‘Whatever the plan is, there’s a high likelihood it’s going to require a gunman,’ I told the gunman in front of me. ‘I need to call some people together, get this sorted out. I’ll call you soon, let you know.’
He nodded, didn’t say anything. That was as much as either of us needed to say to the other. I left the house by the front door, out onto the street. The car was parked on the next street along, far enough out of sight to make sure he didn’t spot it. Ronnie had his orders. Wait for me to leave, then get back to the car without ever being visible to the front of Conrad’s house. The gunman could guess how we’d worked it, but there was no fun in making it easy for him. Took Ronnie a couple of minutes to get back to the car.
‘So?’ he asked.
‘So you know how we took the piss out of Lafferty for his get-together?’
‘Yeah.’
‘We need to arrange a get-together of our own.’
24
Barrett was still in a panic. Someone had shot his best mate and taken away the comfort blanket of having his own gunman. Zara sat next to him on the bed. They’d been in the emergency safe house for almost a day, and the nerves were only getting worse. He was shaking. It was hardly his first experience of death, but him and Elliott and Nasty had been together for so long, it was like losing a limb this time.
‘We should get out now,’ he said. ‘This place is gonna kill us if we don’t get out.’
‘Calm down,’ Zara told him, and put an arm around him. That was mostly to stop him going for the little stash he had in the drawer at the bottom of the wardrobe. She wanted him to keep a cool head for what she was going to suggest next. ‘Listen to me, Dyne, you can still finish this. We have half the money, but we can get the other half. We get back down south and we build something fantastic down there. Listen to me, babe; we’re this close, this close.’ She was holding his face in her hands at that point.
‘We’re also that far from being wiped the fuck out,’ he said quietly. There were times with Barrett when he was walking right on the very edge, ready to fall off into a depression that would have taken him out of Zara’s control.
Her control. She thought she had him under total control, but things were moving too fast for her to steer now. In that hotel room, acting as a lure for Nate. When Barrett had that gun in his hand, when he was making her inject so that he could present her to Nate . . . Zara didn’t even remember it, not really. There was a misty memory of shouting for Nate, but she didn’t remember Nate being there. What she knew about it was what Barrett told her afterwards. It had worked perfectly, apparently, right up until the moment Nasty took a bullet to the back of the head.
He deserved it. She had no sympathy for Nasty, no matter how much he meant to the others. There was something alarmingly cold about him. Nasty killed a bunch of people and he couldn’t have cared less about it. Zara used to hear him talking shop with Barrett and Elliott, and Nasty didn’t have a compassionate bone in his body. The guy was just empty. Perhaps not as bad as Elliott, in some ways. Elliott got off on making people uncomfortable and hurting people who couldn’t fight back. He was the sort of kid who would pull the legs off spiders, where Nasty would just stamp on them and go looking for more. Dyne was the most decent of the three of them, and he was a borderline junkie desperate to become a big-time gangster.
‘Listen to me, Dyne,’ she said to him. ‘You have to set up a meeting. Go meet with him, tell him what happened to Nasty and demand some proper protection. This late in the day he has to give it to you. We’re this close to finishing the job, so he has to help you out. If this fails – listen to me, Dyne,’ she said harshly when he tried to turn his head away from her. ‘I need you to listen to this. You call him up, you set up a meeting. You go there and you tell him that in light of losing your only gunman you’re going to need some extra backup from him to finish this. He’ll give it to you, Dyne, he will. He hasn’t got a choice. If this fails then he doesn’t get a second chance. You’re all he’s got, his one chance. So you go to him and you get the protection you need and we’ll get through this. A couple of days from now we’ll be long gone from here and we’ll have a hundred grand to get us off the ground. Think about that, Dyne. Think about it.’
He started to nod sadly, still thinking about how long two days could be instead of thinking how big a hundred grand could be. He just wanted out, and she didn’t blame him, but her plan was never going to work if his bottle crashed.
She sat on the bed and listened to him making the call, demanding a meeting and sounding coherent and angry. He was playing his little part well and that helped Zara a lot. If she could get him and Elliott out of the house then she could get rid of one little problem they had been lumbered with. A bonus opportunity. Then she was close to finishing what she had come here to do.
‘You get a meeting?’ she asked him, knowing he had.
‘In half an hour, so I got to move it. I’ll take Elliott and one of the boys. Shouldn’t take long. He had already heard about Nasty; he said he would come up with something to help. We should get this sorted out, then we can finish this fucking thing off.’
He had some of his swagger back, some of the old fire that had attracted her to him. He was going to need every scorching drop of it. He was going to a meeting with a jackal and if he got out of it with the shirt on his back then he’d be doing well. But that jackal would give him enough to reassure him, just for a little while. A little while was long enough for Zara.
The three of them left almost straight away, Barrett, Elliott and Aldridge. That left the house to Zara, Keith Henson and the girl locked in the bedroom upstairs. Zara went into the kitchen, where Henson was scrolling through betting odds on his phone.
‘I’m going to write up a shopping list; you’ll need to go and get some stuff for us,’ she told him.
He looked at her with a frown. He didn’t know how he should speak to Zara. She was Dyne’s girl, and that meant he had to treat her with respect, but he stupidly thought that even dumb muscle like him was worth more than the boss’s girl.
‘I ain’t doing shopping. I ain’t here to do shopping.’
‘We need food, Keith,’ she told him, looking for a pen. ‘Do you want to go the next two days without anything to eat? Do you want to go the next two days without wiping your arse or brushing your teeth? Neither do I. This place isn’t stocked properly. I’m writing a list and you can go and pick some stuff up. Find a supermarket that’s still open. We don’t need much, not for a couple of days,’ she said offhandedly as she started scrawling a list for him.
‘I don’t have transport,’ he said smugly.
‘Get a taxi.’
‘Then people will know where I am.’
‘Yes, but they still won’t have a fucking clue who you are. I’m known here, I can’t go. Nobody knows you.’ Nobody in your own back yard knows you, she thought. Henson and Aldridge had been cheap muscle and nothing else.
‘What about the girl?’
‘We can’t send her, for God’s sake.’
‘No, I mean I have to watch her. That’s why I was left behind.’
Zara sighed. ‘She’s locked in a room. I’m pretty sure I can handle her, but we need food and we need toiletries or the next two days are going to be hell on earth.’
She kept on writing and he put his phone away, grumbling under his breath at having to do something as menial as shopping. This was a guy who spent his working life acting as chauffeur, bodyguard and all-round grunt for much smarter people and he was bothered about having to get some food, something that actually mattered. He was bothered because a woman was telling him to do it and his tiny brain couldn’t handle that. Zara finished the list and handed it to him. She’d written a number for a taxi company at the top.
‘Money,’ he said, so she went upstairs and got some for him.
He seemed happy once he had the cash in his hand, which told her that he was going to ignore the sensible list he’d been given and just buy whatever ju
nk and booze he wanted to pass the next two days gorging on. Fine, whatever, she just needed to shift his dopey arse out of the house as quickly as possible. That meeting might not last long. He called the cab and wandered out into the street, Zara watching at a window to make sure he was really gone. Now it was time for her to make a phone call to a different taxi company. She gave them the address, told them to be there in five minutes or they’d get to hear all about her displeasure.
Then she went upstairs with a key in her hand and stood outside the bedroom door. Took a deep breath before she unlocked it, because she had no idea who the girl was or what sort of person she was going to be. The fact that she had allowed Elliott to push her around the night before didn’t mean anything; Elliott pushed some very strong and very smart people around when he was in the mood. She could have been dangerous, or she could have been so dumb as to be impossible to move. She could have been anything, but of course she was just a very ordinary young woman who had been lied to and controlled by bastards with weapons and no morals. There were plenty of them around.
Zara unlocked the door and went inside. Jess was standing at the window, looking out into the street.
‘They’ve all gone,’ Zara said to her. ‘If you’re thinking of making a run for it then now would be the time.’
Jess looked at her, not sure what to think. She didn’t trust Zara; this could be some kind of trap. Get her to run so that you have an excuse to punish her. She had only ever seen Zara hanging around with the one they all called Dyne, the leader of the very people she was praying she could escape from. Zara got it; she knew she’d have felt the same if the roles were reversed.
‘You want to go?’ Zara asked her, pushing her. Speaking harshly because she needed to hurry this up. The meeting Barrett and Elliott had gone to had been arranged in a hurry and was going to involve telling someone powerful things he didn’t want to hear. It wasn’t likely to drag on. Give the bad news, get some reassurance, get out. Zara had already wasted more than fifteen minutes trying to get rid of the Brain of Britain.
‘Yes,’ Jess said, and then looked at Zara curiously. ‘Are you going to run too?’
Zara smiled at her. ‘No, I’m not finished here, not yet. There’s more that I have to do, but you are finished here. There’s no reason for them to keep you, and they won’t want you going out into the city knowing what you know. You need to get away, you understand me? You need to go now.’
Jess started nodding. Kill her or take her with them, those were the equally grim options Elliott and his pals would be considering. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that the woman in the doorway was every bit as bad as the men who had put her here.
‘Is this a trick?’
‘No, it’s not a trick. People are starting to die,’ Zara told her, speaking with what sounded like frustration. The frustration of a woman who was seeing her master plan spin just out of reach. ‘Once the dying starts, it tends not to stop until someone strong enough to stop it puts their foot down. I’m hoping I know who that person is, but I know it’s not me and I seriously doubt it’s you. There’s no reason for you to end up even more a victim of this than you already are.’
Jess started nodding; she could feel the tears starting to form and she was starting to shake. She was so close to getting out. When Zara spoke again it was in her most domineering voice, an attempt to get Jess back on track. Shove those tears back where they came from and smarten up. She still needed to keep her head together; being out of the house didn’t mean being out of danger.
‘Listen to me,’ Zara said. ‘There’s a taxi coming here in about two minutes’ time; it’ll take you wherever you tell it to take you. Do you have somewhere safe to go?’
Jess paused and thought about it for far longer than was reassuring. ‘I can go to my grandparents’, I suppose.’
‘Right,’ Zara said, assuming that Elliott and his fellow super-creep Adam Jones didn’t know where her grandparents lived and wouldn’t have the time to work it out, ‘you go there. Now, when you get there, you don’t tell anyone where you were or what happened, okay? Not for a few days. Not until Monday anyway. Can you do that for me?’
‘Yes, I can,’ Jess said, nodding and still crying, which just annoyed Zara to see. She wanted the girl to be forgettable-looking to the taxi driver and anyone else who might see her on the way out of the house. ‘Right, come downstairs. We’ll wait for the taxi.’
Zara locked the door behind them as they left the room. Jess never once asked her what she was going to say happened, how Zara was going to get herself out of trouble for rescuing her. It had occurred to Jess; it worried her a little, but not nearly as much as the chance of Zara changing her mind. She didn’t want to mention the possibility of reprisals against Zara in case she ended up back in her room before the taxi came. Zara didn’t want her thanks anyway; Jess blubbing on her shoulder and saying what a good person she was would have been too much to take. It was Zara’s idea to come up to Glasgow and work this plan. It was Zara’s idea to use a lure on Christie. If it wasn’t for her, Jess would never have been in that mess anyway. That was Zara’s thinking. One of the two reasons for doing this. The other being the damage it would do to the group.
The taxi came and Zara walked Jess down to it, put her in the back and returned to the house without looking back. As soon as she had closed the taxi door behind her, Jess had curled up into a ball with her feet up on the seats, looking scared and vulnerable and annoyingly memorable. She was gone though, and that was a positive that Zara could cling to. It was also another possible hurdle to her own intentions she had removed.
Dumb-Ass got back from his shopping trip before the crew arrived back from the meeting. That helped Zara a lot. She was at the front window, watching for any of them turning up, and saw him pull up in the taxi, getting out with all his shopping. She ran upstairs to the bathroom and locked herself in. Gave it a couple of minutes, heard him moving around in the kitchen, putting things away. She flushed the toilet, washed her hands and walked loudly back downstairs, wiping her hands on her jeans.
‘You get it all?’ she asked him, knowing that he hadn’t.
‘Some of it,’ Henson said. ‘Got what we need anyway.’
She could see the two twelve-packs of lager that she hadn’t put on her list and wondered what else he had bought as an alternative to food, but she didn’t much care. Zara helped him put it all away in the cupboards and didn’t complain too much about the stuff he’d failed to get. He’d bought some junk, so she took a packet of crisps and can of Coke and told him to take it up to the girl; she hadn’t been fed that evening.
Zara stood in the kitchen and waited, listening. Whatever took him so long, probably eating the crisps, it was nearly five minutes before he came running downstairs, shouting that she wasn’t in the room.
‘What do you mean, she’s not in the room?’ Zara shouted.
‘I mean I unlocked the door and went in and she ain’t there, is what I mean. She must have got out.’
‘She can’t have gotten out,’ Zara told him, sounding certain. ‘She was locked in that room; there’s no way she could have gotten out. Is the window shut? Did you check the wardrobe? Is there a cupboard in the room?’
His eyes widened; he spun round and sprinted back upstairs. Zara ran after him, changing her plan as she went. The original plan had been to pretend that Jess must have somehow disappeared when Zara was in the toilet, maybe pretend that she must have found a key in the room or something stupid like that. Now she had a much better plan and her dim-witted shopper was generously going to take all the blame on Zara’s behalf. She reached the corridor and ran into the room. There was a wardrobe, she knew that already, and no cupboard. Henson had the wardrobe door open and was looking blankly inside at nothing at all.
They were both silent for a few seconds. She looked back at the door. ‘When you came running downstairs just now, did you leave that door open?’
‘Yeah,’ he said with a shrug, already o
n the defensive.
‘For God’s sake,’ Zara said with a sigh.
‘What?’
‘What? She hid in the wardrobe and then you went running down the stairs and left the door open for her is what. Come on, she can’t have gotten far.’
She sent him out the back on the grounds that Jess would probably have gone that way if she’d been on foot. Zara went round to the front and walked up and down the street, and the street facing the house, pretending to look for her. By the time she went back to the house she could hear voices: Barrett and Elliott both shouting at Henson the shopper. They were calling him every name under the sun, which suited Zara just fine.
25
Organizing a meeting wasn’t hard. People seemed to be getting used to dropping everything and turning up on command. Actually, this one was easier, because this one was about the first one. This one had fewer people attending, and they all had a vested interest in being there. That’s how you call a meeting.
The first person to get on board was Kevin, and once he was willing to turn up, everyone was. He and Ben would be there, Marty Jones, Conn Griffiths and Mikey Summers. And me and Ronnie, of course. We were going to meet at Marty’s place out by the airport, a decent spot where we could come and go without drawing too much attention. This wasn’t like Lafferty’s meeting. We weren’t sending any messages with this.
I picked up Ronnie. He got into the car, looking quite excited. He was growing into the job, becoming the sort of employee I thought he would. It’s always a judgement call when you hire someone, especially when they’re someone from the outside. He was smart and he could be tough, but there was always a question mark over his commitment. I had, basically, bullied him into taking the job in the first place, something I hadn’t forgotten about.
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