I looked at the black pieces. They had turbans, beards and Gunga Din kit.
He looked me up and down as he came towards me. 'You've come to play big boys' games and you don't even have the brains to sort yourself out with a fucking weapon. What are you, son? A fucking bank clerk, thinking all this shite is some sort of great adventure?'
He needed a dental plan even more than Magreb. The few teeth that weren't black had an inch of nicotine on them. And he stank.
I nodded and smiled. He had what I wanted. 'I just need a weapon.'
'You got money?'
I stepped back from his BO. 'Enough.'
'What are we waiting for, then?' He turned back to the light-skinned boy and gave him another warning. He left the room and I followed. I grabbed a bottle of water from a pack that was already ripped open.
We passed the sound of more humping and grunting and headed downstairs. We went through the bar just as the dancing girls, now semi-naked, were having some fun with empty beer bottles. I followed the Jock through a door, into what would once have been the kitchen.
Two girls stood next to the sink, chatting away together and soaping themselves with flannels as if we weren't there.
The Jock led me across to two rusty and disconnected chest freezers with hasps and padlocks drilled into them. He unlocked one and lifted the lid to expose longs and shorts of all makes and sizes.
This place didn't do pub grub.
63
I dug around in what amounted to a big collection of rust.
'The semi-auto pistols are two hundred. Revolvers one fifty. AKs two fifty. Anything else, I'll tell you.'
'You heard of a Polish guy, Dominik Condratowicz?'
He leant against the other freezer, eyeing the two girls. They were now up on chairs and squatting over the sink to give themselves a final rinse with running water.
'No. That who you gonna kill with one of these fucking things?'
I picked out an old MP5 and fished about for some mags. There were two. 'You got any nine-millimetre for this?'
He slapped the freezer beneath him but kept his eyes on the girls. One was towelling herself and the one I'd seen upstairs was giving her makeup a bit of a retouch, ready for the next round. 'I've got to keep the fucking lot locked up. Fucking thieving bastards.'
The MP5 was knackered and rusty. I needed to look inside to check it had the basics – like a firing pin. These Heckler & Kochs were very quick to disassemble. I pushed back on the two pins at the rear, which opened up the backplate and one end of the pistol grip.
He was taking an interest in me now that he saw I knew what I was doing.
I pulled out the working parts. There was nothing but rust around the chamber, and so much corrosion in the barrel I could only just about see light through it.
'What about Noah James?'
The Jock's eyes jerked away from the girls. He went ballistic. 'Fucking animal! You anything to do with him?'
'No, just heard he was about. You know where?'
I started to reassemble the weapon.
His finger came up to my face. As long as his breath stayed away that was fine. 'I don't fucking know and don't care. If they come here again I'll do Kabul a favour and kill the shites myself.'
'He come in with the Brit?'
'Joey fucking Wallings. Arsehole used to work here. He was a good lad until the gear got him.' The Jock mimed injecting his arm. 'Fucked him up and he started running with James. They tried to sell me Afghan whores. So smacked up, some of them, they could hardly stand.' He pointed at the legs and heads of the girls at the sink. 'Fucking burns all over them, whip-marks, cuts . . . They stole them from villages, sick fucks.'
He sat on the freezer and lit a Chesterfield with a Zippo. He sucked deeply to calm himself. His eyes flicked down towards the MP5. 'You not interested?'
I shook my head and put the weapon back in the freezer.
'Well, maybe you're not some bank clerk.' He nodded at the weapons. 'They're all shite.'
I spotted a mini Uzi, like the regular Uzi only a lot shorter. It was stuck under a pile of rusty old .303 Lee Enfields, probably left over from the Second World War.
I pulled it out to discover it was a Mini-Ero, a shameless