Every Night I Dream of Hell (34 page)

‘What did he ask you, exactly?’

‘Nothing about your lot. Didn’t mention them. Asked about Adrian’s crew and I gave them names and basic information. Asked about what I knew, I told them nothing. Asked about the stand-off at the house.’

‘Stand-off?’

‘Adrian, Elliott and me blocked ourselves in a room. Adrian’s idea. We had to go along with it. He had a gun. I tried to play it down, make it seem like a misunderstanding. Police kicking in the front door and screaming at us, we didn’t know who they were, Nasty had been murdered. Told him we panicked, that Adrian was trying to protect me, that sort of thing. Help Adrian out a little; least I can do.’

‘Uh-huh. Fisher was talking to you at the door.’

‘He was. Walked me out, gave me a little lecture about bad things happening to the men in my life. Do you think bad things happen to all the men in my life, Nate?’

She was getting playful. ‘What else did he say?’

‘I had prepared myself for some tough questions, but nope, nothing. Told me that it would be in my best interests to leave the city,’ she said with a sigh. Didn’t like that I wasn’t playing along. ‘Made it clear that if I stuck around he’d be watching out for me, waiting for an excuse to arrest me.’

That sounded about right. Also sounded like nothing she’d be concerned about. She had no intention of sticking around; even Fisher had to realize that. There were so many more dangerous people that he could have gone chasing after, people doing far more damage. What was his obsession with Zara? There was something about her that he couldn’t get out of his head and I don’t think it was the fact that she was a pretty, though deteriorating, young woman. Zara represented something that he couldn’t stop hating, couldn’t stop thinking about. She was the kind of person that turned others into the criminals he hated so much. He saw her as the creator of the kind of evil he spent his life chasing down. Which led me on to the next awkward moment of conversation.

‘Where’s the money?’ I asked her.

She paused, trying to think of a clever answer. Maybe some reference to the money she’d taken out of the bank account I had created for her.

‘What money?’ was the best she could come up with after a six-second pause, which was disappointing. Expected better of Zara.

‘That crew came up here working a job. They didn’t do it on a promise. They were paid half up front, right? Half up, half after. I’ll take a guess that they were offered a good amount as well to come all the way up here and provoke a war, start something that would bring down a whole organization. What was it, six figures?’

The glance she gave me said I was close enough to the truth for her to assume that I already knew everything. I was guessing, but we’ll call it an educated guess because a man of my experience knows how these things work.

‘So?’ she asked. Going down the petulant route, another disappointment.

‘So Barrett and his mates are looking at a long time inside. Double-digit years, I’d guess, depending how much of the Christie killing they can pin on them. They were paid half up front. That’s where you’re going right now, isn’t it? Going to get the money so you can disappear out of the city.’

I was driving, watching the road, so I didn’t see the look she gave me. I doubt it was wreathed in smiles and intended to compliment my brilliant deduction.

‘So?’ was her answer to it.

‘So I’ll give you a lift to your money and we can chat on the way.’

‘No,’ she said quickly. ‘No offence, Nate, but I want to get out and I want to get out as clean as possible. Someone’s holding the money for me. I don’t want you to know who because I don’t want you leaning on them. We can chat, fine, but I’m leaving here without dropping anyone else in the shit, right?’

So we drove aimlessly. Didn’t make much difference to me – the conversation was all I was here for.

‘So did you call him or did he call you?’ I asked.

‘Who?’

‘Kevin Currie. At the start of this, I want to know who pitched the idea first.’

I wasn’t supposed to know. They would have been keeping this between as few people as possible, and they obviously preferred the idea of keeping me in the dark. Perhaps because I was so close to Zara, or because I wasn’t a senior man in their eyes. Didn’t matter. I knew enough, and I wanted to know more.

‘Me, I suppose,’ she said with a shrug. ‘I called him first.’

That’s what I had figured. She pitches the idea of having her own crew, asks if there’s any money drifting around they could work for. Kevin thinks about it, takes it to Jamieson, the boss decides to use them to get rid of Lafferty, a man he no longer trusts. Their mistake was using me to make it happen.

‘Wasn’t much of a plan,’ I told her. ‘Relying on luck to get you away from your man like that.’

‘I wasn’t relying on luck,’ she said. ‘I had other ways of doing it; you just complicated matters. I dealt with it.’

‘Yeah,’ I nodded, ‘you did.’

I looked at the clock in the car: nine fifteen. I blessed those few hours of sleep; without them I couldn’t have handled Zara. Couldn’t have handled any of the things that I still had to do that day.

I made the decision to stop turning to look at Zara, even when we were stopped in traffic. Every look was a reminder of other times, and every reminder was a lie. We had never been happy, not really, not in the way normal people were happy. We could never be together again. I had to stop looking at her before the lies caught me out.

We drove in silence for a few more minutes, before I got frustrated with how the non-conversation was going and pulled into the car park of a large DIY store. This wasn’t some attempt to stop somewhere quiet and out of the way where I could say or do something terrible; even on a Monday morning the place was quite busy. I parked, switched the engine off, swallowed my emotions and talked.

‘You need to leave the city,’ I said to her.

‘Seem to be hearing that a lot today,’ she said with a smirk. The look I gave her in reply killed the smile and she got serious instead. ‘I know.’

‘The money you’re getting, that’ll start you off?’

‘Should do, yeah.’

‘How much is it?’

She paused, didn’t want to mention the price she had put on people she was supposed to care about.

‘Well?’ I asked.

‘Fifty grand,’ she said, and I believed her.

It was a decent price, enough to persuade a person like Zara to betray anyone and everyone. She could start again with that money. Get out of Glasgow, out of Scotland. Find another city, another life. I knew her well enough to know that the next phase of her life wouldn’t work out very differently from every other phase she’d gone through. She only knew one way to live.

Maybe she’d have done it for less. Wouldn’t surprise me if Zara had been planning on throwing Barrett overboard from the very minute she met him. That was Zara’s default setting, trying to exploit every person she knew. It told me that every instinct I’d had about her in the last few years was correct. I needed to keep her away from Becky.

‘That was a nasty thing to do, Zara,’ I said quietly. Don’t know why I said it. I was probably trying to set up the demand I was planning to make of her, trying to justify something I hadn’t yet said.

Zara Cope was willing to take criticism on a lot of subjects and from a lot of people, but she wasn’t willing to be dismissed as a nasty piece of work by the nastiest piece she’d met.

‘You have a problem, Nate,’ she said to me, all the playfulness falling out of her while she gripped her courage and criticized me to my face. ‘You think you’re the good guy. You think you’re a good man doing bad things reluctantly. You think you’re forced into these things by the actions of others, the reluctant anti-hero. You’re not the good guy, Nate. Only you think you are. The rest of the world knows that you’re the bad guy. You’re the threat that richer people use, you’re the creative punishment for the really unfortunate, the man that the beasts are scared of. You could walk away but you don’t; you keep on doing the job. I know you want to protect Rebecca from me, but who protects her from you? You need to stop kidding yourself, Nate. You’re the bad guy.’

There was silence in the car for what felt like an age. It was awkwardly long, and any words that broke it would have to fight through that tension. She was right, obviously. I don’t need to tell you that. She was articulating the very thoughts I’d had about myself for the best part of fifteen years. In those fifteen years I had never found a good answer to those criticisms, so I moved us on to my demand. Perhaps threat would be a better word.

‘Listen Zara, you need to get out of the city and you need to stay out. Find somewhere else to live, somewhere else to run to, somewhere else to be you. This city isn’t safe for you any more.’

I wasn’t just referring to the police. They were in the mix, but there was a growling undertone that told her the greatest threat came from the man she was looking at. This was my way of telling her that I wouldn’t let her back into my life. I wouldn’t be the safety net she came falling towards if her next adventure failed. It wasn’t the same macho nonsense as Fisher telling her to stay out of his city, like he was some Wild West sheriff and she was an admittedly adorable Clint Eastwood impersonator. This was me making it clear that my life was now officially off limits. She was out, and she had to stay out or I would push her out. When I push people, they fall far. There was a little threat in there, which from me was more frightening than any big threat from anyone else in her world.

‘I know,’ she said to me. ‘Goodbye, Nate.’

She looked me in the eyes and I could see that it hurt her, even if only a little. I didn’t want to do this to Zara, throw her out of my life. We were silent for a few seconds, showing each other our regrets. Zara opened the car door and got out into the car park. I drove away, not daring to look in the mirror. She was out of my life.

You get used, in a very short space of time, to having people chattering in your ear. The boss wants something done, an inexperienced guy is asking your permission for something, a colleague wants a hand with something. Phone calls and knocks at the door. It had been frantic, the whole of the previous week. That day was nothing.

After I left Zara I went back home. It was Monday morning; there was nothing happening in the world. The place was groggy, back to work after a weekend off. Now was my time to rest. Back to the house and into the silence of a long day filled with nothing. No phone calls. No knocks on the door. That seemed wrong to me, the day after something so big. People should have been in touch. Kevin Currie should have been calling to talk about it before he got in touch with Peter Jamieson.

I knew why he wasn’t. The kernel of it had formed when I called Conn and asked him and Mikey to come and help with the clean-up at Lafferty’s. They had let Original go. That had surprised me, but it shouldn’t have. Original was a plant. He was Currie’s man, working for Lafferty. He went to Ronnie’s friend’s shop so that he would get quickly rumbled and questioned by me because that would speed things along nicely. They let him go because he’d played his part to perfection. That meant one or both of Conn and Mikey were in on it.

I would guess only Conn. You didn’t need Mikey to be in on the secret; he would go along and do the work no matter what. But Currie needed Conn to know so that there would be a man on the street who understood what was happening. Didn’t want me to know. Maybe didn’t trust me. I wasn’t his choice; I was Jamieson’s. That worked against me, kept me in the dark. So Conn knew. Which meant Billy Patterson, his boss, had to know. But Marty didn’t. No way would he have let me batter his brother like that if he did. He thought Adam was working for the enemy. His brother thought he was working for the enemy. Only a chosen few knew.

Showed how little trust there was. Showed that Kevin wasn’t fit to be the leader of this organization. He had gotten away with it, after a fashion, but it would have been a much smoother piece of work if Peter Jamieson had been on the outside to work it. There’s a lot to be said for keeping as many people in the dark as possible, but you have to give a little light to the right people.

Could have been a good little job as well. Use Barrett and his crew to lure Lafferty into making a push for leadership. They knew how he’d react when Christie was killed. So they got him running around, trying to put himself in power, and then had Barrett and his people make it seem like Lafferty was behind the killing in the first place. Suddenly you have Lafferty painted as the guy who created all this in the first place. Killing him is the only thing you can do.

Fair play to Lafferty – he fought a good fight. Naive, but good. Got Conrad on board, which was, on reflection, a good move. Didn’t seem like it at the time, but that’s because I didn’t know Lafferty was being set up at the time. Got Garvey on side and used him well. I would bet a reasonably useful body part that Garvey was the one who fingered Nasty. Nasty would have been looking for a gun after shedding the one he used on Christie. All along Lafferty suspects he’s being set up here, so when I turn up on Conrad’s doorstep they decide to use me. Nearly worked. Nearly’s not enough.

I got a phone call, late afternoon.

‘Nate, it’s Kevin. How are you?’ He had that sad and sympathetic tone in his voice. He didn’t sound wary though, didn’t sound like he’d been warned by Zara. She was cutting ties and getting out; she wouldn’t have called to warn him.

‘I’m fine,’ I said. My tone wasn’t sad, wasn’t friendly, wasn’t anything.

‘Good. Well, I wanted you to know that I’m sorry about what happened to the boy, Ronnie. He seemed a good lad, and it’s a damn shame that we’ve lost him.’ He sounded uncomfortable now, but that was natural when men discussed death.

‘It is,’ I said.

‘Eh, the reason I called, Nate, is that we need to have a face to face. Need to find out all the details of what happened, you know. What do they call it, debrief.’

I had a few hours to sit and work out what I was going to say. The meeting was that night, at Marty’s office above a gadget shop. Didn’t mean Marty would be there. I hoped not. I really hoped not. What I was going to say was confrontational, and I didn’t want that to extend to Marty as well. He didn’t need to know that he’d been kept out of the loop.