by Robert White
He was right, I was wrong. Was I going to admit it?
Never.
“She’s ten a penny, pal, a pretty girl in cheap shoes.”
It was Des’s turn to step in close, a whole new and very dangerous ball game. I had a good four inches over him and maybe three stone, but I’d seen him fight men twice his size. This wasn’t going to be pretty if it went off.
He curled his lip.
“You and your fuckin’ fashions get right on my tits, pal. See that wee lassie? Well, she earns fucking eight quid an hour. What d’you think she’s going to wear to work, fucking Jimmy Chong at a grand a time?”
“It’s Jimmy Choo,” I corrected.
You could have cut the air with a knife. I thought he was about to butt me. Instead he poked me sharply in the chest and wound up the tempo further.
“Ye think that kid shops in Selfridges, don’t you eh, matey? Ye need a reality check.”
Things were about to get out of hand.
I wanted to tell him that when someone suffers a trauma, real trauma, obsessive behaviour is a common side effect. It’s a medical fact.
My obsession is clothes, don’t laugh, yes, clothes.
I mean…how can you kill a man without a Paul Smith suit?
We both turned as the office door opened with a swish.
The very recently deposed Estelle dropped her handbag on her very recently ex-desk.
“What are you two up to?” she managed, head down, hiding her eyes. “Having a dance?”
We stood in the middle of the room doing fair impressions of goldfish.
Estelle sat, removed the cover from her monitor and switched it on.
She started to type.
A silent minute passed, then without looking up she said quietly. “I need this job, Mr Fuller. I have a mum at home on disability and a brother in the nick. So, if you’re going to sack me, so be it, but I’m not walking.”
Finally, she raised her head and there was a trickle of a tear. Her bottom lip trembled.
She was definitely going to fucking cry this time.
Des shuffled over. He was about as good as I was with a distraught female. The dopey Scottish bastard started to rub Estelle’s back with the flat of his hand; he looked like he was fucking winding her.
Add to that, he made various angry comedy faces at me in a vain attempt to involve me in the process of making Estelle feel wanted.
Thankfully, we were all saved by a further swish of the door. This time, the noise announced the arrival of Lauren.
Looking pale as she stepped in from the late afternoon sunshine, she wore a pastel pink silk blouse and cream combats I knew she’d bought from Warehouse, together with pair of classic all white Adidas tennis shoes. Her hair was held in place by Gucci dark glasses that I hadn’t seen before, but quite liked. Despite her pallor, she looked good enough to eat.
In fact, she looked so good, for a moment, I forgot I was pissed off with her.
JJ stepped in behind carrying a holdall.
“The screw’s dead,” he said, and strode in the back.
Estelle burst into floods of tears.
Lauren North’s Story:
I stepped into the back room to find JJ unloading our two Glocks. He checked the safety on each, removed the mags and pulled back the action of each weapon to eject the chambered round, then laid the two bullets to one side for destruction.
It wasn’t something you might do if you were out in the field or short of ammunition, but the theory behind it is that once a bullet has been chambered, the working parts may have left some very small indentations on the shell casing, therefore if reloaded, may increase the chance of a misfire. It was a belt and braces exercise, but better safe than sorry.
“How’s Estelle?” asked Des.
“I called her a cab,” I said, before turning to our esteemed leader Richard Fuller.
“She told me what happened. Sometimes, you are a proper twat, Rick.”
He tapped at his laptop and feigned ignorance before finding a retort.
“If she can’t take a joke, she shouldn’t have joined,” he said.
I was about to find a witty reply myself when he looked up, those dark chocolate eyes of his so full of anger.
“So, where the fuck have you been… exactly?”
Any confidence I’d found on the way back to the office drained from me in an instant. Opening my mouth, I tried to speak, but nothing came out. As I bit my lip with embarrassment, JJ saved me.
“We go to see the prison guard who find Goldsmith hanged. He work at Strangways many years, his name Colin Reed. We go his house, but when we look inside, he is dead.”
Rick thought for a moment before turning to me.
“How’d you find him so fast…this Reed guy?”
I thought I would be sick on the spot. Of course, nothing happened between Larry and me that evening, but I knew Rick would never have agreed to me contacting the cop or using him for information.
I went with a half-truth.
“A reporter…a journalist. I went to the library, looked for newspaper articles around the date of Goldsmith’s incarceration and found this guy who had been investigating suspicious deaths in the high security wing at Strangeways.”
For some reason Des turned away and looked all uncomfortable.
Rick didn’t notice. “This guy have a name?”
I squared my shoulders. I wasn’t going to be so easily intimidated. The fact was, I’d moved the investigation along.
“Warwick,” I said. “Rupert Warwick.”
“And he works for?” pushed Rick.
“The MEN,” I said with a little more confidence, my white lie gaining in credibility.
Rick frowned to show his displeasure but to my relief moved on to JJ, who was next for the treatment.
“So, pal, you and Lauren go to this guy’s house…then what?”
JJ shrugged before slouching in his chair and taking up his standard ‘fuck you’ pose.
“This fat woman next door, she let us in the house with key. We find the guy, this Reed guy, sitting at his table with his wrists cut open…dead, like I said… and before you say anything bad to me, Lauren ask me to go and watch her back…what the fuck you expect me to do eh?”
There was a brief eyeball standoff between the two men.
Rick broke it. “How about letting the rest of the fucking team know?”
JJ gave another shrug and Rick’s irritation began to show.
“So, this guy Reed…he killed himself?”
JJ and I spoke in unison.
“No.”
I gave my impressions of the crime scene. How the horrendously deep wounds to Reed’s arms could not have been inflicted by the small bloodied knife conveniently left on the table top. How the body was deliberately posed and how only three tell-tale drops of blood by the kitchen door had been spilled outside the pool around the body.
As he took in my information, I caught Rick’s gaze. “So,” I said. “If me and JJ can suss this isn’t a suicide, then the cops are definitely going to be onto this one.”
Rick thought for a moment, pulled a yellow post-it note from his pocket and studied the writing on it.
“I’m not so sure,” he said.
“What’s that?” I asked.
Rick tossed the note into the bin. “Nothing important.”
He stood and walked over to the window, which overlooked the small yard at the back of the building. Gazing out, he addressed us all.
“One thing is for sure now, we can’t rule out the Firm having a hand in all of this. If they, as I suspect, did a deal with Goldsmith and had him in some kind of witness protection programme, we will have to watch our backs even more.”
Des was in. “You think the Firm have Goldsmith?”
Rick shrugged. “I think they did. Whether they still do, is another matter. That’s why, from today, we work from the lock-up. Leave your usual work and personal phones here, pull the SIM and switch them off. There is a stash of
pay-as-you go non-GPS phones in the cabinet over there. Remember, good surveillance people can still triangulate your position when you use any mobile phone, so short calls only. Take one each before you leave. I want you all to start using anti-surveillance measures wherever you go from now on. We’re in lockdown until this is all over.”
He checked his watch.
“Our next job is to find a guy called Gjergj Dushku. He is our connection to Stephan Goldsmith. RV at the lock-up in two hours, say any goodbyes you feel the need to, and bring enough clothes for a week.”
He turned to me.
“You sure you’re up for this, Lauren?”
“It would be nice to know exactly what I’m up for,” I said. “But yes.”
He studied me then nodded.
“Two hours,” he said.
Rick Fuller’s Story:
So Colin Reed, the man who allegedly found Stephan Goldsmith hanged in his prison cell, was dead. And I had a sneaking suspicion that the more we looked for answers to that incident, the more the body count would rise.
It was one thing I didn’t need on my conscience, so our lines of enquiry had to progress, and fast.
I’d asked JJ to stay behind. The others left for their respective homes to sort out their lives and a bag of clothes.
Once we were alone, the Turk ran the whole scenario of the visit to Walkden by me in intricate detail.
I quickly realised that the man who I had once thought of as a one-trick pony with a bad attitude, was far more.
The attitude was still there of course, but that made him what he was, it was an essential part of him, and without it he and I would probably be dead.
“We go in the house and find the body in the kitchen,” he began. “He is sitting at the table, hands rest on top like he is meditate, no? His feet flat to floor, but one shoe is missing.
“The cut to each forearm is made by a big knife, I mean hunting knife or Kukri, you know, the knife Gurkha use.”
I nodded.
He continued.
“A big thick blade, and the cut is made from the elbow down to the wrist in one movement. Very clean, very accurate. I know this is so, yet no blood is on the table top, not one drop. All the blood is on the floor around the corpse in a perfect circle yes?”
I thought I was getting his point. “So, he couldn’t have lifted his own arms up onto the table, because he bled out with his arms at his side?”
“This is one part, and this takes time, Richard, a lot of time, because on purpose our guy doesn’t cut the artery. When I see Colin sitting there, this is the first thing I notice, the first piece of puzzle.”
He tapped his nose with his finger. “His missing shoe, the other one, is on the top landing, I see this when I clear the house. I think maybe he was taken from upstairs, maybe he try to run up there to escape. Someone big and strong drag him down, tie him to the chair, cut his veins and watch him die slow.”
“Tie him with what?”
“I think bed linen. One bed has no sheet and one single was in the washing machine alone, still wet. I don’t think you wash just one piece, no?”
I couldn’t help but smile. “You’re a proper little Hercule Poirot, eh?
“I don’t know this person,” said JJ flatly.
I gave in. “Okay, mate, anyway, why do this to him?”
The Turk shrugged as if the answer was obvious.
“He ask him questions of course.”
I had to say, it wasn’t an interrogation technique I’d ever come across, and I’d seen a few nasty ones in my time.
JJ had the answer.
“In the fourteenth century the Ottoman Empire invaded Greece, but some parts remained under the control of Venice, yes?”
“You mean Italy?”
“No, I mean the Most Serene Republic of Venice.”
I was at a loss. My London comprehensive hadn’t run to fourteenth century history, so I kept quiet. JJ, however, knew his stuff.
“The Republic of Venice was a separate entity to Rome and very powerful. She controls the Ionian Islands of |Corfu and Kefalonia whilst us Turks have Crete and others, yes? The Venetian also invade the coastal areas of what is now Serbia, Croatia and most of Albania.”
I tried to keep quiet and waited for the punchline.
“So, when these fighters take the Greek island of Corfu and cleanse whole villages, they find they have no one left to work the farms, no food to feed their army. So, they use labour from the closest country they control…Albania.
“The men of Corfu hate the Albanian for stealing their land. But they will not lie down and die like animal. They form small militias…kill many soldiers and many Albanian, raiding the small villages around the north coast. The Corfiot are very brave men.”
Much to my horror, JJ started to roll a cigarette as he spoke. But as I’d never heard him speak more than two or three words and a grunt at any one time, this was a special occasion.
“So, he continued. “When the Albanian, he catch one of these Greek fighters, this was the way they interrogate him. They cut him bad along the forearm or sometimes the calf, but not enough to kill. The prisoner slowly bleed to death as he is questioned.
“Inside his mind, he know that if he answers, there is a chance he will live, no?”
“But they never did?”
JJ nodded. “The Albanians would leave the corpses of the Greek fighters in a chair surrounded by a circle of their own blood for the local women and children to see. This was a warning.
They call this, ‘the pool of shame’. This is the Albanian way of marking a man, saying they make him inform on his own people. What they say here in Manchester? A grass?
I tell you, Richard, Reed was killed by an Albanian.”
I rooted in my case and found one of the pictures I’d printed out at Egghead’s house.
I laid it on the table.
JJ looked at it for a long time, then said, “The fat lady next door say a man with shaved head and big muscles call at Colin Reed’s house before we go there. One day before, maybe two.”
I had all the conformation I needed.
“So, he’s at least a day in front of us,” I muttered half to myself.
Tapping the picture, I said, “This is Red George. The man who left the bug in Spiros Makris’ house. He’s Albanian and I know he likes to use a machete as his preferred close combat weapon.”
JJ handed me back the photo. “You think this man lead us to Goldsmith?”
I nodded. “I think he is working for Goldsmith, yes.”
“Then we find him…and kill him,” he said.
And they say great minds think alike.
JJ went to light his roll-up.
I caught his wrist. “Smoke that outside, pal.”
Des Cogan’s Story:
Of course, I knew it wasn’t going to be as simple as slotting Red George, dumping his body in the ship canal and going for a pint in O’Shea’s.
Oh no, never mind that we had to take on a seven-foot, machete-wielding psychopathic, Albanian. Our Richard had far bigger fish in his sights, Rick’s ultimate aim was to see Goldsmith dead. He was convinced the Dutchman was still alive and that the big Albanian would lead us to him. And this time, there would be no rest for anyone until he’d seen Goldsmith’s body…personally.
The thing with Rick Fuller, and I feel I can share this with you as we are so far into this tale...he never forgives and never ever forgets.
Goldsmith tortured Rick, scalding his legs with boiling water. He forced him into giving me up; forced him to show weakness. The fact that Goldsmith was on his third kettle, didn’t come into it. The animal had got one over on him. So…the biggest mistake he ever made?
Not putting a second round into Rick’s head up on that moor.
As I packed my carry-on, I have to admit that I felt a twinge of excitement. The mixture of trepidation and anticipation had never left me, and I was pretty sure that it never would. I pushed a spare pair of jeans and the usual
mix of T-shirts, skids and socks into the rucksack. Never bothering with shaving kit on a job, there was just a toothbrush, paste and soap. After all, it’s not a beauty contest. I fastened the zip and sat on the end of my bed.
My flat wasn’t up to much, don’t get me wrong, the place itself was okay, but other than the bed I sat on and one of those zip-up wardrobes, the room was bare.
In the lounge, was a sofa, TV, and a Sky box.
The kitchen had a good beer fridge. To my detriment, the cooker was brand spanking new and had never been switched on.
There were no paintings on the walls, no little souvenirs from days gone by. This was my life, this was what it had come to.
After writing a note to my lap dancer I shouldered the sack, wandered down the hall and stuck my only goodbye on the outside of the door. Both my parents were dead, and after Anne and I divorced, my staunchly Catholic brothers made it clear that I was persona non grata.
I shook my head in the realisation that the young lady who visited me in the early hours was the lone person I felt the need to tell I was going away, and I didn’t even know her surname.
I was just about to leave when I noticed a letter on the mat. I wasn’t sure how I’d missed it, but there it was, and it boasted a Glasgow postmark.
I dropped the sack and ripped open the envelope. It was headed ‘McCauley and Partners Solicitors.’
Inside, were the deeds to Hillside cottage.
Sitting behind the legal documents that needed to be signed and witnessed was another envelope; the one the brief had mentioned at the reading of the will.
The script on the front had been written by a shaky hand, yet I recognised it immediately. If Anne’s hand had shaken though illness, my tremor as I opened the pale pink packet was caused by pure emotion.
Dear Des,
By the time you read this, I believe we will have met for the final time. As you will have witnessed, my illness took its toll on my body, but not my mind.