(2005) Rat Run Read Online Free

clubs that a man who supplied cocaine in the City had been mercilessly, brutally, viciously put to death. It would be assumed he had failed to make a payment and that this was retribution. The name of Ricky Capel might figure in the rumours - loud enough to make certain that no other bastard was late with payments.
    Scented with talc and aftershave, Ricky led Joanne and Wayne, who carried the present, next door to celebrate his grandfather's birthday, the eighty-second.
    Bevin Close was where he had spent his whole life.
    In early 1945, a V2 flying bomb had destroyed the lower end of a Lewisham street, between Loampit Vale and Ladywell Road. After the war, the gap had been filled with a cul-de-sac of council-built houses.
    Grandfather Percy lived with his son and daughter-in-law, Mikey and Sharon, in number eight, while Ricky, Joanne and Wayne were next door in number nine.
    Eighteen years back, Mikey had bought his council house, freehold, and been able - after a choice day's work with a wages delivery truck - to buy the property alongside it. Ricky liked Bevin Close. He could have bought the whole cul-de-sac, or a penthouse overlooking the river, or a bloody manor house down in Kent, but Bevin Close suited him. Only what Ricky called the 'fucking idiots' went for penthouses and manor houses. Everything about him was
    discreet.
    Rumour would spread, but rumour was not
    evidence.
    He breezed in next door. Wayne ran past him with Grandfather Percy's present.
    He called, 'Happy birthday, Granddad . . . How you doing, Dad? Hi, Mum, what we got?'
    The voice came from the kitchen: 'Your favourite, what else? Lamb and three veg, and then the lemon gateau . . . Oh, Harry's missus rang - he can't make it.'
    'Expect he's out pulling cod up - what a way to earn a living. Poor old Harry.'
    He would never let on to his mum, Sharon, that her brother was important to him. Uncle Harry was integral to his network of power and wealth.
    They were making good time, more than eight knots.
    Against them was a gathering south-westerly, but they would be in an hour after dusk and before the swell came up.
    March always brought unpredictable weather and poor fishing, but on board the Annaliese Royal was a good catch, as good as it ever was.
    Harry Rogers was in the wheelhouse of the beam trawler, and about as far from his mind as it could get, wiped to extinction, was the thought that he had missed the birthday lunch of his sister's father-in-law.
    The family that Sharon had married into was, in his opinion - and he would never have said it to her - a snake's nest... but they owned him. Ricky Capel had him by the balls: any moment he wanted, Ricky Capel could squeeze and twist, and Harry would dance.
    Ahead, the cloud line settled on a darker seam, the division between sky and sea. The deeper grey strip was the Norfolk coast, and the town of Lowestoft where the Ness marked Britain's most easterly point in the North Sea. The Annaliese Royal was listed as coming from Dartmouth, on the south Devon coast, but she worked the North Sea. She could have fished in the Western Approaches of the Channel or in the Irish Sea or around Rockall off Ulster's coast, and had the navigation equipment to go up off Scandinavia or towards Scotland's waters, or the Faroe Islands - but the catches for which he was a prisoner were in the north, off the German port of Cuxhaven and
    the island of Helgoland. He had no choice.
    He had been a freelance skipper, sometimes out of Brixham, more often out of Penzance, in truth out of anywhere that he could find a desperate owner with a mortgage on a boat and a regular skipper laid low with illness. He would work a deep-sea trawler heading for the Atlantic, a beam trawler in the North Sea, even a crabber off the south Devon coast. The sea was in his mind, body and heritage - but it was damn hard to get employment from it. Then had come the offer
    . . . He'd talked often to Sharon on the phone, kept in touch even when she had married