Undercover

by Gerard Brennan

  He owned up. "I really don't know how to make you feel better, Mattie."

  "I don't want to feel better." Mattie snuffled. "Just leave me alone."

  Cormac noticed a small cluster of shops on the road. One of them was still open, the vulgar glow from its fluorescent sign intruding on the darkening atmosphere. An off licence. He double parked on the road and waved a visibly disgruntled taxi driver past him.

  "Mattie, forget I'm a cop for a minute."

  "Okay..."

  "Have you started drinking yet?"

  "I'm thirteen."

  "Never?"

  Mattie shook his head.

  "Right, I reckon this is a good time to start."

  Cormac unfastened his seatbelt and reached for the door handle.

  "Wait," Mattie said. "I'll be okay. I'm sorry."

  "I'll concentrate better if you can settle down a bit. You've been through a lot. Consider this medicine. Let me worry about getting you home."

  Cormac took Mattie's silence and confused expression as consent and got out of the car. He felt like he'd solved a problem. Applied a temporary fix at least. And for the most part he was able to ignore the disapproving little voice at the back of his head. The one that sounded an awful lot like Donna.

  ###

  Stephen Black ushered Lydia and Rory towards the old Scot's office. Lydia sensed Rory stiffen as the older man's hand pressed against the small of his back. She was glad of his discomfort. Her shock at Rory's actions had given way to a smouldering rage on the journey to Soho. How fucking dare he? Stephen Black pushed the thick double-doors just below the minute brass plaque with MCGOLDRICK engraved on it. He looked Rory up and down before gesturing for him to enter. Rory scratched his thigh, posture disjointed, his ballsy suave temporarily misplaced.

  Stephen Black turned to Lydia. "Normally I'm a ‘ladies first' kind of chap but I think I should keep an eye on this fellow for now. Please excuse the deviation from etiquette."

  Lydia followed the men. McGoldrick looked up from a newspaper. It was a Red Top and he had a highlighter pen in his hand. The little bastard still trawled for libel cases himself. Like he didn't have a room full of lawyers to do that spade-work for him.

  Lydia couldn't resist a jibe. "This how you spend your Friday nights, Mr McGoldrick?"

  The old Scot didn't even have the decency to act ashamed. He capped the highlighter and twiddled it between his stumpy fingers. Stephen Black moved to the corner of the office, his attention fixed on a bookcase filled with tomes that McGoldrick liked to admit he'd never read. Lydia took another look at him, this time with clearer eyes and in better light. The man's tracksuit was so wrong, like a hoodlum in a tux. Lydia could see argyle socks between the cuff of his trousers and the tops of his trainers. Whippet thin, grey-haired, Mediterranean swarthy.

  "Why did you ask me here, Mr McGoldrick?" Lydia said. "Really."

  "Didn't Mr Black fill you in?"

  "Your security consultant? He said he'd leave it to you."

  Lydia took the central visitor's seat at McGoldrick's desk and waited for the others to arrange themselves around her. Rory sat on the chair to her left and Stephen Black stood behind him, leaving the chair to the right empty. The old Scot held court.

  "Let's not drag this out, Lydia. I know you're in trouble. What can I do to help you?"

  "Why was your man watching me?"

  Stephen Black spoke, his voice just above a whisper. "Maybe you should tell him about Mr Cullen's indiscretion first?"

  McGoldrick ran his hands through his thick grey hair. It flopped back into its well-trained side parting. He leant back on his leather office throne. The recline mechanism hissed.

  "What's he talking about?"

  "You first."

  "I was suspicious about your intentions when you came to me earlier and asked for help with Rory's sponsorship deal." He nodded towards Stephen Black. "So I had you followed."

  "Your security consultant tails people?"

  "He has many talents. And when it comes to money, I don't fuck around. I figured there had to be some sort of angle. But I wasn't expecting to hear what my associate reported back."

  Rory leaned forward in his seat. He was sucked in by McGoldrick. Lydia couldn't blame him. Physically, McGoldrick was the smallest person in the room and yet he commanded it like a king. He continued:

  "John and your kid, Mattie, got kidnapped yesterday and you found out about it that evening. You came to London this morning and visited me this afternoon. When you left here you spoke to a man at The Toucan pub. It didn't look like a social exchange."

  Stephen Black clicked his fingers.

  Lydia turned to look at him despite her resentment. "Don't click your fingers at me, Mr Black. I'm not a waitress."

  "Terribly sorry. I simply thought it was an opportune time to interject with this." He passed her a canvas wallet fastened with zips and Velcro. Very similar to the one Mattie used for his school dinner money.

  She hesitated before opening it. The edges were frayed and she could see a shiny credit card-sized outline. It unfolded into three panels, each one containing a clatter of plastic. A little see-through pocket displayed a driving licence. The photo in the corner was of the pockmarked, sunbed-tanned creep who'd delivered the message at the pub earlier. She folded the wallet back up and tossed it onto McGoldrick's desk.

  "Where'd you get that?"

  Stephen Black flexed his fingers. The gesture was effeminate but seemed to be without irony. "The art of pocket picking is alive and well in London. Surely you've seen the street signs?"

  "You're a wee bit dodgy if you ask me, mate," Rory said. "How can we be sure you're on our team?"

  "We're not on the same team anymore," Lydia said.

  "I'm fucking sorry, all right? It's not like I was going to kill you or anything. It was just like that what-do-you-call-it... temporary insanity or something. I would have stopped before that English wanker came in and started playing the hero."

  Lydia waved him away.

  "Seriously, Lydia. Have you never seen Spooks on the TV? Those MI5 bastards are slippery as fuck. And he looks just like one."

  "I think the kid's got your number, Black," McGoldrick said.

  "Not quite bang on, but close enough for government work, as they say." Stephen Black had the wallet again. He drummed his fingers on the back of it.

  Lydia tried to look unimpressed by the little party trick. He must have taken it from the desk when Rory had distracted her. Hardly an act of Derren Brown proportions but he'd done enough to convince Rory that he was some manner of spy.

  He's sneaky, Lydia thought. A bit off-kilter, too.

  McGoldrick tapped his desktop with the highlighter pen.

  "I don't understand why you would care, Mr McGoldrick."

  "I'm a businessman, Lydia, not a monster."

  To many he fell somewhere in between businessman and monster, depending on how much money was at stake. But she'd always treated him with respect, and he returned the favour. She could do him the courtesy of hearing him out.

  "Okay, Mr McGoldrick, I appreciate the offer. But what good are you to me now? They've got what they wanted so now I get my family back."

  "Oh, really? Have they called you yet to tell you where they've been keeping them?"

  "It's only a matter of time..."

  "Lydia, these people are criminals. They might have no intention of returning your family."

  "If you really think that, then it's definitely time to call the police."

  "Fucking right it's time to call the police," Rory said. "You should have called them from the start."

  "Shut up, Rory," Lydia said.

  "So what's it to be, Lydia?" McGoldrick asked. "Personally, I fancy Mr Black's chances. He'll get to them quicker than the police and he doesn't have to follow any of their daft rules."

  "I need time..."

  "Time's running out, hen. Let's go now."

  "Go where?"

  McGoldrick sat back. He
looked to Stephen Black for an answer. The little man stroked his chin. Then Rory piped up.

  "I might be able to help there."

  "All suggestions are gratefully received," Stephen Black said.

  "They stole my car," Rory said. "My old iPhone was in it. It's got a shitload of music on it so I left it plugged into the stereo when I got the new model last month. Couldn't be arsed transferring all the files, you know?"

  "And that's relevant because..."

  "Because, I've got this app, you see. A fucking GPS tracker! It's meant to help you find it if it's lost or stolen. So if we know where the phone is, we know where the pricks who stole my car are."

  There was a moment of silence then McGoldrick slapped his hand off his desktop. "Let's get fucking moving, then."

  Chapter 17

  I've been dealt a fair amount of red cards. I get passionate sometimes. Some people can't handle that. Pansies. Remember when real men played football? I miss that.

  Rory Cullen, CULLEN: The Autobiography

  Mattie slurped on the big bottle of WKD Cormac had bought for him. The kid was as likely to get a buzz off the additives that coloured it blue and hid the taste of booze as he was off the actual alcoholic content. But it was a good distraction for him. Medicinal almost. Cormac hardly felt guilty about it at all.

  "What now?" Mattie asked.

  "Back to the hospital to check on Donna and your da."

  "And then?"

  "We phone your ma and figure out how to get you guys reunited."

  Mattie regarded his bottle for a moment, shrugged and took another sip. Obviously he felt that he was unlikely to get into trouble over it.

  "But what about the rest of the gang, Cormac?" The kid still wasn't getting his name right; splitting the syllables in the wrong place – Core-mack. "Will they get arrested?"

  "Oh, yeah, wee man. Don't worry about that. We've plenty on them now. They'll all go down hard, so they will."

  "Heh. ‘So they will'."

  Cormac realised the kid was taking the piss. He cleared his throat. "Aye... so they will."

  "Sorry, couldn't resist."

  Cormac thought he detected a little slur in Mattie's voice. The kid was barely a quarter into his bottle, though. He'd hardly be feeling the effects already.

  "Do you think Mum is okay?"

  "Aye, definitely. These guys are professional enough to know that she'd be no use to them if they hurt her. She's completely safe."

  He said it without hesitation and injected plenty of confidence into his tone. Whether or not he actually believed it was irrelevant. There was nothing he could do about it if Lydia Gallagher was in trouble; it was beyond his power. But the kid just needed some assurance and that he could provide.

  Mattie took another slurp of WKD.

  "Maybe take it easier on that stuff," Cormac said. "Slow and steady."

  "Yeah, yeah. No worries. It's not really doing anything for me anyway."

  There it was again. The slightest of slurs. He'd underestimated the strength of the alcopop. Or the kid's resistance to it. It'd been some time since his own first experience with booze and back then there was no such thing as the brightly coloured kiddie drinks that had gotten popular in recent years. He'd split a bottle of white cider with a mate. Thought he was doing well until he tried his first cigarette on the same night. Emptied his stomach onto the footpath. His mate, Kevin Murtagh, had looked after him that night. Made sure he got cleaned up before he went home, filled him full of Polo mints to cover up the stink of cheap booze and tobacco. Kevin Murtagh... thinking about his childhood chum still hurt.

  Kevin had been a good friend. Fun, loyal and wild; everything you needed to enjoy your teen years. But he'd come from a republican family and it was inevitable that he would get caught up in the bullshit. He'd signed up with the Provos at a young age and Cormac had turned his back on him. Cormac's family had been devastated by "IRA activities" when his father had been killed during an attempted bus hijacking. For his best friend to align himself with the same organisation had been a slap in the face. But Cormac would always regret not showing up at Kevin's funeral to pay his respects. The young Provo had been turned by Special Branch and when he was found out for it, his "comrades" nailed him to a tree in South Armagh and emptied a Webley revolver into his face. In the following months, wracked with guilt and white hot with fury, Cormac dropped out of university and signed up to join the RUC.

  Cormac tightened his grip on the steering wheel and tried to force the memories back into the little compartment at the back of his mind. He couldn't have all those old hurts come back. There was a lot to be done and he needed to be focussed. His revenge would continue to be delivered in small doses in every case he worked. The dark idea of putting a bullet in Big Frank’s head was chased away. It wouldn't bring the satisfaction it promised.

  "You okay, Cormac? I can hear you grinding your teeth."

  Cormac relaxed his jaw and forced a smile. "Yeah, no worries, kid. It's just something I do when I'm thinking too hard, you know? My wee brain gets cross with me if I push it."

  "Hmmm."

  "Right, there's the hospital. Let's see how your da's got on."

  ###

  "We haven't pieced together all the whys and wherefores just yet. But we do have a few leads."

  Stephen Black's eyes met Lydia's in the rear view mirror as he spoke. He was behind the wheel and Lydia sat in the back on the passenger side. Rory fidgeted beside Lydia, his wrists bound with cable ties until he proved he could "play nice" as Stephen Black had put it. The Premiership superstar seethed silently. McGoldrick rode up front. There was no telling how long Rory's stolen Land Rover would remain at the address they'd tracked it to through his iPhone GPS app. It could end up in a shipping container to Nigeria in a matter of hours and their trail, the only thing they could grasp at, would go cold.

  And so the four of them had piled into Stephen Black's dark blue Vauxhall Vectra. The finely tuned engine purred and hauled them about the London streets with impressive bursts of raw power. And there was a greenish sheen off the windows that suggested to Lydia they might be bulletproof. She figured it had been a police vehicle at some point in its life. And now it belonged to... well, whatever this posh little guy driving it was.

  "But I did a bit of digging on the nasty fellow you met at that awful Irish theme pub," Black said. "Brendan Rooney. London Irish. Known to the police as a loan shark and criminal handyman. He's served a year here and there for some minor convictions. Bottom of the food chain type of fellow, you know?"

  "So how does he wind up running errands for a gang of Belfast kidnappers?" Lydia asked.

  "How indeed. That's where things get rather interesting. Brendan Rooney may not have risen rapidly through the hierarchy of the London criminal fraternity, but he's connected to a man of great influence among that unsavoury lot. His cousin, Martin Rooney, is quite the shady entrepreneur by all accounts. Sex, drugs, rock and roll, money laundering. His portfolio is quite impressive."

  "And the relevance of this is...?"

  "Oh, don't worry Mrs Gallagher. I won't waste your time with extraneous information. You see, Martin Rooney was an IRA sympathiser in the eighties and early nineties. He donated money, housed terrorist operatives and sang rebel songs at weddings. But as the Rooney cocaine empire grew, his association with the conservative Irish Republicans diminished. They were pushing their anti-drug dogma and he was enjoying the profit too much to let his political inclinations get in the way. He kept in touch with a few soldiers from those good old days, though. I suspect that one of those long-standing contacts kidnapped your family."

  "Why?"

  Stephen Black shrugged. "Let's not speculate. I don't have a complete picture right now but I'm confident that we'll get to the bottom of this lickety-split, without breaking any of the kidnappers' rules concerning police involvement."

  "How long before we get to Peckham?"

  "Five or ten minutes."

  "And what are
we going to do when we get there?" Lydia asked.

  "I think we should keep an open mind on that front. Best we have a good nosey at the setup and then maybe formulate a plan of action if we deem it advantageous."

  Lydia twisted the cap off a bottle of sparkling water she'd taken from McGoldrick's office. The bubbles fizzled on her tongue and tickled her nose. The sensation, coupled with her stress-induced hypersensitivity, brought tears to her eyes. She wondered if this move was a risk too far. Could anything really be gained from a bit of I-Spy with these animals? It wasn't as if they were on their way to uncover the location where her family was being held captive. The exercise was essentially the lion tamer sticking his head in the lion's mouth.

  "We shouldn't do this," Lydia said.

  "That's just your nerves talking, Lydia," McGoldrick said. "Don't worry. Our man here is the best. He'll do his thing and be gone before these arseholes get so much as a sniff of him."

  "I really am quite good," Stephen Black said.

  "It's all right for you two to tell me to chill out and go with the flow. It's not your family that'll get killed if things go pear-shaped. No. Forget it. Turn back. I'll just wait for their next call, okay?"

  "Lydia," Rory said. "I'll back you one hundred per cent if you really want to bail on this, but don't be too hasty. You've got the upper hand for the first time since these bastards came for your family. It could all amount to nothing, but do you really think you can sit back and let things play out, knowing you had a chance to try something and you chose to pass it up? You're just not built that way."

  "Well said, that man."

  "Shut up, Stevie, will you?"

  "That was a great speech," Lydia said. "But again, it's easy to dish out advice when you've nothing on the line."

  "Well how about this, Lydia?" McGoldrick said. "What if you do jump through every hoop? Play the good little pawn and give them every single thing they want. What then? Do they release your family, shake your hand and say thank you for all your hard work? Or do they decide to put you on to the next client? And another one after that? Where does all the shite end?"