The Night the Rich Men Burned (27 page)

The cheek of them. Arresting a Cruickshank. Didn’t even have enough to charge him with. That’s what he thought. Not what his lawyer thought. In the car on the way back to his house the lawyer had a different idea to share. After five hours in the station, Potty wasn’t thinking straight. So the lawyer put him right.

‘They brought you in to scare you. See if they could trip you up. They’ll be arresting other people. Must be, the evidence they have. I think they will arrest you again, Mr Cruickshank. They’re setting you up to arrest you a second time, and this time they’ll charge you.’

He was right. Potty’s been at home for nearly an hour. Taking that time to try to calm down. Not happening. This kind of fury will take days to calm. He needs to find out who grassed him. Find out what damage has been done. There’s an easy place to start. The police were asking about money from that period of time. Time to get in touch with the man who was moving his money around at that time.

Potty has two different men who handle the money, but neither of them is young any more. One of them, Willie Caldwell, has hardly done a hand’s turn for a year and a half. The man’s seventy and had treatment for cancer. He was Uncle Rolly’s moneyman for many years, just carried on working for Potty. He’s started doing a bit of work again in the last three months, but nothing as far back as six to twelve months. Which just leaves Steven Wales. Sixty-three, and amongst the most dependable criminals that God ever placed on this earth.

Potty’s calling his house. It only rings twice and there’s an answer. A woman’s voice. That’ll be Mrs Wales then. The often-mentioned, never-seen spouse. Potty’s never met the woman, for all that he’s heard Wales talk about her over the years.

‘Hello, I’m looking for Steven Wales. Is he home?’

‘No. No, he isn’t. Who’s calling, please?’

The woman sounds emotional. Potty doesn’t have the patience for emotional. Not in the mood. ‘This is Ronald Cruickshank.’

‘Oh, Mr Cruickshank,’ she’s saying. There’s relief in her voice. Something Potty doesn’t like to hear. Usually means someone expects you to do them a favour. ‘Oh, Mr Cruickshank, they came to the house this morning. The police came and they took him away. They said they were going to question him and he hasn’t been back yet.’

Potty’s grimacing, but in a sense it’s good news. They’ve arrested Wales, which means Wales isn’t the grass. Wales is the one who knows the most. He was the one cleaning the money. So long as he keeps his gob shut, that’ll prevent the police knowing the worst of it. So the grass is someone else. Someone a little further away from the centre. Someone who knew that Wales did work for Potty. Knew at least roughly what that work entailed. Specifically from that time period.

‘Now you listen here, Mrs Wales. I will do all I can to make sure your husband is well treated. I’ll get my lawyers on it right away. Your husband won’t be in any trouble if I can help it.’ He can’t say that her husband has done nothing wrong because, well, he has. She must realize it. There may be trouble that Potty can do nothing to stop.

‘Thank you, Mr Cruickshank. It helps to know.’

Wasn’t Wales. Then who? Sitting down and thinking things through. Considering the options. And there’s one there. Lurking in the back of his mind, elbowing its way forwards. Someone who was around a lot back then. Helped him out. Someone who’s been drifting away from him for no good reason in the last six months.

He’s made three phone calls and come up short. Nobody knows just what exactly PC Paul Greig is up to these days. Conflicting reports. One person saying he’s working for Shug Francis. Another person saying he’s working for Alex MacArthur. So now Potty’s calling Alex MacArthur.

‘He isn’t doing any work for me,’ MacArthur’s saying. There’s an edge to his tone. Their relationship has been good these last few months, since the Bavidge thing. But this call doesn’t seem to be welcome. Sounds like the old man’s distracted. ‘I think he’s been doing work for Don though. Call Don if you want to ask about him.’ Didn’t say Don Park’s name with any great love. One of his own men. Sounds like the old man is finally getting wary of potential successors. They all do, in the end.

Calling up Don Park. Getting a chuckle at the mention of Greig. Smooth little operator this one. One to keep an eye on if MacArthur’s health gets worse. ‘Working for me? Not exactly. Working for everyone. You know what he’s like. Doing work for me and doing work for Peter Jamieson. Doing work for you and doing work for Oliver Peterkinney. That’s Greig. A finger in every pie.’

That’s as much as Potty needs to hear. Greig doing work for Peterkinney. Of course he fucking is. A new kid turns up and starts making an impact. Growing untouched. Getting good deals. Knowing where to go. Contacts that others take years to find. Needs experienced people to point him in the right directions. Help him along. People very much like Greig.

Starting to make a lot more sense now. Peterkinney gets Greig onside. They strike a deal. Greig helps Peterkinney by removing the opposition. Good Lord, Potty didn’t take the kid seriously enough. Some little bastard who worked for Marty and set up his own business. Not like he would have learned much from Marty. He did mean to watch him. Had every intention of doing something about him sooner. Should have. Would have. Too busy pulling the rug out from under Billy Patterson. This is what happens when you take your eye off the ball. Slap on the wrist for Potty, move on.

Move on and work out what he’s going to do about Peterkinney. What he’s going to do about Greig. Don’t let personal feeling get in the way of a business decision. Be very careful with Greig. He’s a cop. A lying, cheating bastard, but a cop. You don’t pick a fight with a cop. Not unless you’re on solid ground, which Potty isn’t. No way he can make a convincing allegation against Greig without implicating himself. No way he can bring down Greig without Greig making life even more difficult for him.

But Peterkinney. He’s a different business. He can be taken down. There are things that Potty can and will do to teach that wee boy a few lessons. The first lesson being that you don’t pick a fight with a Cruickshank until you’re 100 per cent certain of victory. So now Potty’s plotting. Trying to work out ways of getting at Peterkinney. He tried once before with the Bavidge thing. Didn’t work out perfectly, but that didn’t matter much at the time. Peterkinney didn’t end up getting any of the blame, as Potty intended. But that was always a bonus to the main event. This is different. Now Peterkinney’s going to be the main target.

3

Glass didn’t leave the flat for days afterwards. Spent the whole time waiting for a knock on the door that didn’t come. Only person who came to the flat in that time was Ella, and she has a key. She spent some time with him, trying to work out what was wrong. He wasn’t responding to her. Lying in bed, refusing to tell her what had happened. She made an effort. A week of treating him like an invalid. Cooking for him, getting him to shower. Never forcing him to share anything, but trying to coax it out of him. Nothing she did made an impact.

It upset her, seemed like he was deliberately pushing her away. So Ella made a decision. Try and shock him into action. Get him out of his bed and into the world again by giving him no other option. She stopped coming to the flat, and he was completely alone. The idea was that it would compel him to get up. Go out and get some food, get into the world. Didn’t work. She waited a week, and no phone call came. Went past the flats a few times and saw no sign of life. When she went back in, he was the same as ever. He’d fed himself, yes, because he had to. But he was eating food way past its sell-by date. Unwilling to leave the flat even for that. She cried over it, and went back to playing nursemaid, fitting it around her work.

One thing Glass made the effort to do was constantly check websites and local TV news. They found Alan Bavidge’s body the following morning. Multiple stab wounds, is what was reported. Knife found at the scene. Didn’t say that it was still in his body. Said they were hopeful of progress. Glass knew what that meant. Meant his fingerprints were on the knife. Meant they had all the evidence they needed for a conviction; all they had to do was track down the killer. But time passed and they didn’t track him down. They had his fingerprints on the knife, but nowhere else.

But there was so much else. The longer he lay in bed thinking about it, the more he remembered what he had done wrong. The people who had seen him. The CCTV cameras that must have picked him up. Leaving the car in a car park. A bloodstained car with the number plates still on it. Would take them all of ten seconds to put two and two together. But nothing. No knock on the door. Nobody coming to tell him that he was being charged with murder.

He’d already decided that if they came for him, he would confess. No point in denying it. He couldn’t claim innocence, so he would confess and hope they were gentle with him. He wouldn’t tell them why. He’d decided that. If he grassed Potty then Potty would take revenge. Could kill him. No, he would say that he owed money, and that he thought Bavidge was going to collect from him. Something like that. Take all the blame for himself. Looking at a long time inside. Thinking about how he would survive it. Twenty years. Thirty, maybe. But the knock on the door didn’t come. It was like they didn’t check the CCTV. Like they didn’t interview the witnesses. Like they never found the car.

Which they didn’t. Not the police’s fault. The witnesses never came forward. Not one. Not even the guy who stopped and got out of his car outside Bavidge’s house. He went home and decided to forget about it. If he saw the report of the dead body found behind the shops, he either didn’t connect the two things or didn’t want to get involved. That’s the thing. People don’t want to get involved. Not if they can avoid it. So the driver of the car that Glass nearly reversed into pulling out of the alleyway said nothing. They must now realize that they saw the killer leave the scene, but he or she is keeping it to themselves. Scared of getting tangled in a gangland dispute.

Without witnesses, the police don’t know what they’re looking for. Don’t know what car. It wasn’t Bavidge’s own car. That was parked outside his flat. This was a company car belonging to Patterson, but the police don’t know that. They’re convinced the body was moved, but they think in the killer’s car. So they’ve gone through the CCTV around the scene, but more than half the cameras don’t work. They’ve come up with no reliable image of the car that took Bavidge to the scene.

And they never found the car. Nobody did. A couple of hours after word spread that Bavidge was dead, the car was gone from the car park. Disappeared off the face of the earth. Glass doesn’t know that. Didn’t know it for those few weeks he spent hiding from the world. Assumed the police had found it. Assumed they would be knocking on his door any minute now. But the car was gone. The evidence they needed, spirited away. Nothing for the police to use. Their investigation undermined. Glass’s freedom saved.

After three weeks, he started to re-engage with planet Earth. Enough time passed for Ella’s pleas to become convincing. She didn’t know what he was scared of, but she kept saying that it had been weeks and nothing had happened. Weeks when he thought he was in danger but was safe. Surely it was time to get back to normal. Three weeks was sufficient for his fear to shrink just enough for him to see other people’s problems. To see how much he was upsetting Ella. So he made the effort. Out into the big scary world. Afraid of every step. Waiting for a hand on the shoulder. Waiting for someone to say or do something. But nobody did. Nobody cared about him in the slightest.

It was a weird couple of months thereafter. He gradually got used to living again. He knows he was childish about it. Living in fear, needing to be looked after. Even in the month after he started going out again. Ella nursed him through it all. But it hasn’t been the same. Hasn’t been the same with Ella. Hasn’t been the same with anyone. Still living with that fear. Always will. Knowing that he did something he ought to be punished for. Knowing that there are people out there who will seek to punish him. Worse people than the police.

He was waiting for the police, because they were the first fear his mind turned to. Still are. Getting to a point where it would almost be a relief if a copper did come for him. But there are more dangerous people out there than the police. Alan Bavidge worked for Billy Patterson. Everyone knows Billy Patterson is a tough little bastard. Everyone knows he punishes hard. He has to be looking for the person who killed Bavidge. When he finds that person, he’s going to kill them. Torture them and kill them. When the police find the killer, Patterson will still try to kill them. You live with that sort of fear, that sort of expectation, and it changes your behaviour.

Glass basically stopped caring. If you’re going to be arrested or killed tomorrow, it doesn’t much matter how you behave today. So he started going out with Ella every night. Even when she didn’t want to go, he insisted. She only went because she was worried about him. Thought he needed her there to stop him doing something stupid. Still nursing him, because he was obviously still sick. Living every night like it was his last. Could have been. You never know. So he lived it that way. Drinking a lot. Using a lot more drugs, because that seemed to help. Kill reality.

You know what’s funny? He doesn’t remember going back to Jefferson for another loan. No recollection at all. Doesn’t even remember spending the money. Jefferson happily gave him the money when he asked. He knew that Glass had paid off Potty. Had done something to wriggle off the hook. Potty was happy with Glass, so Glass got another loan. Jefferson working on the assumption that he can sell this one to Potty as well. Glass doesn’t remember asking for the money. Doesn’t remember spending it. Doesn’t remember going back and asking for more.

That’s what it’s been like. Months of blur. That’s the way he wants to keep it. Life doesn’t feel real, so life stops being something he needs to care about. His relationship with Ella is suffering for it. She cries a lot, shouts at him. Shouting about things he barely understands. Something about a carpet the other day. He didn’t understand that she had been saving up for a new carpet in the living room, and he blew the money on drink. Doesn’t understand that she’s trying to create a stable home, and that he’s destroying it. But that doesn’t matter to him. Nothing does.