Chapter 24

TEA AND BISCUITS

Roy Hanbury sneered and looked him up and down before holding Faultless’s gaze.

“What do you call that thing with the eyes again, Charlie? The one brown, one blue?”

“Heterochromia iridum.”

“Sin.”

“Sin?”

“Adam sinned, sin is passed down through the genes, and we are all sinners. It causes disease, corruption, earthquakes, it makes land barren.”

“And it makes one eye blue, the other one brown?”

“That’s right—sin. You know sin, Charlie.”

They looked at each other for a few seconds. Hard seconds. The moment filled with rage.

Hanbury cooled things by saying, “You made it big, then. Done well for yourself.”

“I done all right.”

“When I urged you to leave—”

“Told me to fuck off, or you’d kill me yourself—”

“When I fucking asked you to leave—I thought you were fucked. Dead fucked. Or banged up, for sure.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

“Where did it all go right, Charlie?”

Faultless looked up at the portrait of the crucified Christ over Hanbury’s mantelpiece and thought, He got a shit deal from his dad.

He looked at Hanbury again. “When you exiled me, Roy, I didn’t know where to go. I was a kid, eighteen. I’d hardly been out of East London. Barrowmore was my patch. I thought I’d stay away for a few weeks and then come back.”

“That wasn’t going to happen.” Hanbury lit a menthol cigarette.

The minty smell made Faultless screw up his nose. He sniffed and then said, “You made that pretty clear. If I came back, they’d kill me.”

“If you’d come back, I’d kill you, Charlie.”

“I thought about doing myself in. I had no clue about anything except running these streets.”

“You were a first-rate thug, I’ll give you that.”

“I wasn’t that mean.”

“You were as mean as a fucking honey badger. You seen those things? They fight lions and leopards. Take on anything. They rip your balls off. Fucking vicious. That’s you, Faultless—a fucking honey badger.”

“Ain’t they fluffy?”

“One of the nastiest of God’s creatures.”

They were quiet for a while.

Faultless had arrived twenty minutes ago, hoping to surprise Hanbury. No such luck. When Charlie was invited in, a coffee pot sat on the low table. Two cups, china, flower patterned, waited to be filled. Hanbury had even made sandwiches and cut the crusts off. And digestives were piled on another plate.

Tea and biscuits with the beast of Barrowmore.

“Haven’t spoken to your daughter in the past few minutes, have you, Roy?” Faultless had asked.

“I still don’t grass, son,” Hanbury answered, inviting Charlie to sit down.

Faultless stared at Hanbury. A big bear of a man with a snake draped over his shoulder. His arms were muscled and tattooed. His head was shaven. A scar, white on his bronze skin, raced across his throat.

Hanbury had been twenty-one. Thug brothers named Bobby and Benny Malone kidnapped him. They were old school. They owned Barrowmore. They ran the drugs and the pimps, and they decided who lived and who died. Hanbury barged into their territory. He was a bulldog. He didn’t go around—he went through. Right through the Malone’s defenses. They got the rage. They killed his mates. They told him, You’re in the deep end—get out.

But Hanbury kept coming. That bulldog in him.

Finally, they got him—five brutes breaking down his door and dragging him out at three in the morning.

They trussed him with wire and tossed him in the back of a van.

He kicked and he bit and dished out some pain. But there were too many of them, and they were too strong.

The wire cut into him. Blood turned him red all over, glistening and wet.

From the back of the van, he heard his wife, pregnant with twins she’d lose because of the stress, scream in the street.

“I promised I’d see her again,” he’d say when he told the story.

And he did.

An hour later.

He staggered home with his throat cut from ear to ear, Ripper style.

Doctors said he would die. Man cannot live without blood, and Roy Hanbury barely had a thimbleful left in his veins. But he survived. That bulldog in him—barge through doors, barge through borders, and barge through death.

Old Bill came and asked what happened, but he said nothing.

“Was it the Malones?” asked a detective.

Hanbury stared at the carnations his mates had sent round.

“Where are they, Roy?” the detective had asked.

Hanbury switched his gaze to the piles of fruit a market trader had delivered as a get well-soon gift.

“Where will we find them?” the detective had said.

Hanbury looked him in the eye.

He said, “You won’t.”

And they never did. Neither Bobby nor Benny Malone, nor their five attack dogs, were ever seen again.

Now Hanbury asked, “Tell me about your transformation from yob to yuppie.”

“I ain’t a yuppie, Roy.” He shrugged. “You dumped me at Waterloo Station, told me never to show my face again.”

“Or I’d cut it off for you.”

“Yeah. That kind of thing. Well, I slipped into WH Smith, planning to nick something to eat. For some reason I found myself in the books section, browsing the travel guides. I saw this—”

He reached into his bag and fished out a travel guide to the United States. It was scribbled on, creased, and well thumbed.

He continued. “I got a train to Heathrow, and with the £500 you gave me, booked a ticket to Miami. I’d never been on a plane before. I had no passport. But I blagged myself on to the flight. Gave them some sob story about my mum being in Florida. She was dying, blah, blah, blah. Customs gave me the third degree. Immigration grilled me in the States. But that was nothing. I’d been fronting up to filth and teachers, social workers, anyone, since I was toddling. I didn’t give a shit. I made it through. They were taking me to some immigration center when I gave them the slip. They never saw me again.”

“Weren’t they looking for you? You some kind of illegal alien in the US?”

“No, I gave them a false name when I got there.”

“Yeah? What’d you call yourself? Donny Osmond or something?” Hanbury smiled at his own remark.

“No,” said Faultless. “I called myself Roy Hanbury.”

Hanbury stopped smiling.