide his face and tell-tale bald head.
Inside the club it was dark. Girls in various stages of undress and drunkenness milled around looking for punters. They gave the blacks a wide berth which suited all three men. The gambling was subdued as it was early in the evening yet, only just past ten-thirty, and the main money spinner here was drink or the buying of drugs.
The air was thick with cannabis smoke. Amphetamines would go down later in the evening when men wanted to feel more alert as they gambled away their wages.
Going to the bar the men ordered shorts and looked around them. There was no sign of O’Hare. Pulling one of the girls towards him, Gates whispered: ‘Where’s Derrick’s office? There’s a tenner in it for you, love.’
The girl eyed him suspiciously then, taking the tenner, said slowly: ‘Top of the stairs, turn right. But he ain’t there.’
Gates knocked back his drink and ordered another. They people-watched for ten minutes before making their way to the stairs that led to the toilets and the upstairs offices. No one took any notice of them as they cut through the throng. Gates could not believe the lack of security. It was as if the man thought himself indestructible.
The office door stood open as they walked inside. Whatever O’Hare was up to, Gates decided, he didn’t plan it from this little room. It was more of a book-keeping centre than anything else.
As they searched through the drawers, the door was opened by a muscle-bound Scouser who said pointedly: ‘Can I help you gentlemen at all?’
The three men behind him were all big too and all muscle-bound. But as Gates always said: Handsome is as handsome does. Some of the most muscle-bound men he had known were as weak as kittens.
Lincoln and Roosevelt felt the same way and the men began their tear-up in record time. The sudden appearance of the baseball bats and pickaxe handles took the smug looks off the faces of the Liverpudlians. They’d expected a fist fight. Instead they got a massacre.
But Gates, as he fought them, knew in his heart that tonight he would not get O’Hare. He enjoyed the fight all the same. Whatever happened, he was going to stop O’Hare before he harmed anyone else, especially Cathy.
If O’Hare wanted the West End and all it entailed, he would have to take it over Richard Gates’s dead body.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Derrick O’Hare sat in the bar of the Café Central and sipped a glass of ice-cold Chablis. He was dressed in a white linen suit and black shirt. His black loafers were hand-made and his socks bright green.
As a fashion statement he was a disaster; as a good tipper he was greeted with enthusiasm.
He sat at a small table, smiling and waving at passers-by who either waved back or dropped their eyes from this bloke who seemed to be drunk or mentally deranged.
It was his eyes that made people think he wasn’t the ticket. They seemed to stare right through you. O’Hare knew this and used it to his own advantage. He enjoyed his notoriety, and also the money he garnered through intimidation. London to him was a criminal Mecca. He wanted it so badly he could taste it. He was even bringing down men from his other patches in Nottingham and Leicester to work with him here, putting them up in Bayswater and giving them large retainers until he needed them. He knew that muscle, and only muscle, would get him London. It was all the Southerners understood.
A tall man with a military bearing walked up to his table and whispered something in his ear. Derrick rose from his seat and followed the man out of the bar and into a small ante-room. He grinned widely to see the man waiting there.
‘Docherty, you bastard! Long time no see.’
Eamonn unfolded himself from his chair and shook hands with the man with whom he had been dealing for the last twelve months on IRA business.
‘How was your flight?’ asked O’Hare.
Eamonn shrugged and sat down again. ‘The usual. This is my first time home for years though and it feels strange.’ He didn’t want to explain himself to O’Hare of all people.
‘So tell me, what’s been happening?’ he asked. ‘I hear there’s skulduggery afoot.’
Derrick laughed harshly. ‘I’m just putting a few old faces out to grass that’s all. It’s about time, eh? Come on, let’s go out and eat and then we can talk. I hear you’re staying in Park Lane. I can get you any kind of brass you desire. Just say the word: blonde, dark, black, white, big tits, little tits, long legs . . . Tell me your preference and I’ll have it delivered to your door.’
Eamonn smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. ‘You don’t have to pimp for me, Derrick, I’m quite capable of finding my own diversions. And I don’t pay for it - never have and never will.’
O’Hare knew he had made a major faux pas. Shrugging, he said, ‘I was paying, it was a gift. So no hard feelings, eh?’
Eamonn didn’t leave his chair. Instead he poured himself another Scotch from the bottle in front of him.
‘I’ll skip dinner and get straight down to business, if you don’t mind. The Cause contributions are drying up, and the Irish want to know why. So do I. You see, we need you and what you can offer us over here, but we don’t need you that much. Your Liverpool contacts have been disappointing recently. We’re running out of safe houses, and it’s getting harder to position people we need in the smaller communities. Now you know what we need these things for.