Private London (Private 4)

He was referring to Sam. They didn’t get on. ‘Sam doesn’t touch them – you know that.’

‘Yeah, I know that. Wuss.’

‘Say that to his face.’

Gary grinned. ‘I would if I could reach that high.’

I drained the Corona and he did likewise with two deep swallows of his ale.

‘I don’t know how you can drink that stuff. It looks like pond water.’

He stood up and slapped my shoulder. ‘It’s the canonical ale, Dan. Puts lead in your pencil – and might in your mitre.’

We took Gary’s car. Nothing too flash on the outside: an oldish Mercedes saloon. A three-litre S320 about fourteen years old – you could probably pick one up for under a grand.

You wouldn’t get one like this, though. Gary had tweaked it a little. Putting the kind of muscle under the bonnet that can get you from nought to sixty in the time it takes a patrol cop to switch on his siren, and out of sight before he’s made it into third gear. It wasn’t registered to him and he never made the mistake of boy-racering it through town. Time would come when its secret powers would be needed and when that time came he would make a nice little earner out of it.

Gary always drew a line between business and pleasure. That was what marked the difference between the professionals and the amateurs in his game.

You could feel the sheer power of the engine, though, even as it purred in low gear through Marylebone High Street. But it was muscle of a very different kind that had brought me to see Gary Webster.

The killing kind.

Chapter 55

TEN MINUTES LATER we were in a lock-up about a quarter of a mile from Gary Webster’s garage.

The place wasn’t registered in his name. Was registered, in fact, to a bogus person in a bogus company should anyone want to look too closely.

Gary pulled the door shut behind him and flicked on the overhead strip lights. In the centre of the room was an almost new Jaguar XK five-litre V8 convertible. About seventy-three grand and upwards the last time I looked at one in the windows of the showroom in Berkeley Street, Mayfair.

I’m pretty sure it wasn’t there waiting to have its wheels balanced and a bit of detailing done.

Gary led me past the car to the back of the lock-up. An old-fashioned safe was to one side amidst a pile of used motor parts. He spun the dial and opened the safe, taking out a pump-action shotgun and a semi-automatic pistol that he handed to me. I slipped them into a holdall I had brought along for that purpose.

He reached in again and brought out a couple of boxes of ammunition, which I put in the bag as well. Then I pulled up one of the towels that I had put into the bag earlier to cover everything and zipped the bag closed.

‘Is it a good idea keeping stuff like this here, Gary?’ I asked.

‘The wife doesn’t like them at home.’

‘You’re not married.’

‘Anyway. They’re not here any more.’

‘Just a couple of days.’

‘You use them, you lose them.’

‘Goes without saying.’

‘Yeah, well, a lot of things best said go unsaid.’

‘You turning philosophical on me?’

Gary gave me a quizzical look, building up to it. Anyone else it would have been no questions asked. But Gary Webster and I had been best friends at school and, even if we hadn’t seen a lot of each other over the years since, it was still a bond that would never be broken. We had both had to watch each other’s back too many times for that.

‘So …’ he said finally. ‘You going to tell me what the gig is?’