by Nicky Black
‘Fucking hell.’ Trevor laughed again once the coughing had subsided, ‘after what he did to your da?’
Tommy’s brow furrowed in confusion. ‘Eh?’
‘Thick as mince, you, mind.’
Tommy straightened his spine. Was he thick? He didn’t think so. ‘You better tell me,’ he said, suddenly fearful of what he might hear.
‘You’ll find out soon enough,’ said Trevor. ‘Smartie, eh?’ He paused, then his eyes turned sly. ‘Tell you what. I’ll get you a buyer if you tell me where the rave is.’
Tommy glared at him with annoyance.
‘Everybody knows, man,’ said Trevor. ‘Tommy’s rave this, Tommy’s rave that. Where is it?’
‘Without a buyer, there won’t be any rave.’
Trevor gave a little snort and shook his head. ‘Paul Smart supplying drugs to your rave. You fucking doylem.’
Tommy felt his heart drop like a dead weight of realisation. Paul had agreed there wouldn’t be any drugs, but since when was he a man of his word? A doylem Tommy wasn’t, a complete and utter idiot, he was. ‘What did he do?’ he asked again.
Trevor looked at him with an I-know-something-you-don’t expression. ‘Maybe you should ask your da.’ With some effort, Trevor raised his body up and rested his head against the wall, closing his eyes, shutting Tommy out.
Having the cash was more important than unscrambling Trevor’s riddles right now, and Tommy felt Trevor’s desperation seep into his own skin. ‘I need a buyer, howay, Trevor.’
‘We need to know where the rave is, but.’ He didn’t open his eyes.
‘Who’s we?’
Trevor grinned a little, eyes still closed. ‘I’m not saying ’owt else, so don’t bother.’ He swung his head towards Tommy, his face bordering on gratification. ‘I’ll be at the rec at nine o’clock with your buyer. But remember. No venue, no money.’
Trevor twisted away from Tommy, pulling up his knees and curling into a ball against the wall of the arch. Tommy stared at the jutting vertebrae of Trevor’s spine, the bruises and scrapes, the veins of his neck shot to fuck, and the guilt settled in his gut once more.
Looking around him at the filth, Tommy thought back to the days before Paul Smart, before his father’s addiction took hold, when his family was hardly rich, but getting by, when there was laughter and Meccano and the Ramones on the record player. It felt like a lifetime ago.
He pulled himself to his feet, feeling a hundred years old. Just a few days ago he’d had the brawn and the confidence; cocky as hell. Now his family was in danger, his best friend had shunned him, and he’d done a deal with the Devil. Two Devils in fact, for Trevor Logan was no angel.
DENISE
Her son-in-law was a drug dealer. How crass was that? What sort of low-life was her daughter in love with?
A sewing basket rested by one of the pink leather armchairs, mostly for effect. Mending things wasn’t her style. Poor people mended things, and if there was one thing she wouldn’t be seen as, it was poor. She’d grown up wanting, hungry, other kids taking the piss out of the jumble sale clothes they recognised as their own cast-offs. Shame and mortification had left their scars and now everything had to be new; the best. The basket was where she threw the useless stuff, like credit card bills and repayment demands written in big red letters designed to intimidate. Tommy’s drugs had joined the trash, and she stared at the basket now, wondering how long the dealing had been going on. A few weeks? Six months? Since before Sam married him?
She remembered the cheap, nasty wedding at the Civic Centre, her daughter dressed in a borrowed two-piece, the bump that was to become Ashleigh evident to everyone. Even as the mother of the bride, Denise had felt entirely overdressed at the pub dinner that followed, Sam tucking into scampi and chips and a knickerbocker glory. No evening do, no cake, no going-away outfits.
Did it start in that godawful place they’d gone on the belated honeymoon? All the girls wearing next to nothing, out ’till all hours, pissed out of their tiny minds? Tommy and Sam had thought to join them, but she’d put a stop to that. As if she was some sort of glorified babysitter. Tap water in Tommy’s water bottle had kept his arse glued to the toilet for the best part of three days.
Hearing her brother call her name, Denise eased herself out of the armchair and walked into the kitchen where Paul watched his men through the window, his stance one of satisfaction. He’d turned up unannounced with a kiss for her cheek and a couple of ugly looking creatures with wheelbarrows of full of rose bushes and black bin bags of compost. Looking through the window now, she gasped, the blood-red rose garden exquisite, but reminiscent of things more brutal.
‘Oh, my love is like a red, red rose,’ Paul sang quietly.
The hairs on Denise’s arms rose to meet the tune, goose bumps prickling in recollection. It was a song their mother had sung, sometimes serenely to them at bed time, more often through tears to comfort herself.
As if he knew the effect the song would have, Paul’s arm went around her shoulder. ‘Thank you,’ he said.
Still reeling from the clarity of the memory, she stammered, ‘What for?’
‘For letting me do this. For you.’
The prickling sensation erupted all over; it stung her skin, raced through her blood. The arm around her felt secure, safe, and she hoped it would stay there a little longer, all the while knowing she was the one who should be strong. She should have taken him with her all those years ago, got him out of that hell. But her husband would have none of it. He wanted her all to himself, he’d said, and at the end of the day, she had to save herself, otherwise she would surely have died of terror.
The tears rose from the hollow depths of a heart she had long thought empty. All the years she’d been convinced her brother didn’t love her any more fell in streams down her cheeks. That was all she’d ever wanted; to be loved, and since Tommy had taken her daughter away from her, she’d been adrift.
‘I’m sorry,’ she sputtered, the back of her hand at her nose.
Paul still watched his men through the window. ‘No need to apologise,’ he said. It was as if he’d expected the tears, and she yearned for him to hold her tighter, tell her everything would be all right. But who was she to expect such affection? She’d betrayed him and now he didn’t know how to offer comfort. She could forgive him that.
‘I won’t tell anyone,’ she said, lifting her head to look at him, ‘about the building society.’
She counted the beats of his silence. He didn’t flinch, didn’t say “thanks, sis,” or pat her arm with gratitude. He just stared through the glass and said, ‘Don’t know what you’re talking about.’ He tightened his arm at last, perhaps too much. ‘Don’t spoil it,’ he said, before walking away.
***
Alone now, vodka bottle half empty, the curtains closed against the relentless afternoon sun, Denise let the fierce, quiet tears run free. About once a year it possessed her, the need to let herself fall to the bottom so she could crawl her way back up again. As always, she did it by herself. No one needed to see this. She was Denise Morris, she could get through anything, but now and then the accumulation of regret, guilt, and fear had to be allowed out.
She cried for her friendless brother, her mother lying in her early grave, her rotten father, decaying in a nursing home with some alcohol induced dementia. Her daughter, her damned ex-husband, and shithead boyfriends.
Her husband, Charlie, had been a rotten twat if ever there was one. ‘A Jack the Lad,’ she’d laughed with her friends, thinking she’d be the one to change him. Hindsight wasn’t a luxury you could fall back on when you were barely a woman yourself and had no experience of the world beyond your own grisly front door. He’d thought her frigid, unexciting, always wanting her to let herself go. Then he’d met Angela, a bland woman with a face like a foot who clearly hid her lust for spontaneity.
‘She’s just so uninhibited,’ he’d said. Decided he wanted another family. Decided he wanted to emigrate to New Zealand w
ith Angela.
Just like that. Divorced.
Then there was Adrian, nice as pie until he was found with his trousers down with a thirteen-year-old. Sam had been ten years old at the time, avoided him like the plague, called him a creep. Denise had wondered – oh, she’d wondered – but had been too much of a coward to ask Sam directly if he’d ever touched her.
She was still a coward, she realised, and the tears of self-pity coursed down her face.
Marvin had been kind, sweet; so nice it drove her to hate him, as if conflict were a necessity to her, like food, water, shelter. The infernal comb-over and his ability to bore even the Pope had driven her to near insanity.
Kevin had been the final straw. Wanted to buy a house for them, he’d said, up in High Heaton. Even showed her around it, all bay windows, cornices and ceiling roses. All he needed was a ten per cent deposit, he’d said. She’d handed it over, her life savings. Then, like something off Rentaghost, poof! He was gone.
She was a monumental failure, and she sobbed like a baby as she stared into the glass of clear alcohol – the abyss of her future. They said you should face your fears head on. But she couldn’t face hers. She couldn’t keep a man, she was losing her daughter, her brother could walk away from her at any moment if she put a foot wrong.
She filled the tumbler to the top. She would numb the fear instead – the fear that she would die alone.
PEACH
Paul Smart had a face only his mother could love. Perhaps it was the wealth, ill-gotten or not, that gained him the respect of the brutes who seemed to colonise him like head lice. He wasn’t stupid either, so the decision not to have some brief sat next to him had to be for a reason which, Peach was sure, would become clear soon enough.
Paul sat opposite the DCI with his hands clasped on the table, dressed in a tight sports top, revealing the shoulders and arms of a man who spent much of his time with his nose to the floor doing press-ups. He was tall, well over six feet, his legs barely fitting under the table. How old was he? Peach wondered. Thirty, perhaps a bit older. Ten years ago, the man was just some small-time lender, but it soon became clear that Paul Smart had ambitions, and that he would do whatever it took to make money and be the Big Man. His dirty work was done by others, however, people who would rather die than grass on their mentor.
With the tape running and DS Murphy spread-eagled in a chair by his side, Peach pushed the photograph across the table. Paul sat forward, looked at it, then sat back again.
‘Want to tell me why a certain Thomas James Collins was at your house yesterday morning?’ Peach asked.
‘He’s a mate,’ Paul replied.
‘Spend a lot of time together, do you?’
Paul shrugged. ‘Not really.’
‘Not a mate, then.’
Sucking in air, Paul lifted one side of his mouth like Popeye. ‘An acquaintance,’ he clarified.
‘Bit early to be receiving acquaintances, eight o’clock?’ Peach pointed at the photograph and Paul looked down at it with a sigh of tedium.
‘He wanted money, I told him to piss off.’
‘Money for what?’ Murphy picked up the questioning.
‘Fucked if I know. People want money for all sorts.’
‘Do you know the prison sentence for supplying class A drugs, Mister Smart?’ asked Murphy.
‘Drugs?’ Paul cocked an eyebrow. ‘Err, nope.’
‘You might be about to find out,’ said Peach, ‘because my officers are tearing up your floorboards right now.’ Tommy Collins was meeting with him in nightclubs and at his house, and these raves needed the fuel of MDMA. Didn’t take a brain surgeon to work out the connections.
Paul blinked slowly from Peach to Murphy. ‘I’m not arrested, I know my rights,’ he said.
‘You might want to tell that bodyguard of yours not to invite police officers into your house, then,’ said Murphy.
They’d had nothing to arrest Smart for, but the dark-skinned man with the stitched-up face that guarded Paul’s front door had believed the uniformed officers. As soon as Paul was signed in, Peach had sent them to Smart’s house with orders to wave a piece of letterheaded paper around and lie to the man that his boss was under arrest and they had the right to search the house. Not everyone was as well informed about the law as Paul Smart, who was now scratching under his chin and looking down his nose at Peach, the fleeting look of cold hostility gone.
‘I know you don’t like me,’ Paul said. ‘You’re a bit of a leftie, you don’t like people making money. It’s distasteful to you. But surely you don’t think I’m some sort of muttonhead? Drugs? Mugs game.’
‘Making money from your line of work is distasteful to me, yes,’ said Peach.
Paul held up his hands. ‘I run a legitimate business. I even pay my taxes, so you can waste them on my floorboards.’ He looked at Murphy. ‘I’ll be looking for compensation.’
‘How long have you known Collins?’ Murphy sat forward.
‘Erm, let’s see,’ said Paul, rubbing his chin in mock thought. ‘Since the little prick was born, probably.’
‘So, you don’t like him?’ said Murphy with surprise. ‘Thought you said you were mates.’
‘An acquaintance,’ Peach corrected.
Murphy nodded. ‘Go clubbing, do you? You know, throwing some shapes on the dance floor and that?’ He gave a little example of what he meant.
Paul eyed Murphy with scorn. ‘I leave that to the bairns.’
Murphy slid another photograph towards him. ‘Phutures, last Saturday night,’ he said.
Peach watched Paul carefully. Not a flicker.
‘I had a game,’ said Paul.
Another photograph.
‘With your acquaintance?’
Paul glanced down at the photograph of Tommy entering the club and scoffed again.
‘Coz, the bird behind the bar said he joined you for a little tête-à-tête. Lasted about, what?’ Murphy looked at Peach for the answer.
‘Ten, twelve minutes,’ said Peach.
Paul’s hands had slid into his pockets. Making sure he doesn’t fidget, thought Peach.
‘Like I said,’ Paul maintained, ‘he wants money, and I’m not into lending to people who can’t pay me back.’
‘Well, knock me down with a fucking feather,’ said Murphy. ‘I thought that’s exactly what loan sharks did. Have I been wrong all this time, boss?’
‘No, you’re not wrong.’ Peach couldn’t take his eyes off Paul’s face. The man was made of iron. Didn’t give a thing away.
‘Let’s just say it’s not a very good business model these days,’ said Paul.
‘So, you need to make your money elsewhere,’ Peach stated rather than questioned. ‘That’s quite a lifestyle you’ve got to fund.’
Watching Paul shrug again, Peach dug into the breast pocket of his shirt and brought out the seal bag he’d found in Sally’s handbag. He threw it onto the table, sensing Murphy staring at them, hearing him clear his throat a little. ‘Are you supplying drugs to Tommy Collins to sell at his raves?’
Paul looked at the seal bag blankly. ‘No. But he wants to be careful getting into that game. I mean, the lad’s got a wife and bairn. Families are fair game to drug dealers. Nasty people.’
‘You know we can trace the batches of these things, don’t you?’ said Peach. ‘I mean, it’s a bit daft putting the stamp on it.’
‘I wouldn’t know, would I?’
At last, some emotion, albeit irritation.
‘So, if I arrest Collins and search his house, I won’t find any of these?’ Peach held up the bag.
‘If Tommy’s stupid enough to keep drugs in his house, that’s his problem.’
‘And yours, when we find them buried under your floorboards,’ said Murphy.
This drew a smile onto Paul’s face; teeth this time, gappy, like the milk teeth of a five-year-old.
Peach leant forward, his own teeth displayed, his patience running out. ‘Stop playing with me,’ he seethed.
>
Paul just continued to smile, and Peach’s fists crashed on the table making Murphy jump beside him.
Paul sighed, long and hard. ‘This is just boring.’
A knock on the door had Murphy pulling himself from his chair and up onto his feet, the long, hooded stare at their interviewee bringing a wider smile to Paul’s face.
The door closed with a quiet click, and Peach pushed air through his nose in a heavy burst.
‘Interview suspended, five forty-three p.m.’ Peach pressed the stop button on the tape recorder and reached for the photographs and the seal bag, but Paul’s hand came down on his, his slate-blue eyes beckoning him in.
‘I know it’s not me you want,’ he said. ‘You want Collins? I’ll give you Collins.’
‘Stay here.’ Peach made to stand but Paul’s grip tightened.
‘I’ll do you a deal.’
Peach sat back in his chair, felt Paul’s fingers loosen, and he withdrew his hand, pulling the photographs and seal bag slowly towards him.
‘I know what Collins is up to,’ Paul said, ‘and I know people. I can make sure he has plenty drugs on him when you bust that rave. You just give me the sign and I’ll take care of it.’
‘There won’t be any rave,’ said Peach.
‘You going to stop it, are you? You and Bugs Bunny out there?’
‘Why would you want to stitch up Collins?’
Paul held up a hand and rubbed two fingers and a thumb together. ‘It’s a big do. Thousands of people. You let me out the back door with the cash and I’ll make sure Collins has the drugs on him. I’ll lead you right to him. I get my money, you get your man. It’s a win-win.’
Peach creased his brow. ‘You’re bankrolling him?’
But Paul’s face remained blank. ‘This is a one-off opportunity. You might get him for theft one day, might get him for pissing up a lamp post, but you’ll never get him for dealing on this scale.’
Peach continued watching him, that growl settling in his throat once more. ‘Where is it?’
‘Well, that’s for me to know and you to find out,’ said Paul. ‘These raves have run their course. They’re pissing all over them down south.’ His eyes darkened. ‘Someone will die, and it’ll all be over.’
