Read Max Wolfe 02.5 - Fresh Blood for Free Online Page A

Lanes.
    ‘Thank you.’
    I went upstairs. The corridor was crowded with men between the ages of fifteen and eighty. Most of them were gawping at their phones, but a few of them looked as though they had been crying. And they were not the kind of men who looked prone to tears.
    ‘I smell pig,’ someone said.
    Oscar Burns and Big Muff were there, part of a group of men in their twenties. The demographic seemed to age the further you got down the corridor. Skinny teenage boys with short haircuts at the top of the stairs. The twenty-somethings in their smart suits and elaborate haircuts a bit further down. And a small band of hard-faced old men right outside Alfie Bloom’s room, conferring with the intimacy of men who had known each other for a lifetime.
    The door to the room was wide open as the paramedics fussed around him. Someone had removed Alfie’s false teeth and his mouth gaped open, as if desperate for one last breath. His lifeless eyes stared blankly at the ceiling and then one of the paramedics passed his hand gently over his face and the eyes were closed.
    They had all clocked me now. They watched me all the way back down the corridor. It wasn’t a good moment.
    I tried to steady my pace, walking neither too fast or too slow, but it didn’t make any difference because when I got back to the car park, there were already a dozen young men standing around my car. Mostly they were the youth wing, although two familiar figures in tight grey suits were sitting on the car – Big Muff’s giant rump parked on the bonnet and Oscar Burns perched on the roof like some kind of nimble vermin. I could see the footprints on the silver paintwork where Oscar had clambered up there.
    Multiple assailants, I thought. Not good. Sometimes there’s not a lot you can do. If they got me down I would just have to cover up brains and balls and wait until they got bored or tired.
    They made no immediate move for me and it gave me a few moments to work out a plan. Maybe if I went down with my front towards the car I would come out of it with less damage. I sized them up, resigning myself to a good hiding, my hands curling into fists.
    ‘Relax, detective,’ Oscar Burns said, jumping off my car. ‘If we wanted to batter you, you’d be on the ground already.’
    There was a big black Bentley parked next to the ambulance that had come to cart off the corpse of Alfie Bloom.
    ‘Mr Warboys wants to see you,’ Oscar said, his Essex accent hushed with reverence.
    ‘Paul Warboys?’
    Oscar nodded. None of them were smiling now. They had this one chore to do – deliver me to the last surviving member of a generation of celebrity gangsters – and it would not look good on their CVs if they couldn’t manage it.
    I walked slowly towards the Bentley. Oscar Burns opened the door for me. I slipped inside. On the far side of the back seat was an elderly man who was dressed for the beach. Tanned and fit, his thatch of thinning hair was dyed an unlikely blond, and there was elaborate gold jewellery on his thick brown arms. No tattoos.
    Paul Warboys.
    Friend of the Krays, rival to the Richardsons and – whatever foot soldiers like Alfie Bloom and Vic Masters might have told their literary agents – the last of the old gangsters.
    ‘Do you know who I am?’ he said.
    I nodded. There were the Kray twins in the east, the Richardson brothers in the south and the Warboys brothers – Paul and Danny, the children of devout London-Irish Catholics – in the west.
    The Warboys were always more active in the West End than the Richardsons and the Krays. Drinking clubs, knocking shops, massage parlours – Soho was on their Notting Hill doorstep. The Richardsons rattled around their south London scrapyards and the Krays brooded in their East End boozers, while the Warboys brothers were sucking the juice out of Soho and its lush environs.
    ‘Your SIO was just inside,’ Warboys said, his accent from an older London. ‘DCI Flashman.’
    I looked back at the