The Faithless - Martina Cole [126]
He looked down on their sleeping forms and thought about how he’d ended up in this place. He had left his bedsit because he had wanted to. He believed that the woman in the next house could read his mind through the walls and he could feel her interfering with his thoughts day and night. She was very old, and she had a foreign accent, but he knew that was all just an act. She was working for his mother and reporting back to her.
He had been very clever. He had got dressed one day, and walked out of his bedsit without anything, as if he was just going to the shops, and he had never gone back. That’s when he had shaken off the authorities – they were all a part of the conspiracy anyway, giving him tablets to stop him knowing the truth. He was a lot of things but a moron wasn’t one of them.
Ha! He had shown them all, and he would carry on showing them all. Now here he was in a den of thieves, living with actual thieves. What was it his father had always said? Never steal off your own – and yet that was exactly what this lot had done. As bad as they had tried to make him out, he had never stolen unless he was at rock bottom. He prided himself on that.
Now these pieces of scum had robbed him. He could smell the sourness of the girls’ bodies and wrinkled his nose in distaste. One of the girls, Alicia, was quite nice. She was very posh and had gone to an expensive school, but her parents had washed their hands of her, and who could blame them? She was a thief, and thieves never prosper.
He sat down on the hearth of the old-fashioned fireplace; it was filthy, overflowing with cigarette butts, roaches, and the usual detritus of a junkie’s lair. Needles, wraps, and sooty tinfoil burned and wrinkled, McDonald’s wrappers, and sugar-laden drinks bottles. He looked at Dougie’s narrow face, thin beyond belief, and his filthy beard full of food and grease. He wondered if they were really asleep – perhaps they were pretending, hoping he would go away so they could get their stash out behind his back. The stash he had paid for, that they had bought with his stolen money!
He stood up and went into the kitchen. Holding open the heavy door was a rusty old iron. It had once been a lovely piece of metalwork, burnished black, and it had probably ironed ladies’ lawn handkerchiefs, or their knickerbockers; he smiled at the thought.
Picking it up, he walked back into the room and, raising the iron above his head, he brought it down with all the force he could muster on to Dougie’s face.
Dougie, so full of heroin he couldn’t feel a thing, was knocked out cold by the first blow. Ten blows later his face was gone and, placing the iron carefully on to the floor by the body, James Tailor methodically searched the man’s clothes for anything of value – he wouldn’t miss it now, after all – before leaving the flat. He had to get away. Far away.
Chapter One Hundred and Twenty-Three
‘But it’s my scan, you said you’d come with me.’
At the other end of the line, Vincent could hear the disappointment in Gabby’s voice.
‘Look, babe, I can’t do anything about it now.’ He sighed. ‘I have to go to this meet, it’s important, OK?’ A few minutes later he put the phone down, and turned back to his two comrades. ‘So are you in then?’
They both nodded. Geoff Gold was clearly thrilled, but his brother Micky was not as easily pleased.
‘Hang on a minute, who told you all about this place?’
Vincent smiled; he had expected this question before now and, in hindsight, he would realise that it should have bothered him. He tapped his nose. ‘Never you mind. It’s enough that I trust the bloke. The fewer people who know our business the better, don’t you think?’
The two men nodded, but he could see that Micky Gold was not that impressed, which annoyed him. The Golds were from Canning Town and they were a pair of blond Adonises. Both were tall, had thick wavy blond hair and dark blue eyes framed by long black lashes. Derek Greene said they attracted too much attention to be villains of any real note – women took too much notice of them for