Revenger

10

Maninder Singh Panu had spent an hour that evening in a hospital ward, making his daily visit to his father Lakhbir’s hospital bed. Once an energetic, ambitious man, determined to improve his family’s place in the world, the older Panu now lay motionless and silent, still trapped in the coma that had held him since the night six months ago when he had been attacked by a gang of teenagers outside the Lion Market, the family’s twenty-four-hour store in Netherton Street. A flying brick had caught him on the side of his head. A fifteen-year-old boy called Jaden Crabbe had thrown it. Jaden had been coming to the shop since he was knee-high, buying sweets for himself or running errands for his mum. Now he was at one of the new high-security young offenders’ units the government had recently set up, the doctors were threatening to turn off Lakhbir Panu’s life support, and Maninder was ready to start fighting back.

He’d got together with some of the other local traders and restaurateurs to form the Netherton Street Self-Help Association. Since the law was no longer willing or able to guarantee their safety, they were going to have to do it themselves. They’d borrowed a motto from The Three Musketeers: ‘All for one and one for all.’ From now on, an attack on any one of their businesses would be treated like an attack on them all, and everyone would respond. The couple that ran the pub had a regular who knew some old-school villains who were no happier with the riots than anyone else. Proper professionals knocking off a posh jeweller’s shop or a Securicor van was one thing. Gobby little knobs going round wrecking local people’s lives, that was quite another. They’d handed out pump-action shotguns, guaranteed untraceable, to anyone that wanted them.

The idea of firing a gun at someone scared the hell out of Maninder Panu. But ending up a vegetable in a hospital bed scared him even more. He was a Sikh and thus a member of a proud warrior race. He told himself that if he had to fight to preserve the business his family had sweated for years to build, then that was what he was going to do. He was getting married in three months’ time. He didn’t want his wife-to-be thinking that her fiancé was a coward.

He was manning the Lion Market tonight with his cousin Ajay. Unlike Maninder, who was a short, slightly overweight man in his late thirties, Ajay was a decade younger, well over six feet tall, built like the proverbial brick outhouse and blessed with a magnificent, uncut beard that Long John Silver would have envied. Ajay had placed a baseball bat behind the counter. If anything should ever kick off, he was relying on his fearsome appearance to be sufficiently intimidating to put anyone off attacking him. In truth, he had no more skill or experience as a fighting man than Maninder. But he too was not prepared to take another backward step.

Both men were reassured by the knowledge that if there was any sign of trouble, they could text the other members of the Self-Help Association and know that they would be on their way.

So far, the Panus had never had to ask for that help. Both cousins prayed that tonight would be no exception.

Bakunin’s operation began shortly after seven o’clock, with a break-in at a refuse-company depot off the Walworth Road, three miles from the Lion Market where Maninder and Ajay Panu were quietly going about their business. Six armed, masked men approached the security guard in his booth by the main gate, and he was gone before they’d even got within thirty metres of him. He didn’t need telling that the guns they were holding weren’t just for show, and he wasn’t going to get himself killed for a job that only paid six quid an hour. The men entered the abandoned booth and opened the steel gates. One of them worked at the depot, and led them to the office where the keys to the trucks were kept. It was empty at this time of night, like the rest of the place.

The six intruders went straight to the two units to which the keys belonged, started them up and drove out of the depot. Before it turned on to the road, one of the trucks paused for long enough to let a passenger get out, go to the abandoned guard’s booth and close the gates behind them. The garbage trucks joined the traffic on the Walworth Road, heading north towards Elephant and Castle, where they turned sharp left, almost doubling back on themselves, down Kennington Lane. They were heading for the industrial estate on Nine Elms, close to the Cringle Dock recycling centre. They planned to park up there for half an hour or so, and keep a low profile till it was time to go to work.