The Drop

by Howard Linskey

  ‘Did you come here to talk about my new couch Blake?’ he asked testily, ‘I rather doubt that.’ He was a Geordie born and bred but he didn’t want to be. He’d spent his life trying to shed the accent. He folded his arms, which made him look like he was wearing a straight jacket made of Harris tweed. Northam was a heavily balding man in his late fifties, who couldn’t summon up the nerve to shave off the last thin wisp of combed-over ginger hair that rested on his head like a Brillo pad.

  ‘I’ve come to talk to you about the Drop,’ I informed him.

  ‘Thought as much,’ and his expression was almost a smirk, ‘in a spot of bother with the boss eh? Not having a good time of it right now, are we?’ He leaned forward and gave me an undertaker’s smile, ‘I hear your brother was making a nuisance of himself at Privado the other day. Does Bobby know about that as well? I realise he was at Goose Green but the Falklands Conflict was a long time ago and it’s hardly a get-out-of-jail-free-card.’

  ‘A long time,’ I agreed, ‘I wonder where you were when Our-young-’un was up to his nuts in mud and bullets? Probably sitting your accountancy exams in Thatcher’s Britain?’ He straightened, clearly not liking my tone but he didn’t have the balls to say as much. ‘Bet you took a few moments out of your day to raise a glass to our fine boys in the army for showing those bloody Argies who was boss. Salt of the earth weren’t they Northam, just so long as you didn’t ever have to meet any of them. Funny you don’t feel that way about gangsters but they tend to have more money than squaddies and that’s what it all boils down to with you doesn’t it, the money.’

  ‘Is there a point to this conversation? I’m surmising there must be.’ He was trying to sound unruffled but I had evidently got to him.

  ‘Let’s not fuck about, shall we Northam? Yes, I am in a spot of bother with the boss, in fact there’s a good chance he will cut my arms and legs off and feed me to the pigs if I don’t come up with some answers and I’m stuck for some right now, which is why I might have to resort to wondering aloud to Bobby why you ignored all of our safeguards and procedures.’

  ‘Ignored what?’ he stammered, ‘but I never… ’

  ‘Yeah you did,’ I said cheerfully, ‘what are we not supposed to do with the Drop Northam? Think hard.’

  ‘I don’t know what… ’

  I interrupted him, ‘the Drop does not get released into the hands of just one individual, always two. That’s the rule, the golden rule, there really is only one and you either forgot it, which makes you a fuckwit, or you wilfully ignored it, which makes you a suspect, so which is it?’

  ‘Now wait a minute… ’ his face flushed. He sounded flustered. He’d known he’d done wrong all along and was just hoping nobody was ever going to pull him up on it.

  ‘No, you wait a minute,’ I told him, ‘I wasn’t there and Cartwright didn’t have Maggot with him, did he? So why let him take the money?’ I knew the answer or at least I thought I did. He’d been sloppy, we’d all been sloppy this time and our bent accountant was no exception.

  ‘He told me he was with him.’ he said, his mouth going dry.

  ‘Sorry, who told who what?’ I was being deliberately awkward.

  ‘Cartwright told me that Barry Hennessy was in the car outside.’

  ‘So you went out to verify this?’

  ‘Well no.’

  ‘You looked out of the window at least, saw him sitting there?’

  ‘No.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I didn’t think… ’

  ‘You didn’t think?’

  ‘No, well why would I?’

  ‘I dunno,’ I shrugged, ‘maybe because you were handing over a very large amount of Bobby Mahoney’s money to one guy, even though that same Bobby Mahoney had personally instructed you never to hand over a very large chunk of his money to only one guy. That’s why you might just have given it a thought.’

  ‘I had no reason to suspect Cartwright.’ he protested.

  ‘Why? Are you two old mates? ’

  ‘No, he is not my mate.’

  ‘Not your friend and not a blood relative or anything? He’s not part of the family?’

  ‘Don’t be absurd.’

  ‘Me, absurd? I’m not the one giving big wadges of cash out to people who are neither my friends nor my relatives. That’s fucking absurd. You realise nobody saw Geordie Cartwright walk in here or leave with the cash. So how do we know he ever received it from you? How can you prove you gave him the money when we don’t sign for anything?’

  ‘Now hang on a moment.’

  ‘No moments and no hanging on. You’re forgetting yourself Northam. I’m responsible for security in our organisation, whereas you are just a fucking bean counter with delusions of grandeur.’

  ‘Don’t you talk to me like that.’

  ‘I’ll talk to you anyway I want until you start giving me some answers. We are staying here until you can prove you gave that money to Cartwright and you had nothing to do with his murder.’ I didn’t think for one minute he was responsible for Cartwright’s death but I was enjoying watching the slimy little shit sweat.

  ‘Murder?’ that took the wind out of his sails, ‘this is ridiculous,’ he stammered, ‘I don’t have to… ’

  ‘Finney,’ I said quietly and Finney rose to his feet. Northam went white. When Finney pulled a flick knife from his pocket, pressed a button and a blade popped out, I thought Northam was going to keel over right there and then and have a heart attack in his own office.

  Finney took a step forward, ‘Please,’ pleaded Northam, ‘don’t,’

  Finney reached behind him, plucked the soft, Italian leather cushion he had been sitting on from out of the outrageously expensive sofa and plunged his knife deep into it, until there was a huge gash in the middle of the pristine leather.

  ‘Oh,’ Northam drew his hand up to his mouth in agitation but didn’t dare say a word in protest. I stood up and Finney reached for the cushion I’d been sitting on and gave it the same treatment.

  ‘I don’t know what you want from me,’ Northam pleaded. Only when I was convinced he had almost soiled himself did I give him any leeway.

  ‘Sit down Northam,’ and he almost fell into his desk chair, ‘now, let’s start again shall we? I want you tell me everything that happened that day. What time Cartwright arrived, what he said, what you said, what he was wearing, what mood he was in, what the weather was doing outside, what you had for breakfast that morning and if you had a dump afterwards. And if you go running off bleating to Bobby about us coming here I’ll drop you right in the shit with him, understand?’

  Finney held up the knife.

  ‘Yes,’ whimpered Northam.

  Finney folded the knife back up.

  ‘Go on then,’ I said.

  Finney chuckled as we drove away, ‘I enjoyed that,’

  ‘It was a moment of light relief,’ I admitted, ‘and he had been holding out on us.’

  Putting the fear of god into Northam had worked. He’d told us two things we didn’t already know; firstly Cartwright had taken the Drop a day early and of course he’d blamed that on me. I’d apparently told him to collect it twenty four hours before it was due. Because I was on holiday, Northam couldn’t verify that with me at the time so he just assumed it was legit, the idiot.

  The other thing Northam remembered, when we took him through the meeting minute by minute, was that mild-mannered Geordie Cartwright had been carrying. He’d spotted the gun in Cartwright’s shoulder holster when he’d leaned forward to pick up the bag.

  ‘What would Geordie need a gun for?’ Finney wondered aloud.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I admitted, ‘but there’s a good chance he got it from Hunter.’

  ‘Yeah, probably,’ he said, ‘him and Cartwright go back years, to the old days.’

  Doesn’t everybody in our organisation, I thought, except me.

  ‘I’m not sure how far forward we are getting here. Every time we learn something new it just throws up more que
stions. Why collect the Drop early? Why carry a gun when that isn’t your line of work? Why tell Northam that Barry Hennessy was waiting outside in the car when he wasn’t? Unless Barry was lying when you saw him after?’

  ‘Doubt it, we scared the shite out of him, literally.’

  I didn’t want to think about that. ‘And Northam looked too scared to lie to us in there, so it was Cartwright telling porkie pies but why would he risk that?’

  ‘He was on the run with it?’ suggested Finney, ‘he knew we’d be after him if he lifted the money so he had the gun, just in case.’

  ‘I don’t think so. He’d know a gun wouldn’t do him much good and the Drop had to be handed over in twenty four hours or he’d be in the deepest shit imaginable, so what was to be gained by it? Anyway, we should go and see Hunter and I think it might be worth having another word with Barry Hennessy.’

  Finney smirked to himself at that. He was clearly enjoying his day. I drove for a little while then a thought struck me, ‘why does Barry get called Maggot in the first place?’

  Finney thought for a moment, ‘cos he’s a fucking maggot,’ ‘Fair enough.’

  Our next stop was across the river in Gateshead; the Railway arches and an appointment with Mickey Hunter. The arches all had solid metal doors on them, emblazoned with the names of the small businesses that operated out of the offices and workshops within. If you could stand the noise and vibration from the trains that went whizzing overhead you could get a very good deal on premises right by the city.

  Hunter ran a little body shop that knocked dents out of cars, put new bumpers and bonnets on for you if you’d had a smash, and might stretch to a respray, if you had the cash and didn’t mind him not declaring it. There was always a demand for low maintenance, cheap repair work and it was a lovely cover for his real business. That’s why he could afford to undercut the main dealers.

  ‘He wanted a piece.’ Hunter told me as if it was the most natural thing in the world. He was sitting back in his chair in the garage’s tiny office, which overlooked three dilapidated cars that were all being worked on at once by blokes in grease-stained overalls. Our conversation was constantly being interrupted by the high pitched squeal as wheel nuts were unscrewed, then an angle grinder screamed as someone sorted out some body work. Mickey wore overalls too but I never saw him getting his hands dirty. He was a tall, stocky bloke in his late forties and his dark hair was flecked with grey. He was also a bit boss-eyed. You wouldn’t notice at first. It was only when he was talking to you and was meant to be looking right at you that, instead, you suddenly realised he was staring at a space somewhere above your right shoulder. It wasn’t his fault his eye was a bit out of sinc but it made him look decidedly shifty nonetheless. Hunter had been with Bobby since he was a teenage tearaway, nicking cars, re-spraying them and selling them on. Now he was the firm’s quarter-master.

  ‘Geordie Cartwright wanted a gun?’ I still couldn’t believe it. I’d never even known him fire a gun much less carry one around with him, ‘what kind?’

  ‘Handgun,’ he said, ‘a Sig Sauer, one of those flashy pistols the cops have in the States.’

  ‘I know what a Sig Sauer is. Did you get him one?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘On whose say-so?’

  ‘Well,’ he looked at me dumbly, ‘yours.’

  ‘Mine?’

  ‘He said you’d asked him to get a piece in case things got a bit hairy down south like.

  ‘He said what?’

  ‘That’s what he said. You mean you didn’t… ’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘Christ, I’m really sorry man,’ he told the wall behind me, ‘but it sounded legit. I mean I’ve known Cartwright as long as I’ve known any of you and, well I mean, why would he lie?’

  ‘That’s the big question,’ I wasn’t really annoyed with Hunter. It’s not as if we have written orders or signed requisition sheets for his bent weaponry, and he could hardly phone me on a land line and say ‘is it true you asked Geordie Cartwright to get tooled up in case you had a spot of bother with some southerners?’ We didn’t work like that. A lot of what we did, strangely enough in our game, was based on trust, that and the fear of a sickening retribution afterwards if you were caught doing something that was against Bobby’s interests. So what would drive a mild bloke like George Cartwright to get a Sig Sauer from our armourer and collect the Drop all on his own?

  ‘When was this? What time?’

  ‘Last Monday afternoon… No, Tuesday; I remember because the Toon were playing their cup replay that night and we were talking about it. We didn’t think they’d get a result… And of course they didn’t… They were knocked out… So we were right like.’

  I held up a hand, ‘yeah, yeah, did he say anything else? Was there anything odd about the way he was handling himself?’

  ‘Well he seemed a bit distracted I suppose, looking back on it.’

  And I understood why he was distracted. He was scared -but what would scare him so much he needed a gun? Answer that question and we were closer to the truth. Whatever it was, the gun hadn’t done him any good in the end of course. Geordie Cartwright still wound up dead.

  FOURTEEN

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  The massage parlour was an understated little building that looked like a doctor’s surgery, perched at the end of a residential street in an area that was almost but not quite the suburbs. Its frosted glass windows and discreet signage, which indicated it was the place to go to with a sports injury, was intended to ensure no one objected too much to its presence.

  I didn’t know what the neighbours really thought about having a knocking shop on their doorstep but they didn’t make too much of a fuss about it. The whole operation was designed to be as discreet as possible, to avoid attracting the attention of the police or any self-appointed moral guardians in the neighbourhood.

  To be fair, we ran a good, clean operation. All the girls were volunteers and there was absolutely no trafficking of any kind. We only put willing lasses into jobs like that. The police knew it was a brothel, everybody did, but they didn’t give a shit.

  I walked in first, so as not to startle Barry Hennessy, aka Maggot, but it looked like he wasn’t there. Instead we were met by Elaine, our housekeeper. She took the bookings, vetted the clients as they walked in and looked after the girls, making sure they were all right, earning money and paying us our proper cut. It was 30 quid to get through the door, which included the straightforward massage, not that anyone ever wanted just that. The rest was negotiable with the girls but a basic service, including a BJ and a shag would set you back another £100, which was cheaper than dinner for two in a lot of Newcastle’s restaurants these days. The girls kicked another £20 back to the house, so we took 50 quid for providing them with a safe, secure environment where they wouldn’t get beaten up, ripped off or arrested for soliciting. They took home £80 a punter and with a steady stream of clients they could earn upwards of £300 a shift. Put another way, that’s £60,000 to £70,000 a year for lasses who would rather be doing this than earning minimum wage on a check-out till.

  The girls here weren’t drug addicts or nymphomaniacs. They were paying off debts their no-account blokes had left them with, putting themselves through college or bringing up their kids, feeding and clothing them, and they were doing okay but it wasn’t exactly Pretty Woman. It’s not what I’d have called easy work having some fat, sweaty Herbert lying on top of you and it certainly wasn’t for everyone but they didn’t have to do it. They could leave whenever they liked. We never held a gun to anyone’s head or kept anybody against their will and they weren’t that hard to replace.

  ‘He not in?’ I asked Elaine.

  ‘He was,’ she replied, ‘I’ll fetch him,’ she wandered away down the corridor and we watched her go. Just as she reached the end I saw Maggot coming the other way. He clocked us, spotted Finney and his eyes went wild then he turned roun
d and pegged it. Whatever Finney had done to him last time, Maggot wasn’t up for a repeat performance.

  ‘Maggot!’ I shouted, ‘don’t fucking run. Christ.’ I took off after him. Finney was the hardest man on our books but he was no athlete. He wouldn’t be able to catch Maggot when he was pegging it away like the devil himself was after him.

  I tore down the corridor and Elaine flattened herself against the wall as I hurtled by. I went through a door that had a little lounge area beyond it. No sign of Maggot. Two bored-looking girls in smart black cocktail dresses were sitting there sipping tea, waiting for their next John. We didn’t want them sitting round in their skimpies. It made the place look less respectable. They looked up and I was about to ask them which way Maggot was headed when, ahead of me, a door banged and I ran on down a little flight of stairs that led to the showers, sauna, jacuzzi and the tiny rooms the girls took their clients into.

  ‘Shite.’ There were too many doors, they all looked the same, white painted, deliberately neutral and I didn’t know where any of them led to. Fuck it, I thought and I ran right through the one that looked most likely to be the back door.

  I nearly knocked over the naked girl who was in the middle of giving a middle-aged business type a hand job on his lunch hour. Nadia looked at me like I’d gone mad. He almost had a coronary. ‘Oh fuck, no please. I’m sorry. I only wanted a massage. She grabbed me. Please, let me go,’ he pleaded.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘it’s alright, I’m not the police.’

  ‘Shut up Tony,’ she scolded him sharply, properly aggrieved at being accused of a sexual assault, ‘he’s one of us,’ then she turned to me and hissed, ‘are you going to fuck off?’

  ‘Back door?’ I gasped and she pointed.

  This time I tried the door first before I opened it. When I got a crack of daylight I went through, just in time to see Maggot at the other end of the back yard, rounding the corner which would take him out and down the side of the building. Predictably he ran straight into Finney, who’d come round the front at a more leisurely pace. Maggot swore and skidded to a halt like some cartoon character in a chase scene. I half expected smoke to come from the heels of his shoes. He turned back, saw me and realised he had nowhere left to run. Maggot backed away from Finney, heading for the crumbling brick wall that covered three sides of the back yard. His eyes were darting around as he desperately searched for somewhere to go.