‘What’s happening?’ Ning asked. ‘You OK?’
Fay sounded jubilant. ‘I got hot and sweaty on your floor,’ she said casually. ‘So I rode up to the allotments on a night bus. Then I took care of the van and some other business.’
‘What kind of business?’ Ning asked.
‘You were right,’ Fay explained. ‘The fight with Hagar is all mine. It wasn’t fair dragging you and Warren into it.’
‘What have you done, exactly? Where’s the van?’
‘I can’t stick around and talk. I’m camped out watching The Hangout and people are starting to leave en masse.’
‘It’s the middle of the night,’ Ning said. ‘Who’s there?’
‘It looks like I was right about Hagar’s temper being his weak spot.’
‘You’re not making any sense,’ Ning said. ‘I thought we were partners. What’s going on? Why are you at The Hangout?’
Fay giggled. ‘I just started a war, baby! Now I’ve got to clear my arse out of here in case someone sees me. You’re not in school tomorrow, are you?’
‘Term ended yesterday,’ Ning said.
‘Come up to the allotments in the morning,’ Fay said. Her breathing seemed deeper and Ning suspected she’d started to walk. ‘I’ll explain everything. But leave it until ten-thirty, because I need my beauty sleep.’
‘Why can’t you just tell me now?’ Ning asked irritably.
But Fay had hung up.
*
A chunky store clerk named Bijal sat on a stool behind the counter of Rapid 24 supermarket. It was 4:30 a.m. The store was empty, but her eyes strayed from a TV showing a Friends re-run as a knackered Volkswagen people carrier stopped on the courtyard out front.
The doors all opened at once. A skinny getaway driver. Three well-built men, including Hagar, plus teens Warren and Ryan. Not many places opened 24/7 and Bijal found nothing unusual in a carload of drunks pulling up. Usually they’d stock up on booze and cigarettes after visiting a nightclub.
But the men got Bijal’s full attention when she saw masked heads and a selection of baseball bats, nightsticks and the scary-looking dude with a white eye patch and bright orange hair. The door was only two metres from the TV. Bijal rushed to the other end of the counter, where an emergency switch could lock the door in a second.
Her palm hit the button, but at the same instant Hagar pushed the door. He felt the electronic bolts shoot outwards, but he was already half a step inside.
‘That’s not very welcoming, miss,’ Hagar said jovially, as he approached the counter.
One of the other men vaulted the counter and slammed Bijal backwards into the cigarettes.
‘You going for the alarm?’ he shouted.
As Ryan came through the door, the thug slapped Bijal a couple of times, then knocked her down and trod on her stomach.
‘Till’s open,’ Bijal shouted. ‘Take the money.’
Bijal had been robbed before, but never by such a large crew. She expected the man to open the till and grab the money inside, but instead he hoiked the entire unit off the counter, tore the plug out of the wall and hurled it at the TV set.
As the TV smashed, the lights flickered. Hagar reached the shelves of booze and began swinging his baseball bat at bottles of wine and spirits. Ryan followed Warren to the back of the store, where the pair began to attack the dairy fridge.
The ceiling was low and Ryan got showered in hot glass as his bat caught a halogen bulb. A second later he got sprayed by exploding cream, as his nose caught the smell of wine and rum trickling across the floor towards his Nikes.
The shop wasn’t too big, and within a minute the five-strong crew had smashed up every shelf.
‘Ship out,’ Hagar ordered. ‘Drag the bitch into the street.’
As Ryan helped Hagar drag the screaming clerk out of the front door, Warren jumped back into the people carrier and the getaway driver began revving the engine.
Hagar dished out a couple more nasty kicks. ‘You tell your boss Eli to get out of town. He’s finished, you hear?’
‘Who’s Eli?’ Bijal pleaded, cupping arms over her face for protection.
Ryan wasn’t surprised by Bijal’s response, because it wasn’t like drug dealers went around introducing themselves to the employees of their legit businesses.
As Ryan slid into the car alongside Warren, the nutter with the eye patch was the last man out of the store, holding a packet of toilet rolls and a flaming lighter. The first stream of flaming tissue went all the way to the back of the shop and fizzled, but the second landed amidst shattered whisky bottles and sent fingers of blue flame in all directions across the shop floor.
‘Fun, fun, fun!’ Hagar shouted, as he jumped in the back, clumsily treading on Ryan’s toes. ‘Like olden days.’
The guy with the eye patch got in last and the front wheels squealed as they pulled off with the front passenger door still wide open. In the back, Ryan untangled himself from Hagar, who he now realised was holding the cash drawer.
‘Chisel,’ Hagar shouted. ‘Get me a chisel or something.’
A guy crunched up in the backwards-facing rear row of seats passed Hagar a big flathead screwdriver. They’d driven half a mile and taken a couple of fast corners when the drawer made a satisfying clank, popping open on a coiled spring and a jangle of coins.
Hagar smiled as he ripped out the ten- and twenty-pound notes and threw them at Warren and Ryan.
‘You two kids split that up. Call it a gift from your old uncle Hagar.’
38. TROLLEY
Ryan had built a mental picture of Hagar since first hearing his name on campus a couple of months earlier. He’d imagined someone fierce and sinister, who gave orders and left the dirty work to enforcers like Craig.
But this couldn’t have been more wrong. Hagar sat in the back of the people carrier, bouncing around like a big kid, cracking jokes and telling stories about places as they drove past: the boarded-up cinema where he got his first proper snog, a shop where he and Craig used to steal fireworks when they were kids and a flat he’d purchased where the ceiling came down two weeks after he’d moved in.
‘Building surveyor pointed to all these disclaimers in his contract. So me and Craig hung her out the window by her ankles and that lady wrote a cheque for my new ceiling lickety-split!’
Ryan had never spoken to Fay Hoyt, but James had kept him up to date on Ning’s end of the mission and the more time he spent with Hagar, the more he realised that Fay had judged his personality perfectly.
Being a weeknight there weren’t many places open, but they found a chicken shop. Hagar bought everyone chips, and soaked his own bag with five sachets of mayonnaise.
‘I’m telling you boys, I’m loving this,’ Hagar told Ryan and Warren, as he shovelled chips into his mouth. ‘The higher up I’ve got, the less I’ve enjoyed the life.’
Ryan smiled. ‘I’m about as low as you can get. You wanna swap places?’
Hagar whooped up a loud laugh as the big VW entered a tunnel. Then he laughed some more when the thug in the front passenger seat opened a bottle of Pepsi which erupted like a volcano.
They’d driven some miles off Hagar’s turf. The tunnel brought them out in east London, with the skyscrapers at Canary Wharf lit up behind streets of newly built apartments. A second thug-stuffed people carrier – a Renault – awaited them in a rubbish collection area at the side of a swanky-looking fourteen-storey block.
‘That’s Eli’s pad,’ Hagar explained, as he pointed all the way up to the flashing red light on the roof.
Ryan and Warren shook a couple of hands as Hagar high-fived men getting out of the Renault. Once everyone had pulled on masks, the two teens made up the rear as a ten-strong posse headed through an unlocked metal gate, past a line of recycling bins and up some metal steps to
a fire door.
The dude with the eye patch must have staked Eli’s building out beforehand. He had exactly the right tool, which he slotted into the gap between two fire doors and jiggled about until it pushed against the metal bar on the inside.
A hot blast came from air-conditioning fans as Ryan stepped inside and caught the smell of chlorine. Another door took them into the rear of a moodily lit swimming pool. A wrinkled woman swam gracefully, until she noticed ten masked men, armed with bats and machetes, striding purposefully across the poolside tiles.
Carpeted stairs took them up another level, to a hotel-like lobby. A grey-haired concierge sat behind a granite counter, half asleep.
‘Wakey-wakey!’ Hagar said, as two thugs cut behind the countertop to make sure the concierge didn’t hit an alarm. ‘You’ve got the lift key, right? We need the fourteenth-floor penthouse.’
‘I’m not supposed to,’ the man said weakly.
Hagar pointed back at his crew, and someone else knocked a big bowl full of oranges and limes off the countertop.
‘You gonna start a fight?’ Hagar teased.
The concierge walked stiffly to the glass-doored lifts, one of which had a sign on saying it was in use only between 6 a.m. and midnight. The working lift took a few seconds to arrive and Hagar, five thugs and the concierge squeezed inside.
‘You boys look like you need some exercise,’ Hagar said. ‘See you up there, don’t dawdle.’
Hagar might have been acting like a big kid, but Ryan noted that Warren and the three bulky men accepted the order to walk up fourteen floors without hesitation.
Two flights separated each level, and by the sixth floor the routine of eleven stairs followed by a 180-degree turn on a balcony started making everyone dizzy. Ryan was last through the door on the ground floor, but though his ankle still hurt from earlier, he was the only one who made it to the top without pausing for breath.
The fourteenth floor comprised a single penthouse. The concierge had unlocked for Hagar and the others and Ryan stepped through an elaborately carved double-height door.
‘Took your time,’ Hagar said brightly. ‘Welcome to chez Eli! Where are the others?’
‘Coming,’ Ryan said breathlessly, as he took in the opulence.
After a marble lobby, the apartment opened out into a huge open space, with floor-to-ceiling glass on three sides and an impressive vista of barges making sedate progress along the River Thames.
A glass staircase led up to bedrooms and a balcony area on the floor above. The elderly concierge had been ordered to sit on a huge leather couch with his hands on his head, and Hagar held court as he grabbed a tall vase decorated with tabloid newspaper headlines and drawings of minor celebrities.
‘Eli thinks he’s sophisticated,’ Hagar said, as he looked at lines of contemporary paintings along the single unglazed wall. ‘Does this dog shit look like art to you? And he pays tens of thousands for this crap.’
Inevitably, Hagar let the vase smash at his feet.
‘What you all standing around for?’ he shouted. ‘Let’s trash this joint.’
As Warren and the others stumbled into the apartment in a breathless, sweaty lump, the rest of Hagar’s crew moved into action, ripping paintings off the wall, smashing up furniture, blocking sinks and switching on taps full blast.
Ryan picked up a wooden sculpture and used it like a spear, punching a hole in a large Damien Hirst painting. Then he teamed up with Warren, stepping out on to the balcony and throwing potted plants into a tiny outdoor pool.
Trashing stuff was fun and the two boys were helpless with giggles as they stumbled back inside, their shirts and jeans dripping wet. The guy with the eye patch was trying to smash a glass dining-table using a cricket bat with nails hammered into it.
‘Who wants a Rolex?’ Hagar shouted, as he emerged from one of the upstairs bedrooms holding three diamond-crusted watches and a woman’s jewellery box. He threw one of them down and two thugs almost cracked heads as they lunged for it.
As someone set off a sprinkler with a burning copy of Wired magazine and Warren tucked a nifty Sony laptop under his arm, Ryan was distracted by a crunch of metal outside. He stepped back on to the balcony, peered down over the railing and saw the VW people carrier he’d arrived in with a BMW coupé rammed into its side. There were two more cars. At least a dozen masked men were swarming into the lobby, while the getaway driver in the Renault had been dragged out and was taking a savage beating.
‘Guys!’ Ryan shouted, as he ran back inside. ‘Eli’s crew has arrived.’
‘What?’ Hagar shouted, as he stormed on to the balcony, followed by Warren and a couple of other men. ‘Shit, they’ve got Curtis. Joe, call for backup. Everyone else, let’s get downstairs and hit these pricks hard.’
Some of Hagar’s crew were up for a fight, but Ryan didn’t fancy it and Warren looked properly scared as masked men charged out of the apartment.
Another sprinkler went off, accompanied by a shrieking alarm as the first sprinkler successfully doused a flaming magazine rack and curtains. Ryan realised that he and Warren were the only ones left in the apartment as the concierge stumbled out, holding his mobile phone.
‘He’s gonna call the cops,’ Warren said, as he went after him.
Ryan shrugged and pulled him back. ‘Who cares? In a big building like this, the sprinklers will have already alerted the fire brigade and half the neighbourhood has probably dialled 999 by now.’
‘Good point,’ Warren said, before glancing around nervously. ‘Eli’s crew outnumber us. If they find us they’ll smash every bone in our bodies. And some of Eli’s crew have a rep for spraying acid in people’s faces.’
Ryan was anxious too, but didn’t want Warren to see it. ‘I’ve got no intention of getting into a pitched battle. Let’s head down a few flights. We can hide out on another floor until things cool off. Maybe even break into an empty apartment or something.’
Warren still sounded worried as he followed Ryan out, still holding the Sony laptop under his arm. ‘Hagar will be pissed off if we chicken out.’
‘Go down and fight if you want to,’ Ryan said, as he opened the door on to the staircase and listened out for footsteps below. ‘I’m sure I can think up an excuse . . . Sounds like it’s all clear.’
Ryan began a charge downstairs. After six flights he stopped and Warren almost knocked into him.
‘Sssh,’ Ryan said, as he crept further down, with a baseball bat ready to swing. He couldn’t decipher sounds that seemed close, but muffled.
‘What is that?’ Warren whispered. ‘It doesn’t sound like they’re on the stairs.’
Ryan crept down two more flights. The fire stairs ran next to the lift shaft, and he placed an ear to the wall.
Then it all clicked into place. ‘They’re stuck in the lift,’ Ryan said, as he thumped a hand against the wall. ‘Someone must have pulled the fuse on them.’
Warren smiled uneasily. ‘Who’s in there? Our guys or theirs?’
‘Don’t know, don’t care,’ Ryan said.
As the two lads reached the eighth-floor landing, it sounded like a bunch of men were charging up from a couple of floors below. Ryan decided it was time to leave the staircase. He led Warren through a swing door, into a carpeted hallway with apartment doors on either side. Then the pair crouched low, so they couldn’t be seen through the shatterproof glass.
Ryan didn’t get up to see how many men went past, but it was either three or four. Warren moved back towards the door once they were past, but Ryan shook his head.
‘It’s probably still kicking off downstairs. Let’s wait it out here.’
But Ryan’s plan to sit tight was foiled after less than a minute. Gentle prepare to evacuate pips had been echoing through the building since the first sprinkler went off. But now something had properly cau
ght ablaze and the fire alarm kicked in at full blast.
People began emerging from apartments, some in slippers and dressing gowns, while others emerged buttoning trousers and pushing arms through sweatshirts. Ryan ripped off his balaclava and Warren followed his lead.
The atmosphere among the evacuees seemed pretty relaxed. One guy held his drowsy-looking six-year-old by the hand, and joked with a neighbour that someone had probably burned their toast like last time.
‘None of Eli’s guys saw us,’ Ryan said, putting his mouth up to Warren’s ear so he could be heard over the alarm. ‘This is our chance to sneak out. Two ordinary kids.’
A steady stream of people were moving down the fire stairs, their pace dictated by an elderly couple half a flight ahead.
‘You want a hand?’ Ryan asked, as he saw a woman behind, struggling with a baby in one arm and a screaming toddler in the other.
Since the toddler needed attention, Ryan found himself walking down seven floors cradling a tiny sleeping baby. She made a perfect disguise, and the warm milky smell made Ryan feel strangely calm, and reminded him of when his littlest brother Theo was born.
At the bottom of the stairs, Ryan rocked the baby as he looked around warily. The fire alarm had caused the lift to drop mechanically, but there was no sign of whoever had been inside. The residents were calm in the lobby, but shocked when they saw the carnage out front.
The Renault people carrier had been rammed and its unconscious getaway driver was being treated on the ground by a fireman. The VW had been set on fire and its cavernous interior now oozed white fire foam.
Besides two fire engines, there was a motorcycle paramedic treating a badly beaten gang member. Two cop cars had just reached the scene and there was a dramatic pool of blood, and sticky foot prints trailing around the side of the building.
Ryan and Warren joined a mass of residents struggling to comprehend blood, wreckage and a plume of dense smoke coming through the open balcony of the top-floor penthouse. Once he’d passed the baby back to its mother, Ryan turned to Warren.
‘The building supervisor might recognise our clothes,’ he said. ‘We need to get out of here.’