‘Go on.’
‘He told me there was fifty in it for me if I did this particular job.’
‘Fifty grand? That’s a lot of money Conroy.’
‘That’s what I said,’ he paused for a moment and then bit his bottom lip before continuing, ‘until he told me who it was he wanted doing.’
‘And who was that?’ I asked him, even though I knew the answer already.
‘Well,’ he said, a little nervously, ‘it was you.’
One of Kinane’s lads took a step forward like he was about to give Conroy a belt across the face, which would not have been a wise move.
‘Hey,’ I cautioned.
‘Get back in your box,’ his voice was a low growl as Conroy stared Kinane’s son down.
‘So,’ I asked Conroy, ‘what did you tell him, your cut-out.’
‘I told him to fuck off.’
I just looked at Conroy, trying to make my face expressionless, and I kept quiet. Bobby taught me the value of silence years ago. It makes people uncomfortable. Sooner or later they feel the need to fill the void and sometimes they tell you things.
‘Honest to God I did,’ Conroy assured me. ‘Why do you think I’m here?’
‘Don’t know,’ I told him, ‘why are you here?’
‘To tell you about it, obviously.’
‘Why come to me? Why didn’t you just send this guy packing and keep out of it? Must have been tempting.’
He thought for a moment before answering, ‘well it was. I did think about that, to be honest, but I figured you wouldn’t take too kindly if you heard I’d been offered a hit and didn’t come to you about it. I mean, I operate on your patch don’t I? I live here, this is my home and you, well you’re the boss,’ he looked a bit nervy there, like he’d just revealed a secret nobody was supposed to know, so he added, ‘I mean sort of.’
Was I surprised that Conroy knew I was the boss? Not really. People were bound to speculate when nobody had seen Bobby Mahoney for two years.
‘Is that why it took you so long to come here?’ I asked him, ‘because you were thinking about it, weighing it up? You’ve been playing a risky game, don’t you think?’
Conroy looked about as nervous as I’d ever seen him. We outnumbered him big style and we were on our home turf. One word from me and he’d be bundled into the boot of a car and his body thrown to the pigs, and he knew it.
He swallowed and licked his lips, ‘you were abroad, so I was led to believe, so how could I contact you any sooner? I wanted to speak to you direct about this, not one of the lads. In the end I had to talk to Kinane because I heard you were back.’
‘You mean you heard someone tried to kill me the other day and you were worried I might have heard they approached you first.’
‘Aye, well, right enough, but you have to understand the business I’m in. You don’t get work if people know the minute they ask you to remove someone you go running off squealing to their targets about it. Like I said though, you’re a special case. This is your city,’ he looked around the room as if he was including everybody in the ‘your city’ but he meant me. It concerned me that the guy who acted as the cut-out had described me as ‘high-profile’. I thought I was about as far removed from the day-to-day as possible, living out in Thailand for most of the year, but I guess the lads had been conducting business in my name, which is the same thing as me being right there in the room. I could see it now, ‘Blake wants this to happen’, ‘Blake needs that to happen’ and pretty soon I am the guy to get rid of if you want to take over the city. ‘I wanted to warn you,’ he concluded.
‘You could have done that through Kinane.’
He chose his words carefully, ‘when someone’s out to kill the boss, who can you trust to tell him but yourself? No offence, Joe.’
‘None taken,’ answered Kinane, because Conroy had a point. He could have been warning the man who’d arranged the hit.
I changed tack, ‘who was the cut-out?’
‘Well, that’s what I came to tell you,’ and he looked around the room again, ‘it’s why I wanted to see you on my own.’
I laughed and shook my head, ‘like that’s ever going to happen.’
He shrugged as if he finally realised it had been an absurd notion. ‘Fair enough,’ he said.
‘Stop stalling me, Conroy,’ I told him, ‘give me the name of the cut-out.’
He exhaled and took an eternity before he spoke. I reasoned that grassing on anyone was anathema to him. Finally he said, ‘Billy Warren’. I almost fell off my chair.
18
.......................
I didn’t need to give the order to find Billy. That much was obvious. With everyone in our organisation out on the streets looking for Billy, we’d get him before the day was out, even if he didn’t want to be found.
As to what had suddenly possessed Billy Warren to become the middle man between a hit man and whoever wanted me dead, I could only imagine – but it seemed I had completely misread him and that worried me, because Billy was about as one-dimensional as it got. I had always thought I’d put the fear of the devil into Billy when I caught him betraying Bobby. He knew I could have killed him for that, but I let him live and kept him on the payroll; admittedly with his wings clipped, but I would have thought that was a small price to pay to carry on breathing.
Now it seemed I’d misjudged Billy Warren. He was too ambitious to put up with earning a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work. He wanted more, and was willing to kill me to get it.
I parked my car with two of its wheels on the grass verge. I got out, climbed over the gate and trudged across the field, cursing the long wet grass and Sharp in that order. When I reached the opposite end of the field there was another gate. I climbed over that too, crossed the road and climbed into Sharp’s parked car.
‘Do we have to go through all of this “Smiley’s People” bollocks every time we have a meet these days?’ I asked him.
‘Yes, we fucking do. Have you got any idea of the heat you are attracting right now? If I’m even seen with you I’m finished.’
‘What have you got for me?’ I demanded, ‘and it better be good since you just ruined a nice pair of shoes.’
‘Officially, nobody knows who was involved in taking down that CCTV system. There are no suspects and, even if there was one, it wouldn’t be admitted.’
‘Go on,’ I urged him, ‘why not?’
‘Because,’ he said solemnly, ‘bent coppers are an embarrassment.’ He spoke with no discernible trace of irony.
‘Give me a name, Sharp.’
‘I can do better than that,’ he told me, reaching into his case and pulling out a photograph. It was an eight-by-ten, black-and-white surveillance photograph and it showed the image of a stocky man in his mid-thirties. He looked more like a gangster than a copper. ‘This is Detective Sergeant Ian Wharton from the Drug Squad. It seems he visited the offices of the CCTV operatives a few days before the system abruptly went down. It is alleged he went to the building with another man, though Wharton denies this, and ordered the security guard to admit them so they could review footage. Wharton showed his credentials and ordered the guard to leave them to it.’
‘Giving the second man plenty of time to hack the software and close down the system at a point in the future?’ I offered.
‘That’s my best bet.’
I thought about this for a moment. ‘What’s going to happen to DS Wharton?’
‘Nothing,’ Sharp said, ‘for now. It seems the security guard got it wrong.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘At first he told a young investigating officer that Wharton was accompanied by another man. When he was brought in to discuss it further, he admitted he had made a mistake and Wharton was really on his own. There was no second man at all.’
‘I can see that would be an easy mistake to make.’
‘The investigating officers weren’t quite as sympathetic as you. They grilled him about it for quit
e some time but he wouldn’t budge, and of course DS Wharton lacks the necessary technological expertise required to hack the city’s CCTV system all on his own, which means nothing can be proved and he is no longer suspended.’
‘Where is Wharton now?’
‘He was encouraged to take some leave. I don’t know where he has gone but he’s no longer in the city.’
‘Shit, he could have been the one man who might have been hired without a cut-out. Give me that picture,’ I demanded.
‘What are you going to do?’ he asked me, looking anxious as usual.
‘Nothing,’ I assured him. ‘I’m just going to ask around.’
Palmer wanted to speak to me alone so we drove out to his house. I sat at the kitchen table while he made us coffee and I looked around.
‘How long have you been here now?’
He shrugged ‘about three years.’
‘The place looks like you moved in yesterday.’ It was amazing how few things Palmer owned. I paid him well, but I was hard-pushed to identify anything in here that looked like it truly belonged to him. He had the 42-inch plasma TV on the living-room wall and a Playstation tucked underneath it with a few games but even his sofas came with the house. It was a former show home and I swear he only bought it so he could take all of the furniture as part of the deal. There was a laptop on the dining-table and he switched it on.
‘Mrs Evans keeps the place pretty clean for me,’ he said. I wasn’t talking about his cleaning lady and he knew that, but this wasn’t a conversation he was comfortable with. The no-possessions thing was an aspect of Palmer’s personality that I found intriguing, and in a way I envied him for it. He didn’t seem to have any baggage at all. There was an ex-wife, but no kids, and he barely mentioned the former Mrs Palmer, except to acknowledge she was probably right to give up on him as a bad lot. We’d see him with a woman now and then but he always held them at arm’s length and they were usually history by the time we got used to their names. It suddenly struck me that one day I might drive out to this house and find Palmer gone without any explanation.
‘What’s on your mind?’ I asked him.
‘Jaiden Doyle,’ he said.
‘Oh yeah,’ I answered him dryly, ‘in all the excitement I’d almost forgotten about Doyley.’
‘At least we have footage of that one.’
‘Not much to go on though, was there? At least that’s what you told me.’
‘I did,’ he agreed, ‘but then I had another look and there’s something I want you to see.’
He turned the screen to show me the frozen, black-and-white image of Jaiden Doyle leaving the hotel. Palmer clicked on the arrow and the image started to move. I watched as Doyley walked away from the hotel. He managed a few steps and then a dark and indistinct figure stepped into the frame, carefully pointed a gun and shot Doyley twice in the back. Doyley fell to the ground, the man left the scene and the image froze once more.
‘What do you think?’
‘I don’t get you.’
‘Look again,’ he said, and I did.
‘What am I looking at?’
‘Who does he look like?’
‘The shooter?’
‘No, Doyley.’
‘Doyley?’ I asked, ‘what do you mean? He looks like Doyley.’
‘Okay,’ he said reasonably, ‘describe him then. Pretend you don’t know him.’
‘Why?’
‘Humour me.’
‘Alright. He’s about six feet tall, fairly slim build, short dark hair, wearing sunglasses, a smart jacket and trousers, for once, and a pair of black shoes. Er, that’s it.’
‘Who have you just described?’ he asked.
‘Doyley,’ I answered impatiently.
‘Yourself,’ he corrected me, ‘you’ve just described yourself, to a tee. I think we’ve been barking up the wrong tree. It was a botched job. I think the shooter that took down Jaiden Doyle thought he had you in his sights.’
I looked again at the frozen black-and-white image of the smartly-dressed, tall, slim man in the sunglasses and saw it anew. ‘Well, fuck me,’ was all I could say.
We sat in Palmer’s garden and drank a beer while we went over it again.
‘So, where do we go from here?’
‘You know what I would prefer?’ Palmer said.
‘You want me to leave the UK until you get to the bottom of this.’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re the second person this week who’s asked me to leave the country. The Police told me to go too, and I will. I’ll fly out very publicly in a couple of days. I’ll have a few days back in Hua Hin with Sarah, then I’ll come back again. But this time it’ll be under their radar. No one will even know I’m here. Not at first, not if we play it right.’
‘I think you should stay out there for a while.’
I shook my head, ‘And how are you going to find out who’s trying to kill me if I am stuck in a compound five thousand miles away, not daring to show my face by my own swimming pool?’
‘I’ll find a way,’ he assured me, but he was a little slower than usual in answering me.
‘I don’t see how. We all know there’s a long list of people who would benefit from my death and none of them can make a move against me if I’m out of the country.’
‘Which is why it makes sense for you to leave on the next flight,’ he interjected.
‘You don’t get it,’ I told him, ‘I would like nothing better than to leave here, disappear and stay out of the line of fire but, if I do that, the problem will never go away. The only chance we have of getting to the bottom of this is if I stay here with you and Joe and Danny and we find out who is behind it. Someone in this city must know something and that’s the only way we’ll ever discover who’s behind this. Then you can put them down before they put me down.’
‘You realise how risky that is,’ he was looking at me like I was a mad man, ‘you want to flush out a hit man so we can find out who put the contract on you. But what if the next hit man is too quick? What if I can’t get to him first?’
‘You’ll be out of a job,’ I assured him ‘and I’ll be six feet under. Any more daft questions?’
He snorted, ‘No.’
‘Look, I’m good at this. I’ve known this city all of my life and I’ve done it before.’ This time it wasn’t missing money I was looking for, but a contract killer so we could find the man behind the hit. It wasn’t going to end because Palmer had gunned down two assassins in the Quayside. This would go on until either the man who hired them was dead, or I was. There was no third option. I had to see this through.
‘I used to do this for Bobby, remember?’ I said.
‘Yeah,’ he admitted, ‘I remember.’
I was glad he resisted the temptation to remind me how that turned out.
19
.......................
I told myself I went down to the sports injury clinic that afternoon to try and get a lead on the whereabouts of Billy Warren from Maggot, but that wasn’t strictly true. It was a dead end, as I suspected it might be, but when I left Maggot’s office and went down into the lounge, Simone was sitting there.
‘I’m glad I bumped into you,’ I said, not sounding as calm as I would have liked, ‘I wanted a word.’
She made a show of glancing at her watch, ‘I haven’t got long.’
‘I don’t need long,’ I told her, ‘have dinner with me. How’s that for getting to the point?’
She laughed, ‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because you own this place.’
‘But I don’t own you.’
‘Exactly.’
‘I’m talking about a meal here, maybe some conversation, nothing more.’
She raised her eyebrows and I laughed, ‘Well, to begin with. Don’t rush me woman,’ and at least that got a smile. It was progress of sorts.
‘Look, say “yes” to dinner. I would like to talk to you, and I can’t do that here, can I?’ Sh
e hesitated, so I added, ‘but I will not let you sleep with me, you hear,’ she actually laughed then. ‘I mean it,’ I said, acting stern, ‘it’s just not going to happen. Can you cope with that?’
‘I’ll try,’ she was still eyeing me suspiciously, ‘so when then? I’m working every night for a week.’
I didn’t want to think about that so I said quickly, ‘the next time we’re both free.’
Billy Warren had disappeared – or so they told me, but I didn’t believe that for one minute. He just hadn’t been seen round his usual haunts, half a dozen places he hung out in when he was between deals; pubs that sensible people avoided or clubs that let in the guys who’d been barred from everywhere else in the city. I doubted Billy had taken flight though. I reckoned he had never left Newcastle in his life, not even for a holiday. He probably didn’t have a passport, so I knew he’d turn up soon enough once the word was out. I had people everywhere ready to pick up the phone to us. It was only a matter of time. Trouble was, I needed answers quickly.
‘Come on,’ I told Kinane, ‘it’s time we went for a chat with Golden Boots.’
The party was at its height when we arrived. Golden Boots’ house was full of footballers, hangers-on and wannabe WAGs, but you could tell it was still early because they hadn’t paired up yet. Most footballers are lazy. As soon as they get bored of the music or the atmosphere they grab the nearest girl that takes their fancy. It’s easy, since the girls attend these parties for one of two reasons; so they can tell their mates they shagged a Premier League player or, the holy grail for them, they are actually going out with a man who is paid sixty grand a week to swear at referees, blaze shots several metres over the crossbar and kiss his badge minutes before demanding a transfer. Why the world continued to worship these vacuous tossers was beyond me. They’d sign five-year contracts worth millions and, if their clubs were lucky, they’d get two good seasons out of them before they lost their hunger and slid into obscurity.
The Damage (David Blake 2) Page 13
