James Craig - Acts of Violence

Rush hour was over, but the relentless hum of traffic from the King’s Road – reassuring and irritating at the same time – never abated. From the direction of Brompton Oratory came the sound of angry horns, followed by the wail of a siren further in the distance – probably an ambulance heading in the direction of the Cromwell Hospital. Gazing up at the darkening sky, Michael Nicholson took a drag on his Rothmans King Size and wondered what exactly he was doing back in London. When he was growing up, the city had seemed impossibly alive and exciting; now, after almost a decade living in Shanghai, it seemed about as dynamic as Derby or Carlisle – and almost as alien.

With a gentle nod of his head, Nicholson expelled the thought along with the smoke; he had never been given to introspection and his forties didn’t much seem like the time to start. Focusing his attention on the cigarette, he took a last drag, watching the end flare in the gloom before flicking the stub over the edge of the terrace and into the street below. Throwing back his head, he quaffed the gin and tonic he was holding in one hand, before wiping his mouth with the back of the other. It was his third gin of the night, so far, and he was beginning to feel pleasantly woozy. On average, he would get through six or seven gins, along with a bottle or two of wine over dinner, before falling into bed. It wasn’t so much that he was an alcoholic, more that he needed to self-medicate against the boredom.

How long would he be stuck here?

It was a question that was impossible to answer. Resisting the temptation to drop the empty glass into the street below, Nicholson watched one of the security team pass in front of the building. ‘One of Marvin Taylor’s finest,’ he hiccuped, as the man disappeared from view round the corner into the alleyway that led to the underground garage and the service entrance. ‘Trained killers, all of ’em.’ Stifling another hiccup, he tried to remember this particular guy’s name but it had gone. As far as he could see, each of the nine guys on Taylor’s crew were interchangeable – all in their early twenties, fresh-faced, with crew cuts and the pumped-up torsos of bodybuilders. God, they made him feel old, conscious of a steady decline when he should still be in his prime.

Bastards.

At least Marvin Taylor himself was a fair way down the same path towards decrepitude. A small, fifty-something black guy, Marvin liked to complain about his bad back. He looked as if he couldn’t fight his way out of a paper bag. His ‘boys’, however, were something else altogether.

Taylor was an ex-policeman who ran his own security firm, promising ‘100 per cent professionalism and discretion’. Nicholson was less than impressed at their first meeting, but Taylor had been recommended by a former chum at Eton. Anyway, it wasn’t as if Nicholson had much to compare him with. After all, he didn’t go round hiring bodyguards every day of the week. And the testimonial from the pal, a rogue called Charlie Simmons, was genuine enough. Simmons was the kind of wheeler-dealer who made Nicholson look almost respectable by comparison. One particularly dodgy scheme left him on the wrong side of a bunch of Nigerian businessmen fearing for his life. In the end, Charlie had survived through a mixture of charm, cash stolen from his parents and Taylor-supplied muscle.

When pitching his services, Taylor was careful to imply that all of his employees were ex-Special Forces, or similar. That was highly questionable. Only some of the men was British; the rest were a random selection of men from around the globe. Perusing their résumés, Nicholson had joked to Wang Lei that they were getting the ‘United Colors of Close Protection’. All he got for his trouble was a blank look, quickly followed by a scowl that made Nicholson wince. He had faced up to the woman’s lack of a sense of humour a long time ago but it could still grate.

Special Forces or not, the boys that Marvin Taylor had protecting the flat knew how to handle a gun. Each of them carried a Heckler amp; Koch MP5, the kind of weapon that every other policeman in London seemed to carry these days, as well as a Glock 22 pistol.

Nicholson knew full well that it had to be illegal, armed private contractors wandering round SW7 like it was the Wild West, but Wang Lei was definitely impressed by the show of force. Initially, Nicholson had been determined to raise the issue with Taylor but, in the end, he had avoided the subject. Over the years, he had come to realize that one of his great skills was not asking questions.

Turning his glass upside down, he let the ice and lemon follow the cigarette butt towards the street, just as a second guard appeared on the pavement below. As the man looked up, Nicholson hailed him with the empty glass and got the briefest of nods in return. They must get so bloody bored. Nicholson knew that there would be a third guy somewhere nearby. Marvin’s nine-man team was split into three groups, running eight-hour shifts.

All of this at a cost of £12,000 a day.

Twelve grand.

Plus VAT.

And expenses.

Nicholson reflected that Taylor Security Services did not come cheap. Maybe I went into the wrong business. The whole set-up seemed to be more than a little over the top for Chelsea, but that wasn’t his call; Wang Lei, convinced that a bunch of killer ninjas were about to descend on them at any minute, had insisted that they invest in a full-on close protection service. To be fair, she was picking up the tab, although Nicholson could think of a lot of things that Wang would be better off spending her money on: him, for a start.

A familiar sense of frustration washed over him as he fished a cigarette packet from the pocket of his cords. The light was fading now and the last warmth of the day had gone. Shivering in the cool night air, he took the last coffin-nail from the crumpled packet and stuck it between his lips, resisting the urge to head back inside.

‘Michael, Mother says “ What are you doing ?”’

Making no effort to keep the annoyance from his face, Nicholson turned to confront the youth. ‘I was just having a smoke,’ he snapped, wondering where he’d left his lighter. Holding up his hand, he waved Exhibit A for the defence, the crumpled fag packet. ‘You know your mother doesn’t let me smoke in the house.’

Under an unruly mop of jet-black hair, Ren Jiong grinned malevolently. In the sanctity of his bedroom, the boy could get away with smoking as much weed as he liked. Nicholson himself was kept on a much tighter leash.

‘The smoke upsets her.’

Nicholson counted to ten. The idiot was the bane of his life; a spoiled brat with the emotional intelligence and maturity of a ten year old – a ten-year-old monkey, at that. Living in England had totally failed to smooth away the rough edges. Ren’s parents must have spent the best part of £600,000 in school fees alone, all of it wasted. The best education that money could buy had done nothing other than refine the youth’s taste in expensive booze, fast cars and even faster women. Not yet twenty, he already had the air of a second-rate playboy.

And, Nicholson reflected, I should know all about that.

The urge to slap the boy into the middle of next week was tempered by the fact that he was his meal ticket. Ren Junior had been his entrée to the Ren family. The extravagantly rich and powerful father, Ren Qi, and the bored and sexy mother Wang Lei, were like something out of a Chinese remake of a 1980s American soap opera. They were so two-dimensional that only by an immense act of willpower had Nicholson been able to convince himself that they were, indeed, real. Even now, their story was hard to credit. Ren Senior was a long-time political hack, the son of one of the ‘Eight Elders’ of the Communist Party, a ‘princeling’ of Chinese politics. His crass populism would have appeared commonplace in the West. In China, however, its novelty helped spur his rise, firstly as a provincial governor, then as a member of the Central Politburo. There was even talk of him getting the top job one day. Nicholson knew the fact that he was being mentioned at all probably meant it would never happen. These things were fairly random, like the election of a new Pope; luck and timing as always would play a decisive part. Even so, Ren Qi was definitely a man worth knowing.