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  There was an almost full bottle of Bushmills and some glasses on the desk, but I didn’t think anyone was about to ask me if I wanted a drink.

  One of the McMahon brothers giggled when I stepped into the room and I could see the chemical glow in his eyes.

  “What the fuck you doin’ here, old man?” the other one said. “You should be tucked up in the old folks’ home with your fuckin’ Ovaltine.”

  “Two minutes,” Chris Boyle said. “Say what you have to fuckin’ say then get out.”

  “Supposin’ we let you,” one of the brothers said and giggled some more. Neither of them looked a whole lot more than nineteen, twenty tops. Boyle was closer to thirty, nearing pensionable age where that crew was concerned. According to Jack, there was a rumour he wore a colostomy bag on account of getting shot in the kidneys coming out from the rugby at Lansdown Road.

  “First,” I said, “Diane knew nothing about either the doctoring of the shipment, nor the fact it was intercepted. You have to believe that.”

  Boyle stared back at me, hard-faced.

  One of the McMahons laughed.

  “Second, though she was in no way responsible, as a gesture of good faith, she’s willing to hand over a quantity of cocaine, guaranteed at least eighty percent pure, the amount equal to the original shipment. After that it’s all quits, an even playing field, business as before.”

  Boyle glanced across at the sofa then nodded agreement.

  “We pick the point and time of delivery,” I said. “Two days time. I’ll need a number on which I can reach you.”

  Boyle wrote his mobile number on a scrap of paper and passed it across. “Now get the fuck out,” he said.

  Down below, someone was playing a penny whistle, high-pitched and shrill. I could feel my pulse racing haphazardly and when I managed to get myself across the street, I had to take a grip on a railing and hold fast until my legs had stopped shaking.

  When Jack learned I was going through with it, he offered to lend me a gun, a Smith & Wesson .38, but I declined. There was more chance of shooting myself in the foot than anything else.

  I met Diane in the parking area behind Jack’s office, barely light enough to make out the color of her eyes. The cocaine was bubble-wrapped inside a blue canvas bag.

  “You always were good to me, Jimmy,” she said, and reaching up, she kissed me on the mouth. “Will I see you afterwards?”

  “No,” I said. “No, you won’t.”

  The shadows swallowed her as she walked towards the taxi waiting out on the street. I dropped the bag down beside the rear seat of the car, waited several minutes, then slipped the engine into gear.

  The place I’d chosen was on Hampstead Heath, a makeshift soccer pitch shielded by lines of trees, a ramshackle wooden building off to one side, open to the weather; sometimes pickup teams used it to get changed, or kids huddled there to feel one another up, smoke spliffs or sniff glue.

  When Patrick, Val and I had been kids ourselves there was a murdered body found close by and the place took on a kind of awe for us, murder in those days being something more rare.

  I’d left my car by a mansion block on Heath Road and walked in along a partly overgrown track. The moon was playing fast and loose with the clouds and the stars seemed almost as distant as they were. An earlier shower of rain had made the surface a little slippy and mud clung to the soles of my shoes. There was movement, low in the undergrowth to my right hand side, and, for a moment, my heart stopped as an owl broke, with a fell swoop, through the trees above my head.

  A dog barked and then was still.

  I stepped off the path and into the clearing, the weight of the bag real in my left hand. I was perhaps a third of the way across the pitch before I saw them, three or four shapes massed near the hut at the far side and separating as I drew closer, fanning out. Four of them, faces unclear, but Boyle, I thought, at the centre, the McMahons to one side of him, another I didn’t recognize hanging back. Behind them, behind the hut, the trees were broad and tall and close together, beeches I seemed to remember Val telling me once when I’d claimed them as oaks. “Beeches, for God’s sake,” he’d said, laughing in that soft way of his. “You, Jimmy, you don’t know your arse from your elbow, it’s a fact.”

  I stopped fifteen feet away and Boyle took a step forward. “You came alone,” he said.

  “That was the deal.”

  “He’s stupider than I fuckin’ thought,” said one or other of the McMahons and laughed a girlish little laugh.

  “The stuff’s all there?” Boyle said, nodding towards the bag.

  I walked a few more paces towards him, set the bag on the ground, and stepped back.

  Boyle angled his head towards the McMahons and one of them went to the bag and pulled it open, slipping a knife from his pocket as he did so; he slit open the package, and, standing straight again, tasted the drug from the blade.

  “Well?” Boyle said.

  McMahon finished running his tongue around his teeth. “It’s good,” he said.

  “Then we’re set,” I said to Boyle.

  “Set?”

  “We’re done here.”

  “Oh, yes, we’re done.”

  The man to Boyle’s left, the one I didn’t know, moved forward almost to his shoulder, letting his long coat fall open as he did so, and what light there was glinted dully off the barrels of the shotgun as he brought it to bear. It was almost level when a shot from the trees behind struck him high in the shoulder and spun him round so that the second shot tore through his neck and he fell to the ground as good as dead.

  One of the McMahons cursed and started to run, while the other dropped to one knee and fumbled for the revolver inside his zip-up jacket.

  With all the gunfire and the shouting I couldn’t hear the words from Boyle’s mouth, but I could lip read well enough. “You’re dead,” he said, and drew a pistol not much bigger than a child’s hand from his side pocket and raised it towards my head. It was either bravery or stupidity or maybe fear that made me charge at him, unarmed, hands outstretched as if in some way to ward off the bullet; it was the muddied turf that made my feet slide away under me and sent me sprawling headlong, the two shots Boyle got off sailing over my head before one of the men I’d last seen minding Patrick in Soho stepped up neatly behind Boyle, put the muzzle of a 9mm Beretta hard behind his ear and squeezed the trigger.

  Both the McMahons had gone down without me noticing; one was already dead and the other had blood gurgling out of his airway and was not long for this world.

  Patrick was standing back on the path, scraping flecks of mud from the edges of his soft leather shoes with a piece of stick.

  “Look at the state of you,” he said. “You look a fucking state. If I were you I should burn that lot when you get home, start again.”

  I wiped the worst of the mess from the front of my coat and that was when I realized my hands were still shaking. “Thanks, Pat,” I said.

  “What are friends for?” he said.

  Behind us his men were tidying up the scene a little, not too much. The later editions of the papers would be full of stories of how the Irish drug wars had come to London, the Celtic Tigers fighting it out on foreign soil.

  “You need a lift?” Patrick asked, as we made our way back towards the road.

  “No, thanks. I’m fine.”

  “Thank Christ for that. Last thing I need, mud all over the inside of the fucking car.”

  When I got back to the flat I put one of Val’s last recordings on the stereo, a session he’d made in Stockholm a few months before he died. Once or twice his fingers didn’t match his imagination, and his breathing seemed to be giving him trouble, but his mind was clear. Beeches, I’ll always remember that now, that part of the Heath. Beeches, not oaks.

  SAY THAT AGAIN

  Peter Lovesey

  We called him the Brigadier with the buggered ear. Just looking at it made you wince. Really he should have had the bits surgically removed. He claimed it
was an old war wound. However, Sadie the Lady, another of our residents, told us it wasn’t true. She said she’d talked to the Brig’s son Arnold, who reckoned his old man got blind drunk in Aldershot one night and tripped over a police dog and paid for it with his shell-like.

  Because of his handicap, the Brigadier tended to shout. His “good” ear wasn’t up to much, even with the aid stuck in it. We got used to the shouting, we old farts in the Never-Say-Die Retirement Home. After all, most of us are hard of hearing as well. No doubt we were guilty of letting him bluster and bellow without interruption. We never dreamed at the time that our compliance would get us into the High Court on a murder rap.

  It was set in motion by She-Who-Must-Be-Replaced, our so-called matron, pinning a new leaflet on the notice board in the hall.

  “Infernal cheek!” the Brig boomed. “They’re parasites, these people, living off the frail and weak-minded.”

  “Who are you calling weak-minded?” Sadie the Lady piped up. “There’s nothing wrong with my brain.”

  The Brig didn’t hear. Sometimes it can be a blessing.

  “Listen to this,” he bellowed, as if we had any choice. “‘Are you dissatisfied with your hearing? Struggling with a faulty instrument? Picking up unwanted background noise? Marcus Haliburton, a renowned expert on the amazing new digital hearing aids, will be in attendance all day at the Bay Tree Hotel on Thursday, 8 April for free consultations. Call this number now for an appointment. No obligation.’ No obligation, my arse – forgive me, ladies. You know what happens? They get you in there and tell you to take out your National Health aid so they can poke one of those little torches in your ear and of course you’re stuffed. You can’t hear a thing they’re saying from that moment on. The next thing is they shove a form in front of you and you find you’ve signed an order for a thousand-pound replacement. If you object they drop your NHS aid on the floor and tread on it.”

  “That can’t be correct,” Miss Martindale said.

  “Completely wrecked, yes,” the Brigadier said. “Are you speaking from personal experience, my dear? Because I am.”

  Someone put up a hand. He wanted to be helped to the toilet, but the Brigadier took it as support. “Good man. What we should do is teach these blighters a lesson. We could, you know, with my officer training and George’s underworld experience.”

  I smiled faintly. My underworld links were nil, another of the Brig’s misunderstandings. One afternoon I’d been talking to Sadie about cats and happened to mention that we once adopted a stray. I thought the Brig was dozing in his armchair, but he came to life and said, “Which of the Krays was that – Reggie or Ronnie? I had no idea of your criminal past, George. We’ll have to watch you in future.”

  It was hopeless trying to disillusion him, so I settled for my gangster reputation and some of the old ladies began to believe it, too, and found me more interesting than ever they’d supposed.

  By the next tea break, the Brigadier had turned puce with excitement. “I’ve mapped it out,” he told us. “I’m calling it Operation Syringe, because we’re going to clean these ruffians out. Basically, the object of the plan is to get a new super-digital hearing aid for everyone in this home free of charge.”

  “How the heck will you do that?” Sadie asked.

  “What?”

  She stepped closer and spoke into his ear. “They’re a private company. Those aids cost a fortune.”

  The Brig grinned. “Simple. We intercept their supplies. I happen to know the Bay Tree Hotel quite well.”

  Sadie said to the rest of us, “That’s a fact. The Legion has its meetings there. He’s round there every Friday night for his g&t.”

  “G&T or two or three,” another old lady said.

  I said, “Wait a minute, Brigadier. We can’t steal a bunch of hearing aids.” I have a carrying voice when necessary and he heard every word.

  “‘Steal’ is not a term in the military lexicon, dear boy,” he said. “We requisition them.” He leaned forward. “Now, the operation has three phases. Number One: Observation. I’ll take care of that. Number Two: Liaison. This means getting in touch with an inside man, Cormac, the barman. I can do that also. Number Three: Action. And that depends on what we learn from Phases One and Two. That’s where the rest of you come in. Are you with me?”

  “I don’t know what he’s on about,” Sadie said to me.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “He’s playing soldiers, that’s all. He’ll find out it’s a non-starter.”

  “No muttering in the ranks,” the Brigadier said. “Any dissenters? Fall out, the dissenters.”

  No one moved. Some of us needed help to move anywhere and nobody left the room when tea and biscuits were on offer. And that was how we were recruited into the snatch squad.

  On Saturday, the Brigadier reported on Phases One and Two of his battle plan. He marched into the tea room looking as chipper as Montgomery on the eve of El Alamein.

  “Well, the obbo phase is over and so is the liaison and I’m able to report some fascinating results. The gentleman who wants us all to troop along to the Bay Tree Hotel and buy his miraculous hearing aids is clearly doing rather well out of it. He drives a vintage Bentley and wears a different suit each visit and by the cut of them they’re not off the peg.”

  “There’s money in ripping off old people,” Sadie said.

  “It ought to be stopped,” her friend Briony said.

  The Brig went on, “I talked to my contact last night and I’m pleased to tell you that the enemy – that is to say Marcus Haliburton – works to a predictable routine. He puts in a fortnightly appearance at the Bay Tree. If you go along and see him you’ll find Session One is devoted to the consultation and the placing of the order. Session Two is the fitting and payment. Between Sessions One and Two a box is delivered to the hotel and it contains up to fifty new hearing aids – more than enough for our needs.” He paused and looked around the room. “So what do you think is the plan?”

  No one was willing to say. Some might have thought speaking up would incriminate them. Others weren’t capable of being heard by the Brigadier. Finally I said, “We, em, requisition the box?”

  “Ha!” He lifted a finger. “I thought you’d say that. We can do better. What we do is requisition the box.”

  There were smiles all round at my expense.

  “And then,” the Brigadier said, “we replace the box with one just like it.”

  “That’s neat,” Sadie said. She was beginning to warm to the Brigadier’s criminal scheme.

  He’d misheard her again. “It may sound like deceit to you, madam, but to some of us it’s common justice. They called Robin Hood a thief.”

  “Are we going to be issued with bows and arrows?” Sadie said.

  “I wouldn’t mind meeting some merry men,” Briony said.

  The Brigadier’s next move took us all by surprise. “Check the corridor, George. Make sure no staff are about.”

  I did as I was told and gave the thumb-up sign, whereupon the old boy bent down behind the sideboard and dragged out a flattened cardboard box that he rapidly restored to its normal shape.

  “Thanks to my contacts at the hotel I’ve managed to retrieve the box that was used to deliver this week’s aids.” No question: he intended to go through with this crazy adventure. In the best officer tradition he started to delegate duties. “George, your job will be to get this packed and sealed and looking as if it just arrived by courier.”

  “No problem,” I said to indulge him. I was sure the plan would break down before I had to do anything.

  “That isn’t so simple as it sounds,” he said. “Take a close look. The aids are made in South Africa, so there are various customs forms attached to the box. They stuff them in a kind of envelope and stick them to the outside. What you do is update this week’s documents.”

  “I’ll see what I can manage.”

  “Then you must consider the contents. The instruments don’t weigh much, and they’re wrapped in
bubblewrap, so the whole thing is almost as light as air. Whatever you put inside must not arouse suspicion.”

  “Crumpled-up newspaper,” Sadie said.

  “What did she say?”

  I repeated it for his benefit.

  Sadie said, “Briony has a stack of Daily Mails this high in her room. She hoards everything.”

  I knew that to be true. Briony kept every postcard, every letter, every magazine. Her room was a treasure house of things other people discarded. She even collected the tiny jars our breakfast marmalade came in. The only question was whether she would donate her newspaper collection to Operation Syringe. She could be fiercely possessive at times.

  “I might be able to spare you some of the leaflets that come with my post,” she said.

  Sadie said, “Junk mail. That’ll do.”

  “It doesn’t incriminate me, does it?” she said. “I want no part of this silly escapade.”

  “Excellent,” the Brigadier said, oblivious. “When the parcel is up to inspection standard, I’ll tell you about the next phase.”

  The heat was now on me. I had to smuggle the box back to my room and start work. I was once employed as a graphic designer, so the forging of the forms wasn’t a big problem. Getting Briony to part with her junk mail was far more demanding. You’d think it was bank notes. She checked everything and allowed me about one sheet in five. But in the end I had enough to stuff the box. I sealed it with packing tape I found in Matron’s office and showed it to the Brigadier.

  “Capital,” he said. “We can proceed to phase four: distracting the enemy.”

  “How do we do that?”

  “We inundate Marcus Haliburton with requests for appointments under bogus names.”

  “That’s fun. I’ll tell the others.”

  Even at this stage, it was still a game, as I tried to explain later to the police. Some of us had mobiles and others used the payphone by the front door. I think a couple of bold souls used the phone in Matron’s office. I don’t know if we succeeded in distracting Haliburton. He must have been surprised by the number of Smiths, Browns, Jones and Robinsons who had seen his publicity. The greedy beggar didn’t turn any away.