The Sacred Band Ch 17

The Sacred Band - chapter seventeen.

Fighting back part 3. The gig.

Barns green, outside Birmingham - night of August 12 1956.

It was a moonless, starry night, and a few small clouds scudded across the indigo sky. Three figures stood, motionless, against the high wall they had just scaled.

They wore shapeless, hooded camouflage smocks and loose canvas trousers. On their feet were newly purchased plimsolls that would be incinerated before their footprints were discovered.

At shortly after one a.m. the lights went out on the upper floor, and only the kitchen was illuminated. Here three men, the two bodyguards and O'Brien the dog-handler, were playing a game of brag, grumbling sometimes at their luck.

They took occasional pulls at the bottle of Bushmills whiskey that they assumed the boss had left out for them.

Half an hour passed before the largest of the three men waiting by the wall walked lightly and easily across the lawn and stood outside the kitchen window for five minutes listening. His body was quite motionless.

When he made no sign, another of the hooded men went to the snoring forms of two unconscious Dobermann Pinscher guard-dogs and checked that they were in no danger of suffocation.

He smiled slightly as he reflected that the inadequacy of their training had rendered them so easily hors de combat. RAF guard dogs would never have eaten anything that did not come from their handler.

The first figure was satisfied that the three guards in the kitchen presented no threat. He walked around the house to the large French windows he had opened a couple of hours earlier.

They opened silently under the pressure of his fingers, and he walked in. The man who had checked the dogs followed a few moments later, leaving the third man on watch in the shadows beneath the wall.

The large man went silently upstairs, treading only on the extreme edges of the stairs to prevent creaking. Five minutes later he came down again, but this time he was carrying the inert figure of a man. His partner had a syringe ready with a long, fine needle.

He met with no resistance as he swabbed a spot on the left elbow of the unconscious man, slid in the needle and slowly, gently eased the plunger home. The three then took their captive and left by the garden gate. They walked down the road towards the vehicle parked a few hundred yards away.

***

Rotkoff had spent the evening playing poker with Tommy and Percy, his two bodyguards and Len the taciturn dog-handler. As a result, he had drunk rather more than his usual half bottle of his favourite Black Bush. He slept heavily for the first part of the night in the spare room where he often slept rather than disturb Sonja when he came up late.

The pressure on his bladder woke him, and he forced his reluctant eyes open. He first realised that there was something wrong when he

could not blink his eyes clear of the bleariness that made all around him look like a heavy fog, relieved only by the slightly paler area where he knew his bedroom window to be.

Puzzled, he tried and failed to lift his body from the bed. Not restraints, he realised. Once in his teens he had been tied and gagged on his father's orders and given a vicious working over, and all because he had broken a pretty whore's nose teaching the silly bitch her new trade.

Oh yes, he knew first-hand what ropes and manacles felt like.

He could expand his chest freely and he could not feel tight bands around his wrists and ankles. He simply could not move them; nor even could he move his head from side to side.

A thrill of unaccustomed fear prickled his mind. By now he was wide awake, but he found that he could not move so much as the eyes in his head.

He knew that there were people in the room. He could hear more than one person's breathing, although he could see nothing and nobody through the fog. Who could they be?

Were Cody and Roberts making a move against him? Maybe they had bribed his bodyguards to sell him out. No! They didn't have the nerve and anyway attacking him like this in his own home was not their style.

Could it be the Maltese? Those bastards would stick at nothing - but, again, not this sort of sophistication. Axes and sawn-off shotguns were more like them.

Fighting off the fog that seemed to be seeping into his brain, Rotkoff thought hard, his analytical mind sifting the possibilities, but coming up blank.

...whispering.

"He's conscious I tell you."

A low, deep voice with a South London accent.

"No; he can't be after the dose I gave him."

A thin, nasal tenor - a professional voice - a Doctor? Maybe he was in hospital. But how could he be?

"Keep your voices down. We mustn't disturb his wife and kids. You know the boss said no killings. Half the point is lost if we have to kill them. He's got to live as an example."

A Midlands voice - low pitched and vibrant with authority - this was the leader.

'The Doctor' replied, a little waspish hiss.

"They don't live very long after what we are doing to him - not more than a year or two. They can't cough and their lungs fill up with phlegm. It's a sort of slow drowning."

The leader's London voice was blandly reassuring.

"No problem. The job's done by then. We'd better get on with it and get out of here before he comes to."

Rotkoff felt he was descending into the pit of Hell. These three calm, dispassionate voices were frightening in a way no hate-filled cries or oaths would have been. They were discussing killing him as if he were a complete nullity.

Why didn't he know who they were? He had been the biggest beast in the jungle of Birmingham for some time. He had fought off all the challengers and imposed his control by bribery, violence and fear. How could they be doing this to him? What were they doing?"

Someone took his head and turned it. A cold, wet pad was pressed against the nape of his neck. He could feel a small trickle of liquid run down the side of his neck and a cold, numbing sensation came over the area. A local anaesthetic!

"Just be a minute or two now." It was 'the doctor' muttering to himself.

Powerless to resist, or even to protest, Rotkoff felt his inert tongue too big for his mouth. Cold, wrenching fear coursed through his body like an icy tide.

He felt a hard inexorable pressure against the back of his neck. Although he could not move his limbs, he could feel the hot trickle of urine spill helplessly down his legs and cool under him.

"That's it now. It will take eight or ten hours for the fibres of his spinal cord to swell, and then he will be permanently paralysed. Hope his wife will take on the job of wiping his arse for him, because he'll not be doing it for himself."

'The doctor' again. A trace of professional satisfaction in his voice. How, Rotkoff wondered, can a doctor do things like this? Aren't they bound by some sort of oath not to injure people? From the recesses of his mind the phrase 'to do the sick no harm' popped up, but he couldn't place it.

The door closed quietly and he knew he was alone. All he could hear now were the ambient sounds. Little creaks and groans - the sounds of the house moving, he assumed.

Funny how he had never noticed them before. Far in the distance he could hear the distant buzz of a car. Again he felt a warm liquid trickle down his leg, hot at first then growing slowly colder and clammier against his flesh.

As Rotkoff lay unmoving, he could hear the repetitive thump-thump of his heart beating. Faintly he could hear the swishing of the blood being forced through the tracery of tiny veins and capillaries that networked his body.

It seemed that he could feel the accretion of tiny dust particles drifting down onto the surfaces of his eyes, unable even to blink them away.

By degrees he became aware that, behind his head - out of sight - the people he had killed - the three children he had burned in their beds in a house-fire, the bent bookkeeper whose fingers he had cut off with a bolt-cutter, the two men he had slashed and jabbed to death with knives in a hotel room - were standing waiting silently; patiently.

He lay, externally, as inert as a log in a swamp. Inside he was beginning to scream; for his mother...his wife...for anyone who could take it all away.

***

At four o'clock in the morning, a frantic telephone call came to the front desk at Birmingham Central Police Station, where a Detective Superintendent had changed shifts just so that he could be there to receive such a call.

"Is that the Police?" The light, cultured voice, of what sounded like a youngish woman. An edge of fear in her voice.

"My husband has been kidnapped. His bed has not been slept in; the chauffeur and the handyman are downstairs. They seem to be drugged. My husband's bed is empty, and the front door is wide open."

"Can you give us your name and address please? A patrol car will be with you in five minutes."

"Sonja Rotkoff. My husband is an important businessman. We live at the Copper Beeches, on Mearse Lane, Barns Green. Please hurry, I'm sure every second counts."

Ten minutes later, three police cars arrived at a house in total darkness. Superintendent Torrens decided to accompany this little expedition himself.

He beckoned his sergeant forward, and there was a short, angry exchange with the gatekeeper, before the bleary-eyed man agreed to call the house.

By then lights were beginning to come on inside. Three or four minutes passed before a woman's voice answered. Only the Duty officer at Birmingham Central would have known that the thin sibilant voice with a hint of a foreign accent was not the voice he had heard on the telephone.

"I don't know what's going on here. My husband is not in the house, and there is something wrong with Baxter and Andrews Oh yes, and O'Brien the dog-man. I've called my solicitor, but I suppose you'd better come in."

By some unfortunate misunderstanding, never satisfactorily explained, the solicitor could not seem to gain access to the house.

Fuming and making increasingly strident threats to the policemen on duty outside, he sat in his Jaguar car in the driveway whilst police searchers found an empty bed, stripped of its sheets and pillows, plus some very large stashes of cash, caches of heroin and cocaine and, most important of all, firearms including two Sterling sub-machines, a Sten, various handguns and sawn-off shotguns.

Over the next month, ballistics would link the handguns to five unsolved shootings.

Finally, the Police were able to resolve the misunderstanding. Apologetically, they let the solicitor into the house and confirmed that Rotkoff was indeed missing.

Under police escort, and fulminating about illegal searches, he was led around the house and shown the various hiding places and their contents.

Meanwhile, the chauffeur and the handyman, both men with extensive juvenile criminal records for violence were detained as suspects in a possible kidnapping.

Before the solicitor could get them released on bail, their confused state made them less than usually discreet in the face of police questioning.

Stephen Rotkoff was not found until mid-day the following day, when two boys, out on their bikes, opened the back of a large furniture van parked on the runway of an abandoned wartime airfield.

They found a still, silent figure, lying in a made-up single bed staring blindly at the ceiling. Although doctors could not find anything physiologically wrong with him, he had retreated from the world into a hiding-place from which he would never return.

Sonja sold the house, emptied the bank accounts, took the children, reverted to her maiden name and moved back to Wednesbury.

***

Superintendent Torrens was ready to intervene if his colleagues got too close to the truth of what happened to Stephen Rotkoff.

In the event there was no need. The only real lead petered out when the pantechnicon was traced to a car auction in Lincolnshire a month earlier, and they discovered that an unknown purchaser who had not been asked for identification had bought it for £110 cash.

The bed was untraceable and Sonja Rotkoff confirmed that the sheets and pillows had been removed from Rotkoff's bed.

The police enjoyed a temporary but welcome respite before the Maltese took over as bosses of most of the Birmingham underworld, and the Jamaicans took the rest.

Even the Maltese, not known for nerves, moved cautiously at first. Their police informers told them all they knew about how Rotkoff had been snatched from his bed and driven into a cataleptic breakdown. They looked over their shoulders a little uneasily for some time to come.

***

After he retired, ex-Superintendent Torrens would occasionally visit Rotkoff in his bed in the mental hospital. He talked to the inert form for half an hour or so, and then went home to his wife and his dahlias.

Unaccountably, he felt a bit sorry for the poor sod, although he would never confess it to anyone. After all, he too had been a big beast in the jungle of Birmingham.

When he knew he was safe from eavesdroppers, Torrens would talk to the living cadaver with a frankness he could never share with any other soul.

"You know Stevie, what the biggest irony of the whole caper was? As long was you preyed off thieves and whores, and sold drugs to people prepared to bend the law themselves you were sitting pretty.

My mob could never really hurt you. Oh yes, we could scratch the surface, shake down a street bookie, arrest some of your girls, mop up a few of the small-fry selling eights of blow to schoolkids; but you, at your level, you were safe as houses. You had a better chance of ending up in the House of Lords than in Parkhurst.

Where you went wrong was getting civilians involved, and they fucked you over. You see, they don't play by the rules. They write their own fucking rulebook. This time they brought you down. But you and I both know that next time they could just as easily turn on the Bill. They just can't be trusted."