Our Little Secrets

by Peter Ritchie

  Hadden ran a finger across the sweat on his forehead, taking him by surprise, and his colour paled a little.

  ‘You’re nervous – good.’ She said it with a smile. ‘You’ve got the picture. Now we can do it the hard way – win or lose I still get my wages in the bank every month and the business goes on. However, my guess is that if your brothers find out – and they will’ – she winked as if they’d shared an intimate moment – ‘it would mean a little war with the boys that you’d have to win. Worst-case scenario is . . .’ She hesitated. ‘Well, guess I don’t need to explain that one to you, but it tends to end in us searching for the body.’

  Grainger was no mug, and because of the worries over his finances he’d run a lot of options through his head before the detective had walked into his life. Up to that moment he’d believed his bitch of a wife was the straw that might break the camel’s back. Part of her revenge package was she’d been spending his money as if there was no tomorrow, and he could do nothing about it because he didn’t want her getting her old man involved in the poisonous mix. That was the ace up her sleeve.

  Grainger was already in a corner, needed breathing space, and now he had Hadden with either something to offer or perhaps a ton of shit to drop into his life. Whatever she was there for wasn’t on the table yet, and he had no option but to listen. Although he was in no position of strength, he guessed correctly that she didn’t know the full extent of his problems – otherwise she could easily have piled even more pressure on him.

  ‘What do you want?’ He leaned forward dejectedly with his elbows on the table. The cocky swagger that he’d been displaying like a beast in heat was gone, and although he wasn’t quite defeated, he was open for business. She read the non-verbals and almost imperceptibly nodded in response to what she saw.

  ‘Simple really. You operate at the top. Hardly a conviction to your name. You deal with the top men and they respect you as a businessman, so for all intents and purposes that’s what you are most of the time. You have pals in the Scottish Parliament and are chummy with a few councillors round the old country. So you’re the go-to guy if someone needs a favour or to be pointed in the right direction.’

  She waved over to the barman for refills.

  He turned up his face slightly to look directly at her, saw something in her that made him sweat a bit more and wondered how to win back some control. He couldn’t have been in a worse position if she was squeezing a handful of his balls under the table. ‘And?’ He could guess what the ‘and’ was but he needed to hear it all the same.

  ‘The “and” is that I want you to sign on with me. I want you as my eyes and ears when I need them.’

  ‘A grass?’

  She smiled because they nearly always said the same thing when an approach was made. He wiped the back of his hand across his chin in a nervous gesture.

  ‘This isn’t London in the seventies, Dominic. We call them agents now, or the official title is covert human intelligence source. CHIS for most people. All nice and official, lots of protection and even the working detectives have no idea who you are – only a couple of us in my unit. You feed me and I feed you back. It’s a two-way process. There’s money in it, but despite your financial problems I’d guess that what we pay wouldn’t be the incentive for you. I’m offering you a bye as far as arrest and possible conviction goes. Plus, your sweet little brothers stay in the dark, at least for now. The big bonus is I can keep my gang off your back, and if the spotlight does fall on you for any reason, I can let you know how and when to keep your head down.’

  It was the strangest feeling, because he was still wildly attracted to her despite the fact she might take his life apart if she was genuine, but he was satisfied that this was no act and she was real enough . . . too real for that matter.

  Grainger had reached that point where panic seemed to make no sense and his heart rate slowed to an almost normal rhythm. His business brain clicked in as he accepted that this was just another piece of trading and negotiation that needed to be dealt with. The costs of failure would be catastrophic, but it was a business deal and he knew how that worked. In a way, it might solve a problem he’d wrestled with for long enough.

  In the crime game, the men who survived to pick up their pensions were the ones who had diplomatic skills and covered all the angles. The killers and radge merchants tended to be wiped out or end up doing fifteen in the HMPs because they had no strategic skills – and wouldn’t have known what the word strategic meant anyway. Grainger had wrestled with the idea that as the business grew, he’d picked up contacts in almost all walks of life except the police. He knew that was a gap in his security and that the wise men in his game had lines into the force; the smart villains would talk about taking out fully comprehensive insurance, which of course made sense to the deeper thinkers. Christ, it made so much sense to get a friendly in the job, because Joe Public paid a lot of tax to put people like him and his brothers away. Every so often the police needed to put big scalps inside and he didn’t want to be one of them. Despite what he was doing, he ran a good business and perhaps this problem could be turned to positive effect.

  ‘How would this work then?’ He wrapped his hand round the glass and felt the cold seep into his flesh. Grainger saw the pupils in the woman’s eyes dilate and he wondered if it was a sign of her small victory or interest in him.

  Hadden felt her skin tingle, not with any attraction to the good-looking man opposite but at the thought that everything she touched recently seemed to have worked, and the roll continued. She’d never felt more alive – if she could land Grainger then she had the big prize in the palm of her hand. A man like him could toss her the occasional major scalp, which would turn her into a rising star again. She believed in her soul that it was her right. Guilt was something that only troubled her in her dreams.

  She explained calmly how it all worked and a couple of times she watched his eyebrows kick up in an involuntary gesture. He was surprised how straightforward it could be and realised he was dealing with a real pro who definitely knew her business. The fact that she was bent law and female did nothing but impress him – he knew it took extra-hard balls to carry that one off.

  ‘Now, the last thing . . . this meeting is unofficial. It didn’t happen, right?’

  He nodded but was confused.

  She continued, ‘The official way is that I’ll approach you again but with another officer. Official means two have to be involved. It’s the law. Remember that we’re breaking the fucking law now. Understand?’

  He got it and she leaned in close to the table. ‘You act like we’ve never met; we do all this again and you agree to come on board. Right?’

  He nodded.

  ‘We do the paperwork and then we’re ready to go. In reality, you and I will meet off the record. You tell me what you’ve got and I’ll tell you what we want. If you have something of interest, I come back with the co-handler and you tell us only what I’ve cleared you to say.’

  ‘Can I ask a question?’ He admired the play and saw it all now – it was just one businessman playing the game with another one. ‘What if I want something?’

  ‘Then ask. I might tell you to fuck off, but if you don’t ask, you don’t get. Just make sure that if you want something you ask me on my own and not with the co-handler. Got it?’

  She almost had him in the bag, and there was a bonus ball because she could see he was still attracted to her despite the revelation. That gave her all the extra leverage she needed.

  ‘Let’s have one for the road and we’ll make an arrangement for next week when the co-handler and I can cold-call you somewhere and get it sealed up.’

  She felt the effects of the drinks she’d already had as one side of her brain told her to go home with game, set and match while the other side told her she just couldn’t lose, whatever she did. That was her first mistake in a while.

  The moon and the stars sat exactly where they were in the night sky and everything should have bee
n as it was, but Hadden had forgotten the lesson that all successful gamblers know: every run comes to an end; it’s inevitable. She was good, very good, at what she did, but like the man opposite, you could never really let your guard down or some horrible bastard would stab you in the eye.

  Grainger was still trying to work out whether he could get her to his flat. The thought of strangling her had passed, however, and he had something else in mind. She knew exactly what that was and toyed with the idea of giving him some hope that he’d get what he wanted (but always in the future), and they were both so preoccupied they failed to notice that they were being watched.

  14

  The two guys blended perfectly with the clientele in the bar. They’d taken care to look the part, were one hundred per cent smart but casual and a few thirty-something girls had given them all the signals they needed, but still they’d carried on talking to each other as if there was no one else in the bar. Their admirers lost interest and decided they had to be gay. In fact, they were real pros and just doing the job Grainger’s father-in-law, Arthur Hamilton, had asked them to do.

  When Big Arthur asked for a job to be done, there couldn’t be any distractions. He demanded loyalty and no fuck-ups. For that he was a top payer and a good boss. The ‘big man’, as he was sometimes known, was virtually retired these days, having operated in a different era when the only gangs that mattered were almost all in the west, with a few scattered through the Central Belt. He was one of the rare breed who had worked all over the country, but Arthur, together with the old Scotland of his younger and middle years, was fading into history, and when he walked past the Parliament building for his morning exercise or saw Wee Nicola tearing up the opposition, he shook his head and remembered the days when a burd like the First Minister would have got a slap in the pus and told to get back in the kitchen.

  Hamilton wore a razor scar that ran from his temple to his jawbone and he displayed it as a badge of honour that had been earned doing it the hard way to the top. It was a sign that said, ‘Do you want to fuck with the man who survived this and beat his attacker into a career in a wheelchair?’

  He was a big man with a full head of short, salt-and-pepper hair. His eyes were clear blue and he looked fifteen years younger than his actual age of sixty-five. For the last decade or more, he’d lived well on the profits of his business and an overblown vanity had seen to it that he took good care of himself: he trained in the gym, played golf a couple of times a week and was careful with his diet.

  Health-wise, high blood pressure was a bit of a problem, but when he saw the state of most of his contemporaries he reckoned he’d done pretty well. His wife was gone so all that was left was his only girl Judith, or Jude as she’d always been known. She was the only person in the world he’d ever felt he really loved, and as long as she was happy, so was he. Even as the years passed and she learned to despise him, he still ached for her.

  The day she told him she was seeing Dominic Grainger, and that it was serious, was the first time in years he’d felt like hurting someone. He’d never met Grainger, knowing him only by sight, but he knew enough about the family to judge that a Grainger was wrong for his little girl. The irony that his daughter hated him and the reasons for that were airbrushed from his mind, apart from at those moments when what he’d done would rip into his conscious mind like gunfire.

  Although Hamilton was semi-retired, he was smart enough to know you never left the game completely – men like him knew too much, and there was always someone who might come back to square up a perceived wrong that had lain dormant for years. It meant that he kept his hand in, followed the news on the men and women in the game, who was playing for big numbers and, more importantly, he kept hold of all his friendly contacts. He knew he might have to call on them again if he needed to come out of retirement. He’d seen the result where a couple of his own generation had done nothing more than stare at the sun as they drank themselves into oblivion on the Costa Crime. Sometimes these men were visited and put into the permanent sleep because someone decided to settle old scores or make sure their secrets died with them. Hamilton had made up his mind that just wasn’t going to happen to him, so he was always ready if anyone wanted to try their hand.

  As for his son-in-law, well, he wanted better for his girl, despite there being much to admire in the Young Turk, who, in his swagger, was a lot like Hamilton himself at that age. He’d climbed to the top quickly and, as soon as he was able, had started to open up legit businesses to complement the illegal side. But it made no difference – the boy was a gangster and he’d never settle with that. Rows had followed and his daughter had given him an ultimatum.

  ‘I go with him and if you make this an issue you’ll never see me again. You can’t buy me with money. You know that. And don’t forget our little secret, Dad.’

  When she said the word Dad her mouth twisted as if something foul was on her lips. The words made him reel, which was exactly what she’d wanted. He’d tried to forget what he’d done to her mother, but she’d seen enough of it through her child’s eyes and it couldn’t be cleaned from the slate. The screams, the sounds of pain and walking in to see the big man standing over her sobbing mother with a leather belt hanging from his hand had left her corrupted, and he was responsible.

  It had been a classic situation: when Jude Hamilton hit sixteen and suddenly realised that she could take control and exert power, she’d turned on her father and told him no more hurting her mother. Perhaps not surprisingly, his wife had died well before her time, and Jude had nearly choked at the funeral as her father played the part of the loyal, grieving husband laying to rest a woman who had loved him right back. She realised that it was all a lie, that everything people believed about him was a smokescreen for the cruel bastard who just happened to be her father. It was still their little secret and she’d keep it that way, as long as she could squeeze what she wanted from the man with the gold-plated reputation for loving his family above all else.

  The truth was that those emotions were only bestowed on the girl whose innocence he’d stolen. He genuinely felt so much love for his daughter, even when the memory visited him in the dark hours. He would see it again and again as if he was an onlooker at a crime scene: the small confused girl in the doorway, eyes wide and holding her favourite toy as she stared at her mother lying like a beaten doll with him towering over her; later, lifting her head from the pillow as he came into her room, sat on the bed and told her it was alright and it was their secret – that her mother was bad and needed to be punished.

  Then came the school years when Jude realised that what had happened was foul, dreaded that it would be discovered and that she would be marked for life as soiled goods, the daughter of an animal. Then as a teenager she’d learned to hate properly. She’d watched the men who worked and dealt with her father bow and scrape to him, treat him as above ordinary beings. But she could bring him down anytime she wanted. It might destroy her as well, but he was vain and lived the lie with style – the truth would kill him, and it was a weapon she kept reminding him she had if she needed it.

  15

  The two men in the bar worked for a friend in Glasgow who was still in the game and owed Hamilton more than he could pay back. Whenever Big Arthur needed pros, they were available from his old friend.

  The two Weegie hoods saw all they needed to see and even managed a couple of photographs of Dominic Grainger and the unknown woman. They really wanted to watch them head off to a hotel or wherever he did the business so they could call it a night plus a result. This was the second time they’d watched him, and the last time he’d taken his pick-up to the flat in St Vincent Place. They had enough now, and Big Arthur would be pleased; well, maybe pleased wasn’t the right word.

  They watched Grainger and Hadden in deep conversation, in two minds about staying or calling it a day. Big Arthur would always have questions and they would have to have answers, so they hung on to see where they would go if the woman who was with Grainge
r was game for a laugh. If they’d known who she really was, they would have been on a bonus from the big man. As far as they were concerned, she looked like someone who mattered when compared with the last woman he’d picked up, but that meant nothing at that moment in time.

  As near as dammit the night was more or less following the pattern they’d hoped for. However, their best-laid plans were about to go belly up, while the consequences of one too many drinks would alter Hadden’s night and future in ways that she could never have predicted or imagined.

  The overweight mouth who had complained at the bar earlier had discovered his balls again, helped on by necking several drinks rapidly. That was his solution to getting over his humiliation in front of the woman he fancied. She’d made her excuses and left halfway through his feeble attempt at explaining why he hadn’t sorted out either the barman or Grainger. Some people just can’t help being an arse, and by the time he was well on his way to being fully pissed he realised that Grainger being some sort of name meant fuck all to him. He’d been in the TA a few years earlier and still remembered some moves. Unfortunately, he’d forgotten that the lads in the Terriers had thought he was an arsehole as well.