Crusaders (24 page)

As he reached for the latch, a key was turning, then the door swung open. There on the threshold was young Jake in a hooded black anorak, his hand in the grasp of a painfully pale and
redheaded
woman in her fifties, clad in a waterproof of her own. Before two pairs of wary eyes Gore was flustered.

‘Hi, I’m John Gore, I’m the new vicar? I was just paying a visit on Lindy.
This
young man I’ve met. Hello there, bonny lad.’

‘I’m his Auntie Yvonne,’ she squinted, her accent Irish, in no way charmed or allayed.

‘Yvonne?’ came a croaking call from the living room.

‘I was just on my way,’ Gore smiled, and slipped past and out, feeling but a shade disreputable.

Stevie stood nursing his ale, stolidly surveying the three young women stripped to the waist as they chattered affably to each other in Dutch, presumably about the merits of this or that trick for hiding banknotes on one’s person. He was more drawn by the range of brassieres on display under the moody light. Here, an innocent white cotton sports number. There, a lewd purple plunger, though its cups were not so bountiful as the black
pushup
model worn by the tallest of the three. The lass he would have most relished seeing in her skimpies was the fourth of the party, Roy Caldwell’s girlfriend Nina, another Dutchie – twentyish, blonde but dusky of complexion, short but ripe at top and bottom. She, though, was only supervising procedures, and none too
happily
neither.

‘You know your route, then?’ Roy murmured, standing at Stevie’s shoulder by the island that divided this
conservatory-cum
-kitchen/breakfast room of the Caldwell residence. Stevie nodded, thrusting his fists into his black leather coat.

‘Leave them off on Collingwood Street, but
park
and get out, yeah? See they all get on. Three separate London trains, on the half-hour, first one at eight.’

‘Ah hear ya,’ said Stevie.

The boss charged his glass from a bottle of Rioja, Stevie topped his pint mug with brown ale. Across the terracotta tiles, grouped around a glass-top table, the girls – tippling from their own bottle of fizz – were packing wads of used notes in stomach belts about their bellies, the overspill laid down by Nina into nondescript new-bought tote bags. Such were the spoils of another week’s
trading. Swaddled in coats and cardigans the ladies’ figures were unlikely to draw comment in this freezing November of 1992.

Stevie only saw as much of Roy as was prudent, but he had been keen to come over tonight and view the new gaff in the
village
of Darras Hill, Ponteland, eight miles’ drive north-west of Newcastle. A desirable residence it was, a big new build with five bedrooms and an epic driveway that would have fully justified the installation of watch-tower or gun turret, if such were the buyer’s requirement. Roy’s company, though, Stevie never found wholly relaxing. He usually came away from it with more chores to fulfil. Tonight he was tasked with conveying the Dutch lady mules to Central Station, for Roy trusted him and him alone to ensure the job got done. Nina, clearly done with her own share of the chore, flounced past the men and out of the kitchen. Roy made an indulgent face.

‘Pay her no mind. You don’t happen to know anything about
ovens
, do you?’

It consoled Stevie that Roy, too, had his woes with women and households and domestic appliances on the blink. Stevie never heard the end of Karen’s grievances – she and little Donna set up perfectly nicely in Chopwell, weekly visits and cash gifts, and it was hardly as though he were living high on the hog himself. Yet their relations were fixed at bayonet-point.

‘Ach, she has to know how busy you are.’

‘Nah. It’s just her way. Never get this bother off anyone else.’

‘Does she know, though? You’ve other wee girls on the go?’

‘Not off me. She knows the score, but. I’ve always telt her, “First duty in my life is that firstborn child.”’

‘Sweet, is she? Your wee girl?’

Stevie grimaced. ‘Takes after her mother.’ His daughter presented her cheek to be kissed with the same Nordic air of reluctance.

‘Aye well.’ Caldwell foraged in his shirt pocket for his Zippo. ‘You’re conscientious, Stevie. Seems to me, but, you might want to … vary your habits a bit? I wouldn’t have so many
haunts
if I were you. Same pubs, same bookies. If you’ve different beds you can sleep in, sleep in them. It’d suit you to be a little more elusive.
Except when I need you, of course.’ He grinned. ‘I’m not just
talking
your domestic, it’s good business too. Keeps your luck fresh. Luck’s a huge part of all this.’

Stevie nodded gloomily. Increasingly he turned it over in his head, this notion of luck – from whence it came, on whom it was bestowed, whether it ever served hard notice of its departure.

‘You can put yourself in places where you’re
liable
to be lucky, Stevie. If you’re a creature of
habit
– then the joker’s always got a chance of lying in wait for you. You get busted for nonsense. Cos the stars had time to line up against you.’

‘Divvint start wi’ that talk, man.’ Stevie winced. It was bad enough that Karen was a head-case for charts and astrology,
forever
muttering darkly as if the topic were an improvised weapon she could wheedle into his guts.

‘Okay, fill me in then. How are your boys? All the parts
working
?’

‘Nee bother.’ Stevie shrugged. The new starts in the minicab firms and the second-hand car lots were doing fine. The number of doorways of the bars and the clubs – graduate school – were ever increasing, and Stevie was taking on a few allegedly more experienced lads whom he might have queried harder in the past. But there seemed hardly the time for fine discrimination any more.

‘It’s just, it’s like – everybody wants a piece of us, man,’ he said finally.

Caldwell set down his wine glass. ‘You’re breaking my heart tonight, Stevie. Look. Expansion’s not a luxury in business, it’s a necessity. It’s a matter of survival. Myself? I’d rather not bother. Much rather the simple life. But it’s a fact, you can’t get off the train when it’s rolling. The
good
news is the life you get. Right? You can have a piece of anything, once you’re big enough. And they all tell me they want my boys in. Well, not all of them, but, you know …’ Caldwell placed a manicured paw on Stevie’s coat sleeve. ‘So, aye, I know it’s more work for you, but it’s worth it, right?
Isn’t
it? Come on. Who’s your pal, eh? Who’s your buddy?’

Stevie threw Roy a forbearing look that seemed to delight the
older man, for he grinned broadly. ‘
That’s
right. Is there anything you’d not do for me, Stevie? If I asked you nice enough?’

‘I wouldn’t touch your old cock.’

Caldwell chuckled into the rim of his sea-dark Rioja. ‘Aye, well there’s other candidates there, son. Less of the old and all, eh?’

Weighing all things, Stevie knew he had no cause for grievance against his paymaster. Their association had carried him a mile north of Hoxheath to his own detached house in clean-swept Fenham. He had sorely needed a bigger drum for his goods, not to mention better security. With due regard for his new neighbours, he sought and secured a double garage, one bin for his handy new Lexus, the other for a pro set of benches and free weights.

Roy urged him always to make his money grow, even offering the services of some shady accountant. Stevie deigned to purchase a local off-licence on an untroubled stretch. He granted Roy’s insistence that in business no stone should be left unturned, no opportunity spurned. Construction was booming about Newcastle – Stevie could see it with his own eyes, even in benighted Hoxheath, where ground was getting broken for some sprawling new City College campus. If builders raised scaffolding in such a blighted zone, the site was surely in need of protection from marauding charver kids – that much was common sense. He
consulted
Roy, who vehemently agreed this was a job for Sharky’s Machine, that the boys should go round forthwith. But Stevie
wanted
the job personally. For when the company signage was lofted up on the perimeter fence, he recognised the name of Jim Doggett’s old firm, albeit linked by ampersand to some new partner.

Stevie presented himself at the site first thing, his stomach growling in the wait to acquaint Doggett with his nemesis. Alas, he found only one harassed foreman, whom he browbeat at leisure for a quarter-hour, firmly boring through his hapless
stammer
that there were already contracts in place, shift teams, alarms, surveillance. ‘Your site’s bigger than that, man. And I’m telling you, there’s neebody else can
guarantee
your security. Nee-
fucking
-body, y’understand?’ He never raised his voice, much less a
hand, and left knowing that he had made the correct impression. The tax was paid weekly when he dropped by, though he never saw sight or heard protesting word of Jim Doggett – the sole
dissatisfaction
in an otherwise happy transaction.

That was how it went in Hoxheath. Round Fenham way, Stevie wished to be better thought of by his neighbours. He had his own definition of fair play in life – it had been wisdom dearly bought – and he was resolved to act like it amounted to something. Offering a little cash to the good of St Mark’s Church was a simple act of
auld lang syne
, for Stevie well remembered how its wooden pews had once been a bed to him. On certain afternoons, if at a loose end, he strode over to the church and through the doors and took a seat, where there was peace and solitude and pale soothing light. The iron, he was sure, had done more than pack his muscles – it had taken his head to elevated places, instilled some stirring thoughts. The silence and decorum of St Mark’s he also found conducive to same. When other churchy folk were present, he was less sure of his welcome, for he could tell they assumed a great deal of his character from the shadow he cast. But he could face himself squarely in the bathroom mirror.
What I am
, he would tell his
reflection
,
what I do, I am a regulator
. It was a term he had gleaned from cowboy films, and it never failed to restore his spirits.

After a spring morning spent watching his three-year-old
daughter
behold him as though he were a burglar, Stevie dialled Roy’s number from the Lexus and was given perplexing details of a new gig. In wheezing amusement Roy described the Damask Rose, a sauna-and-massage place on Westgate Road that had gone
begging
after the busting of an elderly madam who had failed to renew her subscription with the local constabulary. There seemed to be no qualms about new management stepping into her stead – a move that appeared to amuse Roy still. ‘Don’t know what
possessed
me on this one, Stevie son. Would you believe I was raised at the foot of the kirk?’

‘All I knaa, Roy, everybody likes a bit naughty.’

‘Is that right?’ Caldwell cackled back down the line.

The first time that Stevie mounted the rickety stairs he had an odd flutter in his gut, for he couldn’t picture what a bordello looked like in this day and age. In fact, it was a bog-standard
second-floor
flat, three poky bedrooms fitted with heavy blinds and painted in clashing colours as to offer a choice of mood to the punter. It was, he saw, an elementary task to appoint one beefy lad to patrol the narrow hallway. A mumsy woman was perched on a high stool in a galley kitchen, keeping a register, directing traffic, while a few polite and listlessly semi-clad ladies watched telly in a parlour. Stevie was vaguely fascinated by them – just girls,
really
, from Poland and Bulgaria – but he found he got on better with the mumsy manager, always ready with a joke and a plate of oven chips when he called to take the tax.

In the wake of one such drop-by, contemplating a solitary cod supper at the wheel, Stevie received a Roy summons to drive out of town by the Coast Road and join him and a pal at some bar in Whitley Bay. The tide was frothing on the blowsy seafront when he parked the Lexus. The venue, he discovered, was a private members’ club, a queer sort of joint – mauve walls, tigerskin-print seats, and mounted paintings of bosomy females in loincloths basking with panthers or curled up in the coils of pythons. But it was private, for sure, and there, at Roy’s bidding, Stevie shook hands with a flabby walrus of a man, one Jonjo Fitzgerald, who proceeded to witter on incessantly about Newcastle United – the genius of Kevin Keegan, the dead-eyed prowess of Andy Cole. Roy seemed to tolerate it, though Stevie had never taken him for a sportsman, and when Fitzgerald had drunk up and waddled out, Roy looked at Stevie like a cat with moist whiskers and informed him that Fitzy’s day job was as a detective inspector with Northumbria Drugs Squad. That, Stevie decided, was the most surprising thing he had heard in all of 1993.

‘What’s a policeman, Steve, but a human man doing a job? He’s more in common wi’ you or me than Joe Bloggs out there empties bins for a living.’

‘Detective
inspector
, but …’

‘There’s no’ a lot of point getting pally with PC Plod. You’re not
much improving your influence there. Them boys, they’ll talk to you happy enough, but you don’t get much for your money.’ Some indigestible thought had occurred. ‘And some of them
bastards
, the young uns – awful devoted to the good old cause. Wee caped crusaders, dudley-do-rights. Fitzy there was just telling me about some boy got stuck on his team, some cunt-stubble. Didn’t like what he saw, went behind Fitzy’s back to his super. Next day he found these blades of grass in his desk drawer. Then, get
this
for cold – someone stuck a wee photo of his kiddie to the office whiteboard.’

Stevie frowned. ‘What’s that about, then?’

‘Ah, well, it wisnae a picture
he’d
ever seen.’

Caldwell reclined into the tigerskin, raised an eyebrow, drummed fingers on his thigh of his good Italian pants. Stevie nodded. Truly, in a war of such nerves, there was but one side to be on.

‘By the by, do you fancy the match on Saturday?’

Stevie smelled a rat. ‘What,
United
match?’

‘Aye, United–Liverpool. Fitzy wanks on, I know, but I’ve started going a bit myself. It’s good entertainment. Good atmosphere. Cut above Tannerdice, I have to say. Do you fancy it?’

‘Roy, man, I was brought up red and white.’

‘Sunderland? They’re muppets, aren’t they?’

Stevie struggled for a rebuttal. His dad had been one to declare he was Sunderland until he died, but where was his dad now? The place looked a little smarter these days, at least north of the Wear in Fulwell, where his nana was eking out her days. But Wearside was the distant past, of which he remembered naught but rancour, unfairness and disloyalty. And, if he was honest, he liked how Keegan’s United played.