The Crime Trade

37

Neil Vamen knew that many people considered him a violent, murderous criminal of the worst kind, but it wasn’t how he saw himself. He was a businessman, an entrepreneur; a man in pursuit of the type of financial rewards and peer respect that plenty of other people pursue every day. Yet he was the one being punished, simply for following a well-worn path. Yes, he’d used violent methods in his business dealings, and a good many people had had their lives cut short on his orders, but it was a hard world out there, and in his line of business — the supply of those goods and services the ruling powers had decreed the populace couldn’t have — violence was a necessary prerequisite for getting the job done. Neil Vamen didn’t believe that any of the people he’d had executed in the course of his long and colourful career had been wholly innocent. Some, of course, had been less guilty than others, but one way or another all had made their livings in the same nefarious underworld he operated in, and therefore had to be prepared to face the consequences.

It wasn’t even as if, by putting him behind bars, the ruling powers — those faceless bastards who made and enforced the laws — actually achieved their goal. If anything, they made the situation worse. Did crime in his manor suddenly stop the day they arrested him and broke up his powerbase? Of course it didn’t. It just meant that a dozen other young bucks — more violent because they had something to prove, and less time to prove it in — came looking for the scraps. And none, it seemed, was more violent than Nicholas Tyndall. Vamen knew Tyndall — in passing, anyway. They’d met several times when there’d been talk of a business deal involving Vamen supplying Tyndall with coke, but nothing had ever come of it. Vamen hadn’t liked him, hadn’t trusted the bastard, although even he was impressed by the way he’d moved in so quickly after the break-up of the Holtzes and his own arrest, and how quickly he’d come to dominate the manor.

In fact, Tyndall could have probably enjoyed a reasonably successful criminal career if it hadn’t been for one thing: he was up against the best. Neil Vamen might be in prison, cooped up in a cramped cell deep in the maximum security of Parkhurst, but he still knew how to pull the strings and influence events many thought beyond his control. Already Nicholas Tyndall was paying the price for trying to step into a bigger man’s shoes. Soon enough he was going to have the Colombians after him for fucking up their deal. And that was going to be the least of his worries.

As Vamen sat there now, enjoying a Montecristo cigar and a cup of Nicaraguan coffee while peering through the cell window into the morning’s spring sunshine, he felt freedom beckoning. The case against him was weak. It rested on one man. One man who so far had avoided the long reach of Vamen’s revenge, who’d escaped the attempts on his life carried out in Belmarsh, but who was now about to pay the price for attempting to save his own skin at the expense of others.

Jack Merriweather had hours to live, no more than that. Vamen wouldn’t regret his passing. They’d known each other a long time, but disloyalty was a crime more heinous than any other. Grassing to the coppers, giving evidence on their behalf. . there could only be one punishment. And with Merriweather gone, the case would collapse and he’d be released, his reputation cemented for ever as the man who could do anything.

He’d have to be careful, of course; couldn’t get too cocky. The powers-that-be would want him now, and want him badly. He’d be public enemy number one. But it didn’t matter. He was too clever for them. Always had been. And he remembered perfectly the old adage: let them hate me, as long as they fear me.

And fear him they would. All of them.

Including Tyndall.