Every Night I Dream of Hell (7 page)

So now Kelly was single, and probably feeling a little vulnerable. If any one of the stories about the kind of father Vincent Newbury was were true then he was a man worth running from, and I was the sort of guy who could protect her. That might be a cynical point of view. Maybe it wasn’t as negative as that. Maybe she liked me. I’m not an ugly man, a little weathered and starting to grey at the side of my dark hair, but not wholly unattractive and certainly well built. I’m smarter than most in this business, but not exactly a bundle of laughs. So I don’t know. A mixed bag.

The first time I’d met her had been when her man Tom Childs had died. I was the one who took the body out of the hotel Ronnie worked in. She helped. That had to colour what she thought of me now. Negative association. I had been professional at the time, cold but trying to keep it polite. She had called me a few weeks later, saying she wanted to know how the disposal had gone and whether we were in the clear from any police investigation. We met up, we chatted. I didn’t tell her about the disposal, just that it had gone well. She didn’t need those details, not about someone she presumably loved. She was smart and she was strong and she was pretty. The sort of woman that leaves a mark on you. She had contacted me a couple of times since, one time coming round to the house and having a cup of tea. That’s how she knew where I lived. It was flattering. That’s why I had let her get this close.

Thing is, I was in no mood to play nice that evening. The search for Barrett had started with me and Ronnie firing off blanks all across the city. Not only could we not find out where they were, we couldn’t find anyone who would now admit to knowing about them. People who had previously mentioned Barrett and his crew were now denying all knowledge. Defensive amnesia. Information lockdown, us on the outside.

I went in ahead of her to the living room. The living room was ordinary and tidy. Laminate flooring, TV in the corner, three-piece suite, a picture of Rebecca on the mantelpiece above the fire. It was all part of my drive for ordinariness. It was designed to lull you in, make you think I was a normal guy.

‘You working?’ she asked me, standing in the doorway to the living room, practically inviting herself in.

‘Uh, sort of, yeah. Not with any success.’ That was my polite way of saying that I didn’t want to talk about my day’s work. Sure as shit didn’t want to talk about the work I would be doing that night, sitting in on this meeting that Lafferty had called.

‘Okay,’ she said, nodding and saying nothing more about it.

And that, right there, was one of the reasons I really wished I could have made a move. She was smart enough to know how the business worked, already trusted by Currie to carry out decent mid-level work for him. But I couldn’t do anything, because why would I take a woman I liked into my life? A dangerous life. The burden of my work and my daughter and now my daughter’s mother. The best I could do for a woman I liked was to keep her away.

‘I won’t keep you long if you’re busy,’ she said. Watching her as she looked at me out of the corner of her eye. Smart, and playing up to me, trying to get me to see how lucky I was to have her in my living room. I didn’t necessarily disagree.

‘I do have to go out in another hour or so. More work,’ I said, not adding to that.

‘Oh, right, well, I’ll keep this brief. How worried should I be about my employment prospects?’

‘Why do you ask?’

‘There’s talk going around that moves are being made against the whole organization. People are talking about the whole thing finally falling down. I’m thinking of getting out before I get trapped in the rubble.’

I frowned a little because I didn’t like the sound of those rumours. Sort of thing someone who wanted to damage us would start, then sit back and watch panicky employees spread the word for you. It was a good tactic.

‘I don’t think you have anything to worry about,’ I lied. ‘There are people making moves against the drug side of the business, but there always are. Nature of the business. I haven’t heard anything about Kevin’s business being vulnerable.’

‘No, but if someone takes the drug side of the business, every other side is likely to fall down, isn’t it? That’s where a lot of the money and a lot of the toughest people are.’

I sighed loudly. ‘Not necessarily, not if Kevin’s half as smart as I think he is. Most parts of the business are designed to survive without the help of the rest of it. That’s the point of having all the different parts. And anyway, we’ll deal with this new problem, just the same as we dealt with all the other ones.’

She stood in my living room, nodding. ‘Word is that someone got killed.’

‘Someone did,’ I agreed. ‘That’s the nature of the business as well, unfortunately. You know that.’

She winced a little when I said it, more for show than emotion, but she made me feel guilty.

‘Sorry, I didn’t mean anything by that,’ I said to her. I moved towards her, wishing I had the good sense to stay where I was. I was about to reach out and put a hand on her shoulder when the phone started ringing.

I went over and picked it up because Kelly had seen the gesture I was about to make, and seeing it was enough. I didn’t recognize the number, answered it and said hello.

‘Just making sure you haven’t forgotten about lunch tomorrow,’ came the female voice. Zara sounded exasperated, like she’d rather be speaking to anyone but me.

‘I haven’t forgotten,’ I said, and left it at that. There was something in me repulsed by the idea of talking to Zara while Kelly was standing right there in the room with me. Zara was the hard lesson I’d already learned; Kelly was me trying to put that knowledge into practice.

‘So, uh, yeah, it’ll be nice to see you again,’ she said, speaking low and trying to sound personal. That wasn’t the way she spoke when we were together and I didn’t understand why she was trying it now.

‘Will it?’ was all I said. We were meeting for lunch the following day and there were only so many things I could say to Zara; this phone call was in danger of using most of them up. I can indulge in a happy conversation with someone I like but there’s a lot of sense in cutting off people that are dangerous.

‘It will, yeah,’ she said. ‘You’re the father of my daughter, Nate; it’ll be good to see you. Been a while. Not since all that stuff with Lewis.’

I had no idea what the hell this was any more. This wasn’t her just checking to make sure that I would turn up for lunch; this was her trying to establish some sort of connection. Mentioning Becky and throwing in a mention of how I helped her when Winter got killed for good measure. There was something sweet and sticky in her words, a trap I didn’t like the sound of.

‘Yeah, well, I’m busy right now, so I’ll see you tomorrow.’

‘Okay, sure, I’ll see you then.’ Cheerfully accepting my words and their dead tone as though it was the friendliest way in the world of saying goodbye. That wasn’t like her at all. No snarky comment to kill me off with at the end of the conversation, nothing to make sure she had the last word. I smelled a dead rat.

I hung up and looked round at Kelly, and immediately found myself comparing her to Zara. It was a stupid thought that I stamped out before it could go anywhere it shouldn’t.

‘I guess I should get going then,’ she said with a nod. ‘Should I, uh, spread the word that all is well in the organization, that there’s nothing too much for the people I work with to be worried about?’

That made me pause, because there wasn’t an obvious answer. As soon as an organization starts telling people there’s nothing to worry about, people immediately assume there’s something to be worried about. Nobody trusts what their employers tell them and it’s often smarter to say nothing at all than to screech reassurance.

‘Maybe don’t say anything at all unless people ask. If anyone says something then you can shoot it down, yeah, but otherwise let’s not make a fuss about it.’

‘Good thinking,’ she said, nodding. ‘Better not to give people an excuse to panic.’ She was looking at me, waiting for me to say something that would close the conversation.

‘It was good to see you again, Kelly,’ I said, sounding more businesslike than I’d intended.

She smiled and headed for the door, and we said goodbye. Kelly was still staying in the same flat she’d shared with Tom Childs, still working the same job she’d been doing for Currie. It seemed, from the outside, like she didn’t need protecting any more, and that she could build whatever life she wanted for herself. But if she’d been running from that family of hers it would be a hard habit to break.

I grabbed something to eat before I went out to the meeting. Meeting! What a stupid bloody thing it was, another act of petulance that wouldn’t have happened if Peter Jamieson was on the outside. Only he would have the power to make people gather before him, and that was a power he was too smart to use. This was going to be a parade of bad leadership. Anyway, I went, because bad leadership was still leadership.

The one redeeming feature of this meeting was that Lafferty had a good place where we could hold it. He had a three-storey glass-and-steel building next door to a recently renovated warehouse, on a busy, business-looking kind of street. The buildings were tall, brick affairs that shut out the light on the street and made the street lights coming on a relief as I drove along it. A lot of them now had large glass doors and big wide windows knocked into them, but most made an effort to keep the classic feel. One stood out, and the one that stood out was the one where we were having our meeting.

On the left-hand side of the road there were two properties that Lafferty owned, one traditional brick building whose ground floor was now a car park, and a pudgy, three-storey glass-and-steel mediocrity next door. That was Lafferty’s office, bought not long after it was built, replacing a perfectly decent old building that had been knocked down in the name of modernization.

The sliding doors to the rusty brick building were wide open, the place well lit as I pulled in and came to a halt facing the side wall. Sort of place where cars could come and go for meetings and it wouldn’t raise too many eyebrows. This was all part of his cover for the money he was making, and a damn good cover it was too. Lafferty was making enough legit money to walk away from the dirty, but having a lot of money seemed to make him want to have more.

I was busy looking at the other cars, trying to work out who was politically minded enough to get here early and who wasn’t. I didn’t recognize any of them, a collection of entirely predictable German luxury. I wasn’t first to arrive; probably not last. There must have been seven or eight cars in there ahead of me, probably another seven or eight to come, and that just made me shake my head. Gathering everyone that mattered in one place when you’re worried you’re under attack. Might as well have put up a fucking sign.

There was some gormless-looking soul standing at the side of the warehouse, obviously sent by Lafferty to show people the way to the office next door. I didn’t need a map to go out the side door and cross the narrow gap to the next building.

‘Just go in the side door and the stairs are beside you,’ he said as I walked past him and ignored him. ‘They’re on the second floor.’

I mumbled something that he might have mistaken for a thank you if he was in good spirits, and kept on walking. Across the narrow road between the buildings and in through the glass side door. The foyer was a needlessly long and wide waste of tiled floor space, a large curved desk on the left tucked under one of the staircases that stood on either side. There were large paintings hanging opposite each other that looked rather like a giant had coughed up paint onto a sheet of steel. This was presumably designed to give the place a sense of personality. It failed miserably. There was a sterile, functional and contrived feel to it that I guessed hadn’t been the case with the old place they knocked down to build this.

I went up the stairs, found myself looking left in through an open door to a conference room with a lot of chairs laid out for people to sit on, a group of men standing around with drinks and talking in low voices.

The room was all lit up, full-length windows all the way down one wall. Now, I was all for hiding in plain sight, but this just seemed to be pushing our luck. A couple of low voices fell lower when they saw me walk in through the door, my usual scowl on my face. I’m employed to be scary so it’s always worth reminding employers how scary I can look.

Three gravitated over towards me: Mikey, Ronnie and Marty Jones.

‘Some party, huh,’ Mikey said with a smile, nodding across to the table at the side of the room, as amused as I was disgusted.

There was wine, red and white; whisky; orange juice; tea and coffee; and a bottle of rum that was presumably intended for Damon Walker, who I knew drank gallons of the stuff. There were glasses and cups, all very neatly lined up for the happy little troops to drink, in what felt like an attempt at friendly normality.

Marty Jones stuck out a hand, one I wouldn’t have wanted to shake in days gone by. Marty’s always been a weasel, working in the grubbiest, cheapest parts of the business, but you have to give credit where it’s due, even when it’s due to an arsehole. So I shook his hand, because he’d stepped up and done as much as anyone to hold the organization together in Jamieson’s absence.

‘I should warn you,’ Marty said in a whisper, ‘that Lafferty ain’t happy with how things have played out. Doesn’t like the fact that it isn’t his own people who’ve been taking the lead on this.’

That was to be expected, so I shrugged it off and looked around the room, picking out the faces I knew and making a note of the ones I didn’t. Seemed like a lot of people had come along, certainly a lot more people than could be considered important. Some had brought protection, which boosted the numbers, and others had brought company to give the impression that they were too important to travel alone.

Never a good thing to see faces you don’t recognize and realize that they’re important, but that was happening. I leaned across to Mikey and asked him who the cluster in the far corner were.