Body Blow by Peter Cocks

Author:Peter Cocks [Cocks, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781406339765
Publisher: Walker Books Ltd.
Published: 2012-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-NINE

Donnie’s new shoes were pinching.

He was seriously pissed off. The day before, he’d driven up to El Corte Inglés, the department store just outside Málaga, and bought himself a nice new pair of daisy roots. They were soft leather, like before – Spanish, but in the low light of a dark club they could be mistaken for Gucci. In the shop he’d thought they fitted like a glove, but today, after walking around in the heat, they were nipping his toes on one foot and rubbing the heel of the other into a blister.

He’d really bought them so he’d have something new and smart to wear to the birthday party, but it wasn’t until he had phoned Terry Gadd the night before that he realized he wasn’t invited.

“You may be back in,” Gadd had said, “but you’re staff, Don. Not family.”

The rejection had hurt. The bottle of single malt he’d bought for Patsy was unwrapped and consumed. In England he had definitely been part of the family: a long-serving driver, hit man and minder, trusted enough to ferry Tommy Kelly’s wife and kids around. Trusted enough to murder anyone who got in the way.

To be rejected by the younger brother was a big, dry slap in the face.

By Saturday lunchtime, Donnie consoled himself by driving down to the beach and paddling his hot, sore feet in the surf. A couple of beers later, he was feeling marginally better and after a few more he began to feel human. Or as close as he ever got.

By six in the evening he was rolling drunk, walking from bar to bar, propping up various counters and smoking, talking to anyone who dared communicate with a drunk who looked as if he could walk through brick walls. Donnie barely noticed the sirens that raced up into the hills as the sun began to set, stuck as he was in a drunken conversation with an English bloke in a bar.

His tongue loosened by beer, vodka, wine, brandy and cocaine, Donnie found himself overcoming his dented pride by bragging.

A lot of them did it down here, Donnie knew, bigging themselves up to make it sound like they were connected; blokes who boasted that they had worked with the Krays years back, as if that still gave them protection. If everyone who reckoned they’d played a part in the Brink’s-Mat gold bullion robbery had actually been there, there would have been about a thousand villains on the job. The Brink’s-Mat robbery of twenty-five million pounds’ worth of gold bars from Heathrow Airport, back in the 1980s, had certainly set a few up in business – but not even a tenth of those who claimed to be connected.

Donnie had never mouthed off like that. He had never needed to, as he’d always been confident about his protected place in the Kelly firm. And the ruthlessness of the Kellys had never been in question, nor its bankrolling of jobs. The Kelly firm had been pivotal in making the Brink’s-Mat job come off but had never felt the need to boast.

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