Little Doubt

by Little Doubt (epub)

  A flutter settled under his ribcage. It was a familiar feeling, but one that he hadn’t felt in recent years. It was the sensation of ambition. Occasionally Jackson believed that he could do something different; something that wasn’t dictated by his background. Maybe a university degree, or a decent job. But then, after a minute or so, the ripple of excitement would dissipate, and he’d move on, accepting his lot and status. It was the same for everyone on the estate: the expectation to be mediocre.

  The cops this afternoon had emphasised the point. He had zero prospects; in other words, he was worthless. He had no future, no family, no meaningful relationships and no potential. That was what they always told him when they wanted something. But this situation was different. It occurred to him that the effort with which the two coppers had tried to coerce him was unusual. They were desperate.

  But was he? He’d known of informers who’d made mistakes in the past and ended up with a knife in their guts up to their ribcage. Or who’d disappeared. He had a difficult choice to make. His actions could save the establishment and they could all go back to the unexceptional mainstream. Thing was, could he accept the injustice?

  Sharon Bradley wasn’t yielding, so why should he? He knew enough about the police to know that the murder of the middle-class woman would have rattled the senior ranks: it looked bad that it could occur in broad daylight in the middle of a park used by kids. They needed a fall guy and he’d been asked to help. Well, threatened actually. But he’d detected a sniff of panic in the coppers’ tone, and he suspected they were under pressure too. It was the higher ranks who ran gigs like this: informants and snitches. They were called snouts, narks, grasses and finks. But the two coppers who’d sat in his lounge, trying to keep their shit together, were just as exploited as he was. He could tell from their eyes that they were doing somebody else’s dirty work.

  He needed to get to Tyrone, but without drawing attention to himself. He went to the window again and peered out. There was no sign of the police, only more and more people spilling out onto the streets, adding stuff to the makeshift blockade. Sharon was becoming a social hub for the estate: a kind of mascot championing the little people. He smiled again. He wasn’t about to give in.

  He felt alive.

  The temperature had plummeted once more, and they were all waiting for snow, but nothing was stopping these residents who kept bringing stuff to block the road outside Wordsworth Towers. The estate looked like a grey pile of shit, while the mountains – not that he could see them from his flat – would be covered in blankets of the kind of white stuff that didn’t kill you. He wished he was out there, free from any kind of manipulation and obligation.

  He’d considered joining the Mountain Rescue, but then he’d also dreamt of being a lawyer. People like him didn’t do decent things like that. The minute his mother shot her first bit of brown into her veins, his life was over. Not that he felt sorry for himself; on the contrary, his life was relatively good. He had friends, he enjoyed his bikes and he wanted for little. He just hadn’t had any fire in his belly. But since watching the events unfold from his window, he’d begun to lift his head.

  The two coppers had been very specific about what he was to do with the evidence. And now that he’d cleared his head and considered what Sharon was doing for the memory of her daughter, it gave him an idea. Maybe he could play them at their own game and use the evidence to the advantage of the whole estate?

  Why face danger when you could chug along, causing no ripples on the surface of life? But this wasn’t a ripple, it was a fucking tsunami. His life was about to change, and it was up to him to decide if it was to be for the better. He looked at himself in the mirror above the electric fire in his poky living room.

  He knew exactly what he would do with the contents of the bag.

  Chapter 22

  Tyrone Fenton relaxed on a dirty sofa, contemplating his next deal. As he listened to Lil Shane, one of the many drill-rap artists from Chicago that filled the bedrooms and lounges of ninety per cent of the flats on the estate, he repeated the lyrics without thinking about them. Analysis wasn’t necessary: the songs spoke of sex, violence, knives and drugs. The usual. His lips mumbled the complicated rap lyrics, learned verbatim from hours of exposure. Lil Shane was a current favourite because he’d been arrested in the USA for drugs and murder charges. A rival had had his head blown off and Lil Shane had been at the scene. The content of his music gained the attention of the state troopers straight away, but fans knew that it was just an excuse to put another brother behind bars for fucking the system. Riots had erupted on the streets of several US cities and the President had made an unprecedented speech about closing in on the violent subculture threatening to ruin respectable society.

  It was a revolution. Fuck the state.

  Tyrone’s body moved with the beat, and he banged the sofa, getting up to pace up and down when he grew impatient with stillness. He wore his hood up, even indoors, as if someone might spot him through the walls. The room was thick with sweet smoke and he was hungry. He went to the kitchen to see if he could find something to eat, but the TV caught his attention when he heard Keira’s name.

  He wiped his nose on the sleeve of his black sweater. Cocaine crystals sat inside his nostrils and he ran his finger round them and rubbed the residue on his gums. He’d been tidy. He’d done his job and taken the weapon and the clothes to a safe place until the heat died down and they could be disposed of. He still daren’t go out around the estate, though; he knew the cops were looking for him. Of course they were: he’d been fucking Keira not an hour before she died. It looked bad, and he had no way out.

  His thoughts turned to the girl he’d watched being butchered, helpless to do anything about it, and it hurt like hell. Problem was, he was more scared of the Cotton brothers than he was in love with Keira. That was why the drugs helped; they numbed the pain. When he was high, he didn’t see her face as the blade made its first hole in her body. She’d been held like an animal and slaughtered, and there was nothing Tyrone could do about it. He wished Jackson was here. Jackson always knew what to do, and he stayed out of trouble. Tyrone could never manage that for himself.

  The door banged and he heard Adam Cotton’s voice. His heart sank. He rubbed his hand where deep cuts had been hastily bandaged in his flat before being told to leave by the Cotton brothers, and come here. He didn’t regret trying to get the knife off Adam. Keira had seen it; she knew he wasn’t part of it and that was good enough for him. But the fact that he’d run away and left her hurt him inside.

  ‘Bruv, you look proper scared!’ Adam’s voice was menacing, designed to humiliate. He was flanked by sycophants who came and went with the brothers. Of the pair, it was Adam who was more unhinged and unpredictable. He got up to shit that not even Jason knew about. Everyone predicted that one day he would make a mistake and get them all into trouble, and that day had arrived. The killing of the jogger was a huge mistake, though Tyrone had no idea why he’d done it. He looked beyond Adam to the door and realised that Jason wasn’t with him. He wished Jackson was here even more.

  ‘Calm down, fam, you look shit scared!’ Adam laughed, obviously entertained by Tyrone’s discomfort. Tyrone sweated and wished he could leave, but he had nowhere to go and the police were hunting for him. He was trapped.

  He noticed that Adam had a holdall with him. He disappeared into a bedroom, re-emerging without it. Tyrone assumed that it was more incriminating evidence for him to look after until the heat died down. He wasn’t in charge; all he did was follow orders and do what he was told. The flat was a safe house used for deals, decisions, counting money, swapping merchandise, stashing weapons and the odd whoring. It wasn’t the only one: they had several dotted about the estate and the pigs had no idea where they were.

  The Cotton brothers had a reputation for the best-grade gear. Most of it came from Manchester, some even as far away as London. County-lines trading had taken a sharp upturn since gangs realised that urban police w
ere given more money for busting drugs rings than those in the provinces. They stayed one step ahead of the police by trading in the least likely places: middle-class suburbs, schools, warehouses, gyms and National Trust car parks. Once the coppers got wind of a phone network, the gangs would move on, replacing the lines with new phones from different provinces. It was how the Cotton brothers had survived for so long: they were big boys in a little town, not the other way around.

  Life avoiding drug squads was like guerrilla warfare in the concrete jungle. Of course some big names had gone down for serious time. Only last year a county-lines gang in Preston had been banged up for a total of eighty-two years. But for every one caught, there were thirty waiting to fill the gap. It was truly an underworld where survival depended on the network of the gang family and not the usual realms of society with their fucked-up rules and outdated methods. Ganglands had their own rhythms, their own language, their own organisations and economies, their own laws and even their own music. They should be used as models in college to teach kids how to be entrepreneurs, Jason often said, fancying himself as some kind of philosopher.

  Tyrone listened as Adam talked to his hangers-on; noticed that Adam kept bringing up Sharon Bradley. He was agitated, and Tyrone wondered what Keira’s mum had done to deserve such attention. He remembered Sharon through the eyes of her daughter as a sponger, a lazy old hag who nagged her constantly.

  Apparently she was becoming a problem. He listened as they discussed what she’d been up to and the appearance of some kind of blockade as a protest against the police. It stoked his interest and made him change his opinion of Keira’s mother. At least someone was doing something about her death. She was basically going round the estate with a loudhailer promising everlasting life to anyone coming forward for the sake of the community. Tyrone quite liked the sound of it. Unlike Adam, who wanted to get rid of her the only way he knew how. Though apparently Jason was having none of it.

  The tension between the brothers had always been a point of contention. Jason was the more intelligent of the two and always gained the upper hand. Adam did as he was told. Word was they had an informer, but no one knew who it was. Tyrone remembered one squealer, three years ago, who came to the attention of the Cotton brothers after bragging about something and nothing. They found out he’d spoken to the police and figured himself immune. He’d been tortured for five hours and finally dumped, bagged and weighted, into the Duddon Estuary. No one missed him. A lot of the kids who got recruited had no family, or if they did, they were so fucked up and dysfunctional that their absence wasn’t noticed or reported. Adam in particular had enjoyed ripping out the guy’s fingernails, saying that it sounded like sucking pork ribs. Tyrone had laughed along with everyone else, but inside, it fuelled his worst nightmares.

  More people arrived at the flat. The place was also used as a social hub for a select few. Sometimes it was where challenges were settled. A challenge could be one guy directly in beef with another, but it could also be a feud that had rumbled on for months. Jason Cotton was the one who usually decided where they were settled. It might be in a park, a warehouse, or one of these flats, if it involved high-ranking gang members.

  A knife was pulled, and Tyrone heard Jason’s voice.

  ‘Fucking put that away, you twat.’

  Everyone knew how hard it was to survive a direct knife fight. The two antagonists shook hands and Tyrone saw relief in their faces. Tyrone himself had never been directly challenged, and he wanted to keep it that way. Most of the violence he’d witnessed was as a result of rival gangs entering their patch, or vice versa: them travelling to patches where they weren’t welcome. He’d been knifed a few times but he’d been lucky; the NHS had put a plaster on his gashes and he’d walked away.

  ‘What you been up to, Adam?’ Jason questioned his brother directly and something in the room shifted. Tyrone knew that Adam was in trouble for something, and they all assumed it was because of what had happened to the jogger in Potton Park. Word was Adam had made a mistake and slashed the wrong person. He’d had a young recruit with him and thought it clever to initiate him with a brazen attack in broad daylight.

  Jason wasn’t impressed, though.

  ‘Don’t know what you mean. Mother’s.’

  ‘Yes you fucking do. Don’t swear on our mother’s life, man. I told you to do a random, and you do a fucking posh chick in jogging gear, you fucking retard.’

  Adam’s face went pink and he looked away.

  Tyrone knew what was coming; he’d seen Jason like this before. He wouldn’t tolerate being made a fool of. He nodded to two guys, who walked up behind Adam and held his arms.

  ‘Man! Bruv! What you doing? It was nuffin’. I swear, it wasn’t me. It was someone else in your yard, fam.’

  The first blow was sickening, and Adam squealed, but with the subsequent connections between knuckle and face, he grew quiet.

  By the time Jason had finished, blood gushed from Adam’s face and spatters covered the floor. He slumped down and everyone froze, not knowing what to expect next. Jason turned the music up and asked if anyone fancied KFC.

  Chapter 23

  ‘Hey, how you doing?’ Kelly went to Josie and opened her arms. Josie fell into them and hugged her. It was funny how Josie had slowly had more and more impact on her life, and now she felt like the girl’s mother. In fact, Josie visited her own mother pretty rarely, a fact the woman blamed on Johnny. But Josie was old enough to make her own mind up. Any divisions Johnny had suffered with his daughter now seemed to have been healed, and through the power of love alone. Josie was happy here.

  ‘I’m good. I had a therapy session today.’

  ‘How did it go?’

  Johnny appeared wearing an apron, and Kelly kissed him.

  ‘I don’t really know. We just kind of sit and she plays me these meditative scripts. I feel stoned afterwards.’

  ‘That good?’

  Johnny rolled his eyes. Josie was more candid with Kelly than she was with him, and he was slightly jealous, but feigned disapproval when they discussed drugs, gangs and boys. Now, more than ever, it was important to have open discourse about the realities of teenage life, though Johnny didn’t have the same skill set. He’d counselled hundreds of soldiers through PTSD but he couldn’t discuss tragedy and pain with his daughter; he didn’t know how to start. So he listened to Kelly do it, and it worked. Josie opened up to her.

  ‘Have you caught them yet?’ Josie asked. She was nervy as a result of the accident, and any bad news made her worse.

  ‘No. But we will. The family are doing a press conference in the morning.’

  ‘Wow. I can’t imagine how hard that’s going to be.’

  ‘I know. The son is around your age and he’s quite determined to go through with it. It’s a very courageous thing to do. Did you see the estate on the news?’

  ‘The police raids?’ Johnny said. ‘Jesus, I thought we were watching downtown New York!’

  ‘President Trump tweeted that out streets are worse,’ Josie said.

  ‘You follow him on Twitter?’ Johnny was surprised.

  ‘Dad, he’s hilarious. He just says it like it is, no spin, no pandering to the electorate or anything; not like our politicians. All ours want is to trick us into voting for them.’

  ‘Can’t argue with that,’ Johnny said.

  ‘What’s cooking?’ Kelly asked. She took off her coat. It had been a gruelling day and she couldn’t shake the feeling that her job was in jeopardy. If she didn’t get the results Ormond wanted, or if she offended him or made him look incompetent, she had no doubt that she would pay for it with her career. The thought terrified her, because she’d spent her whole adult life building it to where it was now. She had no idea what she’d do without it.

  ‘Chicken curry. I’ll get you a drink.’

  Kelly sat down on the sofa. Johnny’s place was small but tidy, and cosy with the fire lit. He and Josie had found a rhythm that suited them, and it involved her too. S
itting with Josie chatting comfortably about her work and life, with Johnny in the kitchen, felt like the most natural thing. For a fleeting moment she imagined bringing a child of her own into the equation, but she pushed the thought away rapidly.

  After dinner, Josie did her homework in her room, and Kelly and Johnny sat on the sofa, with her feet on his lap. They sipped wine and the TV stayed off. During a case like this, the TV was full of fake news about the inquiry, and it wound Kelly up.

  ‘What’s up?’

  She smiled. ‘Work.’

  ‘Ormond?’

  She nodded. With his army background, Johnny knew how a rigid rank structure was difficult to handle. The police and the armed forces were essentially the same: they did the government’s dirty work. Ostensibly, government was designed to protect the people, but it did the opposite: it safeguarded the establishment in rank order. If soldiers fucked up, they went down. If generals fucked up, they were paid to keep quiet. Same was true in the police. The top brass were untouchable, even from the inside.

  Reports were coming in of barricades on the Beacon Estate and Kelly was waiting to see how Ormond would tackle it. It was his doing after all. Maybe it would work to her advantage, because Sharon Bradley seemed to have been recruiting loyal followers all day. Someone, somewhere, knew something. Johnny agreed.

  Now that Ormond had screwed up so royally with Op Turkey, as it had become known, she hoped that he might be inclined to let her get on with the investigation. As long as he interfered and went behind her back, she couldn’t do her job properly. The problem was that he was her boss. Should she want to make a complaint, she’d have to make it independent and bring in another force, because of his rank. She knew people in the Met, obviously, but she also knew officers in Manchester who could recommend a solid chief constable. It would have to be somebody at least two ranks above Ormond, who didn’t know him.