The Crime Trade

30

At 8.20 a.m. that morning, Paul Richards — a small-time, north London-based career thug with links to organized crime whose claim to fame was that he’d once bitten another man’s ear off in a fight — received the confirmation he was looking for. He’d been standing just inside the tree line for the last three hours, facing a large, modern, white brick bungalow set well back from the road south of the village of Blindley Heath, and he was cold and tired, the early-morning sun having done little to warm his creaking bones. He’d already seen a man in his thirties, dressed in a white rollneck jumper and black leather jacket, come into the kitchen and make a cup of tea an hour earlier, before disappearing again; and then, just as he’d been thinking about going off to find a roadside caff for a much-needed cup of his own, he’d watched, smiling, as Jack Merriweather appeared in the kitchen window wearing a white dressing gown, his shiny bald head still wet from the shower. He too began to make himself a cup of tea.

Bingo. Richards reached into his pocket, pulled out his mobile and made the call his boss had been waiting for.

‘Make the most of it, Jackie,’ he whispered when he’d finished, watching Merriweather sip his tea and share a joke with the copper in the rollneck who’d come in behind him. ‘This is the last morning you’re ever going to see.’