New Guard (CHERUB) - Robert Muchamore Page 0,36

Service,’ Tanisha read. ‘So you want to know if Uncle is a radical, sending all that racketeering money back to Islamic State in Syria or wherever?’

‘Is he?’ James asked, before glugging his orange juice.

Tanisha laughed. ‘The answer is complex.’

‘Story of my life,’ James grinned.

‘Uncle – or Martin Jones to use his proper name …’

‘Is that his real birth name?’

‘Uncle was born in 1968, when racism was far more out in the open than it is today,’ Tanisha explained. ‘Welsh mother, Pakistani father. They decided to give him an English first name and use his mother’s surname.

‘There’s not much remarkable about his childhood. Parents ran a shop in North Wales, and moved to Birmingham when Uncle was ten. He was a tough lad. Got in trouble with the law. Spent time in borstal, two kids by the age of nineteen.’

‘Religious?’

Tanisha shrugged. ‘Not until he married his second wife, who was Muslim. He built up a little crew that hit the big time during the taxi wars in the eighties.’

‘Taxi wars?’ James asked.

Tanisha nodded. ‘There were more than a hundred private-hire taxi firms in Birmingham back then. Price cutting, fare poaching and nobody making any money. Then rival firms started sabotaging one another. Started off with fake calls, and blocking radio signals – this was before everyone had mobile phones. Then windows got smashed, cars vandalised. People started getting their legs broken and their houses burned down. After a few years, Uncle’s crew got the upper hand and you wound up with three big taxi firms for the whole of east Birmingham. All owned by Uncle, or his close friends.

‘He also made money in the scrap business, set up taxi firms in London and Manchester, and when the taxi business took a downturn, he started extorting money from shopkeepers, landlords, restaurant owners.’

‘And the law just let him?’ James asked.

‘There’s a lot of politics involved,’ Tanisha explained. ‘First off, when Uncle started, there wasn’t a single dark-skinned officer in the Birmingham police force. And how do you report a crime when you don’t even speak the same language as your local cops? By the time Birmingham started getting Asian police officers, Asian councillors, Asian Members of Parliament, Uncle was so ingrained in the system that most of them were his people. They’d condemn him in public, but behind closed doors they’d talk him up.

‘Uncle keeps the drug dealers out of Asian neighbourhoods. Uncle paid for repair work on the mosque. Uncle stops the developers moving in and closing down Asian-owned businesses. And when it came to election time, they’d be lining up to ask for campaign donations. Labour, Conservative. Uncle would donate to both sides, as long as they didn’t rock his boat.’

James was fascinated. ‘And Uncle’s influence extended to your newspaper?’

‘God yes,’ Tanisha nodded. ‘We knew his name, but we were never allowed to publish it, to preserve the great mystery. If you published an article about some charity donation made by one of his taxi firms, you’d have the phone ringing off the hook with advertisers. But if you published anything critical, Uncle would send out an edict. Any business that dared to advertise in your newspaper would get a petrol bomb through their letterbox, and no newsagent would dare to sell the paper with the article inside.’

‘Clever,’ James admitted.

Now Tanisha narrowed her eyes accusingly. ‘And you know what really pisses me off?’ she said, wagging a finger. ‘People have known about Uncle for years, but the police always claim not to have resources to investigate. Your intelligence lot are only interested in a tiny number of radicals, while a massive crook sits in the background pulling levers for half of Birmingham.’

James smiled. ‘I’m here to help.’

‘You’re young and idealistic,’ Tanisha said. ‘But the system is rigged against ordinary decent people. I even know what your next question is going to be.’

‘You do?’ James asked.

‘You’re going to ask me if Uncle turned into some crazy radical, and if he’s donating profits to radical groups.’

‘That’s what I need to know,’ James admitted.

Tanisha snorted. ‘Uncle has grandparents, cousins and a half-brother in Pakistan. He sent money to them over the years, enabling them to become quite influential in their region. In 2013 there was an American drone strike close to the family compound. Two of Uncle’s nephews and his eight-year-old goddaughter were killed. I’m also told that some of his cousins were arrested and beaten by Pakistani troops who were hunting for Taliban in the area.’

‘How do you know this?’ James asked. ‘You