Shores of Death

by Peter Ritchie

  When McGovern got the information about the car ten minutes had already passed and it was too late. A message was sent to the control room, but by the time the patrol cars picked it up Handyside’s man was heading south on his own.

  McGovern headed to where the men had been seen and picked up the detective who’d spotted the watchers. ‘Show me exactly where they were parked.’ They hurried to the spot and McGovern cursed. It was perfect, and the bastards must have seen it all, including the teams getting into place. He shook his head and looked down.

  ‘Well, well, well – those boys have obviously got some bad habits.’ He knelt down and looked at the two clusters of cigarette butts about six feet apart. ‘It must have been a long night. Don’t let anyone near this. I’ll get the SOCOs to bag it all up. Not so fucking smart.’

  He stood up, stretched his back and ran the exact amount of time he had left till retirement through his mind, as he did every two or three days. Then he put his hand on the young detective’s shoulders. ‘That was good work, son; take the weekend off.’ It was one of the oldest jokes in the book – the detective was due to be off anyway. But the smile from McGovern was enough. Every man in the team looked up to him. Warm words didn’t come often, but they meant everything.

  Handyside took the call that his men were clear, one on his way back and the other head down till he could get home by public transport.

  ‘Good work. Go and get some sleep and I’ll see you later in the day.’

  A weak pink light started to rise above the horizon as he stared over the River Tyne, watching the early-morning activity starting up around and on the great river. Although he usually kept his tobacco habit to just two or three a day, he’d fired up nearly a whole packet during the night. The smoke and exhaustion irritated the rims of his eyes, but he managed a half-smile that his instinct had been right. About a year earlier he’d agreed to form a business partnership with the top men from Edinburgh and Glasgow. He liked to call it the ‘Northern Alliance’ and enjoyed reminding everyone that it worked even better without any cockney wankers or Scouse gits to fuck things up. It had performed nicely for a while, but then the problems started. He was sure his team were sound, and he was relieved it wasn’t one of them, but in the business of organised crime it was safer to operate without the luxury of trust. Most of his team had been with him since they were in their teens and breaking into warehouses around Newcastle. What had happened in Eyemouth proved the rat was somewhere in the Edinburgh team and his next step was to root out the poisonous little fucker and send out a message to anyone else who wanted to do business with the law.

  He lost all sense of time as he stood motionless, running the options and problems through his head. A movement close by snapped him back to reality and he watched a beat cop walk slowly past him. There was something quite reassuring about seeing the policeman there at that time. He said hello to the uniform, who nodded without paying any attention.

  For the policeman there was nothing unusual about lonely characters doing their thinking in the middle of the night as they stared out at the river. Sometimes they jumped in, but as far as the cop was concerned that was their business; it wasn’t on his agenda to save the sad bastards and risk getting wet. He was on his way back to the station to sign off and get home to his bed. He wasn’t to know that he’d just nodded to the man who’d given an order that would fill the front pages for weeks and unleash a chain of events that would reverberate for months, claiming more victims who were safely in their beds at that moment. A different cop might have made a name for him or herself and prevented the consequences of that night, but fate had decreed otherwise.

  The bored uniform had failed to recognise Newcastle’s most important criminal, who looked round at the river again then beyond to the lighthouse beacons at the entrance to the Tyne. His mouth opened slightly as he watched the morning sky, which seemed to have caught fire, a copper glow melting across his view as if the end of the world had come. It seemed to pour into the calm glass sea, mixing with the greys and blues of the water and turning it to the colour of blood. The spreading fingers of reflected light ran along the surface towards the river – towards him. ‘Red sky in the morning, sailor’s warning.’ He had been taught in school that it was the ‘shepherd’s warning’ and remembered being ticked off by the legions of seamen who inhabited his childhood community. ‘There’s no bloody shepherds in North Shields, son,’ they’d reminded him. He’d felt small and weak for a moment, but it had passed.

  He slipped behind the wheel of his Merc and decided that when he was rested up he’d call an urgent meeting. If they didn’t turn up, he’d make the journey north and kill them all himself. He was more than capable of doing it, but he was sure none of the Jocks were stupid enough to ignore a call from him. It was business; he’d go home and sleep without any concern about either the order he’d given to his two men or what they might have done to the women whose worst crime had been to be born female and attractive.

  As soon as he crossed the threshold of his front door he moved into his other universe. He showered and then slipped beneath the sheets, wrapping his arm round his wife’s waist. She moaned quietly and pulled him closer, loving the feel of his cool skin against her. He was asleep within minutes.

  Hunter, Dillon and Gunderson sweated their way through the interviews, but with great encouragement from their lawyers they stuck to their scripts and, as McGovern had already worked out, they were going to live to fight another day. They eventually walked free and the detectives who’d hoped for so much the previous night shook their heads in frustration. McGovern spoke to them and all he got back was that Hunter and Dillon were true pros, sneering through their interviews. Gunderson was different: no real form for crime, looking spaced out and saying next to nothing.

  The senior interviewing officer summed it up for McGovern. ‘I’m no shrink but I’d say that Gunderson’s head was fucked up.’

  ‘Put it in your notes and we’ll look at it later. I’m going to get my head on the pillow. Goodnight or morning, boys.’ McGovern said it wearily and headed home.

  4

  Handyside looked round the upstairs lounge of a pub he owned near the old fish quays in North Shields, pleased that at least everyone seemed to be arriving on time. The area was a million miles from the one Handyside had inhabited as a kid; the old riverside near the fishing port had been redeveloped and was now full of smart flats and even smarter restaurants. Those days when the area swarmed with fishermen from ports all over the country were gone, but the old men still told stories about the Jungle, one of the most famous boozers in the North-east, where you could buy sex or stolen goods within five minutes of entering the place. In those days the dark streets had echoed with the sounds of men who’d been at sea too long then drank too much, and the occasional mass brawl meant a tough response from the local police force, who treated the area like a war zone. It was just memories now, but Handyside never forgot where he came from – or how hard it had been to climb out of that cesspit. He never wanted to fall back in and he was determined he never would. He saw the world as a bad place full of bad people, including him, and all he wanted was to keep that world away from his family, his only reason for getting out of bed in the morning. What had surprised him was that as he climbed through the social barriers all he found were more bad people. Councillors, lawyers, politicians and detectives – all on the make, and the only difference from his old community was that they needed bigger piles of wonga to keep them happy – or what passed for happiness.

  Handyside had only managed a few hours’ sleep before he’d told the men from Glasgow and Edinburgh that there was a hitch that required them to get their arses into gear and meet up with him.

  The Edinburgh boys walked through the door first, shook his hand then took their seats. They weren’t such a problem – easy enough to deal with in normal circumstances – but he knew what was about to be discussed wasn’t normal, and he was going to test the level of minerals in
their blood.

  Eddie and Pat Fleming were twins and hardly old enough to be called men, but they had balls and Handyside had done quite a bit of good business with their old man, Joe, in the past. With his eldest son he’d run almost the whole show in Edinburgh till they were slaughtered by a loyalist team from Belfast who’d tried to take over business in the city. Most of the Belfast boys had died in what had followed. The Fleming twins hadn’t been slow to re-establish the family’s hold on the capital, and Lothian after that. Eddie was the one with the brains while Pat was all brawn and balls. Handyside liked Eddie – he reminded him of himself a few years earlier, fighting his way through the swamp to get where he was.

  The twins were sitting opposite Handyside, their smiles slightly nervous, and ordered beers when they were offered a drink. Given the previous night’s events, with the loss of gear and women that had been heading their way, they didn’t need to be told there was a problem, though they didn’t know it all. Their driver (and muscle when he was required) was shown into a side room with a stocked buffet that would keep him happy while the bosses were in conference. Handyside was fascinated to see how they would react when they realised there was a rat in their team; or, he wondered, was it one of the twins themselves?

  The Glasgow contingent arrived ten minutes later, and as always made a fucking racket when they came in the front door. He heard them coming up the stairs, pissing themselves at some in-joke as only the Glasgow gangsters knew how. Handyside didn’t like too much joviality and they wouldn’t be fucking laughing when he dropped the latest developments on them. If they did, he’d treat it as unprofessional and there’d be consequences. He wondered if he’d made the right choices with the team from the west of Scotland. The problem he’d noticed with them was that they enjoyed playing to their stereotype a bit too much. There was more than a bit of life imitating art and it annoyed him. They thought being born in ‘No Mean City’ made them fireproof; well, Handyside decided he would burn the bastards if the point needed to be made that they were able to feel pain just like everyone else.

  Eddie Fleming sipped his beer and took the chance to peer over the bottle when it was at his lips. He did his best not to stare at Handyside, but the man intrigued him. Like his host, he heard the arrival of the Glasgow gangsters and saw that even at a distance their lack of decorum annoyed Handyside, and whatever he was, he seemed to believe in good manners right up to the point that he killed his enemies.

  Eddie just couldn’t tie the man he watched to his reputation and remembered the first time he’d met him. He’d heard all the stories about Handyside’s propensity for ruthless behaviour and violence, and shivered at the memory of their first encounter. He’d thought that the North-east’s top villain was some poor sod serving food and drink for the congregation of gangsters. When he realised, too late, who he was, the man from North Shields had stared at him as if he was considering flushing a bug down the toilet.

  Handyside was a stone lighter than the next smallest guy in the room, with slicked hair and a side parting, and though his suits were expensive they seemed to have been designed for a sixties East End gangster. He always dressed and looked the same, and this get-together was no exception, though Eddie knew that Handyside had been up all night. The man’s skin was pale and unnaturally smooth; if there was a line somewhere Eddie couldn’t see it. His hair was jet black; his chestnut eyes soft and almost boyish. Whatever it was that frightened people so much was hard to work out, but it was probably the fact that he never became excited – every word was measured and delivered as if he was an old-fashioned hanging judge laying down a death sentence. Nothing seemed to stress or frighten him. He radiated power and it was impossible to ignore it.

  Handyside looked up and stared at the doors as they were almost broken open. In common with the attendees from Edinburgh, there were two head honchos from Glasgow and a driver who could have doubled for Frankenstein’s monster. The latter was led into the side room with his Edinburgh equivalent and looked as if he was capable of eating and drinking everything in the room, including the Flemings’ spare man.

  Handyside stood up and strode round the table to shake hands with Bobby ‘Crazy Horse’ McMartin and his sister Brenda, aka ‘The Bitch’. He didn’t show it, but he struggled to get his head round a woman being second in charge of a major team, especially in a city like Glasgow. All the evidence suggested she’d earned her position in the criminal hierarchy, but it ran against his belief that women should be in the safe environments of their own homes and protected from the evils that stalked the world he lived in. Not this woman though; not Brenda fucking McMartin, whose ability to hand out and react to violence was as legendary as her inability to complete a sentence without fouling it with brightly coloured language. He shook hands then waved to one of his boys to get them a drink. Bobby asked for a double Bacardi with ginger beer and Brenda went for a pint of lager with a good shot of lime in it. They didn’t have an ounce of class, but more importantly they knew it and didn’t give a fuck.

  ‘Can you do me a couple of fuckin’ packets o’ cheese an’ onion to go with that, sweetheart?’ Brenda said, winking seductively with her good eye to the man serving. He took one look at her and thought it was probably better to get her order right on the money.

  Though Eddie had been studying Handyside, his attention swung to the McMartin clan as soon as they walked in. He’d met them a few times before, but like his host he struggled to get his head round the two of them.

  Crazy Horse deserved his title, which he’d won in the Paisley drug wars, where he’d come out on top. He’d collected enough scars to impress both friends and enemies, though he’d minced most of the latter on his way up. Knives, sawn-offs or broken bottles, he was good with them all and had even chewed a lump out the throat of one opponent who’d foolishly offered him a square go at closing time. He was a pubic hair off six foot and starting to deserve the description of a bit overweight, though no one but his mad sister would tell him that. He consumed most of his calories from the nearest deep-fry outlet, and for Crazy Horse five a day meant his minimum intake of Bacardi or lager. His hair was thinning and swept back. From a distance he had a bit of the Francis Rossi about him, though the only thing he’d ever achieved with a guitar was doing six months for breaking one over its owner’s head. That man’s only crime had been to do a gig at a wedding where all hell had broken out when he and his band did a poor impression of the Proclaimers. The battle started between the McMartins and another Paisley family who they’d fought for years, though no one was sure how the original feud had started. Crazy Horse simply attacked anyone in front of him and the guitarist happened to be the last in line.

  Brenda McMartin had been as involved as her brother in that melee, and a piece of broken glass had put paid to her left eye. Sometimes she put the glass one in, but on occasions she liked to wear her black eyepatch, which she thought made her look exotic, even a bit mysterious. Most of the people who knew her said covering any part of her face was a bonus and it was just a pity she couldn’t do the whole thing. Nobody actually said it to her in person of course.

  Handyside had everyone there that he needed. The organisation he’d formed involved the three cities, but in addition they dealt with and supplied a whole range of other teams from Manchester to Belfast. If they didn’t get the goods on time and without hassle there was aggravation. Worse still, if word got out that the law was on their backs they’d have a serious credibility problem – and there was very little goodwill in his line of business. Whatever was happening in Edinburgh had to be sorted and tucked away as if it had never happened.

  Handyside took his seat and even the mad bastards from Glasgow knew it was time to be seen and not heard.

  ‘There’s a problem. I don’t know how much any of you know but it’s serious.’

  Everyone in the room knew that if the man at the end of the table said it was serious, that meant it was worse than that. Handyside let the words sink in and scanned their
faces, looking for the non-verbals that might hint at treachery. He didn’t see any and carried on.

  ‘The only person who knows all of what was arranged over the last few days was me. Two of my team knew there was a boat coming into the Tyne, but nothing else. Eddie and Pat knew there was a boat going to Eyemouth, but nothing else. Bobby and Brenda knew there was a boat going into Amble, but nothing else.’ He paused again and if it was possible it seemed like someone had pressed the mute button for the room.

  Eddie started to see ahead. This was bad – very fucking bad. It involved Edinburgh, or rather the twins, and he was smart enough to know that all was about to be revealed by the devil himself. It occurred to him that he might need a weapon in the next few minutes, but he had nothing available apart from the beer bottle in his hand. It would have to do.

  ‘I’ve known for some time that there was a problem, or rather that information was leaking from the organisation and that the law was on the case.’

  Eddie and every other person there knew that Handyside was delivering a death sentence, but the question was, who was the condemned man? He looked round at his brother, who’d never been gifted with brain power, but even he looked frozen, just waiting for the finger to be pointed.

  ‘I find it hard to believe anyone round this table would have gone to the detectives, other than the bent ones, but that’s what seems to have happened. I arranged three boats to arrive at roughly the same time, and I sent a team of spotters to each port to see if there were any signs of our friends in uniform.’ He sipped a glass of iced water, looked round the faces again. Nothing showed in them but apprehension.