Post Mortem, Gary Bell [best fiction novels .txt] 📗

little more sheepishly than usual. ‘They have pool tables in prison?’

Patch blinked at her, one lid falling fast over his sharp green eye, the other going slowly over the milky prosthetic. ‘What else is a bloke meant to do? Apart from, you know …’ He made a crude gesture with his right hand.

She rolled her eyes, then considered it for a second, still holding her bag to her gut. ‘Read?’

This got Patch guffawing again, so hard that he doubled over and had to wait to calm down before attempting his move. ‘Who’s this, Rook? Your daughter?’

‘No. This is Zara, one of our pupil barristers at Miller & Stubbs.’

‘Another lawyer, eh?’ He easily potted two yellows in a row and turned his eye back on her. ‘Honestly, you’ve got to love the balls on this bloke. One week he’s kipping out in the Bullring with me and the boys. The next he tells us he’s leaving to be a barrister. Funniest thing we’ve heard all year. Few months later the Great Storm hits London and I figure he’s been swept off to the land of Oz.’ Another neat pot. ‘Years later, nineties now, I’m living up here in Walthamstow and some lad’s sitting in the pub next door telling me he’s been dossing out on Lincoln’s Inn Fields with this tramp who’s claiming to be a trainee barrister. I go there and who do I find? Older, fatter, dressed in robes, the one and only Elliot Rook.’

‘She knows the story,’ I said sharply.

Patch caught my eye and, despite his size, turned away. ‘I’m only winding you up, mate. I know you wouldn’t have brought her along if she wasn’t in the know. Rook here spent the first few weeks of his pupillage living with me, and in return I got myself a resident barrister. How many trials did you win on the bounce for me again? Six?’

‘Seven. You did a fair bit of time on remand though.’

‘Occupational hazard.’ He shrugged, turning back to Zara. ‘People often ask me about a life of crime. I tell them the pay is good, the hours are great, but you get fucking long holidays and not in the places you want them.’

‘Like the Scrubs,’ I added.

‘Yeah. Like the Scrubs.’ He potted another yellow but this time the white quickly followed. ‘Shite. Two shots to you.’

I placed the white back onto the playing field and leaned over the felt. I could smell the chalk on my fingertips. ‘When were you last up in the Scrubs, Patch?’

‘Late nineties, I reckon. Sometime around then.’

From the corner of my eye, I saw Zara frown. ‘You don’t remember?’

‘Missy, I’ve been banged up in places I didn’t even bother to learn the names of. Course, when I was there it was really the Scrubs, you know? Nasty place. They had an onsite bar for the screws back then. What an idea that was.’

He pressed his hand out flat on the felt, my shot narrowly avoiding his beefy wrist. I missed again; it had been a while.

‘See that?’ He was obviously referring to the two fingers that were unnaturally crooked. ‘Screw did that with his boot cos he thought I’d looked at him funny. As I remember it, I’d been facing the opposite direction. Hell of a place back then.’

Zara cocked her head to read the faded green ink across his knuckles: ACAB.

I hit another useless rebound off the cushion and backed up from the table. Patch grinned, chalking his cue, and cracked his shoulders loudly before leaning forward again.

‘Say, Patch, you still keep your ear to the ground, don’t you?’

‘Always.’ Clack. The fifth ball rolled into the nearside pocket. ‘Why?’

‘Don’t suppose you’ve heard much about a few scrappy gangsters going by the name of Cutthroats, have you? E10 Cutthroats, I believe.’

There was a dull thud. The cue’s nose had slammed into felt and the white ball went shooting from the table and hit the wall beside Zara’s head. Patch did one of his slow, nauseating blinks around the room.

All around us, heads lifted.

Patch picked up the two remaining yellows, one by one, and dropped them into the nearest pocket, followed by the black.

‘That’s my game,’ he said hoarsely. He scooped up both twenties and shoved them into his pocket. He dismantled his cue quietly, methodically, and cased it. The men around us were still watching intently.

Patch nodded towards the exit. ‘Got any fags?’ And we quietly followed him out of the building.

8

A man called Roy Macey had been running things in the back in the day.

That’s what Patch told us in the empty darkness of the smoking area behind the club, which was just a bucketful of sand surrounded by poorly aimed filters like so many pale, flattened cockroaches.

Roy Macey had been the sort of career criminal that late-night, low-budget movies were still being made about. He controlled half the docks and owned property all over the capital. He dealt cocaine from his sleazy lap-dancing club in Soho and carried enough of the Metropolitan Police in his back pocket to never concern himself with the dreaded boot at the door. He didn’t hide. He dressed in fine suits, shook hands with esteemed Members of Parliament and donated considerable amounts to London-based charities. He was just another philanthropist whose disparagers had a knack for sleeping in burning buildings, tumbling off bridges and tripping onto the tracks of the London Overground.

‘Macey didn’t need to get banged up to control the gear going into the Scrubs back when I was first there in ’86,’ Patch said, repeatedly turning his good eye back over his left shoulder as if he expected to see the aged crook lurking in the dark. ‘Prisons were built to keep people from getting out. They weren’t designed to stop things coming in. I remember when dead birds were fashionable.’

‘Dead birds?’ Zara grimaced.

‘Oh yeah! You’d be sitting out in the yard, minding your own business when bonk, pigeon lands at your feet, like something out of Monty Python. Seconds