Every Night I Dream of Hell (16 page)

‘I know Zara’s with him.’

‘Ah, right, well, took the wind right out of my sails there. That’s all I’ve got for now then, but I’ll assume you’d like me to keep in touch with my contacts, keep trying to find out anything that might be useful to you.’

‘You can assume that.’

We were done. I got up and left the cafe. Left Greig with his giant cappuccino and his little world of secrets and bribes. Perhaps his info was correct, and that was fine, but it was more complicated than that. You had to trust the information that he was giving you, that it was given with straightforward intent. Wouldn’t be a new tactic for someone to feed false information. Wouldn’t be Greig himself. He knew what the price would be if he was deliberately misleading me with this. But someone could give the false info to him with a straight face and allow him to pass it on in good faith.

Honest or not, it was explosive. It was a suggestion that the twin brother of Marty Jones was helping Adrian Barrett and his crew. A suggestion that he was still involved with them, still talking to them. That implicated Marty. It was the kind of information that an enemy of the organization would be happy to provide. The sort of thing that all of us within the organization had to handle with great care.

I got in the car and drove straight back to the warehouse. Whatever the truth of it, Kevin needed to know this. Needed to find out before Lafferty did, because Lafferty wasn’t likely to take a careful approach. I parked and went in. Kelly was standing talking to someone in the warehouse, a notepad in her hand. She saw me but I didn’t stop, marched straight in and went into Kevin’s office. He was alone, still going through his papers.

‘Nate, you okay?’

Apparently I looked more serious than ever. ‘You need to find out where Marty Jones is.’

They must have known as soon as we came through the door that there was going to be trouble. The kind of trouble none of them were looking for. One thing everyone in the business knows: you have less chance of seeing it coming when your own people start turning on you. Your enemies are the ones you face; your friends can sneak right up on you.

They were in a posh-looking office on the second floor of a building in Blythswood Square. The place had had a ‘To let’ sign outside it for as long as I could remember. It would fetch good money in the right market. It wasn’t the sort of place you would associate with Marty Jones, but that was probably the point. This was his off-the-radar office. A classy three-storey building with a pretty view of the green square.

It had taken Kevin all of three minutes to find them, which was impressive. I was talking to Ben Carmichael in the warehouse while Kevin put the call in. I had already called Ronnie, told him to drop what he was doing and get his arse round to join us. Kevin came out of the office as Ronnie screeched all too dramatically into the yard.

‘He’s having some pow-wow with Billy Patterson, Conn Griffiths and Mikey Summers,’ he said, a little bit of concern on his face.

I nodded. I wasn’t going to commit to saying that Conn and Mikey weren’t involved. I trusted them, sure, but that meant nothing. They were Billy Patterson’s people; he was the one who had employed them. Their loyalties didn’t lie with me or with Kevin.

Ben drove us round there. I did some violent maths. Four of us and four of them. Marty’s not a fighter in any meaningful sense, so you take him out. Same goes for Kevin, with bells on. So it’s three on three. But I didn’t fancy Ben’s chances in a fight with Billy Patterson. Billy knew his way around a right hook. So it was three on two, in their favour. One of our two was Ronnie, the least experienced of all of us. I didn’t expect this to turn into a fight, too many smart heads, but you still work out your odds. Ours told me we had to make sure this didn’t get physical.

Kevin went in first. The front door was unlocked; there were other offices operating in the building. We went up the stairs and into Marty’s, not bothering to knock. The place was immaculate, all new furniture and fitted carpet. The four of them were sitting round a table near the tall window, only Marty looking like he belonged. They were having themselves a conversation that stopped as soon as the door opened. Uninvited guests kill a good conversation. They might have been more relaxed if it was just Kevin, but I made sure I was second through the door, setting a tone. Ronnie and Ben followed me in, closed the door, still not a word spoken. No attempt at jovial hellos. They must have had an idea what was coming.

‘Kevin,’ Marty said. You could hear the nerves in his voice already; he knew that not planned equals not good. ‘What’s up?’

Kevin moved across to the table the four of them were sitting around, looking down at Marty. He didn’t look angry because he makes a point of not looking angry, but you could tell. The way he moved, the way he was watching Marty. Everyone in that room was wary now.

‘We found out that Barrett used a local girl as the lure for Christie,’ Kevin said. ‘The girl was, I don’t know, a party girl, a hooker, I suppose.’

‘Not one of mine,’ Marty said, and you could hear how sure he was. Marty kept his girls on a short leash and cut them loose if they struggled. If it was one of his, he would know.

‘No, not one of yours. One of your brother’s.’

There was silence in the room, people glancing around and making eye contact with each other. Everyone in that room knew everyone else in that room, just about. Maybe not Ronnie, but the rest of us had crossed paths. Everyone was looking to everyone else for answers.

‘Adam?’ Marty said.

‘Yeah, Adam. He provided a girl to Barrett for the lure, and it’s been suggested that he’s bragging about being involved and knowing where Barrett and his crew are.’

Didn’t take more than three seconds for Marty to put two and two together. We all used to think he was dumb, just a party boy with the women and little else. Got involved in a bunch of other businesses that he couldn’t make stick and went back to the women. But he was smart. Made his role in debt collection stick, managed to make himself the biggest debt collector in the city within a year. His failures had given him experience to learn from.

‘I know you think that if he was involved then I must know about it but that’s horseshit, if you don’t mind me saying,’ Marty said to him. There was this force in every word he spoke that let you know how pissed off he was.

‘You had no idea that your own twin brother was working with Barrett?’ Currie asked him. Keeping his tone conciliatory, like he wanted to believe.

It was the tone Currie used that mattered, not what he said. Sounded like he already knew Marty didn’t know, like he had too much respect for Marty to believe anything else. Showed how far Marty had come in a short space of time that his brother’s stupidity couldn’t dent him. It’s become a cliché about Marty, how people are suddenly forced to respect his work. Marty’s brother was a twat but that still didn’t mean Marty was.

‘We might be twins but we’re not fucking Siamese twins. I don’t know everything he does, although I bloody wish I did. Fuck’s sake.’ He paused for a bit, glancing at me before he said anything. ‘Have you been round to see him yet?’

Kevin knew what that was. That was Marty terrified that we’d already dealt with his brother before we came to confront him. Fearing that his brother was a splatter on a floor somewhere and that nothing he could do now would change that. That’s why he looked at me. But that wasn’t plausible. Not when there was still a chance that we might get something out of Marty first.

This was a two-man conversation with an audience of six. Billy, Conn and Mikey sitting at the table, watching the back and forth. Me, Ronnie and Ben standing behind Kevin, literally and figuratively. Glancing occasionally at each other, making sure nobody was making any stupid moves, reaching into a pocket or anything like that. It needed to be tense to make sure Marty understood how serious this was. It was damaging though. It scratched at our unity.

‘We haven’t been anywhere near him,’ Kevin said, ‘but we’re on our way. Your brother has some very serious questions to answer.’

‘You’re too fucking right he does,’ Marty said, standing up behind the table, ‘and I’m going to ask them. The bastard. All of us, we’ll all go. He’ll be at the club at this hour.’

‘He is,’ I said. One phone call from Kevin in the car on the way over had confirmed that. Another of his unnamed contacts.

Marty looked at Kevin, nodded, but you could see he was unnerved by how much we knew. He felt outgunned. He was hoping that him leading the questioning could make the questions a little less physical. Me saying that I knew where his brother was extinguished that hope.

Marty was making a show of his decisiveness, putting on his jacket and getting ready to march down to his car and go round to see his brother. In the seconds he took to do it, I looked at Billy Patterson, made eye contact. I nodded, he nodded back, letting me know that he understood what was going to happen next. That was reassuring.

There was no way Kevin wanted Marty going off on his own, or just going off with his own people around him. That would have given him the chance to warn his brother. I wanted to split the two parties up for the drive to the club. I wanted to be in the car with Marty. Billy seemed fine with that, willing to be one of the people who went with Kevin instead to force the split.

We all traipsed down the stairs and out onto the street. It was lovely out there, in the late afternoon sun. Sort of place I’d have been happy to work if I was ever capable of holding down a desk job. The cars were parked on the street in front of the building. Turned out we were parked right up behind Marty’s.

‘We’ll just take the two cars,’ Kevin said casually.

That was as much as he was going to say. Kevin wasn’t going to force Marty to get in the car with me, wasn’t going to give out any orders. So far everything was being done at Marty’s behest. He wanted to go talk to his brother so we were going to talk to his brother. His demand, his terms. That wasn’t going to change, not as long as he wanted the same things we did.

We did it as subtly as we could. Billy gravitated over to Kevin’s car and got in the back with him. I walked over to Marty’s car and got in the back beside him. He didn’t look thrilled to see me, but he didn’t say anything. Conn was already dropping into the driver’s seat of Marty’s car, Mikey getting into the passenger side. That left Ronnie and Ben no choice but to get in with Kevin and Billy. A three-to-one split.

It was a good chance for Kevin to have a conversation with Billy Patterson. Billy was closer to Marty on a day-to-day basis than we were; he might have a few interesting answers. He was in a better position to confirm or deny Marty being involved with Barrett.

‘This info about Adam,’ Marty said to me. ‘You’re sure about it?’ Interesting that he correctly assumed I was the one who had found this info.

‘Sure as I can be. Only one way to be certain.’

Heavenly was a dump. It was cheap, it had a reputation as a place you could have a wild time, so it got people in the doors. But it was a dump. Could have been something special – the front looked like some classic theatre – if it wasn’t so grotty and badly maintained. We parked across the street and marched in, a conspicuous collection of mobile trouble.

Marty went in first because nobody was more determined to lead the way than Marty. This wasn’t just about him confronting his brother; it was about him being seen to take this more seriously than anyone else on God’s green earth. Didn’t matter how outraged you were, Marty would have found a way of trumping you. Nobody was going to look more innocent than him. He stormed in, the rest of us having to up our pace to keep up.

There were three people in the place and I recognized them all. They were a shabby wee combination of low-ranking criminality. Adam Jones was standing behind the bar. He was the manager of this place. That was his official job title anyway; what he told the taxman. The truth was that he ran private, after-hours parties from this place, something him and Marty had been doing for a while. He was also, apparently, edging his way into Marty’s business of renting out women that he assumed belonged to him. It was grim, what they did. Finding desperate women and pushing them into prostitution. Paid some with drugs alone. I don’t doubt some of the women made the decision for themselves, kept control of what they were doing. There were plenty who didn’t.

There were two men sitting on the other side of the bar, closer to us. One of them was Aaron MacLennan, a tall, narrow guy with a mouth that took up most of his face. He was in his mid thirties, and he’d been around the business almost as long as I had. He was, not to be too technical, shite at everything. I’d never known him to make a good job of anything he’d done in the business, and I knew he’d been inside at least twice. If he was working for Adam Jones, then Adam Jones wasn’t running much of a racket.

The other guy was Neil Fraser. A big lump of dumb muscle. He’d been stabbed the year before, if I remember my dates correctly. Not stabbed hard enough, because he was still polluting the city with his presence. He was a big guy, and that was where his skill ended. He was stupid. He was loud. He wasn’t a good fighter. He was short-tempered. He used to work for us, the Jamieson organization. When Jamieson went down, the unreliable were the first to hit the dole queue. Seemed like he was now plying his trade for Adam Jones. Intimidating wee girls for money. That was his level.

We went in looking angry, and the eight of us could conjure up a pretty furious picture. Adam was trying to play it cool, with the bar and his two mates acting as shield. Fraser looked as dopey as ever, like he didn’t understand. MacLennan knew. He looked like his rectum had exploded, now trying to shrink himself painfully into his bar stool.

‘Marty, what can I do for you?’ Adam said to his brother. Still trying to play it casual, but he wasn’t much of a player. He so desperately wanted to be lord of the manor. He looked at Neil Fraser and smiled a bit, and Fraser, being as sharp as a brick, smiled back.