When they were gone, Billy said, ‘Jesus lads, he was my biggest earner.’
‘Tough,’ I told him, ‘sit down. I want a word.’
Finney was clearly still troubled by the footballer’s behaviour. ‘You know who that was, don’t you?’ he asked me.
‘Yep,’
He shook his head like the world had gone completely mad. ‘Can you imagine Alan Shearer behaving like that?’
‘No,’ I said truthfully, ‘I can’t.’
I got Finney to search Billy’s flat while we went over the story of Cartwright and the Russian one more time. It didn’t take Finney long before he came out of the bedroom carrying a large holdall. It contained around three kilos of coke.
‘Oh shit,’ said Billy.
‘No wonder you can afford this place Billy,’ I said, ‘there’s got to be fifty grand’s worth there. Now, how did you come by that?’
Billy was evasive at first, for all of about two seconds, until Finney picked him off the ground by his neck and pressed him hard against the wall. I watched his feet kicking a few inches from the floor and let him gasp for breath for a moment before I told Finney to loosen his grip and let him drop to the ground, where he lay choking.
‘Now then Billy,’ I told him, ‘we know you didn’t tell me the whole truth about Cartwright so explain it all to me now or I walk out of this door and leave Finney to finish you off. I’m in too much shit to waste any more time on you. You’ve got one chance.’
‘I don’t know nothing about it,’ the words were strangled in his mangled throat.
‘I’ll leave you to it then Finney,’ I said.
‘Right,’ he said matter-of-factly and he started to roll up his sleeves while Billy looked on horrified.
‘Make sure it’s not quick.’ I said and walked away. I’d almost reached the door.
‘Wait!’ cried Billy, ‘wait, wait, I’ll tell you.’
We had to make the silly bastard a mug of tea to calm him down. He had to grip it in both hands he was shaking so much. At first he was so scared all we could get out of him was apologies.
‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I was only trying to… .’
‘What have you done Billy?’ I asked him, ‘you’d best tell us and I’ll see what I can do for you. It’s the only way. If you don’t tell us Finney’s going to kill you anyway aren’t you?’
Finney nodded, ‘definitely.’
‘It wasn’t much, honest,’ he assured me, ‘we was just trying to do a little on the side. A bit of business, that’s all, tax free, you know. I always pay my way with Bobby but this was a chance to do something just for me.’
‘And Cartwright,’
‘And him too.’
‘With this Russian?’
‘Yeah, how’d you know that?’ and he gave me a look like I was Mystic Meg or something.
‘Did you introduce him to the Russian or did he bring him on board?’
‘No he was Cartwright’s man. I don’t know how they met, honest I don’t. He brought him down the pub to see me.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I’ve known Cartwright for ages and I trust him… I mean as much as you can trust people in our game… he’s not greedy you know.’
‘Not like you, you mean?’
‘I was just trying to put a bit aside. I don’t want to be doing this all my life do I?’
‘What was the plan for the coke?’
‘I’d told Geordie ages ago that I could sell a bit more than normal if only I could get a supply from somewhere else.’
‘Someone other than Bobby?’
‘Well, yeah. I told him we could split the proceeds if he could find me someone reliable.’
‘Who were you going to sell to?’
‘That dopey fucker you just scared off. All his mates are on it. Half the Premier League runs on white powder. You’d be amazed at who’s doing it. They can’t get a buzz from nothing else. They’ve got women on tap, gambling’s pointless ‘cos they’re all millionaires by the time they’re twenty, drugs is the only thing that excites them. They all want to be gangsters.’
‘That’s funny, most of the gangsters I know want to be footballers.’ I said.
‘Too right,’ said Finney.
‘Anyway, the bloke’s a tool right enough but he’s minted and he wants a couple of kilos a time so he can show it off at parties, you know, he wants to be Charlie Big Potatoes. Plus he doesn’t know anything about it does he? We can cut it and pass off any old shite as the purest Bolivian and he’s none the wiser. He pays over the odds because he can and he don’t care. He doesn’t know what a pint of milk costs so he’s not going to know how much a kilo of coke is. There was going to be a big mark-up, very big. Cartwright said he could get the coke off the Russian and he’d pay him. My bit was disposing of it to my football contacts.’
‘And you never thought to ask him where he was going to get the money for that amount of blow?’
‘It was none of my business was it?’ protested Billy, ‘he said he would get the guy his money but that I had to set up the meet with our footballer for that same day.’
‘So he’d pay the Russian for the coke and sell it on through you to Golden Boots straight away for a nice, quick profit?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Did he say why it had to be so quick?’
Billy shook his head, ‘That was his business.’
‘So you reckon you didn’t know he was stealing money from Bobby Mahoney to fund this deal?’
“Course not!’ he said, ‘I would never have allowed… ’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ I interrupted, ‘so what happened?’
‘Cartwright dropped the coke off like he said he would. I set up the meet but I had to call it off at the last minute.’
‘Why?’
‘Well it turned out our client had to play in a reserve match at short notice so he couldn’t come by after all. In any case, Cartwright didn’t come back,’ he shrugged.
‘Cartwright didn’t come back,’ I said, ‘because Cartwright was being killed, most probably by his Russian mate.
‘Jesus,’ said Billy his eyes widening, ‘he got killed for a few grands worth of coke?’
‘No Billy,’ I told him patiently, ‘he got killed because of the money he was holding for Bobby, which was worth a lot more than a couple of Ks of coke.’
‘Oh Christ,’ he turned pale, well, even more pale, ‘what can I do? Name it man, anything. What can I do to make this right?’
‘Can you contact this Russian?’
‘No, it all went through Cartwright.’
‘I don’t know then Billy,’ I said regretfully, ‘you’re in the shit now and no mistake.’
‘I knew I shouldn’t have listened to Cartwright,’ he was rocking back and forth on his sofa like a traumatised soldier. ‘I knew it.’
I let it sink in for a while so even a man as stupid as Billy Warren could work out how much trouble he was in. When he was good and scared I told him, ‘okay, you want a way out of this,’ I said, ‘here’s what you’re going to do. You are going to phone up Golden Boots and get the deal back on. Only this time you won’t be making anything because Finney will be standing behind you when you hand it over. Do that and make a few more deals with the Premiership’s finest and we’ll see if Bobby will let you be square, eventually, as long as you keep your nose clean.’
‘Yeah, yeah, of course man, anything - but how will I get him back in here after what you did to him? He was shitting himself when he left.’
‘Which is precisely why he’ll come back and buy your coke. Tell him Finney here is still mad at him and if he doesn’t want to spend the rest of his days contemplating the tragic, premature end to his playing career he’d better turn up and do the business. It’s not as if we’ll have trouble finding him. Just remind him we know where he’s going to be every Saturday afternoon.’
We were sitting in Bobby’s office at the Cauldron. It was sunny outside but the blinds were drawn. It could have been any ho
ur of the day or night.
‘So Geordie Cartwright was freelancing?’ asked the big man.
‘So it would seem,’
‘To pay off gambling debts?’ added Bobby.
I nodded. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘I should have known he was chucking his money away.’
‘Maybe you should,’ he said and he was right to. I was still kicking myself for not knowing about Geordie’s little weakness. ‘But these days you can lose a fortune without even leaving your house. I’ve heard about guys pissing away their life savings on the internet while the missus is asleep in the room next door. I never would have imagined it though, Geordie Cartwright brought down by gambling. He was a good bloke, in the old days. It’s no way to end up is it?’
‘No.’
‘And we can’t find this Russian? What about your bent DS?’
‘He’s on it but no, there are no leads yet.’
Bobby was swirling a scotch thoughtfully in his glass. ‘What brought these people to my city? What makes them think they can take the piss out of me? Who’s feeding them their information?’
‘That’s what we’ve got to find out.’
‘That’s what you’ve got to find out,’ he told me firmly, ‘and fast.’
It’s three hundred miles from Newcastle down to Surrey. We spent most of them in silence. We never had that much to say to each other anyway, Finney and me. I didn’t particularly like the guy but then who said I had to - I was just glad he was on my side.
The BBC news came on the radio; the usual mix of economic doom-mongering and British army casualties from foreign wars, ending with a supposedly light-hearted story about some senile, old bloke from Sevenoaks who’d managed to drive his car straight into a river and somehow survived.
Finney listened to the story with interest.
‘Why would you call a place Sevenoaks?’ he said, ‘daft name that.’
‘Because there used to be seven big oaks there.’ Did Finney ever read anything but the sports pages?
‘Used to be?’
‘Six of them blew down in the hurricane in the 80s.’
‘Really?’ he seemed to find that highly amusing.
‘Yep.’
‘That’s brilliant,’ he said, ‘you call a place fucking Sevenoaks and six of the cunts blow down?’
Finney drove the whole way and I was glad of it. It gave me some time to think things through, away from Bobby, away from Laura, away from the whole bloody business.
After a while I stopped churning over the mystery of Geordie Cartwright and the missing money and started mentally preparing myself for my meeting with Amrein and how I was going to explain the late arrival of the Drop.
‘That Amrein,’ said Finney like he’d been thinking about it for a while, ‘he’s on a good screw isn’t he? I’m not even sure what we get for our money when you think about it?’
I grunted in a non-committal way that I hoped would satisfy Finney. I didn’t want to have to try and explain to him what we got out of the Drop.
The Drop was an insurance policy. It was a bribe and a sweetener. The Drop bought influence and intelligence. It granted us permission to do business on our patch. The Drop was all of those things rolled into one and more.
The organisation we paid had been around for a long time. It had very long arms and a big reach. It didn’t have a name and there were no accounts filed in Companies House. We paid cash and we always paid punctually, except for this last time.
So what did we get out of it? Well for starters, if we didn’t pay they’d come after us - or at least someone else would, with their blessing. You can look at the Drop as a tax that we stumped up and if we didn’t there’d be a big queue of people willing to pay it, as long as they were allowed to take on an operation the size of ours. The Drop was a considerable amount of money but it was nowhere near the profit we made on a yearly basis. If it was, we wouldn’t pay it, simple as that. We’d take our chances on our own but we’d know there was a big outfit out there, devoting a lot of time and energy into bringing us down and we could do without that kind of conflict.
It was not all negative though. We got a lot out of the Drop, including some priceless information. Amrein’s people had an uncanny knack of finding things out, like the name and address of a key prosecution witness in a trial for example. They could tell us if we were on the hit list of someone in authority or if we had dropped below their radar, if the police had a big investigation going on about an aspect of our business or if they were happy to leave us alone since we were the devil they knew. People don’t seem to realise that a lot of organised crime is allowed to exist because the alternative would be disorganised crime, otherwise known as complete anarchy. Police forces don’t like amateur gangsters killing each other every week over a bag of heroin. It makes their turf look lawless and their crime stats go through the roof, which means their top boy is never going to become head of Scotland Yard. Instead they prefer to allow somebody who knows the score to control and regulate a bit of illegal trade. That way nobody gets hurt, particularly innocent bystanders. The police hate it when some housewife or harmless middle manager gets their heads blown off because a drive-by went horribly wrong. They are less bothered when a known heroin dealer is found face-down in the Tyne if that’s what it takes to keep the peace. The police are like everybody really. What they want most of all is a quiet life and we try to give it to them.
What else does the Drop provide? Influence; political and otherwise. I’m not saying that somebody goes around using our money to bribe cabinet ministers into changing the law in our favour. I’m not saying that. It’s a damn sight more subtle but it probably amounts to much the same thing.
Here’s how it works. Amrein’s people take in a lot of money and some of it is used to make political donations to the major parties. The money doesn’t go straight from Amrein. Instead it is filtered through legitimate organisations run by some quite high-profile businessmen. People you have probably heard of. They shell out enough to get the ear of the men in government; lunch with the Party Chairman, an invite to Chequers, that sort of thing. During the course of their discussions they let slip that they might be willing to increase their funding; let’s say one hundred thousand pounds a year could be turned into a quarter of a million, if only the government would share that businessman’s sense of priorities about the area he lives in. At which point the greedy little eyes of the party chairman light up, he leans over his glass of Chassagne Montrachet and asks confidentially what these policies might be. He is then given a passionate entreaty about how the police waste their time and resources in the north east of England. Why are they chasing a couple of big time gangsters who only seem to spend their time fighting amongst themselves? When instead they could be concentrating on other, more serious matters, such as people trafficking, which we have no interest in, or cracking down on those heroin dealers on the sink estates, or burglary, which is definitely of no use to us at all.
If it’s done properly, the mug on the receiving end of this patter will walk away convinced that the legitimate businessman who, after all, has been solidly vetted in advance, has an eccentric but touchingly heartfelt belief in, for example, the provision of community bobbies, who will patrol the streets every night, catching burglars as they shin down drainpipes with bags marked ‘swag’ on their shoulders. Frankly, he will deduce that for a quarter of a mill in the party coffers, humouring the old boy seems a small price to pay.
A discreet missive will then go out to the Chief Constable of Northumbria Police Force, telling him that the Home Office wishes to see an increased clean-up rate on burglaries. There may even be a follow-up phone call, containing a hint that their Chief Constable is on the shortlist the next time the Head Boy at the Met implodes and there’s a vacancy. Overnight the emphasis on solving a certain kind of crime shifts. Officers once earmarked to investigate the supply of blow and Es in nightclubs suddenly find themselves stepped down and redirected to intelligence gathering on
burgling crews. A few months down the line and a notorious gang of burglars is arrested, charged then convicted, receiving lengthy jail sentences for their evil deeds. The Police Commissioner will even go on television to boast of his officers’ success in combating a crime he himself finds personally abhorrent. He will then do everything in his power to ensure footage of this interview finds its way to the relevant minister in Whitehall. It’s all perfectly legitimate and everybody involved, kids themselves, are somehow fulfilling a public need. Meanwhile we carry on earning our living largely unmolested.
You might not believe it works like that but I’m telling you that it does. Why do you think people like Bobby Mahoney carry on operating for so long when everybody out there knows who they are?
We parked the car down by the river next to a little hotel I’d stayed in once before. Not today though. I wanted to be in and out of there as quick as you like. We walked through Shepperton. It was a small place, just a couple of pubs and restaurants, the hotel and some houses normal people couldn’t afford. Not much to do but pretty enough. The place seemed to exist purely to give prosperous southerners somewhere respectable to retire to.
‘It’s a bit quiet,’ said Finney, looking about him at all the trees that lined the route between the centre of the little town and Amrein’s property.
‘I don’t know,’ I said looking about me at the old houses bathed in a sunlight that rarely ventured as far north as Newcastle, ‘I quite like it.’
You’d be forgiven for assuming a place like Shepperton is about as far removed from the world of drugs and protection money as it is possible to be and it is, at first glance, which is why we bring the Drop here. What’s the alternative? Handing it over in disused factories or at the top floor of an NCP car park after dark? That’s strictly for the movies. Those places are usually covered by CCTV or full of junkies shooting up. Not the kind of venue you’d choose to hand over a lot of cash safely.
Here, at the weekend, the population is swelled by amateur boatmen mucking about on the Thames, but during the week it’s quiet. It was the kind of place where the vicar walked by and said good morning to strangers, somewhere there’d be a cricket match played on Sundays. I had to remind myself that we were on our way to meet the most dangerous man I knew.
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