by Anna Smith
Jack chimed in. ‘To tell you the truth, Marty, Kerry just got there in front of me. I was going to tell him to hand over the gun so I could batter the shite out of the wee prick, but . . .’ he glanced at Kerry, ‘I wasn’t sure it was what you’d want me to do. So I held back.’ A grin spread across his face. ‘But I was well impressed, I can tell you that.’
Kerry took the compliment with something resembling a smile then leaned back in her chair, stretching her legs.
‘Look, Marty, I don’t want places like that or people like McCann being part of this organisation any more. So, talk to me about it.’
Marty waited a moment, then spread his hands.
‘You’re forgetting one thing. Who we are. The entire business is built by gangsters. We work with gangsters from other patches, here or down south, or wherever. I know you’re not naive. There are killers, robbers, drug dealers in our everyday lives here, in every area of the business. That’s why the Casey family is at the top of the heap. Places like the Paradise Club, or any other massage parlours, bring in money, are used to launder money, and are useful businesses to have. And on paper they are legit. If we close all ours down, punters will just go elsewhere. We can’t afford to be seen to be out of the loop in any area. So you need to think about that. I’m only the lawyer here, and all I can do is tell you how to keep your organisation functioning at the top – while steering away from trouble.’
‘The place stinks. It’s the lowest of the low.’
‘Then you should get it cleaned up a bit. My advice is to keep it closed for a couple of weeks, get someone to have a look at the other places and make whatever changes of staff or decor you want. Anyway, by this time, the message will have reached the other sauna bosses that they’d better not be ill-treating the girls or you might go round there yourself and pistol-whip them.’ Again the wry smile.
Kerry thought about it for a moment. She could see that even though Marty was shocked and was giving her sound advice, there was a part of him that admired her ballsy attitude. But she knew his job was to keep things running smoothly, so that nobody outside their organisation could see there were any weaknesses, especially now with Mickey gone and everyone appearing to be on the back foot. Kerry’s way of doing things all her life was to march right in and do it. She had really no fear, when it came down to it. When she decided she wanted to study law – even though she knew her family were gangsters, she went right ahead and studied, and passed with flying colours. Perhaps it was being sent away at an early age to Spain that made her build a self-preservation wall around herself. She had hardened herself to the feelings of loss and homesickness, and she threw everything into her studies and making a success of her life. She knew she could make things happen. In her job as a lawyer she was highly respected, everything her father and mother would want her to be. But now, she was the same as the rest of them out there. A gangster. She didn’t feel like it, but Marty was subtly pointing out that this was what she was. Fine. She was a gangster. But she was going to be different.
After a long silence, she spoke. ‘Okay. I hear what you’re saying. But I want someone to go to the three places, get me all the info on who’s who and where the girls come from. I mean, what’s that all about? Why are we taking East European girls up from down south?’
Marty said nothing, and they both looked at Jack.
‘Mickey and Frankie ran all this, with some kind of swap or something or deal with the London mob – you know . . . the Hills? Billy Hill and his crew.’
Kerry looked at him.
‘So tell me, Jack. What do you know? I need you to talk to me about it. Forget Frankie for the moment. Your loyalty is to me. What the Christ is going on? I’ll be asking Frankie myself when I pull him in later, but, like I said, I need to know stuff before I do that. So I know if he’s pulling the wool over my eyes.’
Jack nodded. ‘Okay. Well, as you probably know, most of our drugs come up from Manchester. All agreed prices and all aspects done through the Boyles. Joe Knuckles Boyle. He’s top dog down there. But Knuckles floats his prices around a lot. Sometimes he does a good deal – others it’s not so good. But he controls nearly everything that comes into Scotland. But Mickey became close to the Hills after he got involved with Pat Durkin during some Marbella jaunt. When he came home, he decided to do things a bit different.’
‘Like what?’
‘Well, he seems to have done some kind of special deal with Billy Hill and his mob who move drugs through the Durkins – the Irish mob. The deal, as far as I know, is that he got a cheaper rate, but to get this it involved him buying their birds for our saunas and brothels. I don’t know the exact set-up, or whatever else is involved. I mean, who knows? Maybe some of our boys get used for bringing drugs in as well. I honestly don’t know. But what I do know is that Knuckles somehow got wind of this, and that’s how the trouble started. He was raging that Mickey was dealing with the Durkins and Hills as well as him. He hates them and the feeling is mutual. That’s what started all the killing – all the sending messages.’
‘Why did Mickey change things? What did he stand to gain?’
Jack sighed, looked at Marty.
‘Cheaper drugs for a start. But you know what Mickey was like. He got impressed by people like Pat Durkin. The big set-up he has in Marbella, the gun-running and all that. Mickey wanted us more involved in that. He felt there was a bigger slice of everything to be gained if he moved a bit closer to the Durkins and the Hills. And eventually froze the Boyles out.’
‘And that pissed off Knuckles, no doubt.’
‘Yep. That’s putting it mildly.’
‘It shouldn’t have got so out of control.’
‘Well it has.’
Kerry looked at Marty and shook her head.
‘Well. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it,’ she puffed.
A knock came at the door of the study and one of the bodyguards stuck his head in.
‘The CID are at the door, Kerry. Two cops. Man and a woman. A Detective Inspector Burns. They want to talk to you about the shooting. They need a statement.’
Kerry looked at Marty.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘And there was me thinking that McCann had run to the cops already.’
Everyone chuckled, letting some of the tension out.
‘You want me to stay, Kerry?’
‘If you don’t mind, Marty. That would be great.’ She glanced at Jack who was on his feet. ‘Thanks, Jack, for today. I really appreciate your help.’
‘Always, Kerry. No worries.’ He made his way to the door.
‘Tell them to send the cops in. We might as well get this over with.’
A few seconds later, there was a knock on the door.
‘Come in, please.’
The door opened and a stern-looking plain-clothes policewoman came in, wearing a dark jacket and trousers, looking every inch the store detective. Behind her a tall, handsome figure with close-cropped dark hair and a charcoal grey suit stepped in. He didn’t even look at Marty, but his eyes locked with Kerry’s, and for a moment she was startled by the flash of recognition.
‘Morning, Kerry. Detective Inspector Vincent Burns.’ He didn’t quite smile.
Kerry stood up, taken aback.
‘Vincent Burns? Vinny Burns? From . . . from . . .’
The DI nodded slowly, but it wasn’t a great-to-see-you-after-all-these-years nod. His face was like flint but those eyes, piercing blue, softened a little.
‘From St Aidan’s. Third year. I remember you well, Kerry Casey.’
It was on the tip of her tongue to say You could have fooled me, Vinny Burns. You broke my heart. But that would have been ridiculous – it was all such a long time ago. They were kids. How could they be in love at fourteen years old? She pushed the thoughts away, surprised at how much they still stung.
‘Christ almighty!’ It was all Kerry could say as she stepped forward and shook his hand.
For a moment he said nothing, then Marty stepped for
ward, stretching out his hand.
‘Marty Kane, Detective Inspector. I’m the family lawyer.’
The DI looked at him briefly.
‘I know who you are, Mr Kane.’ He took a breath, then turned to Kerry.
‘I’d like to talk to you about a couple of matters, Kerry.’ He turned to the woman detective. ‘This is DC Jane Black. Obviously you’ll know we’ll need your witness account of what you saw at the funeral, with the gunmen.’ His expression did soften now. ‘And . . . I’m very sorry that you lost your mother in all of this . . .’
Kerry waited, wondering if he was going to say ‘tragedy’, but he looked as though he was trying to find a word that didn’t somehow give the gangland massacre any kind of tag of respectability.
‘. . . in all this terrible business. But we want to gather everything we can to track these gunmen down.’
Kerry looked at him, but didn’t say anything.
‘Look, Kerry, I know how these things work, and your . . . your organisation will perhaps be looking to make their own recriminations. But I’m trying to avoid a bloodbath here, and the best thing you can do right now is sit down with me and tell me everything that happened. Everything you know.’
He glanced at Marty who raised his eyebrows as though to say that was never going to happen.
‘Well, I can only say what I saw, Vinn—’ Kerry stopped mid sentence. ‘Inspector. The gunmen were wearing ski masks so we have no way of knowing who they were.’ She sat down, and motioned him and the DC to the table. ‘I’m sure anyone who was in the room at the wake will tell you the same. Nobody knows who they were, or why they did it.’
DI Burns put a folder on the table and sat forward, looking from Marty to Kerry, a little frustrated.
‘There’s a couple of ways you can do this.’ He looked at Kerry. ‘You can say it was a random attack by masked gunmen at an innocent person’s funeral, or you can sit down, and let’s go over everything you know. I understand you have now taken over the Casey organisation. You are head of the empire, as it were.’
Kerry looked at him. ‘As it were.’ She repeated his words deadpan.
It wasn’t lost on the DI, and she saw a slight flush on his neck, gratified that she’d hit the spot. He shifted in his seat a little.
‘Kerry, listen to me. I’m not your enemy. I’m here to help. I’ve been brought up here from London to work on this, and a whole bigger picture outside of your organisation, which I’m sure you and . . . Mr Kane here . . . know all about. This is not going to get any better with some tit-for-tat killing spree – that has already been going on in the city with other turf wars. But what happened at your brother’s funeral is bigger than this. It’s bigger than you, Kerry, or your organisation. Trust me on that. I’ve been working on these people for a long time, and I know a lot about how they do business.’ He paused. ‘It’s time to rein them in. I need your help to do that. The other way is to create a bloodbath of revenge. And who knows who’ll get caught in the crossfire next time around. So, please. Just think about that for a moment.’
Kerry looked at Marty, but said nothing.
‘Inspector Burns, I think my client has made clear what she saw at the funeral. She can make a statement about that, of course. But anything else you talk about – outside of this organisation, then I’m afraid there will be no discussion on that. My client knows nothing. Nobody knows anything.’
DI Burns shook his head. He glanced at the female cop who looked bored.
‘Have it your way. Okay. So let’s just go over step by step from the funeral to what happened in the bar that afternoon.’ He nodded to the woman to take notes, then looked at Kerry.
She studied his face, remembered his broad grin, the handsome heart-throb of the third year, who was smart and could fight like a hard man. She recalled their first awkward kiss on the way home from the school dance, and how that summer they made promises to each other. Promises he never kept. But that had been a long time ago. Whatever Vinny Burns had been to her, he was now a hard-nosed cop, and there was nothing Kerry could talk to him about today, or any other day.
Chapter Eight
Kerry mulled over documents and papers while she waited in the study for Uncle Danny. Since the Paradise Club incident two days ago, she’d been poring over all their business interests. She felt exhausted. The grief over her mother was crippling at times, and when she’d finally gone to bed at night, she’d collapsed with fatigue, only to waken a couple of hours later with nightmares, lying in bed, staring at the window waiting for the morning light to come. But there was no time for soul-searching or wallowing in self-pity. She was head of the family now, there was no going back. She’d come to the conclusion that she could rely on all of her closest men to have her back at all times, with the possible exception of Frankie. On the face of it, he looked like he was an integral part of the family, Mickey’s closest aide, yet he had survived where Mickey had been murdered. There was nothing pointing the finger at him, but then Frankie would be too smart to let that happen.
The word was coming back through Jack and O’Driscoll that Knuckles Boyle’s mob were behind Mickey’s death and the shooting at the funeral. Now it was falling into place. Because Mickey had been double-dealing with the other mob – the Durkins and Hills – this was the message being sent, that he’d stepped out of line. Knuckles wanted a stranglehold on Scotland because heroin more than anything was big business up here, and heroin was a major part of Knuckles’ operation. Mickey had assured him he had it, yet was working with the others behind his back. If Kerry stripped it down to purely business, then she could see Knuckles’ point of view. Gangsters ordered hits on rivals, and she knew that if she wanted to be regarded as capable of running things, then she would have to be able to do that. Before she’d watched her mother die in her arms, she could never in a million years have imagined herself able to order the killing of another individual. It went against everything she was, everything she stood for as a lawyer. What she should be doing right now was sitting down with DI Vinny Burns and working with him to bring the killers to justice. She didn’t live outside the law – her family did. She wasn’t a gangster, and she had never wanted to be. She’d spent half of her life living down what her family did, how they made their fortune. Now that she was head of the organisation, she should be starting with a clean slate, bringing in the cops and working with them. But something inside her changed the day her mother died. She’d agonised over it, thought about finding another way to get revenge without more killings, but she could feel herself being driven in another direction. It wasn’t just that her rivals would be watching to see her reaction, how she would deal with such a direct hit at her brother’s funeral. That was only part of it. She wanted to hit back, the way they hit her, and that was what kept her awake at night. In her darkest moments she was beginning to feel that when she scratched the surface of who she’d been for the past fifteen years, deep down she was no different from the men of violence who surrounded her. Perhaps she had never been any different.
She’d instructed Danny to pull out all the stops, call in every favour, to get the names of the hitmen behind Mickey’s murder and the gunmen at the funeral. It wasn’t enough to know that it was Knuckles’ men. She wanted to know who they were, because they had to be the first to go. In the middle of all this, there had been a call through to Frankie with some kind of olive branch being offered by Knuckles, asking if he could have a meeting with Kerry. In your dreams, Knuckles Boyle. When you see me, it will be the last time you see anything or anyone. But that was for another time. Now she would send the message right back by taking the gunmen out. And she wanted it done pronto, because if she spent any more time agonising over it, she would be seen as weak. Danny was bringing in Jake Cahill for the job.
There was a knock on the door.
‘Come in,’ Kerry said.
She looked up as Danny came in, with Jake Cahill at his back.
‘Morning, sweetheart. How you doing?’
‘Good, Danny. Getting on with things. You know how it is.’
‘Day by day, Kerry. That’s how you do it.’
‘I know. I’m trying. How’s Auntie Pat? I’ve not had a chance to see her since she got out of hospital. It’s been like a hurricane every day. I’ll call over tonight.’
‘Ach. You can imagine. She’s shattered. Your ma wasn’t just her sister, she was her best friend. The two of them – some double act. Some pair. She’ll get there, though.’ Danny turned to Jake, who’d been standing at a respectful distance.
‘You know Jake, of course.’
Kerry stood up. ‘Of course. Hello, Jake. Thanks for coming. Good to see you. It’s been such a long time.’
‘Sorry for your loss,’ he said. ‘Your mother was a lovely woman. A real lady.’
The soft Irish lilt took her back a lifetime ago. She stepped forward to embrace him, and was surprised at the strong if fleeting hug he gave her. It brought a little catch to her throat. Her family and his had gone back such a long way. He’d been in his early twenties when her father died. To Kerry, he’d always seemed a bit of a cold fish, working in the background on some operation, like some kind of ghost. All she knew about the Cahills was that his father was a big friend of her dad back in Ireland, where he’d lived until they were teenagers. There were whispers that Jake’s father was a high-ranking IRA man, but Kerry was too young to know anything about that by the time her father died and she was shipped off to Spain. Jake apparently still lived between somewhere in the south of Ireland and Spain. But nobody knew much about him. The only thing she’d been told years ago by Danny was that Jake had earned his stripes as a teenager, and he was only ever called in for one reason. He was the most reliable hitman anybody had. There were always plenty of men on hand to take people out, but to get a clean, efficient job done every time, you had to get Jake Cahill. From what Danny had hinted, his specialist skills were not only used by people like her family, but also by government spooks – or so went the folklore. Nobody knew for sure and nobody ever would. It was Danny who’d suggested bringing him in, now that he knew the faces involved in the killings last week. The hitmen Knuckles sent were just thugs from his crew, none of them with any notable reputation that made them stand out from any other thick bastard who would do their boss’s bidding without question.