Page 103 of Troubled Blood

The unsmiling assistant pointed Strike toward the left. Muttering apologies, Strike edged back out past women who were studying bottles and spraying on testers, turned a corner and saw, with relief, the pub where he was meeting Shanker, which lay just beyond the glass doors of a room full of chocolates.

Chocolates, he thought, slowing down and incidentally impeding a group of harried women. Everyone likes chocolates. Sweat was now coming over him in waves, and he seemed to feel simultaneously hot and cold. He approached a table piled high with chocolate boxes, looking for the most expensive one, one that would show appre­ciation and friendship. Trying to choose a flavor, he thought he recalled a conversation about salted caramel, so he took the largest box he could find and headed for the till.

Five minutes later, another bag hanging from his hands, Strike emerged at the end of Carnaby Street, where music-themed Christmas decorations hung between the buildings. In Strike’s now fevered state, the invisible heads suggested by giant headphones and sunglasses seemed sinister rather than festive. Struggling with his bags, he backed into the Shakespeare’s Head, where fairy lights twinkled and chatter and laughter filled the air.

“Bunsen,” said a voice, just inside the door.

Shanker had secured a table. Shaven-headed, gaunt, pale and heavily tattooed, Shanker had an upper lip that was fixed in a permanent Elvis-style sneer, due to the scar that ran up toward his cheekbone. He was absentmindedly clicking the fingers of the hand not holding his pint, a tic he’d had since his teens. No matter where he was, Shanker managed to emanate an aura of danger, projecting the idea that he might, on the slightest provocation, resort to violence. Crowded as the pub was, nobody had chosen to share his table. Incongruously, or so it seemed to Strike, Shanker, too, had shopping bags at his feet.

“What’s wrong wiv ya?” Shanker said, as Strike sank down opposite him and disposed of his own bags beneath the table. “Ya look like shit.”

“Nothing,” said Strike, whose nose was now running profusely and whose pulse seemed to have become erratic. “Cold or something.”

“Well, keep it the fuck away from me,” said Shanker. “Last fing we fuckin’ need at home. Zahara’s only just got over the fuckin’ flu. Wanna pint?”

“Er—no,” said Strike. The thought of beer was currently repellent. “Couldn’t get me some water, could you?”

“Fuck’s sake,” muttered Shanker, as he got up.

When Shanker had returned with a glass of water and sat down again, Strike said, without preamble,

“I wanted to ask you about an evening, must’ve been round about ’92, ’93. You needed to get into town, you had a car, but you couldn’t drive it yourself. You’d done something to your arm. It was strapped up.”

Shanker shrugged impatiently, as much as to say, who could be expected to remember something so trivial? Shanker’s life had been an endless series of injuries received and inflicted, and of needing to get places to deliver cash, drugs, threats or beatings. Periods of imprisonment had done nothing but temporarily change the environment in which he conducted business. Half the boys with whom he had associated in his teens were dead, most killed by knives or overdoses. One cousin had died in a police car chase, and another had been shot through the back of the head, his killer never caught.

“You had to make a delivery,” Strike went on, trying to jog Shanker’s memory. “Jiffy bag full of something—drugs, cash, I don’t know. You came round the squat looking for someone to drive you, urgently. I said I’d do it. We went to a strip club in Soho. It was called Teezers.”

“Teezers, yeah,” said Bunsen. “Long gone, Teezers. Closed ten, fifteen year ago.”

“When we got there, there was a group of men standing on the pavement, heading inside. One of them was a bald black guy—”

“Your fucking memory,” said Shanker, amused. “You could do a stage act. ‘Bunsen, the Amazing Memory Man’—”

“—and there was a big Latin-looking bloke with dyed black hair and sideburns. We pulled up, you wound down the window and he came over and put his hand on the door to talk to you. He had eyes like a basset hound and he was wearing a massive gold ring with a lion’s—”

“Mucky Ricci,” said Shanker.

“You remember him?”

“Just said ’is name, Bunsen, d’in I?”

“Yeah. Sorry. What was his real name, d’you know?”

“Nico, Niccolo Ricci, but everyone called ’im ‘Mucky.’ Old-school villain. Pimp. ’E owned a few strip clubs, ran a couple of knocking shops. Real bit of old London, ’e was. Got his start as part of the Sabini gang, when ’e was a kid.”

“How’re you spelling Ricci? R—I—C—C—I, right?”

“What’s this about?”

Strike tugged the copy of Whatever Happened to Margot Bamborough? out of his coat pocket, turned to the photographs of the practice Christmas party and held it out to Shanker, who took it suspiciously. He squinted for a moment at the partial picture of the man with the lion ring, then passed the book back to Strike.

“Well?” said Strike.

“Yeah, looks like ’im. Where’s that?”

“Clerkenwell. A doctors’ Christmas party.”

Shanker looked mildly surprised.