Every Night I Dream of Hell

by Mackay, Malcolm

  I was driving, watching the road, so I didn’t see the look she gave me. I doubt it was wreathed in smiles and intended to compliment my brilliant deduction.

  ‘So?’ was her answer to it.

  ‘So I’ll give you a lift to your money and we can chat on the way.’

  ‘No,’ she said quickly. ‘No offence, Nate, but I want to get out and I want to get out as clean as possible. Someone’s holding the money for me. I don’t want you to know who because I don’t want you leaning on them. We can chat, fine, but I’m leaving here without dropping anyone else in the shit, right?’

  So we drove aimlessly. Didn’t make much difference to me – the conversation was all I was here for.

  ‘So did you call him or did he call you?’ I asked.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Kevin Currie. At the start of this, I want to know who pitched the idea first.’

  I wasn’t supposed to know. They would have been keeping this between as few people as possible, and they obviously preferred the idea of keeping me in the dark. Perhaps because I was so close to Zara, or because I wasn’t a senior man in their eyes. Didn’t matter. I knew enough, and I wanted to know more.

  ‘Me, I suppose,’ she said with a shrug. ‘I called him first.’

  That’s what I had figured. She pitches the idea of having her own crew, asks if there’s any money drifting around they could work for. Kevin thinks about it, takes it to Jamieson, the boss decides to use them to get rid of Lafferty, a man he no longer trusts. Their mistake was using me to make it happen.

  ‘Wasn’t much of a plan,’ I told her. ‘Relying on luck to get you away from your man like that.’

  ‘I wasn’t relying on luck,’ she said. ‘I had other ways of doing it; you just complicated matters. I dealt with it.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I nodded, ‘you did.’

  I looked at the clock in the car: nine fifteen. I blessed those few hours of sleep; without them I couldn’t have handled Zara. Couldn’t have handled any of the things that I still had to do that day.

  I made the decision to stop turning to look at Zara, even when we were stopped in traffic. Every look was a reminder of other times, and every reminder was a lie. We had never been happy, not really, not in the way normal people were happy. We could never be together again. I had to stop looking at her before the lies caught me out.

  We drove in silence for a few more minutes, before I got frustrated with how the non-conversation was going and pulled into the car park of a large DIY store. This wasn’t some attempt to stop somewhere quiet and out of the way where I could say or do something terrible; even on a Monday morning the place was quite busy. I parked, switched the engine off, swallowed my emotions and talked.

  ‘You need to leave the city,’ I said to her.

  ‘Seem to be hearing that a lot today,’ she said with a smirk. The look I gave her in reply killed the smile and she got serious instead. ‘I know.’

  ‘The money you’re getting, that’ll start you off?’

  ‘Should do, yeah.’

  ‘How much is it?’

  She paused, didn’t want to mention the price she had put on people she was supposed to care about.

  ‘Well?’ I asked.

  ‘Fifty grand,’ she said, and I believed her.

  It was a decent price, enough to persuade a person like Zara to betray anyone and everyone. She could start again with that money. Get out of Glasgow, out of Scotland. Find another city, another life. I knew her well enough to know that the next phase of her life wouldn’t work out very differently from every other phase she’d gone through. She only knew one way to live.

  Maybe she’d have done it for less. Wouldn’t surprise me if Zara had been planning on throwing Barrett overboard from the very minute she met him. That was Zara’s default setting, trying to exploit every person she knew. It told me that every instinct I’d had about her in the last few years was correct. I needed to keep her away from Becky.

  ‘That was a nasty thing to do, Zara,’ I said quietly. Don’t know why I said it. I was probably trying to set up the demand I was planning to make of her, trying to justify something I hadn’t yet said.

  Zara Cope was willing to take criticism on a lot of subjects and from a lot of people, but she wasn’t willing to be dismissed as a nasty piece of work by the nastiest piece she’d met.

  ‘You have a problem, Nate,’ she said to me, all the playfulness falling out of her while she gripped her courage and criticized me to my face. ‘You think you’re the good guy. You think you’re a good man doing bad things reluctantly. You think you’re forced into these things by the actions of others, the reluctant anti-hero. You’re not the good guy, Nate. Only you think you are. The rest of the world knows that you’re the bad guy. You’re the threat that richer people use, you’re the creative punishment for the really unfortunate, the man that the beasts are scared of. You could walk away but you don’t; you keep on doing the job. I know you want to protect Rebecca from me, but who protects her from you? You need to stop kidding yourself, Nate. You’re the bad guy.’

  There was silence in the car for what felt like an age. It was awkwardly long, and any words that broke it would have to fight through that tension. She was right, obviously. I don’t need to tell you that. She was articulating the very thoughts I’d had about myself for the best part of fifteen years. In those fifteen years I had never found a good answer to those criticisms, so I moved us on to my demand. Perhaps threat would be a better word.

  ‘Listen Zara, you need to get out of the city and you need to stay out. Find somewhere else to live, somewhere else to run to, somewhere else to be you. This city isn’t safe for you any more.’

  I wasn’t just referring to the police. They were in the mix, but there was a growling undertone that told her the greatest threat came from the man she was looking at. This was my way of telling her that I wouldn’t let her back into my life. I wouldn’t be the safety net she came falling towards if her next adventure failed. It wasn’t the same macho nonsense as Fisher telling her to stay out of his city, like he was some Wild West sheriff and she was an admittedly adorable Clint Eastwood impersonator. This was me making it clear that my life was now officially off limits. She was out, and she had to stay out or I would push her out. When I push people, they fall far. There was a little threat in there, which from me was more frightening than any big threat from anyone else in her world.

  ‘I know,’ she said to me. ‘Goodbye, Nate.’

  She looked me in the eyes and I could see that it hurt her, even if only a little. I didn’t want to do this to Zara, throw her out of my life. We were silent for a few seconds, showing each other our regrets. Zara opened the car door and got out into the car park. I drove away, not daring to look in the mirror. She was out of my life.

  39

  You get used, in a very short space of time, to having people chattering in your ear. The boss wants something done, an inexperienced guy is asking your permission for something, a colleague wants a hand with something. Phone calls and knocks at the door. It had been frantic, the whole of the previous week. That day was nothing.

  After I left Zara I went back home. It was Monday morning; there was nothing happening in the world. The place was groggy, back to work after a weekend off. Now was my time to rest. Back to the house and into the silence of a long day filled with nothing. No phone calls. No knocks on the door. That seemed wrong to me, the day after something so big. People should have been in touch. Kevin Currie should have been calling to talk about it before he got in touch with Peter Jamieson.

  I knew why he wasn’t. The kernel of it had formed when I called Conn and asked him and Mikey to come and help with the clean-up at Lafferty’s. They had let Original go. That had surprised me, but it shouldn’t have. Original was a plant. He was Currie’s man, working for Lafferty. He went to Ronnie’s friend’s shop so that he would get quickly rumbled and questioned by me because that would speed things along nicely. They let him go because h
e’d played his part to perfection. That meant one or both of Conn and Mikey were in on it.

  I would guess only Conn. You didn’t need Mikey to be in on the secret; he would go along and do the work no matter what. But Currie needed Conn to know so that there would be a man on the street who understood what was happening. Didn’t want me to know. Maybe didn’t trust me. I wasn’t his choice; I was Jamieson’s. That worked against me, kept me in the dark. So Conn knew. Which meant Billy Patterson, his boss, had to know. But Marty didn’t. No way would he have let me batter his brother like that if he did. He thought Adam was working for the enemy. His brother thought he was working for the enemy. Only a chosen few knew.

  Showed how little trust there was. Showed that Kevin wasn’t fit to be the leader of this organization. He had gotten away with it, after a fashion, but it would have been a much smoother piece of work if Peter Jamieson had been on the outside to work it. There’s a lot to be said for keeping as many people in the dark as possible, but you have to give a little light to the right people.

  Could have been a good little job as well. Use Barrett and his crew to lure Lafferty into making a push for leadership. They knew how he’d react when Christie was killed. So they got him running around, trying to put himself in power, and then had Barrett and his people make it seem like Lafferty was behind the killing in the first place. Suddenly you have Lafferty painted as the guy who created all this in the first place. Killing him is the only thing you can do.

  Fair play to Lafferty – he fought a good fight. Naive, but good. Got Conrad on board, which was, on reflection, a good move. Didn’t seem like it at the time, but that’s because I didn’t know Lafferty was being set up at the time. Got Garvey on side and used him well. I would bet a reasonably useful body part that Garvey was the one who fingered Nasty. Nasty would have been looking for a gun after shedding the one he used on Christie. All along Lafferty suspects he’s being set up here, so when I turn up on Conrad’s doorstep they decide to use me. Nearly worked. Nearly’s not enough.

  I got a phone call, late afternoon.

  ‘Nate, it’s Kevin. How are you?’ He had that sad and sympathetic tone in his voice. He didn’t sound wary though, didn’t sound like he’d been warned by Zara. She was cutting ties and getting out; she wouldn’t have called to warn him.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said. My tone wasn’t sad, wasn’t friendly, wasn’t anything.

  ‘Good. Well, I wanted you to know that I’m sorry about what happened to the boy, Ronnie. He seemed a good lad, and it’s a damn shame that we’ve lost him.’ He sounded uncomfortable now, but that was natural when men discussed death.

  ‘It is,’ I said.

  ‘Eh, the reason I called, Nate, is that we need to have a face to face. Need to find out all the details of what happened, you know. What do they call it, debrief.’

  I had a few hours to sit and work out what I was going to say. The meeting was that night, at Marty’s office above a gadget shop. Didn’t mean Marty would be there. I hoped not. I really hoped not. What I was going to say was confrontational, and I didn’t want that to extend to Marty as well. He didn’t need to know that he’d been kept out of the loop.

  How scared would Currie be? He had to know that I would find out, and he had to be terrified of my reaction. That wasn’t a good thing. A senior man who’s scared of what you might do to him becomes dangerous. Tonight I would calm those fears, but only a little.

  There was nobody to call, nobody to talk to. Couldn’t call Ronnie and get him up to speed with events, tell him where the meeting was going to be. Couldn’t call Conn or Mikey either; didn’t trust them. Conn had been in on it, had to have been. Mikey went along with Conn, and that left me on the other side of the fence from them.

  I kept going back and thinking about why they’d used me for this. I kept coming back to Zara. They used me because she knew all about me. She could tell Barrett and his crew scare stories. They would pull stunts like the one at the hotel with Zara drugged up; try to scare me because they were afraid of me. A public way of presenting them as Lafferty’s crew, and I fell for it. There was a problem with Currie’s plan. Not Currie’s, actually; Jamieson’s. The problem with it was that they put me front and centre as their man, and ditching me now would make them look unstable. So now they had to keep me around, after the performance had closed.

  I killed the day in silent thought and then drove to the meeting. I didn’t recognize the cars on the street. Rang the buzzer and was let into the building, made my way up the narrow stairs and into the office. It looked like I was the last man to arrive. Kevin was there, Ben Carmichael with him. Conn and Mikey were both there, both looking tired. Looked like men who had worked a long night and not gotten enough sleep off the back of it. Billy Patterson was there too. He was Conn and Mikey’s boss, but he was supposed to answer to Marty. Marty wasn’t around. Just the people in the know, and me.

  ‘Nate, good to see you,’ Kevin said.

  The five of them were congregated near a desk on the far side of the room. I made sure I stayed a little nearer the door. It was the only exit, and I wanted nothing between me and it. Violence wasn’t likely, but you put me in a room with people who’ve lied to me and there’s a chance.

  ‘I know I’ve already said this,’ Kevin said, ‘but I really am sorry about Ronnie. I was shocked when I found out. That bastard Conrad.’

  The others nodded solemnly and watched me while I watched them back. There was a heavy silence in that room, a bunch of people trying to keep their nerves in a headlock while they waited for my reaction. There was a little bit of implied criticism in Kevin’s words. Conrad had been my mistake. This was Kevin making it clear that Ronnie being killed was at least partly my fault. He was right, of course.

  I nodded a little, and didn’t say anything. Let them drown in the quicksand of their silence.

  ‘I had a talk with Peter a couple of hours ago,’ Kevin went on, trying to take the lead. ‘He was very sorry about Ronnie as well, of course. He was also relieved and pleased that we managed to sort out Lafferty, get it done. So, uh, yeah, he was pleased. There’s still some work to do,’ he said, looking across at me.

  I stood in resolute silence and looked back at him. Left it long enough to make sure that whatever I said next didn’t need to be a response to the bullshit he’d just spouted.

  ‘I went to see Ronnie’s girlfriend last night. Told her he wouldn’t be coming home.’

  That added another layer of depth to the silence. All of them looked at me. Mikey and Carmichael were doing their best to show no expression, Kevin and Billy were shocked and Conn just looked sad. Looked like he sympathized with me for making such a mistake. Even the best of us occasionally lets humanity trip us up.

  ‘I think the least we can do,’ I went on, ‘is see that she gets something from us. Something to keep her quiet, but also something to express our sorrow. Ronnie had a friend, Owen Turner. You own a slice of his business. I think it would be a worthwhile gesture to hand that slice over to Esther.’

  Kevin looked at me, nodding very slowly. I had spoken in a steady voice; there was nothing there to give away my rising anger. But I was still standing by the door, still facing the rest of them. It felt like me against them.

  ‘Of course,’ Kevin said, ‘that’s the least we can do. I’ll make sure it happens as quickly as possible. Does he have anyone else, family?’

  ‘No, none that he mentioned.’

  ‘Okay,’ Kevin nodded, probably relieved that he only had to compensate the girl. It was a twenty-grand compensation, generosity not usually forthcoming in this business.

  Silence made its way back into the room and filled the place. Kevin was watching me, waiting for me to say something else. I was watching him, letting his discomfort grow. He must have known by that point that something was wrong. They all did.

  ‘Everything’s clean then?’ Billy asked, directing the question at Conn.

  This was an attempt to move away from bad news.
I think Kevin would have hugged him for changing the subject if he could. Get them off Ronnie and Conrad and onto the things that went well. The clean-up, for one.

  ‘Yes,’ Conn said quickly. He was smart enough to grab hold of the opportunity to change the mood. ‘Couldn’t have gone better. Bodies are gone, a lot of Lafferty’s key items as well so it looks like he ran. Maybe they’ll believe it, maybe they won’t, but it was well done. We think we’ve cleaned away all the security footage as well.’

  ‘We haven’t had any word from our police contacts yet either,’ Carmichael said, Kevin’s right-hand man trying to move the tone towards something conversational. ‘They haven’t been tipped off about any of the three being missing yet. Shouldn’t be long before someone starts asking questions.’

  A few more nods of the head, a few more glances towards the doorway where I was standing.

  ‘Barrett and his crew have been charged,’ Kevin said. ‘Bunch of stuff, but the murder of Lee Christie is in there. That might not stick, because it was Nasty that did the deed and he’s not around to be charged with anything, but they’re still looking at good time. Been charged with possession of the gun, charged with resisting arrest.’

  ‘We might need to lean on anyone that was supporting Lafferty,’ Conn said. They were so determined to carry this conversation to a non-explosive conclusion.

  ‘Don’t think we’ll have much trouble with them,’ Kevin said with a shrug. ‘I’ll have a word with one or two, the more senior guys who backed the wrong horse. Doubt there’ll be any trouble though. Once they know Lafferty’s gone and he’s not coming back, they’ll be queuing up to lick Peter’s boots again. Should make them more loyal, in the long run. They’ll be desperate to prove their loyalty as well, so we can use that. Might have to push one or two out, I suppose; we’ll see.’