by Owen Mullen
If only he had the courage, it could all be over.
The sound of footsteps stopped him. The door opened and Marcus stood in the frame, his muscular body backlit from the landing. He came towards him and slowly prised the gun from his hand, whispering, ‘Easy, boss. Easy. That isn’t the way.’
The big man emptied the bullets from the chamber and put them in his jacket pocket. He leaned on the desk, towering over Glass, quietly reassuring ’til the insanity faded from the other man’s eyes and he returned from whichever circle of hell he’d been in. Danny had aged ten years since this morning.
‘Want a drink, boss?’
Danny slurred. ‘Yeah.’
‘What?’
‘Anything, doesn’t matter.’
Marcus filled a tumbler almost to the brim with Johnnie Walker Black Label, then gently fitted Glass’s fingers round the glass and covered them with his own much larger fingers. When he was satisfied Danny had a hold on it, he took them away.
Glass sipped it like a sleepwalker, unaware what he was doing. He gulped the whisky, took a second swallow and turned his head to look at the office, rubbing the numbness from his arms.
The question was childlike, whispered and innocent. ‘I did it again, didn’t I?’
‘You did it again, Danny.’
‘How long have I been like this?’
‘Not long. You’re all right now.’
Marcus paused before he spoke again. ‘You wanted information. I’ve got it.’
‘And?’
Marcus took air into his lungs and slowly let it out.
‘Anderson was definitely at the club early on Friday. Since then, neither him, Ritchie, nor any of the major players in his crew have been spotted.’
‘Which means… he is dead?’
‘No. Nobody’s seen them, that’s all.’ Marcus played with the gold strap of his watch. ‘But we’ve found one of them.’
‘Who?’
‘A Geordie, name of Jonjo.’
‘Never heard of him.’
‘He’s George Ritchie’s nephew.’
‘Then he’ll know where his uncle is.’
Marcus allowed himself a slow smile; he’d been looking forward to this. ‘That isn’t the best bit.’
‘Tell me.’
‘This Jonjo’s been boasting about a video he put on YouTube.’
Danny sat forward in his chair – back from the dead.
Marcus said, ‘We’ve got him, boss. We’ve got the bastard.’
‘Where is he?’
‘A bedsit in Islington. Got somebody watching the place. He won’t get away. Want me to lift him?’
‘Give him one more day. We’ll make it a double celebration.’
Danny Glass wasn’t the only one who hadn’t slept. In Hendon, Oliver Stanford tossed and turned most of the night. Tiredness had nothing to do with it. His time as a policeman hadn’t prepared him for what he’d seen in the aftermath of the fire, and he lay in the dark, unable to forget the stench or the endless procession of bodies removed from the scene on stretchers.
At ten minutes to five, afraid his restlessness would wake Elise, he slipped out of bed and went downstairs to the kitchen. His wife never questioned where the money came from to finance their expensive lifestyle, but she wasn’t a fool, she must have known. Nobody could be that naïve – unless it suited them.
Stanford made coffee and gazed round the state-of-the-art kitchen: a complete wall housed a multi-unit combination of gas burners, a griddle and a deep-fat fryer, all finished in gleaming stainless steel. Overhead, a full-length hood provided maximum ventilation and a rail for gadgets and utensils. He added sugar to his cup, asking himself if they really needed this stuff. Stanford didn’t understand how most of it worked, and some, like the fryer, hadn’t been used and wasn’t likely to be. This was what he’d sold his soul for.
He put leads on the dogs and opened the back door as quietly as he could. Before Danny Glass’s heavies had appeared at her house, being the wife of a detective chief inspector had been all the security Elise needed. Since then, she anxiously checked everything was locked up and he’d catch her glancing towards the bottom of the garden, to the tree where the big man had been.
The pre-dawn sky above a deserted Sunny Hill Park was streaked with blue-grey light and the air was cool and fresh. He let the dogs run free and watched them chase each other over the grass and along the hedgerows from former field boundaries; they loved it here, and so did he. But it would take more than a peaceful hour or two to ease his mind.
Danny Glass could be up to his arse in alibis; it made no difference. He was responsible for the atrocity at the club. Now, he was demanding Stanford personally bring Bob Wallace to him. The prospect chilled the detective. Luring Wallace into a trap, lying to his face right until the moment Glass’s thugs seized him, was too much: he hadn’t the stomach for it.
After the mess in Kent, he’d been certain the overeager Scot had ratted them out – there had been three men in the room when the information came through: Wallace, Trevor Mills and himself. Inviting him into the study had been a test.
A test he’d failed.
Stanford followed the dogs to the south-east corner of the park, near the Anglo-Saxon archaeological site. He pulled up the collar of his coat. Where was the evidence against Bob Wallace? The actual evidence? The beyond-a-doubt proof? There wasn’t any. Word of the raid could’ve been leaked to Anderson by any number of links in the chain. Wallace might be innocent.
All too late. Glass was expecting him.
49
The bedsit was scarcely more than a box with a toilet. The window – the only window – was in the lavatory. Through the flimsy net curtain and the glass heavy with grime, the grey dome of St Paul’s Cathedral on Ludgate Hill dominated the skyline as it had for more than three hundred years. Without the iconic landmark to remind him, Jonjo could’ve been anywhere. In Newcastle, he’d dreamed of living in London, imagining fantastical scenarios with flash cars and flashier women. The flat was as bleak as anywhere in the north-east: three storeys up, sharing a cooker blackened by smoke and grease and a sink on a bare-board landing with a Greek who hadn’t spoken a word. The guy had a surly dark-haired woman in tow, who’d dismissed Jonjo with an uninterested glance. Listening to them going at it, two nights out of the three he’d spent here, while he drew the thin sheet around him and tried to sleep on a lumpy mattress, was a stark reminder of how far and how fast he’d fallen.
He thought about the last time he’d seen George Ritchie. The memory brought no comfort; his uncle’s cold expression in the club had said all there was to say.
Since then, nothing. Ritchie was done with him. And no wonder. Everything he’d warned him about had come true. Jonjo needed to get out of this place, find somewhere decent to stay – well away from horny Greeks and their sultry girlfriends – and figure out what to do. He picked up his jacket, patted the pockets to make sure he had the cash with him, and went out into the world.
The first bus that came along was going to Victoria. As good a destination as any. Plenty of accommodation in that part of town. He paid the conductor and went upstairs, the only passenger on the top deck, his fingers tight around the wad of money, all that stood between him and sleeping on the street. At the terminus, he bought coffee and a sandwich from Caffè Nero in Buckingham Palace Road and went into the station to find a seat. The station was like an anthill under attack; people rushed past, manic intensity on their faces. Nobody noticed him and Jonjo basked in the anonymity only a big city could deliver. He studied the electronic arrivals and departures board across the concourse stretching out above Burger King, wondering if he should get a ticket. Better still, why not take the Gatwick Express and leave the country? That required a passport and he didn’t have one.
In the end, he bought a second coffee – from Costa this time – and an early edition of the London Evening Standard.
The fire was still the main headline and Jonjo didn’t want
to read about it. He flicked through the pages from front to back without seeing anything about a gangland attack at the weekend. That didn’t mean it hadn’t happened. This was Tuesday. Both Anderson and Glass could be dead.
Wouldn’t that be nice?
Bob Wallace manoeuvred a path through the traffic in the direction of Lambeth Bridge. It was a sunny day in late-June, hot and muggy, and at four o’clock in the afternoon progress was slow. London was rammed with tourists in shirt-sleeves and sunglasses, taking pictures of the Palace of Westminster and anyone who came out of the building, imagining they had to be ‘somebody’. Wallace accelerated past a slow-moving Fiat and raced ahead. He was feeling good.
The whispered exchange with his boss in the corridor at New Scotland Yard had confirmed what the detective sergeant had already suspected. The Wallaces hadn’t fitted in with the company at the party. Obviously, they’d been invited for a reason. There had been much more to the dinner than the drunken banter of a run-of-the-mill social event. He’d said as much to his wife. She hadn’t seen it. Wallace had and the realisation had filled him with pride. Stanford had been sussing him out, running the rule over him, including him and gauging his reaction to the news about the raid on Rollie Anderson’s drug shipment.
But then word had got out and the Transit had ended up all over the Internet. Wallace knew it wasn’t him – he hadn’t spoken to anybody – and now, apparently, his boss knew it, too.
‘You’re the only one I can trust, Bob. The only one. We need to talk.’
He’d asked where and Stanford had told him, his lips dry, struggling to get the words out. ‘Across the river. An abandoned factory in Fulton Street. Say you’ve got a meet with an informant. Don’t mention a location. And make sure Trevor Mills hears you.’
‘Will do.’
‘One last thing. If you get there before me, go inside.’
He drove until he came to the derelict factory at the end of a cobbled road, a relic from the Victorians, ripe for redevelopment, boarded and barricaded against trespassers. The car shuddered over the broken road and threatened to stall. A name on a crumbling brick wall scarred with white crystalline salt stains from a bygone age told him he’d arrived.
Wallace stopped yards from a cluster of buckled sheets of rusted corrugated iron, blown from the roof and left where they’d fallen. No sign of his boss or his car. The policeman stepped onto the uneven pavement littered with weeds and glass, wondering why this place had been chosen. Clearly, secrecy was everything. Nobody would discover them here.
Like the good soldier he was, Wallace followed the instructions. He drew the door open and went in.
George Ritchie stood on the Gateshead side of the river and gazed up at the steel arch of the Tyne Bridge in the evening light. The symbol of the city stirred nothing in him. This wasn’t his home any more and he wasn’t happy to be back. The place he’d grown up in had changed, and so had he. It wasn’t possible to live twenty years in the south and be the same man who’d kissed his mother and sister goodbye on the platform of Newcastle Central Station, waving until they were out of sight.
The old lady hadn’t lasted long. He’d come north for the funeral – arriving one day, leaving the next. He couldn’t get away fast enough.
His only living relative was his sister, Hannah, Jonjo’s mother. She’d have heard he was back, no doubt about that. He hadn’t visited her yet and wasn’t looking forward to it. Hannah had trusted him to take care of her boy. When they finally met, she’d ask why Jonjo wasn’t with him. Would he say her son was probably dead? And even if he wasn’t, with the way he was going, he wouldn’t see thirty? Or should he soothe her anxiety with a lie? Tell her he was doing well, that everything was fine, and, yes, he’d make sure he called more often. Ritchie wasn’t certain he could pull it off.
So far, he’d avoided his former haunts, although there wouldn’t be many who’d recognise him after all this time. But there would be a few, keen to buy him drinks in exchange for war stories. But George was weary of war.
On his first day back in the north-east, he’d walked the once-familiar streets until it was dark before returning to his room at the Malmaison. London had been the adventure of a lifetime. From the beginning he’d planned what to do the second he sensed it ending. And when it had – thanks to the stupidity of his nephew, Anderson and the insanity of Danny Glass – he’d acted as he’d promised himself he would.
So why did it feel so wrong?
Jonjo lay on the bed with his hands behind his head. His skin tingled from a day sprawled on the grass in Regent’s Park, eyeing up the girls with four cans of Newcastle Brown Ale at his elbow and the sun shining down on him. He was hopeful now, thinking more clearly. Rollie was an unpredictable mess, that was the truth. Nothing he said, good or bad, should be taken seriously. Loyalty wasn’t a concept his brain could process. His uncle George had had his own experience and tried to warn him. Next time, Jonjo would pay attention. According to urban mythology, George Ritchie had saved Anderson’s teenage arse, taking the reins of the organisation and holding it together after his father died at the hands of Luke Glass. A wiser man would’ve been grateful to Ritchie and learned to listen. Rollie Anderson would never be that, not if he lived to be a hundred. He’d cut George out of the decision to hit Glass’s pub both times because he knew Ritchie would see past the attack, understand the risk they’d be running, and nix the plan. Yet, even though the first attack had failed, the crazy fool was ready to do the same again only days after Jonjo had uploaded the video of Danny’s humiliation to YouTube.
From hero to zero.
There was a lesson in there. Anderson blew with the breeze. Yesterday, you could be his friend. Today, his enemy. Tomorrow – who knew?
It would come out all right on the night. The trick was to stay with it and not run away.
The Greek wasn’t around, thank God. Jonjo had the kitchen – such as it was – to himself. He peeled potatoes and opened a can of beans; not exactly five-star cooking but enough to guarantee he wouldn’t starve.
A noise like wood cracking got his attention. Jonjo heard footsteps racing up the stairs and realised, too late, what was happening. Three men threw him to the floor and started punching. One blow winded him, another connected squarely with his chin. They took hold of his arms and dragged him head first. Outside a big guy stood beside an SUV. Jonjo was bundled into the back. Somebody tried to put a hood over his head.
The big guy said, ‘Doesn’t matter if he knows where he’s going – he won’t be telling anybody.’
Nina hadn’t heard from Vale since the morning in her flat and assumed he’d managed to get a hold on himself. There would be no more sex with him, no matter how much whiskey she drank or how horny it made her. Calling him was the last thing she wanted to do but she had to know he hadn’t put them in danger.
Vale answered on the second ring, his voice low and hoarse, awash with self-pity.
Nina said, ‘How are you?’
‘What do you care?’
‘You’re right, I don’t. But I care about not ending up in Fulton Street and so should you.’ She continued, ‘Have the police contacted you?’
‘Not yet. What do you think that means?
‘It means the ball is back with us. We need to act normal.’
‘I am. I’m at work, as usual, going through the motions.’
‘Except the woman who works for you hasn’t turned up for days and you’ve done nothing about it. That isn’t normal.’
Mention of Fulton Street was enough to bring him back in line. When he spoke, his tone was devoid of whatever bitter emotions had lived there.
‘What should I do?’
Nina rolled her eyes; at some point, Eugene would go the same way as Yvonne. She accepted it as inevitable and waited for him to repeat his question. ‘What should I do, Nina?’
‘Call her mobile. When you get no answer, go to her flat. Talk to the neighbours. It’s important they remember you. Explain you’re her
boss and you’re worried she might be ill. Then, back to the office and call the police.’
‘Me?’
‘Yes, you.’
‘Will they believe me?’
‘You’re a conscientious employer – no reason not to. And for Christ’s sake, calm down. The only person who can put us in the frame is you. Got that?’
Vale faltered. ‘Yes… yes, I’ve got it.’
‘Call me when it’s done.’
50
I hadn’t seen or heard from Danny since the night of the fire. Three days and twenty-one hours. But who was counting? The weight I’d carried around all my life had suddenly been lifted. I felt free. No more Team Glass. Except, old habits died hard. Whenever my mobile rang, I half expected it to be him, on with sentimental stories from the past and bullshit apologies to bring me back into the fold. It seemed he’d got the message his routine wasn’t going to work and cut ties with me. I wasn’t sorry.
Physically, Mandy was well. The marks on her face and neck were still visible but make-up would disguise them. Emotionally, the assault had affected her confidence. Her daughter was due to visit and she’d arranged to meet Amy the next day off the Manchester train.
She’d brought Eric Clapton’s ‘461 Ocean Boulevard’ – arguably his best album – and we were on the couch, drinking wine and listening, when she said, ‘Do you think she really wants to visit me?’
‘Of course, you’re her mother.’
‘I mean, what has her father told her?’
‘Doesn’t matter what he’s told her. Nothing bad or she wouldn’t be coming.’
Mandy’s insecurity was threatening to break her.
‘You can’t be sure of that. And if she knew the truth, what would she think?’
I moved closer and drew her to me. ‘Listen, your little girl is coming to see you. She’ll want what all kids want – her mum to tell her she loves her. All you have to do is have a great time together and forget everything else.’