Two Faced. Garry Bushell
left she gave him her phone number – ‘Ring me, ya bastard, you know you will.’ Harry screwed it up and chucked it as soon as they had parted. He was a bastard, that much was true, but what did she expect? Lovey-dovey phone calls and chats about Elsie Tanner, alfalfa and muesli? Fuck that. He didn’t have time for that shit. His mind was already racing.
Before Harry could get involved in his first operation, he knew that he and all the other UC graduates would have to serve a testing apprenticeship. They would be put out into shady corners of the real world for six to nine months in order to create a new, criminal identity. Most of the group chose not to use their real Christian names but Harry was a Harry, there was no getting away from that. Besides, Harry, H, Hal … it had a real street ring about it. It was a name you could associate with a gangster, a hard man, a trader. A name you could trust.
But Harry who? Harry had got on well with Jeremy Tyler. He’d called him ‘Tark’, short for Tarquin, because Jeremy had been educated at Dulwich College, a minor public school in South London, but Harry’s ingrained class prejudice didn’t blind him to Tyler’s considerable talents. He was an exceptionally gifted detective constable from Thames Valley police who had an outstanding working knowledge of the arts and antiques. He could skipper his own yacht and held a full pilot’s licence. Jeremy was as different from Harry as you could get, so it appealed to the Essex boy’s sense of fun to appropriate his name. At the end of the course, he became Harry Tyler, and soon he had the paperwork to prove it. Each officer was given a starter pack to back up their new personas. Harry’s came in an oxblood-coloured briefcase with two gold-plated combination locks. He set the left lock at 999 and the right one at 814 – numbers which corresponded with his real initials H.A.D. Many crooks were going to be.
Many Rachels too.
INTO THE VALLEY
Through a villainous friend of a villainous friend, an established UC had managed to feed Harry into Ronnie Clavin’s scrapyard in Madison Gardens, Charlton, London SE7; close enough to the Thames to be able to ‘hit the lapping water with a gob full of phlegm’, as Ronnie so poetically put it. The sole holder of Valley Metals was a burly 52-year-old with a greasy complexion whose perennial off-white string vest stretched tightly across two disturbingly developed man breasts. It was a small yard with an even smaller breeze-block office. The tin-roofed building was just about big enough to contain a desk, two chairs, a filing cabinet, a kettle, a cat called Mandy and a dog called Brandy, so ugly that Harry swore her arse backed away when she tried to lick it. A poster of topless Page Three beauty Christine Peake was blu-tacked to the wall above Ronnie’s head, next to a framed, autographed picture of the legendary Charlton Athletic player Derek ‘Gypo’ Hales. The yard had been in the Clavin family for sixty years. Ronnie habitually described it as ‘big enough to unload two trailers’, by which he meant two lorry-loads of stolen – ‘halfinched’ – gear.
Ronnie Clavin was a grafter not a villain, but it was well known in the area that he’d been ‘a bit of a boy’ and had ‘run with the hounds’ in his younger days. He had earned the respect of South London’s thriving criminal fraternity by keeping his mouth shut and never talking about other people’s business. Not while they were still alive, at least. So there were always faces hovering about and favours to be done. It was a perfect place for the Harry Tyler identity to be forged and for Harry’s own handsome face to be noted.
Over the weeks leading up to his first encounter with the Nelsons, Harry learned plenty about the scrap business, the yellows (brass) and reds (coppers). He also learned that Ronnie had a major source of income outside of metal dealing – he bought lorry-loads of commodities, but only on the ‘strict understanding’ – large wink – that none of the goods were stolen. ‘They have to be seconds or bankrupt stock, son,’ he told Harry. ‘That’s the company line – and that’s what you’ve gotta tell the Filth if they ever catch you unloading any cases of knocked-off onto a pallet truck, know what I mean?’
Harry found himself doing plenty of unloading too, as Ronnie had put his back out lifting fridges, or so he had said. Banjo Vic, the barman at the Conservative Club in nearby Charlton Church Lane, thought otherwise. ‘It’s the way Ron plays golf that caused that, H,’ Vic confided. ‘He always stands too close to the ball. After he’s hit it …’
Fridays seemed to be the day for any other business at Valley Metals. That was when Ronnie would retreat into the shelter of the office as a Transit van full of designer dresses or Italian suits backed into the yard. Ronnie never said what Harry should do when the bent gear arrived, but Harry knew enough to make himself busy elsewhere. Conversely, when the local CID turned up, as they did on a regular basis, Harry would scuttle off to the office while Ronnie held court in the yard. DS Gunther and DC Muldoon popped by once a month, ‘just to make sure Ronnie was well’. Clavin always seemed delighted to see them, although he must have lost a lot of bets on the football results to the two detectives because he always seemed to be handing them ‘beer tokens’ for the weekend, generally in £20 denominations. After the second time they visited, Ronnie muttered, ‘It don’t hurt to have friends in low places,’ but Harry didn’t respond. His see-no-evil approach paid dividends because five weeks into their working relationship Ronnie was referencing Harry to all and sundry as ‘the kid who works for me’ who was ‘all right’, who ‘minds his own’. But then why should he be suspicious? Harry had come from a trusted source and Ronnie’s yard was never going to be the target of infiltration. He was small fry. A useful idiot.
Ronnie never asked Harry too many questions about himself. He knew he was from the other side of the water, he was West Ham and therefore ‘a wrong ’un’ and that seemed to be enough. He had taken a shine to Harry as soon as he’d met him. OK, he’d slapped him down verbally a couple of times early on in their relationship, just to let him know who was guv’nor, but he liked his cocky boyish style.
It took Harry about two weeks to get the full measure of Ronnie Clavin. He was a man of fixed daily habits. He liked his bet at dinner time, £5 a day – although he had put £50, ‘a bull’s-eye, H,’ on Lloyd Honeyghan to win the world welterweight title later that year. And aside from the odd Mickey Spillane book, he read only the sports pages of the Sun. Every other Saturday Ronnie would watch Charlton; every Friday night without fail he would have a shave, put on a collar and tie and play bingo at the Charlton Conservative Club with his wife Marlene – her real name was Marigold but everyone called her Marlene because she dressed, spoke and flirted exactly like Boycey’s wife on Only Fools and Horses. They had one son, Stevie, who was in the Merchant Navy. Marlene was 44, still very sexy with eyes as bright as morning dew – and Harry would have banged it rotten if he hadn’t thought it would have mucked up his important work experience. Besides, he liked Ronnie – as much as he ever liked anyone. There was a hard cheerfulness about the man. He looked on life’s bright side, looked for possibilities in every setback and cracked gags morning, noon and night. Most men dream of getting rich and buying themselves an Aston Martin, a Lear jet and a country pile. Ronnie, who each week believed with religious certainty that he would win the pools, vowed he would splash out his fortune on a cattle farm. He pictured himself dressed like the Marlboro man, sitting on his picket fence in Montana blowing smoke rings at the sun. At heart, he was still a kid. Whenever a new customer came calling, Ronnie would get them to stand on the scales to see how much they weighed, surreptitiously slipping a steel-toecapped boot on it behind their backs so they would believe they were porking out. The only time Harry ever saw Ronnie lose his temper was when a Nigerian driver reversed a van full of knocked-off Head sports bags right over Mandy the cat. The air was blue with racial abuse – Harry had to stop his boss from killing the poor sod. Then, when the driver had gone, Ronnie sat at his office desk, held his head in his hands and sobbed like a child.
It didn’t take Harry long to get to the bottom of the incident with the Nelsons. Six days before, Ronnie had been approached by a well-known lorry hijacker from Deptford called Mickey Riordan. He had a trailer-load of Wilkinson Sword razor blades that he had stolen from a lorry park in Deptford. Ronnie had middled the parcel and attempted to sell it on to the major firm north of the river, the Nelsons. The problem was that Buck Nelson had already bought the parcel once and laid it down in SE8 for safe-keeping, only for