The Damage (David Blake 2)

by Howard Linskey

  Golden Boots’ parties were very popular. He liked to get people together. He saw himself as a middle man between the players, the women and the Charlie, as he liked to call the coke we sold him, which was heavily cut with baking soda.

  The house had cost him two million, which was small change to Golden Boots. It had a massive glass frontage, which shone light down onto the usual assortment of black leather sofas and armchairs, and there was a huge plasma TV in every room, including the kitchen. He didn’t seem to be able to cope with silence or being on his own. I reckoned he had ADHD.

  Golden Boots face dropped when he saw us, but he quickly transformed it into the cheesy smile of a man greeting two old friends.

  ‘David Blake,’ he said, pumping my arm, ‘and Joe Kinane…my main man!’ He pretended to shadow box my enforcer. Kinane looked at Golden Boots like he was someone he couldn’t even be bothered to hit. There was a reason for all of this faux camaraderie. Technically we were in business together, because Billy Warren sold coke to Golden Boots that he then sold on to his Premier League mates and their entourages, which in turn made us a lot of money and gave Golden Boots the gangsta cred he craved. However, the main reason for his obsequiousness went back to the first day we met Golden Boots at Billy’s flat. I had Finney with me and he almost finished the gobby bastard’s career because Golden Boots thought he was harder than we were. It was fun watching the Premiership’s finest crawling on the floor begging Finney not to break both his legs, then thanking him for teaching him some manners afterwards. We’d moved on since then, and now Golden Boots acted like it had never happened, but you could tell he was shitting himself every time we showed up.

  ‘Drink, guys?’ he offered, ‘Mandy!’ His latest pneumatic blonde almost jumped out of her skin when he shouted her name, ‘get them a drink, you lazy bitch,’ he nodded at us and she broke away from her mates sharpish. They all looked at the walls and the floor while she legged it to the kitchen, looking flushed and humiliated. No one said anything.

  ‘That wasn’t very nice,’ I told him, ‘you forgot your manners.’

  ‘What?’ he genuinely didn’t know what I meant. ‘Sorry lads, did you want something else?’

  ‘That your girlfriend is it?’ I asked him.

  ‘Yeah,’ and he grinned, ‘well, sort of.’

  ‘Shouldn’t speak to her like that then, should you?’

  ‘Eh? Oh,’ and he looked like a little boy who was being told off by the headmaster, ‘S’pose. I’m a bit stressed, you know, business and that.’ He was playing the gangster again, blaming his piddling coke deals for his appalling behaviour.

  ‘No excuse,’ Kinane told him, ‘you’d better apologise.’

  ‘Of course,’ answered Golden Boots and he turned to me, ‘I’m really sorry you had to see that.’

  ‘Not to us, you twat,’ I said, sighing. ‘To her.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ he was nodding, ‘I was just about to.’

  At that point the blonde returned and handed beers to Kinane and myself. We both made a point of thanking her and I looked at Golden Boots, who was already having trouble remembering his promise. The girl was walking away when he called, ‘Babe,’ and she reluctantly turned and walked back. ‘I’m really sorry, babe’, he said and he pulled her to him in an embrace, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m stressing about everything. I’m really, really sorry babe, love ya.’

  She looked like she couldn’t believe it. I doubt he had apologised to anyone since the day Finney threatened to smash his legs in, least of all to one of his girls. She beamed, ‘That’s okay babes.’ When she’d gone, Kinane said, ‘That’s better. Now we need a word with you.’

  Golden Boots looked worried. ‘We’re looking for Billy,’ I told him, ‘you’re having a party and Billy always comes to your parties. So where is he? Where’s Billy Warren?’

  ‘He does usually, yeah, but I’ve not seen him tonight,’ and he looked put out by this, ‘he was supposed to sort out a couple of my mates, if you know what I mean.’

  Of course I knew what he meant. ‘You might have missed him,’ I said, ‘in a place this size. You don’t mind if Kinane has a look?’

  Most people would mind if Kinane was clomping round their house during a party but he was in no position to argue with us, ‘Course not,’ he said, ‘mi casa su casa,’ he added self-consciously. We left him to it. Kinane took the upstairs and I wandered outside towards the pool. There were lots of pretty boy footballers and glamour models out here, showing off and preening in their designer clothes.

  ‘You’re not a footballer,’ said a voice accusingly. It was a skinny brunette in her mid-twenties with a stack of eye make-up on. She was lying on a lounger in a bikini top and shorts. ‘So what are you then?’ she waved her glass of champagne at me and narrowed her eyes, as if I might be a spy sent from a tabloid.

  ‘I’m an agent,’ I told her.

  ‘A football agent?’ she asked and she literally sat up at that point like she was paying attention to me now. I nodded, ‘Looking after this lot?’ her eyes were wide and hopeful.

  I surveyed the young trash in front of me, ‘some of them,’ I told her. It was partially true. We had invested some start-up cash in a guy who had made some inroads in the agent world. He wasn’t that much brighter than Golden Boots but he had a way with words and his baseless threats that one of his young players was about to be spirited away by Spurs, Chelsea or Manchester United usually had chairmen scurrying to increase their wages to a new level of obscenity. It was the easiest, most legal cash we took, though, in some ways, it was grubbier than the drug money.

  ‘You must be minted then?’ She was clearly wondering whether it was worth cutting her losses on the players who were goofing about by the pool with younger girls.

  ‘I get by,’ I told her.

  She climbed to her feet and put the glass down on the table, ‘we should have a talk,’ she said and she put her arm through mine like we were about to go for a walk along the beach together.

  ‘Now?’ I asked her.

  ‘No time like the present, honey,’ she laughed a stoner’s laugh, but it reminded me of the girls we employed as lap dancers down at Privado. They were trained to fleece guys, twenty quid a time, though she wanted it all and wasn’t as patient as they were.

  ‘Where?’

  She shrugged, ‘where would you like to go?’

  ‘For our talk?’ I asked. She nodded. ‘How about the bedroom?’

  She giggled, ‘okay.’

  Kinane appeared. He shook his head to indicate there was no sign of Billy. He didn’t react to the presence of the girl, who was hanging on me like a barnacle. ‘He can come too, right?’ I asked her and she looked up to see the bigger, older man with the pock-marked face.

  ‘I don’t know about that.’ She sounded unsure.

  ‘He always does,’ I assured her, ‘whenever I talk to a girl, you know, about money and the like.’

  ‘Right,’ she wrinkled her nose up as she contemplated this. She obviously didn’t want Kinane anywhere near her, ‘if you’re sure.’

  ‘Why not?’ I asked her all innocently. ‘We could all three of us go up to one of the bedrooms for our chat, then I could let him beat you up and we’ll both roast you. One of us at each end. How does that sound?’

  ‘You what?’ she let go of my arm, ‘what you fucking going on about? I ain’t doing that.’

  ‘Then how about we start again while I remind you that you don’t know either of us or what we do for a living. You were this close to going up to a bedroom with us and we could have done anything we liked to you and no one would have heard you scream because of the music. The next day you’d have cried rape but you wouldn’t know who you were accusing because you didn’t get my name. I’m not a football agent love, I’m a postman and he’s a serial killer. Have you got it now?’

  ‘You’re horrible,’ she told me, ‘why don’t you fuck off?’

  ‘You know what,’ I said, ‘I think I will
.’ And I took a last look at her, ‘you’re a bit old for me.’ And I left her to digest that comment. She crossed her arms over her chest defensively and padded off towards the footballers by the pool. We could see she was telling them all how horrible I’d been to her and a couple looked like they wanted to do something about it but they soon simmered down when they saw Kinane standing there next to me. Instead one of the footballers came up behind her and pulled her shorts and bikini bottoms down to her knees. She squealed as she tried to grab them and, while she was pulling them back up, his friend pushed her into the pool. They all burst out laughing.

  ‘They’re vermin,’ said Kinane, ‘all of them, every last one. They think they can do anything they want.’

  ‘So do we,’ I reminded him.

  ‘But we’re not like that,’ he reasoned, ‘you can’t say we’re like that.’

  ‘No,’ I conceded, ‘we’re not like that.’

  We watched as the brunette splashed to the opposite end of the pool and tried to climb out of it while trying to pull her clothes back on. Her make-up had run till she had panda eyes and her hair was a dripping mess. None of the girls went to help her and the group was laughing at something else by then.

  Kinane was right. We weren’t like that. It comes to something when footballers behave worse than gangsters and nobody does a thing about it. The girl ran round the pool and disappeared into a side door of the house.

  20

  .......................

  Billy lay back on the soft pillow on the hotel bed, staring contentedly up at the ceiling. Billy Warren had never had money before. Not proper money. He’d never been minted. Not like this.

  Sure, he’d done a few decent deals with the Premier League lads, and that was money for old rope. Some of these guys earned thirty, forty grand a week, more even, yet there was one thing none of them could buy in the shops. Billy could provide that, and it wasn’t just the drugs either. He gave them the gangster glamour they all craved. That’s why Billy had the nerve to look Golden Boots in the eye and, straight-faced, give him a price for a kilo of blow that regular cokeheads would have laughed their cocks off at. Golden Boots had looked at him for a moment then answered, ‘So, when do we get the stuff?’ in a mockney voice that proved he’d been watching too many Danny Dyer DVDs.

  These guys wanted people like Billy Warren at their parties. They wanted to nudge their mates and nod at Billy, who’d be standing at the edge of the room, then say, in a world-weary voice, ‘that’s my dealer, he’ll sort you out.’ And they’d watch as their friends traipsed over, looking like virgins walking up to a hooker, about as scared and excited as it is possible to be, hoping to pick up a bit of something forbidden.

  That’s the kind of thrill you need when you play football every week in front of tens of thousands of foul-mouthed fuckers, earning a weekly wage that would be the windfall of a lifetime to most people in the process. When you have a stunning model or a singer for a girlfriend, yet she’s the one who never takes her eye off you in a club, because she knows there’s a wall of fanny queuing up to take her place the minute her back’s turned. What else is there to excite you when you don’t have to try to score goals, not when it comes natural and always has done, when you can shag every girl you meet, and you have a garage full of Ferraris, Porsches and Astons? Billy had seen the cars, some of them with just a few hundred miles on the clock before the owners got bored with them and moved on to the next flavour of the month their mates are driving into the training ground. Billy has seen Bentleys and Maseratis gathering dust, their owners too stupid even to put a cover over them. So what do you do when you have already earned more money than you could ever spend and you’re twenty-two years old? Where can you possibly get your thrills from then? Billy, that’s where.

  Doing something forbidden, something where the risk is so high that if they were caught their whole world could come crashing down around them is about the only thing that gets them truly hard. They are like the bank manager who defrauds his company, then leaves his wife and kids to run off with a Ukrainian hooker less than half his age; or the married career politician who goes looking for rough trade on Clapham Common, getting a blow job from a complete stranger who might mug him or kill him. Billy knew enough about life to know that the best thrills are the ones that come with a little bit of risk, because it makes the pay-off all the sweeter at the end.

  Billy Warren spent his free time at parties with spoilt, twenty-something millionaires and their hangers on; as drug dealer to the stars he should have been rolling in it. Instead, because of the tight leash Blake had him on, he was lucky if he made a few quid out of it.

  The longer this went on, the more he began to resent David Blake. Who was he anyway? Just one of Bobby’s ‘yes’ men. He wasn’t hard. It was Kinane who did all of Blake’s dirty work for him.

  Then Peter Dean had showed up at Billy’s flat with his plan. All Billy had to do was set Blake up and he was in for a massive score. It would make the coke deals with Golden Boots look like nowt by comparison. And the beauty was the upfront part of the deal; half as soon as he approached the hit man and half once Blake was removed from the scene. It was amazing. He was being paid a shedload of money to get rid of the one man who had stopped him earning a decent living for the past three years. Talk about sweet.

  Finding the hit man hadn’t been difficult. Everyone in Billy’s world knew what Jack Conroy did for a living. When it came to sitting down with the guy and talking to him though, that was when Billy had earned his money. Sitting in the apartment of a man who had killed countless other men gave him the creeps. Then Conroy had turned down the job.

  ‘What do you mean, man?’ asked Billy, ‘the money’s bloody amazing.’

  ‘It is,’ agreed Conroy, ‘but I don’t shit where I eat.’

  Baffled by this response, Billy made sure Conroy understood that their conversation had never happened. Conroy just laughed, ‘don’t worry, Billy. I’m like a grave. Nothing gets out.’

  Billy left Conroy’s place in a hurry, then spent a good while racking his memory, trying to dredge up someone else who could take Blake out for them. Then he remembered Tate, a borderline psychopath who’d killed two mental Albanians for Bobby because they’d been trying to take over his vice operation and weren’t prepared to do a deal or listen to reason. Tate had managed that easy enough, so he was surely the right man for this one. Billy had gone to see him and, as soon as the money was mentioned, Tate signed on.

  With the first part of the job done, Peter Dean came to see him and he paid what was owed. Dean looked nervous, and well he might, but there was nothing to link Billy to the hit and he decided to use some of that money to lay low for a while. First he booked himself into the poshest hotel in town under a fake name and turned off his phone. Then he went shopping for some new threads down the fancy shops with all of the labels. New shoes, suit, shirts, even socks and underwear. He’d gone for all of the brands his Premier League clients favoured; Moschino, Prada, Armani, Boss and a pair of Ferragamo shoes. He paid cash, and made the bemused girl who served him cut the tags off everything while he was still wearing it, then plonked his old gear on the counter, telling her, ‘shove that lot in the bin, pet’.

  Next stop was a jewellers for an Omega. He could feel its reassuring weight on his wrist when he walked and it made him feel like a player. He went back to the hotel and waited for news on Blake. The sirens outside told him the hit had gone ahead so he turned on the radio to BBC Newcastle and waited. Sure enough, the news report announced there’d been a shooting in the Quayside and two men were believed dead. Two men? That rattled Billy. He decided his best bet was to hole up in the hotel for a few days, living off room service and watching porn on the in-house service. He wasn’t too worried at this point. He just thought he should probably keep his head down till the dust settled and he found out exactly what had happened.

  Trouble with porn, though, is that it isn’t as good as the real thing, and he was flush no
w, so he called down to the concierge. He’d heard they could get you anything and, sure enough, the bloke gave him the number of an up-market escort agency.

  ‘Escort agency’, Billy sniffed, they were still hookers when it came down to it. He dialled them anyway.

  ‘I want a bird,’ he informed the woman who answered, ‘actually, no, make that two birds, but they’ve got to be quality.’

  ‘All of our escorts are exceptional ladies for men of discernment sir,’ the refined voice assured him.

  ‘Yeah, right, well, that’s what I want then,’ he told her, ‘what you said. How much?’

  The woman gave him a price for each girl. There was a cost per hour and a cost for the whole night. The cost for the whole night was colossal but he had the readies and he had promised himself something a bit special; the kind of night Premier League players had every Saturday.

  ‘Alright, you’re on,’ he said and he told her the name of the hotel he was in, before adding ‘I want a blonde and a brunette,’ then, almost as an afterthought, ‘the blonde has to have big tits and the brunette’s got to have long legs.’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do, sir,’ said the woman with little enthusiasm.

  ‘And they’ve got to be mucky, I mean, proper filthy,’ he said, before adding, ‘in bed like.’

  ‘Sir, I don’t think you understand our role here. We simply arrange the company of our girls and they provide their time.’

  ‘Company?’ asked Billy in disbelief. ‘Time? I don’t want company love, it’s a shag I’m after and for what you charge it ought to be fucking guaranteed!’

  ‘Anything you arrange between yourself and the girls is entirely at their discretion,’ she told him, seemingly between gritted teeth. This sounded more promising, but Billy wasn’t entirely convinced.