Revenger by Tom Cain Read Free Book Online Page A

Snoopy,’ he said.
    ‘Oi, show some respect, you cheeky sod,’ said the South London voice on the other end of the line.
    Carver laughed. ‘All right then, I’ll start again . . . Good evening, former Company Sergeant Major Schultz. How are you?’
    ‘Getting by. And yourself?’
    ‘Not too bad . . . You still on for that drink?’
    ‘I’ve got to do some business at a pub tonight, as it happens – the Dutchman’s Head, down Clapham way. We can go there, get a couple of pints in first. You getting here by cab?’
    ‘Most likely, yeah.’
    ‘Tell the cabbie it’s just behind Clapham North station. What do you reckon, half seven?’
    ‘Sounds good to me.’
    ‘And boss, keep your eyes open, yeah? There’s always kids off the estates, playing at being gangbangers. They’re just a bunch of chavvy little toerags, but they’re all tooled up with knives and that, so watch yourself, yeah?’
    ‘Understood. I’ll see you at seven thirty. And if you get there before me, mine’s a pint of London Pride.’

8
    BETWEEN THE SOUTH London districts of Battersea Park and Vauxhall nine sets of elevated train tracks run side-by-side, like a coronary artery of wood and steel twenty-five feet above the streets. Many of the buildings on either side of the tracks are council blocks, erected after the Second World War to replace the Victorian terraces that had been flattened in the Blitz.
    Donny Bakunin lived in a fourth-floor council flat in one of these blocks, though his name was not on any of the rental papers, nor the utility bills that lay unpaid on the mat beneath the front door. Bakunin was fifty-two years old. He had short, grey hair that ringed a bald spot that seemed to get wider by the day. He would never have admitted to being vain enough to have noticed, any more than he would have given any reason for the choice of his plain, metal-framed spectacles other than their extreme cheapness. His face was so lacking in flesh, the skin so tightly wrapped around his nose and cheeks and his surprisingly strong, forceful jaw that the contours of his skull were clearly visible beneath the skin. His body, too, was severely underweight.
    Bakunin was no more interested in the pleasure of good food than he was in elegant clothes, comfortable furniture or agreeable surroundings. In his mind all were trivial fripperies. So were intimate relationships of anything more than the most fleeting, functional kind. All he cared about was his own personal faith of anarchic revolution. Much like the Americans who had invaded Iraq without the slightest idea of what they would do once they had conquered it, so Bakunin had spent his entire adult life plotting the downfall of capitalism and no time whatever in planning its replacement. It was destruction that interested him, not the creation of a better world.
    Now, after more than thirty years of frustrating, even futile, activism he could finally see his end in sight. It was no longer a matter of insanely optimistic ideology to say that the West was falling apart. It was a simple statement of fact. And that, too, explained why he was not eating. He did not have time. There were so many better, more profoundly nourishing things to do.
    A phone rang on the cheap MDF desk at which he was sitting, one of half a dozen prepaid mobiles lined up in front of him.
    There were no introductions, and there was no social chit-chat. Just a voice that said, ‘You got everything sorted for tonight, yeah? Eight-fifteen, Netherton Street, SW4. Now remember: what we want is maximum damage. They can loot the shops, rip the shit out of the curry house and the Chinky takeaway, take all the money and gold from the cash converters, all that good stuff. But we’re not looking for bodies all over the place. GBH yes, murders, no. Capeesh?’
    ‘Yes,’ said Bakunin with an oddly clipped, middle-class accent.
    ‘And remember, tell your people that pub’s off-limits. No one goes near it.’
    ‘Already done it. How