Queen of Green (Queen of Green Trilogy Book 1)

by V E Rooney

  “So…so what happens when the boxes are empty?”

  “Well, they get taken back to the docks, and then they get put back on the ships and then they sail away again, back all over the world. Like that tanker over there, that one’s going home,” she says, pointing to a smaller ship heading out towards the Irish Sea.

  “But…but there’s loads of boxes in Kirkby. Do people forget that they’ve got them?”

  “I dunno, love. I think sometimes people do forget, or maybe they don’t need their boxes straight away so they just leave them there for a bit. You know when I was a little girl? There would be so many ships going in and out of the docks. All day and all night. And back in the olden days, when it was all the big wooden ships with the sails? Oh, you couldn’t move for ships going in and out. That’s how all the Irish came here, you know. Remember when I told you about the time when everyone in Ireland was really hungry and they had to leave and go and live in other countries? Most of those Irish people came here, you know. Some of them would then get on the big ships to go to places like Australia and America but some of them stayed here in Liverpool. That’s why we talk funny, you know. And we’re more Irish than English, you and me.”

  “But you was born in England. And I was born in England,” I say, confused. “That means we’re English.”

  “Yeah, but…oh, do you know what? Too clever for your own good, you are,” she says, smiling and ruffling my hair.

  The buzzing in my jacket pocket wakes me from my dream. There are so many missed calls from Sean, Ste in Spain, John and Vanessa that my mobile battery is almost dead.

  “Hello?” I croak, barely able to hear with the rush of the wind coming off the sea.

  “Ali?”

  It’s Sean. His voice is cracking. He sounds rushed and panicked.

  “Ali? Where are you, girl? I got to the hospital but the doctors said you’d gone. Where are you?”

  I break down again.

  “Ali…just take a deep breath, girl. Tell me where you are.”

  “The dunes at Crosby.” Then I hang up.

  The sun is coming up. A dim orange glow is slowly creeping across the sea, chasing away the darkness once more. I don’t even notice Sean walking towards me across the dunes. He sits down beside me, gets me in a bear hug, rocks me backwards and forwards. He strokes my hair and kisses my head. He doesn’t say anything. He just holds me while I cry. I bury my face in his chest, with his shirt soaking up my tears and muffling my primal sobs.

  When I eventually get myself together, he holds my face in his hands. I’ve never seen him looking so tender, so concerned.

  “I’m here for you, girl. I’m always here for you. Never forget that. You don’t have to do everything by yourself, you know. You should let people help you every now and then,” he says quietly.

  “Sean…it was horrible. She didn’t deserve that. She didn’t deserve to die like that.”

  “I know, girl, I know. She’s in a better place now. No more pain. No more suffering.”

  I say nothing for a while, I just stare out to sea. If there is such a thing as a soul or a spirit, I hope that Mum is wherever she wants to be.

  Sean reaches into his coat pocket and pulls out a small bottle of Scotch. He unscrews the cap.

  “Sean, you know I don’t drink.”

  “It’s not for you, it’s for me,” he says, seemingly affronted at my presumption. “Fucking freezing up here, girl, my bollocks are like ice cubes,” he says as he fills the cap and necks a measure, smacking his lips. “Come on, let’s get you back to mine, eh?”

  I straighten up, wipe my face and blow my nose. He pulls me up off the sand, brushes me down, puts his arm round me and guides me back to the car park at Crosby Marina. Paul and Lee are waiting outside Sean’s Mitsubishi.

  “Ali, I’m so sorry, love,” Lee says, touching my arm as I approach the car.

  “Sorry, girl,” Paul echoes.

  We drive back to Sean’s Albert Dock pad in silence.

  The funeral is a small affair, held at St Joseph the Worker Church, just down the road from where I grew up. Sometimes Mum and I would go to Midnight Mass there on Christmas Eve. I was baptised there, but I never did the Holy Communion thing. Didn’t see the point. Funny how parents are all up in arms about violence in films and on telly, but they don’t think twice about dragging their kids to church every week to prostrate themselves in front of a statue of a naked man being tortured on a bit of wood.

  There’s Mum’s coffin in front of the altar. But all I can see is the silent scream on her face when she died, the pain and anguish etched into every line of her sunken, hollow face. Father Driscoll says some lovely things about her, although the last time he saw her was over 15 years ago. Nice of him to remember, though.

  The mourners are myself, Janice, Lucy and Lauren, some of the people off the estate, the girls from the bingo, some of Mum’s mates from school and some of her old workmates.

  There are a few distant relatives on my Mum’s side but nobody I recognise. We make polite chatter of no significance, all ignoring the missing elephants in the room. No sign of her brothers. No sign of Dad. Even with all the money and resources at my disposal, I wouldn’t have located any of them anyway even if she’d wanted them there.

  I have a few moments of wondering if Dad will turn up. Fuck knows why. What would he look like now? Would I even recognise him? What would we say to each other? I push those thoughts away. Exercise in futility, that is. Much better to leave him in the past where he belongs. I don’t want to think about what Mum said in the hospital. I can’t.

  I tell the crew to stay away as I don’t want a big fuss but Sean wants to pay his respects. He’s attentive and respectful, not just to me but to the other mourners. He makes a few fans, put it that way. The old biddies can’t get enough of him with his manners and his sharp suit, his effortless jokes and his canny ability to charm the knickers off a nun.

  At the graveside, as her coffin is lowered into the ground, I bite my lip so hard that it bleeds. I have shades on because it’s sunny but I still see the fuckers.

  There they are, a few hundred yards away behind the graveyard fence trying to look all inconspicuous. Bit hard to blend into the background when you’re pointing a big fuck-off camera in my direction, dickheads. Today of all days, eh? I don’t know whether they’re the Police or Customs. Truth be told, I don’t give a shiny shit at that point. I just nudge Sean ever so slightly.

  “I know, girl, I know,” he says quietly. “Let them take their fucking photos. They’ve got nothing on us.”

  Afterwards at the wake, in the Boffin of course, he asks me what Mum was like. He never met my Mum but from what I tell him about her, he’s admiring.

  “Fuck me, girl. I can see where you get it from.”

  “Get what from?”

  “You know…not taking any crap. Doing things for yourself. She passed on her brains and her guts, that’s for bloody sure,” he says to me. “You’re a credit to her.”

  “Hmm. That’s a matter of opinion.”

  34. PENITENCE

  6am, or as I call it, twat o’clock when the alarm goes off, is my least favourite part of the day. Particularly when it’s not the alarm clock that wakes me but a fuckload of busies breaking down my door and hauling my arse out of bed.

  A loud, sickening thud in the hallway, the sound of my door being kicked in. In they come, at least ten of the fuckers, steaming into my bedroom at the Wood Street flat, standing over the bed, guns raised and screaming into my face.

  ARMED POLICE! RAISE YOUR ARMS ABOVE YOUR HEAD! DO NOT MOVE!

  “For fuck’s sake, make up your minds, lads. I can’t do one without doing the other, can I?” I shout back at them as I raise my arms. They handcuff me in a couple of seconds.

  Then a plain clothes female busy is in my face. “Alison Reynolds, I’m arresting you on suspicion of conspiracy to supply Class A drugs. You have the right to remain silent but anything you say…” The usual bollocks,
but it’s the first time I’ve been arrested and the first time my rights have been read to me. I get a strange thrill, like a virgin wet with anticipation of her first fuck. That feeling doesn’t last long.

  “…do you understand the charges?” the female busy says briskly.

  “I understand that you’d better have some fucking evidence to back up your bullshit, love,” I reply.

  I’m dragged downstairs into a waiting black Maria and then I’m carted off to the Police station on Admiral Street. It’s a safe bet that the same thing is happening to Sean at the same time, only he’ll be taken to a different Police station. How many others in the crew are being so rudely awoken right now?

  After the busies process me at the station, my brief Robert arrives. He’s looking rather flustered as he’s led into my cell.

  “What’s happening? What about…” I ask.

  “Stay calm, Alison,” he says, cutting me off in a low voice. It’s possible that the busies are recording us right now. He leans in to me and starts whispering. “Whatever they throw at you, it’s no comment to everything. Don’t let them wind you up. It’s for them to show what they’ve got against you, not for you to fill in the blanks for them, right?”

  Mindful of that, we’re taken to an interview room. Sitting across the table from me is Detective Chief Inspector Dean Hawley from Merseyside Police and a woman who introduces herself as Officer Jane Carter from HM Customs & Excise. Holy fuck. It’s a right royal tag team. The busies and the cuzzies seem to have put their own competitive differences aside to take us down.

  Carter is eyeballing me. I mean, seriously eyeballing me. I wonder where I’ve seen her before. Hmmm. A little tinkle of a bell in my mind. Oh, yeah, that’s right. She was one the twats on the surveillance team, the one I clocked at Burtonwood Service Station. She’s still eyeballing me, she’s not even blinking. She’s loving this, having me sat in front of her. I wonder how long she’s been staring at fuzzy photos of me, plotting my capture. And now she’s got me in the flesh up close.

  “Alison Reynolds,” she says, “you’re employed as an admin assistant at Granby Property Management Limited. Is that correct?”

  “No comment.”

  “Are you aware that this company is owned by an individual named Sean Kerrigan?”

  “No comment.”

  “How long have you worked for Sean Kerrigan?”

  “No comment.”

  “Sean Kerrigan owns several businesses. Are you connected to any of these other businesses?”

  “No comment.”

  She knows that I’m not going to answer anything but she also knows that she has to go through this rigmarole before she does the big reveal. I’m just wondering what – or who – that is.

  “We have reason to believe that Sean Kerrigan is involved in the trafficking of several drugs consignments into this country. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you?” she says with the beginning of a smirk on her face. Here it comes. She’s building up to her big finale.

  My brief Robert jumps in. “I’d like to remind you both that my client has never been convicted of any criminal offence. Has never been arrested, never even received a caution. If you want to ask about Sean Kerrigan’s business, how about you ask Sean Kerrigan himself? Why don’t you outline your evidence for this arrest of my client?” he says forcefully.

  Carter stops eyeballing me for a few seconds as she browses through a folder in front of her. She pulls out a couple of black and white fuzzy photos and places the first one in front of me.

  “This was at your mother’s funeral, wasn’t it?” she says as I quickly look at the photo of Sean and I stood at Mum’s graveside as they were lowering her in. “Can you tell us why Sean Kerrigan was at your mother’s funeral?”

  “No comment.”

  “Bit too old to be a gangster’s whore, wasn’t she?”

  Carter says this with such contempt in her voice that I almost rise to the bait. I want to reach across the table and shove my fist down her throat. I clench my fists tightly under the table. I can feel the breath in my chest rising quickly and the heat creeping up my neck but I don’t react. Fuck this cuzzie bitch. She won’t get a rise out of me.

  “No comment.”

  Carter smiles at me. Then she pushes the second photo towards me. Another black and white photo, this time of Richie and I sat in the car at Burtonwood Service Station.

  “Who is this man?” she says, pointing at Richie’s face, which is contorted in fury, looking at me.

  “No comment.”

  “He seems to know who you are. Doesn’t seem very happy with you here. What was all that about?”

  “No comment.”

  There’s the big reveal. It’s Richie. The busies or the cuzzies have managed to turn Richie. He’s grassing on us. And now he’s a dead man walking. I know that much.

  Carter then brings out an audiocassette tape and places it into a portable player next to the interview recording machine. “For the benefit of the interview tape, I’m now playing a recording of a telephone call between Sean Kerrigan and Alison Reynolds,” she says as she presses ‘play’.

  There are a few buzzes and crackles before the audio recording begins. I hear my voice. It was a call from me in Amsterdam to Sean in Liverpool. They’ve been wiretapping us. Fuck fuck fuck. Who has been wiretapping us? The busies or the cuzzies? In the UK or abroad?

  So I’ve spoken to the Birdman. They’re all plucked and ready to go.

  Then it’s Sean’s voice.

  Aw, nice one. That’s a weight off my mind.

  So, what’s happening with you?

  Oh, you’ll never guess who I bumped into last night. Only fucking Rod, Jane and Freddy.

  Fucking hell. That lot still causing mayhem, are they?

  Oh, you know what Jane’s like. Fucking lunatic…

  Carter presses pause. “Can you tell me what this call relates to? Who is Birdman?”

  “No comment.”

  But both Carter and I know what that call is about, even if she can’t identify Birdman. It was yet another consignment of coke coming in to Rotterdam on the Vasser. Nunes had called me to confirm that the vessel was leaving the Venezuela docks safely and on time, with 230 kilos tucked away on board. I had then phoned Sean to give him the good news.

  As Carter reels off more pointless questions, I do a mental inventory of all the calls I made to the various members of the crew whilst I was in Amsterdam. All the codenames, all the smoke and mirrors codewords, the riddles and the innuendos. They have multiple calls linking me to Sean, to Paul and Lee, to Nunes…what they don’t have is us blatantly arranging large-scale drug deals over the phone or actually saying the words coke, shipment, Mendez or Venezuela. They have their photos…what they don’t have is me with my hands on any drugs. I hardly ever come into contact with the product itself.

  But what they do have is Richie. And Richie has everything on us. And if he’s turning Queen’s evidence on us, we could be well and truly fucked. Would he really be prepared to betray his childhood friend Sean like this? Knowing that would mean certain death for Richie? What has he been promised in return for turning grass?

  I do the no comment thing to every question that this fucking cuzzie bitch puts in front of me. She actually has the gall to look pissed off that I’m not capitulating. She and DCI Hawley are about to wrap things up. Cuzzie bitch leans across the table and eyeballs me one more time.

  “If you do remember anything that might be relevant to our enquiries, feel free to get in touch for a girly chat, yeah?” she hisses as she throws her business card onto the table. Then she’s up and out of the room. Fuck you, you cunt. Fuck you.

  I get charged, remanded into custody, denied bail, and then taken to HMP Garside in Yorkshire, a comfy little women’s jail, to await the trial. After the obligatory strip search, with one of the prison guards being a little over-enthusiastic with her rummaging within my special secret lady place, I get changed into my standard
issue trackie and am escorted to my cell. Some of the other inmates have clocked onto me what with all the nudges and whispers as I walk past them on the landing.

  That’s her? Fuck me, she’s barely out of nappies.

  I bet you anything she can get weed.

  She’s fit, she is. Might ask her if she fancies playing horsey with me.

  I’m sharing a cell with this posh bit of fluff from down south banged up for GBH. I’ve only just put my stuff down on my bunk bed when there’s a knock on the open cell door. I turn around to see another inmate nodding at me.

  “Oi, virgin. Come with me,” she says, beckoning me to follow her. Well, it’s not like I’ve got anything else to do. I follow her down the landing and I’m ushered into a cell where there is an overgrown tomboy in a pork pie hat sat on the top bunk, munching on biscuits and flicking through a magazine. She sees me and jumps down.

  “Alright, love? Oh, excuse me, your majesty,” tomboy says as she does a mock curtsy.

  Another fucking Scouser. Small world, eh?

  I step towards the tomboy. “Who are you?”

  “Never mind that,” she says as she pushes her hand underneath her mattress and pulls out something wrapped in cellophane. It’s a mobile phone. Tomboy hands it to me.

  “A welcome gift. Sean says he hopes you’re alright, that you’re keeping your chin up, and that when you’re not using this, you’re to give it back to me to stash. Yeah?”

  “Yeah,” I say as I turn over the bundle in my hand.

  “Good. Now sod off,” says tomboy as she turns me around and pushes me back out of her cell.

  Back in my cell, with my new roommate standing guard at the door, I take off the cellophane and switch on the phone. It beeps alive with a notification of a text message.

  CHIN UP, GIRL. DING ME WHEN YOU GET THIS.

  I call the number and feel a wave of relief washing over me when I hear Sean’s voice.

  “Alright, mate?” I say.

  “Alright, girl? You been fingered yet?”

  “Give me a chance, only just got here. Where are you?”