***
South London: October 7: early afternoon
The driver parked his white transit van in the quiet suburban street. The late-Victorian brick houses sat in ordered lines on the South London contours. Back down the hill, across the main road, blocks of morose, unkempt council flats suggested a more sophisticated, twentieth-century vision of squalour. A punctured helium balloon sat semi-shredded high in the branches of a denuded plane tree. Shoals of fast food wrappers and drink cans eddied in back-alley tornadoes that swept through the urine-splashed walkways and concrete corridors. Black youths patrolled their fiefdom with Staffordshire Bull Terriers and mountain bikes.
Phil Goss walked purposefully down the hill towards the main road, accompanied by a young black man and woman. They crossed where the traffic bifurcated into a one-way system then homed in on one of blocks towering in front. The girl clip-clopped just behind Goss, struggling to match the men’s pace. At the entrance to The Hargreave Estate, the black man stopped to peer through the heavy coating of graffiti at a map of the decaying labyrinth in front of them.
‘You found it, Dazza?’ Goss asked.
‘Yea, here we are. Numbers 52 to 108 Hargreave. On the left,’ he pointed.
They followed the path to the stairs.
The men took the stairs two at a time, pausing briefly on each landing to check the numbers on any doors that had them. On the fourth floor Goss stopped, sending Dazza first left then right along the corridor in search of the flat. The girl eventually caught Goss up at the top of the stairwell and masticated her gum sloppily, blowing annoying bubbles into the fetid air.
Shortly, Dazza returned.
‘This way,’ he whispered, thumbing to Goss’s right back along the corridor.
‘Off you go then, Kiara,’ Goss hissed. ‘Time to do you stuff.’
The girl strutted with lazy swings of her large hips down the corridor towards one of the numberless orange doors Dazza had just marked with his gum. She had to knock three times between long pauses before the door finally jerked back, opening no more than a knife blade width in aperture before it caught on its chain.
‘What the fuck you want?’ grunted the sleepy voice behind it.
‘Hi,’ Kiara cooed. ‘Eejay told me to swing by. Said you could fix me up with some stuff I was wanting.’
‘Where d’ you see Eejay, sister?’ asked the suspicious, black voice.
‘At my place. He comes round from time to time, know what I mean?’ Goss had crept closer and now he watched Kiara take a step backwards into the light, where she started to fondle her cavernous cleavage with glossy red nails.
‘Hey, you alone in there, handsome?’
‘Why do you wanna know, gal?’ The sleepy voice brightened up.
Kiara was good. Goss could just imagine the arousal.
‘Why dontcha just let me in,’ she teased softly, ‘and I’ll show you how I like to pay for my kit.’
‘Sure thing, sister, come right on in,’ the man chuckled, pushing the door shut to remove the chain.
But it was not the girl who greeted the man behind the door. The lead-weighted cosh struck with an expert blow across the arch of the nose, neatly cracking the bone. The stunned man let out a piercing scream, collapsing in agony on the hallway floor.
Goss was on top of his spread-eagled body in a second, deftly binding mouth, hands and legs with duct tape. Dazza jumped over the torso as Goss worked the tape, rampaging through the rest of the flat with his .22 Ruger Mark II bobbing in a jumpy hand. The girl followed behind more cautiously but similarly equipped.
The search was quickly completed. Kiara had the barrel of her Ruger tight against the fat man’s temple before he could lift his bare torso off the mattress, while from the bathroom, Goss could hear the sound of a quick scuffle.
Dazza emerged moments later to join Goss in the living room, dragging a slim, spiky-haired youngster by the scruff of his dirty blue t-shirt before throwing him down onto the living room floor. The young man cowered under the downward pressure of the Ruger barrel that was jutting into the base of his neck, while Goss immediately set to work with the tape. The assured rips and scrunches of the tape were tell-tale signs of Goss’s familiarity with this kind of work, and when he had finished the last wrap with a flamboyant flourish, Goss spat a rich wad of saliva into the young man’s spiky hair. He laughed out loud when the gob started to trickle down the side of his victim’s head, then prodded the man with his boot till Spiky Hair had rolled over on the filthy cream carpet next to the man whose broken nose was etching its own dark red signature into the seam of stains.
With another snigger, Goss grunted at Kiara.
‘Get your fella on the floor over here with the other two.’
The girl nodded in response and jerked her pistol muzzle ever deeper into the fat man’s temple until he had joined the other two on the carpet.
Working with speed, precision and fat, heavy breaths, Goss taped up his last body, and now that he felt secure, he sat down on the sofa to enjoy a short break, looking down with satisfaction at the three writhing bodies on the floor, eyes bulging grotesquely under the pressure of the tape and the workings of fear.
Goss pulled out a cigarette, lit it, and switched on the television.
‘Just like you little shits not to have Sky,’ he scoffed, exhaling a lungful of smoke in the direction of the cookery programme.
‘Anyhow,’ he continued, matter of fact, ‘we’d better get down to business. Which one of you little pricks is called Jules?’
He paused to inhale, watching the frenzied contortions on the floor with an amusement he communicated to Dazza in a wink. Then he walked over to Kiara, took the Ruger from her hand and returned to the twisting bodies, crouching low to talk into ‘Spiky-hair’s’ ear.
‘Hey Skeleton Boy! We’ll start with you, like. What’s your proper name, son? Are you the bastard called Jules I’m looking for?’
Goss fingered his moustache ponderously, while the man below him tried to grunt through the tape.
‘I thought not. You look like too much of a prick to be in charge of this outfit. So if you aren’t, who is, like?’ he asked, ramming the pistol muzzle into ‘Spiky-hair’s’ ear, drilling the head sharply downwards into the floor.
‘Spiky-hair’ groaned his denial almost loud enough to be heard. Goss followed the sweep of his screaming eyes as they fell onto the fat man, Kiara’s find.
‘Gotcha, Jules!’ he shouted triumphantly, hurling himself across the room to land on the fat man’s chest, his pencil-thin moustache crunched up in a menacing snarl.
‘All right, then, Julsey boy. I’ve got a message for you from Mr Marks,’ he seethed histrionically, pulling a crumpled scrap of paper from his back pocket.
‘Yea, here we are, like. It says, ‘Please give my friend, Jules, an extra-close shave’. All right, Mr Marks,’ he sighed, ‘here we are, then. One close shave, cooomiing up!’
Goss pulled out a flick-knife and opened the blade, leering at the fat man thrashing desperately below him as he slowly tossed the blade from one hand to the other. Then, with a sudden spontaneity that caught Dazza and Kiara by surprise, he pushed down hard on the fat man’s forehead, pressing the back of his head into the floor. The movement that slit the throat was swift and accurate, opening up the jugular with a single knife-pull.
But Goss hadn’t finished yet. Pushing down on the fat man’s chest with one foot, he started stamping on his victim’s chest with the other, sending jets of blood spraying onto the carpet with the pump-action of his boot.
Only when he had repeated the action half a dozen times did he lift his boot from the fat man’s chest, bending low over the heaving chest to wipe the blood from the blade on the dying man’s trousers.
‘Now, you little shits, let that be a warning to you,’ he growled, wagging a chubby finger at the two others on the floor. ‘Mr Marks wants you out—and fast, like. Take your fucking stuff and flog it somewhere else. You’re not wanted round
‘ere.’
Dazza and Kiara sat silently in the front of the van on the return journey to Peckham, privately digesting the execution they had just witnessed. Goss was busy in the back on his mobile and didn’t give a shit what any of them thought. Mr Marks was happy, and that was all that mattered.
But it was the message on his answerphone that catapulted Goss from the here-and-now of a south London gangland hit to another world, a yes-sir world full of ‘right away’s’ and ‘you can count on me’s’.
And when he eventually rang off, Goss leant forward with a triumphant leer and punched the air. Finally, lady luck had smiled on him. Fortune favoured the brave.
‘Drop me at the office, Dazza. Looks like a good bit of business has just turned up. Could be taking a little trip abroad, like!’