Inside Straight (28 page)

"Graham Ellis."

He sniffed and looked me over. He flicked the match to the other side of his mouth, then nodded at the wired door, which clicked open. This one had a nose for the police, and I realised why Kennedy had been so desperate to get me in here – he needed someone on the inside just as much as Pollard had.

Into the main hall, lit by bright hanging lights and padded with deep shadows around the walls, so I had no idea how big the room was, or how many men lurked in the dark. I saw four men and Pollard. I smelled sweat and beer and what I guessed could have been testosterone, but which could just as easily have been curry flatulence. Pollard smiled at me and waved me over. As I approached, I heard the place for what felt like the first time – the clack of balls against each other, the thump of them bouncing off the cushions, the low murmur of heavily-accented conversation, the oddly inflected, somewhat canine laughter that rattled from one corner of the room like a warning as my feet scuffed the worn nylon carpet. It was deafening, aggressive. It made me want to run. I wondered if Kennedy and the others could hear anything over it.

"Come on into the back, Graham. Get a bit of privacy." Pollard let his hand hover over my back as he ushered me towards a door. I moved away from him, just in case he decided to bring the hand closer. He chuckled and shook his head.

A part of me panicked when Pollard closed the door behind us, but only for a moment. The sound of the snooker hall cut short, and the sudden peace allowed me to breathe. The back room was small and hot, looked like someone had dumped a load of corporate furniture into a stock room and called it an office. On a large wooden desk against the far wall squatted a Tesco carrier bag. There was money inside it.

"Y'alright?"

I stared at the bag. "Yes."

"On you go."

I went over to the desk. I didn't know what I'd been expecting, but it wasn't a cheap plastic carrier. I flicked it further open with two fingers.

"It's not going to fuckin' bite, you know."

I peered inside. Banded twenties and tens. Easily spent. "How much is there?"

"Twenty."

I turned. "I thought we said—"

"I know what we said. That there's your net after I take away the cunt tax." He nodded at the bag. "If you'd kept your shit together, you'd have the lot."

I felt sweat on my neck. "That's not fair."

"Life's not fair."

"No, wait, come on—"

"Take it or leave it. Your choice."

I swallowed. Looked at the bag again. I picked it up and balled it to my chest. It rustled against the microphone.

"Good lad." Pollard grinned. He held out a hand. "Now I know you don't like shaking or nowt, but ..."

The thought of his rough skin in mine made something stick in my throat, but I had to do it. Guys like him needed justification more than oxygen. Pollard needed me to shake and tell him that it was okay, that all the pain and humiliation was forgotten and we could move on. He almost looked guilty and for a second there, I almost felt sorry for him.

But it was only a second.

I shook his hand. His skin was hard and his grip was harder.

He pumped my hand once and held on. "Sorry this wasn't smoother on you, Graham."

I nodded and gave him a tight smile, which tightened further as his fingers clenched. "That's okay."

He opened his eyes wide to show how sincere he was. "I'm serious. I mean, I'm not going to lie to you – you deserved a fuckin' slap for coming round unannounced an' that – but you took it a lot worse than I thought you would."

"No hard feelings." I tried to remove my hand.

He held on. The flinch made the carrier bag rustle. His gaze flickered to my chest, then back to my face. "You sure?"

He knew. Or maybe he was just suspicious and thought he'd test me. Or maybe he had someone on the inside – and wouldn't that be a turn-up if he had a mole in the Met, eh?

I looked him right in the eye. "Yes, I'm sure. No hard feelings"

"You wouldn't do anything daft, would you, son?"

It was more a statement than a question, but I answered it anyway. "No, sir."

He laughed and released my hand. He slapped me on the shoulder. It hurt immediately and wouldn't stop hurting for a while after. "You're a good lad, Graham. Don't let anyone tell you any different."

"Thank you."

Pollard stepped out of my way and I walked out. When I emerged, all heads turned. My hands tensed around the bag. They weren't going to rob me, but they knew what I was carrying, and my lizard brain screamed for me to run as fast as I could.

"You're alright." Pollard was laughing at me, apparently amused at my discomfort the way men like him always were. "On you go, son."

And so on I went. Across the room, out through the wired door and past the reception, where I stopped and leaned against the wall.

I couldn't catch my breath. My chest hurt. I felt like sitting down. Something had thrown a tremble into my legs. I heard a wet clicking sound and when I looked over my shoulder, I saw the fat man on reception laughing at me. "What's the matter, flower?"

"Nothing. I'm fine."

I turned back and saw the dim green glow of the fire exit sign. I put one hand on the bar and leaned as I straightened. It dipped under my weight and clicked.

Wait.

I looked back at the stairs that would take me out into the waiting cuffs of Kennedy and his crew. They'd take the money off me –
my
money – and they'd duck me into the back of one of their cars and take me down the station while the rest of them raided the place. It didn't matter what Kennedy did then, I'd be caught, broke and dead.

The fat man leaned over the reception counter. "Here, mate, you want to go down the fuckin' stairs if you're leaving. That's a fire exit. That's for emergencies only."

I scratched my right palm until it bled, then wiped my fingernails on my trousers. If I walked out of that front door, it was suicide.

So for all intents and purposes, this was an emergency.

I shouldered the fire exit and rushed out the back. Clanging down wrought iron steps and into a concrete back yard, the bag held close to my chest, rustling against the microphone. I ran to the gate, felt for the deadbolts and wrenched them to one side – top, middle and bottom – my hands cold and scraped by the time I threw the door open and ran out into the lane.

Nobody out here, and my breath misted in front of my face, I reached under the bag and wrenched the wire from my chest, taking a few errant hairs along with it. I pulled it out of my shirt like a bad magic trick and tossed it and the power pack onto the street. As it clattered across the concrete, I heard shouts from round the front, heard footsteps running and decided to add to them by sprinting off down the lane. I was out of shape – it felt as if I was merely waddling at speed – the carrier bag clutched to my chest like a baby. I skipped out onto the road and then across it, glancing both ways for traffic and police, and then ducking into the safe shadows of another back lane. If I could keep to the alleys, I'd be alright.

It didn't matter where I ended up. I had enough money to catch a cab and enough time to get to the station.

I stopped to catch my breath, felt in my jacket pocket. The ticket was still there, nestled against my passport and ship documents. I leaned against the wall and stared up at the sky, waiting for the sound of my breath and heart in my ears to subside. There was a mist of rain in the air, a cool tease that made me thinking I was sweating worse than I was.

I let it settle on me as I listened to the ambient sound come rushing back.

There were shouts. I heard the staccato
doo-weep
of sirens, but they were far away. I looked into the carrier and took out a bundle of tenners and stuffed it into my empty inside pocket.

It would look like sudden flight. It would look like the kind of thing a child would do – "I don't want to be here, so I'm just going to run and I don't know where as long as it's far away from
here
" – and not the kind of thing that I'd prepared in advance. Truth of it was, I hadn't known I was going to run until I did. It could so easily have gone the other way, and they just would have found my ticket and travel documents on me when they cuffed me. Then I would have said they were there to make Pollard think I was leaving right away, that if I wasn't arrested in front of him, he'd spend some time looking for me on the ships. But it wasn't needed. He hadn't searched me. He'd trusted me. More fool him.

And more fool them for not searching me before I went in there.

I needed to get moving. Kennedy and his pals would have gone in for Pollard. They probably had enough on tape to warrant a broken door, and they probably wouldn't let a doughy prat like me ruin their day. I was small fry.

So they'd be busy with Pollard for the time being, but I still needed to move quickly. If they thought I was running scared, then they'd expect me back at my flat sooner or later. Then when I didn't turn up, they'd start looking properly. Because even if they had Pollard, they wouldn't have the money and they wouldn't have their grass.

After another twenty minutes of on-off limp-running, I found myself in familiar surroundings when I saw the Lowry. I jogged to the Holiday Inn Express and hailed the first cab I saw.

I ducked into the back. "Manchester Piccadilly please, mate."

"You catching a train?"

I checked my watch. "Nine o'clock, yeah."

"No bother."

I sat back in the seat and breathed out, found myself smiling. It was nice to hear someone so optimistic about my chances for once.

The train pulled into London Euston at a hair past midnight. My ticket told me to change trains and continue on to Southampton, but my instinct told me otherwise. I jumped off and strode along the platform, heading for the exit, the carrier bag full of money wrapped and bundled under one arm. It was difficult to move quickly now. All that running had brought out the old limp, and the long train journey had stiffened me up.

It didn't matter. London was one of those places where it didn't matter how dirty and broken and battered you looked; you would always fitted in somewhere. And that was the plan, to break off and disappear into the heaving mass of a capital city for the night. Because if I went to Southampton, I would have to find a hotel, and Southampton wasn't the kind of place you could find a hotel in the wee small hours with nothing more than the clothes you stood in and a carrier containing twenty grand in cash. At least, it wasn't the kind of place where that wouldn't be noteworthy. So I needed somewhere to lie low, somewhere to disappear, somewhere that wouldn't remember me.

I found a hotel that was still open and not so cheap that I thought I'd be robbed, raped or ritually murdered if I checked in, and I paid in cash for one night. The receptionist – which was a nice name for the bag of elderly bones wrapped in denim that sat behind glass near the entrance – slid my key under the partition and extended one nicotine-stained finger towards the stairs.

I went up to my room, made sure the door was double-locked and then sat on the bed. I was exhausted, but I knew I wouldn't be able to sleep. My brain wouldn't shut up; it kept running through different variables, extrapolating what could happen to me – I would get away, I would be caught, I would be allowed on the ship, they would chuck me off – riffling through what-ifs like a deck of cards.

Enough.

I needed to calm down. I needed to sleep. I needed some help to do both.

I pushed off from the bed, turned on the light, and then crouched in front of the minibar. There were a couple of small cans of Coke, some nuts, a couple of bars of chocolate. The caffeine wouldn't do me any good, but my gut demanded food, so I took the cashews and emptied the bag into my mouth as I continued my inspection. I wished I'd brought my laptop with me, or I'd bought one from somewhere – that way I could've smothered my mind with Solitaire. But it was no good. The only tools I had at my disposal were the minibar and a television with a channel listing that barely scraped double figures. I had to make do.

So for the first time in over a decade, I poured myself a drink – a small bottle of Bacardi in the bathroom glass – and sipped it as I watched a repeat of
Strictly Come Dancing
. It was a tough drink, and a gaudy watch. The rum made me grimace with every sip until my throat burned cold and my tongue became numb. When I finished the rum, I moved on to the vodka, then the small bottle of chilled white wine before finishing off with a nip of whisky that put my back to the bedspread and my gaze to the ceiling.

I breathed heavily through my nose and mouth at the same time. The ceiling swam and my sinuses felt full. I snorted back and swallowed. My bruises, the aches and pains of the past few weeks, were momentarily dulled and half-forgotten. I smiled. I'd had time to think about why I'd got away so easily. I wasn't so arrogant that I believed it was all down to my lightning-fast reflexes and cunning escape skills. No, what had happened was that Kennedy – that
pig
Kennedy – had underestimated me. He'd thought old Graham Ellis here was a coward. Thought I was easily intimidated and that I'd do what I was told like a good little boy and then come trotting back to him for my pat on the end and knife in the back. That there were two kinds of people in this world – the strong and the weak – and it was only nature that the weak should have to cower beneath the strong's boot. He'd been treating me like a school bully because that's what he was. Just another barrel-chested new pubescent, ripped through with hyperactive hormones and repressed homosexuality. Why else would he spend so much time tanning and working out? He was a narcissist. He loved the sight of his own body, which meant he appreciated the sight of other men's bodies. Which meant he was a closet case, and those people, they were all kinds of messed up. The combination of rage and abnormal sexuality made them dangerous. Kennedy was a mess. And he thought he was better than me. Thought he was stronger than me.