Kiss Me, Hadley

By Nick Macfie

An English girl with a Chinese father gets caught up in the illegal gambling business. A benevolent gangster kills a dodgy dealer with a bow and arrow. It's Christmas in Hong Kong and journalist Hadley Arnold, king of the cynical hacks, is in trouble again.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Earnshaw Books Ltd
• Release date: Feb 25, 2022
• ISBN: 9789881608949

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

I KNEW I WAS BEING FOLLOWED but didn’t care. Half a hip flask of Castle Stalker can do that. It puts a smile on your face, even at three in the morning on the rainy streets of Soho where old whores huddle in doorways like wet goats and make baah noises at anyone who passes.

Hey mister, why you walk alone?

If I could answer that, I could unlock the secrets of the universe. Someone closed a curtain in an upper floor sash window, shutting out the cold autumn night, the hookers in their long black coats and a man - me - wearing a silly, clip-on bow tie and an inappropriate grin. I cut through the back streets towards Foyles, sad neon signs buzzing above closed adult shops and stone steps leading down to basements offering everything but pleasure and goodwill. Sexual gratification on sale, but only if you liked it cold, tawdry and wearing a frown. Don’t get me wrong. I love London. Except for this. The pandering to the creepy and the weird. My shoes made an unusually loud click-clack which echoed off the brick walls as a car sputtered behind me.

In the reflection of an angled office window near leafy Soho Square, I saw the car was big and old, releasing an unhealthily thick exhaust. There were two people in the front. They were out prowling, but for what? For me? I was the best they could find on these grim streets of London? Get a life.

Still I didn’t care. I pulled out the pewter hip flask with a Hong Kong bargirl engraved on the side, a bubble coming out of her mouth saying born to be wilt. I would be back in Hong Kong within weeks and couldn’t wait. I took a large mouthful of Castle Stalker, knocked my head back and gargled. The noise made a dog bark. My phone beeped an SMS.

Would you like to join me in my isolated moorland wood and construct a compost toilet? Hugs and kisses Sparky. P.S. We would divert the urine into a separate canister.

I looked at my watch. The answer had to be no. What business did anyone have sending messages about compost toilets at three in the morning? I ought to say here I had become a member of the Small Woods and Amenities Society by default after buying a couple of acres of woodland as an investment in the West Country and Sparky was an enthusiastic correspondent. I didn’t know if Sparky was a he or a she.

The car turned off in the maze of ancient one-way streets, only to reappear at junctions, its nose jutting out at corners, waiting for the lights to change, and disappear again. I was already on Tottenham Court Road when it pulled alongside. It was a battered, boxy BMW at least twenty years old. A Chinese man lowered the window. The driver next to him, leaning forward to see me, was also Chinese and they were both smiling. They looked innocent enough, but who could be innocent prowling the streets of Soho at this time?

You the casino man? the passenger asked.

Casino man? I didn’t stop walking

You the man? In the casino? Silver Star.

I didn’t say anything. I was walking up Tottenham Court Road and the police station was a hundred yards ahead on my side of the street.

It’s nice, he said. Casino good for girls.

What do you want? I looked again at the two of them, both in their late twenties, wearing bomber jackets done up tightly at the neck. I was intrigued. Why do you ask?

Why we ask. The passenger laughed and signalled the driver with his thumb. Why we ask. I saw tattoos on his fingers. My friend thinks you some kind of English gentleman shit.

I beg your pardon?

Some kind of English gentleman shit. I say no, he no English gentleman. Then we laugh. Why they make you work crap hours?

What do you want from me?

You want a lift?

I ignored him and kept walking. The car crept along the road until it was kerb crawling in front of the police station where I stopped.

The man smiled at me and wound up the window. He got out, followed by the driver on the other side. The car was left parked at an angle on a double yellow line with its engine still running. That was a crime. Not a very organised crime, but a crime nevertheless. Good to know if and when I had to make a run for the police station. I stepped backwards in that direction.

The two men didn’t seem to care about the police.

Why you scared? the passenger asked. He was shorter than me, but built like a wrestler. He pulled a hood over his head and stepped closer.

I don’t always wear this bow-tie, I said. I’m a journalist. Great line. Good defensive move.

Really. Do you pull strokes in casino?

Do I what?

You pull strokes with the other men?

I was not familiar with the expression but I was worried where he was going with it.

Do I…?

Pull strokes, pull strokes, he said impatiently. He made a chic-a-chic-chic noise like a gecko and rubbed his thumb and forefinger together under my nose. Cheat money, cheat chips. Pull strokes.

Of course not. Why do you ask?

Silver Star. Lots of palms, lots of strokes. Many idle fuckers.

Idle…?

Be good.

In a flash, he made to punch me in the stomach, but his fist stopped short. I bent over instinctively and he flicked my chin with his forefinger.

People who pull strokes don’t see.

A man came running out of the police station. A policeman at last! But it was the driver. I hadn’t seen him go in. He had what looked like a lunchbox in his hand and he threw his mate a packet of cigarettes.

Remember, the passenger said as he climbed back into the car. Say no to pull strokes.

The car roared off down the empty street in a cloud of exhaust. Against the lights shining on the wet tarmac, I saw the outline of a third man in the back of the car, sitting upright in the centre.

All I could say about him was that he had short spiky hair.

THE SILVER STAR is a windowless ground floor and basement casino in Archer Street, off Piccadilly Circus, that smells of brass polish when it opens in the early afternoon and of sweat and stale cigarette smoke when it closes in the early morning. I had taken to walking back to my tiny apartment in the cool but occasionally rough district of Camden Town when I got off work but now started mixing up the route to avoid the attention of tattooed Chinese men in crappy cars. Back at the table the next evening, I looked around for the two gangsters, but did not see them. Every other punter was a crook, and the women, their long legs on show, all had a thing for London crooks. I had a thing for those legs and found it difficult to concentrate. But I wasn’t a gangster and didn’t stand a chance.

Two zero straight up, the punter shouted. "Two zero-three.

Hit me."

I had been in the casino business all of a month, but long enough to guess that when a punter said hit me, he wanted me to place his bets with some urgency before the ball dropped, which is what it was just about to do. Two chips on zero, two on the boundary of zero and three. No one had said hit me to me before. What a phony.

"That’s it, ladies and gentlemen. No more bets, please. No more bets."

I waved any more action over the table away with my arms like a magician. Apparently in full control, just as I had been taught. Don’t let the customer get one over you, the pit bosses had said. But remember I had only been in the business a short while. The hit me stuff was what the punter had seen in the movies. He was adding dramatic effect. I placed his bets, a knowing smile on my face, kept one eye on the baize and the other on the ball which was click-clacking now over the metal studs of the wheel. It skipped, slid and jumped over the brass number stalls, apparently slowing and then skipping quickly again before coming to rest.

A man sitting in front of me clapped his hands once and loudly.

What did you do that for? I asked.

Nob, he said. Don’t be a hero.

What?

Don’t be a nob.

The man looked sulkily away towards the wheel, turning his chips over in his fingers. What the fuck was all that about? The ball had settled. Twenty-six black. I turned to look down the table and there were four fifty-pound chips on twenty-six black that I was a hundred percent sure hadn’t been there when the ball fell.

Twenty-six black, I called weakly.

Percy, what are you doing?

Sorry, boss, I said. I must make clear now that Percy isn’t my real name. It’s Hadley. Percy was my nom de plume. This bloke distracted me clapping his hands. What did he do that for? I think someone’s cheating.

Of course they’re cheating, the pit boss said. The oldest trick in the book. Someone distracts you, you look up, and some twat, the first twat’s mate, sees the ball land and places his bet before you have time to say ‘what a twat’. It’s the oldest trick in the book.

Sorry, boss.

They’ll be waiting for you every time at a busy table. If the ball lands in a number near the wheel, someone will distract you at the end of the table. If the ball lands in a number at the end of the table, someone will try to distract you near the wheel.

I looked up and saw the twat near the wheel who had stitched me up. He was looking back at me with dead eyes. I don’t like to jump to conclusions about people, but I had him down as an evil and violent hater of all mankind. He was another dealer, helping out on this live training session, but that didn’t change my opinion.

If it’s the oldest trick in the book, I said, why do they bother? Why don’t they find a new trick?

Because they can spot a dickhead a mile away. Someone new to the business like you.

Dickhead, the hater of mankind, the pervert, said. His dull, blue eyes looked like they were made of metal. Round smudges on aluminium. This was the sort of fucker who hangs around street corners in Soho at three in the morning.

If they can get away with it once in a hundred spins of the ball, that’s a good day’s takings, the pit boss continued. They’ll have a fight, or someone will just shout out ‘fuck off’ or say he needs to go to the bathroom. In some places, they’re in it with the pit bosses.

You’re kidding.

Anyway, four fifty pound chips straight up. Let’s say you didn’t see it, the chef didn’t see it and the pit boss didn’t see it. What’s the damage?

Straight up pays thirty-five to one.

So?

Four fifty pound chips. That’s two hundred quid. That’s thirty-five times two hundred quid. That’s seventy hundred… seven thousand pounds.

Seven thousand pounds on one spin of the wheel, the pit boss said, now addressing all the punters who were a mix of veteran dealers and fellow trainees. A lesson to be learnt. One of many. The oldest trick in the book.

Fucking dickhead, the pervert said.

The pit boss ran his right hand through his black hair.

Percy? he said.

Boss?

When working out the arithmetic, do it in your head. No need to do the sums out loud like some sort of utter moron.

Okay boss.

They’ll just think you’re a moron called Percy.

Well, I wasn’t a dickhead or a moron called Percy. I was a journalist for Shrubs News Agency and was going, as we say in the trade, undercover in the latest in a series of projects aimed at creating scoops, some of which had come off, that made every other agency say fuck and play catch-up.

I was based in Hong Kong but had been given the assignment while filling in for a London reporter on maternity leave. Croupiers were being hired in London to work in illegal casinos in Asia at double or triple the money they were earning at the top clubs in Mayfair. But none of them lasted very long. I was going to follow their trail and see who was doing the hiring and why the turnover was so high. It was a simple, colourful story, one in which you basically wrote what you saw.

What we are doing is breaking new ground. We are doing what newspaper reporters are supposed to do, Harriet Stone, the Shrubs London news editor, told me. But they don’t, do they? They nick agency copy, add a quote from an ‘analyst’ and stick their own bollocks by-line on top and get all the credit.

Bastards, I said.

Fuckers.

We knew nothing about the casinos, other than that they were rumoured to be spread across China and Southeast Asia, had heavy North Korean involvement and a thing for English dealers.

Percival was the name Stone and I had chosen as an alias. Stone was middle-aged, hard-drinking and wore old gardening jeans and baggy jumpers. She was famous for her unkempt hair, nicotine-stained fingers and mischievous smile. She had made me turn off my mobile and take out the battery while we discussed the matter at head office in Kentish Town, right next to Camden Town, saying walls had ears. She wanted a name that was casual and run of the mill. After three-quarters of a bottle of Beefeater’s, we arrived at Percival Arbuthnot. She said she had once known an Arbuthnot who had emptied her mini-bar at some dodgy hotel in Afghanistan and made alcohol-fuelled love to her during an earthquake. Her words, not mine, though I doubt any hotel in Afghanistan stocks up mini-bars in its rooms. There were no jokes about the earth moving.

And then, just days after my twenty-six black fiasco, training was over and I was doing this stuff for real. I was walking into the smoke and the perfumes and making my way through third-rung royalty whispering gossip, getting looks from some of the gangsters and their girls which said to me: here comes someone new, with little confidence and completely fucking gullible. What a dickhead. If they were smart, they may have added: here comes someone who has had a couple of stiff eye-openers, probably Black Label, to put a smile on his face and help him through the ordeal.

Go get the bad guys, Percy, an older dealer said as he clapped his hands and we swapped positions. The clapping was to show he didn’t have any chips in his hand.

I managed a smile. What did he mean? The trick, surely, was not to let the bad guys get me and to keep the man with aluminium eyes out of my line of vision. I felt like I had just walked out on stage. I picked up the ball and gave the wheel a spin (it wasn’t allowed to come to halt at any time during working hours).

Place your bets please! I shouted far too loudly. Especially the please. It came out along the lines of "last orders please" and triggered a frown from the chef and caught the attention of the pit boss who pressed down the air in front of him with his palms. Take it easy, you moronic nob, he was signalling. Two punters gave me angry glances, picked up their chips and walked away.

Sure enough, they were replaced by four or five chavs (more dead eyes) wearing tight-fitting trousers. Slacks was the perfect word for who these people were, not what they were wearing. The bastards were out to stitch me up, I knew it. A couple fondling their chips moved to the far end of the table, and another pair took up position directly opposite me, next to the wheel. The oldest trick in the book, you bastards. You think I’m going to fall for that? Fuck off.

The baize was loading up fast. I found myself praying the ball would land on a number with no bets on it, in between the sky-scraper stacks of chips. Look, there’s a nice, empty three red. Land there and everyone loses and I can clear the table without having to remember my picture bets (so called because you work them out by the layout of the chips and can forget the arithmetic - for instance a ring of eight chips around a number in the middle column, on the corners and splits, pays out exactly a hundred).

Place your bets, I reminded everyone. The confident croupier in total command.

I gave the wheel an extra hard nudge. Now it was really spinning. This wheel was moving. It was a blur of red and black and of polished bronze picking up the light from the chandelier and the faces of the eager punters in one, thin, yellow streak. I liked it. It empowered me. None of these chav gangsters was going to fuck me over. I pressed the white, marble ball under the wooden rim with my middle finger, the idea that the release, when it came, would send it spinning fast anti-clockwise round the woodwork for about ten seconds before it started falling towards the bronze studs.

Pow! Off it went. A lovely feeling.

No more bets please. I was surveying the table, scrutinising every movement, watching out for wayward hands. I wasn’t going to look away. No one was going to stitch me up. Which one of you fuckers was going to try it on with me on my first night at the table? On my first spin, even? You wouldn’t dare.

The first distraction, out the corner of my right eye, was the usually calm chef who was now waving his hands frantically. I looked back to see him rising from his seat in what seemed like slow motion and the pit boss standing erect on his umpire’s chair behind him, pointing at the wheel and beginning a long shout of Noooooo.

The ball hit the first, fast-spinning metal stud and within a tiny fraction of a millisecond I had competing images of what was about to happen. The marble, as lethal a weapon as I could imagine right then, was going to leave the wheel at speed. It could fly backwards towards the dark red baize wall where the chef and the pit boss were. In any other direction, it had a choice of about fifteen eager faces all looking its way. There were glasses to land in, except it wouldn’t land in any of them. It could smash a couple, but the trajectory would probably be too high. There were the curvy women leaning over the table, eyeing up the gangsters. In a 1960s Ealing comedy, the ball would land in some blonde’s cleavage and everyone would go ooh, cheeky. Except this thing was travelling fast and would really hurt. I had a vision of it hitting me in the forehead, and my knees giving way and me beginning a sort of vertical descent, looking ahead all the time. What a way to stitch me up. How could I have seen that coming? Knock out the dealer and then nick all his chips. Baize-light robbery.

Lift-off. The pit boss was still shouting Noooooo as the ball hit the stud and left the wheel at five times its land speed. Would I hear it whistle past my ear, I wondered. Would it whistle as it hit my ear? No on both counts, as it happened. It took a direct route down the table, retracting its landing gear soon after takeoff. It had passed all the punters before they realised what had happened and the pit boss’s slow-motion Noooooo had turned into a simple, but very loud, NO SPIN, the call that went up any time a dealer fucked up. Sometimes the wheel was spinning too slowly, sometimes the ball left