Bent Horrocks was beside the water. She’d wanted to talk; he hadn’t. When she wanted to, and he didn’t, she’d sulk. Might sulk too much one day. He sat on the cold concrete of a wall that enclosed a small garden feature. It was five hours till Jack would pick him up, but he was wearing his suit. His shirt and tie were impeccable, and he had on the cufflinks Trace had bought him for his birthday, with his money. His shoes were polished. He would travel as an anonymous businessman. He had been to Spain, years before, done cigarettes there, had thought the place ‘leaky’ and felt his security was compromised. He had not been abroad, looking for contacts, in years. He questioned his position, let it revolve on a flywheel in his head. He could hear distant traffic but the area around the block was pedestrian. The last of the drinkers were going home; an Afro-Caribbean man came past him with a rubbish trolley and a broom, emptied a bin and wished him well. A stranger wishing Bent Horrocks ‘well’? That didn’t often happen. His photo was never in the papers. He was in a few Flying Squad files but had arrangements in place that would let him know of new investigations.
He was troubled. He didn’t share his anxieties with associates, with the lawyer he kept on retainer or his money-man, and certainly not with Jack, who carried his bags and did the administration, Angel or Trace. There was an Irishman in Silvertown, who seemed short of respect for him and had taken two waste-clearance contracts that Bent had regarded as his own. There was an Asian crowd in Peckham, flush with the rewards of a vodka scam – they were bringing in bootleg booze from Naples, sticking on brand labels and selling it on to corner shops. They had two clubs now within spitting distance of premises Bent owned, and were undercutting him. Troubling. . . . But before he went to war, last resort, he’d need to strengthen his powerbase.
The deal abroad would ensure it. But Bent didn’t know ‘abroad’. He didn’t know the people from ‘abroad’, and didn’t speak the language. What he did know was that they had cocaine, top quality, in tons. It would lift him if he did the deal, put him way above the Irish shite and the Asians. He sat on the concrete – troubled, but didn’t know another way. Jack was clear on it – Jack, who was Giacomo and whose family were in Chatham, had done the outline fixing. He had said nothing could go wrong – nothing. Bent liked to have control, was nervous when it slipped away.
‘Now we go to swim, Jago.’
‘Swim? You sure?’
‘Of course I am . . . You can swim, Jago?’
‘Yes.’
In the moonlight the beach was the colour of silver, clean and without rocks. It was broken only by two open boats, for inshore fishing, that had been pulled high beyond the tide line. Even after midnight, it was the sort of place that featured in holiday brochures. They’d have called it ‘quaint’, ‘old world’ and ‘unspoiled’. She had left the Fiat in a parking bay overlooking the beach. There was a sharp wind and he’d felt it when he stepped from the car, heaved himself upright and stretched. His back had cracked. She had said, in the car, that the town was Scilla – did he know the myth of Scylla and Charybdis? He didn’t. Off the headland of Scilla knife-edge rocks would tear the bottom out of a boat, and Charybdis was the fearsome whirlpool that could suck boats down and swallow them. Odysseus, according to Homer, had come through the strait and had had to decide whether to go near to the whirlpool or the rocks. He had gone towards Scilla, had thought he might lose a few sailors when tossed among the rocks but that was better than risking the whole crew and the boat in the whirlpool. He’d said, again, that he didn’t know the story, but it sounded like out of the frying pan and into the fire.