‘This is ridiculous. Way fucking beyond ridiculous. I mean, Jesus Christ. You see that dickhead, sitting there running off at the mouth like we were all kids and we had to sit there and listen to it. I mean, come on, what the fuck is this anyway? Is he in charge now, is that it? Are we all just going to trudge along and listen to whatever he’s got to say like he’s some sort of boss now? Sitting there talking like he was Peter Jamieson, as if Peter fucking Jamieson would have called everyone together like that in the first place. Has this prick never heard of a security risk?’
‘All right, Marty,’ Kevin said, running a hand over his mouth while he considered a response. ‘I talked to Lafferty beforehand. He had this all planned out well in advance.’
‘Too fucking right he did,’ Marty said, his voice a higher pitch than God intended for him. ‘He’s been waiting for a chance like this.’
‘Maybe, but he’s handled it well,’ Kevin said. ‘He had managed to get a call with Peter in prison before he arranged the meeting; got Peter’s permission to go down this road.’
Marty groaned and Billy looked mildly surprised; the rest of us looked like juniors who weren’t entitled to a big reaction to a boss’s decision.
‘He already knows the first move he’s going to make as well,’ Kevin said. ‘He’s found out who Barrett’s gunman is and he’s going after him as well as Barrett. He’s serious about getting revenge for this Christie person.’
‘No he fucking isn’t,’ Marty said with a hiss. ‘He’s serious about making himself look like he’s the big shot in town now, that’s what he’s serious about. And how the hell did he find out who the gunman is when we haven’t got anything to go on?’
‘Lafferty’s well connected down south. He managed to find out a bit about Barrett’s history. Found out that he’s a smart mover, used to have his own network down there, a small one but still something. He left the Midlands after trouble. Came up here with his crew, brought along his own gunman with him. Jawad Nasif, the gunman’s name is. They call him Nasty, apparently.’
‘Course they do,’ Mikey said with a smile.
‘So what now?’ Marty asked. ‘I mean, are we just going along with all this? If Peter says yes, then yes, I do it, but this is nuts. This is giving Lafferty the chance to run just about everything until Peter gets out.’
‘It does, yeah,’ Kevin said, ‘and there’s not a whole lot we can do about it. Barrett needs to be dealt with and Lafferty’s taken the lead in that. What can we do? We have to help the man; it’s our own necks on the block if we don’t. We do it and we see what plays out.’
Marty sighed and Billy folded his arms; nobody else seemed to feel like filling in the silence so I thought I’d take a stab at it and see what damage I could do.
‘So he got Jamieson’s agreement to hire Conrad?’ I asked. My voice rumbled round the room, deep and older-sounding than my years. Sometimes my voice intimidated people on my behalf.
‘Yeah,’ Kevin said.
‘And he found out about Barrett’s background within a few hours of looking around for it. Has he found out where Barrett or his crew are now?’
‘He says not yet,’ Kevin said, ‘but he’s looking around for them with everything he’s got.’
‘Kicking up a storm, in other words,’ Billy said. It was a small and ordinary voice, made to sound higher and lighter by the impression mine made. A fact I kind of liked.
‘There isn’t anyone in the business who isn’t going to see his boys stomping around the city,’ Conn said. ‘Gonna make sure every bastard knows that he’s the man now.’
‘Advertising it won’t get him far,’ Mikey said.
‘He find out anything else about Barrett?’ I asked.
‘All he told me was that his connections down there knew the name, respected it, didn’t know that he was up here.’
‘So Lafferty doesn’t know if Barrett’s working for anyone or just decided to come up here on a whim – fancied the weather or something?’ I asked.
‘You’re thinking about Don Park?’ Conn asked.
Damn right I was. Everyone was thinking of Don Park and someone needed to say it. Wouldn’t be the first time he tried to use a new name to attack us. He’d done it before: picked up a young guy that was looking for a way into the business and used him as a front, attacking us on our own patch to try and take business. Park was smart and a threat, and we needed to talk about that.
‘Could be Park,’ Marty said. ‘I already talked to a contact I have in MacArthur’s organization. Senior contact, mind, no bullshit. MacArthur isn’t involved, but that doesn’t mean fuck-all for Don Park. Park’s pulling jobs by himself these days, only reporting them to MacArthur when they’re done. MacArthur’s scared, close to the end of the rope.’
Alex MacArthur ran a major organization in the city, bigger than Jamieson’s but flabby. MacArthur was old, coughing up a lung every time he took a step, so the story went. Don Park was young and ambitious. He had been a rising star for MacArthur. Now he was morphing into a treacherous successor. The best ones always do.
‘We need to find out if Park’s involved then,’ Kevin said. ‘Doesn’t change anything if he is. Priority is finding Barrett and putting an end to him. In that regard we have to back Lafferty unless Peter says otherwise.’
We were all a toxic mix of misery, anger and impotence leaving that meeting. Everyone knew that this was Lafferty trying to put himself at the front and marginalize everyone else involved in the running of the organization; there was no secret to that. If you call everyone to a meeting in your office and make demands for their support then you’ve blown any secret out of the water. But Lafferty was smart enough to wait until he had a damn good reason to claim support, which was why it was important that we got to Barrett before he did. If he could clean up the mess then he would be untouchable, at least until Jamieson came out.
That was the real issue here. Lafferty was playing for leadership until Jamieson got out, but what happened then? Having split leadership was all part of Jamieson’s plan to make sure nobody got too big for their boots before he got out. If Lafferty changed the equation then his release became an unpredictable event. Nobody wanted unpredictable. Unpredictable was invariably trouble.
I walked down to my car with Ronnie and we stood on the street for a few minutes, talking. Conn was giving Mikey a lift home. Billy, Kevin and Carmichael had already gone and Marty was staying in the flat for the night. I think his plan was to get as drunk as possible in there and see if the morning would calm his fury.
‘I know it’s loose change,’ Ronnie said to me. ‘But about the stuff they were saying in the meeting about businesses doing their share . . .’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘They’re talking about businesses like Owen’s shop, aren’t they? Small businesses, legit businesses.’
I nodded and said, ‘Yeah, they are. I wouldn’t worry too much about it though. There’s no way Jamieson’s going to let them start harassing small legit businesses into cleaning money through them. He’s far too smart for that. He needs some legit businesses to clean money through, but he needs some to just be legit businesses so he can explain income. That doesn’t change.’
‘But if Lafferty’s pulling the strings . . .’
‘If Lafferty’s pulling the strings then you and me will end up being hung from them anyway,’ I said. I wasn’t looking to depress the boy, but he had to know where this was going. ‘If Lafferty gets any amount of real control then it’s going to be Lafferty’s boys that get to do all the meaningful work. You and me might find work as low-level muscle, debt collection and bullshit like that, but the whole security-consultant cover will go to someone else, someone close to Lafferty. We’ll be pushed down the chain or pushed off it altogether.’
He sighed loudly, making a show of what a bad thing that might be, but it was as skilled a performance as Lafferty’s. I could see that he quite liked the idea of being pushed out of the business, of having to go legit. It would
be an escape route back to a safe life.
‘How much do the Turners owe Kevin?’ I asked, just to drag him back to horrible reality.
‘He bought a twenty-grand stake in the shop. He owns it; they’re not paying him back. It’s just a minority stake though; I mean, they still run the business.’
I looked at him and raised my eyebrows, thinking that I must have taught him a lesson about ownership in the industry by now. Apparently not. ‘The second they let someone from an organization take a share in their business, they stopped running it. Not like they can do anything to stop Kevin doing whatever he wants with it.’
‘But Kevin doesn’t want to put pressure on them though, does he?’ There was naive hope in his voice.
‘No, he doesn’t,’ I said, ‘but I don’t know how much that’s going to matter. Not if Lafferty gets his way.’
It was a suitably horrible way to end the day, so I drove back home. It was late when I got in, pushing past midnight. I checked for messages and breathed out when there were none. There would be plenty coming, I was pretty damn sure. People were starting to make moves that were all about sending messages.
Lafferty had men out there looking for Barrett and this Nasty gunman of his, and that was going to mean blood. You hold yourself up in front of the organization as a man who defends his people and you bloody well better come up with a result. This was a dangerous game for Lafferty too, and that was where I dared to get a little bit hopeful. You take any gamble as big as this and you can lose. We could still knock Lafferty down on his arse. Not to harm him; he was still profitable to the organization. There was a route out of this that kept the status quo. We find Barrett and deal with him and his crew before Lafferty can get Conrad on the job. We make it clear that we handled it for Lafferty and now that he has what he wanted, it’s time to play nice. If he gets what he wants from us rather than getting it for himself then it holds him firmly in place. Holds him where Jamieson should want him.
I went to bed with all that shit running through my head, so that’s my excuse for not sleeping that night. Three, three and a half hours altogether, perhaps. Yet another night of not sleeping well. Not because of the things I’d seen or done in my life. They ran through my mind when I was awake, not when I was sleeping. I was always waking up growling at the darkness, scared of the things I was yet to do.
11
Being awake early let me get to work early, which just ensured I had even more time to get slowly pissed off with the world. Nobody seemed to know anything at all about Adrian Barrett or Jawad Nasif or any other member of the crew Barrett had brought up with him. They were invisible men, drifting silently through this city.
Nobody would tell me a thing about them, and that got me worried. People tell me things, because they know the cost of silence if I find out that they’ve been holding back. If they were more scared of Barrett than they were of me then Barrett was a man to worry about. It had to be fear. There were people in this city who knew something about him.
Me and Ronnie stumbled through the morning, powered by bacon rolls and watery tea, clearing as much of our list as we could. Properties where a crew coming in from outside might hide. We were at the point where we had ruled out the idea of the Barrett crew staying in any hotel or B & B that we could think of. Everywhere was too public, too easy for them to be spotted. That meant they had a place or places of their own in the city. Made more sense if you were willing to buy into the idea that they were here for the long haul, and that they had people from the city helping them.
‘What now?’ Ronnie asked me.
‘Now you go pay a visit to Brendan Thorne and have a conversation about housing stock, who has what, that sort of thing.’
‘And you?’
‘And I have a meeting of my own I have to go to.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah,’ I said, giving him a look that told him the questions ended round about here. He needed to understand that not every meeting I had needed his permission, or even his awareness.
I headed over to the place on George Square Zara had said to meet her. I was nervous about it – no shame in admitting that. I hadn’t seen her in so long, didn’t want her back in my life, knew she was poison to me, but couldn’t stop myself being excited. Being a man of reasonable good sense I then couldn’t stop myself from being angry with that excitement.
She was sitting at a little table towards the back of the busy little place when I went in. It was the kind of narrow restaurant designed to make tall and broad men like me look epically clumsy. The tables were all too close together, the chairs were all too big for the little square tables. It was all a good way of making a small place seem busy, but it guaranteed that I bumped into two chairs and stood on some poor woman’s handbag on my way to Zara. I already disliked the place by the time I sat down.
Zara was sitting there, looking like a thinner version of the girl I had known. Her cheekbones stood out more; her lips looked a little thinner and her eyes a little bigger. Her hair was the same as I remembered, dark and just past her shoulders. And she was still the same Zara, still beautiful and just a little too obviously dangerous for most.
She was one of the few people I had ever been close to. Properly close, in an emotional sense. I don’t have a lot of emotion to spread around, so very few people get a share. I make a point of keeping my distance. Create a sense that I exist a split second and a million miles away from everyone else, that nothing in the world the rest of you live in could intrude on the one I occupy and dominate. I want to be just out of reach, especially for people as dangerous as Zara. And then, for a little while, when she was pregnant with Rebecca, she crossed the gap into my world. That was when we connected, when we really had something special. It had to end though, when she had Rebecca. There’s only room for one other person in my world, and from that moment on it would always be our daughter. I pushed Zara back out, and I’d been pushing her further and further away ever since. I thought I’d done a good job of that, until I saw her sitting there waiting for me.
‘Nate,’ she said when I sat down. ‘You haven’t changed a bit.’
Not entirely true, but truth was a barrier Zara had long since hurdled over. I was a little greyer, maybe a little broader in the gut than I was last time we met. The lines on my face that had started digging in when I was still in my mid twenties were deeper than ever. But I had a look that aged well, so her lie was at least living on the same street as the truth.
I reached into my pocket and pulled out a slip of paper, passing it across the table to her, beside the bowl of soup she’d ordered. ‘That’s all the details you’ll need to empty the account. Got as good a price as possible for what you gave me.’ I said it cold and businesslike, making sure she got the message early and clear.
She reached out and pulled the paper across the table, glanced at the bank name and the sequence of numbers on it, and put it into her bag. ‘Thanks. I do appreciate it, Nate. I know you didn’t need to help me.’
That, right there, was the moment that the last grain of trust between us put on its coat and left the building. Zara being nice and appreciative was not Zara. I looked at her with a stern expression, waiting for her to say something reassuringly sarcastic.
‘What?’ was all she could come up with.
‘Is that it then? Are we done?’
She looked disgusted, a look she wore with the kind of perfection only practice can bring. ‘You’re that desperate to get away from me, huh?’
‘I’m busy.’
‘Sure you are; you always were. Cleaning the blood out of the grooves in your boots, wiping other people’s skin off your knuckles. Always so busy. You can’t even manage one conversation?’
There she was, the good old Zara I had expected. ‘If you have nothing else to say then I don’t,’ I told her.
She smiled that wry little smile of hers. ‘Always the enigma, playing your cards close to your chest. I’d like to know how my daughter has been, seeing as my
parents enjoy speaking to me about as much as you do.’
‘She’s fine,’ I said, then decided it was only decent to say a little more. ‘She’s into photography at the moment, however long that’ll last. Enjoying school, but she’s smart enough to enjoy it.’ That was as much as I would commit to saying; anything more and it might feel like an invitation for her to ask more.
In fact, it was about as much of a conversation as she and I needed to have, and I was ready to get up and leave. She could see me glancing at the door, trying to work out a way of saying goodbye that was polite but firm.
‘So who are you working for these days?’ she asked me, looking down at the table so that we couldn’t make eye contact.
That meant that my withering look in response was entirely wasted, which was a shame because it was a good one. The kind that makes tough men squeeze their lips together to prevent another stupid word squeaking out. I said nothing, kept looking at her until she had no choice but to look up to make sure I was still there. When she did I held her eye until she shrugged and looked back down at the table.
‘You still want to keep everything to yourself then,’ she said. ‘Good to know you haven’t changed; still hiding yourself from the world.’
‘Still hiding myself from you.’
She looked up at me and smiled. Sneered, actually, might be the better word for it. Trying to make it seem like she could never respect a supposed tough guy who hid himself from little old her, but that was bull. Whatever else she thought of me, she thought I was respectably tough. I started to get up, pretty sure that we’d reached the inevitable dead end that any conversation between us always arrived at.
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