Chapter 67
Jason Ritchie sits at a corner table, finishing his lunch. Monkfish and pancetta, both locally sourced.
He doesn’t know quite what to do.
Jason is surprised by the changes in the Black Bridge. It is now a gastropub called Le Pont Noir, with its name written, black against gray, in minimalist lowercase font. Some of the rough edges have really been knocked off Fairhaven over the years; some of the darker corners have gone.
You and me both, Jason thinks as he sips his sparkling water.
He is thinking about the photograph. He would feel a lot safer with a gun, and twenty years ago that would have been easy.
He would have walked into the Black Bridge, talked to Mickey Landsdowne, who would have rung Geoff Goff, and before he’d finished his pint, a kid on a BMX would have delivered a brown parcel to the saloon bar and been given a packet of crisps and twenty Marlboros for his troubles.
Simpler times.
Now Mickey Landsdowne is in Wandsworth for arson and selling fake Viagra out of the trunk of his car.
Geoff Goff had tried to buy Fairhaven Town FC, lost his money in a property crash, made another fortune selling stolen copper, and was eventually shot dead on a Jet Ski.
And did kids even ride BMXs anymore?
The photograph lies in front of Jason on the table. Taken in the Black Bridge long ago. In the days before pancetta and sourdough bread.
The gang, just like it was yesterday. Laughing away like trouble wasn’t around the next corner.
Ever since he sat down, Jason has been trying to work out exactly where in the pub Tony Curran had shot that drug dealer who was down from London, trying his luck in sleepy Fairhaven.
In about 2000, was it? It was hard because they had moved a wall, but he thinks perhaps it was by the reclaimed fireplace with the locally sourced logs.
“Coffee, sir?” The waitress. Jason orders a flat white.
He remembers that the bullet had gone through the guy’s stomach, straight through the paper-thin wall, and out into the car park, where it went through the front wing of Turkish Johnny’s Cosworth RS500. Johnny was gutted, you could see it, but it was Tony, so what could he do?
Turkish Johnny. Jason has been thinking about him a lot. He is sure Johnny had taken the photograph that had been left by the body. Always had that camera with him. Did the police know? Had Johnny come back to town? Had Bobby Tanner come back? Was Jason next on their list?
The boy Tony shot had died in the end. They had often come down from London in those days. Sometimes South London, sometimes North. Gangs looking to expand, to find soft new markets.
The waitress brings his flat white. With an almond biscotti.
Jason still remembers the boy Tony had shot.
He was only a kid. He’d offered a wrap of coke to Steve Ercan in the Oak on the seafront.
Steve Ercan was a Cypriot lad, used to hang around on the fringes of the gang, never liked to get involved but was loyal.
Owned a gym now. Steve Ercan had set him up, told the young drug dealer to try his luck at the Black Bridge.
Which the boy had done, before quickly realizing his luck was out.
He was bleeding a lot, Jason remembers that, and it wasn’t fun, he remembers that too.
Thinking back, the kid must have been about seventeen, which seems young now but didn’t at the time.
Someone put him in Bobby Tanner’s old British Telecom van, and a cabbie Tony liked to use in this sort of situation drove him out to the WELCOME TO FAIRHAVEN sign on the A2102 and dumped him there.
That’s where they found him the next morning.
Too late for the boy, he was long dead, but he’d known the risks.
The cabbie got shot too, because Tony thought you could never be too careful.
That had been the end of things for Jason.
The end of it for all of them, really. It was no longer young men making money, friends having fun, pretending to be Robin Hood or whatever he had thought it was at the time.
It was bullets, and dead bodies, and police, and grieving parents.
He’d been an idiot. He’d spotted it all too late.
Bobby Tanner left soon after. His younger brother, Troy, had died on a boat in the English Channel.
Bringing drugs in, presumably, but Jason never found out for sure.
Johnny did a runner too, straight after the cabbie was shot.
And that was that. Just like that, with one bullet, those days were gone. And good riddance to them.
They say two brothers from St. Leonards now ran things in Fairhaven. Good luck to them, thinks Jason. Still keeping it locally sourced.
He walks over to the fireplace, then crouches.
Yep, this was the place, all right. He runs his finger across the reproduction antique tiles.
Take them off, keep scraping, and you’d find a little hole Mickey Landsdowne had filled in and painted over, twenty-odd years ago. The one bullet that changed everything.
There was nothing left here now, in the Black Bridge, with its memories, and with its green tea with ginseng. All the gang gone. Tony Curran, Mickey Landsdowne, Geoff Goff. Where’s that Cosworth with a hole now? Rusting somewhere in a field?
And where was Bobby Tanner? Where was Johnny? How could he find them before they found him?”
Jason sits back down and sips his flat white. Well, he supposes, he probably knows the answer to that. Has known it all along.
He sighs, dips his biscotti into his flat white, and calls his dad.