Gerald Seymour - Rat Run

The route the Bear took him that day was past the old fish market, where he had been shot by a Russian in the right side of his upper chest. It was when the Russians had come, refugees, into the city, sensed the wealth of the pickings – narcotics, weapons, girls

– and sought to muscle aside the power in place. Some of the Russian groups had been 'persuaded' at gunpoint to go elsewhere; some had laughed at the advice and had fought for territory. Timo's way had sent the message five times. Russians dead, packed like herrings into ice boxes, then dumped in the boots of cars, which were pushed off the quay of the fish market car park into the waters of the Elbe. The man who had shot him, spitting through his gag, struggling to break the rope on his elbows, had gone into the boot of his Mercedes and he – Timo – had slammed down the lid. All the way to the quay's edge there had been kicking inside the b o o t… and he had helped to push the car over the edge. He had had no more difficulties with Russians. Three or four of the men who had helped him in those days, twelve years before, could have put him with their testimony into a cell at the Santa-Fu, but they were all the gjak, blood relations, who would not have contemplated betrayal.

The Passat remained behind them, and took the same turn away from the fish market. Political friends, men bought with money, told him of the director of the unit that dealt with what they designated organized crime. The pinnacle of the director's police career would be the conviction of Timo Rahman, but he would never reach it.

The Bear headed for the Reeperbahn. It was where Timo had begun, where he had been knifed. He took the narrow cut through and they were held up behind a tourist bus that paused for photographs of the street with the high wall at its end and the gap through which only pedestrians could go to the brothels. At the police station, high and brickbuilt on the corner of the Reeperbahn, where the detectives had always failed to link him to ownership and 'immoral earnings', the Bear swung right and into the wide street.

Young, fresh from Albania, he had dismissed the Germans who ran the Reeperbahn, fought them and overwhelmed them. Three or four of those who had been at his side in that little war of guns and knives, all Albanians from the northern mountains, could have sworn evidence and imprisoned him, but they were miqs, relatives by marriage, and would have died rather than be accused of treachery against him.

Now, increasingly, he was clean. His business activities were distant from the wars on which he had built his empire. The Bear brought him to

Schauenburgstrasse and the premises of one of the oldest and most respected legal companies in Hamburg. A fellow guest, but arriving by a different doorway off the street, would be a city politician against whom no stigma of corruption existed. In a private room, over lunch, there would be discussion on the development funds necessary for the building of high-quality offices on one of the few bombsites remaining from the Feuersturm; minor investment and major profit in return for development permission being nodded through Planning. Neither the politician nor the lawyer who would chair the discussion, knew of the Canun or of the fis, had little comprehension of the reach of a blood feud and the vicious reprisals that could be brought down on them and their families, but they understood the threat of public disgrace that an appearance in court would bring them and those they loved, and they would not have lasted a sentence of imprisonment in the Fuhlsbuttel gaol. He was safe from them.

For Timo Rahman the meeting was routine. A matter of greater complexity was nagging in his mind as he took the lift to the upper floor where the lawyer practised hospitality. That matter, the rewards for which were great and the challenge huge, would take him to the western coastline. It excited him because the ground to be covered and the cargo to be delivered were new to him, and the risk to his security was devastating. He shook the lawyer's hand and was ushered inside. What nagged at him was his feeling of certainty that the man he must rely on was a foreigner with no understanding of the loyalties of Timo's people, the grandson of his father's comrade in war, Ricky Capel. The coded name Timo had given him, spoken with contempt, was 'Mouseboy'.

Rubbish day, and from the window Sharon Capel, matriarch certainly of number eight and probably of all Bevin Close, saw the bin lorry edge into the top of the cul-de-sac. Her own wheelie was outside her front gate, on the pavement, but her daughter-in-law next door received better treatment because the boys came down the side of that house to collect her wheelie, then put it back by the kitchen door. Joanne had that small luxury because nothing that concerned her husband, Ricky, was too much trouble for the bin-boys.

Sharon had lost track of time. If she had realized how late it was in the morning she would not have been dusting in the front room. She kept the house spotlessly clean because there was little else for her to do. It hadn't always been that way. She had been in Men's Underwear at British Home Stores for most of Ricky's childhood, and spent evenings washing up in a cafe, all the years that Mikey was 'away' doing bird and his share of what had not been retrieved by the Old Bill was running down. Mikey had been in Brixton, Wandsworth and Pentonville too long and too often… and when he was out she had kept up the jobs because the big one that he was going to retire on always fucked up. Mikey had been between release and rearrest on a day when the bin lorry had come into Bevin Close. That same day, Ricky had been a month past his twelfth birthday – and from that day his sisters, Therese and Rachel, had detested him.

Small wonder that Therese now lived in Australia and didn't write, and Rachel was in Canada and didn't ring. They should have beaten him that day, made a line and queued up to thrash the little sod – but none of them had. He had stood by the door with his fists clenched and no one had dared face him down when the bin lorry had come along Bevin Close.

It was the day she had realized the nature of her son.

The cat was a coal-black neutered torn and the family called it Soot. It was worshipped by the girls and however many bloody years Mikey had been inside it always greeted him when he came out, like he was Soot's favourite. The cat was old and could be

'caught short'. That morning, wheelie-bin day, Soot had been shut inside little Ricky's room – probably an open window downstairs had slammed the door.

Ricky had gone to his room and found that it had crapped right in the middle of his bed. He'd brought the cat down, holding it helpless by the neck, and before any of them could intervene, he had wrung the cat's neck, then smiled, like it was nothing, and taken it outside the front, where the wheelie was waiting for the bin lorry. He had lifted the lid, dropped the cat inside, then gone straight back upstairs, brought down his bedding and dumped that in the wheelie too. He'd come back in, had stood by the door and had dared them, his grandad and his nan, his mum, dad and sisters, to do something. If he had screamed abuse at them, they would have done 'something'.

Not like that… calm as anything, a little smile at the side of his mouth and no creases on his face. His eyes

– Christ, his eyes – had been so bloody cold that they'd terrified her. Not just her: Mikey, who had been a quality get-away driver for wages snatches, and Percy, who had been a one-man crime wave in burglary after his demob. All of them frightened by a boy of twelve because of what was in his eyes.

She went on with the dusting and cleaning. Because of the money her son gave Mikey, she didn't have to work, didn't have to do anything but keep the house clean and cook his favourite meals, and she doubted he even remembered killing the cat.