Jack and Maggie sat unnaturally close on their sofa, champagne glasses in hand, fixed grins on their faces, staring at the open laptop on the coffee table in front of them. It was eleven o’clock. Jack wore a nicely ironed shirt, Maggie wore a smart blouse, as though they were going out to a smart dinner party—and both wore pajama bottoms. Their image in the top right-hand corner of the screen deliberately showed them from the waist up. Eventually the word “connecting” disappeared from the center of the screen.
“Hello, darling!”
Penny’s overly excited voice crackled through the laptop speakers and Jack’s head sank in momentary despair as Penny launched into her obviously rehearsed chatter.
“Mum! Mum, click the camera! Dad! We can hear you, but we can’t see you. Click on the little icon thing that looks like a video camera!” Jack and Maggie could hear Penny and Charlie having a mumbled conversation, before their faces finally appeared on screen. “We can see you now!”
All four of them raised their glasses and said “Cheers.”
Maggie and Charlie looked like typical Brits abroad—they had bright, shiny pink faces and looked drunk. Charlie’s shirt was open down to his belly button, showing off his abundance of gray hairs that looked ten times grayer against his pink chest. Penny wore a halter-neck dress but had clearly been wearing a spaghetti strap tank top throughout the day, so now her shoulders were an array of pink and white stripes. Jack couldn’t stop grinning as she went on and on about what they’d been up to.
“Madeira has the most wonderful food, Jack, Maggie would love it. We’ve seen whales and dolphins, haven’t we, love? And it’s ever so green considering the heat. We’re in Funchal—have you been to Funchal? It’s Europe’s most picturesque and cleanest capital, according to the guide books. It’s famous for pirates. And do you know who was born here? Guess, Jack. Go on.”
“No idea, Mum,” Jack lied.
“Cristiano Ronaldo!”
Jack and Maggie stifled a giggle and sipped their champagne as Penny continued with her various tales of beautiful gardens, long beach walks, the thrill of eating at eleven o’clock each night and drinking cocktails with fruit perched on the rim of the glass. And all the while, Charlie watched every move that she made, listened to every word and laughed at every single terrible attempt at a joke. He was exactly where he wanted to be and Jack knew it. He almost cried because his parents looked so incredibly happy. His relief was palpable.
At ten o’clock the next morning, Jack was being frisked by prison guards on his way into Pentonville to see Tony Fisher. Tony and all of the other inmates wore yellow smocks to distinguish them from the visitors—not that that was really required. The cons in this wing were the kind of men you’d cross the road to avoid just because of how they looked.
Tony walked toward Jack with a scowl on his face that said You’d better be worth getting out of bed for, boy.
When he sat down, he didn’t bother pulling in his chair and getting comfortable, suggesting that he had no intention of staying. He had a natural sneer and, for 75 years old, he was still a frightening man. He had a split lip, a cut just beneath his left eye and a small wound to his neck, which Jack assumed was where his young assailant had tried to cut his throat. Tony was bigger than Jack, stockier and far more intimidating—and he knew it. Tony stared, motionless and silent. If Jack didn’t speak within the next couple of seconds, he had the feeling Tony would get bored and leave.
“Thank you for agreeing to see me, Mr. Fisher. I appreciate it.”
Jack knew that a man with such a big ego would prefer to be treated with respect, even if it was fake.
“I don’t give a fuck,” Tony growled.
Jack couldn’t help but smile, because he sounded exactly like the impression of a stereotypical East End gangster Jack had done for Laura.
“I’d like to talk to you about the Witheys. If you don’t mind.”
Tony’s face softened just marginally and he scraped his chair under the table; he was staying after all. He grinned, showing his short, worn, yellowed teeth with blackened lines round the gums.
“I’ll talk to you about Shirl. I’ll talk to you about her all day long. She was proper tasty and fancied me something rotten. Great tits that just fit into the palm of your hand. Big blue eyes with zero brain behind them. Perfect woman in my books. She was a model, ya know. Pretended to be prim and proper but she was just a council slag underneath all that make-up and fancy hairdo. I reckon she saw me as her ticket out of there and to something better. I owned half of Soho back in the day.”
Jack pandered to Tony’s ego again by revealing everything he knew all about the Fisher brothers’ social standing back in the eighties. It had been comparatively impressive; they were very well respected in the criminal hierarchy and they normally stayed one step ahead of the police, so Tony actually had a lot to be proud of.
“The rest of the family? Greg was a twat,” he suddenly blurted out, so he’d obviously been thinking about the rest of the Withey family while Jack was talking. “Drugs and all that crap. Made him thicker than Shirl. And Audrey . . . Jesus Christ! She was an ugly cow. How she produced a stunner like Shirl, I’ll never know.”
“Did you know Mike Withey?”
“Not for long. He was a bugger when he was a kid, then he went into the army, which turned him into a pussy. People think the army turns boys into men, but it don’t. It makes pussies who can follow orders, but who can’t think for themselves. That ain’t got nothing to do with being a man in the real world—that’s institutionalization, that is. And there’s no fucking point in being able to kill a man with your bare hands if you’re not allowed to actually do it. Nah, the only thing Mike could have been when he came back from the army was a copper—from one bunch of sheep to another. No offense,” he added with a grin. Oddly, Jack agreed. “My path never crossed with Mike’s in a professional capacity, you understand. He came to the club a couple times, Shirl told me bits about him, then there was gossip from people he was into for a couple of grand. Mike Withey had one foot in your world and one foot in mine. He never quite had the balls to be bent, but he was definitely flexible, if you know what I mean.”
Once Jack had asked all the questions he needed to about the Witheys, he moved on to his own investigation.
“I spoke to a bloke the other day who suggested that you might have known Jimmy Nunn.”
Tony immediately wanted to know who had mentioned his name, and Jack thought there would be no harm in revealing that it was Kenneth Moore. He explained that Ken knew the Fisher brothers by reputation and had “great things to say.” This seemed to placate Tony enough for him to answer.
“Jimmy Nunn was thick as pig shit,” he said. “Best wheels man in the business though. How come you’re asking about Jimmy Nunn? He ain’t been seen for donkey’s years. His missus pegged it, I know that. She was a proper slag—the only man I knew that never had her was my brother, and that’s ’cos he was bent.”
Jack had no memory of Trudie and he’d already heard bad things about her from his Aunt Fran, but to hear scum like Tony Fisher slagging her off in such a horrific way was more than he was prepared to listen to. An uncharacteristic temper began to boil up inside him which, for now, he kept a lid on because there was more he needed to know.
“Trudie would come to the club and hang around the biggest wallets till one of them took her home. If it was a quiet night and she got no takers, she’d wait around for me to finish work and we’d take a bottle of something up into Arnie’s office. He had a great big leather sofa, but she liked me to shag her on his overpriced, antique, French-polished, poncey fucking desk. It was his pride and joy—he’d say, ‘Don’t touch my desk with your filthy hands.’ And I’d think, ‘I ain’t, bruv, but Trudie Nunn’s been all over it with her filthy arse!’ Ha! He had no idea! God, I ain’t thought about Trudie Nunn in years.” And with that image in his mind, Tony grabbed his groin and left his hand there until the memory passed. “What a bleedin’ shame she’s dead. A visit from good old Trudie would go down a treat right now.”
If looks could kill, Tony would have fallen stone dead right there in front of all the prison guards. As Tony grinned his horrific psychopathic grin, Jack glanced down at his own hands in his lap—his fists clenched tight and his knuckles white. He was filled with a simmering rage that he’d never felt before.
“And Jimmy Nunn . . .” Tony went on, oblivious to what was going on in Jack’s mind. “The last time I heard Jimmy’s name mentioned was in connection to that armed raid on a security van in the Strand underpass. That was one of Harry Rawlins’s fuck-ups.” He bellowed laughing. “Harry bloomin’ Rawlins! I’d never seen my brother so overjoyed to see someone put six feet under. He spent a fucking fortune on the wreath.” Tony mimed the size of it with his hands, then went on to explain how every criminal in London had felt the same way as Arnie did. “Harry Rawlins was the only man who could make my brother nervous. He’d never been arrested for so much as a parking ticket but, Jesus Christ, he was like an octopus with tentacles in everyone’s business. There was nothing that man didn’t know about the criminal world, and that’s what made him so dangerous. If you’d ever worked for the son of a bitch, you’d never be safe again.”
Jack really wanted to hear more about Jimmy, but Tony seemed determined to continue talking about himself and Arnie.
“My brother was a bit of an art expert—fenced loads of paintings for Harry over the years. That was his mistake. Like I just said, once you was involved with Harry, he had you by the balls. ’Cos if he went down, so did you. I never met the man personally, on account of him always doing business with the organ grinder and not the monkey—that’s what he called me, the cheeky bastard. A ‘monkey.’ Fuck him! The newspapers made out Harry’s funeral as being half of London paying their respects . . . It wasn’t. They were making fucking sure the bastard was dead. Criminals and coppers. And we were all wrong!”
In a flash, Jack’s mind leapt from the hatred he felt for Tony to an overdue penny finally dropping . . . If Harry Rawlins was shot to death by his wife in the autumn of 1985—who did Tony and half of London watch being buried approximately nine months earlier?
Tony was still talking—having a whale of a time—but at least he was back on topic now.
“Jimmy Nunn was a fucking nobody who did what he was paid to and then kept his head down, spending his cut on women and cars till the next job came along. So, I’ll tell you something for nothing, DC whatever-you-said-your-name-was—if Jimmy’s still got his head down after, what, thirty-somefink years, then he took one hell of a cut from his last job.”
“You think he’s got his feet up somewhere?”
“If there’s one thing Jimmy Nunn was good at, it was running away. He was there for a good time, not a long time . . . as they say. He’d do a caper, then disappear. He’d do a bird, then disappear. I mean, if Trudie was mine—full-time I mean—I wouldn’t have left her.”
Jack noted Tony’s last comment about Jimmy Nunn probably being on the run with a load of cash. But, as he stared at Tony, he could also see the very second that the dirty old man’s mind strayed back to the good ol’ days of shagging Trudie on his brother’s French-polished desk. Jack’s nostrils flared and his eyebrows dipped.
“Somefink I said?” Tony grinned. Jack pushed his chair away from the table and stood up. “Don’t go yet, son. We’re having a nice chat, ain’t we?”
Jack paused. “I hear the man who attacked you is recovering well.”
His tone was now very different. The sucking-up had stopped, the pandering to Tony’s ego had stopped and he was suddenly playing a different game. Tony could feel the change in mood, although he didn’t know what had brought it on.
“I also hear that you’re on a warning. One more bit of trouble and you’ll get a nice, long stint in solitary.” Jack placed his fists squarely on the table, looked Tony straight in the eye and whispered, “I’m going to make sure you die in here. No one looked up to you then and no one looks up to you now—as Harry Rawlins said, you’re just a big, stupid ape.”
Jack waited for the second Tony’s brain disengaged and animal instinct took over. It didn’t take long. Tony leapt to his feet, dodged round the table and charged. Jack, being thirty years his junior, dodged his incoming fist with relative ease; but Tony swung again and again. He was strong and relentless but Jack was fast and that’s all that mattered, because all he had to do was stay out the way. The alarms sounded within seconds and all of the other inmates started cheering for Tony. The guards ran across the room, Asps extended, and landed a couple blows on Tony’s back but he didn’t even flinch. The next three hits landed on his thighs and they took him to the floor. Once he was down, there was no getting up. With his face pressed against the cold blue lino, Tony spat out every threat he could think of while Jack walked calmly from the room.
In the incident statement Jack was asked to write, he neglected to mention that he’d called Tony an ape, and instead made something up about bringing up the wrong person from Tony’s past and stirring bad memories.
“He’s got quite a temper, hasn’t he?” Jack said innocently.
The prison warder reassured Jack that Tony would have plenty of time to think about his actions in solitary confinement. Jack was then given back his mobile, his wallet and his warrant card, and he left.
Once outside the prison, he checked his phone. There was one missed call from Ridley, with an accompanying voicemail asking if he’d found Julia Lawson and Angela Dunn yet. Shit! Jack hadn’t even started looking.