‘I want us to make an offer to Mark Garvey,’ Lafferty said. ‘He’s well connected, he’s reliable, he’s close to a number of people inside the organization and he’s managed to keep himself out of all the trouble lately. Does anyone have a better suggestion?’
It was a nice move, I’ll give him that. After picking out Marty as the dissenting voice Lafferty was now suggesting hiring a man that was a friend of Marty’s. Garvey was a friend to anyone with money and connections, but he was closer to Marty than he was to Lafferty as far as I knew. There were, it seemed, no better suggestions.
‘Presumably this is the sort of hire that our security consultant can make on our behalf, so we’ll leave that in his hands,’ Lafferty said, the one reference I was going to get. I didn’t bother blushing when eyes in the room turned towards me.
‘There’s the issue of cleaning money as well,’ Crockley said, an area he had a right to speak about at last. ‘We have a lot of small businesses on the books that aren’t pulling their weight. Too many that are behaving like they’re separate from the organization.’
Ronnie, sitting next to me, stiffened at that and it took me a little while to remember why. His friend ran a little electronics shop that had been circling the drain despite their best efforts, so Ronnie got them some investment I suggested he should avoid. That, I correctly guessed, was what was on his mind. It was only the start of what was on Lafferty’s. There were a lot of legit little businesses like that. They existed just to give people an explanation for income and were kept carefully away from any illegal activity. Apparently he wanted that to change.
‘Then we need to be much more aggressive about getting them to cooperate,’ Lafferty said, his voice rising as he got to the end of the performance. He wanted to sign off with a good line, bless him. ‘We need every part of this organization pulling in the same direction or what happened to Lee Christie will happen again. We will continue to be attacked and eventually we will lose the ability to defend ourselves. It’s why I wanted everyone here tonight. I want to know that everyone is pulling in the right direction here.’
I don’t know what he expected at the end of that – some sort of triumphant cheer of agreement that he saw in a shitty film one time. Well, that didn’t happen, but he got some agreement from those who were in on the performance, a few grumbles from those who weren’t and silence from a few others.
‘Good,’ he said, ‘then we can move forwards with confidence in our direction.’
Doesn’t take a genius to work out that Lafferty, having been the first to sit down, also wanted to be the first to get back up. Centre of attention at the open and close of the play. He was the main act, the star of the show, and that meant everyone else had to follow his lead. But he wasn’t the first to stand up; Brendan Thorne was.
‘We’re done then, are we?’ Thorne asked wearily, standing up.
There was silence, people looking at Lafferty to see how he would react to being dismissed. ‘We are,’ was all he could manage.
‘Right, well, I’ll be off.’
‘In a hurry, Brendan?’
Thorne was already putting his coat back on. ‘I’m an old man; I don’t have as much time left to piss away as you boys.’ Now that was a challenge from an old man without the means to back it up, just the power of his poisonous tongue.
‘Piss away?’ someone other than Lafferty asked. I didn’t catch who; I was watching Thorne on the other side of the room.
‘Aye. Your man here isn’t my boss. Peter Jamieson’s my boss. If I get a call from him telling me to follow everything you just said then I’ll follow everything you just said. If I don’t, I won’t. See you, boys.’
Most of us made sure we didn’t look Lafferty in the eye in his moment of fury, but he had a line for those that did.
‘Must be past his bedtime,’ he said with a smile.
That gave the sheep something to laugh at. Dismiss Thorne as a goofy old man with a small role to play in the business, which was, at its heart, true. But he was more than that; he was the voice of the silent men in the room. There was some idle chatter for a couple of minutes, and then the Robot and his little crew made their departure.
I waited around for a little longer, making sure my face was well seen by everyone, and then me and Ronnie left. By God, I was glad to get out of there. I was driving home when I got a text on my phone telling me to head to one of Marty’s flats, so I did. The world’s a funny place when a meeting with Marty Jones is the best meeting of your evening.
9
You can’t chase every rat; you will end up getting lost in the sewers. You catch the ones you can. You keep an eye out for the most rotten of them; you don’t get distracted from the bigger picture. But some, Jesus, some of them you just can’t stop chasing. It’s not a professional thing to admit to, no cop should get sidetracked by a criminal of little importance, but it happens. Someone infests your mind. Might be a victim you just have to help. Might be a criminal you just have to catch. Everything else drops into the background.
For DI Michael Fisher it was Zara Cope. There had been a few others before, there would be others after, but at that time it was her. She’d gotten right under every inch of his skin and he needed to do something about it. Ignoring it made it worse, he had learned that. He wouldn’t let it get in the way of his actual work; too much a professional for that. Too aware of the consequences if colleagues noticed his obsession. That meant using whatever passed for spare time in his life to go hunting.
He knew she was back in the city; she had been spotted. Some plod had mentioned it; thought Fisher would find the news amusing. Thought wrong. Nothing about Zara Cope ever amused him. A pretty young woman who picked up dangerous men to get access to their cash. Even they must have known that she didn’t care about them, but they stuck around because she was pretty. But that woman was brutally cold. Look at what she did when Winter died.
Fuck’s sake, she went into the very room where her lover was lying dead on the bed and recovered drugs and money for herself. Heartless bitch is what she was. It enraged Fisher to think about it. He didn’t know where the drugs and money went; a girl like her had too many connections to trace them all. But it went, and when she got out of jail, she disappeared as well. Went south was what he heard, and became another little shit flowing out of the city that he could try to forget about. An obsession happily sidelined.
Then she came back. She had some nerve. She came back to this city, his city, almost certainly looking to make some more money from some other poor sap. There were always plenty to choose from. When she got out of prison he had followed her around, just a little. Keeping an eye on her in his spare time. Didn’t have much of that; there was far too much going on at the time. She knew he was watching, he was sure of it. Might have been one of the reasons she left.
He had a justification for this minor obsession, if you care to hear it. The one where he told himself that what he was doing was logical and sound. Zara Cope was a woman who seemed attracted to trouble, and it liked her right back. She would have someone or something on the go, some scheme that any cop would be wise to check out. That was what he told himself. It was almost convincing.
Truth stood pretty far away from that explanation. The truth was that she had pissed Fisher off by telling him the truth. All the lies, all the bullshit she spun when he arrested her after Winter died, that didn’t bother him at all. That’s a pretty big part of the job. No, it was the one time she told the truth. The time she looked him in the eye and pointed out that he was failing. That was what did it. Stared him down in an interview room and told him a truth that made him feel about three inches tall. Just because he was arresting her and not the person who killed Winter.
Some of that bitterness was gone now. Fisher had put Peter Jamieson and John Young in prison. He had put Shug Francis and a whole bunch of other more minor gangsters behind bars. Not for nearly as long as he wanted or as they deserved, but it was a damn good score. Didn’t manage to
pick up Calum MacLean after he pointed a gun at Fisher and stole his car, but he hadn’t given up on him. He had every right to be proud of what he’d managed to achieve and little right to be sitting in his car across the street from the guest house where Zara Cope was staying. It was a busy road and he was exposed, parked across the street. There were trees out the front of the building that obscured the view. But if he hadn’t been there, he wouldn’t have known who she was with.
People tell you not to get negative and obsessive, but sometimes it’s the best damn thing you can do. It’s the difference-maker. It was starting to get dark, the street lights were coming on, and Fisher was watching the entrance to this place. Can’t have been more than twenty rooms in that building. Less, probably, although he couldn’t see how big it was out the back. She had turned up in the city and it had taken him little more than a day to track her down. Spotted her in the city centre, picked up the trail and followed her to Nate Colgan’s house. She didn’t get in, went back to the guest house.
Fisher was happy to sit there watching the building all night, watch for people coming and going. Every one of them was worth watching. Couldn’t do that though, because his phone started to ring. DC Ian Davies’s name on the screen. A useless, harmless DC, hanging on long enough to retire and claim his barely earned pension. He wouldn’t dare phone Fisher off duty unless it was something important.
‘Fisher.’
‘Boss, it’s Ian, uh, DC Davies,’ he said, never confident enough that his superior would remember who he was despite the years they’d spent working together. ‘Listen, I think you’re going to want to come along to see what I’m seeing.’
Fisher had no idea what the man was seeing, and less idea why he would want to share the moment with him. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘You know the office building that Angus Lafferty owns?’
That was enough to grab his attention. ‘Go on.’
‘I’m in an office down the road from it, other side of the street. We got a message in from uniform saying there were a lot of people of interest turning up at the building.’
‘What do you mean by a lot of people of interest?’
‘Well, a lot of them were in by the time I got here, but Lafferty, Kevin Currie, Marty Jones, a whole bunch of others. Basically everyone you can think of that matters to Peter Jamieson.’
‘Give me an address and a safe entrance to the building you’re watching from.’
He hated to leave the guest house unwatched, but the problem with personal obsession was that it was personal. He couldn’t get anyone else to stand in for him. Took him nearly fifteen minutes to get round to the building Davies was watching from. Parked a street away from that building, ran round to the next street, in through the front door, up two flights of stairs and along to an office at the back. The back of the building looked down onto the street where the entrance to the garage and Lafferty’s building sat. They could see the glow of light from first-floor windows, but they didn’t have an angle to see into the room.
Davies was sitting on an office chair at the window, looking down into the narrow street. DC Baird was standing by the edge of the window and another man in plain clothes was sitting at the side of the room. He, Fisher assumed, was the one who’d let Davies into the building.
‘Well?’ Fisher asked.
‘Some of them are leaving already. Not sure who the first guy out was – couldn’t see him. See, they’re going across the alley to the building next door where their cars are parked. Can’t get a good look at them in the cars,’ Davies said.
Fisher was standing in the dark, looking down into the street to see cars leaving in the hope of getting a glimpse of the occupants. Davies had a notepad on his lap and a pen in his hand as he watched the building next to the offices. A trainspotter in the dark.
‘Can’t have lasted long,’ Fisher said.
‘Less than half an hour between the last one arriving and the first one leaving,’ Baird said. Took Fisher ages to learn that man’s name but he still seemed irrelevant, even in the company of Davies.
‘Here’s another one,’ Davies said, as a car emerged from the red-brick building next to the offices.
It pulled slowly onto the street and moved away, a dark saloon with more than one person in it. They couldn’t see more than that; the high angle they were at was useless. Getting closer would get them spotted. Fisher sighed loudly.
‘Give me some names.’
‘Well, we don’t know them all because a few had arrived before I got here,’ Davies said. ‘I saw Marty Jones and I think I saw Billy Patterson as well. Can’t be a hundred per cent though. Lot of little skinheads around. Definitely saw Kevin Currie arriving, he had someone with him. Think I saw Damon Walker as well, although I wouldn’t put my house on it.’
Another car emerged from the building as he spoke.
‘I think that’s Marty Jones’s car,’ Fisher said. He thought it but he wasn’t sure. It was the sort of car he had anyway, one of those big four-by-fours that nobody needs on a narrow city street.
A figure crossed from their side of the street up towards the office, walking briskly with his collar pulled up and his head down. He moved with a purpose, striding fast.
‘That guy?’ DC Baird asked.
‘Nobody,’ Fisher said. He was a man with an intimidating walk and a sense of purpose that didn’t belong to him, but that didn’t mean he was a criminal. There were plenty of little men walking with that stride in this city, convinced that nobody had anywhere more important to be than they did.
They stayed at that window for another two hours, waiting until they were sure nobody else would leave. Fisher wasn’t sure what he was watching. It was big because of the numbers and visibility of it, but that didn’t mean it was important. Seemed to him that the most likely explanation was someone making a move within the organization. The internal politics of a struggling beast.
‘I have a theory, sir,’ Davies said as they were walking slowly down the stairs. Baird had stayed behind with the security guard.
Fisher did his best to ignore any theory that managed to fight its way through the gloom of Davies’s mind. He thought it best not to encourage him; instead let him reach his longed-for retirement with the least possible fuss. But now and again, you just never know, he might say something useful.
‘Go on.’
‘That Christie guy was working for Lafferty. Suddenly Lafferty is bringing everyone to his offices. If you were Lafferty and you wanted to position yourself as the big cheese, this would be a golden time to do it, right?’
Fisher thought about Lee Christie. Dead in the corridor of a nice enough flat in an area a knowledgeable pro wouldn’t use. Too busy. He’d gotten to the flat where it had happened after DS Louise Forbes. A brash young woman, probably because she had to be to keep the rest of them in check. She was short with dark-brown hair always tied back in a short ponytail. A cop he did respect. That he thought had a chance to be great. They didn’t know much about the victim, until a uniformed officer Fisher couldn’t bring himself to trust any more linked him to Lafferty. A drug-trade killing. Christie wasn’t important to Lafferty, but his death could be used for position.
It wasn’t arrogant for Fisher to think that he would have reached that conclusion eventually without anyone’s help, but Davies was right. Things had settled down a bit in the city after the arrests; now would be the time to start positioning yourself for leadership. A smart and ambitious man could gather enough power to make sure that Jamieson had no organization waiting for him when he got out. It could become the Lafferty organization. Bold move. Dangerous move. Public move as well, and using the Christie killing to justify it. This was worth Fisher’s ongoing attention. But he was still thinking about Zara Cope.
10
I was one of the last to arrive at the flat above a charity shop on what would be a fairly busy street in the daytime. If any one of the stories I’d heard about Marty Jones were true then I gues
sed the charity began at home with that shop. I went upstairs and found Marty, Billy Patterson, Mikey, Conn and Ronnie waiting awkwardly for me, and Kevin Currie still to arrive. I nodded hellos to men I’d seen all too recently and stood next to Ronnie beside the door of the living room we were in.
Marty was pacing. Mikey and Conn looked relaxed enough. I got the impression that Patterson didn’t see this as being much of his business. But he ran debt collection for the organization, which made this very much his business. He was important, whether he liked it or not. Smart people often didn’t want to be important in this industry. Billy always looked like he wasn’t bothered about anything in this world. That was a lie. Billy Patterson was hellishly ambitious. He had run his own debt collecting organization before he hooked up with Marty and I was sure he wanted to run his own organization again in the future. Working with Marty was a convenient way of making sure the Jamieson organization didn’t wipe him out. Maybe he didn’t care much if Marty got hacked down by these events. Maybe he figured it would help him get back out there on his own, free from the deal he made with us in the first place. There were a lot of agendas, even in that little room.
‘Just waiting for Kevin to get here,’ Marty said to no one in particular. Might have been me.
We were in a small living room and the place was crowded. There were two couches in the room, Billy Patterson on one with Mikey on the arm of it. Conn was sitting on the window ledge, which meant the empty space on that couch was for Marty, if he ever decided to sit down. Didn’t seem likely to me. The other couch was empty, waiting for Kevin and Ben Carmichael, who was Kevin’s second in command. A smart guy, and Kevin trusted him, which was enough. Me and Ronnie just hung around silently by the door for five minutes until Kevin Currie and Ben Carmichael arrived.
They came into the flat; Conn went out into the corridor behind them to lock the front door now that everyone was here. Kevin and Carmichael were smiley and said hello to everyone before they sat on the couch. Kevin knew that he was entitled to the best seat in the house. He carried his authority lightly, but it was always in view. Had to be. As soon as his arse hit the leather, Marty started talking, and wouldn’t have stopped if Kevin hadn’t thought to interrupt him.
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