He held up the phone, glanced between me and Ronnie to see if now was the time for him to play it. Ronnie nodded and he played us the video. It was wobbly, showed a blue saloon car moving up the street to the corner.
‘Didn’t get either of the two that came into the shop: one was driving and the other was sitting behind the driver’s seat. You can see the other two passengers though.’
The car stopped at the lights, the phone pointed at them. The angle wasn’t great, but it was enough. I recognized him straight away.
‘Take it back a little,’ Ronnie said. ‘Pause it where the car’s right alongside you. That’s a better shot.’
I already knew, but I was willing to get a better look and make my ninety-nine per cent certainty a round hundred.
‘There,’ Owen said, passing the phone to me.
A dinky wee thing, too small a screen for my fingers to manipulate it. He’d paused it as the car pulled alongside him, as the passenger in the back of the car glanced his way. All fake tan and stupid hair. Taylor ‘Original’ Carlisle. One of Lafferty’s little pets.
The silence in the room was broken by Ronnie. ‘It is, isn’t it?’ he asked me. Not mentioning the name in front of Owen Turner.
‘Could you leave us for a few minutes, Owen,’ I said to him. Being polite, but I wasn’t asking.
‘Sure, yeah,’ he said, and he got out of that chair like it was on fire. He went out into the shop to help his wife and to get away from me.
‘It’s Original, isn’t it?’ Ronnie asked me. ‘I called you as soon as he showed it to me. It’s him, and he was here, talking about Barrett being the new power in the city.’
‘Fuck’s sake,’ I said, looking down at the table. I had worked out how bad this could be and I was already working out all the possible ways this could go next. There were a lot of directions that all led deeper into the shit. I picked up the phone and looked at it again. ‘It’s Original Carlisle all right. Fuck.’
We had to work out what this meant, who we could trust and who we couldn’t. Original was a right-hand man to Lafferty. Him being involved in this could mean a whole bunch of things, but jumping to conclusions tended to be akin to jumping off a cliff. It could mean that Lafferty was working with Barrett. It could mean that Original was stabbing his own boss in the back and helping Barrett. It could mean that Lafferty was testing us out, trying to work out if people were loyal to him by being a dick about it, provoke us and see how we reacted. It could mean something else entirely that didn’t leap to mind at the time. We had to know which of those it was before we made any sort of move. Knowledge is power. Go into battle as the dumber of two armies and you have a right good chance of being taught a lesson.
‘What do we do?’ Ronnie asked me quietly.
I didn’t like people talking when I was considering things. I think that was down to the fact that I much preferred to work alone. Always had. Spent years avoiding getting tied to anyone, working for different employers and always working alone. That was my reputation. Lone wolf. Hire Nate Colgan and you don’t have to hire anyone else. Ronnie was the first person I’d ever brought under my wing. A nice kid with no history of violence. A strange choice.
‘I don’t know. We have to tread very carefully with this and not go accusing Lafferty of anything until we know for sure. But it isn’t good, whatever it is. We can put to bed any idea that Barrett is up here on his own.’
‘Maybe Barrett’s got Original working for him.’
‘No,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘Not unless there’s someone else, someone senior. Original wouldn’t walk away from what he has for the risk of a start-up.’
‘Doesn’t mean that he’s working for Lafferty though. That would mean Lafferty ordering the killing of Lee Christie.’
‘The guy who was feeding info to Mikey and Conn, yeah. Would be a ballsy move for Lafferty, but a fucking messy one as well. Doesn’t add up to his style, either way. He could be spinning a lot of plates though; might not just be Barrett he has. Fuck, might not even be Lafferty. Could be Don Park. Could be any bastard. Gets to Original, uses him to help organize all this. Creating weaknesses from within the organization. Once we start turning on each other we’re doing our enemies’ job for them. I don’t know.’
I was wrestling with a giant alligator of a problem. If the guilty party could be anyone then who do you go to with this information? How do we solve the problem when we don’t know who’s on our side and who isn’t? ‘Trust no one’ is a fine principle if you’re working alone. I was an organization man now, the security consultant, no less. This was my problem and I had to share it with someone, but I was buggered if I knew who.
‘We need to get to Original,’ Ronnie said suddenly, surprising himself with his certainty. ‘If not Original then someone close enough to Lafferty to give us the truth.’
I straightened up, thinking about it. He was right, I knew it. He must have been spending too much time around me when he came up with it that bloody quick, but I knew it was the right way to go. We track down Original or some other senior figure and we get the information we need from them by any means necessary. It was sadly obvious. It would cause ructions. You don’t go questioning a senior man without causing offence to someone or other, but someone or other was just going to have to put up with it. The organization came first.
I started nodding, thinking about candidates. Trying to come up with a name that would cause the fewest problems. Had to be senior, close to Lafferty. Had to be someone that would have useful knowledge, not just some hanger-on. Someone I could talk forcefully to without them pissing their pants. There was someone. A person I’d been thinking about chatting with since my early-morning visit from DI Fisher.
‘That’s true. There’s someone I want to talk to. I been thinking about it all day. The Nasty killing. That was professional, and I’ve been thinking about who might have carried it out. I can’t work out why, but I have an idea for who. He’ll be able to give us some answers.’
23
Ronnie was standing watch from a garden across the street. If he saw our target coming home early, he would ring my mobile, which was on vibrate. I was round the back of the house, sneaking up to the back door with Vernon Bell. Vernon was a little old guy in his sixties, English-born but been working Glasgow for a good forty years. He would once have been called a burglar, but there wasn’t much call for breaking into houses these days. Most of his work was for professional organizations, breaking into offices and storage facilities. A boring old house was a rare challenge for him.
He only said yes because he knew I was working for the Jamieson organization now. If I was on my own he would have politely declined the risk. I watched him kneeling down by the back door; couldn’t see what he was doing to the lock. Made a scratching noise for the first ten or twenty seconds, silent thereafter. There was a little island of hair on his otherwise bald head, tilting sideways as he worked. He hadn’t said a word since we got out of the car.
Took him about three minutes. He straightened up, nodded to me, and walked out of the garden. It was his car we’d come in; he would drive home and I would be left to find my own way. He didn’t need to hang around. From what I understood of it, getting into the house involved breaking the lock to open the door, and then fixing it with the door open. Something like that anyway. It wasn’t a skill of mine. The door was ajar and had been for the last couple of minutes while Vernon worked at it.
I went inside and closed it. Walked through the downstairs of the house, took a quick look upstairs as well. Nobody there. Nothing of obvious interest, but I knew there wouldn’t be. A small terraced house, a man living on his own, careful about his work. He was hardly going to leave incriminating evidence lying on the bedside table, was he? I wasn’t wearing gloves or a balaclava. I was here for a conversation, nothing more. Just a conversation on my terms. It was nothing the police needed to worry about.
I went back downstairs and into the dark living room. Nothing much to do unt
il he got back. Sat in the chair beside the table with the lamp on it, facing the doorless arch to the corridor. A good spot. Made sure the lamp was plugged in. Would make a neatly dramatic scene.
We knew he’d be out; Ronnie had been watching the house from across the street for a few hours. We didn’t know how long he’d be gone. I was sitting in that chair for forty fucking minutes, waiting for him. The phone in my pocket rumbled, then went still. Ronnie had seen him arrive back. I’d heard the car pull up in the street. Heard the car door closing. There was nothing out there for him to be suspicious of. He wouldn’t see Ronnie. He hadn’t been followed. His front door wasn’t tampered with, and his back door didn’t look like it had been. He came into the house, blissfully unaware.
It was silent, perfect. He walked a couple of steps from the front door until he was in view of the arch. That was when I clicked on the lamp. Russell Conrad. Gunman. Our gunman, now. The sudden burst of light from the living room caused him to spin and stare at me. Nearly caused me to spin in the chair. The man must have had a hundred-watt bulb in that fucking lamp. He looked frightened, which was a good thing.
‘Come in and sit down,’ I said to him. Said in a way that made it clear he didn’t get a second option to dither over.
He moved slowly, but he moved. He walked into the living room and took a seat on the couch, looking across at me with the kind of look his victims might have specialized in. Confused, horrified and very suddenly aware that something bad was nearby.
I let him get comfortable, took a few seconds before I spoke. ‘You killed Jawad Nasif.’
‘Nasty? Yeah, I killed him last night. That was the order. If you wanted to know about the job then you should have gone to Lafferty. You got no right coming to me the day after a job; you know how risky that is.’
It was convincingly said. Gave me pause, another little puzzle to twist around in my hands. That reaction, quick, honest and defiant, made it seem like Conrad didn’t know what he’d done wrong.
‘I think I’d rather talk to you about it. You don’t mind talking to me about it, do you?’
‘We’re on the same side of this, aren’t we?’
‘We might be,’ I said slowly. ‘That’s the very thing I’m trying to work out.’
He frowned and grimaced. He didn’t like the sound of anything I was saying. He was new to the organization, and that made him vulnerable. If he was on the wrong side of an argument that he didn’t even know was happening then he was in peril. He had reason to be concerned.
‘Well, you tell me what you want to know and I’ll tell you anything I’m able to. As far as I’m aware we’re on the same side here.’
‘How did Lafferty find out where Nasty was going to be?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. The casual shrug of a man who only needs to know where his victims are, not how they were found. ‘He called me up, told me he wanted it done, said that he thought Nasty was going to be at that location but that there was a tight window because he was only visiting the place, not staying there. He gave me the location, told me to get there early. I did. Went in through a downstairs toilet window that some idiot had left open. Went into the kitchen and waited because the kitchen was at the back of the house. The front looked out onto the street and there were no curtains in the place so I didn’t want the gun flashing there. I heard him come in; he was in the living room for a while. I don’t know why – I didn’t go through the house to check if there was anything there. Cleaning up, maybe. He came into the kitchen, went to the fridge, I shot him. That was it. I figure he was going to stay there the night or something, separate from the others. I don’t know.’
My face was stone. There was nothing he could have said that would have elicited a reaction from me in that room. What he was saying tallied with what I knew about the killing, which wasn’t nearly enough.
‘Do you think Lafferty lured him there?’ I asked.
‘He might have, I suppose. Good for him if he did; we got rid of their gunman. Isn’t that a good thing? Am I missing something here, Nate?’
Russell Conrad was a long-term, high-calibre gunman. You don’t get to be that if you aren’t a reasonably smart person. You don’t reach thirty-six, which he was at the time, with a dozen years’ experience in the business, which he had, without above-average intelligence. He could have been acting. His surprise wasn’t enough to gain trust.
‘Was there any mention of Barrett in this job?’
‘No, just the gunman, nobody else. If they knew where Barrett was then they’d have gone after him, wouldn’t they?’
Without a pause I asked, ‘Did you kill Lee Christie?’
‘No, I did not,’ he said quickly and confidently. ‘Nasty killed Lee Christie, didn’t he? That’s my understanding of it anyway. Why would you think that I . . . Wait a second, Nate, what the hell are you getting at here? You’re pitching an idea I don’t much like the sound of. You’re saying that Nasty might not have killed Christie?’
‘I’m saying he probably did,’ I told him: emphasis on probably.
‘But you’re nodding and winking towards Lafferty right now, aren’t you? That’s what this is about. You’re saying he killed his own man, used Barrett and his crew as patsies. Now, what? You think he’s picking off Barrett’s crew so that they can’t drop him in it?’
I might have been surprised at him reaching that conclusion so speedily if I didn’t already know how smart he was.
‘What do you think?’ I asked him.
He sighed and looked me straight in the eye. ‘I think we got a big problem here, Nate. I don’t much appreciate you breaking into my house and scaring the shite out of me, but we’ll put that aside. I’ve done worse. I just had a conversation with Lafferty, not more than an hour ago, and you were mentioned in it. Look, I don’t want this turning into a war, but I think it’s going to. I want to be on the right side of this. I’m trying to make a living and nothing more. I just got in the door with this organization, and I had no idea the way things were shaping up when I did. I thought Lafferty hiring me had everyone’s support; otherwise I’d have walked away. But this, this thing, this job, it’s all going to hell. We’ve both been around a lot; we’ve both seen the crazy shite that people pull. I think that’s happening now.’
‘Why?’
‘Because in the meeting I had with Lafferty just now he was pointing the finger at Marty Jones and Kevin Currie. He said that they used Marty’s brother to get them a girl that would lure Christie to where they killed him. He thinks they’re using Barrett as a front to push him out and take control of the drug business for themselves. Once they have that they can take the whole organization before Jamieson gets out. He pointed the finger at you, Nate. He thinks you’re leading the charge – that’s why Currie hired you. Leading the battle at street level. You’re supposed to be my next target.’
I still didn’t change my deadpan expression, although it took a little more effort this time. ‘That right?’
‘He’s more afraid of you than he is of Barrett now. With Nasty out of the way he thinks he’s dealt with the worst of Barrett. But you? You he’s terrified of.’
‘Did you believe what he had to tell you?’
He shook his head a little, frowning. ‘I don’t know. He was talking about Currie and Marty and blaming them for everything under the sun. Sounded, I don’t know, a little much. But I don’t know either of them, and I don’t know you well. I haven’t been on the inside of this organization or this job. I only know you by reputation, and that doesn’t help you much in this case, no offence.’
I shrugged that off. My reputation was the uniform of my business. Sometimes it fell out of fashion. ‘Could Lafferty be faking all this? Could it be that he’s the one working with Barrett, trying to give himself an excuse to take over the organization? Doesn’t that seem plausible right now?’
‘None of it seems plausible to me right now,’ he said with a shake of the head. ‘I will say this: if this organization is in the
process of eating itself alive then we both picked a hell of a time to join up.’
Almost smiled at that one. He wasn’t the only one who had signed up without bothering to check the small print. ‘True, but if we’re going to sort this out then there’s a chance that we both come out of it well, don’t you think? We just need to be on the right side of the argument.’
He could see where this was going. ‘What are you suggesting?’ he asked, already knowing the answer.
‘What I’m saying is that right now you’re standing on the wrong side of the fence, and you need to hop across. We’ll make sure you don’t rip off a bollock on the barbed wire as you jump. If you get caught on the wrong side of the fence, you won’t work for this organization again. Might not work in this city again.’
‘I only ever said yes to working for Lafferty because he had Jamieson’s clearance. Way I saw it, I was working for Jamieson, and when he got out of the jail I would be answering to him. If keeping on working for Jamieson means working against Lafferty then I work against Lafferty. You have a plan, I take it?’
I nodded very slowly. ‘I’m getting towards that point, yeah.’
I stood up and he did the same. I was much taller than him, looked down on him. I wasn’t trying to intimidate him because there was no point. He was a gunman, he had done awful things that even I hadn’t done, but it was worth gazing down to see if he would wilt a little. There are plenty of men in this business, in this city, who are as big and tough as me and know how to throw a punch. There are plenty of brave men, plenty of psychos, plenty of men who can handle themselves in a fight. No gunman would be intimidated by any of them, because most of them didn’t have the balls to do the things that Conrad had already done in his life. But that reputation of mine, that made it worth looking down on a man you knew had worked in the darkness as well. That reputation had been hard earned by acts that created the indefinable little element of fear in others that separate the truly dangerous from the merely wild or nasty.
Every Night I Dream of Hell Page 17