Dead North (Sam Williams Book 1)

by Joel Hames

  “What are you drinking?”

  “Two pints of Stella,” said Maloney. “You’re buying.”

  I went to get the drinks. I glanced back at the table as casually as I could while I waited. Maloney and “Crick” were sitting in silence. This wasn’t going to be a sociable evening.

  Crick grabbed his drink with the eagerness of a man who was getting uncomfortable and wanted something in his hands. He sipped slowly, staring at nothing, and then he turned to me and said, “So what do you want to know?”

  I’d assumed Maloney had been through all of this already. I didn’t really know why I had to be here, but if that was the way Crick wanted to play it, well, he was the one with the information.

  “Thomas Carson. Who is he, really? What can you tell me?”

  Crick took a long drink, dragged the back of his hand across his mouth, and nodded.

  “Carson. Had no idea, till I saw the pictures in the papers. I thought that guy was dead.”

  I waited.

  “Used to know him, though. Francis, his name was. Is. Francis Grissom. Just a kid, really, but handy with his fists. That was, what, fifteen years ago? Twenty?”

  I looked closely at Crick. He was grey and there were lines, sure, but he wasn’t as old as I’d first thought. Early fifties, I guessed. Younger than Roarkes, anyway. I nodded.

  “He used to work with some people I knew. Up north. I didn’t like them. Didn’t like any of them. But that one I remembered. They were proud of the guy. Used to boast about him. Liked the way he did what he was told to, no questions asked, and the people he worked for did very nicely out of it.”

  Crick bent back down to his drink and I took advantage of the pause.

  “What did they do, the people he worked for?”

  Crick shrugged, and for a moment I thought he didn’t know, but it wasn’t that.

  “What didn’t they do? Drugs, mainly, and people, a bit of protection, guns, I heard, but I don’t know if that was true.”

  Another pause, another sip. Crick was letting the facts out slowly. Maybe he thought he’d get more money that way.

  “Where were these guys?” asked Maloney, and Crick turned to him with a frown on his face, like he was trying to remember.

  “Lancashire. Burnley and Blackburn, you know, those places where they have so many stabbings no one notices one more.”

  Maloney pushed. “So how did you know them?”

  Clever, I thought. Wouldn’t have occurred to me. Whatever his name really was, Boris Crick was one hundred per cent cockney. This place was probably his local. Not a hint of a northern accent.

  “People I worked with back then, they had arrangements with the people he worked with. I used to go up there once a month, for a year or so. They never came down here, though. We always had to go to them.”

  I opened my mouth to ask precisely what these arrangements were, and then closed it. Better I didn’t know, unless I had to. I had another question, though, a more pertinent one.

  “So what happened to Francis Grissom? Why did he change his name?”

  Crick shrugged and I thought here it is, the bit where he pretends he doesn’t know until a fat bunch of tenners turns up, but it didn’t come out like that.

  “You hear rumours, you know. I mean, these guys were nasty. I thought I was hard, but they were something else. They had a line, a motto, ‘In For Life’ they said, it didn’t matter what happened, you couldn’t leave. And if you pissed them off, they killed you. No second chances, no apologies, no excuses. Story was they even got one guy to top himself, let him know they’d come after his family if he didn’t. So Grissom, if he wasn’t happy, he couldn’t exactly tell anyone. And a lot of people were getting killed back then. I’d open the paper and there’d be a fire some place no one else has ever heard of, somewhere in Lancashire and I’d be saying bloody hell I was only there last week picking stuff up and there’s a couple of bodies there and no one ever finds out who did it. So I show up one day and there’s no Grissom, he’d always been there, always him and a couple of others, seemed to get on well enough, all of them, but this time he’s not there, and I say where’s Frank then? and all I got was nothing.”

  It hadn’t been the easiest thing, following Crick’s narrative line, but I just about understood it.

  “And that was it?”

  “Right. They said nothing, I thought better keep your mouth shut, Boris, and that was it. No more Frank. Thought they’d be pulling his body out of some ditch in a few weeks’ time. Did a few more runs for them and then, well, I had my own bit of bad luck.”

  I frowned, expecting more, but Crick was back to his pint. Maloney stepped in to explain.

  “Boris had a bit of a run-in with the police. Grievous Bodily Harm. Wrong time, wrong place. Did his stretch.”

  “Seven years.”

  “Seven years, Sam. Fair stretch.”

  I nodded. I’d had clients who’d done less than that for killing people, and that wasn’t because they had the world’s best lawyer. Whatever Boris Crick had done, I wouldn’t have fancied being on the receiving end.

  “That’s me done then,” he said, suddenly, and stood, empty pint glass in one hand.

  “Really?” I asked. I couldn’t help it. It was all so abrupt.

  “That’s all I’ve got, mate. Seriously. You want anything else, you’re going to have to ask some other guy.”

  “No names, then?”

  “You fucking kidding?”

  He’d turned to face me, and even though he was the same man, past his prime, nothing to worry about if you looked at him, there was suddenly a hint of menace. Maybe it was because I’d just heard about the seven years. But I didn’t think so.

  “I’ve given you Grissom. You think I’d give you the other names even if I had ’em? You’re not paying me enough for that, mate. Not even close.”

  He turned, again, and found his way blocked by Maloney. Maloney was smiling, but I knew Maloney. This wasn’t a happy smile.

  “Sit down, Boris. You’ve had your money. Have yourself another drink.”

  Boris sat. That was all it took. A few words from Maloney.

  But there were no more names. He’d given us Grissom and Grissom was all he had, and Grissom’s face was all over the news anyway. “Someone’s gonna tell you who he is. Might as well be me.” Crick had another drink and entertained us with the tale of a rival dealer who’d been shut down using a nail gun and a bucket of acid, and a family suspected of talking to the police, burnt to death in their own home, just in case. Nice people Francis Grissom had mixed with.

  No more names. When Crick got up to leave a second time, neither of us tried to stop him. He nodded, wished us good luck, advised us to leave it there. And then something else, just as he was about to go.

  “No names, right? No people. But there was something. They called themselves the Corporation. Haven’t heard a word about them for years. They’d been getting smaller for a while, you know how it is, the Poles were coming in, the Pakistanis, new suppliers, new products. They were losing turf. But I can’t believe anyone took them down. They’re still there. You can count on it.”

  Part of me thought that was the best piece of information I’d got since I’d been dragged into this mess. But that was a small part. For the rest, it was just a word, a stupid word, and a name from the past that might turn out to mean something, but probably wouldn’t. Boris Crick wasn’t the kind of man I’d trust to give me the time of day, let alone the name behind a murder.

  Maloney didn’t agree. We got one more drink each, which was enough to put me over the limit, but you couldn’t drink lemonade with Maloney. He was convinced Crick was on the level. It wasn’t like he knew the guy. It wasn’t anything more than a hunch, with a light dusting of arrogance on top: he was Maloney, and you didn’t lie to Maloney. Me, I came at it from a different angle. Most of the people I spoke to lied to me. My clients lied to me because it was second nature. The police lied to me because I was on the oth
er side. Witnesses lied because they were scared or greedy or just didn’t care enough to tell the truth. When I spoke to someone, I started with the assumption they were lying. Crick hadn’t done much to change my mind.

  Maloney had to go after ten minutes, which meant I could leave my half-drunk pint of lager and drive home. The Mitre was no more inviting than it had been when I’d walked in, less so now my companions had left. Boris Crick didn’t seem the kind of person you’d rely on in a tight corner, but if I had to be here I’d rather be drinking with him than by myself.

  But who could you rely on in a tight corner? I thought back to Roarkes. Get a grip, he’d said. I’d bought it, for a time, but now I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure about Roarkes at all. Nothing was as clear as it should have been. I sat in the driver’s seat, shut the door, closed my eyes and took a long, deep breath. I was tired, I decided. It had been a long day. That was all.

  I took it slowly; on top of the tiredness, I didn’t know the East End well enough to drive through it without concentrating. For all the money and the banks and the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park within spitting distance, this little stretch of East London wasn’t much more than a slum. Crumbling tenement blocks, screams in the distance, men lying in the gutter, bins emptied across the street, no lights except the ones on my car. I thought about Crick, the bullshit name, the bullshit handshake, the story which gave us just as much as we needed and no more. He was lying, I decided. I was all but certain of it. Maloney was too used to people fearing him to notice when they were only telling him what he wanted to hear. I sat waiting at a red light and felt a surge of anger, but it didn’t last long, because however angry I might be it wasn’t angry enough to hold back the cold, black wave of depression that followed. Crick was lying, I’d wasted my time coming down here, and Maloney had wasted his money. I was all but certain he was lying and I’d go back to Manchester tomorrow and follow the rest of the half-leads until there was nothing left to follow.

  And after that?

  I didn’t know. The one thing I was sure of was that I didn’t want to work for Atom Industries.

  All but certain.

  The tiniest sliver of doubt.

  What if Crick was telling the truth? If Carson was Francis Grissom. If he’d been part of a crew who did things that disgusted even Maloney, because I’d glanced at him, briefly, during the story about the dealer and the acid, and there was an unfamiliar look on his face. If there was anything in that sliver, anything at all, then it would change everything.

  But that was one hell of a big if.

  16: Nose

  CLAIRE WASN’T HOME. I checked my watch before I rang the buzzer, and then I rang it anyway, because the last thing she’d said to me was still ringing in my ears. I didn’t think she’d take kindly to me just showing up in the bedroom and waking her.

  But she didn’t answer, and I let myself in, and the place was a mess, but the usual kind of mess. No one in the living room. No one in the bedroom or the kitchen or the bathroom either. It was eleven, so it wasn’t like she had to be in, but Claire always told me when she was going out, even if I wasn’t going to be around.

  Till now, anyway.

  I panicked, for a moment, and threw open the wardrobe where she kept her clothes. Still there. Panic over. There was a scotch egg in the fridge, a packet of watery, wafer-thin chicken slices and an almost-empty carton of orange juice. Loaf of bread on the counter, hard but not yet green. It was bad, but better than when I’d been living alone. I was hungry. It would have to do.

  I was sitting on the sofa watching a repeat of an old US sitcom when I heard the door open – I’d left it unlocked so Claire would know I was in and awake – and turned just in time to see a fist coming at me. I ducked, but I’d been drinking and I was tired and I probably wasn’t that good at dodging a fist at the best of times. It hit my left temple and I was sure I felt the contents of my head come uncoupled from whatever was holding them in place and start to slide around.

  “Get your nose out of Thomas Carson’s business,” said a voice in a bland, nondescript accent, and then the fist came swinging back, straight for the same nose that had only just started to recover from its last beating, and everything went black.

  Claire woke me by screaming. I opened my eyes, shut them because it hurt, the light and the scream and the general state of being awake, counted slowly to three, and opened them again. She was standing in front of me and even through the tears and the light I could tell she was torn between are you OK? – which I clearly wasn’t – and what the hell are you doing here?

  “Someone beat me up,” I said. I was surprised how clearly the words came out. “Again,” I added. I reached up, felt my face, my nose. It stung. That was all. I couldn’t really tell without a mirror, but it didn’t seem much worse than Tarney had left it. I explained what had happened. My eyes were still stinging and I couldn’t keep them open for more than a few seconds at a time, but I was sure I saw her wince in frustration when I got to the bit about leaving the door unlocked.

  “We need to call the police,” she said.

  I shook my head. I didn’t want to speak to the police. Not yet. I didn’t want to speak to anyone.

  I didn’t know who I could trust.

  “I’m going back to Manchester tomorrow. I’ll sort it out then.”

  “A doctor, then.”

  My head was still ringing from the shake I’d just given it, so I had to make do with words.

  “No. It’s nothing serious.”

  She shook her head, gave an exaggerated, exasperated sigh, then hugged me and helped me onto my feet. We staggered together into the bathroom, where she cleaned me up slowly and carefully, undressed me, pushed me into the shower (“because we might have got rid of the blood, but you still stink, Sam”), turned it on and left me there to soak in the steam and the hot water and try to forget about Roarkes and Carson and Tarney and the grief my nose had been through over the last couple of days. I couldn’t get it out of my head.

  After five minutes the bathroom door opened and Claire stepped into the shower. Suddenly, my head was utterly, beautifully clear.

  She was still pissed off with me next morning, and I couldn’t blame her, but I apologised, repeatedly, and after the seventh or eighth time she said, “Just forget about it, OK?” and I decided that was as good as I was going to get.

  “How’s your nose?” she asked. I’d almost forgotten about my nose. It was hurting, a little, but a little wasn’t so bad. The arm was aching, too, from time to time, a niggling reminder that boots could do just as much damage as knees and fists, but the arm could wait in line. I had more important things to worry about than the arm.

  There was a moment of uncomfortable silence when she asked me when I was heading back, and I told her as soon as I could. But it was just a moment.

  “Then you’d better get on with these,” she said. “Let’s see if that photographic memory can extend past a takeaway menu these days.”

  There was a file in her hand, and I opened my mouth to argue with her, because I’d only just had my face smashed in and surely she could let it go, just this once. Then I remembered a smashed-in face hadn’t stopped me running around after Sally Carson, blood dripping out into Sergeant Briggs’ Shogun, and I’d been owing Claire this for a while now, as soon as I had the time, and the fact was, I was interested, too. If she had anything new, anything that would take her a step closer to finding out who the traffickers were, then I wanted to be the one to slot that something new in its place. Maybe a couple of hours’ work wouldn’t kill me.

  She’d made good progress, even if her files were a mess, scraps of paper of different sizes and colours placed seemingly at random. I spent half an hour putting them in order, and there it was, staring me in the face. One man, two places, and I’d been working with criminals too long to believe in coincidence. I called Claire over from the kitchen where she was brewing strong, dark coffee, and showed her what I’d found.

  She check
ed and double-checked until she was sure there was no mistake. The man, Jonas Wolf, ran a business on the site the traffickers used to bring the girls in. Jonas Wolf had been in the apartment block where one of the girls had died. It wasn’t exactly proof, but it was more than just a crack in a case, it was an opening a mile wide. Claire kissed me, and smiled, and told me I was allowed to go back to Manchester after all.

  I took five minutes to flick through my own files before I left, but there was nothing there that screamed Sally Carson at me. Whatever bells she was ringing, they weren’t on my hard drive.

  “You don’t have to do this, Sam,” said Claire, and I remembered I hadn’t got round to telling her how desperate things were. Just a cashflow problem, I’d said, and she’d nodded like I was offering her cheese on her spaghetti. And she didn’t know about Atom Industries, either.

  “I do,” I replied. That was all I could think to say.

  She shook her head.

  “No you don’t. You just think you do. You just think this is what Sam Williams does, or at least, the Sam Williams you’ve decided you want to be, and you’re Sam Williams, so off you trot. You do have a say in this, you know.”

  I froze for a moment, and wondered whether maybe she was right. Then I remembered it didn’t matter. I needed Carson. I needed that sliver to come good. I smiled at her. I’d given up having a say in anything a long, long time ago.

  17: Solid Smoke

  I HAD ANOTHER message from Atom Industries, a little less polite, a little less patient, and a voicemail from Hasina Khalil informing me that it might take some time to obtain the funds since her bank accounts had been frozen. I hadn’t managed to figure out what was bothering me about Sally Carson, and the source for the lead I’d counted on breaking her husband’s case was as trustworthy as a shark with a smile. I’d been punched in the face, again, and when I’d reluctantly called Roarkes and told him about it, he’d laced his sympathy with a healthy dose of patronising sarcasm. But I drove back into a cold wet Manchester feeling a lot better than I’d felt leaving it. I didn’t know who’d hit me and who’d sent him, but it meant I was on the right track. I was on half a dozen tracks, so that didn’t narrow things down as much as I’d have hoped, but it was a start. Something was going to happen. Something would turn up.