Every Night I Dream of Hell (20 page)

Henson drove, Aldridge in the passenger seat giving him directions. Neither of them seemed to know where they were going, but from the back of the van you could hear street names being repeated. They were going slowly, Henson more concerned about not getting lost than getting there quickly. They were going north and east to Shettleston, Zara knew. Going to a house that none of them had even checked to make sure was safe. Dyne had panicked, leading them further away from the certainty this job had so far contained.

The van slowed to a crawl, pulling over to the side of the road. In the back they could hardly see anything.

‘Can’t park here,’ Aldridge said.

‘What’s going on?’ Barrett said, grumpy. His nerves were running, giving him energy he needed to shift.

‘There’s no garage or anything,’ Henson said back over his shoulder. ‘We’ll have to park out on the street.’

‘We can’t park out on the street,’ Barrett said, his Birmingham accent getting thicker with fear. ‘They’ll be looking for the van. Fucking hell, park somewhere else. Find somewhere near. Fuck.’

Jess watched Zara put her hand on Barrett’s. He turned and frowned at her, but he didn’t take his hand away. The two in the front were mumbling, Henson leaning across to look at the map.

‘What’s that?’

‘Church.’

‘That’s just round there, back that way. That’ll have a car park.’

Aldridge looked over his shoulder to Barrett, sensing he needed the boss’s permission. ‘There’s a church back down the road and round the corner. We can park the van there, walk up to the house.’

‘Fine. Just fucking do it, will you?’

They swung the van round in the street, something else to draw attention, and moved slowly back down to the junction. The church was on the right-hand side, plenty parking around it. Henson slowed to a crawl, looking for a spot they could use that would draw the least attention. It wasn’t clear to him what was going to happen now. Finish the job. That was the obvious bit. If Dyne didn’t intend to finish the job then they would be on the motorway right now. Could they finish it without Nasty? Wasn’t up to Henson to ask.

‘Park it there, at the edge,’ Aldridge said.

They stopped at the back of the small car park at the side of the church, against a wall and underneath some trees. It was as far out of view as they could get. Two days, max. That’s what they’d been saying. Finish the job in two days. So if nobody complained about the van being there in that time, it would be fine.

Everyone got out, taking all the bags with them. They wouldn’t come back for a second trip. Zara led the way. She knew where the house was; she had the back door key in her pocket. Out of the churchyard and down to the corner, left along the street. The whitewashed houses were in bunches of two. Up steps to get to them all. Zara found theirs.

Elliott was walking with a bag slung over one shoulder and the other hand gripping Jess’s arm. He didn’t like this house. It faced down an adjoining street; it was too far from the van; they had no idea who was in the houses around them. They should have stayed where they were. They all fled round the back and into the house. Cold and unfurnished. No wonder it was emergencies only.

‘Get her out of my sight,’ Barrett said, turning to glance at Jess.

Elliott led her through the kitchen and into the corridor.

‘I still need the toilet,’ she told him quietly.

They went upstairs; he pushed open a couple of doors and found the bathroom. Pushed her in and stepped in after her. She stood and looked at him. He smiled.

Henson and Aldridge put the bags in the corridor and started searching the house, happy to leave Zara and Barrett alone in the kitchen. Barrett stood by the sink, eyes shut, trying to process it all. Nasty was dead. They were under attack. Someone had known where Nasty was going to be and when. None of them were safe. Not in this city. They should get out. Just cut and run. They had gotten half the money up front. Take it and run, and if their employer sent people after them then so be it. Survive crossing this bridge before you worry about the next one. He felt Zara’s hand on his shoulder. He opened his eyes, turned and looked at her. His girl.

‘Hey, listen, we’re nearly done,’ she said to him, looking up into his eyes. ‘I know this is hard. I know it. Losing Nasty like that. It’s hard, and it’s shocking and it makes you want to run from everything. Two days, and that’s it. Two days and we’re out of here, you and me. Back down south, and we can build something amazing together. Two more days.’

She hugged him tight, and he felt better. Two days. They didn’t need Nasty for what was left. He could do this.

I got the call early from Kevin himself; they had been tipped off by one of their police contacts. Jawad ‘Nasty’ Nasif had been found dead in a house that was up for sale. Bullet to the back of the head was what they had been told; someone sneaking up on him in the kitchen of this house and leaving the body behind. I put the phone down and got out of bed, sat there thinking about what this was going to mean. I didn’t like it, which is strange given that it got rid of the gunman of our threat. But it didn’t add up to something I could be happy with, coming hours after I had encountered Adrian Barrett in that hotel room.

That meeting was on my mind; what we had done after it was on my mind as well. We had gone back with a full crew, armed and ready to bring them down, but they were long gone, of course. We tried to find out where they had gone but the staff in the hotel knew nothing. Their ignorance was genuine, not bought and paid for. We had the message to pass on, but it wasn’t a message anyone was going to pay any attention to. It was passed to Lafferty given that it was his import business that was partly under threat, and I understood that, despite being a small man, he had hit the roof.

‘He was shouting about you, Nate,’ Kevin had told me. ‘He couldn’t accept that you had walked away from Barrett when you had him right in front of you.’

‘He had a fucking gun on his lap. What did he want me to do?’

‘I don’t know. Nothing I suppose. He’ll calm down; he’s just bricking it right now. He thought this was going to be his chance to step up to the top and he isn’t dealing with it, not as easily as he thought he could.’

Now that Nasty was dead it was inevitable that people were going to point the finger at us, particularly if they knew that Barrett had confronted us the previous night. Everyone would be thinking about that, expecting Barrett to retaliate. Maybe Barrett was already planning to retaliate. He probably thought it was us that had moved against his gunman because, let’s face it, that was the most logical conclusion to jump to.

‘We’re sure Lafferty didn’t make this move?’ I asked Currie when he called.

‘As sure as we can be,’ he said, and his tone didn’t aim for reassuring. ‘I might not place a high regard on his tactical prowess, but I don’t think he would try and pull this. Killing the gunman doesn’t wipe them out, he has to know that. Just pisses them off. The way Lafferty’s thinking, he would only make a move against Barrett or against all of them. He is getting nervous.’

‘But not nervous enough for this?’

There was a pause while Currie considered it. ‘Christ, I don’t know. I don’t think so, that’s as much as I can say.’

Which left a lot of questions that we needed to find the answer to just as much as Barrett did. Was this someone else muscling in on the act? Maybe another dealer or supplier that they’d threatened. Or was this their employer, let’s assume they had one, trying to get rid of them because he felt their work was done? Or, and this was the most likely one, was this a falling-out among the group that ended with them getting rid of their own gunman? All of those questions hinged on it not being Lafferty.

I got up, showered and called Ronnie, told him what had happened and that we should expect a response. I warned him to be on the lookout in case anyone tried to target him. He seemed a little shocked by that suggestion, maybe a little dismissive even. I warned him a second time, made sure he understood.

‘If Barrett thinks that we made a move against him then he will make a move against us. He has to. Doesn’t have to be against Lafferty or Currie or one of the top guys. As long as he can show people that he can still hit us without his gunman then he gets his message across. You and me, guys out on the street, we’re all at risk.’

I hoped that got the point across to him and sat down to work out what I was going to do next. In a sense this didn’t change a lot. We still needed to know where Barrett was if we were going to deal with him quickly, and we needed to prepare for him and his little mob when they stepped out into the open. His mob being littler than expected didn’t matter. We also needed to know who, if anyone, was backing them. But still, our enemies had lost their gunman and we were no further forwards thanks to it. We didn’t know where they were and there didn’t seem to be any obvious way of finding out. That, right there, was why I was leaning towards Barrett being the killer of his own gunman. Couldn’t work out who else benefited much.

The safe house was interesting. Needed to find out if it had been checked, but if it was for sale then it probably had. So maybe that wasn’t their safe house, just a place for, what, doing deals? Storage? Something like that. Didn’t change the fact that after an attack they were bound to have moved. Bound to have. That meant the squad of them all moving at the same time, because they couldn’t plan to go earlier if they didn’t know the attack was coming. Even if Barrett was behind it they couldn’t have moved earlier without alerting Nasty to the fact that something was going down.

That was exactly as far as I had gotten when my doorbell rang. I didn’t like that, a Friday morning and someone ringing my doorbell without warning. If it was someone from work, Ronnie or Mikey or someone like that, they would have called first. There’s an etiquette that says you don’t turn up on someone’s doorstep without giving fair warning. If it’s an emergency, fine, but I didn’t want an emergency ringing my doorbell either. I opened the door to something worse than an emergency. I opened the door to DI Michael Fisher.

I nodded for him to come in, seeing that he was angry and feeling my own anger beginning to boil. I wasn’t his contact and he wasn’t mine. I don’t know what our relationship was at that point. Didn’t matter – if you’re looking for info or influence you do not turn up on someone’s doorstep, not when you’re a cop and certainly not when you’re a high-profile cop. He was putting my life as well as my career in danger by being there. I ushered him through to the living room and we stood looking at each other, just a few feet apart, me looking down at him. Always impressed me, how little guys like him managed to look tough using only naked fury.

‘Was it your lot?’ he said. ‘It bloody was, wasn’t it?’

‘No, it bloody was not,’ I said, growling because I was trying to stop myself from shouting. He had no business being here just because he was in a huff about the Nasty killing.

‘You know about it though.’

‘Course I do. I heard half an hour ago. But I’d be as interested as you are to find out who was behind it.’

‘Oh, would you?’ he said, raising his voice and trying to sound sarcastic. He sounded a little frantic to me. ‘So I tell you who’s in his crew and a day later one of them is found dead.’

‘We already knew all about Nasif. I didn’t need that from you. We couldn’t find them and we still can’t. You were the one who knew where they were.’

There was something in that glance he gave me that set alarm bells ringing. It was guilt, that’s what it was. There was a guilty look in his eyes.

‘You didn’t know where they were,’ I said.

‘I did,’ he said, snapping at me, ‘but I don’t now. I went round to the hotel they were at and they’d moved; I haven’t picked them up yet. The house we found Nasif in? I didn’t know they were using that place, if they even were. Seemed like that house had been used by someone, so, I don’t know, must have been them.’

He fell silent and I let him. It was a good thing for him to calm down a little before I tried to prise any other info out of him. I felt a little sorry for him, which was ridiculous. He might just have been the last person in the whole damn city that I should have had any sympathy for. The guy was trying to stop bloodshed, and I could respect that. It mattered to him.

‘And there was nothing to ID the killer?’

‘No,’ he said with a shrug, ‘there was nothing there. There was no weapon found anywhere in the area, nothing that we can grab onto yet. Might be, still early, but I doubt it. I think the guy was a pro. I think he was the kind of pro that an organization like yours might employ.’

‘Maybe he wasn’t a pro,’ I suggested. ‘Maybe he was known to the victim. That would let him get close, make sure the job was as clean as possible.’

He thought about it but I could see that he wasn’t buying it. ‘His own lot don’t benefit from it, not in any way I can see. Your lot, you’re the ones who benefit most from it; that’s why I suspect you.’

I said nothing to that because I’d told him how wrong he was and he didn’t need to hear it again. ‘I want to stop this as much as you do,’ I told him, whether he believed me or not. ‘We’re all at risk here, and more people will be dead before this is all over. I don’t want that. I’m still trying to find Barrett, and if I do, I give you my word I will try to make sure that it ends peacefully. I’ll try to make sure that it ends with Barrett in your hands and not mine.’

He looked at me like he believed me, perhaps because I was being honest. I could see his discomfort, partly because he was talking to me and I wasn’t the sort of person he wanted to talk to. But there was something else there. I think he was a little bit panicked by what was happening. He had made a huge score with Jamieson and Young, Shug Francis and all the other smaller fish he put away. He was the star pig in the pen, but now he was watching an incident coming down the tracks that he couldn’t stop. He needed my help.

‘You get me Barrett,’ he said, ‘and I’ll get you Zara Cope. She’s tied to Barrett, but I’ll make sure he doesn’t drag her down with him.’