*

He could see from the sneering gaze of the woman in front of him that he repelled her, and the thought made him smile. Oh, she’d be singing a different tune if she knew what he was going to be worth soon. He was already a rich man, but this new piece of bounty would put him in a different league. No snotty looks then. Just a queue of women willing to lift their skirts.

‘I can’t put that through the till.’ At the sight of him, the girl had decided to be difficult.

Surprised, Shaw looked at the checkout girl. ‘What?’

‘You’ve opened the crisp packet.’

‘I’m eating the crisps. You know a way of doing that without opening the pack?’

She pulled a face and the woman behind Shaw joined in. ‘You can’t do that. You can’t come in and start eating things—’

‘Who invited you to the party?’ Shaw retorted, turning back to the checkout girl. ‘What’s the problem? I’m buying the crisps—’

‘A full bag.’

‘I’m paying for the full fucking bag!’ he snapped as the checkout girl pointed to the sign over her till. It read:

WE WILL NOT TOLERATE ANY OF OUR STAFF BEING ABUSED BY CUSTOMERS.

‘I can’t put them through the till,’ she persisted. ‘Not half eaten.’

Nodding, Shaw glanced at the woman behind him. Then, greedily, noisily and very slowly he began to eat the crisps, the whole queue watching him, until finally he put back his head and emptied the last crumbs down his throat. Then he put down the empty bag, smoothed it out, and passed it – with the bar code uppermost – back to the checkout girl.

Red-faced, she ran the scanner over the bag. Shaw picked up his shopping and walked back to his car. Bitch, he thought, sliding into the driver’s seat. He could see the checkout girl through the window of the supermarket and waved, smirking as she gave him the finger.

But then Shaw’s attention was diverted by a note stuck under one of his windscreen wipers. The writing was facing towards him, so he could read the words through the window:

Art relic up for grabs.

Historian has it in Madrid.

Interested?

Getting out of the car, Shaw looked around. But whoever had left the message had long gone. Irritated, he reread the note and then screwed it up in his fist.

For once Jimmy Shaw wasn’t the only person to hear of a find – a notorious, infamous, priceless find. He had thought he was ahead of the pack and would secure the relic before anyone else. He had even made a discreet – anonymous – call to an unscrupulous dealer in Paris and a connoisseur in Turin. With pleasure he had sensed their longing and his hands itched with the whisper of coming money.

But now he had a rival. Someone who was taunting him. Asking if Jimmy Shaw was interested … Shaw wiped his fleshy mouth with his handkerchief and wondered at the daring of the note. Who was fool enough to challenge him? Obviously someone who didn’t know his reputation. Someone who didn’t know that among Shaw’s runners and thieves were men who would do anything for enough money.

Irritated by what he took as a show of false bravado, Shaw drove out into the London traffic. Preoccupied, he never saw the van following him three vehicles behind, and his instincts – usually so nimble – cheated him.

It was a fatal miscalculation. One that would lead to humiliation, failure, and enough suffering to turn him mad.

Three

On the sofa in the room above the shop, Emile Dwappa dozed. In the chair beside him a woman was reading a magazine, a child at her feet. And in a small space beyond, hardly big enough to be a room, an ancient woman divided herbs and potions into equal measures. Her hands were thin, her fingers like twigs, brown as sugar cane, long years of practice making an alchemist of her. She never spoke – hadn’t done so for many years – just made up the potions for Mama Gala to sell in the shop below. Potions desperate women bought to make their men fall in love with them. Potions to help them fall pregnant or get rid of a baby. Potions and remedies and spells for the vulnerable who believed the daytime Mama Gala, who wanted to help. Because she was old school, with tricks from the Old Country.

This was the Mama Gala who had wheedled her way into the community; the woman who had proved herself a good friend, a gentle neighbour; a woman so loved it took a while for people to begin to whisper against her and longer for the rumours to start. Even more time for people to hurry past the shop to escape her gaze following them from the window.

Because she did have tricks from the Old Country. Mama Gala had tricks from hell. Some she inherited, some she stole, some worked like worms in the pus of her mind. Potions from the night-time Mama Gala, the ones she sold under the counter when the shop was closed. When the neighbourhood children no longer needed babysitting, and the health-food customers had all gone home. When the iron shutters came down on the windows, the doors were barred and the shop alarm went on. As though there were something in a health shop other than the meagre takings worth stealing.

But there had been no rumours fifteen years ago. Not when Mama Gala first opened the shop and Emile Dwappa was a teenage boy. She rolled down the street smiling, rocking her girth through the market and joking like a jester. She collected friends like fresh eggs, drawing them out of the nest of their families. Children too – all came to Mama Gala’s when the shop sign turned to OPEN.

But when more than a year had passed, another kind of person visited after the sign turned to CLOSED. They weren’t children or shoppers. They were furtive, coming in at the back door, skirting the shop that smelt of spices and herbs, making instead for the cordoned-off area. Separated behind a locked door, any sounds muffled behind thick drapes suspended from a metal rod.

To the left of this unwelcoming space stood a massive fish tank, the water milky, an ailing turtle banging wretchedly against its glass confines. Opposite the tank were cages in which monkeys crouched disconsolately, the ammonia smell of their urine catching at the throat. And under the arch of the stairs, glass tanks writhed with snakes, the artificial sunshine of the lighting casting gloomy shadows on the wall behind.

As Mama Gala’s son grew into a vicious and determined thug, many people began to avoid the shop altogether. Others asked how Emile Dwappa, who had been a sickly child, had developed a cruelty which was fast becoming notorious. What had happened to change a nervous boy into a man who tortured men and women alike?

Among the underworld, rumours began to circulate. Dwappa had knocked over a man who owed him money, and then reversed the car over his legs. Dwappa had poisoned a rival, the man suffering a lingering death, the skin of his scrotum peeling away with an infection resistant to anything a hospital could prescribe. Soon Dwappa had a reputation: he was dangerous, he was ungovernable, he was fearless.

Only one person controlled Emile Dwappa: his mother.

The worst of his excesses were as nothing to her cruelties. The widow Gala had raised her poisonous offspring single-handedly. As an only child, Dwappa had had her full attention, which had proved to be his downfall. To outsiders they seemed a unit, but inside the hermetically sealed confines of the shop, their hatred festered. She despised him for being handsome, slight of build and a homosexual – a fact hidden from the world, a fact with which she taunted her son and blackmailed him. Her suffocating attention and demands had stunted his emotions, his resentment had made a killer of him, and yet – for all this – Emile Dwappa could not break free from her. And, God forbid, he needed her.