LITMIR.BIZ

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they were still following him, there was no way they could know what he was up to at this moment. He checked his rear-view mirror, but it was half past nine at night: the streets, which were dark and wet from the rain that had fallen earlier, were deserted.

      ‘It could be you’re flattering yourself,’ he said under his breath. These guys ran what amounted to an underworld corporation. ‘Don’t kid yourself into thinking you’re so important that they’ll watch you every minute of the day.’

      He told himself this with growing conviction. It was a realistic assessment of the way things were. But his hands still sweated on the steering wheel. Until this evening, everything had been fine. Now his road felt much, much darker.

      When he arrived at the Bellhop Industrial estate, it was nearly ten.

      At this time of night, there was nobody around, the corrugated metal warehouses and workshops all standing in darkness, their windows and entrances covered by roll-down security shutters. There would be CCTV in operation, of course, but Lazenby was not an unfamiliar figure on the site – he’d been a regular visitor in the three years since he’d taken out a lease here for one of the privately rented lock-ups – so if anyone was watching from a security office somewhere, or a mobile patrol made an unexpected drive-by, his presence, even at this hour, would draw no comment.

      In truth, if you wanted absolute certainty that your goods were in strong safekeeping, the Bellhop wasn’t the ideal spot – there were certainly safer facilities in Crowley, but having lots and lots of officialdom around would hardly have suited Lazenby’s purpose. In any case, from the outside, the lock-ups here looked like old garages and so were unlikely to be tampered with by opportunist thieves, while those who knew there were personals stored here would also know that, because of the low rates, it was mostly rubbish: old furniture, moth-eaten clothes, a few corroded car parts. Slim pickings indeed. Nothing worth bothering with.

      From Lazenby’s perspective, such anonymity was ideal. Because in his private little depot, along with various knick-knacks he’d installed to provide window-dressing, he also stored the bulk of his product, and just in case there was ever a real emergency, a supply of liquid cash.

      On this occasion, he approached with more trepidation than usual, turning his Galaxy slowly into the narrow lane between the last two rows of lock-ups, half expecting to find the roll-down door to No. 17 jemmied open and all his goods, or what remained of them, scattered on the tarmac – though an inner voice kept telling him that this was unlikely. No one knew that he kept his stash here. Even among his electronic records, all of which were meticulously coded, there wasn’t a single reference to it, and he’d taken out the lock-up lease under a fake identity. The only way the Crew could have come to know was if they’d been following him around, and while he suspected they’d done a bit of that, surely they hadn’t been doing it for weeks on end; he hadn’t been here for at least a month and a half.

      He rounded the corner and halted, his headlights flooding the straight ribbon of tarmac running ahead of him, the brick backs to the penultimate row of lock-ups on the left, the row of garage-like doors on the right. It was bare of life. The shutter on No. 17, which was three doors down, was locked in place, as it should be.

      Relieved, Lazenby edged his Galaxy forward. The motion-sensitive lights overhead activated. So far so normal. He drove past his own unit, and parked across the entrance to No. 16. Climbing out, he looked around and listened. The only sound was a distant thrum of night traffic. There were no voices, no metallic clatters as other shutters were opened or closed.

      He peered once more to the far end of this particular lane, seeing only the distant boundary wall. Satisfied, Lazenby opened the back door to his car, took out the overlarge sports bag that normally travelled there, and emptied his unused squash gear into the footwell; he hadn’t played squash in ages, and only kept his kit in the car as cover for keeping the bag, which he always wanted handy in case of occurrences like this. He took his keys from the ignition, closed the car and locked it, and, squatting down, opened the padlock at the base of the shutter.

      The shutter wasn’t heavy and he was able to lift it easily, its own momentum pulling it up the last few feet, at which point a steel catch clicked into place.

      The interior of the lock-up was rectangular, about twenty-five feet by twelve, enclosed by breeze-block walls. When he hit the light switch, an electric bulb shuddered to life, exposing what he thought of as his ‘knick-knacks’ but which, in reality, was a clutter of junk expanding wall to wall and comprising all the odds and ends he’d assembled over the last few years: from disused garden furniture and dated, dust-coated office-ware, to boxes of second-hand books that he’d bought cheaply at auction for this sole purpose. Even the hooks on the walls had come in handy, and now dangled with rusted, cobwebby tools, both of the garden and DIY variety.

      The good stuff was right at the back, but even if some intruder managed to navigate his way through to that distant point, all he would see, jammed between a rusty fridge and a stack of propped-up bamboo matting, were two ratty old armchairs. The one on the left had a cardboard box crammed with video tapes on top of it, but underneath this, and underneath the cushion, the chair’s base had a false bottom, and a hidden compartment in which there was a steel strongbox containing twenty rubber-band-wrapped blocks of clean twenty-pound notes, each one totalling around £8,000, an overall sum of one hundred and sixty grand. The chair on the right was weighed down by a long-broken television, but the strongbox concealed inside it contained the real gold in Lazenby’s stockpile: eight one-kilo bricks of cocaine wrapped in cellophane, the street value of which came to just under half a million pounds.

      He unzipped his sports bag and went first to the chair on the right, loading the bag with the eight bricks of coke. When he’d finished, he moved to the chair on the left. One-sixty K wasn’t humongous money in gangland terms, but it would serve to give him some kind of safeguard, a final fall-back if everything else went pear-shaped. He got it all into the bag, which was now heavy and cumbersome, but he was still able to zip it closed and lug it back through the junk and out into the fresh air, where he humped it round to the Galaxy’s boot.

      He wasn’t overly keen on taking this stuff home with him, but it would only be for one night – tomorrow he’d find somewhere else, somewhere better.

      ‘That would be ours, wouldn’t it?’ a muffled voice said.

      Lazenby spun around, startled.

      Two men faced him from about ten feet away.

      He hadn’t heard them approach, which was probably no surprise given that he’d been banging around inside the lock-up, lost in his thoughts. But even if he had, it didn’t look as if there’d have been much he could do – their intentions were pretty clear.

      The one on the left was of average height and broadly built, while the one on the right was equally broad but a little taller. Both wore dark clothing, including black leather jackets, but also scarlet woollen ski-masks with holes cut only for their eyes. Each was armed with what looked distinctly like a sub-machine gun, the two weapons levelled on him.

      Strangely, almost as quickly as the shock had hit Lazenby, it subsided.

      All along, he’d perhaps expected something like this. It hadn’t seemed terribly probable, not in that safe, average, everyday world that Lazenby’s success had lulled him into believing he still occupied. But there’d still been that constant, nagging doubt, which is why the stuff had been ready to move at a moment’s notice.

      ‘What … what do you mean, this is yours?’ he stammered, breathing hard from his exertion. He hadn’t yet given up on the idea that a deal could be made. Maybe they were simply testing him here?

      ‘Just what we say, arsehole,’ the taller one said. ‘The bag.’

      As if to emphasise that this wasn’t a joke, the shorter one raised his weapon to chest height and squinted along its barrel. Helpless to do otherwise, Lazenby rocked forward on the balls of his feet, and hurled the heavy sports bag over the two or three yards between them.

      The taller one let his firearm swing from a shoulder strap while he hunkered down and tugged the holdall’s

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