Every Night I Dream of Hell (31 page)

I led us out of the kitchen and into the hallway, a wide and long space with a staircase down near the front door. There were doors along the corridor, the sort of places just about anyone could have jumped out from and attacked us. We were all treading slowly on the polished wooden floors. A carpet that cushioned our footsteps would have helped. We moved silently to the bottom of the stairs. It was time to shuffle the order. I stopped, looked behind me for the other two. The plan was for Conrad to go first, but Ronnie didn’t realize that. He moved in front of me and started to step carefully up the stairs. I waited and let Conrad get into the middle and I went last. I didn’t think about it at the time; I just went up the stairs behind the other two, all of us as silent as the grave.

Ronnie was moving too slowly up the stairs, too worried about making a small noise as he went. Understandable and acceptable in a small house, but this was not a small enough house for a footstep on the stairs to reach Lafferty’s office. But Conrad wasn’t going to nudge him, push him along a little faster; it would only have scared the kid. The one thing you want the awkward third wheel to be is predictable. He reached the top of the stairs and we were in the upstairs corridor.

The light was on in the corridor, and the door to the large office was ajar. We were walking slowly on carpets thick enough to lose a cat in, approaching the door and hoping that he was going to be where we assumed he would be. It had been, basically, textbook so far. We had used the key and the alarm code; we had made it upstairs without any sign of anyone other than Lafferty being in the house. This was exactly what I wanted, exactly what any gunman would want on a job like this. This was reassuringly perfect.

I was thinking about Conrad at that point. Strange. Should have been thinking about Lafferty. We go in there and we kill him. Then we need to remove him. A lot of work to do to get that done properly. Go through the house and find his personal belongings. Find his security systems and switch everything off before we bring a car up to the house. It would need to be done inside thirty minutes. That’s where my mind should have been. This one time, with the tiredness and the awkwardness of the job, it wasn’t. I was thinking about Russell Conrad, and what a dangerous little man he was.

You can call me whatever you like. You can call me a bad person, a sociopath, a stain on society. Fine, I wouldn’t bother my arse arguing with you on any of those points, because they might all be true. What I never was, not from day one in the business, was stupid. I knew that Conrad, the man with the gun in his hand, the man with all the experience of pulling triggers, was the most dangerous person in that house. I was not the man that anyone should fear most. Ignore my reputation. Ignore the fact that I was big, angry and had a gun of my own. The man who knew how to pull the trigger was the man to fear.

I’d slipped my gun out of my pocket at the top of the stairs, and I was assuming that Conrad had done the same thing with his. Russell Conrad with a gun in his hand, creeping through the shadows of another man’s house. That was the stuff of many a person’s nightmares. Ronnie had the sense to stop before he reached the door, glancing back. He paused, letting the gunman move in front of him. That was how it should have been from the start. You go to a shooting and you let the gunman go in first. Conrad stepped past him up to the door and paused for just a second, listening. Ronnie was right behind him; me another foot or so back, feeling the weight of the gun in my hand. There was movement in the room, sounded like someone shuffling something, pushing something across a desk maybe. Conrad turned back and nodded to me and Ronnie, the kid standing in between us. He blocked some of my view, but I looked down long enough to catch a glimpse of Conrad’s gun held loose and confident in his right hand.

The gunman turned back to the door, still hearing someone moving conspicuously inside. Sounded to my ears like a man who wanted to be heard. That set off an alarm. Lafferty wasn’t experienced at set-ups; he was trying too hard. I was too late to notice. Conrad took a quick step and pushed open the door, entering the room with the gun half raised. Lafferty was opposite the door, on the far side of the long room, standing at the side of his large oak desk. He had a piece of paper in his hand and dropped it as he looked at the door. He and Conrad made eye contact just for a split second before Lafferty looked over the gunman’s shoulder at the two figures behind him. Conrad spun round, faced Ronnie, raised the gun and shot him in the forehead.

Shouldn’t have run upstairs. Should have put their hands up and let the coppers take them in. Didn’t think Dyne would react the way he did. He should have seen what the best way out of this was, but he didn’t. Now Elliott was stuck in the room with his best friend and his best friend’s girl. The woman who had gotten them into this.

Barrett and Elliott were pushing the bed up against the door, trying to block themselves in. Zara was standing back by the window, looking nervous. Dyne looked like he was panicking as he pushed the bed, wide-eyed and sweating. This was the one thing he couldn’t stand, the thought of a long stretch. Better to be killed than this. The gun was lying on the bed in front of them. The gun Henson had brought back from the house Nasty had died in. The gun Nasty had died for. Elliott did as he was told, blocking the door, doing a poor job of hiding his reluctance.

Barrett shouted out at the cops when they reached the door. ‘I’m armed; I have a girl in here.’ That, Zara and Elliott both knew, was a stupid thing to shout. He was making things worse when they needed to engage in some damage limitation.

They had the bed against the door but that didn’t matter – that was only going to slow the police down if they chose to push their way in. The whole idea of resisting, of trying to get away, seemed stupid to Elliott. You don’t fight your way out of a corner this tight; you try and talk your way out. He backed away towards the window, towards Cope.

Elliott Parker hated that girl. He had hated her from the first day because he knew Zara Cope was bad news, but now . . . Now he knew that she was the reason for all this. She had gotten the crew to come up here. She had told them there was a deal here where they could make good money and get out quick. Set up some third-rate loser, kill an easy target and then whatever thug the first guy’s boss sends to chase them, and get out. She had been full of shit from the start.

Zara set up the deal and they had all gone along with it. His old mate Dyne had led them up there and Elliott had followed because their friendship ran far deeper than his hatred of Zara. Now Nasty was dead because of it. She wasn’t mourning. Wouldn’t get any tears out of her for the death of their friend. Nasty had been like a brother to Elliott and Barrett and he was dead because of Zara and her stupid fucking deal.

If only he had been able to make Barrett see how stupid this was. Going up to Glasgow like a bunch of mercenaries, doing a job in a city they didn’t know for people they couldn’t possibly trust. It was always going to be a disaster, always. Common sense was blinded by money. Blinded by her reassuring words.

Elliott was trying to piece things together. Trying to work out how much the police knew. Must have been when Jess got out that the cops found out about them. He had liked Jess. She looked about fourteen without her make-up. He could have kept her for ages, had a lot of fun with her. Would have been good for her too, he was convinced of that. She just didn’t understand. She didn’t know that Elliott was the one who stopped her from being killed by Nasty. She didn’t understand, so she ran. Ungrateful and stupid. Didn’t think she had it in her to go to the police. If she told them all she knew then the police knew a lot.

That idiot Henson shouldn’t have let her get away. Neither should Cope. She was in the house with them when it happened; she should have been able to do something about it. Maybe she did do something about it. Maybe she was the one who let the girl out. That thought had been floating through Elliott’s mind for a while now. Wouldn’t have surprised him if he was correct. He was never surprised to be right.

Didn’t matter a damn at that point. This was over. Elliott knew it as soon as the cops came crashing through the front door. Knew it before then. Knew it when Nasty got killed. They should have been out of there then, but she persuaded him to stay. Her, again. Little Zara Cope, whispering bad ideas that sounded oh-so-good.

‘We need to hand ourselves over,’ Elliott whispered to Barrett. He figured the cops would still be outside the door in large numbers, trying to listen in.

‘No, we can get out of this,’ Barrett said. He knew that wasn’t true; you could see in his eyes that he knew. He just wanted to believe it so much.

He blamed himself, that was why. Himself was a good place to start, Elliott thought, but she was as much to blame as he was. And, fuck it, they all went along with it, didn’t they? He didn’t put a gun to their heads to make them go up there with him. Elliott and Nasty could have stayed in Birmingham if they’d really wanted to. The money lured them north. The need to be a part of the group. The need to protect each other.

‘We can’t get out of this,’ Elliott said to him. ‘They got us surrounded. They ain’t going to let us out. Either they take us by force or we hand ourselves over. Looks worse if they have to use force. Come on, man, we have to give this up.’

He hated saying it. Hated it. Couldn’t believe that they’d reached the point where they were going to give themselves over to the cops. Since day one of their careers Elliott was the one who thought they would always get away with it. He thought they would have no problem staying one step ahead of every enemy in town. Their mix of skills, his strategic mind. It would always work for them. Now he had to admit that they were done.

‘Don’t . . . Just fucking don’t,’ Barrett said to the room in general. He was whispering, trying to keep his voice down and failing.

Elliott didn’t say anything for a few seconds, but that was as long as he could leave it. The longer this went on, the worse the consequences would be for them. They were getting damn close to the time when the police could start to dress this up as some kind of dramatic stand-off and use that against them in court. If they walked out quickly they could make it look like a misunderstanding. Make it seem like they were just scared by the cops crashing in, didn’t realize who it was. Their mate had just been killed and they were scared witless, that sort of thing. Maybe not a great excuse, but better than the nothing Barrett was offering.

‘Come on, man, you know this ain’t happening. We’re in the corner, right, and the only way out is with our hands up. Live to fight another day, that sort of thing.’

‘We’ll get time, big time,’ Barrett said to him, the sort of whisper that made it clear he wanted to shout.

‘What for? Nasty killed that Christie guy, that was it. We haven’t done anything else, not really. We get done for possession of the gun, it’s a few years, I don’t know what they give you up here. Give it three years and we’ll be back down home, chanting ‘Shit on the Villa’ and pretending Birmingham and Wolves aren’t an embarrassment to us. There’s nothing else they can do us for. The girl that ran, she could be a problem, but maybe our employer keeps her quiet to help us out. Keeps her away from court,’ he said, more in hope than expectation. ‘Least he could do.’

‘Exactly,’ Cope said, the first thing she’d said. ‘There’s no way that girl is going to stand in a dock and point the finger at any of us; he won’t let that happen. There’s nothing major that they can pin on any of us. Maybe possession of a weapon, but they can’t prove who it belongs to. It’ll be a short term,’ she said.

Elliott wanted to say, yeah, it’ll be a short term for you. They got nothing on you, sweetheart – you’ll be walking free in months. But he agreed with her, so he fought down the urge to provoke and kept his mouth shut.

‘Give it a few months and we’ll all be back down south,’ she said. It was hard to tell if Barrett believed her; maybe he was hyper enough to believe anything just then. He was walking in a small circle, blinking heavily. ‘We can be down south and forget about this,’ she went on in a calm voice. ‘We can start again. We still have half the money from this job. That’s something. We can start again, Dyne.’

She was persuasive. In that little room, with decor that had fallen out of an eighties catalogue, the bed pushed against the door, the cops surrounding the building, you would have believed that everything was hunky-dory. Zara Cope could persuade you of just about anything you wanted to believe. It was easy to see and hear why Barrett had fallen under her spell. If she had been speaking to him like this all along, Jesus, it was no wonder. She might even have gotten inside Elliott’s head if she’d bothered to try.

‘I don’t want to have to start again. I don’t want to be always starting again,’ he said to her. His tone wasn’t rough though, not as rough as it had been with Elliott. He was relaxing. She was getting through to him.

‘It wouldn’t be starting again,’ she said to him, going across and intercepting him as he circled. She stopped him and put a hand on each arm, looked him in the eye. ‘It would be starting for the last time. This would be it. Get this out of the way, serve whatever time they give us, and when we get back together in Birmingham we have the chance to make proper plans. We’ll have enough money to plan what we want to do, not what other people want us to do for them. We won’t need other people’s help, other people’s jobs. This’ll be it. We just have to pay this price first.’

He was looking into her eyes as she was talking. It was impossible to tell if he believed her or not. Barrett was always too smart to really believe that sort of thing. If they went down, they would go down for different terms. Him and Elliott, maybe months if they were lucky, years more likely. If Zara was lucky, she wouldn’t get anything at all. She could plead ignorance of everything and Barrett would back her up. She would be long gone before they got out. At least two of the people in the room knew that, maybe all three. But Barrett wanted to believe her. He wanted her to give him an excuse to end this thing because he was smart enough to know, once the panic and anger faded, that they were finished.