Free A Hard Woman to Kill (The DCI Hanlon Series) by Alex Howard

the company of the people he least wanted to see. The place: the back bar of the Three Compasses in Edmonton. The people: David ‘Jesus’ Anderson and Morris Jones.
    The pub belonged to the Andersons. To call it a public house was technically, but not literally, true. Admission was by invitation only. If you had walked into the scruffy, down-at-heel dead-end street where it was located – the terraced houses with peeling paint, saggy gutters and the occasional EDL flyer in the window, white and proud but not house-proud, their small front gardens choked with weeds – and tried to enter the small backstreet pub, you wouldn’t have got in. Anderson’s praetorian guard, two shaven-headed, Crombie-wearing men, always stood intimidating watch outside the door to the street.
    ‘Sorry, mate. Closed for a private function,’ they would have said. But you wouldn’t have tried anyway. It was that kind of pub.
    Only the chosen got in. Whether or not you wanted to be chosen was a different question. It was that kind of pub.
    Jackson came to pleasantly enough. Jones had injected him with a high dose of diazepam after they’d bundled him into the back of Anderson’s Range Rover. Morris Jones was a big fan of diazepam. The drug had kept him under for the relatively speedy journey back to North-East London and its relaxing side-effects eased the trauma of the unwelcome return to the real world.
    Now he was back in the room, mentally as well as physically, and wishing he wasn’t. Confused memories of a dash through the woods at the rear of his cottage, Anderson and Danny in pursuit, driven like a pheasant by beaters into the arms of a waiting Morris Jones, and now this.
    ‘Hello, Barry,’ said Anderson quietly. Jackson had never heard him raise his voice. He never needed to. Today was no exception. When Anderson spoke, you listened.
    Anderson moved close to where Barry Jackson was sitting, gaffer-taped to an old wooden Windsor chair. Barry Jackson started praying, mentally, to a God whose existence he doubted, promising him anything if He’d allow him to live.
    ‘I don’t particularly want to hurt you, Barry, but you know I will,’ said Anderson reasonably, ‘if I have to. I want to know what happened and why, and your part in it.’
    Please God, let me live and I’ll go to church on a weekly basis and renounce crime.
    Morris Jones lit a candle that burned steadily in the gloomy light of the small back bar with its stained pool table, the baize shiny with years of use, and the crooked, old-fashioned chintz light fittings with their dim bulbs. They provided the illumination; the candle was certainly not there to enhance the mood. Danny stood by the door, hands folded in front of his body, Anderson’s attack dog. Jackson had seen him in action; he was a useful man in a fight, vicious and fast and strong.
    ‘I’m waiting, Barry,’ said Anderson.
    I’ll atone for my sins. I’ll do good works.
    Jackson and Anderson watched as Morris Jones tipped the contents of a small folded packet, a greyish-brown powder, into an old tablespoon and took two syringes from his jacket pocket. He put one down on the bar. It made a dull clatter. It was made of glass. He filled the other with water, depressed the plunger and carefully voided the liquid into the bowl of the spoon. He stirred it around with the end of a match, warming it over the candle.
    Jackson watched as he cooked the heroin mix, Morris Jones’s face impassive. He watched the mixture dissolve, bubble and thicken. Barry Jackson knew what it was; he could smell its slightly bitter, aromatic scent from where he was sitting.
    Please God, don’t let them kill me.
    Jones squinted down at the spoon, his narrowed eyes glittering, the pupils pinpricks, and, satisfied, broke the filter off a cigarette and removed the paper. He fitted a needle to the hypodermic, inserted it into the cotton-wool filter and put it into the spoon. He pulled the plunger back gently and they all watched as