Our Little Secrets

by Peter Ritchie

  When Hamilton told the Glasgow man what he wanted, he was surprised, but he’d seen it done before. It meant that whatever Hamilton had against this woman it was serious business.

  ‘Fair enough, Arthur. Easy done.’

  60

  Arthur Hamilton took an early call to find Frankie Mason sounded stressed.

  ‘The boys just called me and it looks like something’s up. Sean’s riding passenger in a lorry and Paul’s following in a hired car. They’re on the M8 heading west towards Glasgow. What do you think, Arthur?’

  ‘What I think is the boys stay wi’ them. If the bastards are up to somethin’ I want to know what it is.’

  ‘Cheers, Arthur, just wanted to make sure.’

  Mason was terrified of getting anything wrong with the big man again, and he relaxed once he’d had the nod. He called the boys following the Graingers. They were relaxed – as far as they were concerned it was a good job and a good earner.

  What those boys and Mason couldn’t know was that they were being observed by the police surveillance team covering the Grainger job. The call had come to the operational commander that there were a couple of unknown cars and drivers following the lorry, as well as Paul Grainger. He took the logical conclusion that they were part of the team and it meant the surveillance team had to be even more careful than normal. It wasn’t a great problem, because they knew exactly where the handover of gear was taking place near Cairnryan. They had a tracking device on the lorry with the gear, and this meant the police team could stay well away from following cars.

  Later in the morning, Mason took another call that the lorry was heading down the Ayrshire coast road and there were no problems so far. Mason called Hamilton again, who sounded pleased.

  ‘Sounds good, Frankie. Bastards are up to somethin’ and I wonder if they’re headin’ for the Belfast ferry?’

  ‘Christ, what do we do if that’s the case, Arthur? It’s a possibility an’ there was the calls Dominic made across there.’ Mason felt slightly panicked again but Hamilton was easy with it.

  ‘Fair enough, Frankie. If they go to the ferry, just leave them there. If they can, stay wi’ Paul though – I want to know where he is.’

  Sean Grainger was unaware of all the players watching their movements as they travelled down the narrow coast road at the edge of the Firth of Clyde. He watched the sun shine down on the sparkling waves around the majestic island of Ailsa Craig and wondered how he could get away from the business without causing a bust-up with his brothers. Dominic wouldn’t be a problem, but Paul certainly would. He lit up another cigarette and passed it to the driver before doing one for himself, then called Paul, who told him there were no problems.

  When they pulled into the car park a few miles short of the Cairnryan ferry port, they saw a couple of cars parked where they’d been told they would be.

  Sean jumped out of the cab and watched as the four Belfast men left their cars. Sean Grainger could handle himself, but they looked like serious people. He walked over to them, shook hands and then the mood changed. Despite what they were involved in, they cracked a couple of funnies and acted as if it was a day out at the seaside.

  Paul arrived and they did the introductions with him. The leader of the Belfast team seemed relaxed and suggested they leave the lorry with the driver and his team and he could grab a coffee with the Graingers in a roadside cafe there. Sean almost forgot why they were there but was first to see the movement of people at the edges of his vision. There were armed police coming at them from all sides, and he knew in an instant they had to have been waiting for them. There was no way they could have got into position without prior warning.

  Paul and Sean ended up on their bellies beside each other as the police team started to cuff them all up.

  ‘Fuckin’ grassed again, Sean,’ Paul snarled. ‘I’ll kill some fucker for this. Swear to God.’

  They had them all on their feet and lined up, with the Graingers and their lorry driver next to the Belfast men, as the police team covered them and secured the area.

  Sean looked to his left and realised there were two men who didn’t seem to belong. He looked at Paul and nodded towards the two men; Paul shrugged and managed to say, ‘No idea, brother,’ before one of the police team told him to shut the fuck up.

  It was cleared up when a detective went along the line and asked everyone to identify themselves. When they came to the first of the two unknown men they got their answer.

  ‘We’ve fuck all to do with this, pal. We were hired to follow these fuckin’ cowboys from Edinburgh. Private contractors.’

  The detective looked puzzled for a moment then realised they had a slightly more confused situation than they’d planned for. He pulled the two unknowns out of the line and passed them to a couple of plain clothes who took them away from the car park.

  The Grainger brothers looked at each other and knew that they’d been pissed on from a great height. The Belfast men stared at them as if they were responsible, and all the goodwill that had taken place at the beginning of the meeting was toast. Whatever had gone wrong had gone wrong on the Scottish side of the Irish Sea.

  An hour later, Frankie Mason was sitting in his office, wondering why it had all gone quiet, when his door opened and he disappeared under the weight of some serious law men who hadn’t called on a social visit. It took a few hours to sort out, but Mason and his boys hadn’t committed any offence, though the detectives who interviewed him took a bit of convincing.

  Mason refused to say who his client was because that was confidential, and he knew it was better to get a hard time from them then explain to Arthur Hamilton why he’d disclosed his name.

  The detectives were pissed off with him, but they had the result with the firearms and dope so they could live with it, although they warned him they’d be back.

  As soon as Mason was free, he called Hamilton and explained what had happened but that he hadn’t given up his name.

  Hamilton was pleased and intrigued. He told Mason it was all okay and that there was a bonus waiting for him.

  ‘Want me to do anythin’ else, Arthur?’

  ‘Naw, it’s job done, my son. Leave it for the time bein’ an’ I’ll get one of the boys to drop an envelope off at your place.’

  Hamilton sat back and wondered how he could have underestimated his son-in-law so much. He was sure the bastard had sold his brothers down the line. He’d already heard the news on the BBC that a major operation had resulted in the arrests of men from Belfast and Edinburgh, and that there had been a significant seizure of firearms and drugs.

  ‘The devious fucker.’ Hamilton said it quietly, but it proved Dominic Grainger was capable of anything.

  Hamilton had been a ruthless gangster in the past, but selling your brothers to the law seemed a step even he wouldn’t have taken in those days. As far as he was concerned, the evidence was mounting against his son-in-law, but the next step was Janet Hadden. She was bent law, so he could take a risk he wouldn’t normally have contemplated.

  He called the two Glasgow heavies who were on loan to him and told them what he wanted. They were both mad as fuck and thought it was a great idea. When they put the phone down they high-fived.

  ‘Kidnap a fuckin’ detective. Love it.’

  61

  Janet Hadden felt sick in her gut. She’d met Dominic Grainger at his flat and had been buzzing with nerves in case Macallan or some other team had eyes on her or Grainger after what had happened. She knew Macallan hadn’t been happy with her, but the success with the Belfast job meant she had some brownie points again, and her boss back on board as a fan. She could have done without seeing Grainger, but he’d insisted and sounded as if he’d just won the lottery.

  He was full of it, and she realised she’d gone from thinking she controlled him when he’d been recruited as a source to watching him completely turn the tables on her and everyone else. He was off the Richter scale, and she had no idea how to take back control.


  He’d roped her into an indirect involvement in the deaths of Jude Hamilton and Davy McGill. She was in the middle of a nightmare, and watching the smile on Grainger’s face almost made her retch. He seemed to act as if she belonged to him; she could see what was in his eyes and what he might try next with her. She wanted to kill him, but another body turning up with a direct line to her would bring her down.

  When she left his flat, she headed to the nearest bar and downed some doubles, hoping the booze would calm her down. She had always had a plan in the past, but there was no way out of this mess as long as Grainger was alive, and there was nothing she could do about it.

  Macallan would keep digging – she knew it, and there was no way of knowing what she might find.

  Grainger had seemed relieved that at least they knew who’d been watching them. It had been private detectives, and Grainger had been sure his father-in-law must have had something to do with it. He knew that Hamilton had used Frankie Mason in the past, and it was just the kind of stroke the big man would have pulled. It meant he knew a bit and definitely suspected him now, but Grainger’s view was that there was fuck all he could do about it.

  Hadden knocked back her last drink and thought about the range of problems she already faced – and now Arthur Hamilton was on her case.

  She walked away from the boozer. The street was empty, and the only sound she heard was the rhythmic tap of her shoes on the damp pavements. She never heard the man behind her and it all happened in the space of a few seconds: the hood, the tape on her mouth and wrists, terror and the realisation that she was bound up in the boot of a car. She was a detective, so this shouldn’t happen, but all of her nightmares had become real. All she could hear above the rumble of the engine was the dull sounds of male voices and the occasional burst of laughter.

  She had no idea how long she was in there; she seemed to lose all sense of time and wasn’t sure if she’d been minutes or an hour trapped in the dark. A deep and terrifying dark.

  She tensed as she felt the boot being opened. The voices of the men were clear and pure Glasgow, and there was the draft of cool air on her neck as she was lifted to her feet and walked into a building of some kind. The sounds of their feet seemed to echo, which meant it was a big place, and it felt cold.

  She was forced to sit and tied onto a chair. The hood was lifted and she blinked repeatedly to clear her vision. The place was in semi-darkness, but she could make out that it was a large garage or industrial unit. Arthur Hamilton stood in front of her and he nodded to whoever was behind her.

  ‘Go an’ get the kettle on, boys. You deserve it.’

  She heard footsteps behind her, but they didn’t go too far because she could make out the sound of a conversation and what sounded like a kettle being filled from a tap.

  ‘You know who I am, girl?’ Hamilton stood in front of her with his hands clasped behind him, like a teacher giving a lecture to an errant pupil.

  Hadden nodded and felt sick with fear. Gangsters didn’t abduct detectives – there was no script for this one, and she knew he would only do this if he wasn’t worried about payback.

  ‘Now I’ve dealt with a lot of your kind over the years and there was always limits, but you’ve walked into the wrong territory. Now you’re goin’ to tell me all about what you an’ that fuck of a son-in-law of mine have been up to.’ He pulled the tape from her mouth.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean. You’ve just fucked with the wrong detective.’ The other Janet Hadden had taken over and she strained against the tape holding her arms.

  Hamilton hit her a shot to the side of the head. He hadn’t done it for years, and it felt good as the skin above her eye spilt and dazed her.

  She made a low sound in her throat and felt a trickle of blood down the side of her face.

  Hamilton leaned down and whispered in her ear exactly what was going to happen to her and all her fight was gone in a moment. She sobbed and told him everything he wanted to know. She knew resistance would only bring pain. There was no way out. He was happy for her to see his face, wanted it – that meant there was no happy ending and he knew part of the story already.

  At the end of it all he nodded, satisfied – his son-in-law had indeed killed his daughter and Davy McGill.

  ‘Well, I’ll be fucked.’ He felt the pulse bang at the side of his neck and he fought to control his rage, but he was determined that he would be cold and hard when he dished out the final sentence.

  ‘What are you going to do with me?’ Hadden said.

  Hamilton’s head snapped up; he had almost forgotten her as he imagined what he would do to his son-in-law.

  ‘You’ve got a treat comin’, girl. You helped that bastard kill the lassie. Maybe you never expected that, but you were involved.’ He nodded to someone behind her.

  The Glasgow gangster who she’d slept with, ripped off and treated like a numpty walked into her view. He grinned as if he was looking at his next meal. Hamilton walked out of her view and she heard him say, ‘Enjoy it, boys. Remember. I want her alive when you’re finished wi’ her.’

  The Glasgow man leaned over until his face was only inches from hers. He leered at her torment. ‘It’s payback, darlin’.’

  He snapped the tape back on her mouth and waved to the men behind her. The gangster she ripped off like a fool wiped the back of his hand across his lips and two shambling junkies appeared from the shadows. It looked and smelled like they hadn’t washed in a month, and they seemed completely out of it, both of them sweating despite the chill air.

  ‘These two star turns are gonnae spend the next couple o’ days wi’ you and dae whatever they like, as much as they like. They’ve got every fuckin’ junkie disease ye can think of: hep, AIDS – they have it all, and so will you by the time they’ve finished. First things first though – I’ll have a go before I head back tae Glasgow.’

  He told the two junkies and whoever else was there to fuck off and that he’d give them a shout when he was finished. He pulled out a syringe and her eyes nearly popped when he pushed it in her arm and watched her drift off the edge.

  Two days later, Janet Hadden was found wandering about on the edge of the M8 and was almost wiped out by cars that had to swerve to avoid her. When the police arrived, they thought she was a junkie and couldn’t make sense of a word she said. She looked like she’d been the victim of an accident or serious assault. She was taken to intensive care, but her mind was broken and would never recover. Even if she had been rational, she could never have told the police why Arthur Hamilton had taken such a course of action.

  When Macallan heard what had happened, she went to see her and was shocked at what she saw. It didn’t make any sense. The doctors said she was pumped full of dope and looked like she’d suffered a prolonged serious sexual assault, but unfortunately, she couldn’t tell them a thing and was in deep shock.

  Macallan stood and watched her for a few minutes, but while her eyes were open, she was somewhere else in her mind.

  She drove back to the office and realised they were no nearer to finding out what was driving this train of events. She reported back to a meeting of senior officers who had no idea how to deal with it. Hadden had been reported missing when she hadn’t turned up for work, but if she couldn’t tell them what had happened, it was impossible to know where to start.

  The press were all over it, but they didn’t know what line to take other than investigations were being carried out and a dedicated team was trying to establish what had happened.

  In Janet Hadden’s mind, she played the old nightmare over and over in a loop. The sky was even darker, but she was trapped on the edge of the same cliff and the earth below her feet was moving as if it was alive.

  62

  Dominic Grainger wasn’t surprised when he got the call from Arthur Hamilton. It had to come, and in any case, he was relieved that he could get a chance to gauge what Hamilton was thinking or up to. Grainger was beginning to feel the weight of what had happened falling of
f his shoulders, but the thing that still kept him awake at night was what had happened to Janet Hadden. No one had worked it out, and the police were keeping quiet. Hadden walked on the edge, and there was no telling who else she’d fucked about, but he still couldn’t be sure. He’d contacted the co-handler, who told him they had made a new arrangement and Hadden wouldn’t be coming back. That was the line they were taking and sticking to it.

  ‘Thought we could meet up, Dominic,’ Hamilton said. ‘Some stuff we need to talk over about Jude’s things and her estate. I’d made some arrangements for her but obviously that’s changed.’

  Hamilton sounded calm enough but that meant nothing. Grainger knew there would be something else behind the call, but as long as they met in a public place it was fair enough, and he was sure Hamilton wouldn’t try anything without proof. He might suspect, but if there was something more than being seen going to Davy McGill’s flat, he’d be dead already. The police seemed to have given up, and he’d heard that Ronnie Slade had been moved onto another case.

  ‘No problem, Arthur. What about Leith Walk? Some nice boozers down there now.’

  It was arranged, and Grainger made sure he had a couple of heavies with him, or at least close by if they were needed. He couldn’t see Hamilton trying anything in a public place, but you never knew what would happen on the way there or coming away. It wouldn’t be the first time. He’d decided to act like a professional now. His debts were all taken care of, his brothers were inside and probably wouldn’t see the light of day for twenty years. The Belfast boys were pissed off at the loss of the gear and the fact that four of their men were inside, but it happened, and there had not been any serious follow-up by the police on either side of the water so it could just as easily have been a problem on the Northern Ireland side. The PSNI had agents everywhere, and bugging operations were routine. They were making their own enquiries to see if the problems were theirs.