They Thought I Was Dead: Sandy’s Story

2 26 July 2007 — Roel Albazi

Roel Albazi was forty-seven years old, stocky and squat, and dressed in mismatched Versace. He was Albanian and had lived in England for many years. He had a shaven head, tattooed neck and a pencil-thin moustache that ran down either side of his mouth to his chin. Adorned with a gold necklace, big rocks on his fingers and a bling watch, he sat outside the pizza restaurant in Shoreham High Street that was one of his legitimate business fronts, sipping a macchiato and smoking his short cigar, which was nearly down to the stub.

He had the physique of the kind of non-negotiable muscle you’d find outside any nightclub door on the planet. From a distance he looked a thug and not a man with a degree in international law. A hard man, you’d think. Not someone who would be afraid of anyone.

Until you looked closer and saw his frightened eyes.

He was very afraid right now of one person. Her name was Song Wu. She was a lot richer than him, a lot more ruthless and a lot more powerful. And she owned him — pretty much — since making his company, Albazi Debt Recovery International, an offer he should have refused but could not, three years ago. The offer had been a vastly lucrative contract to work for her company exclusively.

It had been an invitation to sup at the Devil’s table, he was well aware of that, but he thought he could handle it. The money on that table just too good to turn down.

And the deal had been too good to last.

And at this moment he was in deep trouble with Song Wu.

There was a rumour that she liked to have people who crossed her — or defaulted on her — cut up alive, and then she watched the videos. But Roel Albazi knew it wasn’t just a rumour.

Before his rise from mere debt collector to Fu Shan Chu in the triad run by Song Wu — effectively, in Mafia terms, her underboss — she’d made him watch the video of his predecessor. It was an hour long and involved kitchen knives, a rotary bandsaw and a chainsaw. The man was still conscious fifty-five minutes into the procedure. His mistake had been trying to broker a deal with another employee to siphon off some money. He didn’t understand about loyalty. This employee was Chinese, and Albazi’s predecessor fatally did not get the way the triad connections worked, and how a Chinese person would always be loyal to another Chinese person over a westerner.

Song Wu was third-generation English, but she was still as pure Chinese as the day her family had left Hong Kong back in 1954. Her father had amassed an empire of thirty-five restaurants and takeaways across the south of England, twenty Chinese grocery stores and a wholesale business supplying Chinese restaurants around the UK.

Privately educated at one of the nation’s poshest girls’ schools, she had reacted to racist bullying with a ferocity that soon made other pupils steer well clear of her, and she found she enjoyed both the power and inflicting pain. Within five years of her father’s death, she had added a dozen more restaurants, a string of launderettes, two fully legal casinos in England and another five around Europe, as well as seven stone of body weight to her existing twelve. She liked an excess of food, but she liked an excess of money even more. She was a glutton for cash. Profits made her eyes light up; losses made her face flame. Nothing melted the ice that was her heart.

She had two brothers who were directly beneath her in the family hierarchy but dealt with other areas of her business. Silent figures in the shadows who executed their sister’s instructions with precision. Albazi wasn’t aware of anyone who admitted to knowing them, or even having seen them, but everyone in the Song Wu organization feared them.

It was from the Casino d’Azur group that she hauled in the biggest gains — but only in part from the actual gaming tables. The highest margins came from her business model of loaning cash to gamblers who had run out of luck. They were given big loans, always short term, with interest rates of fifty per cent per month. Defaulters were sent a video of someone being tortured, which self-erased after one viewing. Most paid up pretty fast, finding the money somehow. And that was partly because Albazi vetted the people the Casino d’Azur lent to very carefully in advance. He made sure they had assets they could turn to, in desperation. Assets such as the unmortgaged portion of their homes.

But at this moment, Albazi was a worried man. Two people he’d approved big loans to in the past three months had, separately, done a runner, and Song Wu had not been happy. Albazi knew she suspected he was lying to her and had cut some kind of a deal with these people behind her back. Now this third person wasn’t showing up either, and he was feeling physically sick at the thought of having to tell Song Wu. She was going to be even more certain he was double-crossing her.

Every five minutes Albazi methodically checked his watch and each of the three phones lined up on the metal table. Traffic streamed past. Pedestrians streamed past. But there was no sign of her. And no message.

She had given him her word. Assured him. They had an appointment. An assignation. At 12 p.m. today she was going to turn up with the £150K she owed him.

It was now 12.20 p.m. Then it was 12.25 p.m. Then 12.30 p.m.

Yet again he checked the middle phone, the one she had the number for, the one they always spoke or texted on. No message.

Bitch.

He stubbed out the cigar in the ashtray. She might think she was clever, but it wasn’t clever not to pay him. Sure, the interest rates were high, but so they should be as he never took security for the loans. All of them were on trust and he made sure he collected what he was owed. Always. However long it took. His customers paid either with cash or with their homes or with their lives. He preferred the cash but killing a debtor — and very publicly — served as a great warning to others. Call it a marketing cost.

He picked up the phone on the left and dialled. It was answered almost instantly.

‘Sandy Grace,’ Albazi said. ‘Find her. Now.’