Fred’s gym.
There was a svelte forty-something woman who looked like she should be running through her yoga asanas banging seven bells out of the heavy bag. There was an old man in glasses with a blood-pressure monitor attached to his upper arm and the latest Asics on his feet walking steadily on a treadmill, taking his time, as if he planned to live forever. There were a couple of young men in their twenties who looked like cage fighters but who worked in the City, pumping the free weights that were all printed with one word.
And Fred was in the middle of it all, silver hair pulled up in a topknot, counting down someone’s reps, then fussing with the music, looking for a soundtrack that matched the mood to perfection, and always urging encouragement.
‘You’re so lucky to be training,’ he told me, as he put on some Chic and I whaled away at the heavy bag until a buzzer went and I got down on the floor for ten burpies and ten press-ups. By the time I got up from the press-ups and burpies the minute’s break between rounds had almost gone by and Fred was waiting for me with curved Lonsdale punch mitts on his hands.
‘On the bell – double jab and move away,’ he said. ‘Recover while you work.’
On the final buzzer, Fred tossed the punch mitts aside and went off to change Chic to The Jam on the sound system, Nile Rodgers somehow not quite hitting the spot. And as I was waiting for him to return, Jackson Rose appeared before me, watching me, already in his training kit, black-and-yellow protective wraps on his hands.
‘Put some gloves on,’ I told him, putting the punch mitts on my hands.
Jackson slipped on a pair of red Cleto Reyes 16-ounce gloves, the old Mexican leather cracked and worn.
‘Double jab, straight right, left hook,’ I told him.
He threw out the combination I had called, his punches hitting the pads I held up with a whiplash crack, his left hand drifting away from his chin with the final punch, dropping down by his hip.
With my right hand, I slapped him hard across the left side of his face.
‘Keep that guard up,’ I said. ‘Triple jab, straight right, two left hooks.’
He did as he was told, his punches harder now, the light brown skin on one side of his face reddened by the pad.
This time he kept his guard up.
‘You are not doing Pat Whitestone any favours,’ I said. ‘Double jab and move away.’
He threw out two stiff jabs. They rocked me back an inch.
Jackson was not a natural boxer but he had what the old-timers called heavy hands. He hit hard.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said.
We began circling each other. Jackson held his guard up in peekaboo fashion, and I had the pads held loosely by my side. When I showed him one of them, lifting it to head height, he smacked it as hard as he could.
‘You’re meant to be on her side, Max.’
‘I am on her side,’ I said, showing him the left pad. He hit it with a straight right and kept hitting it until I pulled it away. Nobody was listening to us but I lowered my voice anyway. ‘If you provide her with a firearm, you’ll be getting her into more trouble than she already has.’
‘Who said I got anyone a firearm?’
He dropped his guard and I clobbered him around the left side of his face as hard as I could with the pad in my right hand.
There was the slap of hard leather on flesh and bone and, at last, the first sign of real anger in his eyes.
‘Pat Whitestone thinks that Harry Flowers is trying to own her,’ he said. ‘Like he has owned dozens of good cops. Men who are now behind bars because they took his money or did him a favour or looked the other way or tried to stay on his good side.’
I held up both pads and Jackson struck them with a furious combination.
‘You want that to happen to her, Max? You want Flowers to own your friend?’
‘Nobody’s going to own her. Have you tooled her up already, Jackson? What is she – a hitman all of a sudden? What’s she going to do? Blow his brains out?’
‘Maybe someone should.’
We had both forgotten the pad work.
We stood facing each other in that crowded gym, Paul Weller singing ‘Eton Rifles’ on the sound system.
‘She’s got a teenage son, Jackson. You dumb bastard.’
‘Do it again, Max. Go on. Call me a dumb bastard again.’
‘She’s bringing her boy up alone. Great kid. Justin. Can’t see. Lost his sight in some stupid bar attack. What happens to him if his mother goes down because some dumb bastard got her a gun?’
And finally he lost his rag.
‘I remember Justin. I remember his mother kept seeing the scumbag who blinded him. What were they called? Oh yes – the Dog Town Boys. She ever have any problem with any of the Dog Town Boys these days? And I remember that swaggering little sack of shit who hit Justin with a bottle. What was his name?
‘Trey N’Dou.’
‘Trey N’Dou. If it wasn’t for me, Trey N’Dou would still be wandering the streets where they lived as if nothing had happened. And I remember we went up to see him. You remember any of that, Max?’
I remembered it well.
I remembered the desperation of Pat Whitestone at seeing her son’s attacker wandering the streets as if nothing had happened.
And I remembered driving north with Jackson one hot summer’s night two years ago.
Whitestone wanted the scumbag gone. Not dead. Not the score evened up – because the score could never be evened up. But she wanted Trey N’Dou gone. She was sick of looking at the face of the man who had blinded her son. So Jackson and I went to see Trey N’Dou. But reasoning with him didn’t work. Even threatening him didn’t work. So Jackson got him on his back in a car park on Liverpool Road and made Trey N’Dou wet his baggy jeans by firing two shots between his legs.
‘Am I dead?’ Trey N’Dou had said.
And that worked.
The idea had been that Jackson was going to watch my back while I sorted out this problem.
But Jackson had done more than that.
He had made the problem go away.
‘This isn’t the same thing, Jackson, and you know it.’
‘I remember that Dog Town Boy – I remember he laughed in your face. And I remember that I had to deal with it. I had to clean it up. Just as I have been cleaning up your mess all your life, Max.’
I punched him in the face.
It really hurts to be hit with a punch mitt.
They are not nicely rounded like boxing gloves. The side of the things have a thick, hard edge and that was what connected with Jackson’s gap-toothed mouth. He took the blow and then swung back at me, all discipline gone, lashing out with a wide haymaker that I had time enough to roll away from.
But then he was on me, punches raining down on the top of my head as I covered up and started digging the hard ridge of those punch mitts into his lower ribs.
It was all pretty even.
I was always tougher than him.
But he was wilder.
He had that touch of madness that Flowers had talked about with such admiration.
Then Fred had both of us by the scruff of the neck and was pulling us apart.
‘I could sell tickets to you two,’ he laughed.
And I saw that TDC Joy Adams was standing by Fred’s side.
‘We’ve found Ruben Shavers,’ she said.