They Thought I Was Dead: Sandy’s Story

6 Early July 2007 — Roel Albazi

They called him Tall Joe, although he was actually very short. Two inches shy of five feet, with a shaved head, snooker-ball shiny, and the body of a Sumo wrestler, he looked even shorter than his height. He had a problem with walking, due to knackered hips from too many fights, so that he strode along in a kind of pendulum motion that had something of the drunken sailor about it, swinging each leg past him and then sort of throwing his body forward. It looked pretty clumsy, but that was deceptive. Nothing about Tall Joe was clumsy. Joe Karter was a man of precision.

He was also a man of light and dark. On the light side, he was scrupulously polite, funny and charming — charming so long as you paid what you owed, when you owed it. On the dark, he was an aikido eighth dan black belt who had killed two men with his bare hands — and five in more painful ways — permanently disabled another eight, and had become a legend in prison, when serving lengthy time for GBH, by throwing a fridge down two flights of stairs, during a tantrum.

Not many people ever messed with Tall Joe Karter, which was why Roel Albazi employed him. If you owed money to Albazi’s boss, Song Wu, when Joe Karter, always dressed in a suit and tie, looking like an overgrown schoolboy, knocked on your door, you paid it, or you made arrangements, fast. Albazi, and his associate, Skender Sharka, always ensured that any of their debtors who had fallen behind were made aware of Tall Joe Karter’s CV.

Albazi was stressed before he picked up the phone to call Joe, and the fact that his bagman was sounding so calm was making him even more stressed. Not just one but two people he’d given substantial loans to, to cover their gambling debts, had gone missing — done runners. And Joe was in the middle of sodding nowhere, in his car, cheerfully telling him that he didn’t know where they were.

The wife of one, Alan Mitten, who owed £30,000, plus £15,000 of interest, had just told Joe that she hadn’t seen her husband in three weeks and even if she never saw him again it would be too soon. She’d been served a foreclosure notice from the mortgage company, her car had been repossessed and the bailiffs were coming this afternoon to take their furniture. So far, Skender Sharka was making some headway but not quickly enough. Although he was confident of finding him within the next twenty-four hours.

Tall Joe was even more hopeful about the other, Robert Rhys, a lawyer who owed £25,000 plus £15,000 interest. He was close to getting an address. And as soon as Rhys was located, Karter said he would meet him to arrange a payment plan.

‘What payment plan do you have in mind?’ Albazi quizzed.

‘I’ll ask him which bone of his body he would least like me to break, boss,’ Tall Joe replied in his deep, cheeky-chappie voice. ‘So I’ll break another one — a toe or a finger — and tell him I’ll break another one every twenty-four hours, saving the one he really doesn’t want me to break to last, until he’s paid. He’ll pay tomorrow, boss, I’m confident.’

‘He’s a card player, isn’t he, Joe?’

‘Poker.’

‘So he won’t want you to break his fingers, will he?’

‘He won’t, boss.’

Albazi thanked him and hung up, fretting about Alan Mitten. He was a double-glazing salesman and his employers hadn’t heard from him for over two weeks. At least Robert Rhys had decent employment, a partner in a small firm of solicitors. He would have equity in the firm, although the fact that he was in his late forties and living in a flat gave a clue to his gambling habit, that maybe he’d never amassed enough to afford a house. Gambled it all away. Hopefully Tall Joe would work his magic. Poker with your fingers in splints would not be a good prospect.

He leaned back in his swivel chair in his sixth-floor, white-carpeted penthouse office above his restaurant. It had a magnificent picture window view to the south across the river Adur to the houseboats on the far side and the English Channel beyond, and another across Shoreham High Street to the north. He pulled up a map on his screen. His loyal right hand, Skender Sharka, towered over him, looking down at it, too.

Sharka, a freak of nature, was six foot six tall and totally hairless. He’d been nicknamed ‘Deve’ at school, which translated into English as ‘Camel’, because he had two lumps on his skull. He was a gentle person, gentle in all he did, gentle even when he killed.

They’d worked as a team for the past decade, he, Sharka and Tall Joe, collecting debts that weren’t legally enforceable — mostly drug debts — and then Albazi had been approached by a representative of Song Wu with the proverbial offer he could not refuse. Although subsequently he had realized the offer was too good to be true.

The tracking system of locating his debtors, devised by Sharka, was highly effective. People in hiding generally did not travel far. Those who needed to hide in a hurry rarely went out of their comfort zone. Albazi had had enough debtors go bad over the years to warrant his investment in the latest technology, with algorithms created by Sharka, whose principal method of tracking people was through payments to a source on the internet who had access to all the different phone companies’ records. By cross-referencing numbers, he’d been able to see the burner phones each had bought in the mistaken belief these would make them invisible and impossible to track. It worked so brilliantly Albazi had only ever lost one completely. But he had dealt with that swiftly, by having the man’s parents and then grandparents, back in Albania, tortured and murdered.

Now, Song Wu was not happy with him, and he cursed himself for getting reckless. In truth, he hadn’t done the full due diligence he would normally do on a customer before lending them the money, he had come to rely too much on his debt-collecting abilities. On top of Mitten and Rhys, and with Sandy Grace playing games, the situation was a whole lot worse.

He sometimes felt his relationship with the Song Wu organization was like being a man trapped in a watery cul-de-sac with a crocodile. So long as he kept throwing it chickens, the crocodile would keep smiling. And all the time growing bigger and needing more chickens...

‘So where is she right now, Skender?’ he asked.

From the moment, a month ago, when Sandy Grace had first defaulted on a repayment instalment to his boss, Tall Joe had placed a tracking device on her car. It was a magnetic transponder, attached beneath the boot, so small she would only have found it if she had been searching for it specifically. Its current location showed as a small blue dot on a map on the computer.

‘Brighton, boss. Looks like she’s in Churchill Square car park.’

Albazi studied the screen carefully as he drilled a hole in the tip of a Cohiba Robusto, then put the stubby cigar in his mouth without lighting it. ‘So she might be trying to get the cash together, as she promised. One hundred and fifty thousand pounds in cash — in fifty-pound notes. Her time is running out. Let’s hope she’s taking the threats seriously.’

Albazi lit his cigar carefully with his gold Dunhill, turning the end over and over in the flame until it was burning evenly. His face disappeared in a cloud of blue smoke. His disembodied voice said, ‘So wait. Watch the blue dot. Tell me when it moves again.’

Skender assured him he would.

‘Know what’s going to happen to you and me if she fails to deliver?’

‘No, boss.’

‘You don’t want to know.’

‘OK.’

‘Which is why I’m going to tell you.’