Head of the Firm

by Caz Finlay

  Feeling like a voyeur intruding on their grief, Grace slipped past them both. Michael caught her eye as she did and gave her a look that reminded her of a rabbit trapped in headlights. ‘I’ll make you two a drink,’ she mouthed.

  Putting the kettle on, Grace took three mugs from the cupboard and then leaned against the kitchen counter. She was heartbroken by Paul’s death. She had loved him like a son and had no idea how they would all cope without him. But she could only imagine what Michael and Cheryl were going through. Paul was their child, whom they had raised and loved from the moment he was born, and now he was gone.

  As she carried a tray of hot tea out of the kitchen, Grace noticed that the hallway was empty and could hear voices coming from the living room. She walked in and placed the tray on the table in front of Michael and Cheryl who were both sitting on the sofa.

  ‘Haven’t you got anything stronger?’ Cheryl sniffed as she looked at the mugs of tea with open disdain.

  ‘I’ll get you a brandy,’ Michael replied before Grace could. He walked over to the drinks cabinet and poured two large measures of brandy. ‘Want one, love?’ he asked Grace.

  ‘No, thanks,’ she said with a shake of her head.

  Returning to sit on the sofa, Michael handed Cheryl her drink. She took it without a word of thanks and turned her attention to Grace. ‘Don’t you have somewhere to be?’ she said as she shot Grace a withering look.

  ‘Yes she does. Right here,’ Michael snapped as he glared at his ex-wife.

  Grace groaned inwardly. Cheryl would never change. Even in her grief she couldn’t see Grace as anything other than a threat.

  ‘I should check on the kids, to be honest,’ Grace lied as she picked up her mug of tea from the table. ‘I’ll let you two talk.’ She smiled at Michael and gave his shoulder a squeeze as she walked past him.

  ‘Goodnight, Cheryl,’ she added on her way out. ‘And for what it’s worth, I’m truly sorry.’

  Before Cheryl could offer a snarky comeback, Grace left the room.

  ‘I still can’t believe you married that stuck-up bitch,’ Cheryl said as she downed her brandy after Grace had left the room.

  Michael glared at her. ‘I thought you came here to talk about Paul?’

  Cheryl shrugged. ‘I did. I’m just saying. I don’t know what you see in her. She’s not your type at all.’

  ‘I don’t think you have any idea what my type is, Cheryl. And you have no fucking business coming into my house and insulting my wife.’

  ‘Okay, keep your hair on. I’m sorry,’ she said. She smiled at him and fluttered her eyelashes and he realised he’d never been able to tell whether she was being genuine or not.

  ‘Any chance of a refill?’ she asked as she held up her empty glass.

  Grace was putting some laundry away when Michael came into their bedroom.

  ‘Has Cheryl gone?’ she asked.

  ‘Just. I thought she was going to stay the night at one point. She kept hinting at it, but I put her off.’

  ‘She could have stayed if she needed to,’ Grace said as she closed the dressing-table drawer and walked over to him.

  ‘Are you joking? We’d never get rid of her. Can you imagine her flouncing round the place demanding to be fed and watered?’ he said as he pulled Grace into a hug.

  ‘She probably wants to be close to you,’ Grace said. ‘It must be hard for her going home to an empty house. Maybe being with you makes her feel close to Paul?’

  ‘Or she just wants to cause aggro as usual,’ he said with a sigh. ‘I’m sorry about what she said to you.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ Grace reassured him. ‘She’s grieving. Besides, it would take more than a dig from Cheryl to bother me.’

  ‘You’re an angel, do you know that?’ he said as he brushed her hair behind her ear.

  She smiled. ‘I don’t think your ex-wife would agree with you.’

  ‘Well, no, she thinks you’re the devil incarnate. But who gives a shit what she thinks?’ he said with the faintest of smiles.

  ‘Do you think she’ll be okay?’ Grace asked in all seriousness.

  Michael shrugged. ‘I don’t know. She’s a survivor though, I know that much.’

  ‘I hope she’s got someone she can ring for company. Maybe you should have asked her to stay?’

  Michael shook his head. ‘I think we’ve got enough on our plates, don’t you?’

  Grace nodded and rested her head on his chest. ‘How are you?’ she asked softly.

  Michael rested his chin on her head and sighed. ‘I don’t know, Grace. I feel kind of numb today. Maybe that’s a good thing though?’

  Grace squeezed her arms tighter around him. ‘Just know I’m here for whatever you need.’

  ‘I know,’ he replied before planting a kiss on her forehead.

  Chapter Sixty

  Jake stopped his car outside the terraced house in Kensington and turned off the engine.

  ‘You think these fuckwits will know anything?’ Connor asked.

  ‘Who knows? They can’t know any less than the other four dozen fuckwits we’ve spoken to today, can they?’

  Connor nodded and absent-mindedly rubbed the knuckles on his right hand, which were already bruised. ‘Seems as good a place as any then.’

  The occupants of the house were a pair of nut-jobs who’d moved down from Glasgow a few months earlier, and occasionally operated as armed robbers. Not knowing the local area, they had burst into The Blue Rooms one quiet Sunday morning when only the cleaners were in, and tried to rob the safe. They hadn’t been able to get into it, and had escaped with a few crates of spirits instead. Jake and the twins had paid the pair of them a visit and had ensured they learned exactly who they had fucked with by putting them in hospital for a few nights. The only reason they’d escaped a more severe punishment was because they hadn’t harmed either of the cleaners who’d been unfortunate enough to be on duty that morning. Both women had been shaken up, but otherwise unharmed, and Jake and the twins had given them some credit for that.

  Since then, Jake had heard that the pair had made it their business to get to know every villain in the city and had quickly learned who they could take on and win, and who to leave well alone. Neither Jake or Connor seriously believed that either of them had anything to do with Paul’s murder, but they might just know who did.

  Getting out of the car, Jake and Connor put on the leather driving gloves they always carried in their pockets. Then they scanned the street before opening the boot and taking out a baseball bat each. Jake also had a blade tucked away inside his long coat, while Connor had brought a Baikal handgun. If things went south, they always had a back-up plan.

  ‘You do the honours, mate,’ Jake said to Connor as they approached the front door. With one swift kick, Connor booted through the rotten wood and the door sprang open, ricocheting against the interior wall. They ran inside and almost collided with the occupants, who had obviously heard the noise of the door almost coming off its hinges, and had decided to make a run for it.

  ‘Woah. Where the fuck do you think you’re off to?’ Jake said as he pushed one of the cousins through the open doorway to the living room. He fell onto his cousin behind him as well as a third man whom Jake and Connor had never seen before, causing them to fall like a row of dominoes.

  The three men scrabbled over each other to get up.

  ‘Sit the fuck down!’ Connor barked at them as he walked into the room behind Jake.

  The three men scurried to the sofa and sat on it, staring up at Jake and Connor who stood in front of them, each of them holding a baseball bat over their shoulder.

  ‘We’ve come looking for some answers, lads. And if you don’t start talking, we’ll start breaking some bones,’ Jake said.

  The three men nodded. ‘What do you want to know?’ one asked in a thick Scottish accent.

  ‘Anything that you know about my brother’s murder,’ Connor replied.

  They sat in silence with pale faces sta
ring at Jake and Connor. Fed up with the silence, Jake swung his bat and cracked one of them on the kneecap. He howled in pain, causing the other two to start talking.

  ‘Nothin’. We don’t know nothin’,’ they said, shaking their heads furiously.

  ‘Don’t believe you,’ Connor snapped as he swung the bat and popped another kneecap.

  Jake pulled the knife from his coat. ‘I think it’s about time we stopped pissing about, don’t you?’

  Ten minutes later, Connor and Jake walked out of the house to a chorus of wailing and sobbing.

  ‘Don’t think they knew anything?’ Jake said with a shrug.

  ‘Nope,’ Connor agreed. ‘So, where to now’

  ‘How about we pay all of our dealers a visit? Maybe one of them decided to try a takeover?’ Jake replied. He didn’t believe that was the case, but he was out of ideas.

  ‘Why not?’ Connor replied. ‘I’ve got fuck all else to do.’

  Connor climbed into Jake’s car and sat in silence as Jake drove. ‘Shall we start with that prick Stu Poynter?’ Jake said.

  ‘If you like,’ Connor replied with a nod. Jake didn’t like Stu. He didn’t like that Paul and Stu were mates – or at least they had been. That was why he wanted to visit Stu really. He just wanted an excuse to beat the shit out of him, and why not? Connor felt like beating the shit out of someone too. He’d lost his best mate in the whole world – someone who was quite literally his other half, and if he even thought about Paul for more than a second, he felt so much anger and grief that he worried his heart would burst out of his chest and he would spontaneously combust. To make matters worse, Jazz had started avoiding his calls too. Just when he really needed her, she was ghosting him.

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Acting DI Leigh Moss groaned inwardly as she noticed DI Webster walking across the busy office towards her. He grinned as he finally reached her and perched himself on the edge of her desk. Leigh rolled her chair back a few inches in order to put as much distance between her and her former boss as possible. She’d worked for Tony Webster in CID until six months earlier when she’d secured her acting up promotion to the Organised Crime Task Force, and she hated him. To Leigh, Webster was the embodiment of everything she despised in a police officer – his arrogance, his sense of absolute entitlement, his conviction that he was invincible, and his belief that he was irresistible to women. If all of that wasn’t bad enough, Leigh knew without a doubt that Webster was bent. But he’d been her boss and he had the ear of the Chief Super, so there was no way she was going to be the one to try and expose him, no matter how much she wanted to.

  ‘How are things?’ Webster said with a flash of his eyebrows. ‘Missing me yet?’

  ‘Not yet, Tony,’ Leigh responded quickly, grateful that she no longer had to call him Sir. She was only an acting DI, for now, but that still meant that for the time being, at least, she no longer had to address him as her superior officer.

  ‘How are things in organised crime?’ he asked.

  ‘Same old, same old. You know how it is,’ Leigh replied. She knew he was fishing for intel from her. Any little titbit could be useful to him in order to keep his benefactors happy.

  ‘What? I’d heard the whole city’s going to shit. Four shootings in the last two days alone, not to mention a surge in violent crime,’ he said as he picked up one of the case files from her desk and started to flick through it.

  Leigh snatched the file from his hands. ‘Don’t believe everything you hear.’

  Webster frowned at her. ‘Don’t forget where you come from, Leigh,’ he said with a snarl. ‘At a time like this, you should remember who your friends are.’ Then he stood up and gave her a patronising pat on the shoulder. ‘Keep up the good work, Detective,’ he said before walking away.

  Leigh scowled after him. What the hell did he mean by all that ‘remember where you come from’ crap? He acted like he was her mentor or something – like she had ever learned anything remotely useful from him! As she was thinking that, a cold trickle of fear ran down her throat and into her chest. Surely he didn’t actually know anything about her past? Almost nobody did. She had worked hard to erase any trace of her former identity and become the woman she was today. But there was one person who knew the truth, and that person just happened to be the queen of the bloody underworld. The same woman who kept Webster, and no doubt a few of his colleagues, in her vast pockets. Leigh shook her head and admonished herself. She was being paranoid. There was no way Grace Carter would betray her, Leigh was sure – least of all to a scumbag like Tony Webster.

  ‘What did he want?’ The familiar voice of DS Nick Bryce interrupted Leigh’s thoughts and she realised he had made her way over to her desk while she’d been glaring at Webster’s retreating figure.

  Leigh shook her head and gave him a faint smile. ‘Nothing really. You know what he’s like. Thinks I’m his mate or something,’ she said dismissively.

  Nick frowned. ‘He’s a dick. I’ve never liked him. Hated working for him in CID.’

  ‘Me too,’ Leigh agreed. ‘Do you have something for me?’ she said, indicating the manila folder in his hand.

  ‘A stabbing early hours this morning,’ he said with a sigh. ‘But we think it’s connected to our case.’

  ‘A stabbing? For God’s sake,’ she muttered in response.

  ‘Well, not so much a stabbing as a slashing really,’ Nick corrected himself. ‘Victim has two slices across his face and four on his forearms.’

  ‘Defensive wounds?’ Leigh queried.

  Nick shook his head and passed her the folder, which included photographs of the injuries. ‘He had the shit kicked out of him first. I doubt he could have defended himself even if he’d tried. Besides, the knife wounds appear deliberate. They’re carved into the victim’s flesh rather than random slices. The doc thinks so too.’

  ‘Who is our victim and where is he now?’

  ‘Stu Poynter. He lives in Heswall, but he was at his girlfriend’s in Gateacre last night. She drove him to A and E. He’s not been one of our big players up to now. Has a few assault PCs on his record and a couple of possessions. Not someone who’s been massively on our radar anyway. He’s in The Royal being stitched up. Refuses to give a statement or co-operate in any way.’

  ‘And the girlfriend?’

  ‘She didn’t see a thing. Obviously.’

  Leigh shook her head. ‘Of course not.’

  ‘He claims he was mugged on the way home from town.’

  ‘How many muggings on the way home from the pub has it been this week then?’ she said with a raised eyebrow.

  ‘He’s our fourth so far,’ Nick replied.

  ‘And those are just the ones we know about,’ Leigh said as she absent-mindedly rubbed the bridge of her nose.

  ‘We knew Paul Carter’s murder was going to cause problems,’ Nick reminded her.

  ‘I know that, but in the meantime, Jake Conlon and Connor Carter are making this unit look bloody incompetent. What’s happening with the surveillance?’

  ‘Still not approved, Ma’am. DCI James is still saying we don’t have enough to go on. It’s not like the pair of them have ever even been arrested or anything. And no one is willing to give us their names. They’ve got the criminal community running scared.’

  ‘I’ll bloody follow them myself if I have to,’ Leigh snapped.

  ‘It’s at times like this I almost wish Grace Carter was back at the helm,’ Nick said quietly. ‘At least she kept the rest of them in line.’

  ‘Well, she’s not at the helm any more, is she? Or if she is, she’s lost control. There’s no way she’d have sanctioned this kind of mayhem.’

  ‘You sound like you speak from experience,’ Nick said.

  Leigh nodded. ‘I was only a beat copper when Grace Carter, or Conlon as she was then, rose through the ranks. Before she took control, there had been a few years of carnage and chaos as the factions battled for the top. Then Grace stepped in, and everything calmed down. Stay
ed like that for years. She has a way of doing things that doesn’t involve shooting or maiming every scumbag in the city.’

  ‘If I didn’t know you better, Ma’am, I’d almost think you admired her.’

  Leigh stared at him. ‘Don’t be so bloody soft,’ she snapped. ‘Why don’t you make yourself useful and make me a coffee while I have a look at this.’ She turned away from him and opened the folder.

  ‘Whatever you say, Ma’am,’ Nick replied with a shrug.

  Leigh leafed through the photographs in the folder, paying little attention to Stu Poynter’s wounds. Instead, she thought about her conversation with Nick. The truth was, not only did she admire Grace Carter, or Grace Conlon as Leigh had first known her so many years ago, but she also had a great deal of respect for her. Not that she would ever admit that to anyone, including Grace. No matter how much respect Leigh had for the other woman, it didn’t change the fact that everything Grace stood for was the complete antithesis of everything Leigh believed in. They were two very different people on two very different paths, and even their shared past would never change that. Now Grace’s son and her stepson were running unchecked across the city, causing untold damage, and Leigh was determined to bring them down, even if she had to bring Grace down too.