For Those Who Know the Ending (16 page)

He took the list out of his pocket and looked at it. Mostly bog-standard, with a couple of designer items near the bottom that seemed to be there as a test. Wouldn’t be a problem, Argyle had connections in Holland that could get him a lot of that synthetic stuff. Looked like a tap-in to Aiden, an open goal with the Allens getting an assist. They were making it as easy as they could for this deal to succeed. He put the list away and sipped at what was left of his drink.

He left the pub ten minutes later. He had given Sarah a head start, just in case anyone was watching the place, just in case anyone was watching her. Nobody was watching him, he was sure of that. Aiden had been in the business long enough to know how important he wasn’t. He was a middleman, probably lower end of the middle ranks. Maybe, just maybe, the Argyle deal would give him the chance to step up to something better, be the senior figure he knew he was capable of being, but he wasn’t a man who had ever been important enough to be a target for others.

Usman had watched him go into the pub. He waited at a safe distance, watching carefully. He wouldn’t go in; any customer would stand out in a nearly empty pub. Didn’t need to get that close anyway to work out what was happening here. He saw Sarah McFall arriving. She was the link, the one he knew to watch out for. Her ex had drunkenly spilled the beans about her working for the Allens, about her trying to make some sort of deal between them and Argyle. The guy was the kind of self-righteous, bitter loudmouth that was always fuelled by alcohol and inspired by being deservedly dumped. He told a friend of Usman everything and the friend passed the info on.

So he watched her go in, admired her from a safe distance. She was smarter about looking for tails, checking the street before she went inside. Aiden Comrie had wandered into that dump without so much as a glance up the road. Complacent halfwit, thinking that because nobody had bothered to keep tabs on him before, they wouldn’t start now. People don’t start paying attention to you when you become senior, they start watching you when you’re on the way up. Sarah was smarter; she looked both ways before she leapt. Usman was playing it carefully; he was comfortably out of view when she looked.

They didn’t take long in there. She was out first, moving quickly to her car and driving away. Didn’t look thrilled with the world, but you wouldn’t after spending a few minutes with Aiden Comrie in that hole. Her being unhappy didn’t mean the deal was dead, or even floundering. The one to watch was Comrie, he was the weak link here. If the chain is the Allens, Sarah McFall, Aiden Comrie and then Chris Argyle, then the weak link is pretty damn glaring. You follow him and you wait for that moron to give you an inevitable opening.

Aiden Comrie left the pub about ten minutes after Sarah McFall. He didn’t bother looking around on the way out either, having not gotten any smarter in the twenty minutes he’d been inside. He walked with a sort of waddle, a short and broad guy with his arms out from his sides, taking up more of the pavement than he needed. He walked like he was fat, which he wasn’t. Could be tough, Usman reflected, to take down a brawler like Comrie. Following a dumbass is easy enough. Working a job against said dumbass is only easy if his body is as weak as his mind. There was no evidence of that; Comrie could probably fight his way out of being cornered by a lone attacker. Usman waited for the target to get into his car, watched him drive to the end of the street before he followed.

12

Her shift at the bar started at six, so she needed to make this quick. Alison knew the way; she’d been in the pub she was going to before, although she hadn’t worked there. One of her flatmates had told her who to call, given her the number and a few details about the person she was talking to. She knew a lot of people in the business, the flatmate. They didn’t talk about it, not a subject you casually raise, but Alison knew Heather was connected. So she asked, and Heather delivered.

‘I had a word with BB, and he told me this is the guy you want, if you’re sure.’

Heather Cannero was tall, pushing six foot, and Alison always had the sense that she was tough, a fighter. No reason for that assumption, other than Heather being very tall and quite broad-shouldered. She was always tucking her curly brown hair behind her ears, which annoyed Alison for some reason, and because of small things like that they had never been especially close. But she knew people on the fringes of the criminal world, had done since childhood, and had gone out with a few of them.

‘Who’s BB?’ Alison had asked her.

‘Oh, he’s a sweetie. Works for Billy Patterson, I think.’

‘Who’s Billy Patterson?’

Heather smiled. ‘Bad people, be glad you don’t know. Works for Peter Jamieson.’

‘Him I have heard of.’

‘Good. Well, BB says this is the man you want to go talk to. Nate Colgan. I don’t know what he does exactly, but I know he’s got a big reputation, a man to be scared of. BB says he’s the man. And he’s expecting you to call now, BB told him you would, so maybe you have to. They know you know something. I don’t think Nate Colgan is the sort of person you disappoint.’

Which sounded ominous and unusually dramatic for Heather, so Alison called Nate Colgan. She got a very brief and rather grumbly set of instructions in which he informed her that they had to meet face to face and told her where and when, as well as how to get there without anyone seeing her. All seemed pretty over the top, but he insisted and he didn’t sound like someone who wanted to be argued with. So she found herself, a little after five o’clock, on a busy city-centre street, looking for the gate to an alleyway.

She found it, looked up and down the street in a cartoonish way that would have been suspicious to anyone who was watching her, and went inside. She was on a narrow path, high fences from the backs of the buildings on either side of her. She counted her way down to the third gate and pushed it open, recoiling at the clatter it made on the cobblestones of the little courtyard. She moved quickly across the courtyard and in through the unlocked back door of the pub.

There was plenty of noise coming from the front of the building. People shouting orders, the general murmur of badly constructed conversation and too-enthusiastic laughing. The stairs were on her left, as he’d said they would be. She went up, knocked on the door at the top, heard a shout for her to enter.

Nate was sitting at the little round table, looking miserable. Glancing at Alison Glenn didn’t help his mood, a pretty young girl who made him feel instantly like an old man. It was the place that depressed him though. This pub, which was becoming a regular haunt for meeting people he didn’t much want to meet, was one of the last places he wanted to be. This was where Kelly’s ex-boyfriend had been killed, and Nate had been part of the clean-up. You don’t go back to the scene of a bad event, especially when it becomes personal. Recently he’d cracked, asked Kelly out, begun the process of turning it into a proper relationship. She’d stayed at his place a couple of times, he’d been to hers, they’d been out to dinner and the cinema, doing all the things normal couples do. It was uncomfortable, because these things always were for Nate, but it was nice too. He was part of something enjoyable and exciting, and he liked that. Falling hard for Kelly and feeling the sort of things that other, weaker, people felt. Bringing her into his life and knowing that she could be used against him. And here he was, back in a place of bad memories, because he didn’t have anywhere better. Not for meeting this girl, anyway.

Information. She said she had some, suggested it would be valuable to him. Everyone thinks the information they have is the most valuable thing in the world and they can’t all be right. She looked like a kid, and he knew she wasn’t an insider, so the chances of her knowing anything worthwhile were slim, but you still had to meet her, hear her out. One of Billy Patterson’s debt collectors had put her in touch with Nate, vouched for her as useful. That meant nothing.

‘Sit down,’ he said to her as she closed the door.

She walked quickly across to the table and sat, nervous already, perched on the edge of her chair. She was here to ask for a favour, and Nate wasn’t the sort of guy who handed them out freely.

‘I’m told there’s something you wanted to tell me,’ he said. The usual opening gambit, make it seem as though she has to tell him everything first and only then can she ask for a reward. It was all part of the haggling process.

‘Um, yeah, there is,’ she said with a mumble. ‘The thing is, there’s something I wanted to ask you first. I work in a bar, Derby’s, do you know it?’

Nate nodded. She was very pretty, which was distracting. That was what made her dangerous. If she ever learned how to use that distractive power in Nate’s industry she could be quite a weapon, and quite a target, too. Jesus, when did he start looking at young women as nothing more than weapons to use against others?

‘Well, the rumour is that it’s struggling. I’m worried about losing my job, and I know that your boss is opening a place across the street. I figured, maybe, if I could get a job there, that would really help me.’

Nate shrugged. ‘It’s not up to me to hire staff for a bar. That would be up to the bar manager. You would need to talk to whoever that is. How do I know you’re any good at your job?’

She was flustered. She might have met people in the business before, but she had never met Nate Colgan. This was a step into a world where every conversation was a battle, people trying to hold back as much as possible.

‘I am good at my job. Really good, I would say. I know the business and I know how to do a good job. All I’m looking for is, like, a recommendation. If you recommended me then that would be worth something, right?’

Nate very nearly smiled at that. Smart girl. He either had to agree with her or pretend that his recommendation meant nothing. He couldn’t very well do the latter, even a novice like Alison could find out that his word carried weight in Glasgow. It was why BB had passed her along to him.

‘If I recommend you then you will get the job,’ he said to her. Not bragging, his tone was flat throughout. ‘But I will not recommend you for no good reason. You want a recommendation, you have to earn it. You tell me what you came here to.’

‘You know Usman Kassar?’ she asked him.

It took him a few seconds. He knew a Kassar, but it wasn’t Usman. A lad who had done some work with the organization, mostly with Kevin Currie and his counterfeit-goods business. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘Oh. Well, it’s him I have information about. Do you know Akram Kassar?’

That was the one. ‘Yes.’

‘Well, Usman’s his little brother. He’s a nice guy, kind of harmless. Bit flashy, you know, but decent enough with it. People think because he’s all flash he isn’t smart, but he is. I know that he works in your business. I don’t know exactly what he does. I can’t give you that sort of detail. But I know that he did something a couple of months ago that made him a lot of money. Enough that he hasn’t had to do anything since. And I know that he’s working on something right now and I think it must be pretty big. I know that he works with another person, and that this other person doesn’t want to work on this new job with Usman. He’s annoyed about it, so . . .’ she said, trailing off. It didn’t sound like much, when she said it out loud. Not quite enough to fill the empty little room, take the cold out of the air around Colgan. She felt like she had overreached herself.

Nate was looking down at the little table. Didn’t say anything for about twenty seconds, seemed to be considering issues far bigger than anything she’d said.

‘I’ll find out who’s running the bar, make sure that your name is top of their list,’ he said eventually. ‘They’ll contact you, so don’t go chasing after them. They’ll set up a way of making it look like they headhunted you. I expect you to do a good job for them. Don’t make me look stupid. And when you have any more information that might be useful to me, I expect you to get in touch.’

‘I will,’ she said, nodding her head. That line about not making him look stupid had been said with a hint of venom so slight that she had to stop and think about it, make sure she’d heard it right. As soon as she realized she had, it scared her.

She didn’t want to leave until she was sure that he was finished. ‘Can I go?’

He looked at her with a rather sad expression. She didn’t know he was thinking about Kelly and the fragility of any relationship you thought you could trust. She was about to start explaining that she needed to get to work when he spoke.

‘Yes, you can go. The same way you came in.’

She got up and left quickly. There was something about this man that was hard to explain. He was intimidating, but not threatening, like it was just natural for him, a man who couldn’t help but scare people. Never mind that, she had gotten what she came for. She would get a job at whatever they called the swanky new place across the street, and the people who hired her would know that she had gotten the job through the one and only Nate Colgan. That was the clincher, the thing she hadn’t mentioned. It wouldn’t just get her the job, it would make the job secure. Whoever was bar manager wasn’t going to sack an employee who had been recommended by someone so senior.

Nate knew all that without her pointing it out, but it didn’t matter. The girl had given him information that made her valuable, she was worth putting into a position where she would have to pass along any other information she gathered. They were only buying the place and using it because they needed somewhere else they could clean money through. They had taken their eye off that particular ball when Jamieson went inside. Used to be his right-hand man, John Young, who handled that sort of thing, and Young was inside as well. The guy who took over from him, Stuart Crockley, picked the wrong fighter in the internal squabble that got Nate’s former protégé Ronnie Malone killed, and was now outside the organization. Money laundering, always a challenge, had become a fucking great chore.

As soon as she began to talk about Kassar, the pieces started falling into place. He knew of Akram, the older brother, knew he wasn’t going to work a job against Jamieson. But the little brother, that one had flown right under the radar. Worked a job a couple of months ago that paid well. Worked with another person. That ticked a couple of key boxes. Nate needed to find out who the other person was and needed to find out more about Usman Kassar. Most important thing was finding out what this new job was. He wasn’t going to find out on his own. He picked up the phone and called Gully.