Where No Shadows Fall

by Peter Ritchie

  McManus was clear about what he’d seen and heard. Logan had no reason to doubt him – although the man was mad, it meant he never panicked, and unlike so many in the game he also stuck to the facts when it was business. That’s why he’d hired him a couple of months before. McManus was a pure Glasgow hard man through to the empty space where his soul should have existed. He’d been in Liverpool for nearly six years working for a gang who did a lot of business with the Logans and Frankie had realised there was a place in his team for a man with some special talents.

  McManus had already been a bit of a legend when he left Glasgow. His critics only spoke at a safe distance, never to the man’s face, and they said that he must have gone to the ten o’clock school as a kid because he was a daft bastard. That was fair enough, but only up to a point; he claimed proudly that he’d been more of a radge than stupid as a boy, so the authorities had tried to keep him away from the mainstream and sent him to a special school. He always maintained he’d got into crime as soon as he could take his old man in a square go and had then made his name as part of an outfit who specialised in breaking into top-end business premises.

  Unfortunately, on one of the jobs a security guard had got in the way, displaying balls well above his pay scale. His bravery left him brain-damaged, and although McManus was pulled in, there hadn’t been enough evidence to hold him. The problem was that the old security guard was an ex-marine who’d fought and been decorated for an action in the Falklands War. Even for a heartless bastard like McManus it was a PR disaster. He’d walked free but decided to take a break from his native city till the tag that he’d brained the old hero on minimum wage was washed away by the passage of time. He’d known that the detectives working the case had sworn they would put him away eventually, so it had been time for pastures new.

  He’d enjoyed his time on Merseyside, and after a few years became the muscle for a few runs up to Scotland with gear for the Logans, which reminded him how much he missed his home city. Eventually Frankie made him a good offer to come home, and seeing as the detectives who’d wanted his skin had retired to their holiday homes in Florida, it had seemed a suitable time to get back north of the Rio Grande. With the money he’d made over the years he managed to buy himself a decent flat in the centre of Glasgow, and the real icing on the cake was pulling Wilma Paterson. She had fuck-all brains but very tasty looks; in other words, his kind of woman. She was the perfect fit for McManus, and although she was a bit of an arse when she had a few wines in her, she did what she was told, and if she overstepped his red lines a bit of a slap in the puss usually did the trick. She’d hinted at a trial separation a couple of times but that wasn’t going to happen. If there was any walking out it would be when he decided it was game over.

  The truth was that he knew little about Paterson and wasn’t that interested anyway. He just liked the idea of having a female there to fulfil his needs or to hang off his arm when they went out to the boozer. He’d told her straight that if she tried to walk he’d stab her, and she could take that offer or leave it.

  ‘You reckon you’d know these clowns again then, Stuart – no doubts?’ Logan asked. He could see a chance opening up to finish off the McMartins once and for all. Slab was on his last legs, Crazy Horse was manure and all that was left was the mental daughter.

  ‘No fuckin’ doubt about it, Frankie; gimme the turn and I’ll bring them in for questioning in a couple of days. It was definitely a female in the car so it has to be The Bitch. Case closed.’

  Frankie turned to his idiot nephew and asked a question he already knew the answer to. ‘What about you? Get a good look at them?’ He studied the weak link in the Logan dynasty and hoped to God the reins were never in his useless hands.

  Deeko shifted uncomfortably and after a silence that was almost an answer he decided to come clean to his uncle, who expected absolutely nothing. ‘You know I’m short-sighted, Uncle Frankie. No glasses on. Saw them close up with the balaclavas but I couldn’t ID the bastards when we chased them.’

  McManus looked round at Deeko as soon as he suggested he was due equal glory for terrorising the would-be drug robbers.

  ‘No problem, son.’ Frankie had only asked the question because he had to and was happier that Deeko did not need to have any further involvement.

  McManus was feeling pleased with himself, having proved his worth facing off a couple of highwaymen armed with a sawn-off. That took balls, and Frankie knew that Deeko couldn’t have handled it without the big man. Few men could look at the wrong end of a gun and win the day; in fact you had to be a twenty-four-carat nutter. McManus ticked all the boxes for that.

  ‘Bring these boys in first before we move on her. One of them will do if you can’t manage them both. I want to hear it from them. Let’s keep it quiet for the time being, and if we can close them down I’ll decide what to take off the McMartins before the vultures start circling. You okay with that, big man?’ Logan asked, though he knew McManus would lap it up.

  ‘Fuckin’ right I’m okay with it. I’ll have them nailed to a door for you in a couple of days maximum. Personally, I’d set fire to the cunts.’

  ‘Alive – I need them able to talk. Keep that at the front of your mind. Got it? The driver has to be Fanny Adams, but he must be due for a bus pass so we can think about him later, alright? I mean we’re no’ the Glasgow branch of fuckin’ Islamic State, Stuart.’ Logan shoved his palms out and looked at his minders, who nodded, but then there was no way they were going to disagree.

  McManus was mad but he knew who the boss was. He blew a succession of smoke rings as a kind of confirmation that Logan’s will would be carried out.

  When McManus left the room a few minutes later, Logan leaned back in his leather office chair and closed his eyes for a moment. He ran it all through his head and was sure everything was in its place. Once they had worked on the two robbers they could make their move and get this business over and done with. If it was the McMartins then what they’d been up to was messy, and he didn’t like messy. It was a sure sign that their business was falling apart and their income streams must have dried up. That meant an opportunity to move in. Timing was everything. He couldn’t believe how quickly the McMartins had car crashed after Crazy Horse was done in Edinburgh.

  Frankie’s old man had trained him well, and he’d become as much a businessman as a gangster. His younger brothers still liked to get a bit of blood on their knuckles, but Frankie knew that his place was on the business side with strategic planning and always an eye to the future. Things were good and he wanted to keep them that way. He wanted his boys to go to uni, into nice professions away from crime, and by then maybe the business would be mostly legit. Worth going for.

  He pulled a long Cuban cigar from a wooden box in his top drawer. He kept them for special occasions and this felt like as good an excuse as any to indulge himself. There was a chance to wipe out the McMartins, who’d pissed on the Logans a few times in the past when their league positions were reversed. He puffed the thing alight and savoured the rich, almost wine-flavoured smoke. He looked across and caught his reflection in the mirror opposite the desk.

  Frankie Logan was overweight. Not grossly but he was definitely a bit on the heavy side. Like his brothers, his skin had an olive tone and his hair was so dark as to be almost black. There must have been something in their genes that had once developed under the Mediterranean sun. In his youth, Frankie had actually been a decent midfielder, and if he hadn’t had a taste for beer and charlie, he might have made the grade. Once he’d stopped kicking a ball though and started keeping clean after his sister’s death, he’d piled on the pounds and barely kept control over it. But for a man in such a serious business he also smiled a lot, and the small lines he had around his eyes gave him an almost mischievous look. That, coupled with the extra pounds, made him look more like a celebrity chef than a bad boy, or so his brothers said, and he found he liked that idea. He didn’t fancy the stereotypical gangster look that had turned ni
nety per cent of the men in the business into clones.

  He looked at the framed picture of his family on the desk and blew a satisfied stream of cigar smoke into the air. Things were good, no doubt about it. His two kids went to a great school, he lived in an attractive area of the city and the neighbours thought he was just another successful business man. Of course, they were spot on. In addition, his wife was a stunner he’d picked up on a stag night in Budapest. She had poise and had learned to speak English with almost no accent – just enough to make her sound exotic. She had a degree in law from the Hungarian Republic and was smart enough to figure out that the man she’d married and his brothers worked both sides of the law. He never brought work home and he was good enough for her. Her family had been poor but struggled to put her through her degree, and the life he’d given her provided opportunities she’d only dreamed of when he’d bought her that first drink in Budapest.

  Frankie Logan was a careful man and his father had taught him caution. Some said there was no place for caution in his business, but he’d seen what had happened to the other clans when greed had taken hold. In a way, what bothered him most was that despite his nature, they’d climbed to the top of the pile, and he worried the other competitors would watch the Logans’ seat on the pinnacle and fancy it themselves. It was what it was, he knew that, and as long as he could control his wilder younger brothers they’d be okay. If this thing with the McMartins needed doing then so be it. He never shirked from an order to dish out violence – that was just how the game was played. But Frankie was unusual in the business because he never let emotion come into his decision-making. He weighed all the angles, and like all good managing directors he was a strategic thinker. The McMartins were fatally wounded and it would almost be a kindness to deliver the coup de grâce to Brenda and what was left of their team. She was a puzzle: brutish, violent, with barely a feminine attribute apart from the obvious ones God had given her, or so it seemed.

  ‘How in the name of the wee man did she end up like that?’ he said into a cloud of fragrant smoke.

  It was a question so many had asked but no one could ever have imagined the truth.

  20

  After he left the meet with Frankie Logan, McManus decided to stop off and get a few on the way back to his flat in Charing Cross. He called Paterson and told her he’d be back in an hour, which was never going to happen when he was on the piss and high from success in Edinburgh.

  ‘Once we’ve some scran down us we’re out on the town, darlin’. Frankie gave us a nice wee fuckin’ bonus.’ He waited for enthusiasm but it didn’t come, because Paterson knew that he was in ‘let’s get pished’ mode and they’d never get past the door that night. He’d be out of his skull and unconscious by the time the evening news came on the telly. The other problem was that she was cracking up because she already knew that the robbery plan had all gone to rat shit and she was barely keeping it together.

  ‘Try not to get over fuckin’ excited, doll,’ he said when she didn’t reply, then shook his head, wondering if it was time to get rid of the cow.

  ‘Okay, Stuart. Just had a shit day wi’ the bairn.’

  McManus grunted down the line, which was the nearest he could get to interested, and put the phone down before she could say anything else. He shouted to the barman to do him a treble and started annoying every other punter in the bar. But no one was ever going to tell McManus that he was a boring bastard. The more whisky he drank, the more annoying he got, but in his mind he was the man everyone wanted to listen to. And could he talk when he was on the juice!

  McManus eventually managed to tear himself away from the bar and onto the street, leaving the customers who had managed to survive listening to him to roll their eyes and get back to enjoying themselves. He blinked into the sunshine and hoped Paterson had something on the go for eating.

  He stopped off on the short walk back to the flat and bought a bottle of cheap whisky to go with whatever she would have cooked for him. He preferred cheap whisky, always maintaining that ‘malt was for poofs’. He sniggered when he put the words Wilma and cook together.

  ‘Cooked. I should say fuckin’ warmed up in the microwave . . . Cow!’ He laughed at his own joke and saw the passing shoppers try to speed up a bit to get past the bam talking to himself. Best avoided, especially when they were the size of a garden shed and dressed like a World War Two Yank pilot.

  ‘What the fuck you lookin’ at?’ He directed the question at a frail old woman, who grasped her equally frail husband’s arm. He quite rightly gave it the welly and steered her away from the nutjob while avoiding all eye contact.

  McManus loved winding up the elderly; it always gave him a good laugh.

  When Paterson took the call from McManus she still felt ill and it had turned out to be one of those all-day-plus-probably-the-next-day hangovers. He was high and full of it after saving the Logans’ gear, and he’d filled up on whisky, which he always did when he was pleased with himself.

  ‘Bastard.’ She said it at the phone when she’d finished the call from him. Paterson wanted and needed something to calm her down, but any alcohol or dope so early in the day would just make her more ill than she was already. Her worry was how to stop her hands shaking, and she just hoped he’d be that pissed he wouldn’t notice. If he did, she’d have to say she’d done some wine and a curry that had kept her up all night.

  Paterson sat in her favourite chair, working her way through another packet of smokes, her back stiff with tension. For the rest of the day she stared at the phone and waited. At some point McManus might or might not call and tell her he was on the way back from the boozer. How could she lie and get away with it to a man with his instincts, and why the fuck had she got involved with him in the first place?

  She remembered the night she’d first met him. As usual she’d been pissed enough to be interested when everyone said what a big noise he was – a real gangster, not just some wanker who liked to talk a good game. Women like Paterson always had limited choices in men, but this time it was as bad a choice as she’d ever made (and she’d been with a few wasters in her time). McManus was good to her for about a fortnight, which was par for the course, but then when she saw him doing his Jerry Lee Lewis impression in the local boozer the warning lights had started to flash. He played rock and roll music from morning till night and basically ignored her and the kid unless he wanted her to go to the pub. Then there were the rough fumblings she had to endure after his sessions in the boozer. She tried as far as possible not to think about that. He snored like a gorilla, and her nights were spent staring up at the stupid rock-star posters he insisted on hanging on the bedroom walls. She’d never even heard of Bill Haley and the fucking Comets till she first saw their ugly coupons on the poster opposite the bed.

  Paterson had only taken McManus to meet her mother once, which had been enough for the two of them to decide they couldn’t stand being in the same room. So that was that for happy families. She’d lost touch with Bobo McCartney some years earlier, and anyway, he’d been inside for most of the time she and McManus had been together. They’d only got in touch again because of their old man’s death and funeral and discovered that they actually liked each other. It was fair to say that as far as possible she kept her family out of conversations with McManus, who didn’t really give a fuck anyway.

  When she’d talked to Bobo it hadn’t been long before she’d mentioned McManus’s association with the Logans and that she’d like to get as far away as possible from the bastard. For his part, McCartney had ignored the man’s CV and dreamed up an idea to make some money.

  Life had become a complete bore for Paterson, and to make it worse McManus didn’t like her going out on her own. He seemed to be convinced that she was shoving it about with other men – as if anyone would have been crazy enough to stamp her card while she was involved with him.

  ‘See, yer a nice lookin’ burd, Wilma, an’ some prick might try an’ take advantage when yer pished. Know what
I mean, hen?’ He’d actually looked sincere when he’d said it.

  Chance would be a fine fuckin’ thing, she thought. She’d tried to talk about splitting up, but that wasn’t up for negotiation. He usually turned up the volume on the sound system when she started to bore him, to show her that the conversation was over. If she left it would be on McManus’s terms – and he’d promised her more than the stoat in the puss that he liked to dish out every now and again if she dared to make decisions or think independently.

  Paterson was checking herself in the mirror for the umpteenth time when she heard the key scrabbling to penetrate the lock. That meant he was well pissed. She felt her shoulders slacken off a bit as it probably meant he’d be asleep in a couple of hours, max. With a bit of luck, he’d have stopped at the offy on the way back to top up whatever he’d had already.

  ‘Hi, darlin’, any kisses for the boy?’ He laid the bottle and fag packet on the hall table then grabbed her round the waist. She was tiny in his arms and tried not to wince at the reek of his breath. He hadn’t shaved, and by the look and smell of him he hadn’t bothered to shower that morning either. That was par for the course when he was on the pop.

  ‘Miss me, hen?’ He started to nuzzle her ear, and she wondered if he could feel her heart thrashing against her breastbone. She bit her lip and did the best she could with her lines.