‘It was good to see you again, Kelly,’ I said, sounding more businesslike than I’d intended.
She smiled and headed for the door, and we said goodbye. Kelly was still staying in the same flat she’d shared with Tom Childs, still working the same job she’d been doing for Currie. It seemed, from the outside, like she didn’t need protecting any more, and that she could build whatever life she wanted for herself. But if she’d been running from that family of hers it would be a hard habit to break.
I grabbed something to eat before I went out to the meeting. Meeting! What a stupid bloody thing it was, another act of petulance that wouldn’t have happened if Peter Jamieson was on the outside. Only he would have the power to make people gather before him, and that was a power he was too smart to use. This was going to be a parade of bad leadership. Anyway, I went, because bad leadership was still leadership.
8
The one redeeming feature of this meeting was that Lafferty had a good place where we could hold it. He had a three-storey glass-and-steel building next door to a recently renovated warehouse, on a busy, business-looking kind of street. The buildings were tall, brick affairs that shut out the light on the street and made the street lights coming on a relief as I drove along it. A lot of them now had large glass doors and big wide windows knocked into them, but most made an effort to keep the classic feel. One stood out, and the one that stood out was the one where we were having our meeting.
On the left-hand side of the road there were two properties that Lafferty owned, one traditional brick building whose ground floor was now a car park, and a pudgy, three-storey glass-and-steel mediocrity next door. That was Lafferty’s office, bought not long after it was built, replacing a perfectly decent old building that had been knocked down in the name of modernization.
The sliding doors to the rusty brick building were wide open, the place well lit as I pulled in and came to a halt facing the side wall. Sort of place where cars could come and go for meetings and it wouldn’t raise too many eyebrows. This was all part of his cover for the money he was making, and a damn good cover it was too. Lafferty was making enough legit money to walk away from the dirty, but having a lot of money seemed to make him want to have more.
I was busy looking at the other cars, trying to work out who was politically minded enough to get here early and who wasn’t. I didn’t recognize any of them, a collection of entirely predictable German luxury. I wasn’t first to arrive; probably not last. There must have been seven or eight cars in there ahead of me, probably another seven or eight to come, and that just made me shake my head. Gathering everyone that mattered in one place when you’re worried you’re under attack. Might as well have put up a fucking sign.
There was some gormless-looking soul standing at the side of the warehouse, obviously sent by Lafferty to show people the way to the office next door. I didn’t need a map to go out the side door and cross the narrow gap to the next building.
‘Just go in the side door and the stairs are beside you,’ he said as I walked past him and ignored him. ‘They’re on the second floor.’
I mumbled something that he might have mistaken for a thank you if he was in good spirits, and kept on walking. Across the narrow road between the buildings and in through the glass side door. The foyer was a needlessly long and wide waste of tiled floor space, a large curved desk on the left tucked under one of the staircases that stood on either side. There were large paintings hanging opposite each other that looked rather like a giant had coughed up paint onto a sheet of steel. This was presumably designed to give the place a sense of personality. It failed miserably. There was a sterile, functional and contrived feel to it that I guessed hadn’t been the case with the old place they knocked down to build this.
I went up the stairs, found myself looking left in through an open door to a conference room with a lot of chairs laid out for people to sit on, a group of men standing around with drinks and talking in low voices.
The room was all lit up, full-length windows all the way down one wall. Now, I was all for hiding in plain sight, but this just seemed to be pushing our luck. A couple of low voices fell lower when they saw me walk in through the door, my usual scowl on my face. I’m employed to be scary so it’s always worth reminding employers how scary I can look.
Three gravitated over towards me: Mikey, Ronnie and Marty Jones.
‘Some party, huh,’ Mikey said with a smile, nodding across to the table at the side of the room, as amused as I was disgusted.
There was wine, red and white; whisky; orange juice; tea and coffee; and a bottle of rum that was presumably intended for Damon Walker, who I knew drank gallons of the stuff. There were glasses and cups, all very neatly lined up for the happy little troops to drink, in what felt like an attempt at friendly normality.
Marty Jones stuck out a hand, one I wouldn’t have wanted to shake in days gone by. Marty’s always been a weasel, working in the grubbiest, cheapest parts of the business, but you have to give credit where it’s due, even when it’s due to an arsehole. So I shook his hand, because he’d stepped up and done as much as anyone to hold the organization together in Jamieson’s absence.
‘I should warn you,’ Marty said in a whisper, ‘that Lafferty ain’t happy with how things have played out. Doesn’t like the fact that it isn’t his own people who’ve been taking the lead on this.’
That was to be expected, so I shrugged it off and looked around the room, picking out the faces I knew and making a note of the ones I didn’t. Seemed like a lot of people had come along, certainly a lot more people than could be considered important. Some had brought protection, which boosted the numbers, and others had brought company to give the impression that they were too important to travel alone.
Never a good thing to see faces you don’t recognize and realize that they’re important, but that was happening. I leaned across to Mikey and asked him who the cluster in the far corner were.
‘Guy with the grey hair and the earring is Davey the Robot. You heard of him, yeah?’
‘Fuck’s sake, what happened to him?’
‘Got old fast is what happened. I heard there was something wrong with him, but, I don’t know, I hear that about a lot of people that keep hanging around. Rest of the people with him are just his crew. Probably got them along to make him look like he’s tough and not worth arguing with.’
‘Same reason I have you and Conn along,’ Marty muttered, acknowledging that he was the man most people would feel comfortable arguing with. Marty was the most recently junior of the people in the room so could most easily become everyone else’s punchbag if he didn’t do a damn good job of protecting himself.
Davey Boyd was one of the biggest distributors of drugs in the country and had been working exclusively for Jamieson for a few years. It had been a while since I’d seen him, back when he was the picture of health. I recognized one of the people he had with him, a tough guy who worked distribution for the Robot. The other two looked like they were there to drink the coffee and make up the numbers.
I could see Bobby Wayne standing near the window, back to it, looking around the room like an autograph hunter. Bobby owned a bunch of warehouses, garages and other useful storage spaces that people like Kevin Currie had urgent need of. Kevin wasn’t around, nor was Lafferty himself as far as I could see.
Stuart Crockley, who oversaw the process of cleaning up the money now that John Young was in the clink, was sitting talking animatedly at old Brendan Thorne, who looked after the housing stock the organization owned. Thorne was sitting there not listening to a one-sided conversation that was obviously unimportant given its volume.
There was another little knot of young, tough-looking guys standing off to one side who could have belonged to anyone in the room other than themselves. Take those kids out and you were left with a fine collection of white, middle-aged men to set fire to if you wanted to damage the organization. I stopped myself shaking my head in front of people who might see and t
ake note.
Marty nodded a familiar hello to someone who had just come into the room and I turned to look down at Billy Patterson. Still looking for all the world like a street thug, Billy did the donkey work running the debt collection side of the business, keeping a lot of tough guys on staff and reporting to Marty. They made an odd and uncomfortable partnership, the tough and quiet Billy and the brash and sneaky Marty, but they were holding it together. They were making damn good money, so of course they were holding it together.
‘Hasn’t started yet,’ Marty said quietly.
I was starting to realize just how big a spread this was if Patterson was invited along to be a part of it. This wasn’t just the very top guys, guys who might be able to keep the discussion a secret: this was enough people to guarantee that word got out.
‘Yeah, I saw a few of them coming up behind me,’ Billy said.
Took a few more minutes for the last of the senior men to arrive. Matt Harris, who oversaw a bunch of pubs and a couple of clubs, and Damon Walker, who ran an assortment of little businesses for the organization, coming in together. If memory serves me, Taylor ‘Original’ Carlisle was the last to arrive. He was running some boiler-room set-up that John Young had been keen on before he went down, a sharp-tongued bastard with a fake tan and a faker accent and hair that should have been cut months ago.
Kevin Currie had wandered into the room not long before, looking like a man who’d already had a conversation he wasn’t happy with. He nodded a hello but didn’t stop; there were far more senior people in the room he had to be seen talking to.
The chairs were lined up so that three or four were facing a semicircle of twenty or so, and there was little doubt who was to occupy the few that the many were to face. That was for Lafferty and his people, the ones who were taking charge of the meeting, the current crisis and, they obviously hoped, the senior positions in the organization.
It was only thirty seconds after Original arrived that Jake ‘Lonny’ Donezak stuck his head round the door, made a head count and disappeared again. I’d met Lonny before, briefly, when I went round to Lafferty’s house to have a friendly word in his ear on Peter Jamieson’s account. Lonny was the tea boy, but being the tea boy meant he was senior enough to be in the house. Made him a trusted employee, if not quite a right-hand man.
Thirty seconds later and a scowling Angus Lafferty graced us with his presence, trying to look something close to presidential as he walked across the room to the chairs. He was never an impressive spectacle, too short and chunky and close to fifty to make a statement with appearance. I knew he’d been to a few of Marty’s parties before the fall as well, which ruled out presidential. But here was a man who had one of the best drug import businesses in the country, a man who had made more money than I could burn through in a lifetime, a man who had managed to drag all these men into this room to listen to him just because he was in a huff. That was impressive.
Lonny was with him, and another man that I didn’t recognize until he sat down somewhere behind Lafferty and I got a good look at him. Russell Conrad, his name was. A gunman, freelance as far as I knew, experienced and good at his work. I’d worked with him not that long before. He’d killed Potty Cruickshank, a debt collecting rival of Marty’s. He did the killing, I did the disposal. One thing the organization didn’t have was a gunman we could reliably call our own, and it seemed like Lafferty was about to solve that.
People gravitated towards seats, Lafferty the first to sit down. Taking the seat that he evidently considered put him at the head of the conversation. Junior guys like me and Ronnie held back, letting Currie and Marty and the rest of the senior men sit nice and close if they so chose. Not all did. I noticed old Thorne sitting near the back, making no effort to hide his boredom. A man who understood that this meeting wasn’t for him.
I would have preferred to stay standing, but everyone else sat down and you don’t want to be the odd one out. Sitting at the back, watching the farce unfold. Sitting watching what could have been a scene from an unimaginative low-budget movie, because Lafferty was an unimaginative director. He wanted a meeting that would make a statement about his influence, a meeting that everyone would remember. Well, he had that much at least, but no more.
‘We all know what happened,’ Lafferty said with a tone that told the room he’d already rehearsed this, ‘and what we need to know now is who was responsible and how we punish them. Lee Christie was a good man and a good employee, and all of us here know that the way we defend our people is how we are judged by our people. We let Lee down, but we will get justice for him.’
He paused, like he was expecting a murmur of agreement from the room. Some gave it, because they were happy to give what was expected of them, but the rest of us stayed silent. I was there to listen, not to play along.
‘I want to know who was responsible, and I think I already know who was,’ Lafferty went on, looking around him for the agreement he had obviously set up before he got there.
‘Word on the street is that this Adrian Barrett was behind it,’ Original Carlisle piped up in his faux-posh accent.
‘That’s what I’m hearing, and people are worried about it,’ Crockley added too quickly. ‘We need to show people we’re making moves.’
For one thing, Original Carlisle knew as much about the word on the street as I knew about particle physics. The guy spent his life running cons from behind computers and a bank of telephones, and Crockley wasn’t a damn sight better informed. They were reading their lines from the script Lafferty had given them beforehand, and it showed. This whole thing had been set up in advance to make sure Lafferty got exactly what he wanted out of it. That’s why an old guy like Thorne, who had seen it all before, was sitting at the back of the room; he knew he didn’t have a line to play so he sat there while the pantomime went on and would bugger off home as soon as it was done.
‘That’s what I’ve been hearing,’ Lafferty said, ‘and I think we have to take action. Now I know Marty has had men working on this, so I would presume that by now they’ve found something useful.’
That was a challenge to Marty: throw your men overboard or stand up to Lafferty in front of a room of senior men. I was thinking that Conn and Mikey should have brought themselves some life jackets.
‘They’ve been looking for a very short while,’ Marty said, his thin voice puffing out its chest as best it could. ‘They’ve been investigating the fact that someone they didn’t work with was killed, so it’s not as though they’ve had the best chance at finding the truth here. You’ll have had guys investigating your man’s death as well, won’t you?’ Now, he asked it like a friendly question, but this was wee Marty Jones rolling a grenade into the middle of Angus Lafferty’s parade.
‘Of course,’ Lafferty said a little stiffly. He should have given Marty a copy of the script if he was going to give him a part. Thought he could knock Marty around, but damn it all if Marty hadn’t grown a fully functioning spine in a medically improbable space of time.
‘We know it was Barrett though,’ Original said, trying to pull this back around to the version of events he could most benefit from. ‘I mean, come on, we do.’
‘Agreed,’ Lafferty said, ‘which is why we have to move. We all know that people think we’re weak because Peter is in jail, and it’s important that we don’t let that carry on. We have to make big moves, and that means making big moves against Barrett. We presumably have people who can make some moves,’ he said, looking at Marty and Kevin like it was their responsibility to provide. It wasn’t; if Lafferty wanted something done then in the good old days he could have gone and fucking well done it himself.
‘Of course we do,’ Marty said, getting a little red in the cheeks with all the defiance that was flowing through him now.
I was ignoring Lafferty at this point, watching Conrad behind him because Conrad’s moment in the spotlight was about to arrive. Seemed like Lafferty was about to advertise the new arrival, something you should never do with
a gunman, or any newcomer for that matter. In most circumstances it’s best to keep your new card hidden up your sleeve for as long as possible.
‘Good. I, obviously, have good people to contribute to that. I think it’s about time we resolved some of the ongoing issues we’ve had since the arrests. We’ve let too many things slide for too long, a failure of leadership that we all must take some responsibility for. I’ve employed a gunman for the organization, which should have been done a long time ago. I also think it’s about time we addressed some other issues that are holding us back. All these things, these weaknesses, are part of what’s allowing Barrett to attack us.’
There were mutters and nods but the matinee idol was over-egging the role; too much of a performance even for the rest of his cast. If you want to put on a good show then you must maintain focus on a single narrative, and we were going off into subplots that people were bored of.
‘We need a reliable weapon supplier,’ Crockley said.
I noticed Damon Walker rubbing his forehead; saw the little smirk on the Robot’s face. Experienced men who understood that this isn’t how the business works, or how it’s supposed to work. You don’t have one weapon supplier, because your gunman should have his own and should be left to deal with his own. A good gunman doesn’t want a relationship with a new supplier and a supplier doesn’t want to be tied to one organization.
‘I agree,’ Lafferty said quickly, ‘and to that end I think we should make contact with a good supplier and get him on board. We may have to overpay, but this is something we shouldn’t be penny-pinching on.’
A couple of morons murmured their agreement while the sensible clung to the most respectful silence they could find. This was setting up a new hire that Lafferty had already decided on and the experienced men in the room who weren’t part of the performance were getting a little offended. All these decisions being made in advance by a rump supporting Lafferty was beginning to look like the importer positioning himself as leader.
Every Night I Dream of Hell Page 6
