from side to side as he crossed the Fulham Road, weaving around a pony and trap and then a car to make it to the other side. He made his way across to an alleyway, which was illuminated by the light of a single window from a block of flats. Vince squinted as his eyes adjusted to the gloom, wary of being jumped. Fulham was a rough area.
At the end of the alley, in a small, rain-lashed courtyard, was a butcher’s van. As Vince approached, two heavy-looking men, pin-stripe suits and trilby hats denoting their status as wide boys, quickly appeared from the van. The one with the pencil moustache indicated for Vince to follow them. Vince’s fingers gripped the cosh in his pocket. He might need it. As was always the case in Vince’s life, when he met someone, he’d weigh them up for their potential threat value. Could he win against them in a fight? Vince decided that he could take these two apart if he had to. But he hoped it wouldn’t come to that.
“You got it?” Moustache Man said as they swept under an awning and walked into a warehouse.
“Does it look like I’ve got it?” Vince replied, with contempt.
Moustache Man threw a look at his partner, a man with a large hooked nose and heavy eye brows. An ex-boxer, thought Vince. He thought he could still take him apart in a fight. Moustache Man was also assessing the situation. Was he losing face by being talked to in this way? Should he do something? But before he could decide on a course of action, an older voice bellowed from the recesses of the damp warehouse.
“Vince! I see you brought the crappy weather with you!”
A rotund man in a light-grey pinstripe suit appeared from the gloom and shook Vince warmly by the hand. Vince clocked that he was wearing a signet ring on each finger. It was his trademark: jewellery that could double as a knuckle duster. This was Amos Ackley – a comical-looking figure with a shiny bald head. But Vince didn’t underestimate the appearance of this man and was somewhat relieved when he got his hand back in one piece from the crushing hand shake. A handshake that was designed to intimidate. Amos Ackley was an amusingly named, but vicious, gangster and black-market trader, a man who had run most of Kensington, Fulham and Putney since 1937. As the authorities concentrated their efforts on the immediate effects of the war, the air raids, the destruction, the looting, Amos had seen his shady little empire expand, filling the darkness left by lawlessness. Now he liked to think of himself as Mr Black Market, a man who could get you anything you needed even without a ration book. He had the police in his pocket on the understanding that Amos wouldn’t commit too many open atrocities on the streets of South London. But that was fine, the only people who usually felt his wrath were gangsters further down the food chain or those civilians, as he called them, who dared to resist his attempts at extortion and blackmail.
“Bit of rain is good for you,” Vince said, smiling.
Moustache Man and Eyebrows circled round to stand either side of Amos Ackley. Vince noticed that both the heavies had a hand in their pockets. It didn’t matter if they didn’t actually have weapons in there because, like the crushing handshake before it, he knew this was being done to intimidate him. To show him who was boss.
“Now then, I’m looking forward to my Sunday lunch, Vince,” Amos smiled.
“The sirloin is out of this world,” Vince replied. “Succulent.”
Amos laughed. “Hark at you, the flaming expert.”
“I’ve had too much bad meat in my time to not know the difference, Mr Ackerly,” Vince smiled.
“And you’ve lifted a lorry full of this stuff?”
Vince knew he didn’t have to go into specifics about where it had come from. Amos wasn’t interested in provenance. “It was supposed to be filling a load of yank stomachs, but their supply chain got broken, didn’t it? I just need the three hundred and it’s yours, van included.” He knew three hundred pounds was a lot of money, but then he was selling a huge amount of premier quality sirloin steak. And in a country where meat was rationed, the sales potential of that meat was phenomenal.
Amos cracked his knuckles. A dark smile flickered over his face. Vince felt uneasy. Had he misremembered how much they’d agreed on? Or was Amos going to try to short-change him?
Or, the worst scenario of all, did Amos know what Vince was up to?
That morning, Vince Halliday had opened his eyes without getting a wink of sleep. He’d been too nervous. This was the big one. It would be a day filled with danger but, if it went well, it would end in incredible rewards. Three hundred pounds would set him up. It would allow him to get out of the rat hole where he lived and start again somewhere else. He stared at the yellowing ceiling paint and the plaster rose around the light. All being well, this would be the last time he woke up in this run-down tenement.
There was a soft tap on the door. Vince swung his thick legs off the bed and pulled up his trousers, hooking the braces over his shoulders. He opened the door a fraction, saw the friendly face of a wide-eyed girl with a battered cloche hat, and let her in.
It was Glory. Her real name was Gloria Wayland, but Vince liked calling her Glory. Although she always wore her desperately unfashionable cloche hat, Vince had never bothered to ask why. He guessed it had some sentimental value; but delving into that area had little interest for him. She was seventeen, tall and thin. Gangly from being undernourished from all her years in a children’s home in Bow. When she left at the age of sixteen, she joined the Women’s Auxiliary Army and learnt to drive an ambulance. But one night, a road near Shockley Aerodrome had been bombed and Glory crashed her ambulance into a ravine. With trauma from the accident, Glory’s army career was cut short and she found herself on Civvy Street. It was a harsh place to be, and soon Glory was penniless and living on the road. That’s when Vince had befriended her. There was no romance or sex involved, just the simple and unedifying business arrangement which Vince had found had worked with girls so well in the past. He would befriend a woman who needed help and then turn her to a life of crime. Many of Vince’s scams would require a female face: someone to lure and distract his targets. This was particularly true of the wedding-ring scam. In this caper, Vince would encourage the girl to flirt with a rich married man (the target) in a bar or restaurant. Then the girl would take the man to a rented room, with the prospect of having sex. But once there, Vince would threaten the man with violence unless the man handed over his wedding ring. Then with the wedding ring in his possession, Vince could extort money by blackmail from the rich man, threatening to give the ring to the man’s wife and to explain how he’d come by it.
Glory was fairly good at the wedding-ring scam and they’d worked it successfully four times together. But just as often, she failed, due to her awkwardness and lack of confidence, to lure the man to the room. She knew that Vince had her on borrowed time. She had to prove her worth to him soon or she’d be replaced and out on her ear.
“Is it too early?” Glory asked.
Vince shook his head. “Haven’t slept a wink anyway.”
“Me neither,” Glory said nervously.
Vince pulled a suit jacket over his shirt. The fabric was shiny and old. He turned up the collar around his neck.
“I was thinking,” Glory said as she sat on the end of the bed. Vince looked at her sad and fragile face. “I was thinking that maybe we should just tick along as we are.”
Vince went to interject, but Glory wasn’t finished.
“I mean we’re making money each month from the wedding rings and everything.” She knew she was on thin ice; knowing that Vince wasn’t happy with her success rate.
