Gerald Seymour: Rat Run

Across the river big money was to be made from the kids who worked in front of the banks' computers, who traded the high numbers and who snorted

'white' to keep themselves alive, alert and awake.

The man who was now bumping in the back of a van and going south towards the cliffs had done the trade in the City, had taken the white, and had pleaded a cash-flow crisis. He had promised that last week an outstanding payment would be made. The promise was not kept. Cocaine to a street value of five hundred and sixty thousand pounds had been given over on trust, and had not been paid for. That was a denial of respect for Ricky Capel. Go soft on one, and word would spread, like the smell of old shit.

Every last trace of the warehouse was gone by the time he was dressed, and little memory of it remained in his mind. The man had been blindfolded when he was brought to the warehouse, still in his pyjamas, and he'd been alternately blustering protests at this

'fucking liberty' and whimpering certainties of finding what was owed by that night, 'on my mum's life, I swear it'. Too late, friend, too bloody late. The bluster and the whimper had gone on right through the moments that the man had been tied down on to a chair, with wide sheets of plastic under it.

'Right, boys, get on with it,' Ricky had said. He needn't have spoken, needn't have declared he was there and, lounging against a rusted pillar, need not have identified his presence. He had spoken so that the man would know who had had him brought to the warehouse, and his voice would have been recognized. In those seconds the man would have realized he was condemned. Suddenly, there was a stain on the pyjamas and the stink of him, because he knew he was dead. Ricky's life was all about sending messages. It would go clear through the rumour mill that a big boss had been cheated, and the message of the penalty for that would run crystal sharp to others who did business with him.

The Merks, that was what Benji called the guys with the pickaxe handles. They were small, muscled, swarthy, had the faces of gypsies, and were hard little bastards. They'd brought cheap sports bags with them so that afterwards they'd have clean clothes to change into. They wore plastic gloves, like a butcher would use, and stockings over their faces so that the drops of blood couldn't mark them. The man had kicked with his tied feet and the chair had toppled. He'd tried to heave himself away, frantic, his bare feet slithering on the plastic sheets, and then he'd screamed. The first blow from a pickaxe handle had battered across his lower face. Blood and teeth had spewed out. The blows broke his legs, arms and ribs, then fractured his skull. He was hit until he died and then some more.

Afterwards, while Ricky watched the man's body trussed up in the plastic sheeting, Davey lit the fire for the clothing. Charlie checked the floor, went down on his hands and knees to be certain that nothing remained.

Ricky Capel liked to keep business inside the family. He had three cousins: Davey was the enforcer and did security, Benji did thinking and what he liked to call 'strategy', and Charlie had the books, the organized mind and knew how to move money. He'd have trusted each of them with his life. The Merks were no problem, good as gold, reliable as the watch on Ricky's wrist. Charlie drove him back from the warehouse to Bevin Close and dropped him off for his shower. It had all gone well, and he would not be late lor lunch.

He put on a clean white shirt, well ironed by Joanne, and a sober lie. It was right to dress smart for a birthday celebration.

While he dressed, and selected well-polished shoes, the body was in a plain white van, driven by Davey who had Benji with him. They'd get near to the coast, park up till it was. dark, then drive on to Beachy Head.

From the cliffs there, which fell 530 feet to the seashore, they would tip the body over. The tide, Benji had said, would carry it out to sea, but in a couple of days or a week, the plastic-wrapped bundle would be washed up on the rocks, as intended, the police would be called, statements made, and then the rumours would eddy round the pubs and clubs that a man who supplied cocaine in the City had been mercilessly, brutally, viciously put to death. It would be assumed he had failed to make a payment and that this was retribution. The name of Ricky Capel might figure in the rumours – loud enough to make certain that no other bastard was late with payments.

Scented with talc and aftershave, Ricky led Joanne and Wayne, who carried the present, next door to celebrate his grandfather's birthday, the eighty-second.

Bevin Close was where he had spent his whole life.

In early 1945, a V2 flying bomb had destroyed the lower end of a Lewisham street, between Loampit Vale and Ladywell Road. After the war, the gap had been filled with a cul-de-sac of council-built houses.

Grandfather Percy lived with his son and daughter-in-law, Mikey and Sharon, in number eight, while Ricky, Joanne and Wayne were next door in number nine.

Eighteen years back, Mikey had bought his council house, freehold, and been able – after a choice day's work with a wages delivery truck – to buy the property alongside it. Ricky liked Bevin Close. He could have bought the whole cul-de-sac, or a penthouse overlooking the river, or a bloody manor house down in Kent, but Bevin Close suited him. Only what Ricky called the 'fucking idiots' went for penthouses and manor houses. Everything about him was discreet.

Rumour would spread, but rumour was not evidence.

He breezed in next door. Wayne ran past him with Grandfather Percy's present.

He called, 'Happy birthday, Granddad… How you doing, Dad? Hi, Mum, what we got?'

The voice came from the kitchen: 'Your favourite, what else? Lamb and three veg, and then the lemon gateau… Oh, Harry's missus rang – he can't make it.'

'Expect he's out pulling cod up – what a way to earn a living. Poor old Harry.'

He would never let on to his mum, Sharon, that her brother was important to him. Uncle Harry was integral to his network of power and wealth.

They were making good time, more than eight knots.

Against them was a gathering south-westerly, but they would be in an hour after dusk and before the swell came up.

March always brought unpredictable weather and poor fishing, but on board the Annaliese Royal was a good catch, as good as it ever was.

Harry Rogers was in the wheelhouse of the beam trawler, and about as far from his mind as it could get, wiped to extinction, was the thought that he had missed the birthday lunch of his sister's father-in-law.

The family that Sharon had married into was, in his opinion – and he would never have said it to her – a snake's nest… but they owned him. Ricky Capel had him by the balls: any moment he wanted, Ricky Capel could squeeze and twist, and Harry would dance.

Ahead, the cloud line settled on a darker seam, the division between sky and sea. The deeper grey strip was the Norfolk coast, and the town of Lowestoft where the Ness marked Britain's most easterly point in the North Sea. The Annaliese Royal was listed as coming from Dartmouth, on the south Devon coast, but she worked the North Sea. She could have fished in the Western Approaches of the Channel or in the Irish Sea or around Rockall off Ulster's coast, and had the navigation equipment to go up off Scandinavia or towards Scotland's waters, or the Faroe Islands – but the catches for which he was a prisoner were in the north, off the German port of Cuxhaven and the island of Helgoland. He had no choice.

He had been a freelance skipper, sometimes out of Brixham, more often out of Penzance, in truth out of anywhere that he could find a desperate owner with a mortgage on a boat and a regular skipper laid low with illness. He would work a deep-sea trawler heading for the Atlantic, a beam trawler in the North Sea, even a crabber off the south Devon coast. The sea was in his mind, body and heritage – but it was damn hard to get employment from it. Then had come the offer