to the back of the shop and fizzled, but the second landed amidst shattered whisky bottles and sent fingers of blue flame in all directions across the shop floor.
‘Fun, fun, fun!’ Hagar shouted, as he jumped in the back, clumsily treading on Ryan’s toes. ‘Like olden days.’
The guy with the eye patch got in last and the front wheels squealed as they pulled off with the front passenger door still wide open. In the back, Ryan untangled himself from Hagar, who he now realised was holding the cash drawer.
‘Chisel,’ Hagar shouted. ‘Get me a chisel or something.’
A guy crunched up in the backwards-facing rear row of seats passed Hagar a big flathead screwdriver. They’d driven half a mile and taken a couple of fast corners when the drawer made a satisfying clank, popping open on a coiled spring and a jangle of coins.
Hagar smiled as he ripped out the ten- and twenty-pound notes and threw them at Warren and Ryan.
‘You two kids split that up. Call it a gift from your old uncle Hagar.’
38. TROLLEY
Ryan had built a mental picture of Hagar since first hearing his name on campus a couple of months earlier. He’d imagined someone fierce and sinister, who gave orders and left the dirty work to enforcers like Craig.
But this couldn’t have been more wrong. Hagar sat in the back of the people carrier, bouncing around like a big kid, cracking jokes and telling stories about places as they drove past: the boarded-up cinema where he got his first proper snog, a shop where he and Craig used to steal fireworks when they were kids and a flat he’d purchased where the ceiling came down two weeks after he’d moved in.
‘Building surveyor pointed to all these disclaimers in his contract. So me and Craig hung her out the window by her ankles and that lady wrote a cheque for my new ceiling lickety-split!’
Ryan had never spoken to Fay Hoyt, but James had kept him up to date on Ning’s end of the mission and the more time he spent with Hagar, the more he realised that Fay had judged his personality perfectly.
Being a weeknight there weren’t many places open, but they found a chicken shop. Hagar bought everyone chips, and soaked his own bag with five sachets of mayonnaise.
‘I’m telling you boys, I’m loving this,’ Hagar told Ryan and Warren, as he shovelled chips into his mouth. ‘The higher up I’ve got, the less I’ve enjoyed the life.’
Ryan smiled. ‘I’m about as low as you can get. You wanna swap places?’
Hagar whooped up a loud laugh as the big VW entered a tunnel. Then he laughed some more when the thug in the front passenger seat opened a bottle of Pepsi which erupted like a volcano.
They’d driven some miles off Hagar’s turf. The tunnel brought them out in east London, with the skyscrapers at Canary Wharf lit up behind streets of newly built apartments. A second thug-stuffed people carrier – a Renault – awaited them in a rubbish collection area at the side of a swanky-looking fourteen-storey block.
‘That’s Eli’s pad,’ Hagar explained, as he pointed all the way up to the flashing red light on the roof.
Ryan and Warren shook a couple of hands as Hagar high-fived men getting out of the Renault. Once everyone had pulled on masks, the two teens made up the rear as a ten-strong posse headed through an unlocked metal gate, past a line of recycling bins and up some metal steps to a fire door.
The dude with the eye patch must have staked Eli’s building out beforehand. He had exactly the right tool, which he slotted into the gap between two fire doors and jiggled about until it pushed against the metal bar on the inside.
A hot blast came from air-conditioning fans as Ryan stepped inside and caught the smell of chlorine. Another door took them into the rear of a moodily lit swimming pool. A wrinkled woman swam gracefully, until she noticed ten masked men, armed with bats and machetes, striding purposefully across the poolside tiles.
Carpeted stairs took them up another level, to a hotel-like lobby. A grey-haired concierge sat behind a granite counter, half asleep.
‘Wakey-wakey!’ Hagar said, as two thugs cut behind the countertop to make sure the concierge didn’t hit an alarm. ‘You’ve got the lift key, right? We need the fourteenth-floor penthouse.’
‘I’m not supposed to,’ the man said weakly.
Hagar pointed back at his crew, and someone else knocked a big bowl full of oranges and limes off