Dead Won't Sleep (23 page)

Rosie looked at Quigley. Poor bastard.

‘Will you help us?’ She mustn’t let this story get to her.

He said nothing, just kept sobbing quietly. Rosie looked at Matt, who shrugged.

Eventually, Quigley took a deep breath. ‘Aye,’ he said, his head in his hands.

‘Okay.’ Rosie moved closer to him. ‘How much do you get paid each time you take the kids to the judge’s house?’

‘Two hundred pounds.’

‘Every week?’

‘Aye.’

‘I don’t know the name of the judge,’ Rosie lied, and put her hand on Quigley’s arm. ‘I want you to tell me the name – and the names of the others in the house.’

‘It’s a lord. Lord Dawson,’ Quigley said. ‘You know him. He’s famous. There’s a few others there, but I don’t know their names. One’s a judge, but I only know that two others are sheriffs and one is a lawyer.’

‘Who asked you to get involved in this?’ Rosie’s heart was beating fast.

Quigley sniffed again and flicked his cigarette end away.

‘My boss. Duncan Davidson. He’s the manager of the home.’

Rosie and Matt exchanged glances. She hadn’t expected this.

‘The manager of the home organises for the children to be passed around paedophiles? Is that what you’re saying?’

He nodded. ‘That’s right.’

‘Jesus,’ Rosie said. ‘I was told it was the manager, but I didn’t believe it.’ Another lie.

‘Who told you about this?’ Quigley asked.

Rosie told him there was no way she could tell him that. ‘Listen, Paddy. ‘We’re well down the line with this investigation, but we do need your help. As I said, it’s not you we’re after. Would you be prepared to wear a hidden tape recorder when you talk to your boss while he’s arranging a meeting at the big house?’ She didn’t know what she would say if he refused, but she knew he’d run out of choices a long time ago.

Quigley stared into the middle distance. Then he turned to Rosie. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Okay. I’ll do it.’

Bingo! Done up like a kipper. Nothing could stop them them now. And even if he walked away there and then, Rosie had their entire conversation on tape. At least that was something. She asked Quigley for a phone number and gave him her mobile. They would meet tomorrow and she would give him the wire and tape.

‘Okay, Paddy.’ She stood up. ‘We’re going now. It’s up to you what you do. You can walk away and tell your boss everything, but it won’t stop the story. It’ll just put
it off. And remember, you’re up to your neck in it but I can give you an out. I hope you understand that? I hope you’re going to help us. Then you can disappear.’

Quigley nodded.

‘I’ll help.’ Tears came to his eyes again. ‘As long as I can get out of here with my laddie.’

Rosie shook his hand, greasy from the fish, then turned and walked away, Matt following her. She had no idea if there was any way to save Quigley’s skin. Part of her felt a twinge of sorrow for him, for the shitty deals that life sometimes threw at people. But right now, that was not her problem.

Gavin Fox filled up Bob Reynolds’s whisky glass, and poured a little into his own and Bill Mackie’s. He winked when Bill caught his eye, as Reynolds protested that he didn’t need any more whisky. Foxy felt smug. The hourlong session with Reynolds had gone even better than he had anticipated. He sat back in his leather chair and stretched out his long legs, admiring the shine on his shoes.

‘I fully understand, Bob,’ Foxy said. ‘I can see why you feel pushed out.’

Reynolds swigged from his glass. His face was flushed and his speech slurred a little, but he still seemed coherent enough. He was talkative, and Foxy was glad of that. In truth, he hated Reynolds as much as he despised all the journalists he’d ever met. Parasites, he called them in private, even though he’d often been seen lunching or dining with the hierarchy of the newspapers during his career. He knew they thought he was
slippery, but once they’d spent a couple of hours having their egos bolstered by him, most of them were putty in his hands.

Reynolds was easy meat. He was so keen to be first on all the major crime exclusives, he would have sold his granny. Foxy and Bill had thrown him some big stories over the past fifteen years, and Reynolds always made sure the cops came out smelling of roses, even if it meant massaging the truth. Reynolds had already called Bill earlier in the week to mark his card that Rosie Gilmour was working on something about Jack Prentice’s suicide. Fox’s only agenda was to find out what Gilmour was doing and what evidence she had. That business with the two heavies Big Jake had sent to Edinburgh after her meeting with Alison had been well fucked up. One of them nearly got stabbed to death by Gilmour’s big minder, and Jake was not happy. That reporter was too fucking smart for her own good. Foxy would make sure she’d be sorry. If he didn’t, he knew Jake would . . .

‘The way I see it, Bob,’ Foxy said, ‘is you’re just being frozen out altogether, pal. Maybe they’re looking to get rid of you and this is a ploy. Keep you in the dark about stories. That’s what it seems like to me.’

‘I know, Foxy,’ Reynolds said. ‘It’s been like that for the past two years. Any time there’s a big investigation going on it’s always that bitch Gilmour that’s running the show, and I end up playing some bit part. You know something? I was doing this job when she was wearing
gym knickers. It makes me sick.’ He shook his head.

‘Know how you feel, Bob,’ Foxy said. ‘But she’s reading something into all this that just isn’t there. I mean, what the hell is she looking at Jack Prentice’s death for? What’s that got to do with anything? We all loved Jack, but we knew he was going round the twist for months.’

‘I know, I know.’ Reynolds drained his glass.

Foxy put on his gravest expression. He explained to Reynolds that they had information that Gilmour was planning to run a story about corruption inside the police force. A story that would name himself, Bill and Jack as rotten. Apparently, it was based on a letter written by Jack Prentice before he died. The fact was, it was all a set-up by a rogue cop with an axe to grind against Foxy. He had already been quietly dealt with and moved to a rural police station in the back of beyond, but it was important that this crap didn’t come out – for the good of the force. But the story, Foxy emphasised, was absolute rubbish. There were allegations about prostitutes and drugs, and the Big Man. And even some nonsense linking them to the wee hooker that washed up on the shore. All shite.

If Gilmour and the
Post
came out with that story, he said, they’d be fielding off lawsuits from everywhere, especially from him. Bob would be doing his editor a favour if he warned Gilmour off. The editor would be grateful in the long run. Reynolds seemed delighted to get this much information. He promised he’d sort it for
them. He’d lean on Gilmour, tell her the story was a setup. That would probably be enough for her to have doubts about it. Her ego was too big to be brought down by something that wasn’t watertight.

Foxy stood up.

‘Right, Bob. So let’s see how it goes. That’s all we can do. But the story is just a farce, Bob. A total farce. Mind you, we would get the last laugh if the
Post
printed it because one thing’s for sure: that wee bitch Gilmour would be out of our hair for good.’

They all guffawed.

‘Might be worth just letting her go with it,’ Bill said, as Foxy shook Reynolds by the hand and slapped him on the back.

‘Don’t you worry, Bob, you’re still the kiddo up here. You’ll always be welcome here. The only man we can trust, eh, Bill?’

‘Absolutely,’ Bill said.

Foxy walked Reynolds to the door with his arm around his shoulder.

‘Right, Foxy. I’ll be in touch. You can count on me.’ He walked out of the door, and Foxy closed it behind him.

He looked at Bill. ‘Prick,’ he said.

Across the city, in a smoke-filled basement room, four men sat around the poker table. There was twenty grand in the pot, and Big Jake Cox was almost gleeful as he
reached across the table and dragged the hundred-pound bundles towards him. His straight flush had put them all out of the game and it couldn’t have felt any better – especially sticking it right up that wanker Tam Ryan, who once took thirty grand off him during a three-day poker game at York races. The silence hung in the air, thick with tension. All four men glanced from one to the other, then all eyes rested on Tam. A slight redness rose in his neck. Then Tam’s belly shook a bit as he seemed to simper to himself.

He looked at Jake. ‘Fuck me, Jake. You’re some fuckin’ man. Some fuckin’ man.’

Jake chortled. ‘You fuckin’ better believe I am.’ He knocked back the remains of his Jack Daniels and Coke in one.

When the players left, Jake told his minder to wait outside while he made a phone call. He keyed a number into his mobile.

‘Bob,’ Jake said, when he heard the voice. ‘Jake Cox.’

He waited for DI Bob Fletcher to answer. Eventually, he heard a curt hallo.

‘Bob? Listen, big man, I’m gonnae make your day.’

Silence.

Jake spoke. ‘Call it a wee payback for that cunt Hamilton you never managed to bag for that murder. I know you were never in any doubt what happened, big man. But it had to be done. Big Foxy fixed it for me.’

Silence.

‘So, it’s like this, Bob. I’ve got something for you. A wee package. I hear you’re now in Internal Affairs, so this will give you a hard-on. You can bury Foxy and Mackie. No need to worry about that dead prick Prentice. Listen: that wee bird that washed up? I’ve got stuff to give you on it. But I want guarantees, big man. Guarantees.’

Silence. Big Jake looked at his watch. It was ten-thirty.

‘If you’re as smart as you think you are you’ll meet me now,’ he said.

‘Where?’ Fletcher said.

They sat in the corner of the deserted pub next to Jake’s club, and the barman brought drinks to their table. Fletcher sipped a straight whisky, and Jake enjoyed watching him, savouring the fact that Fletcher had come running.

‘You know it was Foxy who made that knife disappear in the Dick Hamilton murder case, don’t you, Bob?’

Fletcher didn’t answer. It had been his first big murder investigation, ten years ago, and he’d been convinced he had Hamilton nailed down for stabbing the young woman who’d fallen to her death from the balcony of the high flats in Petershill.

It had appeared at first to be suicide, but the stab wounds in her chest told a different story. Hamilton, one of Cox’s scumbag enforcers, had been seen by a witness running from the building, and a fingertip search of the
area by police found the bloodstained knife the following morning. Most of the blood had been wiped off, but there were traces of Hamilton’s prints all over it. Gavin Fox was Fletcher’s DCI at the time, in charge of the case. He had instructed Fletcher to bring Hamilton in, and charge him with murder, but, by the end of the week, the knife had disappeared from the police station. There had been an inquiry into how a bagged and tagged possible murder weapon that would be used as a production in the trial, could simply disappear. But nobody ever found out.

‘He gave it to me,’ Jake said. ‘Hamilton is an arsehole. No bottle. I couldn’t afford to have him standing in the witness box singing like a fucking canary. He knew too much. Of course he was well out of line for killing that wee bird, but I dealt with him myself.’

Hamilton had gone missing after he was released from custody when the Crown Office decided not to prosecute. It was eighteen months later that Spanish police discovered the remains of a dismembered body in a suitcase in the Sierra de Mijas hills, above the sleepy white village of the same name near Malaga on the Costa del Sol. The remains turned out to be Hamilton.

‘That’s in the past.’ Fletcher looked at his watch. ‘What have you got for me, Jake?’

Jake looked hard at him. ‘I need a guarantee from you right now, before I tell you anything, that I will be nowhere near this. I’ll be in Spain by the time it all kicks off, but I need a guarantee.’

‘You’ve got it. Tell me.’

Jake told him about the trips on Fox’s boat, and how he had twice brought hookers for Fox, Prentice and Mackie. He had taken pictures when they were all drunk or coked up – a bit of insurance, he told Fletcher, because if he ever needed to get out, it was always his intention to shop Foxy to save his own skin.

Fletcher listened to the story; his face showed nothing.

‘Where’s the stuff?’

‘You’ll get it. Wait for my call.’ Jake beckoned the barman and told him to phone his driver.

‘You need dropping off somewhere?’ Jake grinned at Fletcher.

The DI stood up. ‘From you? Aye. Like a fucking hole in the head.’ He looked down at Jake who was finishing his drink. ‘Phone me.’ He turned and left.

It was almost midnight by the time Rosie typed the final sentence into her laptop. She stabbed the full stop key, sat back in her chair, put her hands behind her head and took a deep breath. She called up on her screen the three articles she had written over the past twenty-four hours, holed up in the flat. There was enough material here to run the scandal of Gavin Fox and his cop cronies over three full days. The revelations in Prentice’s suicide note – that they fitted up men who were serving time for crimes they didn’t commit – could make a day’s coverage in itself. These convictions could now be deemed unsafe, and there would be appeals flying all over the courts. All she had to do now was to let McGuire see the copy before it was shown to the lawyers.

Rosie turned away from her screen and stared out of the window, rubbing her eyes. She took a long gulp of tea from her mug. She was knackered, but there was still a long way to go. The lawyers would baulk at the
revelations, but with the photograph of Big Jake on Fox’s boat, and Fox in the background, plus the letter from Jack Prentice, the story was copper-bottomed and safe. She couldn’t wait to see the look on Fox’s face when she door-stepped him with the allegations. McGuire had decided that they would not take the story to the press office in the usual way; that the showdown would be done at Fox’s home, with a photographer there on the doorstep to snap him as his bottle crashed. Rosie relished the thought of it. She put a disc into the laptop and burned the three stories onto it, then another disc for a back-up copy in case anything happened to the first. Just because you were paranoid, the hacks used to joke, didn’t mean they weren’t out to get you. She had already made two extra discs of the photograph and Prentice’s letter. They were safely tucked away so that McGuire wasn’t the only one who had the material.