Every Night I Dream of Hell (27 page)

Now I was sitting with Ronnie and Russell Conrad in a car on the south side of the Clyde, watching a flat we thought Taylor ‘Original’ Carlisle might be in. It belonged to his girlfriend, and we knew he wasn’t at his own place. It was a four-storey old building on a short street that probably used to be industrial, back in the days of industry. Now the buildings were converted into other things, but those other things made the place seem lifeless compared to the old industrial work. Her building was on the corner, looking down on the once industrial site turned dumping ground badly hidden behind a thin mesh fence across the street.

‘There,’ Conrad said quietly.

Original was running across the street, hands in his pockets, hair flapping behind him, looking cold and eager to get to his car. We were back along the road, watching the front door of the building that he hadn’t come out of. If he hadn’t parked his car across the street we wouldn’t have seen him go. I nudged Ronnie and he started the car, moved down to the corner and pulled alongside Original.

The bastard could have run if he was marginally more stupid. He was a lot of things, but not dumb. He knew that running was the first step in getting chased, and getting chased was just a sweaty way of getting yourself caught and punished. He stopped on the pavement and looked down into the car; saw us looking back at him. Conrad opened the back door. None of us said anything. Original stood on the pavement and looked around, maybe hoping that someone was going to magically appear and rescue him. There were no white knights around. He dropped down into the back of the car; as soon as Ronnie heard the door close, he pulled away.

Nobody said anything for a while; we just drove through the city. I adjusted the rear-view mirror so that I could watch the floppy-haired fraud from the passenger seat, but there wasn’t a lot to watch. He had his head turned sideways, looking out the window and trying to stay expressionless. I think there were nerves there, a little bit of fear, but not as much as there should have been. He was being taken to God knows where by a gunman and two dangerous muscle. That lack of fear told me that this was going to be easy; Original Carlisle had already decided to tell us whatever we wanted to know.

We went east, Ronnie picking a route that I wouldn’t have used. He got away with it because his route wasn’t terrible and it was Sunday so it was just a little less busy than it might have been. But the kid wasn’t a driver; this wasn’t what he was employed for. As far as I knew the organization still didn’t have a full-time driver for jobs, not since Kenny McBride took a walk in the woods with Calum MacLean over a year ago. Something else that should have been arranged by now. The organization needed a driver that we knew we could safely use on jobs, instead of every senior man having his own chauffeur. So it took us a little longer than it should have, and we might have been seen by more people than I would like, but it was no big deal. Original wasn’t leaning out of the window, screaming for help; he was just sitting there, accepting what was happening to him.

The up-and-over garage door was open when we turned onto the street. It was a wide street, built to be used by big vehicles and heavy industry. I don’t know how long the intended use had lasted but I’m guessing not very. Some of the buildings were still used for storage, including the one we were pulling into, but the street was quiet and there was nobody to see us arrive.

Currie had told his man to have the door open for us but not to be there when we arrived. The place was empty and it needed to stay that way. We were going to get details from Original and there were ways of getting details that you don’t want witnesses seeing. People think they’re loyal to an organization, they think there’s nothing that’s going to turn them against you, and then they see the dirty side of the business. They see you do something that turns their stomach and suddenly they’re desperate to get out, desperate to unburden themselves. It happens. It’s not everyone that’s blessed with an iron stomach and Teflon memory.

Ronnie got out and pulled the door down behind us, dipping the place into darkness. The three of us stayed in the car while Ronnie presumably fumbled around to find a light. If there was a window in the place then it was caked in a wall of muck sturdy enough to repel daylight. A strip light flickered above the car; I opened my door before the light had decided to settle on staying on. I went and opened Original’s door, waited for him to get out. Ronnie was over beside me, Conrad getting out of the other side of the car. Original was sticking with his conspicuous effort to look nerveless.

‘This way,’ I said to him, leading him up three short steps and through a door into a large open back room. Must have been a workshop at some time; when I switched on the lights you could still see the markings on the floor where machinery had been bolted. The place was gloomy, even with a row of small windows along the top of the walls. There was dust everywhere; the place hadn’t been cleaned in years. I naturally assumed that this had been a pretty miserable place to work.

It was places like this that led me into the life. All the men in my family worked in places like this, bigger or smaller variations of it anyway. They were ground down by it, every single one of them. Welders, joiners and sparkies, all working long hours for little reward and suffering health issues because of it before they hit fifty. I watched those men and I knew I couldn’t be like them. The pride they felt in the good, honest work they did just wasn’t enough for me, never would be. Pride was no substitute for a life I could be comfortable with; that was why I took the shortcut the criminal industry gave me. I wanted better. I thought I could have better.

There I was, standing in that abandoned workshop with some kid I was willing to torture to help an employer. Not once did the thought run through my mind that it really wasn’t any better than the life I’d turned my back on. Certainly didn’t occur to me that it was far worse. The place was grotty but it was towards the back of the building; the walls were thick and the only windows were high and faced out back. There was a small chair with a plastic seat, metal legs and the back missing sitting in one corner, a row of cabinets and a sink along a side wall. It was a smaller, dirtier version of the place out by the airport that Marty owned, these kinds of places being very useful to men like us. At least some kind of industry was using them. The chair was all I needed. I grabbed it, skidded it along the floor into the middle of the room.

‘Sit down,’ I said to Original in a low voice.

‘You don’t need to do this,’ he said to me with a hint of his usual cocky tone.

‘Sit.’

He did as he was told with the kind of smug look that told us all that he was going to do whatever we asked and we were wasting our time in being aggressive. Being superior because he thought we hadn’t realized it yet. We had. He sat on the chair, arms folded, and looked at me. He made eye contact and held it. This guy in his late twenties, trying to look younger, thinking he knew just exactly what he was doing. Never been in a fight. Never done anything darker than rob some gullible halfwit of their cash over the phone. He thought he understood. When you’re grassing your boss, giving away damning evidence against someone who gave you your living, you do not look smug about it. You make an effort to be sad, to be reluctant and you at least have the balls to show a little defiance. This little bastard thought he knew how this was going to play out, and the certainty of a victim is never a good thing. Certainty is a strength that you have to take away from them.

I walked over to him and punched him in the face. Little backswing, a rabbit punch in the mouth that tipped him backwards on a chair with no back. He tumbled onto the floor, rolled over and got quickly onto his knees. He was a little disorientated; falling over always makes a punch seem much worse than it really is. When the world does a somersault your mind tricks you into thinking it was the punch’s fault, not the backless chair’s. He was gasping for breath for no reason that I could guess at other than shock. I grabbed the collar of his presumably expensive thin jacket and lifted him up, dumped him back on the chair.

Ronnie was leaning back against the sink, watching and keeping any sign of emotion off his face. That was something I had tried to teach him. Don’t let the victim think that you sympathize or that you’re bored and want this to end as much as they do. Don’t give them anything that they can cling to. Conrad was standing back towards the door we had come in through. There was an expression on his face that went somewhere near to disgust. He wasn’t muscle; he wasn’t a guy who knocked people around or liked to watch people get knocked around. No, he was just a guy who shot people in the back of the head. Everyone had their own little standards, I suppose.

‘You’re going to tell us everything we want to know,’ I told Original quietly.

‘Yes,’ he said quickly, still gasping. ‘Yes.’

Getting a man to talk is one thing. Getting him to tell the truth is another. Original was ready to blab because he was scared of another shot to the mouth. Scared of getting his expensive clothes any dirtier as he rolled across the floor of the workshop. He wasn’t a fighter. What he was an expert at was talking. An expert at running off at the mouth, lie following lie until you were wrapped in so many of them you were forced to accept them as truth. That was his skill. It was why he was in the organization. It was why I still didn’t trust him now.

‘Tell me about the Christie killing,’ I said to him.

He took a few seconds. Showing some long-overdue reticence. Trying to think of how much he should say. This was him working out his own place in the story he was about to tell, making sure that he didn’t say anything to incriminate himself. What he said next would certainly be lies whenever he talked about himself. He was going to gloss over his own role in all of this.

‘I wasn’t really involved then, you see. Right, your man Lafferty, he called me up when he was organizing the meeting. That’s when I got pulled into all this.’

‘But you knew him before,’ I said. A test of honesty. He knew Lafferty before; there was no way Lafferty would have used him as a mouthpiece at the meeting if he didn’t. No way he would be using Original as a senior man. There had to be history there, but it was a history Original thought he had kept hidden.

‘Okay, yeah, I knew him a bit. I’d helped him out with some stuff. I got connections. See, you guys, you think I’m just sitting there scamming old ladies, but I need to make a lot of connections to do what I do. I got skills. I mean, not your kind of skills. Tech skills. I had helped him out a bit. Helped him make a bit of money. But it was for the organization,’ he added quickly.

‘Lee Christie.’

‘Like I says, I wasn’t working close with Lafferty then. So, you know, this is just what I heard from others. The boy Jake, people who were around. He found out about Christie giving info to that two that work for Billy Patterson. Summers and the other one. Those two. Lafferty found out about all that and he was pissed off. Didn’t like Christie grassing on him, didn’t like anyone spying on him. It was trust, you know.’

‘But that wasn’t it, was it?’ I asked him. ‘He didn’t just want to kill Christie?’ The other two were silent, letting me get on with what had to be done. They didn’t much want to get involved. Just me standing over Original in the middle of the floor, him sitting carefully on the backless chair.

‘I don’t know,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I told you, I wasn’t around. I don’t know how it started, right. Really, okay. I don’t. Maybe he already planned to make moves against people. Seems like, I don’t know, he saw Currie and Marty getting all pally and thought he was being excluded, something like that. He thought other people were trying to push him out. He figured, I don’t know, that the organization needed a strong hand, you know what I mean? A single person in charge. He thought it should have been him.’

I knew how it had started. How it had to be. He had Barrett and his crew on hold, waiting for the chance to use them. Working in the city to make a name for themselves, but not pulling the trigger on a takeover until he had the excuse he needed. Waiting for something to come along that Jamieson would have no choice but to back. One of Lafferty’s men killed so Lafferty gets to lead the investigation. Didn’t matter that Lafferty was the one who had him killed.

‘So Lafferty’s using Barrett and his crew to try and take control.’ I said it as a statement, not a question.

‘Yeah,’ Original said, nodding his head. ‘Got them in quick. Had them here already, I guess. I don’t know. Like I says, I wasn’t involved at that point. Had to use someone from outside. Someone from the city, that would have been too obvious; people would have known them. There would have been leaks. Had to use outsiders. They killed Christie and then he called the meeting so that he could start leaning on people, get them to back him. Force them to, I suppose. The meeting, that was all a set-up. Some of us had been told what to say beforehand.’

Didn’t bowl me over with shock. He was talking fast, spurting out the words as he tried to ingratiate, show what a good little helper he was being. He had stopped now, breathing heavily and looking up at me. Scared. He knew that one wrong word was going to cost him.

‘Tell me about his crew.’

‘Lafferty’s?’

‘Yeah, Lafferty’s.’

Original snorted, and then almost choked on the blood that was in the back of his throat. He spat a blob of it out onto the floor.

‘Lafferty doesn’t have a crew,’ he said. The attempt at cool derision had been wiped out by the blob of thick blood and spit in front of his chair. ‘The guy doesn’t have a clue. Okay, all right, that’s not fair. He has a clue. He knows how other people run things, with people around them, but he thinks he can do it different. Like he can keep doing things the way he always has. He’s got all these legit businesses and he plays at being this legit businessman and he thinks he can keep that up.’ His voice was getting more Glaswegian as he talked.