Post Mortem by Gary Bell (free children's ebooks pdf .TXT) 📕

to being about which ends you come from.’ He paused. ‘You know what ends are, don’t you?’

‘Territory,’ Zara answered. ‘Home turf. Estates. My end would be St Ann’s, Nottingham.’

‘Smart lady. Every end had its own gang fighting postcode against postcode, spraying bullets into playgrounds just to hit one target. It was all about bling, fast cars and guns, and members had a limited shelf life. Then along comes Macey’s truce, and now these bastards are growing. Soon they’ll have enough to take over the country, one town at a time, with east London as the distribution hub.’

‘What about existing drug trades?’ Zara asked. ‘Surely those towns will already have established set-ups.’

‘Same way Britain built an empire,’ he said, ‘and that wasn’t with cups of tea and scones. They’ll dispatch workers and spread into any place they can.’

‘Including the Scrubs,’ I said quietly, checking around; in the shadows, Patch’s paranoia was infectious.

‘You know me, Rook. It serves a man of my talents to keep up to speed with these sorts of things. I’m telling you this because we go back, but I don’t want to be any sort of witness in whatever you’re into. You two aren’t Starsky and Hutch, and I’m not Huggy Bear. I don’t want my name coming up in or out of the courtroom.’

‘Never. All we’re looking for is a nudge in the right direction.’

He nodded, spinning the last of his cigarette into the bucket; it glowed brightly for a second or two before suffocating. ‘What’s the best way to start a burger business on a street full of McDonald’s? How do you make an impact when there’s already a business that customers are loyal to?’

‘By offering a better burger?’ I suggested.

‘Maybe. A quicker way would be to put a dozen of your employees on that street and tell them to stick pubes in every sodding Big Mac they can get their hands on.’

‘A hostile takeover,’ Zara whispered. ‘You’re saying these Cutthroats sent a group of their dealers into prison on purpose?’

‘It wasn’t no win for the police …’ I muttered, echoing Andre’s words.

Zara shook her head. ‘I don’t believe that anybody would choose to go to prison.’

‘Some people aren’t built for civvy life,’ Patch replied. ‘For some, prison is like a Friday night out. They know everybody in there and get to shoot the shit with mates they haven’t seen in a while. The maths, well, that’s a no-brainer. You can work your knackers off in a lousy chicken shop for the next two years and earn thirty grand, minus tax, or you can go inside, forget about where next month’s rent is coming from, eat three square meals a day and earn two hundred grand tax-free, which’ll be waiting for you on the outside. These people wouldn’t see that sort of money in a lifetime working straight. As for walls, there’ve always been walls holding them back. Least they can see these ones. Accept them.’

‘What about officers?’ I asked.

‘Screws? Same thing. They’re mopping up suicides and stabbings, getting spat on every night. Somebody offers them a few grand to bring something in. Just once. That’s a quarter of their salary in one morning for putting something in their back pocket. They do it. Take their kids on that Disney holiday they’ve been promising them for years. Clear a couple of credit cards. Only, once they’ve started on that road, the cons have got something to hold over them.’

‘And you end up in somebody’s pocket,’ I said.

‘Deeper and deeper.’ He looked around and sighed. ‘I should be getting back inside. People talk. It was good seeing you, Rook, but let’s keep it social next time, yeah?’

‘Sure, Patch.’ I shook his hand; it was incredibly large and rough as bark.

‘Before you go …’ Zara said slowly. ‘I might’ve missed something from your burger analogy. You said that getting your employees into the restaurants was only the first part of the takeover. Then you’d corrupt the existing product?’

‘Smart.’ He smiled thinly. ‘Didn’t I say she was smart, Rook? Pays more attention than you do.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You’re saying they chose to go to prison so they could corrupt the supply and win customers away from the existing product?’

‘Maybe. What happened could’ve been coincidence. Smoking chemicals is risky.’

‘Holy shit!’ Zara gasped, and it echoed loudly off the bricks around us. She lowered her voice. ‘They didn’t just want to attract new customers to their product.’ She turned to me and her eyes were bright. ‘They tainted the existing product to kill any customer who remained loyal to the old dealers. The killed them. They killed them all.’

9

I was glad to get home to the dog.

After a quick growl she seemed pleased to see me too.

‘Hello, Scout.’ I let her out of the cage and took her down to Dorset Square at the south end of my block before she had chance to further stain the carpet. Then, after returning home, I unfolded the futon and turned on the television for background noise; she settled down to watch it, while I opened my laptop and got to work.

First, I googled Roy Macey. A few stories from the seventies and eighties. Very little of interest. Wanted by Interpol on a number of inquiries. A mugshot in a Crimestoppers appeal for fugitives hiding out on the Continent. Just another stone-faced white man glaring into the camera. It all fitted with Patch’s description of the man’s formative years.

After that, I began to refresh my memory on the finer points of HMP Wormwood Scrubs.

Glancing over the Prison Service’s website, it almost read like the brochure for a self-catering Swiss chalet: in-cell power and cooking facilities, television for a pound a week, and an enhanced package including personal bedding and a PlayStation. A full-size gymnasium with sports including badminton, basketball, weight training and volleyball.

It was only in the digitalised archives of national newspapers that the uglier side of the prison was revealed. Ever since Russian spy George Blake managed to scale the outer