‘I know where he’s going to be. Tomorrow night.’
The tomorrow night thing caught his ear right away. It was going to make him suspicious, of course. I had to tell him now because the following day was going to be very busy for me. I’d have the chance to phone him and tell him, but I didn’t want my phone giving away my location. Not when I was planning to do things I didn’t want the police tracking.
‘Tell me then,’ he said.
I took a piece of paper from my pocket, passed it across to him. The address in Shettleston that Zara had written out for me. A man of Fisher’s experience would know where it was. He could get a team of people, surround the place. Might have trouble getting round the back unseen, but that was his problem. If some of Barrett’s people made a break and Fisher had to give chase then that was just something else to distract him from me.
‘Not a great spot. From the front they can see along their own street and down an adjacent one, so it’ll be tough to get close unseen.’
‘Tomorrow night, huh?’
‘Tomorrow night,’ I said.
‘So if I went round there now with a squad I wouldn’t find Barrett and his people there?’
I gave him the look. The expression doesn’t change, not in any way that I can sit here and describe to you, but there was something in the eyes that told him he was playing with fire. A man with stony face and stony fists, giving you a blank look that would scare the waves from the sea. That was the plan, anyway.
‘We had a deal,’ I said. I was talking low, and my grumbly voice was turning into a growl.
‘The deal was that you let me have Barrett and I let you have Cope. That deal stands. You have my word that if we sweep up Cope in these arrests I will make sure that she doesn’t get time. I’ll make sure she’s out on the streets within hours, in fact. But the deal said nothing about timing.’
He wasn’t being smug, which was big of him. He was just saying that he needed to be able to carry out a big move like this on his time, not on mine. I took a deep breath before I spoke.
‘I’m giving you the chance to stop a war here. You go and arrest Barrett and his men tomorrow night, sometime after nine o’clock, and you’ll have that bastard off the streets. You’ll also have helped avoid something much bigger, much worse. You go in early, and taking Barrett off the streets won’t mean a damn thing. You have my word on that.’
I didn’t want him knowing that there was something much bigger going on, but there wasn’t an alternative. Now he knew that my priorities had shifted away from Adrian Barrett. Had to assume that he was smart enough not to ask, not to push me. Assume that he was smart enough to guess that whatever I was glaring at now was something he couldn’t touch.
An intelligent man like Fisher would know that my demand for the timing meant the Barrett job was a distraction. The plod focus their attention on Barrett while big, awful Nate Colgan and his band of merry thugs do something unspeakable to someone else. He wouldn’t guess who the real target was. Fisher would guess at Don Park, most probably. No doubt that sent his mighty little brain off wondering what an attack on Don Park might do for the city. Hurting Park would keep MacArthur in place; keep a lid on the tensions that were rising within that organization. And, let’s face it, if Park took control the first thing he would have to do was establish himself as successful by picking a fight with someone he could beat. Me taking out Park might actually calm things down; bring a little peace to the world. What was Fisher doing if not trying to encourage people to calm the fuck down?
‘I’ll be all over this address at nine o’clock tomorrow night,’ he told me. ‘If anything happens in the meantime that makes me think I should go sooner then I will go sooner.’
I nodded just a little, accepting and respecting that he had come to a difficult decision. ‘And Zara?’
‘The deal stands,’ he said.
I had what I wanted, so I turned and walked out of his house. Breathed a sigh of relief when I got out of there, and I’ll bet Fisher did too. Relieved that I was gone from his view. We were two men who could do each other a world of damage. Not just if we were caught fraternizing. It was a mental thing, after years of being on the opposite side of a bloody big fence. Years of conditioning. It damaged me in my own mind, associating myself with someone like Michael Fisher. God knows what it did to the mind of an honest cop like him to be working with me.
A hypocrite. That would be the right word for it. Each of us as bad as the other. You can’t trust a hypocrite. If a man works his whole life to do one thing, then flips and stands against it in an instant, how do you trust him? Fisher shouldn’t have been working with me. I shouldn’t have been cutting deals with cops. And not just any fucking cop either. The one that put Jamieson where he was. It was rotten. It was also very late, so I drove back home. I would get in touch with everyone I needed to the following morning, early. One of the benefits of not sleeping at all. I would be up early, ready to organize a long day for everyone else.
29
It was Sunday afternoon and I should have been with Becky. The job was a means to support her, to provide me with a life where I could spend my weekends with her. That was what I told myself. Convinced myself. That was what good people did. They worked jobs they didn’t like because it supported the people they loved. Here I was putting the job first. Fine, I could argue that it was an emergency, but there would always be an excuse if I allowed it. Maybe the job wasn’t just a route to providing for her. Hadn’t started out that way.
The day was going to come when I had to talk to her about what I did for a living. She was going to hear rumours, or I was going to get arrested or hurt, and I was going to have to try and explain some things to her. Scared the crap out of me, to be honest. The thought of her hating me for what I’d done. I didn’t hate what I had done; I had always been able to justify and accept what I did and why I did it. What I hated, what I feared, were the things I knew I was still going to do. There were worse things out there than the things I’d done, and I knew it was a matter of time before I did them. The path I was on, with the Jamieson organization, made it unavoidable. That was why I didn’t sleep well. Lying there, knowing that I was going to do terrible things. Knowing that the day would come when I had to explain those things to someone I actually cared about.
Now I was sitting with Ronnie and Russell Conrad in a car on the south side of the Clyde, watching a flat we thought Taylor ‘Original’ Carlisle might be in. It belonged to his girlfriend, and we knew he wasn’t at his own place. It was a four-storey old building on a short street that probably used to be industrial, back in the days of industry. Now the buildings were converted into other things, but those other things made the place seem lifeless compared to the old industrial work. Her building was on the corner, looking down on the once industrial site turned dumping ground badly hidden behind a thin mesh fence across the street.
‘There,’ Conrad said quietly.
Original was running across the street, hands in his pockets, hair flapping behind him, looking cold and eager to get to his car. We were back along the road, watching the front door of the building that he hadn’t come out of. If he hadn’t parked his car across the street we wouldn’t have seen him go. I nudged Ronnie and he started the car, moved down to the corner and pulled alongside Original.
The bastard could have run if he was marginally more stupid. He was a lot of things, but not dumb. He knew that running was the first step in getting chased, and getting chased was just a sweaty way of getting yourself caught and punished. He stopped on the pavement and looked down into the car; saw us looking back at him. Conrad opened the back door. None of us said anything. Original stood on the pavement and looked around, maybe hoping that someone was going to magically appear and rescue him. There were no white knights around. He dropped down into the back of the car; as soon as Ronnie heard the door close, he pulled away.
Nobody said anything for a while; we just drove through the city. I adjusted the rear-view mirror so that I c
ould watch the floppy-haired fraud from the passenger seat, but there wasn’t a lot to watch. He had his head turned sideways, looking out the window and trying to stay expressionless. I think there were nerves there, a little bit of fear, but not as much as there should have been. He was being taken to God knows where by a gunman and two dangerous muscle. That lack of fear told me that this was going to be easy; Original Carlisle had already decided to tell us whatever we wanted to know.
We went east, Ronnie picking a route that I wouldn’t have used. He got away with it because his route wasn’t terrible and it was Sunday so it was just a little less busy than it might have been. But the kid wasn’t a driver; this wasn’t what he was employed for. As far as I knew the organization still didn’t have a full-time driver for jobs, not since Kenny McBride took a walk in the woods with Calum MacLean over a year ago. Something else that should have been arranged by now. The organization needed a driver that we knew we could safely use on jobs, instead of every senior man having his own chauffeur. So it took us a little longer than it should have, and we might have been seen by more people than I would like, but it was no big deal. Original wasn’t leaning out of the window, screaming for help; he was just sitting there, accepting what was happening to him.
The up-and-over garage door was open when we turned onto the street. It was a wide street, built to be used by big vehicles and heavy industry. I don’t know how long the intended use had lasted but I’m guessing not very. Some of the buildings were still used for storage, including the one we were pulling into, but the street was quiet and there was nobody to see us arrive.
Currie had told his man to have the door open for us but not to be there when we arrived. The place was empty and it needed to stay that way. We were going to get details from Original and there were ways of getting details that you don’t want witnesses seeing. People think they’re loyal to an organization, they think there’s nothing that’s going to turn them against you, and then they see the dirty side of the business. They see you do something that turns their stomach and suddenly they’re desperate to get out, desperate to unburden themselves. It happens. It’s not everyone that’s blessed with an iron stomach and Teflon memory.
Ronnie got out and pulled the door down behind us, dipping the place into darkness. The three of us stayed in the car while Ronnie presumably fumbled around to find a light. If there was a window in the place then it was caked in a wall of muck sturdy enough to repel daylight. A strip light flickered above the car; I opened my door before the light had decided to settle on staying on. I went and opened Original’s door, waited for him to get out. Ronnie was over beside me, Conrad getting out of the other side of the car. Original was sticking with his conspicuous effort to look nerveless.
‘This way,’ I said to him, leading him up three short steps and through a door into a large open back room. Must have been a workshop at some time; when I switched on the lights you could still see the markings on the floor where machinery had been bolted. The place was gloomy, even with a row of small windows along the top of the walls. There was dust everywhere; the place hadn’t been cleaned in years. I naturally assumed that this had been a pretty miserable place to work.
It was places like this that led me into the life. All the men in my family worked in places like this, bigger or smaller variations of it anyway. They were ground down by it, every single one of them. Welders, joiners and sparkies, all working long hours for little reward and suffering health issues because of it before they hit fifty. I watched those men and I knew I couldn’t be like them. The pride they felt in the good, honest work they did just wasn’t enough for me, never would be. Pride was no substitute for a life I could be comfortable with; that was why I took the shortcut the criminal industry gave me. I wanted better. I thought I could have better.
There I was, standing in that abandoned workshop with some kid I was willing to torture to help an employer. Not once did the thought run through my mind that it really wasn’t any better than the life I’d turned my back on. Certainly didn’t occur to me that it was far worse. The place was grotty but it was towards the back of the building; the walls were thick and the only windows were high and faced out back. There was a small chair with a plastic seat, metal legs and the back missing sitting in one corner, a row of cabinets and a sink along a side wall. It was a smaller, dirtier version of the place out by the airport that Marty owned, these kinds of places being very useful to men like us. At least some kind of industry was using them. The chair was all I needed. I grabbed it, skidded it along the floor into the middle of the room.
‘Sit down,’ I said to Original in a low voice.
‘You don’t need to do this,’ he said to me with a hint of his usual cocky tone.
‘Sit.’
He did as he was told with the kind of smug look that told us all that he was going to do whatever we asked and we were wasting our time in being aggressive. Being superior because he thought we hadn’t realized it yet. We had. He sat on the chair, arms folded, and looked at me. He made eye contact and held it. This guy in his late twenties, trying to look younger, thinking he knew just exactly what he was doing. Never been in a fight. Never done anything darker than rob some gullible halfwit of their cash over the phone. He thought he understood. When you’re grassing your boss, giving away damning evidence against someone who gave you your living, you do not look smug about it. You make an effort to be sad, to be reluctant and you at least have the balls to show a little defiance. This little bastard thought he knew how this was going to play out, and the certainty of a victim is never a good thing. Certainty is a strength that you have to take away from them.
I walked over to him and punched him in the face. Little backswing, a rabbit punch in the mouth that tipped him backwards on a chair with no back. He tumbled onto the floor, rolled over and got quickly onto his knees. He was a little disorientated; falling over always makes a punch seem much worse than it really is. When the world does a somersault your mind tricks you into thinking it was the punch’s fault, not the backless chair’s. He was gasping for breath for no reason that I could guess at other than shock. I grabbed the collar of his presumably expensive thin jacket and lifted him up, dumped him back on the chair.
Ronnie was leaning back against the sink, watching and keeping any sign of emotion off his face. That was something I had tried to teach him. Don’t let the victim think that you sympathize or that you’re bored and want this to end as much as they do. Don’t give them anything that they can cling to. Conrad was standing back towards the door we had come in through. There was an expression on his face that went somewhere near to disgust. He wasn’t muscle; he wasn’t a guy who knocked people around or liked to watch people get knocked around. No, he was just a guy who shot people in the back of the head. Everyone had their own little standards, I suppose.
‘You’re going to tell us everything we want to know,’ I told Original quietly.
‘Yes,’ he said quickly, still gasping. ‘Yes.’
30
Getting a man to talk is one thing. Getting him to tell the truth is another. Original was ready to blab because he was scared of another shot to the mouth. Scared of getting his expensive clothes any dirtier as he rolled across the floor of the workshop. He wasn’t a fighter. What he was an expert at was talking. An expert at running off at the mouth, lie following lie until you were wrapped in so many of them you were forced to accept them as truth. That was his skill. It was why he was in the organization. It was why I still didn’t trust him now.
‘Tell me about the Christie killing,’ I said to him.
He took a few seconds. Showing some long-overdue reticence. Trying to think of how much he should say. This was him working out his own place in the story he was about to tell, making sure that he didn’t say anything to incriminate himself. What he said next would certainly be lies whenever he talked about himself. He was going to gloss over his own role in all of this.
‘I wasn’t really involved then, y
ou see. Right, your man Lafferty, he called me up when he was organizing the meeting. That’s when I got pulled into all this.’
‘But you knew him before,’ I said. A test of honesty. He knew Lafferty before; there was no way Lafferty would have used him as a mouthpiece at the meeting if he didn’t. No way he would be using Original as a senior man. There had to be history there, but it was a history Original thought he had kept hidden.
‘Okay, yeah, I knew him a bit. I’d helped him out with some stuff. I got connections. See, you guys, you think I’m just sitting there scamming old ladies, but I need to make a lot of connections to do what I do. I got skills. I mean, not your kind of skills. Tech skills. I had helped him out a bit. Helped him make a bit of money. But it was for the organization,’ he added quickly.
‘Lee Christie.’
‘Like I says, I wasn’t working close with Lafferty then. So, you know, this is just what I heard from others. The boy Jake, people who were around. He found out about Christie giving info to that two that work for Billy Patterson. Summers and the other one. Those two. Lafferty found out about all that and he was pissed off. Didn’t like Christie grassing on him, didn’t like anyone spying on him. It was trust, you know.’
‘But that wasn’t it, was it?’ I asked him. ‘He didn’t just want to kill Christie?’ The other two were silent, letting me get on with what had to be done. They didn’t much want to get involved. Just me standing over Original in the middle of the floor, him sitting carefully on the backless chair.
‘I don’t know,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I told you, I wasn’t around. I don’t know how it started, right. Really, okay. I don’t. Maybe he already planned to make moves against people. Seems like, I don’t know, he saw Currie and Marty getting all pally and thought he was being excluded, something like that. He thought other people were trying to push him out. He figured, I don’t know, that the organization needed a strong hand, you know what I mean? A single person in charge. He thought it should have been him.’
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