Every Night I Dream of Hell (21 page)

I nodded because there was nothing I wanted to say to him about Zara. My thoughts about her were my business and certainly not some cop’s, but I wanted her out of that mess and he was the man who could make that happen. The thought of her, lying on that bed, drugged to the eyeballs, laughing because she’d tricked me. It wasn’t her. Not the Zara that I had known back in the good old days. This one was a skinny, wasted, pathetic version of the sharp and determined woman I had known. It was the sharp and determined woman that I needed to rescue and then keep the hell away from me.

The morning had been an unscheduled meeting with Fisher. Around lunchtime I got a call from Ronnie. He was supposed to be working on finding out where Barrett and his people had gone. Same thing I should have been working on, but my mind was starting to drift off into other areas. We were beyond the point where Barrett working for himself was plausible. He was working for someone, and I needed to figure out who. The call from Ronnie told me he had a lead on who had employed them, that I needed to get round to his mate Owen Turner’s shop.

I hadn’t been there before, but I knew where it was. I’d heard all about it from Ronnie. His mate had a store selling technology, mostly high-end stuff. It sounded like the sort of stuff nerds and show-offs would buy, but they had a good spot in the city centre. Had its problems though. Bad economy made selling high-end stuff hard, and their shop wasn’t the swankiest place. A cramped little space with narrow aisles and poor lighting, but they were planning to change all that. Going to renovate the place with the money they got from Kevin Currie for a cut of the business. That was their hope, anyway. A young couple, living on hope. Owen and Trisha Turner. Tish, Ronnie had called her. I remembered that. Remember names; remember why the people behind them matter.

Didn’t manage to get parked anywhere near the place, so it was a short walk up to the shop on the corner. It didn’t look like a young person’s shop from the outside, that was the problem. Needed paintwork and a sign, needed a better window display. Can’t remember what that shop was before they had it.

Inside wasn’t a lot better. Too much stuff in too small an area. No room for people to wander round, browsing. That’s what I figured a place like that needed. Get people in to look and maybe they buy something. Or maybe they see something they want to save up for. Or maybe they see something they tell a friend about and the friend comes in to buy. Walking up the narrow aisle to the counter, tall and broad, I felt closed in. It needed change.

There was a young woman standing behind the counter. Late twenties, dark curly hair, pretty enough. Had a hint of the hippy about her with a nose ring. Anyway, I assumed she was Tish.

‘I’m looking for Ronnie. He about?’

She looked at me. She must have been a good judge of character because she didn’t like the look of me.

‘Hold on,’ she said with a wary nod and disappeared into a back room.

She emerged after twenty seconds, Ronnie sticking his head out of the door after her.

‘Come through,’ he said. She said nothing, watching me walk round the back of the counter and through the door to the storeroom.

This place was cramped as well. Boxes of everything stacked against three walls, including against the fire door. The only wall that wasn’t covered with boxes had a small sink and worktop with a microwave and a kettle on it. There was a table in the middle of the room, Ronnie taking his seat at it. Owen was already there, dark hair down to his shoulders, a beard that belonged to an older man.

‘Take a seat. Owen has something to show you,’ Ronnie said.

I sat in between the two of them and looked at Owen. He had his mobile phone in his hand, twisting it back forth nervously. He looked at me like he wasn’t sure he was supposed to speak, then leapt into a sentence.

‘I got a video of them on my phone. Not much, cos you can’t see the ones that came in,’ he started, and I stopped him.

‘Start at the beginning,’ I told him. ‘Tell me everything. I want details.’

The problem with people is that they always want to tell you what they think is interesting. They skip straight to the punchline, and you don’t get the detail. That’s where the Devil is, and we were looking for him.

‘Right, well, it happened this morning. I was in the shop, everything normal, quiet. Sold a tablet in the morning, so that was something. And then these two guys came in. They came up to the counter.’

‘Describe them.’

‘Right, yeah. They were both twenties, I guess late twenties. Casual, but well dressed. One of them, the one who did the talking, he was the smaller of the two. I figure he was, I guess, the more senior. Sometimes you can just tell, you know?’

‘Sure,’ I said, nodding my head. He was nervous; he didn’t like the way his day was panning out.

‘So they both came up to the counter, and the smaller one . . . Well, he was smaller than the other guy, but the other guy wasn’t that big. I mean, not as big as you, for example. He asked if I was Owen Turner. Seemed casual, nice enough. I didn’t really think about how he knew my name. Only afterwards I realized that should have got me, you know, suspicious. When I asked him what I could do for him, he said that I could recognize that Kevin Currie no longer owns his share of the business. I played dumb, you know,’ he said, looking to me for a nod.

‘No one was supposed to know about Kevin owning a share,’ I said, nudging him along.

‘Exactly. He said I had to recognize that Adrian Barrett now owns that share of the shop. I had no idea; I never even heard of this Barrett guy before. Said that if I acknowledged that now things could work out very well for me. I just told him that Kevin Currie owned a share of the business, that it was a legit business and that he needed to speak to Kevin Currie about it. He laughed at me, told me that the Jamieson organization was dying and Adrian Barrett was the guy who was going to kill it. Said that Barrett was the coming power and I needed to think carefully about whose side I was on. I told him to leave.’

I nodded. The guy didn’t like talking this much, not to me. I was familiar with that. People are waiting for me to lose my temper, for me to do something terribly scary. The more they say, the more chance of saying something that upsets me.

‘Did they have an accent?’

‘Local,’ he said quickly. ‘Definitely local.’

‘Tell him what happened next, Owen,’ Ronnie said quietly, doing his bit to push his friend over the finish line.

‘Yeah, right. Well, they went out, and for the first few seconds I was just glad to see them gone, you know. Then I thought, well, fuck them, who are they coming into my shop and saying all that. So I went out, stood in the doorway. I could see the car they were getting into; they had parked down the street. There was other people in the car too. It came up to the corner, and, you know how there’s traffic lights there? They had to stop for a few seconds, then pulled away. As they were coming up to the lights I got my phone out, videoed them.’

He held up the phone, glanced between me and Ronnie to see if now was the time for him to play it. Ronnie nodded and he played us the video. It was wobbly, showed a blue saloon car moving up the street to the corner.

‘Didn’t get either of the two that came into the shop: one was driving and the other was sitting behind the driver’s seat. You can see the other two passengers though.’

The car stopped at the lights, the phone pointed at them. The angle wasn’t great, but it was enough. I recognized him straight away.

‘Take it back a little,’ Ronnie said. ‘Pause it where the car’s right alongside you. That’s a better shot.’

I already knew, but I was willing to get a better look and make my ninety-nine per cent certainty a round hundred.

‘There,’ Owen said, passing the phone to me.

A dinky wee thing, too small a screen for my fingers to manipulate it. He’d paused it as the car pulled alongside him, as the passenger in the back of the car glanced his way. All fake tan and stupid hair. Taylor ‘Original’ Carlisle. One of Lafferty’s little pets.

The silence in the room was broken by Ronnie. ‘It is, isn’t it?’ he asked me. Not mentioning the name in front of Owen Turner.

‘Could you leave us for a few minutes, Owen,’ I said to him. Being polite, but I wasn’t asking.

‘Sure, yeah,’ he said, and he got out of that chair like it was on fire. He went out into the shop to help his wife and to get away from me.

‘It’s Original, isn’t it?’ Ronnie asked me. ‘I called you as soon as he showed it to me. It’s him, and he was here, talking about Barrett being the new power in the city.’

‘Fuck’s sake,’ I said, looking down at the table. I had worked out how bad this could be and I was already working out all the possible ways this could go next. There were a lot of directions that all led deeper into the shit. I picked up the phone and looked at it again. ‘It’s Original Carlisle all right. Fuck.’

We had to work out what this meant, who we could trust and who we couldn’t. Original was a right-hand man to Lafferty. Him being involved in this could mean a whole bunch of things, but jumping to conclusions tended to be akin to jumping off a cliff. It could mean that Lafferty was working with Barrett. It could mean that Original was stabbing his own boss in the back and helping Barrett. It could mean that Lafferty was testing us out, trying to work out if people were loyal to him by being a dick about it, provoke us and see how we reacted. It could mean something else entirely that didn’t leap to mind at the time. We had to know which of those it was before we made any sort of move. Knowledge is power. Go into battle as the dumber of two armies and you have a right good chance of being taught a lesson.

‘What do we do?’ Ronnie asked me quietly.

I didn’t like people talking when I was considering things. I think that was down to the fact that I much preferred to work alone. Always had. Spent years avoiding getting tied to anyone, working for different employers and always working alone. That was my reputation. Lone wolf. Hire Nate Colgan and you don’t have to hire anyone else. Ronnie was the first person I’d ever brought under my wing. A nice kid with no history of violence. A strange choice.

‘I don’t know. We have to tread very carefully with this and not go accusing Lafferty of anything until we know for sure. But it isn’t good, whatever it is. We can put to bed any idea that Barrett is up here on his own.’

‘Maybe Barrett’s got Original working for him.’

‘No,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘Not unless there’s someone else, someone senior. Original wouldn’t walk away from what he has for the risk of a start-up.’

‘Doesn’t mean that he’s working for Lafferty though. That would mean Lafferty ordering the killing of Lee Christie.’

‘The guy who was feeding info to Mikey and Conn, yeah. Would be a ballsy move for Lafferty, but a fucking messy one as well. Doesn’t add up to his style, either way. He could be spinning a lot of plates though; might not just be Barrett he has. Fuck, might not even be Lafferty. Could be Don Park. Could be any bastard. Gets to Original, uses him to help organize all this. Creating weaknesses from within the organization. Once we start turning on each other we’re doing our enemies’ job for them. I don’t know.’

I was wrestling with a giant alligator of a problem. If the guilty party could be anyone then who do you go to with this information? How do we solve the problem when we don’t know who’s on our side and who isn’t? ‘Trust no one’ is a fine principle if you’re working alone. I was an organization man now, the security consultant, no less. This was my problem and I had to share it with someone, but I was buggered if I knew who.

‘We need to get to Original,’ Ronnie said suddenly, surprising himself with his certainty. ‘If not Original then someone close enough to Lafferty to give us the truth.’

I straightened up, thinking about it. He was right, I knew it. He must have been spending too much time around me when he came up with it that bloody quick, but I knew it was the right way to go. We track down Original or some other senior figure and we get the information we need from them by any means necessary. It was sadly obvious. It would cause ructions. You don’t go questioning a senior man without causing offence to someone or other, but someone or other was just going to have to put up with it. The organization came first.

I started nodding, thinking about candidates. Trying to come up with a name that would cause the fewest problems. Had to be senior, close to Lafferty. Had to be someone that would have useful knowledge, not just some hanger-on. Someone I could talk forcefully to without them pissing their pants. There was someone. A person I’d been thinking about chatting with since my early-morning visit from DI Fisher.

‘That’s true. There’s someone I want to talk to. I been thinking about it all day. The Nasty killing. That was professional, and I’ve been thinking about who might have carried it out. I can’t work out why, but I have an idea for who. He’ll be able to give us some answers.’

Ronnie was standing watch from a garden across the street. If he saw our target coming home early, he would ring my mobile, which was on vibrate. I was round the back of the house, sneaking up to the back door with Vernon Bell. Vernon was a little old guy in his sixties, English-born but been working Glasgow for a good forty years. He would once have been called a burglar, but there wasn’t much call for breaking into houses these days. Most of his work was for professional organizations, breaking into offices and storage facilities. A boring old house was a rare challenge for him.

He only said yes because he knew I was working for the Jamieson organization now. If I was on my own he would have politely declined the risk. I watched him kneeling down by the back door; couldn’t see what he was doing to the lock. Made a scratching noise for the first ten or twenty seconds, silent thereafter. There was a little island of hair on his otherwise bald head, tilting sideways as he worked. He hadn’t said a word since we got out of the car.