My car was parked right in front of my house. I got in and started to drive, heading for a house in the middle of the list. I had a key for this one, given to Ronnie by Brendan Thorne. They wouldn’t be there, I was sure of it, but I wanted a house I could get into. The red car followed. It was trying to stay back out of view, I could tell that much. Hoping I wouldn’t spot it. Maybe it was someone who didn’t want to be seen, someone who was just very bad at his job. He was alone, which was a comfort. One on one I fancied my chances against anyone.
The house I was looking for was on a residential street, council houses in bunches of four down either side of the road. I stopped outside it; the red car went past and stopped at the bottom of the street. Out of the car. The rain was falling down on me. Through the wobbly gate and up the chipped and broken front path, through a noticeably shabby garden. Hard to be noticeably shabby on this street. I had already seen that there were no curtains on any of the rooms in the house: this place was empty. I took the front-door key from my pocket, slipped it into the lock and went inside.
I went through to the living room; the place was a mess. Didn’t matter to me. I was looking sideways out of the window, watching him come up the front path. DI Fisher. The bastard. He was a good cop, we all knew it. Not all bluff and bullshit like a lot of them. He was no media whore either, performing for the press. Just a guy who wouldn’t give up. If he’d been on our side of the fence, he’d have been a very rich man. He looked ruffled, getting soaked in the rain chasing after me. Let him get soaked. I was going to check every room in the house before I opened the front door again. Might as well strike that house off the list while I was at it.
I stomped around upstairs and down, made sure nobody had been in the place for a long time. Then I went and opened the front door. I squared my shoulders and puffed out my chest, made sure I filled the doorframe. Fisher was standing next to the door, back against the wall, trying to avoid the rain. Being a man of this city, his first instinct when faced with someone so big and intimidating was to look for ways to cut me down.
‘Mr Colgan,’ he said, hoping he was catching me off guard.
I turned and looked at him casually, a bit of a smile that didn’t belong on a face like mine. ‘DI Fisher,’ I said. ‘Fancy meeting you here.’
‘You visiting a friend?’ he asked me.
‘Not exactly.’
‘So just what exactly were you doing visiting this empty house first thing in the morning?’
I didn’t say anything.
‘Shall we go back inside and have a wee look around?’ he asked. He was hoping that there was something in there that incriminated me.
The ease with which I turned and unlocked the door again should have told him that there was nothing inside the house for him to get excited about. Took guts for him. A cop walking into an empty house with a man like me. I could have done anything I wanted to him in there. But he knew I was too smart to play silly buggers. I wasn’t ever going to attack a cop.
The house was as cold inside as out. No carpets on the floors, not a stick of furniture, rubbish strewn on the bare floors. Fisher walked around the three rooms that constituted the downstairs and found absolutely nothing. Hoping against hope. He knew there would be nothing upstairs, and searching this place wasn’t why he was here. Fisher stopped in the kitchen, leaned back against the sink. I stood in the doorway, watching him, waiting for him to take the lead. He was the one following me; he had to speak first.
‘So what were you doing here?’ he asked me, as a matter of boring routine.
‘Not a damn thing,’ I said, my voice a rumble that sounded more threatening than it meant to. Hopefully he realized that, didn’t think I was trying to intimidate him.
‘You just happened to have a key.’
‘I’m thinking of moving, got a key from a friend, had a look.’
‘Going to put an offer in?’ he asked me.
‘Don’t think so.’
That was about as much bullshit as either of us had the appetite for. It was time to get down to the business that had led him to this dump in my wake.
‘So you and your lot are looking for Adrian Barrett, is that it?’ he asked.
No reaction, not even a flicker. I had been around too long to give anything away for free. ‘I would guess a lot of people are looking for him,’ I said to him. ‘I should think your mob are looking for him too.’
‘You think so? Why would we be looking for him?’
‘Man turns up looking to deal drugs on your patch; I would hope you might take some interest in that.’
He nodded a little, but neither of us was thinking about Barrett’s drug deals. ‘And Lee Christie?’ he asked.
‘Man gets shot dead, I would think you’d be investigating that anyway,’ I said with a barely interested shrug. I wasn’t going to push him on this. Would be nice if the police took Barrett off the streets for us, but it would be better if we did it ourselves. ‘If that leads you to Barrett then that’s your business.’
‘And you wouldn’t be surprised if it did?’
‘Nothing much surprises me any more,’ I said. I think he believed me.
This was waltzing in circles and neither of us were eloquent verbal dancers. I looked at him, watched him stare right back at me, held his eye until he looked away.
‘I know your lot are going to go to war with Barrett and his people, and I want you to think again,’ he said. He wasn’t begging. No way in hell a man as proud as him would beg, but he was exercising his right to ask.
One massive thought was crashing to the front of my mind. ‘You know where he is, don’t you?’ I asked. Kept my tone calm, polite, disinterested.
He nodded. ‘I know who he’s with too.’
‘Meaning?’
He looked me in the eye and managed to hold it this time. ‘He didn’t come up the road on his own; he had someone from here to lead him on. The mother of your child.’
I didn’t react. It wasn’t a challenge for a man with my practice to stay dead-eyed. I spent the better part of my professional life making sure my expression didn’t betray me, so this was nothing. It wasn’t a surprise, let’s face it, but I didn’t want him knowing I already knew. Never confirm your knowledge to a cop.
‘You’re sure of that?’ I asked.
‘I’ve seen her with him. Seen him without her as well. Him and most of his crew went to a meeting yesterday afternoon; got a good look at them.’
There was a terribly stupid question I was obligated to ask. ‘Where are they?’
He smiled at me and I kept my face hard. ‘If they were behind the Christie killing then we’ll get them,’ he said, and ignored the doubting expression I shot back in return. ‘But if you go after Barrett then you know what’s going to happen to Zara. She becomes a bargaining chip that he can use against you.’ I went for a look of dismissal this time. ‘You think he won’t? And you think that when he does you’ll just blow it off? She’s the mother of your child. How are you going to explain it to your daughter when she finds out? And she will, won’t she?’
Maybe a little bit of annoyance crept onto my face at that point, I’ll admit it. A little victory for Fisher. I wasn’t used to being spoken to that way. Most people had more sense of self-preservation than to challenge me.
‘So what do you want from me?’ I asked. He hadn’t hunted me down to share anything he’d said so far.
‘I want you to do what you can to make sure this doesn’t end with bodies all over my city. If this turns into something big then Zara is very likely to suffer for that. I don’t want that and I don’t think you do either. You’re no one’s halfwit; you know that settling this my way works out much better for you. If Barrett and his men killed Christie, and I think they did, then I can nail the lot of them.’
I stood in the doorway, looking down at the floor, thinking it over. Wasn’t much to think about: he was asking me to help him avoid serious trouble. It was that rare occasion when Nate Colgan and DI Mich
ael Fisher probably wanted the same thing.
‘You won’t tell me where they are?’
‘You know I won’t,’ he said.
‘Then tell me who they are. We know Barrett, we know his gunman, Nasty, but that’s it. I can’t find out anything that might help you if I don’t know who I’m looking for.’
This was a wrench for him. Every instinct in his body would be telling him to clam up, say nothing to a thug like me. But he knew I had a better chance of finding out the right info to lock them up than he did, given the corners I could cut. Take any help you can get, because there isn’t much going around.
‘Adrian Barrett, goes by the nickname Dyne. Jawad Nasif, goes by Nasty. There’s another guy, we figure him for Barrett’s right-hand man, name of Elliott Parker. Those three are skin tight – been together for years. Parker and Barrett since they were kids, Nasif with them at least since they started getting noticed down south more than a decade ago. These three won’t be broken apart. Used to be a fourth member of their group but he’s inside on dealing charges, been out of the picture for a couple of years.’
‘That it?’ I asked him. ‘Just the three of them?’
‘They’ve got another two with them who seem to be muscle. One of them we’ve ID’d as Keith Henson, twenty-seven, from the Midlands, got a record as long as a basketball player’s arm. The other one we haven’t pegged yet, but he doesn’t seem to be anything more than another grunt. He’s not local either, I know that. They’ll have brought him up with them. It’s a tight group. They’ve got your little Zara with them; she seems to belong to Barrett himself. There’s another girl we haven’t identified either; she seems to be with Parker.’
‘So they have seven bodies at the most, only three with experience at any sort of level?’
He gave me a look that said he didn’t like my last sentence. ‘They have as much as they need,’ he said.
I gave him a look that was designed to tell him he was wrong. His theory, I can only guess having not asked, was that they only needed the small number to get started; once they had a name here they could start spending some money on hiring locals. That might seem to an outsider like the common-sense way to do it anyway. It wasn’t.
A guy like Barrett needed more than the little help he had brought if he wanted to come into a city like this and make a splash. He needed someone established to help him out, point him in all the right directions. One wrong turn and he was buggered. Zara wasn’t an experienced guide to the back-streets. If he had a big crew then maybe he could do it himself, maybe. With a crew that small he wasn’t here working an angle of his own: he was here to work for someone else. Finding out who had just leapt to the top of my list of favourite pastimes.
‘Promise me,’ Fisher said, ‘that you won’t go racing into some street war with anyone, and I can promise you that Zara Cope gets out of this unscathed.’
‘Your promises aren’t worth any more than mine are,’ I said. ‘Neither of us have any control over this. But I’ll do what I can to avoid a war.’
I turned and walked out of the house, not bothering to lock the door behind me. I needed the confusion to settle so I could work out what all this meant. Got into my car and started driving, not going anywhere in particular. Barrett was working for someone in the city. That meant Barrett stopped being the priority. He mattered, of course he did, but he had just become a little less important. Barrett was being brought in to work this as an outsider, and when it was over he would disappear. The person who hired him, that was the person that mattered.
My phone started ringing as I was driving. I assumed Ronnie. It rang off before I could find a place to park. I wasn’t going to get myself pulled over for using the phone while driving, I wasn’t that daft. Looked at the screen. There’s a wall that you build between your work and the rest of your life. It keeps things separate, keeps the rest of your life safe, you hope. Then someone knocks a hole in the wall. The call was from Zara’s mother.
15
It was agreed by all parties, very early on, that Zara’s parents were the best people to raise our daughter. Zara couldn’t do it. Wouldn’t do it, I suppose. She was young; she hadn’t wanted a kid in the first place. Dumping Becky on her parents was a way out for her. Told herself she was doing the right thing for the kid. I did the same. I could have taken Becky. I was making more money than Gordon and Mary, Zara’s parents. I was older than Zara, wiser to the challenges of parenthood. Might be why I chickened out as well. I tell myself it was because I wanted what was best for my daughter, and living with me could never be the best. She would never be safe. She would grow up in an unreliable, violent environment, and that was totally wrong. But I could have walked away from the business for her. I didn’t. I was a coward, scared of the responsibility.
Rebecca came and stayed with me every weekend. Whenever her grandparents went on holiday I had her, and every year we took a short holiday together as well. I was a big part of her life. A safe part. It was as much as I was able to be.
When I saw the name on the screen, I felt nervous. First time in all this. Wasn’t nervous about Lee Christie getting knocked off, or Barrett and his lot. I was annoyed about a lot of things, wary, but this call had me scared. What if Zara had been in touch with her parents? Had been in touch with Rebecca? Becky never talked about her mother, didn’t ever seem interested, but that would change if Zara was on the scene. It could change things dramatically. I called back.
‘Hi Mary. You were calling? I was on the road, couldn’t answer.’ I tried to sound casual and hoped she’d sound the same.
‘Oh, I’m sorry, Nate. Is now a bad time for you?’ She sounded her usual self.
‘No, go on.’
‘I’m needing a favour from you, Nate. Becky’s off school today; she was sick in the morning. It’s nothing serious, just a bug. Problem is that Gordon has a doctor’s appointment at twelve. Normally we’d put her with our neighbour, but she asked if I would call you first.’
‘You drop her off at my place; I’d love to have her for lunch. You can pick her up when you’re done.’
‘Oh thanks, Nate. You’re a godsend.’
‘How is Gordon?’
She lowered her voice. ‘Well, he’s managing to stay on top of it; this is just a check-up. It’s not easy though.’
There was something wrong with Gordon’s heart. Not in the way there was something wrong with mine. He had a condition and every time I spoke to Mary she was more concerned about it. The way she was talking, there was a chance Gordon didn’t have an awful lot longer in this world. Maybe she was exaggerating; she did that a lot. But he had stopped driving nearly a year ago, so she had to drive him everywhere. That was why he couldn’t go to the doctor’s on his own.
Didn’t bother me that I’d miss a couple of hours’ work to be with Becky. She was worth putting a little burden onto other people for. At the time I figured that was the reason I had gone and hired Ronnie. Thought about that as I drove home. Why had I hired the boy? Was it really so that I could spend more time with Becky? Or because I knew working full-time for Jamieson would give me more work?
They arrived at about half eleven. I saw them coming, opened the front door. I smiled down at Becky; she was pale and sickly-looking.
‘They made me hold a plastic bag in front of me in the car in case I puked on the way over,’ she said. She was as indignant as any nine-year-old girl can be.
‘And did you?’
‘No!’
Mary and Gordon came in behind her. Gordon looked thin and fragile like he always did. Mary was prim and small, but there was still a hint of her daughter’s look in her.
‘She was sick in the morning,’ Mary said, Becky tutting as she took off her coat and went through to the living room. ‘We won’t be long, an hour and a half at the most.’
‘Take all the time you need,’ I told them.
They didn’t ask about my work. They knew. A conspiracy of silence. They had known when Zara and me met that
I was trouble, and I’m sure they’d wanted her as far away from me as possible. I can’t imagine they were thrilled at the thought of their pretty little daughter having a child with me either. But they made the best of a bad situation. As they drifted away from Zara, they stayed close to me. They weren’t in contact with Zara now at all, but I was doing my best to be the son-in-law they never had.
‘So, you want something for lunch?’ I asked Becky when they were gone.
She frowned. ‘I don’t know.’
Sometimes she knew exactly what she wanted, and woe betide the person who tried to make the decision for her. Other times she couldn’t possibly make up her mind, and you had to step in. This was the latter, and that meant she was hungry but worried about throwing up again.
‘Something light. I’ll make you some toast; you can nibble at it.’
It was perfectly mundane. Perfectly being the key word. Making her some toast while she flicked through the channels on the TV and landed on what was optimistically referred to as a music channel. It was ordinary. It would probably be a boring, everyday occurrence for most parents. She ate a little of the toast I gave her.
‘Are you not working today?’ she asked me.
She’s a smart little girl, my Becky. She knew, or at least had a sense of, what that question meant. She didn’t know what I did for a living. Not exactly. Myself and her grandparents had agreed to try and protect her from the truth of it. But she had an idea. She seemed to sense that I was involved in something people didn’t talk about, that it might be something dangerous. Maybe she was young enough to think that was glamorous, exciting.
It was a conversation I was dreading. The moment she asked me to explain why I did what I did. I spent so much of my time with her trying desperately to be a good person. Trying to be a father that she could be proud of. If she ever truly understood what sort of person I was, what I did to others for money, then she might hate me.
‘Well, I was at work, first thing in the morning, when you were still bent over the toilet bowl.’
Every Night I Dream of Hell Page 11