‘Sure I can, yeah. I have the stock and access to much more if needed. I’ll always make sure the organization is as well supplied as it can possibly be.’
I nodded and didn’t say anything else because there was nothing else I trusted myself to say. He was on board, which was what Lafferty wanted, but we both knew he had no place with us. It made no sense to have a gun dealer tied to us, or have our gunmen tied to a single gun dealer. This whole thing was a result of bad leadership. The sort of bad leadership that couldn’t last.
‘One thing,’ I said as I got to my feet. ‘You will be dealing exclusively with us. You will not sell a single piece to a single other person at any point in time. If I find out that you have, I will deal with you the way I deal with anyone who betrays this organization. No warnings, no second chances. It’s us and it’s no one else. There is nothing you or your wife can possibly do that’s going to get me under your thumb, you understand?’
His mouth was a little open, his face a little red. He stood up to try and match me and realized he would have been better sitting down. He looked up at me, working up the best pious impression he could manage.
‘You certainly don’t have to worry about that sort of thing with me, Nate. I can tell you now, I’m delighted to be working with the organization and I won’t sell a single thing to anyone else. Not a thing. You have my word.’
I’ve blown things out my nose that meant more to me than his word, but I nodded anyway. At the very least I’d denied him the opportunity to pretend that he hadn’t been warned. He might have been welcomed into the organization by Lafferty and Marty, but he was still on probation with me and there he would stay until I could find an excuse to get rid of him.
There’s a sense of relief when you leave a place you wish you’d never gone to, and leaving that house gave me a rush of it. That was a sad little marriage standing on the brink of collapse and I didn’t want to get the dirt of it on my clothes. Instead I went home and killed a little time before I called Ronnie.
Couple of hours had ticked away since I’d last called him, so I tried again.
‘You back from your farmhouse?’
‘Yeah.’
‘And?’ I knew he’d have called if they’d found anything.
‘And it was a farmhouse with no one in it. Didn’t look like anyone had been living there for a while.’
‘What’s the story of it?’
‘Old house, couple of barns, nothing alive in any of them. House was recently renovated; one of the barns was new. Farmer overspent, went tits up, owned by the bank or someone now. We went round it carefully; place had no signs of being used. None at all.’
I trusted Conn and Mikey to make that judgement. An empty place, not scrubbed so clean it becomes suspicious. They would know what signs to look for.
‘How did you get on with Garvey?’ he asked me.
‘Waste of time,’ I said. ‘The guy already knew he was going to be working for us; I was just there to make it look official.’
‘So what now?’
‘We keep looking, is what now. Come round and pick me up. We’ll go out and look at a few places. You talk to Thorne like I asked?’
‘Yeah, he gave me a few addresses, but, I don’t know, he didn’t seem confident. He reckons there are better ways of putting people up than that.’
‘Oh?’
‘Yeah, caravans and empty buildings that never come on the market. All the places he had for me were places he knew were available recently, but he reckons they’ll be somewhere that was never available in the first place. Places we have are too obvious.’
I sighed. ‘I know it’s obvious, but we still have to check them. If we don’t and it turns out they’re there we look ridiculous. This is donkey work. It has to be done and we’re not above it. Come round and get me; we’ll have a look at some of those addresses he gave you.’
I didn’t want to be short with the boy, but he was making this harder than it needed to be. Kids like Ronnie always wanted to go looking for the glamorous long shot and ignore the simple, obvious stuff, and I could understand that. It seemed implausible that Barrett would have his crew hidden away in an easy-to-find place, a hotel or a large house available for rent, but that missed another obvious point. Barrett and his crew couldn’t stay hidden forever; they needed to come out into the world and be seen on the streets if they wanted to maintain the credibility they’d built so far. There was no need for a clever hiding place when you had no intention of staying hidden.
13
It was after ten o’clock at night. We’d had no joy finding even a hint of Barrett and his crew, so my mood hadn’t improved any. The clock was ticking down to the moment when that bunch of English bastards stepped out of the darkness and into the spotlight. That moment was going to be failure for me. The security consultant. Men like Lafferty would accuse me of letting this happen. Goes without saying that the moment they stepped out was the best chance we would get to take a shot at them. A chance to wipe them out. But that didn’t matter: it was about perception. The perception would be that I’d failed. That the organization was weak and hadn’t dealt with them.
I had just gotten in, gone into the kitchen to get myself something to eat. Hadn’t eaten a proper meal all day. My stomach was rumbling and the tiredness was sitting heavily in the back of my head somewhere. I would have relished the chance of a good night’s sleep. Not much chance of that anyway. The phone started ringing in the living room.
The mobile number that showed up on the screen was new to me. No record of it in the menu, no record of it in my memory. Some numbers I don’t give a name to on the menu screen; don’t want other people seeing. I answered.
‘Hello, is that Nate Colgan?’ A well-educated version of a local accent, all the edges sanded down. I didn’t know who I was talking to.
‘It is.’ Of course it was. Who did he think he had called?
‘Is now a good time to talk?’
I still didn’t know who I was talking to. ‘As good a time as any.’
‘This is Charles Simpson. I wanted to make sure that you were at home. Peter would like to have a conversation with you. Will you be at home for the next hour or so?’
‘Yes, I will,’ I said, all of a sudden taking the phone call seriously.
‘Excellent. I’ll let him know.’
Simpson hung up, and left me alone with a bundle of unpleasant thoughts. First thought was about the trouble they were going to, setting this call up. Jamieson would tell someone in the prison, presumably an officer, that he wanted to call me. The officer would alert Simpson, who was Peter’s lawyer, and he’d make sure I was available so that Jamieson didn’t waste his time. He wouldn’t be calling on some prison phone either; he had his own mobile in there.
None of that mattered much. What mattered was that Jamieson was about to call me. First time since I’d become his organization’s security consultant. First time since I became his organization’s muscle of choice. This was going to be about Lee Christie. Or Angus Lafferty, to be more accurate. Christie now existed only as a pawn in the Lafferty game. This could very easily be a phone call designed to put pressure on me.
Peter Jamieson, the boss, sitting in his grotty wee cell, waiting for clearance to make a phone call to me. It was almost a comic picture. That man, with all his influence, all his money, sitting there waiting for some bent prison officer to tell him he had fifteen uninterrupted minutes to get the call out of the way. Made me feel small, that this guy was still so much more powerful than me. That’s the business though. Always was. The walls of a prison don’t determine whether you’re in charge or not; the people on the outside decide that.
I knew about his cellmate, a guy called Seth Miller. He was one of ours. Had been loosely tied to us when he was on the outside. Got sent down for something that had nothing to do with us, battering a guy in a pub I think. He wasn’t much of a criminal, but he was loyal and Jamieson needed someone loyal to share a cell with him. Needed someon
e who could act as his bodyguard as well. Miller wouldn’t be the only one. Jamieson needed as many people as possible looking out for him while he was in Barlinnie. It wouldn’t be long before they moved him somewhere softer, and we would have to get an entirely new bunch of people to look out for him.
He was a sitting duck in there. Just needed one arsehole working for a rival to get at him, and he might never come back out. Look at it this way: if we had a bunch of people on his block to look out for him, what were the chances that other organizations had their own people there? So we had a few prisoners taking money from us to play defence for Jamieson. We also had three different officers on the payroll, trying to cover as many shifts as possible. One of them had been on the payroll for ages, long before Jamieson went inside. Another had been an easy pickup. The third had taken some work to persuade. I had been involved in that, before I was officially on the books. Had to go to his house to scare him into it, in the end. Dirty work, but it was effective. That made three prison employees on the books.
The phone started ringing, thank Christ. I had spent too long sitting there, phone on the arm of the chair, waiting for him.
‘Nate, this is Peter. This a good time to talk?’ Talking a little more quietly than usual. This was a man from whose lips confidence poured with every sentence.
‘Yeah, sure.’
‘Any progress being made with this Christie killing and Barrett?’
This would have been going through his mind since he heard about it. Sitting in a jail cell, trying to work out a strategy for an organization that was always on the other side of the wall. It was a hard way to run a business, even if it wasn’t impossible.
‘Not much in the way of progress, no. Haven’t managed to find Barrett or his crew, although my theory is that they’re hiding in plain sight. They have to come into the open anyway to make this push stick, and I figure they’ll want to do that soon.’
‘Do it on their terms?’
‘Exactly. They jump into the open before we push them. Hunting them down might not even be the best use of our time. Might be better to focus on shoring things up so when they do emerge we can deal with them better.’
‘Mm. I think at this point you got to follow the lead Angus gives you.’
‘Sure.’
Wasn’t what I hoped to hear from him. Look, everyone questions the wisdom of their superiors. It happens even when the boss is on the outside. Back in his office above the club, giving out orders with his usual charm. When he’s inside, that’s when it becomes very easy for people to think he’s losing his grip. That his judgement’s screwed because he can’t see what’s really happening on the street any more. Very little he can do to combat that, other than hire guys like me to throw his weight around for him.
Thing about Jamieson was that he was a married man with two kids, a family man. His wife’s name was Julia, tidy-looking woman in her late thirties, early forties. They had two kids. Twelve-year-old girl called Scarlett and a fifteen-year-old boy called Jordan. That was irrelevant when he was on the outside. On the outside he had the time to look after his family, hang out with his kids, be the regular husband and father. Now he was on the inside, people would start to wonder. Was he spending all his time in there missing his kids, having dreams about his wife? Was he even thinking about the business at all? Stupid. A man like Jamieson was always going to spend more time thinking about the business, but it was something else for people to consider a weakness.
‘What about Angus? How has he been handling all this?’ Jamieson asked me.
That question was so fucking loaded. I took a few seconds before I spoke a word. It was the only reason he had called, obviously. I didn’t know Jamieson all that well. Had met him a few times, knew plenty about him, but I wasn’t close enough to answer that question with total honesty. I wasn’t close enough to trust his motives when he asked it.
‘Well, I guess he’s been handling it how you would expect,’ was what I said. ‘He lost a man. He’s concerned about how that makes him look, he’s lashing out a bit. Feels like he has to take charge of the issue.’
‘Just this issue?’
‘Seems like he’s moving towards some sort of leadership role, but that’s just how it looks from where I’m standing. I don’t know – time might tell a different story.’
‘What makes you think that now?’
He wasn’t making this easy for me. He was trying to cajole me into saying things I didn’t want to say. I paused for another few seconds, wasting the credit on his mobile. Him talking in that low tone, making sure his voice didn’t carry beyond the cell. Talking loud enough for his cellmate to hear, but knowing that Miller had been told to keep his ears shut during all phone calls. He was putting me in a spot here and that was tough shit on me; I was his employee and he wanted my opinion. I decided to give it to him. Let him have the truth and react however he wanted, even if it meant me disagreeing with things he’d already agreed to. He needed people to tell him that mistakes were being made on the outside.
‘He’s hiring people that, I don’t know, don’t seem like good hires. Hiring Garvey I think is a mistake. We shouldn’t be tying our man to a single supplier, shouldn’t be tying ourselves to Garvey like this. Hiring Russell Conrad I don’t know about. Conrad’s fine – I have no complaint about him. Worked with him once before; he was fine. It just feels like Lafferty’s trying to make decisions that only a leader would make. He wants people to see him as the man in charge.’
There wasn’t even a second between me stopping and Jamieson starting. ‘Okay. I want you to do something for me, Nate. I want you to keep both eyes on Angus. You’ll be heavily involved in this, I’ve made sure of that, and you’ll need to be careful that Barrett and his mob don’t get the better of us. If they’re working with Don Park then it could get complicated fast, but I want you to focus on Angus and what he does, keep me up to date with it.’
‘Sure.’
‘All right, Nate. It was good talking to you. Any time you need to talk to me, get in touch with Simpson.’
That was the end of the conversation. I said goodbye and hung up. Simpson, I was sure, was making a nice little bundle out of being Jamieson’s middleman at the moment. Good luck to him. I pictured Jamieson, hiding his mobile, getting into his bunk for the night. It was actually rather sad. Him sitting there, not able to change the world around him like he always had before.
I went and got something to eat. I wasn’t going to sleep, not now. My mind was racing. That phone call had cleared a few things up. Made me feel a little bit better about Jamieson and his grasp on power. He knew what Lafferty was playing at. Me keeping my eyes on Lafferty was part of that. Jamieson could see the threat and he wanted me, and probably a whole scrum of others, watching for it as well. Fine, that was a good thing. The boss was aware. But it also meant the threat from Lafferty was real, and that worried me. If Lafferty was making a run at leadership, no matter how half-arsed it was, it was going to weaken us. Can’t defend yourself against attacks from other organizations when you’re fighting against people inside your own.
That had been one miserable fucking day. Zara, sitting in that restaurant. I hadn’t mentioned her to Jamieson, you’ll have noticed. Garvey and his wife. What a pair of bloody clowns they were, and now Garvey was inside the organization. Now this call from Jamieson. And I still hadn’t found Barrett.
14
One good thing about not sleeping is that I always get an early start. Actually, I should say the only good thing about not sleeping. I was exhausted, and exhaustion was going to push me into making mistakes. This wasn’t going to get any better. Not with Zara in the city. Been a long time since I woke up thinking of her. I showered and got myself something to eat, but it was still only half seven.
I called Ronnie. He was my junior, so if I was up then he should be up. The phone rang and rang. I was happy to wait.
‘Hello?’ Confused that anyone would have the temerity to phone him that early in the mo
rning. His girlfriend, Esther, worked in an office, so I figured she would be getting up soon anyway.
‘We need to split up this morning, get the last of that list Thorne gave you done. I’ll do the bottom half; you do the top, all right? Give me a call when you’re nearly done. If you see anything that looks suspicious, call me straight away. Don’t go in anywhere on your own unless you’re sure it’s clear.’
He mumbled something, cleared his throat and said, ‘Yeah, all right.’
‘Good,’ I said, and I hung up.
There was movement in the background of the phone call, his girlfriend getting out of bed presumably. I was a little jealous of him, I’ll admit that. My thoughts drifted to Kelly. I could have that. There could be someone rolling out of my bed after early-morning phone calls. It was a pretty thought, but I couldn’t have pretty things in my life. You care a damn about a woman then you keep her as far away from this life as possible.
I went back upstairs, used the bathroom. Didn’t know when I’d get back home and I wasn’t a huge fan of other people’s toilets. I did what I always do when I’m upstairs: I took a good look up and down the street from the upstairs window. The street curves, so you can’t see all the way along, but you can see far enough. You can see, for example, when there’s a car parked across the street, the figure of a man in the driver’s seat. The red car was facing away from the house, but he’d have had a view of the front door in his mirror.
I didn’t know who it was, not for sure. Someone who wasn’t doing a brilliant job of hiding, probably not making much effort. So someone who didn’t care if they were seen. Intimidation tactic? Nah, I wasn’t buying that. You don’t intimidate me by parking down the road from my house, everyone knows that. So someone spying. Someone who wanted to know what I was doing. Maybe someone who wanted to talk to me. Only one way to find out who. Confront the situation.
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