Mendoccini Read online

  Table of Contents

  Article

  O N E

  T W O

  T H R E E

  F O U R

  F I V E

  S I X

  S E V E N

  E I G H T

  N I N E

  T E N

  E L E V E N

  T W E LV E

  LAURENCE TODD

  M E N D O C C I N I

  THE CHOIR PRESS

  Copyright © 2015 Laurence Todd

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

  The right of Laurence Todd to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  First published in the United Kingdom in 2015 by

  The Choir Press

  ISBN 978-1-910864-81-4

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual events in real locations or to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  O N E

  Late Friday evening

  He never knew what hit him. He’d left the pub shortly before closing time after consuming a few late-evening drinks with someone he’d been mining for information, and was walking hesitantly along the road, thinking about how useful what he’d just learned was likely to be in his investigation and also wondering whether to stop at the nearest fast-food outlet for some chips, when he felt an agonising pain in the back of his neck as he was hit hard from behind. The pain lasted only a split second as he immediately lost consciousness and dropped to the ground. He hit his head hard on the pavement’s edge and, a few seconds later, died from a massive cerebral haemorrhage brought on by the impact of concrete on bone. Even had he survived the fall he’d have been a paraplegic for the remainder of his life, paralysed from the neck downwards, as the leather sap he’d been struck with had broken his spinal cord.

  His assailant looked down at his victim and, patting the pockets, took the mobile phone, computer access key and memory stick and put them into his own pocket. After ensuring there was no pulse and satisfied his victim wouldn’t be getting up again, he turned and walked away. No one had seen what he’d just done. As he walked away he took the SIM card from the mobile, broke it in half and then dropped the pieces down a drain.

  T W O

  Saturday evening, a week later

  I was contemplating whether to have another beer. The four I’d already consumed had gone down easily, probably too easily, and, not being a particularly big drinker, as well as drinking less regularly than I used to, I was beginning to feel the effects. I was drinking Tsingtao in a restaurant in Chinatown with my partner Karen, plus Mickey Corsley and his wife Sarah, on one of our all-too-infrequent evenings on the town. I’d not seen Mickey for a while so it was good meeting up with him again. The gathering was particularly poignant as, a couple of months back, after trying for some while, Sarah had been told she was pregnant, but within a couple of weeks she’d miscarried and had sunk into depression for a time, so this evening was all about lifting her spirits and encouraging her to try again.

  I’d first met Mickey when he’d joined the Metropolitan Police straight from leaving the army. His frustration at failing to make the cut for consideration to try out for the SAS a second time had led to disillusionment with the army, so he left when his time was done. In between time he’d also made, by his own admission, a ludicrous attempt to join the French Foreign Legion and had travelled to Paris with this aim in mind but, after getting involved in a brawl with a couple of potential recruits from Algeria and coming into contact with some other recruits, he’d decided the description he’d read about the Legion being an ideal repository for the scum of the earth was apposite and he had withdrawn his application, returned to the UK and applied to join the police. He continually maintained Sarah’s ultimatum of ‘join the Legion and you lose me’ was nothing to do with his not pursuing his initial interest.

  At the time, before being promoted and transferring across to Special Branch, I’d been in CID based at West End Central. I’d got to know Mickey through our working together a few times and, with my help, he’d made his first arrests. But, even after he’d become disillusioned with the everyday reality of police work and all the attendant issues involved, and had quit to open a pub in Bayswater, we’d stayed in touch. He was a skilled fighting man, well versed in boxing as well as two forms of martial arts, and he taught self-defence classes to youngsters in a gym near to where he lived. He and I trained together occasionally.

  After deciding to hold off on another drink for the moment, I left the table to go to the gents’. I was inching my way through the crowded bar area towards the toilets and noticed someone staring at me quite intently, as if trying to place me somewhere in his mind. On my return, the same man who’d been staring at me as I’d moved through the bar area came up off the counter and stood in front of me. He was smiling broadly and looked as though he’d consumed a few more drinks than I had. He had an ecstatic look in his eyes, almost a look of wonderment.

  “Fuck, man, I thought that was you walking past just now!” he exclaimed in an excited voice. “Jesus, you don’t look any different, how long’s it been?” He was gesturing enthusiastically with his arms.

  I looked at him. He was probably my age and about an inch taller. He was wearing what looked like a very expensive set of duds: pale yellow silk shirt unbuttoned to the chest, a dark suit and a thin gold chain around his neck, plus shoes probably costing more than my week’s pay to purchase. He looked like he might be Greek or an Italian with his healthy skin, darkish complexion, two-week growth of designer stubble and shock of black curly hair, which also looked like it had been expensively trimmed.

  I looked at his face, trying to place him. He obviously knew me. I thought something about him was familiar but I couldn’t pin it down. Did I know him?

  “I’m sorry, do I know you?” I asked.

  “Robert, break my fucking heart, why don’t you?” He affected a sorrowful sigh. “Do I really look that different? Have I changed that much?”

  As he spoke I looked at his face and, as my alcoholic haze passed, it all came flooding back to me. I beamed at him. “Oh, Christ, Michael: Michael Mendoccini. How you doing, pal?”

  I was excited to see him and I went to shake hands, but he extended his arms to indicate he wanted a hug and I reciprocated. We embraced and he patted my back a number of times. His grip was firm, his back slap was solid and it felt like I was being punched in the latissimus dorsi muscles.

  “How long’s it been, eh? Where you been keeping yourself? I’ve not seen you since you went off to university about, what, fourteen years ago?” he gushed excitedly.

  “Yeah, it must be about that,” I agreed. “I’ve not seen you around for ages either. What are you doing with yourself these days?”

  “Oh, I’ve a few things on the go; some of this, a little of that, always on the move and into something. You know me. But I’m still in the family business. So, what about you; what’re you doing with yourself these days? You keeping yourself busy?”

  “I’m with the police, in the Met,” I said, trying to keep a straight face but not succeeding. “Can you believe that? Me, a copper?”

  I didn’t mention I was a DS in Special Branch. Something told me it wasn’t the right thing to do at this time, though I didn’t know what it was.

  “Police? My God, who’d have thought that? My old friend Robert’s now a law ’n�
� order man. I’d better be careful around you.” He affected a look of concern, then smiled and gestured to a woman standing by the bar. An attractive, dark-haired woman dressed in a red jacket, white blouse and black leather trousers so tight they were at risk of cutting off blood circulation in the lower half of her body teetered over to where we were, walking on heels so high and narrow it was an achievement even to keep upright, never mind walk.

  “Angie.” He nodded at me. “This is Rob McGraw, my closest friend from the neighbourhood back in the day. Haven’t seen him since forever and a few days and then he suddenly appears out of a toilet in Chinatown.” He laughed, revealing sparkling white, almost perfect-looking teeth.

  “Hello, Robert.” She held out her hand and I took it. She had a very demure voice, almost bordering on shyness. “Nice to meet you.” It was lively with talk in the crowded bar and I could barely hear her voice.

  “Nice to meet you too. What are you doing with a louse like this?” I patted him on the arm. “Good-looking woman like you, you can do much better for yourself, you know.”

  We all laughed. She held on to his arm.

  “So, how’s your old mum?” he asked. “You be sure to tell her I still remember her cooking and all those times she bollocked me for getting you drunk.”

  We discussed family memories for a couple of minutes.

  “Look, I can’t talk too much now, I was just ordering another round of drinks. I’m with those people over there by the window table.” He nodded across the room to a group of people sitting at a table near to the main entrance and with a view out into Gerard Street. I looked across to them. At a guess there were probably ten, twelve people sitting around the large table. Most looked unfamiliar. I saw one face I thought I recognised, but was only able to look for a few moments as, when he saw me looking, he turned away, and I didn’t want to make it too obvious I was staring at him.

  “But it’s great seeing you again. Let’s keep in touch, eh? You got a number I can reach you on, other than 999?” He smiled wickedly.

  “Yeah, I have.”

  I took my notebook from the inside pocket of my jacket, tore out a page and scribbled down my landline and mobile numbers. He folded the page and slipped it inside his wallet, which was leather and looked expensive.

  “Who’re your friends?” I nodded innocently towards the table. I was curious as to who it might have been I thought I’d recognised.

  “Ah, just business associates mainly, nobody exciting. Anyway, it’s good seeing you again, Rob. I’ll be in touch soon, definitely. We’ll have to go out, have a few beers and catch up. It’s been much too long, man.” He shook my hand and patted my shoulder with his left hand.

  “Yeah, do that. I’ll look forward to it.”

  Angie smiled at me as they turned and walked back to the table they had places at. Looking at Angie walking, I was wondering if she’d make it home without ankle splints.

  Back at the table, I explained to my friends who I’d just been talking to at the bar. Michael Mendoccini had been my closest friend all through my adolescence. We’d met at school in year seven, at the beginning of our first year at grammar school, as his family had just moved to my hometown. We ran with the same crowd when we were kids, playing football and getting up to the kinds of mischief a group of high-spirited kids inevitably did – scrumping apples, riding bikes the wrong way down a one-way street and the occasional shoplifting of small handfuls of sweets from the corner shop near to where we lived – which usually stopped just this side of blatant, outright illegality, if the definition is given a loose interpretation. We’d stopped altogether when one of our crowd was caught stealing by his parents and roundly chastised for this transgression.

  As we moved further into teenagerhood we played for school sports teams and drank beer whilst underage, buying it from the same corner shop we’d previously stolen from. The proprietor, a one-eyed ex-sailor called Ernie Shellard, knew we were all underage but reasoned we were probably going to buy cheap beer somewhere and drink it anyway, so if we had money to spend, he might just as well relieve us of it as anyone else. He saw it almost as a philanthropic gesture on his part. Later on I suspected it was his way of getting his own back for all the pilfering we’d done in his shop as he was hoping we’d be caught drinking it someplace.

  Sadly for our little gang, we became young teenage lads right on the cusp of the revolution in technology and laptops and computer games suddenly became prevalent in teenage lives, which meant after a while some of our circle began to prefer staying indoors to play with their home entertainment games like Pac-Man, Mario and Sonic the Hedgehog, and watch DVDs on their laptops in their bedrooms. One by one our friends stopped coming to football and rugby training and hanging out, and then stopped coming out altogether, and gradually our little gang began to grow apart.

  But Michael Mendoccini and I had stayed friends and, as we moved into young adulthood, became very close friends, to the extent that we considered each other the brother neither of us had. We spent a lot of time together; watched football, chased the same girls, with him attracting far more than me, saw lots of films and began having quite pretentious debates about the state of the world and how we could rectify everything as we began our studies for the exams that’d get us into university. At that time the idea of a career as a police officer hadn’t taken root and I was unsure where I’d end up after studying, but Michael Mendoccini was adamant he was going to be rich and wasn’t going to spend his working life as someone’s dogsbody. His father was a businessman, importing and exporting speciality Italian foods and wines to sell in his shop, and, when he was seventeen, Michael decided to follow his father into the world of commerce, rather than go to university. He dropped out of school before completing his A-levels and began working for his father. I passed my exams and went on to King’s, London, to read Law and Politics. When I returned home at the end of the first term, I was told by Michael’s family that he was away working in Italy and wouldn’t be back for a few months, so we didn’t meet up at Christmas.

  He wasn’t at home the next few times I visited and, gradually, the disappointment of his not being around whenever I came back home began to dissipate. The year I graduated I’d not even bothered going to his house and we lost touch with each other. After graduation I’d joined the Met. I now lived in London and, up till a few moments back, hadn’t seen him for well over a decade.

  But there he was, at the bar of a Chinese restaurant, holding on to the arm of an attractive woman and as large as life as I remembered him. I hoped he didn’t lose my numbers as I was looking forward to meeting up with him again. Mickey was more impressed with the legs on the woman he’d been with and asked why I hadn’t asked for her number instead, which earned him a not-quite-playful slap from Sarah.

  T H R E E

  Monday

  Two weeks ago, Simon Addley had been arraigned at the Old Bailey on charges of conspiracy to cause explosions, contrary to section six of the Terrorism Act 2006, as well as engaging in acts preparatory to terrorism, which was ironic as he and his brother Colin had both been acquitted in the same court on similar charges in the summer of last year. This time, the issue was more straightforward and there was none of the previous drama of their being released by a judge who’d not been satisfied a fair trial could occur because tainted evidence had been allowed to be presented against them.

  After some lengthy pre-trial negotiations between the law officers of the Crown and MI5, both keen to prevent particularly sensitive information from being made known, Simon Addley was persuaded not to contest the charges and plead not guilty, which had been his original intent. This would have meant a jury trial and large parts of the trial being held in camera, with the possibility of press speculation and informed leaks to the media. For cooperating, Addley was sentenced to only twelve years in prison after pleading guilty to the slightly lesser charges brought against him. Given the weight of the evidence, any other plea would have been futile and, quite like
ly, mean a lengthier sentence for wasting the court’s time.

  Colin Addley, because of his role as my boss’s informant, had not been charged. His contribution to preventing a terrorist atrocity had been recognised because it had kept police and security one step ahead of the plan. That he’d not been charged wasn’t made known as his role as an informant had to be kept hidden, both from his brother and from others associated with the terrorist group Red Heaven. Colin had been relocated and given a new identity.

  Simon didn’t know this. He’d been told his brother was being tried separately because of the sensitivity of the case and, because of the media blackout imposed on reporting the trial, he thought his brother was in prison elsewhere. It was an elaborate ruse but secrecy was essential.

  The true facts behind the case were never made known and much of the limited evidence presented never made it into the press as the bulk of the trial was held in camera. Christine Simmons, despite playing a pivotal role in the events leading to the arrest and trial, hadn’t been asked to give evidence, though she’d submitted a lengthy statement which was part of the evidence presented by the Crown against Simon Addley.

  As the senior of the two arresting officers, I’d appeared as a prosecution witness after Addley had entered his guilty plea, and my version of events was largely accepted. There’d been no hostile cross-examination by defence counsel. I’d simply answered a few questions about procedure put by counsel for the prosecution and, eventually, Simon Addley had been sent down to become a category-A prisoner in Belmarsh, a maximum-security prison.

  I was now attempting to catch up on what I’d missed whilst being in court. There were reports to complete, a couple of routine and ultimately pointless meetings to attend and a few people to confer with about a number of ongoing investigations. I’d brought my boss, DCI Smitherman, up to speed about what had gone down in court and he was pleased Simon Addley was now safely behind bars. He was happy with my account and the role I’d played in helping to send self-styled urban guerrilla Simon Addley to prison for the next twelve years. Red Heaven, the group whose philosophy Addley had subscribed to, had largely evaporated in the UK after the failure of the plot. Several of its previous adherents had gone to ground and there were no reports of the group’s being active any longer. We could but hope.