Our Little Secrets

by Peter Ritchie

  Dominic looked sheepish, for once on the back foot. It was simple – he had no answer to an obvious truth. He needed fresh cards and he grabbed the only ones available.

  ‘Look, I’ve managed to bend a top suit. Early doors but they should be able to give us an inside line on what the fuck’s happening. If there’s something going on, then we should know what the problem is.’

  He sat back and wondered if he’d made the right move. He’d spent his life mostly getting it right, but now he felt there were forces backing him into a corner with no escape routes.

  ‘A cop? How did this happen? Think we should have been in on this one, eh?’ Paul looked round at his younger brother for the first time. He normally didn’t wait for his okay but he wanted to show that Dominic was becoming isolated. Sean didn’t really want to take sides but when he was forced there was only one, although not necessarily the best choice.

  ‘Yeah, you should’ve mentioned this. We should agree. This could be a set-up.’ Sean sat back; he’d said all he needed to.

  ‘It’s sound.’ Dominic had to win this one. ‘This cop’s as bent as a nine-pound note. It’s about money. We keep the suit in readies and we get a pass on the business. I’ll test it this week and let’s see what we get.’

  He left it there. It was enough but his stomach cramped because he wasn’t even sure he could deliver. Given the mood he was in, if Paul found out he was skimming a fortune out of the business, there would be blood.

  Paul nodded slowly and smiled but there was nothing pleasant or brotherly in the expression. ‘Let’s see then, but this better work. Tell you what, find out if the runner that’s been lifted talks to the bizzies. He’s sound as a pound and hates the fuckin’ force. Never forgave the bastards. Never know, though, so let’s see if your wee pal can tell us.’

  He stood up – the meeting was over. ‘We need to get on this now and see what we can find out.’ He turned to Sean: ‘Find out all who knew about this run and we’ll start from there. What a fuckin’ life, eh?’

  He shook his head and turned away without another word to his older brother. Sean at least offered a nod and the trace of a smile as they left.

  Dominic tapped the desk with his phone and prayed that Janet Hadden could come up with a solution to what he’d just used as a lifeline.

  21

  Frankie Mason was a happy bunny, and like the scavenger he was, he could smell something rotten a long way off. When Hamilton hired someone outside to do a job it was important, and not for a charitable cause. Mason worked on one principle: that nothing was sacred and he would do whatever it took to do the job. He didn’t like people too much, plus people didn’t like him, and that was okay as far as he was concerned. The job was all he had – there was no wife, no children and his social life consisted of standing on his own at the end of whatever bar he was in. That was where he could be with the thing he really enjoyed: a good beer.

  Doing the job gave him access to people like Big Arthur, and being asked to do something for men of status gave him something he couldn’t get in his private life. They needed him for his special form of expertise, and they came to him because he was one of the best in the business. Most private detectives played at it and couldn’t do much more than amateur surveillance or proving somebody’s wife or husband was playing away. Mason could look deep into a target’s secrets and probe the places they wanted to keep hidden. Over the years he’d developed a network of people who owed him or he’d corrupted, and it wasn’t unusual for him to blackmail the odd punter to get what he wanted. For a man who seemed so out of kilter with society, he didn’t worry about much and slept easily, although only for a few hours a night.

  The request from Hamilton was, on the face of it, routine in some respects: see who his son-in-law was with and report back. He hadn’t been told why the woman in the photograph was important and his nose twitched at that one. Half the time he was hired, the client would only give him part of the story because they had their own secrets, but when it was a gangster, their intentions could well end up with some punter needing surgery – and that was if they were lucky. Mason made it his business to find out all he could, including whatever it was the client was hiding, because you never knew whether it might be useful down the line.

  Part of his success came from being a creep, and there was always a bit of a buzz in having the inside story on the men who mattered. At the same time, it could end up as good business – he’d built up an extensive knowledge of who was doing what, and he’d been able to sell the odd gem to rivals in commerce or crime. It was delicate stuff, and if he ever fucked up with the wrong men then he could fall off a very high cliff and onto a very hard place. Other people’s secrets were another of his few pleasures, and he tried as far as possible only to use the ones that wouldn’t blow up in his face.

  Mason used a subcontractor to help him with the eyes on Dominic Grainger. They split shifts and took turn about watching him, which wasn’t too difficult because he spent most of the day in his office with only a walk round to Princes Street Gardens on the odd lunchtime. If the information was correct, he lived quietly enough during the week and his weekend started on Thursday nights. The subcontractor Mason used was from Paisley. He’d known him in the army and the guy didn’t care who the target was, just liked earning. He was sound as a pound and could watch a target all day without ever getting bored.

  It took Mason a couple of days to tie down the phone records from his contacts inside the phone companies. With the clampdown, plus bad press about phone hacking, things had become a bit tighter, but there were always greedy bastards who’d sell their granny for a price, and Mason invested heavily in finding and recruiting bent souls in the right places. He had the call lists for Dominic and his wife, but as Hamilton wasn’t pressing him too hard for a quick result, he hadn’t yet started work on the subscribers.

  The subcontractor was in place on Grainger, and Mason thought it was time to get a bit of background. He looked at the photos again on his laptop. He was a sleazeball but he had a tremendous ability to recall information, and even what might have seemed liked trivia was stored in case it was ever needed. He knew that in his trade, knowledge was power and the way to bonus payments.

  One of his pastimes was to wander the bars of Edinburgh, upmarket and dives in equal measure. That’s where he would pick up bits of information, watch and listen in to conversations. He could spot the couples playing away a mile off, and he learned, even from these small, almost insignificant, moments. It took him no more than a few minutes to recognise the bar where the photos had been taken – and he should have because he’d spent enough time there himself. It was a frustrating place because a lot of the punters went there to pick up or be picked up. At one time, he thought he’d try it himself because he’d witnessed so many successful pulls and thought that even he might have a chance. All he’d managed to do was prove to himself that he was almost unsellable to the opposite sex without paying for the privilege.

  In the end, he was successful only once, pulling a woman who amazed him by being attractive, beautifully well dressed and had a flat in the West End. But that was as good as it got and he ended up with just more disappointment. It turned out she was a member of the fruitcake family and the grin on his face when she’d handcuffed him to the bed soon disappeared when she announced she was right into S&M and to ‘shut the fuck up and take it like a man’. He still winced when he remembered her displaying her favourite equipment and telling him what she was going to do with them.

  Mason pushed the doors open in the middle of the afternoon, when the late lunches had gone and the early drinkers were still in their offices watching the clock.

  ‘The gaffer in?’ he said to a girl cleaning the top of the bar with a cloth that looked like it could give the whole of Edinburgh an unpleasant stomach bug.

  She never answered, just chewed her gum and lifted a phone. ‘Punter wants ye.’

  She paused, chewing slowly as someone at the other
end spoke then shook her head. Whatever had been said annoyed her, but then working for the minimum wage meant everything annoyed her.

  ‘Please yersel’,’ she sneered into the phone and looked at Mason, chewing even harder. ‘He says take a seat.’

  She turned away and started spreading the bugs across the bar top again.

  He waited for a few minutes like a stookie, working out that she wasn’t going to ask him if he wanted anything to drink.

  ‘Any chance, hen? Pint maybe?’

  She looked up, understood the question and sighed. The girl eventually poured the beer and Mason took the seat where he thought Dominic Grainger had been sitting with Miss X when the photos were taken. The barman who had served Grainger and the woman emerged from the door behind the bar and looked disappointed when he saw who it was.

  ‘Jesus, thought you’d’ve retired to the south of Spain by now.’ He kept the piss-take mild by street standards because, much as he disliked Mason, the only reason he wasn’t locked up himself was that it suited the detective’s purposes at the time.

  ‘Sure you’d be happy for me if that was the case, son. Have a wee seat.’ He could see the barman’s face give the occasional twitch as he tried too hard to look relaxed.

  A couple of years earlier Mason had been employed by the owner to find out who was stealing from the business. He’d done a good job, identifying a couple of staff ripping the pish out of the system. But he’d also discovered the owner’s younger brother’s hobby was looking at pictures of young children in the scuddie. He let the boy know exactly what he knew and that he would do him a favour by keeping it between them as long as it suited him. It was the kind of thing the detective liked to store up for a rainy day – and it always rained in Scotland. It was simple really – Mason just wanted to know what had happened in the bar with Grainger and the female with the deadly hands.

  ‘It was weird. She was the real thing – definitely not yer average burd, know what I mean?’

  ‘You ever seen her before?’

  ‘She was in two nights before, but never before that. Only time I’ve seen the woman and I’d remember. Widnae mind a wee shot, masel’.’

  The boy’s hands were shaking as he tried too hard to please Mason. He was sitting opposite the man who could train-crash his life in a moment and he’d be a pariah. Sex offenders were registered and segregated in the tin pail in case some mad fucker did unto them what they would have done unto those frightened kids on their screens.

  ‘You stick to the kiddie porn, son; that’s where your heart is.’ Mason grinned; he loved watching the fear in the young man’s eyes. ‘Tell me everything you remember.’

  He sat back and listened carefully to what he was being told. Maybe there was nothing in it and she was just some high-class bitch who did martial arts. Christ, she wouldn’t be the only one in the world. She was on her own, though, and why was Grainger concerned when he’d asked the barman if he knew who she was? According to the gibbering boy, Grainger had never given a fuck who the women were any other time.

  He described going to serve them another drink and backing off because Grainger looked like he’d been kicked in the goolies. What was that about, and why was an arrogant bastard like Grainger so worried about a female he’d known for about twenty minutes?

  Mason scratched the three-day stubble on his chin and decided he had to find out who she was, never mind Big Arthur’s needs. He wanted to know her secrets so he could store it away in his rainy-day box.

  ‘The CCTV still working?’ he asked.

  It was working perfectly and it still had the recording he needed. Mason took it back to the dump off Leith Walk that he called home, which also functioned as his office. He ran the recording again and again, stopping several times to stare at various angles of the woman with Grainger. He watched her coming into the bar and he saw it: the way she sat, the way she glanced up every so often, pretending to read her paper, and how she had chosen the best seat to watch the door behind her in the mirror. Was he imagining it?

  He went over it again and again. She was watching and waiting. Whoever she was, she was waiting for Grainger, and at some point, she’d delivered a message that he hadn’t wanted to hear. The assault on the twat was there as well – almost off camera but enough to tell him she operated on a hair trigger, and that was interesting.

  Mason spent time watching the way she walked, moved, the small involuntary habits that are hard to disguise. By the end of the afternoon he was happy and intrigued. He stared at the still frame again with her face looking back at him.

  ‘Christ, I’d give her one myself.’ He leered and scratched the stubble on the side of his face again. ‘Lookin’ forward to meetin’ you, hen.’

  He switched everything off and called the subcontractor, but there had been very little activity at Grainger’s office. He was in there but there’d been no visitors, and only the postman had been at the office door.

  22

  Tonto was pissed off. Janet Hadden shrugged; she was getting bored trying to reassure him that there was nothing to worry about.

  ‘The Graingers are taxin’ me tae death. Fuckin’ Paul looks at me funny – he’s convinced I’m a grass.’ He was stressed up to the eyeballs, and he felt like there was pressure everywhere he looked.

  ‘Well, you are a grass, Davy. I mean, what the fuck did you think you were at the end of the day?’ It was taboo to tell a CHIS this, and she would never have said it in front of a co-handler. It was a hanging offence, and when the whole informant system had been taken out of the dark ages into the caring, sharing modern world, it was decided that the old terms for an informant were derogatory and counterproductive. Words like grass, rat, tout and squeak were consigned to the same dump as the flared trousers on Life on Mars. Human sources would be made to feel included and part of a greater cause. As far as Hadden was concerned it was fine for the management meetings, but a rat was a rat, even when you put a little sheriff’s badge on it and told it you cared. She fucking hated rats, but you had to live alongside the horrible little bastards.

  ‘I thought I was doin’ the business for you. You said I was worth my weight to the force. All of a sudden it goes quiet. I mean, I’m gettin’ a bit nervous. Just tell me what the score is here.’

  He tore the beer mat he was fiddling with into smaller and smaller pieces till there was nothing left to tear. When he’d finished taking his stress out on the piece of cardboard, he picked up the one Hadden had been using and got to work on that. It started to irritate her, and she really wanted to be on her way. They’d spent an hour parked in a Glasgow boozer because Tonto had been through delivering some samples of counterfeit goods that had been offered by the Graingers to a Loyalist team from Belfast. Apparently, they wanted a shitload of moody gear if the Graingers were interested in delivering. Tonto had shown it to Hadden, who’d looked bored, tried her best to give him a pat on the back but told him she wasn’t that interested.

  ‘I’ll make a note of it. If they buy in bulk get back to me and we’ll see what we can do, alright?’

  ‘Do I get a pay-off for this then?’ Tonto couldn’t hide the stress in his voice; he felt like he might have just had a using by the detective. It hurt after the elation of feeling that he’d been part of her gang.

  ‘Afraid not.’ She tapped the table with the ends of her fingers in a rhythmic beat. ‘I need to go.’

  Tonto looked and felt gutted. He’d really believed they’d become friends, and he was excited about doing work for someone other than the bastards who controlled the crime business in the city. It was a fucking liberty. He’d been putting his faith in someone who was turning out to be no different from the bandits on his side of the fence. Christ, he wouldn’t have put it past her to have arranged for the Pole to chase him through Gorgie. Was the mad bastard a grass as well? he wondered.

  The problem was that he couldn’t see the big picture, and of course he could never have guessed what was going on in Hadden’s mind. No one
could. She wanted someone like Tonto inside where he could tell her if what the intelligence suggested about the Graingers was anywhere near true. Fill in the names and who did what job – couriers, dealers, anything he could get. He could never fill in the big-business gaps, but he was a scout, the pathfinder telling Hadden it was okay to proceed. He’d done that and she’d made her move on Dominic, which, apart from the incident in the pub, had gone to plan. Ideally, by the end of the week she’d have Dominic signed up and Tonto would still be inside the gang if she needed to back up a story. Two sources were always better than one, because everyone lied to a certain extent.

  At some stage, Hadden would have to make a choice and decide on her medium-term tactics. She had a dilemma: did she run Dominic for as long as possible, regardless of the dangers that held for her, or get him locked up at the first opportunity? The Graingers were top tier and eventually there would be questions on whether the force was protecting someone who was as bad or worse than the people he’d provided information on. That was how it used to work, and she knew that prior to the unified force, there had been some dark secrets where poisonous characters were protected for all the wrong reasons. The gangsters flung a few numpties to the force concerned, who ignored bigger crimes and crowed over their solved-crime figures.

  Although she wasn’t feeling remotely sorry about her treatment of Tonto, Hadden realised she was being too hard on him. She couldn’t risk him walking out on her, because she would need him for something in the future, so she relented, smiled and slipped fifty notes across the table squeezed inside her hand in case anyone was eyeballing.

  ‘Here, have a wee drink, and if the counterfeits look good I’m sure there’ll be a bonus.’ She thought the PSNI might be happy to tie up some heavy-duty Loyalist boys, which couldn’t do her any harm.

  Tonto, easily pleased, visibly relaxed as if it had all been a wind-up and he was back on board as the sheriff’s deputy. Christ, she thought, I’ll have to buy him a fucking badge at this rate.