Dead Won't Sleep (28 page)

‘I mean, my boys actually saw that lassie with the reporter. They actually saw her in the car after they were in the cafe, and they saw her handing over something to the reporter. What’s her name? That Gilmour bird. They should have fucking gone in there straight away and beat the shit out of the two of them. At least we would have the fucking material in front of us, instead of it sitting in the fucking office of the editor of the fucking
Post
. But no. My boys hung back. Then when they caught up with the bitch, she had some big fucking
Lurch guy protecting her. Stabbed one of my boys, you know.’ He snorted. ‘He’ll fucking suffer for that – when we find him.’

Foxy tried to reason with him. ‘I know, Jake. That was bad, but we don’t know that Alison didn’t take a copy of the stuff. She might have had a copy somewhere else, so moving in and doing people over doesn’t mean we wouldn’t still be in the shit.’

Jake opened his drawer. He took out a small plastic bag with cocaine in it and emptied some of it carefully onto his desk. Foxy watched as he chopped two lines with his credit card. He snorted one line then sat back, sniffing and wiping his nose.

‘Foxy,’ he said. ‘We’re not in the shit, pal. You’re in the shit.’

Foxy suddenly felt weak. He was glad he was sitting down.

‘No, Jake.’ He was flustered. ‘What I mean is, that the letter Jack wrote talks about stuff we’ve done down the years. It mentions your name all through – money changing hands – it’s quite damning stuff.’

‘Fuck it.’ Jake snorted the other line of coke, then grinned. ‘It’s not as if people think I’m the parish priest. What the hell do I care if they say I’m a gangster? They’ve been saying it all my life. I don’t give a shite.’

Foxy insisted. ‘Yes, but if an investigation starts they’ll be all over you like a rash. Tax. VAT. Everything.’

Jake shook his head. ‘I know. But they’ll have to fucking
find me first.
And
all my money. Hey, Foxy. You don’t think I’ve been daft enough to keep it in the post office, do you?’ He chuckled. ‘I’m one of the untouchables, pal. Un-fucking-touchable.’

Foxy sighed. He was getting nowhere. Coked up like this, there was no reasoning with Jake, he was just a psycho from the streets, only interested in protecting himself. Foxy had never been naive enough to think it would ever be any other way, if push came to shove, but he had never imagined either that everything in his life would fall apart the way it was at the moment. He could never have imagined that Jack Prentice would have a crisis of conscience and stick them all in before he topped himself. How do you make plans for that kind of crap? He had hoped Jake would be a bit more helpful. He should have known better.

‘So,’ Jake said, looking at his watch. ‘What do you want me to do, Foxy? I can rough the reporter up if you want. Christ, I can shoot her if you want. Fuck, I might even shoot her anyway, but it doesn’t look like it will stop anything. So what do you want?’

He didn’t know himself what he wanted. He had talked to Bill Mackie about what they would do if the story came out. They had even talked about disappearing . . .

‘So?’ Jake looked at his watch again. ‘Do you want me to get you a one way ticket to Bolivia?’ He smiled. ‘You could do a Lord Lucan, no sweat. But I’ll tell you this, Foxy. A guy like you won’t be able to hide anywhere for
too long, so I think you can forget that.’ He stood up.

Foxy got to his feet, too. His legs felt shaky. He straightened up.

‘I don’t know, Jake. I don’t know what to do. That’s why I came to see you. We’re old friends. I thought you could help.’

Jake gave him a long look, and Foxy could see the smugness in his eyes. He stubbed out his cigar in the ashtray, and said, ‘I can get you out of the country, you and Bill, but I can’t make this go away. I’m well pissed off, Foxy. If I’d handled it my way, I’m sure this would never have got this far. There might have been a couple more stiffs, but not this much heat.’

Foxy said nothing as they walked towards the door.

‘Look, we’ll talk in the next couple of days,’ Jake said. ‘But when the shit hits the fan, Foxy, I won’t be here. That much I can promise you. Keep me informed, we’ll see what we can sort out.’ He opened the door and gave Foxy a friendly pat on the shoulder as he ushered him out.

Humiliated, and by a fucking wide boy who can hardly write his name! Gavin Fox felt very small as he walked along the corridor and took the backstairs lift to the exit, where Bill Mackie was waiting in his car in the sidestreet.

Jake watched from the window as Foxy came out of the building and onto the street. He shook his head. ‘What a tit,’ he said aloud. He knew that Foxy had no
idea that two men were in a parked car fifty yards up the street, and one of them was taking pictures of him leaving the back door of the club.

If he had seen them, Foxy would have recognised DI Bob Fletcher of Internal Affairs, who had, in his inside jacket pocket, Mags Gillick’s mobile phone, completely intact, with the message from Tracy Eadie – the one she left the last night she was seen alive. He was also in possession of a brown envelope with a photograph that would incriminate Fox, Prentice and Mackie. It had been Jake’s parting gift to Fletcher – at a hastily arranged meeting yesterday – in return for the copper looking the other way while he got out of the country.

Jake saw Foxy get into the car, saw it drive off. Then he punched in a number on his mobile.

‘Rab?’ he said. ‘Get me on a flight to Spain tonight.’

Everything was ready to roll. McGuire was strutting around the office, his sleeves rolled up. Nights like this were what you lived for, he told Rosie. It was already seven in the evening, and the plan was to run the Gavin Fox exposé in all of the editions of the newspaper.

The phone call to Rosie from DI Bob Fletcher, a trusted friend, had been a bolt from the blue in the morning.

‘Rosie,’ he’d said. ‘Listen. You should know that I have, in my hot little hand, the mobile phone of one Mags Gillick, deceased. There’s a message from Tracy Eadie. We believe it’s her final phone call. You know if I’m telling you this, then it’s a hundred per cent true.’

‘Christ almighty, Bob,’ was all she could say.

‘Don’t ask any questions, Rosie. And this phone call never happened. In the next twenty-four hours we will be all over this. Fox is finished. You have your scoop.’

‘Thanks, Bob,’ Rosie said.

‘And Rosie: in about twenty minutes someone will
arrive at the front door of your office and hand you an envelope. I’m sure you’ll enjoy the photograph inside.’

‘Thanks, Bob.’ The line clicked off.

Her friendship with Bob Fletcher went back to the days when he was a uniformed desk sergeant and she was a young reporter. Their connection had lasted as he rose through the ranks. She knew there had been bad blood between Fletcher and Fox ever since the murder inquiry against one of Cox’s boys, Dick Hamilton, had collapsed. Crucial evidence had gone missing from the police station where Fletcher had been working as a detective on the case, and Fox had been a DI. He had always suspected it was Foxy who’d made it disappear, but he knew it could never be proved.

When the envelope arrived Rosie tore it open, then rushed straight into McGuire’s office. She told him that Fletcher had confirmed the message left by Tracy Eadie on Mags’s mobile phone.

‘Oh, fuck, Rosie! Holy shit! This is boots and saddles time. We were hanging them out to dry anyway with the confession and the one picture we had, but you know what the lawyers are like. Now we can just throw everything at this. Everything.’ He buzzed Marion to get the lawyers in.

‘It’s down to you, Rosie. I know you can’t tell me where you got the picture or the information, but if you have any doubt about your source, then tell me now.’

‘No doubts, Mick. None. You have to trust me on that.’
Rosie’s stomach tweaked. The impact of getting this wrong didn’t bear thinking about.

‘Then let’s do it.’

McGuire rubbed his hands as he looked down at the copies of all photographs he now had, scattered on the rough sketch page layout on his desk. The photograph Alison had given them was good because it placed Jake Cox on Fox’s boat. But the picture Fletcher had sent Rosie showed Fox, Prentice and Mackie with hookers.

‘Game on,’ McGuire said.

Later, in McGuire’s office, Tommy Hanlon sat sipping coffee as Rosie checked over the page proofs for the first day’s exposure of the investigation. They looked fantastic. She could feel adrenaline pumping as she looked at the picture of Fox, with a big grin on his face, taking up most of the front page. The headline screamed ‘TOP COPS’ COKE AND TEEN HOOKER SHAME: World Exclusive by Rosie Gilmour’. The story was based on the Jack Prentice confession that Tracy Eadie died on Fox’s boat, and it told how they had dumped her body in the water. Another headline blazed ‘THE HEAD OF CID AND THE GODFATHER’. Above was a picture of Foxy on his boat with his arm around Jake Cox. The inside story tracked Gavin Fox’s career and gave a full account of a lifetime of corruption in the police. Another inside page gave details of the taped conversation of Mags Gillick talking to Rosie, of her claims that she had been with the three
policemen on Fox’s boat several times, and how it was she who organised for Tracy Eadie to go there the night she died. There was even a transcript of the frantic final mobile message Rosie had taped from Mags’s phone that day they had met in the cafe.

McGuire was preparing to go on radio to talk about their exposé – revelations that would strike at the very heart of the establishment. On one of the inside pages was the facsimile text of Jack Prentice’s suicide letter, and there was a rogue’s gallery of colour pictures of Fox, Mackie and Prentice with prostitutes. The caption cheekily asked, ‘Are you these girls? Contact us at the
Post
.’

‘You’re outrageous, McGuire.’ Rosie laughed.

‘Well,’ he beamed. ‘Can you imagine what story these birds have to tell?’

The rest of the piece told of how Foxy and his cohorts had been involved with Jake Cox, the Big Man. It listed details of various convictions, where the men serving time in jail had always claimed they were innocent and had been fitted up by the cops. Prentice’s confession revealed that they
had
been framed, making those convictions unsafe.

All they needed now was to doorstep Fox and Mackie. It had to be done simultaneously, and in the next half hour, so that their pictures and reaction could be used in the first edition. Rosie had asked for Matt to go along with her. They had already had a useful night on Friday,
going back to the judge’s house in Peebles a second time and witnessing the children arriving, driven by Quigley.

Rosie couldn’t believe how well everything was going. She was nervous that the way the story was being presented hinged on that phone call from Bob Fletcher about the mobile, and also the damning photograph. But she knew in her gut it was true. She was eager to see the Foxy story in the paper, not just to bring him down, but for Mags’s sake – for the shitty, horrible way she died, for Gemma, and for the other prostitutes used and abused by guys like Fox.

But even more, perhaps, than the Foxy exposé, Rosie wanted to get the judge’s story published. It was even bigger, and would rock the entire system, from the social work department to the judges and lawyers at the very top of the legal establishment. And now that she had witnessed the kids going to Lord Dawson’s house twice,
and
had the taped conversation with Woodbank’s head from Quigley, she was certain the story was ready to go. Tomorrow, first thing, she would write the paedophile ring copy.

‘Okay,’ she said, turning to McGuire. ‘I can’t wait to see the look on Foxy’s face.’

‘Go for it,’ McGuire said.

‘Mind you,’ she said, ‘it will be nothing to the look on the face of Lord Dawson when we knock on
his
door.’

McGuire smiled but said nothing. Rosie thought she saw him throw a fleeting glance at Hanlon, but perhaps
it was her imagination. She left the office and met up with Matt at the lift. McGuire had arranged for one of his most trusted senior reporters, Joe Garret, to doorstep Bill Mackie. He had taken him into the office earlier in the afternoon and briefed him on the whole story, swearing him to secrecy. Joe had called to say he was already on his way.

‘Is your tiny heart all aflutter?’ Matt held open the door to the car park.

‘Just a tad,’ Rosie said, ‘but it’s a good flutter.’

They drove into the tree-lined avenue, where Gavin Fox lived at the end of a row of red sandstone houses. You needed money to live here. Some of it was old money, houses passed down the generations from when they had been occupied by industrialists and bankers. Others were owned by football stars and the nouveau riche. Foxy’s house was a turreted mansion with a long driveway leading up to it.

‘Christ,’ Matt said, when they got to the huge pillars at the open gate. ‘Look at this. Bastard must be minted. Crime pays, all right.’

But Rosie didn’t feel like cracking jokes. Her insides were churning. ‘Just drive right up, Matt. Get out and stand behind me, but don’t take his picture until I tell him what the story is. I want to see his face fall.’

They drove up to the house and got out of the car. A soft light burned in one of the front rooms, but there was no sign of life. Two cars sat in the drive. One was
Foxy’s Jaguar and the other was a 4 × 4 which they presumed was his wife’s. Rosie felt her palms sweaty as she got out of the car and went towards the huge oak door. She rang the brass bell, which made an echoing sound. A light came on in the hall, behind the stained glass door, and a figure approached. The door opened. It was Foxy. His face blanched when he saw her.

‘Chief Superintendent Fox?’ Rosie spoke almost chirpily but her mouth was dry. ‘Rosie Gilmour, the
Post
.’

Foxy tried to smile but Rosie saw his lip tremble. ‘I know who you are, Rosie. But what on earth are you doing at my house?’

‘Chief Superintendent Fox.’ She would take her time, this was her show now. ‘I’m here to ask for your reaction to a story we’re running in the
Post
tomorrow. It concerns yourself, Detective Superintendent Bill Mackie and Detective Chief Inspector Jack Prentice. The story is the result of a lengthy investigation into corruption inside Strathclyde Police. Corruption led by you, Mr Fox.’ She raised her arm. Matt started taking pictures.