by Anna Smith
She sighed and picked up the remote control and clicked on the television where the news was blaring. She peered at the image of a large building ablaze somewhere in the city. Then she heard the reporter describe an Asian warehouse on the Clydeside that had been burned to the ground last night, which the police were treating as an arson attack. Then a video panned to the owner, in tears, telling the reporter he didn’t want to talk about it or speculate, that he was too devastated. The warehouse had been in his family for two generations and his own father had built it up when he came here from Pakistan, a penniless immigrant in the 1960s. Kerry felt sorry for the poor man and his family. She’d almost forgotten that Jack had told her at the time that he wanted to torch the place, but she’d told him no, that they were better than that. Jack wouldn’t have ordered it to be done behind her back, so someone else must have done it – maybe connected to the thugs who had forced him to keep the boy. Perhaps they suspected he’d double-crossed them. She threw back the duvet and got out of bed, and as she turned towards the bathroom, another news report pricked up her ears. ‘The bodies of three men have been found in Glasgow with gunshot wounds to the back of their heads,’ the reporter said. ‘They were found in a lock-up garage in the East End of the city. That puts the body count to six in the past twenty-four hours in what now looks like a vicious gangland turf war.’ Police were investigating rival gangs and finding who was responsible following the shoot-out yesterday near the farmhouse on the outskirts of Glasgow, and also probing if it was connected with the kidnapping of top criminal lawyer Marty Kane’s grandson Finbar. Kerry listened to the speculation in the reporter’s story. It was all sources and rumours, and police saying nothing. Because the police didn’t actually know anything, she thought. She padded into the shower, hoping that Vinny wasn’t going to burst her head quizzing her about this all morning.
Kerry checked herself in the mirror as she looked at her watch, and heard the front doorbell ring. She was dressed in a navy cashmere V-neck sweater that showed her curves, and faded jeans that hugged her long, slender legs, and a pair of tan Chelsea boots. She wore very little make-up as she didn’t want to look like she was going on a date. Because this definitely wasn’t a date. There was a knock on her bedroom door and Elsa called to her that Detective Inspector Vincent Burns was here to see her. Kerry told her to send him up to the study and to bring some tea up for them, and she quickly went out of the bedroom and down the hall to wait.
Kerry was standing by the window when there was a soft knock on the door of the study, and she called come in. And there he was. Vinny stood in the doorway, in jeans and a black polo shirt that was tight enough for her to imagine his fit body underneath. She immediately batted the thought away.
‘Vinny,’ she said, trying to conceal her excitement. ‘Come on. Sit down. Elsa is bringing up some tea.’ She ushered him to the easy chair by the fire and walked across the room with him. Then she met his eyes and smiled. ‘Good to see you,’ she said softly. ‘I mean that.’
They stood face to face and she automatically stepped into his arms. He hugged her close and she felt the warmth of his body, and a little shiver ran through her as he eased himself away, then kissed her gently on the lips. It was fleeting, but the softness of his lips on hers brought a blush to her cheeks, and Vinny noticed.
‘Jeez, Vinny,’ she laughed. ‘You’ve got my blood up there. That wasn’t supposed to happen. You’re not supposed to kiss me.’
He was still holding her and studying her face.
‘I know,’ he said, touching her hair. ‘I’m sorry, Kerry. What can I say? It just felt so natural.’ He eased himself away. ‘But that’s it. No more of that.’ He grinned and moved towards the easy chair. ‘I’ll sit here and you can be over there and I won’t even look at you. I’ll pretend to myself that we are more or less strangers, and that those beautiful nights in my flat were just a figment of my imagination. I’ll pretend that I never had any feelings for you in the first place. Even when I was fourteen.’
Kerry was taken aback by the way he was talking and stood there watching him, wondering what was happening. Surely this was not why he had come here, to see if there was a way back, because there wasn’t.
‘Vinny,’ she said. ‘Come on. Stop your carry-on.’
‘Sorry. Probably too much coffee,’ he smiled. ‘Seriously, Kerry. I mean everything I said there, but I know the score, so I didn’t come here to bleat about what has come and gone for us. Really, I didn’t.’ He paused for a beat and she made sure her face was straight. ‘I came here to talk about everything that’s gone on in recent days. Informally. Of course. And I think I have some information you might be interested in.’
‘Okay.’ Kerry looked at the door as it opened and Elsa came in with a tray and teapot. ‘Let me get you some tea then we can chat.’ She went to the table and poured out two mugs of tea, and brought a plate of croissants, and another with jam and butter, and sat them on the coffee table. ‘Come on. We can eat and talk at the same time – we were brought up in Maryhill!’
They both smiled, and there was a little pang in her gut at how lovely it was to see him, be with him like this, even if the meeting was not about them. Kerry tried not to watch as he opened the croissant, prepared it, then took a bite of half of it, and a gulp of tea.
‘Sorry. But I’m starved. Had to go to the office straight away with all this shit overnight, so I haven’t had breakfast.’ He held up what was left of the croissant. ‘Good shout with the croissants, by the way. Very posh for a couple of kids from the schemes.’
‘You bet,’ Kerry said, joining him in a croissant and tea.
‘Have you seen the news? Bodies all over the place.’
‘I just saw a bit of it when I woke up.’
‘And a Pakistani warehouse got torched.’
‘Yeah,’ Kerry said, as disinterested as she could manage. ‘I saw that too.’
‘We think it’s all connected.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘All linked to the kidnapping of Marty Kane’s grandson. That’s what we’re looking at.’
‘You got evidence pointing to that? Or just speculation?’
‘Put it this way. We have a couple of leads.’
‘That’s what the cops always say when they don’t have anything.’
‘I know. But in this case we do.’ He paused. ‘And it’s leading me here.’
Kerry rolled her eyes to the ceiling, trying her best to look incredulous.
‘Christ, Vinny! Come on! There’s got to be half a dozen hard men in this city who can wreak havoc on any given night. Why come here?’
‘The stiffs that were found this morning.’
‘What stiffs?’
‘Billy Sinclair, Lenny Wilson and Rab Bolton.’
Kerry shrugged her shoulders and made a don’t-know-what-you’re-on-about face.
‘We have information that they were part of, or in some way involved in the kidnapping. They’re not big players, by any shot. But we believe they were involved in moving the boy from place to place.’
Kerry kept impassive. ‘How do you even know he was moved from place to place?’
‘We’ve had specially trained officers teasing some small bits of information out of the boy, Finbar. Obviously it has to be softly-softly, but so far they’ve gleaned that big boys came and took him somewhere. Then another place in a car, then somewhere else.’ He sipped his tea, watched her. ‘Some things look as though they are adding up.’
‘Then why don’t you track down the places you say he was taken to and talk to the people there? Put some pressure on them?’
He put his mug down. ‘Because, spookily enough, they’re all dead. All of them. One guy found yesterday afternoon with a bullet in his head – and the house where he was shot has been searched and we may have DNA traces of Finbar. And the warehouse. I mean, who torches a warehouse for no reason? Nothing to suggest that it’s a racist attack. So we think maybe the boy was even there.’
/> ‘How can you think that?’
He waited for a long moment. ‘Because someone came forward to the police.’
Kerry knew he was watching her closely and she made sure she didn’t show a flicker of anything. She thought of Donna. They had paid her five grand to get out of town and keep her trap shut. Surely the little bitch hadn’t gone to the cops. She’d been in the car when Jack and his boys had roughed up Rab Bolton and she was savvy enough to know that he was having information beaten out of him. Would she really go to the cops?
‘What do you mean, came forward? Who? Someone in the kidnap gang?’
He shook his head. ‘I can’t say. But no. Not someone in the gang. But someone who saw something. That’s all I can say.’
Kerry let it hang for two beats, then she shrugged. ‘Oh, well. I’d say you’ve got it pretty much wrapped up then, Inspector Morse.’ She knew her tone was sarcastic, and that Vinny would take it as such. ‘So why are you here?’
Silence. He looked hurt. And Kerry hated herself for treating him like this, but really, he had no right to feel hurt. What the hell did he expect? Vinny looked down at the back of his hands for a long moment as though he was studying them, searching for words. He finally looked up, and their eyes locked.
‘I’m sorry, Vinny. I didn’t mean it to sound like that – like “why are you here”, as if we’ve got no history. But you know what I mean, don’t you?’
His look was beginning to disarm her, and she couldn’t allow that to happen. Eventually he sighed, sat back and stretched out his long legs, steepled his hands over his chest.
‘Kerry. I’ll tell you what I think.’ He paused for effect. ‘I think the Caseys are in trouble. I think you took on too much when you upset the Colombians – that Pepe Rodriguez scumbucket.’
Kerry sat back, folded her arms, closing shop, showing no response. Vinny continued.
‘I think Marty Kane’s boy was kidnapped by them to get at you, and I think that your . . .’ He hesitated. ‘Well, for want of a better word, your foot soldiers stormed in the other day and took the boy back, leaving behind a trail of bodies. And I also think your boys torched that warehouse on the river, and also put a bullet in the head of the three stiffs who turned up dead today. By the way, that’s three extra stiffs from the ones killed during the shoot-out where we believe the kid was rescued.’ He stopped, raised his eyebrows. ‘How right am I so far?’
Kerry gave him as dubious a look as she could muster, while wondering how the hell he could be so well informed.
‘Yeah, sure, Vinny. I don’t think I’ve seen that movie you’re describing. But it sounds like a belter.’ She sat forward, picked up her mug and gulped from it, looking straight at him.
He never took his eyes off her, and eventually she was forced to look away.
‘Look, just listen to me for a moment. Hear me out.’
‘I’m all ears, Inspector.’
‘Pepe Rodriguez is spearheading a major coup from the Costa del Sol to Amsterdam to the UK, and our boys in the Drug Enforcement Agency have been tracking his movements for months. He’s got the purest cocaine and he’s planning to flood our streets with it, the crack market, the lot. There are a few other big shots over there on the Costa del Sol who don’t like the way he’s muscling in. But he seems to have the manpower and the clout, and he’s making inroads – and he has the best of coke. I mean, no cocaine is ever a hundred per cent pure, but his stuff is ninety-six per cent. So that’s top dollar shit.’
Kerry processed this for a moment, then answered. ‘So if you’ve been tracking him for months, why can’t you stop him? There must be some way you can get what you need to nail him. I thought the DEA were all over Europe working together?’
‘We are. We do. And we share all our information. But we need more.’
‘So why come to me? What am I supposed to do, Vinny? You’re losing me here.’
He looked at her, and she knew he was trying to read her.
‘You could get inside his organisation. You could work with him.’
‘What?’ She almost laughed.
‘I’m serious. Isn’t that why he was coming after you? For your big hotel complex you’re planning out on the Costa del Sol? He wanted that, didn’t he?’ He waited a second, but put his hand up as though trying to stop her from speaking, even though she hadn’t been going to say anything. ‘In fact, he was going to take that off you. And you’d have been working for him.’
‘Look, Vinny. I—’
‘I know what you’re going to say. Where am I getting all this information? Trust me, Kerry. We have snitches on the periphery of a lot of the action from here to Colombia that pass us information.’
For a moment, Kerry was trying to work out if someone in her organisation was passing information. She couldn’t think of a single person, but would talk to Danny and Jack as soon as Vinny was gone.
‘But you sound so well informed, Vinny. What’s stopping you from taking that a bit further? Nailing him. Big time. You must be able to do that. Christ! Sure, they nailed Al Capone on tax dodging! Surely to Christ you can work out something that he must be doing so you can take him down.’
‘It’s not as easy as that. We don’t want to get him on parking tickets or some shite, because he’ll just come back bigger. We need to strangle him completely. Strangle his supply.’
‘What about the Irish?’ she said. ‘He works with them – they went over to him.’
‘They’re history. Pat Durkin is dead.’ He hesitated. ‘Shot dead in Spain. But I’m sure you already knew that, Kerry.’
She said nothing, and they sat in silence.
‘Kerry. Will you think about what I’ve said?’
She was feeling exhausted by all this, by the information he had, by his proposition, and just the fact that he was here and she had to hold back from touching him, from talking to him, from telling the truth about what was going on in her body.
‘Vinny, I have to go and talk to some people. I’ve got a lot on my plate right now.’
She stood up, and he sat for a second watching her, then he got up. He took a step towards her and she felt she should take a step back but she couldn’t. He reached out and touched her hair, then brushed the back of his fingers on her cheek.
‘Kerry. I . . . I . . .’ He seemed lost for words for the first time since he walked in the door. ‘I can’t get you out of my mind.’
‘Vinny. Come on. We’ve done this. We talked about this. Come on. Don’t do this. Not now.’
‘I can’t help it, Kerry. I want you to know that.’ He stood there, the electricity crackling between them. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever stopped loving you. I don’t know if I ever can.’
He took a step closer, and before she could stop herself, she was in his arms and he was kissing her on the lips that way he did when they ended up in bed together in his house. But this was different. This was her house. He was a cop sent to see if he could get her onside, and now he was throwing all this emotional stuff in. And all the time, she was standing there, choking that the biggest betrayal of all was that she had his child inside her. But she pushed him away and they stopped kissing, stood breathless, feeling the heat of their bodies. She stepped back.
‘Vinny. Please.’ She felt her chest tighten. ‘Don’t do this to me right now. I can’t take it.’
He let her go and touched his lips with his finger.
‘I’m sorry. Honestly, Kerry. That was so not meant to happen. Please believe me.’
She half smiled and shook her head to take the heat out of the situation.
‘You’re something else, Inspector, you really are.’ She ushered him to the door. ‘Now go on. I’ve got a lot to do.’ She touched his arm. ‘But really. I’m so glad to see you.’
‘Will you think about what I said?’
‘About what?’
‘About working with us? Helping destroy Rodriguez. I know I can get you the protection you need over in Spain with the cops there. We have sp
ecialists. People your people could work with.’
She put her hand up. ‘Vinny. Please. Let me digest everything you’ve said. Okay?’ She walked him to the door. ‘Now get the hell out of here and let me get back to work.’
He smiled as he backed out of the door, and when she closed it behind him, she stood for a moment in the silence of the room, suddenly feeling as lonely as she’d felt in a very long time.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Before she even picked up her mobile from the bedside table, Sharon knew it could only be bad news. She opened one eye and could see the orange glow of the Costa sun begin to push itself out of the sea. She looked at her phone. It was six a.m., and Enrico, the security boss on the hotel site, was calling. Christ! She sat up, pressed the answer key and cleared her throat. Before she could even speak, Enrico’s breathless throaty voice was already ranting.
‘Sharon! Sharon! Fackeeng beeg problem at the hotel! Is like a bomb site! Really! Like someone drop a fackeeng bomb! You need to come!’ He paused, and she could hear people talking. ‘Oh sheet! An now my boys tell me we have two men dead. Fak!’
‘Okay, okay, Rico. I’ll be there as soon as I can. But listen. Just calm down. Tell me what you know. As much as you can. Just take your time. Are you okay?’
‘Yes. I’m fine. I just got here. The workers just arrive and they call me straight away. Blood everywhere. What they do to my boys. Fak, Sharon! You don’t do that to a pig what they did.’
He sounded as though he was somewhere between tears and rage, and she tried to bring him back so she could listen.
She leaped out of bed, pulled back the blinds and opened the terrace door. Then she stepped out into the chilly morning air, and stood in the stillness, trying to take in what Enrico was saying, once she calmed him down.