“I’ll need you to sign it for it.”
“Wait here.” Moretti left him standing and Thomas watched him search for a pen.
He never made it back. Jack’s men shouldered Thomas aside as they went in, single file. Thomas couldn’t see everything but when he saw the gun in Jack’s hand as he passed, he knew he’d seen enough. “Sit down.” Jack levelled his gun.
For one horrible moment Thomas thought Jack was going to shake his hand as he left. Thomas shifted position to put a foot out to block the door, and whispered through the gap. “Before you’re done with him I want to know the name of the caretaker and where the body is. You’ve got my number.”
Jack’s eyes widened, as if he were seeing Thomas for the first time. He grunted by way of a reply and then slammed the door. Thomas started walking and tilted his head down to make sure Karl’s wire received him loud and clear. “If you or Heick plan on getting to Moretti, you’ll need to be quick.”
Somewhere behind him Thomas heard a door bursting open and the splinter of wood. He kept on walking. Outside, the deluxe glass-fronted apartments sparkled, reflecting silvery traces in the Thames. Thomas pulled the wire clear and headed off to find Canary Wharf Station. As expected, Karl was waiting for him in the ticket hall.
“Rough day at the office?”
“A confusing one. I thought Moretti might have recognised me, but I was just another face.” He thought about that for a moment. “Course, that’s a good thing. I heard a commotion on my way out. It never occurred to me that Heick may already have had a team on site — they were Heick’s people going in after Jack, right?”
“You almost sound disappointed. Come on now, Tommo, you didn’t really want Jack to execute him?” Karl looked perplexed.
“I s’pose not.” He wandered over to the ticket machine. “But I want him to leave Miranda and me alone, and then there’s the business with the caretaker.”
“Captured on the wire and noted. Heick will ask your questions and you’ll have your answers, and more besides.” Karl dug out his Oyster Card. “What?”
“I dunno, Karl. How do you square the fact that he’s your dad with . . . well . . . everything else?”
Karl shrugged and Thomas let the matter drop. But he knew Karl well enough to realise it would be another reckoning for another time.
“Fancy a shandy, Tommo?”
“Yeah, why not? I’ll give Ajit a ring first — thank him for looking after the phone, and then tell Terry he can come back first thing tomorrow.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
“Alright, Aj? How’s it going?”
It took one sentence to work out it was not going well at all.
“What do you mean he never got in touch? Well, why didn’t you bloody ring me?” He felt the panic rising up his face and as it subsided it drained down to his feet. Terry had been out there for hours, alone.
Karl didn’t waste words when he heard the news. “Ring him, see if he can talk.”
Thomas swallowed. Miranda was going to go ballistic. No one picked up.
Fuck. He was sweating now, toying with the idea of going back to Moretti’s apartment.
“No need, I’ll ask dad.” Karl made the call. “Uh huh. Right. Send the details over. Ask him about the phone he’s been chasing — quickly. I’ll wait.”
Even Karl twitched at the scream in the background.
“Two of them? He what? Well, he’d better call them off, otherwise I’ll come and dislocate the other shoulder.” Karl snapped the phone shut, his jaw rigid. “Two men — a thousand pounds each to catch up with your phone. You better ring Miranda and the family.”
Chapter 21
Thomas paused in his tracks when he saw the Mini Cooper. A glimpse of Miranda at the wheel evoked a mixture of desire and regret. Her face told him to add disgrace to the list.
“Get in.” She managed a half-nod to Karl as he opened the back door. “What are you gonna tell Mum and Dad?”
Thomas looked to Karl to deflect her stare.
“The good news is that the two geezers aren’t pros — they’re hired hands looking to earn a few quid.”
Thomas read the small print: unlikely to be armed. In a word, chancers. Miranda ignored Karl and spoke directly to Thomas.
“You chose this life, not us. You know that Terry and Sam will do anything for you, but you can’t keep doing this.
He conceded the point without a second bout. “I’ll sort it.”
In the silence that followed, Karl did the thinking for everyone.
“Terry must have had a reason for not passing on the phone. Maybe he couldn’t find your friend, Ajit.”
“He could hardly miss him.” Miranda cracked a smile.
Thomas breathed a little easier. “So maybe Terry couldn’t get to Ajit. If he’d hung around too long in York — even if he’d stuck with the crowds — they might have eyeballed him. Plus, there aren’t many ways of reaching Pickering. And not much cover when you get there.”
“What I don’t get, Tommo, is why Terry didn’t switch the phone off, assuming he realised someone was on to him?”
Thomas’s heart sank. Because he’d told Terry not to. That was the whole point. Jesus, he’d even supplied a charger for the train. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Karl leaned forward. “If they had him, Moretti would have mentioned it while Jack Langton was rearranging his arms. So where would he go?”
“London.” Miranda’s voice could have cut steel.
“He gave me the all-clear signal though.” Thomas made a show of checking his phone. “About an hour ago.”
“Probably trying to buy you some time. Right, not a word please.” Karl took his own phone out. “Hey, Christine, it’s Karl McNeill. Listen, can you get a phone triangulated ASAP. Unofficial channels. Sure, let me give you the number. Uh huh. Yeah, that’s right, it is Thomas’s. London, I think. No, that’s fine. I can deal with it. I’ll await your call. Thanks, I owe you.” Karl lowered the phone. “She said about twenty minutes.”
Miranda glowered. “Why has Christine still got your personal phone number?”
“Now is not the time.” He didn’t need to look round to know Karl was grinning behind him.
Chapter 22
Thomas noticed the front door was ajar before Miranda had stopped the car. His first thought was that Terry had gone there, but if so the two geezers following him were unlikely to have made it out again. No, the door was for him. Miranda folded her arms. He got the message.
“Stay here, Karl. I’ll do this on my own.” It wasn’t bravado, just basic human decency. Family was family, after all, even if they weren’t his blood.
He announced himself as he pushed the front door.
“We’re in here.” Diane’s voice gave nothing away. Inside, John, Diane and Sam were lined up on the settee, ready to pass sentence.
John looked up. “What can you tell us?”
Thomas sidestepped an apology and laid out the facts. Moretti — he didn’t name him — had been taken out of the picture, but the two blokes after Terry were hired hands who didn’t know that. They were too busy tracking a phone that Terry was supposed to have passed on in Yorkshire. Thomas got the point in, not to stitch Terry up, but rather to show that there’d been a plan — even if it had all gone to shit.
No one asked ‘what next’, which stung him because it implied they didn’t expect an answer. For now, it was a waiting game. Their coats were piled in the armchair opposite and a sports bag lay by John’s feet.
“Someone is trying to trace the phone’s last position.”
Diane nodded slowly, eyes on the ground.
“This is bullshit.” Sam rose a little from his seat and then thought better of it. “We should be out there, looking for Terry.”
“Easy, Sam.” A mother’s voice made all the difference.
Thomas waited with them, in the middle of the room. It reminded him of hospital corridors and bad news.
Miranda creaked the door as
she spoke. “Everybody up. Karl’s got a fix for the last call — Canning Town.”
The settee sagged with relief, and so did Thomas. Terry had gone to the breaker's yard. In the past, Thomas had gone to the Moors — Terry knew how to play to his strengths on home ground.
John got up and the others followed in his wake. “We’ll take three cars. Miranda, you go with Karl. Sam, you’re with me.”
The three cars moved out in convoy. The message was clear: mess with one of us and you take on all of us.
* * *
Diane drove. If Thomas thought he’d got an easy draw, one look at her face told him otherwise. After six minutes the silence got to him. No one needed that much concentration on the A13 to Canning Town.
“He’ll be okay, Diane, I promise.”
She didn’t look convinced. “When you joined the family you promised to look after Miranda, so Sam and Terry became your brothers. But you’re the cause of all this trouble. Well, not you — what you do.” She glanced his way, watched him open his mouth to speak and cut him off. “I know you saved the kiddie from the stolen car. That doesn’t square things though. You can’t keep doing this, Thomas.”
Now where had he heard that before? He wiped a hand over his face.
“When you become a parent, Thomas, it changes everything. John and me, we had a very different life before . . . me working at the casino, parties, trouble. Schemes and dreams.” Her voice was monotone, finding no pleasure in remembering. “You have to make a choice about what matters and in the end family comes first.”
He watched her shoulders tense.
“There is nothing I wouldn’t do for my family. Nothing. So you better hope Terry is safe and sound, or that pair of bastards won’t be walking out. Do we understand one another?” She fell silent again. There was nothing more to say.
The breaker's yard gates were still locked. If he was there, Terry must have climbed in. Sam left his motor running, freed the lock and then the convoy drove inside. The jumble of headlights splayed like search beams.
“It’s alright, Terry!” John called. “We’re here now. You stay put till I tell you.”
He bent down to his sports bag and Diane moved beside him. When she straightened she had a shotgun nestled in the crook of her arm.
“In case of rats.” She hinged the barrels forward and inserted two cartridges. Her face tightened as she snapped the weapon closed.
Karl was busy keeping watch. He whistled to attract their attention and pointed towards an alleyway running between stacks of vehicles. In the distance, metal creaked.
“Thomas.” Karl invited him centre stage.
“Right!” Thomas bellowed, edging forward out into the light beams so that his shadow became a praying mantis before him. “This is how it works. You come out now and we can sort this peacefully.” He looked back to see John delving into his bag again. “Do it now!”
Diane emphasised the point by emptying a shotgun barrel into an abandoned car door, shattering the window.
“Bloody ’ell, Mum. That was stock.”
“Alright,” a voice squeaked in the distance. I’m coming out. I’m unarmed.” Walking and cowering, he hobbled his way towards them, hands high above his head as if he expected the sky to come crashing down. He made it to thirty feet from the cars.
“On the ground.” John took a step. One was enough.
Chapter 23
The bloke followed the script and lay down obediently. John placed a foot on his neck. “Right. Don’t fuck me about.”
“Ned, for Chrissake!” The body on the ground started coughing.
Karl moved towards John. “It’s okay, I’ll get the dog out the car and flush him out.”
“Ned! They’ll send a bloody dog for you.”
“Wait.”
The voice was nearer than Thomas expected and came from a pile of cars off to the right. The brown suit trembled as he walked towards them, arms limply at his side. All it took was one look from John and he joined his companion, face in the dirt.
A look passed between the family. No one wanted to make the call.
“Terry, it’s Thomas. You coming home tonight or what? Terry!” The sound carried through the yard. He glanced back at John, who looked capable of snapping the bloke’s neck without a second thought.
A door lurched open, four cars up. Terry emerged and clambered down. He took his time about it. Even in the half-light he looked a little rough around the edges.
A cricket ball had lodged in Thomas’s throat and he had to force the words out. “Jesus, Terry, you scared the shit out of me.”
As Terry drew closer, Thomas noticed the abrasions and bruises.
“They saw me in York and tried to take the phone, but I wouldn’t let ’em ’ave it. The battery died — bloody train’s electrics didn’t work coming back.”
“Are you hurt?”
“Nah.” Terry came over all coy in front of his family. “Only a few bumps and scrapes. I gave as good as I got.”
He passed the phone over and Thomas took it in a stranglehold. He walked it over to the bodies on the ground and dropped it close to their faces.
“Look, mate, we’re just trying to make a living. This fella rings us from London — Italian, like. He gives us the information, says he’ll even direct us, and it’s worth two grand, plus expenses, to get the phone and its owner. He wires us five hundred pounds as an advance and tells us to get down to York. It were nothing personal.”
Thomas felt the heat in his cheeks, relief and shame in one furious wave. Not professionals, a couple of chancers from Yorkshire by the sounds of it. And why intercept Terry at York? Because that was the station for Pickering — where his family lived.
He stepped back, his chest rising and falling like an engine with nowhere to go. When he saw a scaffold pipe nearby he grabbed it and stomped back to the others. He raised the pole in the air in front of the two blokes and squeezed it until his knuckles ached. He couldn’t remember rage like it, making his blood pump and clouding his thinking. With a guttural grunt, he drove the pole down and smashed his phone, splintering pieces by the prisoners’ heads. They screamed. Good.
“The signal’s dead. You found nothing. Understand?” There were no arguments. “Get a new phone number, in case he ever tries calling you again. And don’t come back here. Stick to . . .”
“Doncaster.”
Fuckers. That explained how they were on to Terry so quickly. They could have been waiting for him at York. He started walking, dragging the pole behind him. The first car he came to paid the price. Once he’d begun knocking seven bells out of it he didn’t stop until he’d hammered out his frustration and traded it for a couple of blisters. Finally, with the sweat pooling at his back, he launched the pole through a car window. His eyes prickled with the exertion. At least, that’s what he told himself.
When he turned to re-join the others, Miranda was close by, watching him.
“All better now? Look, Thomas, it wasn’t your fault you know.”
“Who else’s then?”
She sighed. “Show me your hands” She cupped them and examined them, like a palmist reading his future. “Your skin’s so soft — like a girl’s.” She squeezed gently.
“Give over.”
John had stopped using one of the prisoners as a footrest and brought them to standing. Diane made them empty out their pockets. Karl was taking notes.
John flashed a thumb backwards. “What do you want to do with them?” Sam had the shotgun trained on the pair. Thomas hoped Diane had unloaded the other chamber. He remembered Sam shadow boxing once and accidentally punching a wall.
Thomas looked at Ned. Another mug doing someone else’s bidding.
“We’ll drop them off at the nearest station. Then they can head into London and fuck off back to Doncaster.”
Diane had started returning their personal effects.
“No, no,” Karl insisted. “Not the phones.”
Miranda passed her car key to T
homas. “Don’t be long. Mum and Dad will probably want to have a chat when you get back.”
Karl rode up front and the two blokes sat in the back seat. If anything they looked more worried now, as if they might be disappearing to a landfill site.
Thomas got the last word in at Canning Town station. “Forget you were ever here, and you better hope we do the same — Ned.”
* * *
They waited with the engine running until their passengers had scurried into the station complex. Thomas swung the car wide for the short drive back to the breaker's yard. “Right then. Time for my bollocking.”
“You can hardly blame them, Tommo. But hey, regardless, you did what you thought was necessary.”
Good point, Thomas couldn’t argue with that. And from one who knew what that felt like. Karl checked his phone.
“Hang on. One missed call — under H.”
Thomas made a dash for the moral high ground. “Come on. You must feel something about your dad turning up after all this time?”
“Sure. Given what we know about him, Tommo, he could be a useful asset to my organisation.”
“Even if he’s retiring from all this?”
Karl yielded a sad smile. “The first lie they tell you is that they’re the only ones you can trust. The next is that it’s possible to step away. No one ever retires. There’ll be a call someday, or a favour, or some shit-bag intruding upon your carefully managed life.”
“We’re nearly there.” Thomas tried to lift the mood, but Karl already had the phone pressed to his ear.
Karl didn’t speak again until they’d parked up outside the yard.
“We have a dilemma.”
Thomas noted the ‘we’ in the sentence and didn’t interrupt him.
“Heick got the information you wanted. The caretaker for the stolen cars — he was called Theo Pritchard. And . . . uh . . . well, Moretti says he didn’t pull the trigger. His alibi is that he was talking to some bloke on the phone when it happened. And he had no idea, your honour, that the gentleman with him was carrying a firearm.”
“Where’s the body?”
“Well, that’s the point. How would he know, if he wasn’t involved?”
Shadow State Page 10
