by Jay Stringer
Gaines smiled when he saw me flinch. “Aye, they were at the other end of that deal. We shut that down for a long time once the police started sniffing, and our friends lost a lot of money. They didn’t take kindly to it, you could say.”
“They wanted someone to blame.”
“They did. And I was all set to give it to them. Give them your name and address, lay the whole bloody thing on you like we should have. But Ronny, she liked you, said we needed you.”
“Who got the blame?”
“Never you mind. The point is, they came back with another offer, still just a bunch of businessmen having a sit down, but now there were two options on the table. Take the money, or take a war.”
“I’d say money wins.” The penny dropped. “This is where she’s getting the money for the Birmingham deal?”
“Aye. We’ll be getting enough money to buy into that development clean, no more hiding, and they’ll get the illegal businesses that you’ve spent a couple years perfecting for them.”
“How the hell would we launder that kind of money?”
“Like I said, let the men in offices deal with that. Ronny’s working on that end of things. Once we have the money she can get it clean, then get it gone.”
Claire’s mood turned to impatience. “Daddy, tell him about the leak.”
“All right, all right.” He folded a piece of paper from beneath his blanket and passed it to me.
I glanced it over and quickly realized it was a message from the cartel, even though it wasn’t signed.
“Looks like someone’s whispered in their ear about our leak problem,” the old man said. “The immigration deal was strike one. This is strike two.”
Had Jelly been in contact with the cartel? How would he know to contact them? Another question to add to the list.
“If this is two, what’s strike three?” I said.
“Read the end of the letter.”
I scanned down to the bottom. The last few lines said that failure to identify the threat to the deal within seventy-two hours would lead to the negotiator being terminated.
“I assume they didn’t misspell negotiation?”
The old man shook his head.
“And I assume that the negotiator in this deal is Veronica?”
This time the old man nodded.
“And when was this delivered?”
“Last night.”
Great. Seventy-two hours just became forty-eight.
I waved the letter. “Does she know the men she’s negotiating with are planning to kill her?”
Back to his head shaking again. “And she can’t know. I want her protected from this, so she can do her job.”
“All that stuff earlier about the pictures of me and Laura, that was all crap, wasn’t it?”
He gave me a slow handclap. “I was fucking with you. Claire had already vouched for you. She likes you. That’s not always been the test of a good man, but Ronny likes you too, and they can’t both be wrong. I needed to see how loyal you were to her.”
The knot in my stomach vanished. I’d passed a test by lying to him. If only they taught shit like that at school. I looked over at Claire, but she was still tense, still pissed at me deep down.
“You said this was delivered yesterday? Was it by hand?”
When Gaines nodded I described the man I’d met in the photography studio, and he dropped down a few inches and a great fatigue seemed to pull his body inward. “No, but I know who you mean. His name’s Branko. He’s from Montenegro, but they won’t have him back there. I once saw him make an IRA triggerman cry like a baby. If he’s working for the cartel, we can’t let him find the leak first.”
I nodded and said I was already on it. I hoped he trusted me at my word because I didn’t want to go into detail. All that would do was show how many more questions I had than answers. All I could think was that Jelly had somehow gotten word to the cartel about the leak, and had ended up dead. The Cartwrights had looked to be involved, but now they were either on the run or in the morgue, and I had a feeling I knew which. And Branko seemed to be one step ahead of me in the investigation, so maybe he was behind what had happened at the hotel. If that was the case, we were already on borrowed time.
The old man had one more message for me before I left. He pointed from me to Claire and said, “If you put your dick anywhere near her again, I’ll mail it to your old man.”
Claire didn’t join me on the drive back. She walked me out to the car and then had a quiet conversation with the driver. I couldn’t catch the words, but I caught the tone. She was not in a mood to be messed with. The driver walked away in a hurry, and someone else stepped down from the house to take his place.
I knew the guy. He was a Glaswegian called Ross Nicol, a former bouncer and debt collector who Ransford had brought down to replace the old enforcer. His predecessor, Bull, had been arrested and then died on the end of a knife in prison. Ross had been intended to be Veronica’s new right-hand man, but she’d picked me instead, and Ross had never been shy about letting me know how much he hated that.
I’d nicknamed him Chuckles when we first met, because he never smiled. That was before I’d learned he hated me, but the name had stuck because it seemed even more appropriate.
“So, ready to quit?” Chuckles said over the volume of the radio.
“No.”
“Aye, you always were an idiot.” He kept his eyes on the road, never looking at me as he spoke. “Like last night. Should have just called me to help.”
“And would you have?”
“Probably not.”
Click.
“You took the photographs, didn’t you?”
“Yup.”
“Do you usually follow me?”
“Yup. Better chance of getting you sacked that way.”
We sat in silence for the rest of the drive. He dropped me outside my flat, and I decided to leave my car where it was until morning. I took the easy way out and bought a bag of chips from one of the many takeaways on Broad Street; then I headed back up to my flat already knowing I was going to regret the food choice tomorrow.
I’d been on my sofa for less than a mouthful when my buzzer rang, and Laura asked to be let up. I tried to think of a reason to refuse, but I realized I didn’t want to. For the first time in years I was looking forward to seeing her again.
I opened my door and then turned back to the sofa. She climbed the stairs and stayed in the doorway, leaning against the frame.
“I think you should invite me in.”
“Isn’t that for vampires?”
“Just to be polite.”
I laughed and stood up again, heading over to the doorway. I bowed theatrically and waved for her to step inside. She was still dressed from her work day, a bland suit and shirt that looked more like a uniform than the actual uniform.
“You’ve been avoiding me,” she said. When I didn’t answer, she added, “Don’t worry, I’m not mad.”
“Matter of opinion.”
She laughed and it gave me a lift, pushed away the hunger and the stress of the day. She walked around the open-plan living room, taking in my clean modern flat for the first time. She nodded and turned back to me, saying, “Not bad.” Then she pointed to the far wall, where a large bookcase was holding my ever-expanding collection.
“That’s new,” she said. “When did you start reading?”
I’d never been a big reader when we were together. “Got into it a couple years ago, that time Noah was staying with me. He left a Sean O’Casey book when he left, and I gave it a go. Got addicted.”
“So your brother does have a use, then. Good to know. But you know these things are digital now? You don’t need a bookcase.”
“Steady on. I’ve only just gotten into reading—let’s take things slow, eh?”
“So I’m not talking to a budding author, then?”
I shook my head and changed the subject. “You’re here about the fire?”
“Nah.” She slipped her jacket off and draped it over the kitchen counter. “We will need to talk about that, though. The two uniforms from last night might connect the dots and report that they saw us. But I’ve been thinking all day about last night.”
“Me too.”
“And really, I was wondering when we were going to do it again.”
She stood with her hands on her hips, waiting for the stupid boy in the room to hurry up. I stood up and moved over to her, reaching in for a soft kiss, nothing like the ferocity of last night. It felt good and, I knew then, it felt right. We pushed each other around a little before she let me lift her up onto the kitchen counter, seating her there while we kissed some more.
I’m not sure how long we’d been that way, but we were still there when I heard a key in the lock of my door and Claire stepped into the room, carrying a bottle of wine and a heavy takeaway bag full of food. She set the food down on the living room table and turned, catching sight of us.
She flushed with a brief anger before biting it back and giving us a look that was entirely cold. She rocked on the balls of her feet for a moment before adopting a fake smile. “Laura.”
Laura returned the greeting. “Claire.”
“Right, then.” Claire picked up the food. “You kids have fun.”
She headed back out, shutting the door quietly behind her. If I’d expected a tantrum I didn’t get one. She was full of surprises. A couple of seconds later I heard her knocking on the footballer’s front door.
I turned back to Laura but she pulled away with a question on her face.
“Can’t have one Gaines, so—?”
I smiled and pretended I didn’t know what she was talking about. “Come on.”
Sometime in the middle of the night I quit staring at the ceiling and got out of bed. Laura was sleeping beside me, with a soft snore that she hadn’t had when we were married. But that wasn’t the problem.
I rummaged though my clothes until I found what was eating me.
Tony’s wallet was still in my coat pocket. It had been calling out to me. I flipped it open and could make out the family picture in the dim light. I sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the photograph. I’d been skating by for two years by ignoring the cost of what I was doing. I’d not even known Tony had a family until I was knelt over his dead body. Did he have problems looking them in the eyes after a day working with me?
I didn’t believe in a Mullo, but I was well acquainted with guilt.
The wallet felt heavy in my hands.
In dream, in memory.
I’m in the cellar at Apna Angel. Marv is lying dead beside me, his brains on the far wall. My hand still trembles with recoil from the gunshot.
Channy Mann is on his knees in the center of the room. Both of them are broken and bloody, and his whimpers fall on my ears as if I should care about them.
Veronica Gaines stands over him, a gun in each hand.
She turns to me and, for the second time, says, “You don’t have to stay.”
I do. I know I do. I did this. I have to carry it.
She bends down in front of Mann and uses the tip of one of the guns to raise his chin, making him look into her eyes. Those eyes. They’re darker in that moment, in my dream, in my memory. They shine.
“You have a family,” she says to him. “Beautiful children. I’ve seen them. I know where they live, where they sleep right now, waiting for you.”
His whimpers get louder, but they’re burying swear words. Even in his pain he’s finding the strength to curse Gaines, her family, her gender.
She ignores him. “I’m going to kill you either way, Channy. But here’s your choice. You give me what I want, and one of these guns will stop your pain. If you answer my question in any other way, or if you even hesitate in answering me, we will go to your house, and you will watch these guns kill your family first. Do you understand?”
Channy doesn’t hesitate.
I woke up to the smells of cooking. The thought of someone else at work in my kitchen was enough to get me out of bed, even as I checked my phone and saw it was only nine a.m. My thoughts flashed on the cartel’s ticking clock: they’d set their deadline at seventy-two hours. Three days. Yet a day had gone by before I’d even been brought in. I couldn’t afford to hang around. But then I found Laura in the kitchen, dressed in one of my old concert T-shirts and her trousers from the night before, making French toast. When she saw me, she held up a jar of garlic and shook it, to answer my question before I’d asked it. I slid onto the stool at the counter and waited, watching the way the fabric of the trousers hugged her ass cheeks. She caught me at it and smiled, but that took my brain somewhere more troubled.
“What’s this thing that we’re doing?”
She shrugged and handed me a plate of French toast still steaming from the hot pan. The smell of garlic rose off it. “I don’t know. Don’t care.”
“Last night you said that was all you’d been thinking about.”
She shook her head but didn’t answer straight away. After setting her own plate down on the counter, she poured two cups of coffee from the pot, added milk and sugar to hers, and put them beside the plates. She pulled the other stool from beside me to sit opposite, so we faced each other across the meal. She chewed on a mouthful of fried bread before shaking her head again and getting to the point.
“No. I’ve been thinking about us, not about us. I’ve been thinking about the sex ever since we had it. I think it’s going to cost me a fortune to get that sofa fixed, by the way.” I smiled and she said, “But all the baggage that comes with it? We’ve burned that house down too many times. You remember when you were a teenager, and you had sex or fancied a girl, what did you spend your time thinking about?”
“My inability to ask her out.”
“Okay. But when you did? You were out for good times. You weren’t thinking about divorce, or moving out, or how to explain the breakup to your parents. You were thinking about how much you liked being with that person, and how long it was until you could do it again. It feels good, sitting here like this, talking to you. So I’m not thinking about the rest.”
I raised my cup in a mock toast. “To not thinking.”
She responded with her own cup and a smile.
“And, hey, not that I’m not grateful for my breakfast and all that, but shouldn’t you be at work?”
“I’m not in the office this morning. I’ve got a court appearance at eleven, giving a statement on a robbery case. Then, this afternoon, I’m giving a talk at a school.”
“Police recruitment?”
She shook her head. “Self defense. Not the practical lessons,” she got in as she saw my eyebrow go up, “though I could take you if I had to. I go in and talk about the other side of it. Tell teenagers it’s okay to say no, and how to spot the signs of trouble and walk the other way.”
“Going to show them pictures?”
“Yes, people collapsed on the street in their own vomit on a Friday night. Kids with bruises on their faces who walked down the wrong street while drunk. All the fun ones.”
“Think they’ll listen?”
“Nope.”
“Good.”
We both laughed at that. Then she got serious in that sneaky way of hers, getting there ahead of me and catching me off guard while I was still laughing. “So what’s with you and Claire?”
“Nothing serious. You know how she is.”
“I know how she was. And I know who she is. The spoiled little brat? That was someone you could afford to mess around. The adult? Eoin, we both know what she’s capable of. You sure the two of you are on the same page?”
I hid my face in the bottom of my coffee.
I’d still not figured out what page Claire was on, let alone whether the two of us were on the same one. I didn’t like other people asking me to think about things I’d been choosing to ignore.
When I put my drink down I used my patented changing of the subject. “So what’s going to happen with those cops who saw us at the hotel?”
“That your patented changing of the subject?”
“You call it that too?”
“No, I call it bullshit. But you’ve called it that enough times in front of me that I know what just went through your brain. Any woman who’s sleeping with you, especially you, must have a reason. As much as it’s best for us not to question what we’re doing, you owe it to Claire to find out. And maybe you owe it to yourself. ”
“Thanks, mum.”
She nodded and bit back a response, and all the resentment we’d lost after our work together at the hotel seemed to come back again, bringing with it the type of sarcasm and nitpicking that we tended to fall into. She ate in silence, and I sat there feeling like a dick.
She finished her last bite and then smiled, lightening the mood. “What do you think of the food—am I allowed in your kitchen again?”
“It was good, yeah. Maybe we should try it the other way next time—I’ve never cooked in your current flat. There’s a whole world of smells that your kitchen is not acquainted with.”
“I do miss the crazy smells. Not the mess, though. Tonight?”
I nodded. Then shook my head. The cartel’s clock was ticking at the back of my mind. “I don’t know. I’m kind of—there’s something going on, things I have to do, fast.” I saw the look on her face, like she assumed I was backing out. She started to say it was okay, and I saw her protective wall starting to go back up. I touched her hand. “It’s not a brush off. I do want to see you again.”
