The Damage (David Blake 2) (10 page)

Danny beamed. ‘When do you want me to start, like?’

‘Opening night,’ I told him. I was relieved he was so up for the job. Along with Palmer and Kinane, Danny had been my main muscle since I became the boss, but I was keen for him to take a bit of a back seat now. Doyley getting shot had reminded me how tough this business we had chosen could be. I liked the idea of Danny being the face of our club, no longer the guy out there collecting protection money or taxing our local villains. I could trust him to keep a proper eye on the club and it would keep him safe.

‘What are you going to call the place?’ he asked.

‘“Cachet”,’ I told him. I’d not long decided on a name but I liked it. It was short and snappy, a one-word depiction of style, which I reckoned would fit the bill.

‘Should call it “The Laundry”,’ he told me.

.......................

W
e’ve got twenty-three pubs in Newcastle and Gateshead. The Mitre was one of those pubs and tonight we had the big upstairs bar to ourselves. The lads were downing pints and, as usual, Hunter had put himself in charge of the old-fashioned jukebox. None of the boys minded because they couldn’t be bothered to change the tunes themselves and he kept us entertained, his lazy eye scrutinising the track lists as he sought inspiration. Trouble was that he thought nobody made decent music after 1985, so the choices were a bit limited. The boys enjoyed Meatloaf’s
Bat Out of Hell,
followed by Fleetwood Mac’s
The Chain
, because they could play air-guitar to them, then he gave us some Cult and a bit of AC/DC, followed by Bryan Adams’
Run to You
. It was like we’d all suddenly gone back in time in one of those crap TV series.

I watched Hunter choose the next round of tracks. These get-togethers were virtually the only time we ever saw Hunter dressed in anything but overalls. That night he was wearing a pair of jeans and a blue pullover his missus probably picked up for him in Marks & Sparks at the Metro Centre. He didn’t look much like a hardcore criminal from this distance, but he had seen some things in his time and he’d dealt with a lot of shit for the firm. He was tall and stocky and his hair was now more grey than brown. He would have had a forgettable enough face if it wasn’t for that lazy eye. When Hunter looked at you, one eye was fixed on yours and the other seemed to be staring at a spot somewhere over your left shoulder, which could be a little distracting. Hunter was our Quartermaster, and his cover was the body shop he had in the arches under the railway bridge. If the boys needed a piece they went there to see him, their comings and goings easily explained to the police by a duff radiator or burned out clutch.

The whole crew was there that night. More than twenty of our most-trusted faces. I like to get them together from time to time. Bobby used to do the same thing. Put them all in a room with free beer on tap and watch them. I didn’t have an ego about it but I needed them all to see men like Palmer, Kinane and my brother Danny deferring to me on business matters. That way, no one was likely to forget who I was or where I fit into the scheme of things.

We’d been there a couple of hours when Palmer walked in, straight from the airport. He got an ironic cheer for making the effort even though he was late and he waved to acknowledge it. When he saw me at the bar he came straight over. He was wearing the long black leather coat he always wore these days. It was the only thing I could ever remember him spending any money on and he virtually lived in it. It had been raining outside and the drops clung to his shoulders and the top of his head. He’d given up on his thinning hair and spontaneously shaved it all off one day then turned up the next morning ‘looking like Yul Brynner,’ as Kinane put it. That was the kind of thing Palmer did. He didn’t bang on about it, or even discuss it with anyone. One minute he had hair, the next he was shaven headed and sporting a thin layer of stubble that, if anything, made him look even harder.

I was relieved Palmer was back from his meeting with the Turk. I took a quiet table in the corner so we could talk before we rejoined the rest of the lads.

‘How’d it go?’

‘Easy. It’s a shame we’re not in the Euro.’

‘You’re not serious.’ It was the first time I’d heard that view expressed in the UK in a while.

‘A million Euros weighs a lot less than a million pounds,’ he explained, ‘and you can fit it all into one bag.’

‘I meant how did the meeting go?’

‘Okay,’ he said.

‘Any hitches?’

He shook his head, ‘No.’

He took a sip of his pint and I took a sip of mine.

‘You were gone a while.’ I noted.

‘They do things slowly over there. You have to meet everyone before they even sit down to talk business, you know that.’ I didn’t know that, but then I had only met the Turk twice. I left the rest of it up to the men I trusted. ‘I lost count of how many cousins he introduced me to but they all work for him. His is a big operation. I had the deposit on me for three days before he agreed to accept it. I slept lightly with that amount of money in my room I can tell you.’

‘So why did it take so many days to shake hands on the deal? You did shake hands on it?’

‘Yes we did and I told you, they do things slowly out there.’ Palmer seemed a little edgy. Was he nervous because he had something to hide or nervous because he didn’t and the last thing he wanted was me to think that he had? Maybe it was just me. Perhaps I was the edgy one these days. ‘He wanted certain assurances for starters.’

‘What kind of assurances?’

‘The usual kind; are we secure as an organisation? Do we have a safe, foolproof route to get the product into the UK? Did we have enough money to buy that amount of product from him each and every month?’

‘We’ve been through this countless times.’

‘I know,’ he said, ‘but he’s cautious. You would have to be in his shoes.’

‘And what did you say?’

‘I told him we’d been in business with the Haan brothers for years without a hitch and they were more than satisfied with our credit history.’

‘Was the Turk happy with that?’

‘Yes and no,’ he said, ‘happy we could pay, but not too happy I’d reminded him our former suppliers were looking at life sentences.’

‘He knows that comes with the turf,’ I said.

‘Maybe he thinks we had something to do with it?’ he offered.

‘Not if he has done his homework. If he has checked us out, and he will have done, he’ll know we are not undercover cops trying to make a name for ourselves and we don’t grass,’ I took another sip of beer, ‘well, not about anyone that actually matters.’

‘Yeah, I know that,’ he agreed, ‘if he’d thought I was an undercover cop I’d be floating face down in the Med.’

‘So the deal is on?’ I asked him.

‘The deal is on and the first shipment is on its way. Our million Euros saw to that and he needs two million more by the end of the month to establish a line of credit.’

‘He’ll get it,’ I assured him.

‘Then we are back in business.’

‘Thank fuck for that. Another eight weeks and we’d have been out of product completely.’

It had taken months of delicate negotiations with the Turk to get us to this day and we were almost out of supply. Newcastle would have been open to anyone with product in his back pocket and, sooner or later, they would have taken over. That’s how vital it was that Palmer shook the Turk’s hand in Istanbul.

Danny was in a good mood that night. Turning my older brother’s life around is the achievement I am most proud of. If you’d known him a couple of years ago you wouldn’t recognise him now. Back then he was a basket-case and nobody really knew why. All we did know was that he’d had a bad experience in the Falklands War when he was still a teenager and it had somehow messed up his life. He could never hold down a job after he left the Paras and, by the time he hit forty, he was walking round like a zombie; no job, no partner, no prospects, no money, shit flat, shit life. He basically mooched round the grottier pubs in Newcastle living off benefits and whatever money I threw him. That all changed when I was in the shit. Nobody could argue that when I really needed Our young’un he was there for me. Virtually everybody I knew and trusted was dead at that point. We had no crew left so I had to rebuild from scratch.

That was when men like Palmer and Kinane earned their stripes. They stepped up and stood alongside me to take on Tommy Gladwell and his Russian henchmen. Danny was right in there with me. He stood by me and I made sure he got his reward.

We all had a few pints that night and Danny got a bit loud. Nothing like he used to be when he was into the sauce but just enough to be embarrassing. He was banging on about our childhood, when we had no money and he had to look after me because our Ma told him to.

‘I tell you I couldn’t get rid of him. He’d follow me every-fucking-where.’ The lads who worked for me were lapping this up, which only encouraged him. ‘If I wanted to go to the pub with me mates, he’d still be tagging along. We’d tell him to go and sit in my pal’s car and if he didn’t come inside we’d bring him out a bag of crisps. It was the only way I could ditch him.’

‘And he never did bring me any crisps,’ I told them.

‘And we never did bring him any crisps,’ said Danny, as if I hadn’t already spoken.

‘We’d come out hours later when it was dark and he’d still be sitting there, bubbling.’

I could really do without this. In my line of work I don’t need anybody questioning whether I’m a soft arse, so the image of me crying, because my brother was a twat to me when I was a nipper, wasn’t doing me any favours. I knew why Our young’un was doing this. It was the last thing he had over me, the only remaining point where he could still say he was a bigger and better man than me. Those days are long gone and I could crush him in front of the guys in an instant, with a few carefully chosen words. I could say that it’s just as well I am more generous with his wages than he used to be with his crisps, otherwise he’d starve. I could basically make it clear that I own Danny, but what would be the point of that? Danny realises he owes everything to me and, even though I know he is grateful, on another level that has to hurt. No one really wants to be in debt to their younger brother. You don’t have to be a psychiatrist to understand that.

‘He was horrible to me when I was a kid,’ I tell them all, smiling like it was such a very long time ago, ‘I think that’s why I’m such a cunt now.’ And they all laughed at that one.

Were they laughing because it was funny or laughing because I was the boss? I honestly couldn’t tell you. Hunter changed the record on the jukebox. Somewhere far away Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers were singing about an
American Girl
.

.......................

W
e used to take the Drop down to Amrein’s home; a huge country house in Sevenoaks that had state-of-the-art security and rooms for all of his bodyguards. We don’t do that any more. I think his faith in the place was dented when we broke in and left Tommy Gladwell’s severed head on the windowsill of his summer house.

You could describe that as the low point in our business relationship but we are both realists and we moved on. Amrein needs me to keep sending the Drop every month and I need the information, influence and protection it buys me. It’s what’s known as a symbiotic relationship. We don’t have to like each other, and Amrein certainly doesn’t like me. Not after that little incident. But he knows he was bang out of order. He betrayed me by going behind my back and giving information to Tommy Gladwell and withholding it from us. He knows I could have – maybe should have – had him killed for that, and for the blessing he gave the eldest Gladwell boy to take over our operation when he was supposed to be on our side. I think, if his superiors had known what he was up to, they’d have saved me the bother of killing him. His little bit of entrepreneurialism would have been the death of him. So, although Amrein undoubtedly despises me for scaring the crap out of him the way I did, he also understands that I was well within my rights and, if I’d handled things a little differently, it would have been his head on the windowsill not Tommy’s. So there’s an uneasy truce between us these days but, like I mentioned, we don’t meet in Sevenoaks any more. Instead he prefers nice, big shiny hotels in neutral cities, places with wide open spaces and lots of witnesses. Today though, he is meeting me on my patch, in a conference room at the Malmaison in Newcastle. They think he’s the MD of a Financial Services company. Me? I’m wondering why he is affording me the courtesy of driving all this way from Kent to see me in my city to talk about the Gladwells. It can’t mean anything but bad news.

The two of us sit together at the end of a large conference table, his bodyguards stand against one wall, rigid, like they are about to come to attention on the parade ground. My lads are opposite them. They look a bit more laid back, but they’re just as alert, ready for anything. They have to be with Amrein and I am sure he feels exactly the same way about me.

We have a corporate video running in the background to drown out anyone who might be trying to listen in. Just as the video cuts to shots of prosperous and youthful-looking retirees with perfect teeth, striding across a foreign golf course, we get down to business.