(2005) Rat Run Read Free Page A

war worth fighting.
    I never been to Afghanistan and I'm not going to Iraq.
    But they don't seem to me as places that matter, not to me. Maybe, just possible, we can win a war in Afghanistan or in Iraq, but sure as hell we're losing the war at our doorstep. You go up to the top of block nine and look all around you. From that roof, you'll see wealth and power and Parliament, you'll see where all the big people make their money. You'll see the City - banks and insurance, you'll see the ministries, fat cats running your life - but if you look down by your feet, you'll see where the war is. The Amersham is a dump ground for dysfunctionals. You shouldn't be here, Malachy. No, you shouldn't.'
    It was seven weeks now since Ivanhoe Manners had last called by.
    Days slipped away in which Malachy went
    nowhere, spoke to no one. What drove him from flat thirteen most often was that the fridge was empty - no bread, no milk, no coffee, no meals for one. But every fourteen days, regular, the first and third Thursday of each month, he was invited next door for tea.
    That Thursday morning, Malachy Kitchen dressed in the best of the clothes bought for him at the charity shop seven months earlier, kicked off the trainers and wiped the brogues with a cloth so that their old brightness returned. He would while away the hours, lost in thoughts and pitying himself, till he heard the faint knock on the common wall. He had little else to live for.
    He washed himself. In the shower, piping-hot water cascaded down on him. Ricky Capel always had the lever turned high in the hot sector when he sluiced his body, always washed well, and the suds of liquid soap rolled from his face and chest and down his groin. His short dark hair plastered his scalp. Joanne never had the shower water turned that high: it scalded his skin, reddened it, but he had no fear of pain. Each time he took a shower, it was as if he needed to test his ability to withstand pain . . . That morning he had seen pain, another man's, and it mattered little to him. Above the shower's hiss, he heard Joanne's shout: when was he going to be ready? He did not answer. He would be ready when he cared to be ready.
    The overalls he had worn that morning, and
    Davey's, had gone into the petrol drum at the back of the warehouse, where the fire was lit so that no trace of his visit to the cavernous, derelict unit remained.
    But he always washed afterwards, and so thoroughly, because he knew of the skills of the forensic experts.
    With a towel loose round him and water dripping down, he stood in front of the full-length mirror beside the cubicle. He glowed and that brought a smirk to his rounded, child-like face. No one, not any of them in his circle, would have dared to suggest it was a baby's face, but it was untouched by lines of worry, anxiety, stress. Self-respect was everything to Ricky Capel, and respect was what he demanded. He had burned his overalls because a man had denied him respect. The man who had made that mistake was now on the road south of the capital and heading for the coast.
    He was thirty-four years old, though his complexion put him younger. He had married Joanne in 1996, and had the one child - Wayne. One of the few decisions he had allowed her was to give him that name. The boy was now seven and an overfed lump, without his father's sleek stomach line. The man who'd denied him respect was the eighth to have died under the supervision of Ricky Capel. At that young age, he controlled an area of the capital running from Bermondsey and Woolwich in the north, Eltham in the east, Catford in the south and Lambeth in the west.
    Inside that box he had authority over all matters of business he chased after. But, on Benji's advice, he had gone into the City of London at the start of the year.
    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