The Damage (David Blake 2) (17 page)

‘This isn’t a social call though,’ I told Conroy, ‘not from the tone of your message.’

‘No,’ he said, ‘not a social call.’

I cocked my head slightly and gave him a questioning look to prompt him.

‘I had a visitor a few days ago,’ he explained.

‘Did you now?’

‘Aye. It was a go-between, a cut-out, you know.’

‘Yeah, I know,’ he was telling me he didn’t know the identity of the client who wanted to hire him.

‘Anyway, I knew the guy right enough, we all do, but I was surprised as he’s not into that game normally. I mean,
you
wouldn’t have sent him to talk to me. He asks me straight out if I’d be interested in a job, someone local, somebody “high profile” as he put it, and I said “well that depends”. He asks me on what, and I say “on who it is and how much we are talking” and that’s when it got interesting.’

‘Go on.’

‘He told me there was fifty in it for me if I did this particular job.’

‘Fifty grand? That’s a lot of money Conroy.’

‘That’s what I said,’ he paused for a moment and then bit his bottom lip before continuing, ‘until he told me who it was he wanted doing.’

‘And who was that?’ I asked him, even though I knew the answer already.

‘Well,’ he said, a little nervously, ‘it was you.’

One of Kinane’s lads took a step forward like he was about to give Conroy a belt across the face, which would not have been a wise move.

‘Hey,’ I cautioned.

‘Get back in your box,’ his voice was a low growl as Conroy stared Kinane’s son down.

‘So,’ I asked Conroy, ‘what did you tell him, your cut-out.’

‘I told him to fuck off.’

I just looked at Conroy, trying to make my face expressionless, and I kept quiet. Bobby taught me the value of silence years ago. It makes people uncomfortable. Sooner or later they feel the need to fill the void and sometimes they tell you things.

‘Honest to God I did,’ Conroy assured me. ‘Why do you think I’m here?’

‘Don’t know,’ I told him, ‘why are you here?’

‘To tell you about it, obviously.’

‘Why come to me? Why didn’t you just send this guy packing and keep out of it? Must have been tempting.’

He thought for a moment before answering, ‘well it was. I did think about that, to be honest, but I figured you wouldn’t take too kindly if you heard I’d been offered a hit and didn’t come to you about it. I mean, I operate on your patch don’t I? I live here, this is my home and you, well you’re the boss,’ he looked a bit nervy there, like he’d just revealed a secret nobody was supposed to know, so he added, ‘I mean sort of.’

Was I surprised that Conroy knew I was the boss? Not really. People were bound to speculate when nobody had seen Bobby Mahoney for two years.

‘Is that why it took you so long to come here?’ I asked him, ‘because you were thinking about it, weighing it up? You’ve been playing a risky game, don’t you think?’

Conroy looked about as nervous as I’d ever seen him. We outnumbered him big style and we were on our home turf. One word from me and he’d be bundled into the boot of a car and his body thrown to the pigs, and he knew it.

He swallowed and licked his lips, ‘you were abroad, so I was led to believe, so how could I contact you any sooner? I wanted to speak to you direct about this, not one of the lads. In the end I had to talk to Kinane because I heard you were back.’

‘You mean you heard someone tried to kill me the other day and you were worried I might have heard they approached you first.’

‘Aye, well, right enough, but you have to understand the business I’m in. You don’t get work if people know the minute they ask you to remove someone you go running off squealing to their targets about it. Like I said though, you’re a special case. This is your city,’ he looked around the room as if he was including everybody in the ‘your city’ but he meant me. It concerned me that the guy who acted as the cut-out had described me as ‘high-profile’. I thought I was about as far removed from the day-to-day as possible, living out in Thailand for most of the year, but I guess the lads had been conducting business in my name, which is the same thing as me being right there in the room. I could see it now, ‘Blake wants this to happen’, ‘Blake needs that to happen’ and pretty soon I am the guy to get rid of if you want to take over the city. ‘I wanted to warn you,’ he concluded.

‘You could have done that through Kinane.’

He chose his words carefully, ‘when someone’s out to kill the boss, who can you trust to tell him but yourself? No offence, Joe.’

‘None taken,’ answered Kinane, because Conroy had a point. He could have been warning the man who’d arranged the hit.

I changed tack, ‘who was the cut-out?’

‘Well, that’s what I came to tell you,’ and he looked around the room again, ‘it’s why I wanted to see you on my own.’

I laughed and shook my head, ‘like that’s ever going to happen.’

He shrugged as if he finally realised it had been an absurd notion. ‘Fair enough,’ he said.

‘Stop stalling me, Conroy,’ I told him, ‘give me the name of the cut-out.’

He exhaled and took an eternity before he spoke. I reasoned that grassing on anyone was anathema to him. Finally he said, ‘Billy Warren’. I almost fell off my chair.

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

I
didn’t need to give the order to find Billy. That much was obvious. With everyone in our organisation out on the streets looking for Billy, we’d get him before the day was out, even if he didn’t want to be found.

As to what had suddenly possessed Billy Warren to become the middle man between a hit man and whoever wanted me dead, I could only imagine – but it seemed I had completely misread him and that worried me, because Billy was about as one-dimensional as it got. I had always thought I’d put the fear of the devil into Billy when I caught him betraying Bobby. He knew I could have killed him for that, but I let him live and kept him on the payroll; admittedly with his wings clipped, but I would have thought that was a small price to pay to carry on breathing.

Now it seemed I’d misjudged Billy Warren. He was too ambitious to put up with earning a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work. He wanted more, and was willing to kill me to get it.

I parked my car with two of its wheels on the grass verge. I got out, climbed over the gate and trudged across the field, cursing the long wet grass and Sharp in that order. When I reached the opposite end of the field there was another gate. I climbed over that too, crossed the road and climbed into Sharp’s parked car.

‘Do we have to go through all of this “Smiley’s People” bollocks every time we have a meet these days?’ I asked him.

‘Yes, we fucking do. Have you got any idea of the heat you are attracting right now? If I’m even seen with you I’m finished.’

‘What have you got for me?’ I demanded, ‘and it better be good since you just ruined a nice pair of shoes.’

‘Officially, nobody knows who was involved in taking down that CCTV system. There are no suspects and, even if there was one, it wouldn’t be admitted.’

‘Go on,’ I urged him, ‘why not?’

‘Because,’ he said solemnly, ‘bent coppers are an embarrassment.’ He spoke with no discernible trace of irony.

‘Give me a name, Sharp.’

‘I can do better than that,’ he told me, reaching into his case and pulling out a photograph. It was an eight-by-ten, black-and-white surveillance photograph and it showed the image of a stocky man in his mid-thirties. He looked more like a gangster than a copper. ‘This is Detective Sergeant Ian Wharton from the Drug Squad. It seems he visited the offices of the CCTV operatives a few days before the system abruptly went down. It is alleged he went to the building with another man, though Wharton denies this, and ordered the security guard to admit them so they could review footage. Wharton showed his credentials and ordered the guard to leave them to it.’

‘Giving the second man plenty of time to hack the software and close down the system at a point in the future?’ I offered.

‘That’s my best bet.’

I thought about this for a moment. ‘What’s going to happen to DS Wharton?’

‘Nothing,’ Sharp said, ‘for now. It seems the security guard got it wrong.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘At first he told a young investigating officer that Wharton was accompanied by another man. When he was brought in to discuss it further, he admitted he had made a mistake and Wharton was really on his own. There was no second man at all.’

‘I can see that would be an easy mistake to make.’

‘The investigating officers weren’t quite as sympathetic as you. They grilled him about it for quite some time but he wouldn’t budge, and of course DS Wharton lacks the necessary technological expertise required to hack the city’s CCTV system all on his own, which means nothing can be proved and he is no longer suspended.’

‘Where is Wharton now?’

‘He was encouraged to take some leave. I don’t know where he has gone but he’s no longer in the city.’

‘Shit, he could have been the one man who might have been hired without a cut-out. Give me that picture,’ I demanded.

‘What are you going to do?’ he asked me, looking anxious as usual.

‘Nothing,’ I assured him. ‘I’m just going to ask around.’

Palmer wanted to speak to me alone so we drove out to his house. I sat at the kitchen table while he made us coffee and I looked around.

‘How long have you been here now?’

He shrugged ‘about three years.’

‘The place looks like you moved in yesterday.’ It was amazing how few things Palmer owned. I paid him well, but I was hard-pushed to identify anything in here that looked like it truly belonged to him. He had the 42-inch plasma TV on the living-room wall and a Playstation tucked underneath it with a few games but even his sofas came with the house. It was a former show home and I swear he only bought it so he could take all of the furniture as part of the deal. There was a laptop on the dining-table and he switched it on.

‘Mrs Evans keeps the place pretty clean for me,’ he said. I wasn’t talking about his cleaning lady and he knew that, but this wasn’t a conversation he was comfortable with. The no-possessions thing was an aspect of Palmer’s personality that I found intriguing, and in a way I envied him for it. He didn’t seem to have any baggage at all. There was an ex-wife, but no kids, and he barely mentioned the former Mrs Palmer, except to acknowledge she was probably right to give up on him as a bad lot. We’d see him with a woman now and then but he always held them at arm’s length and they were usually history by the time we got used to their names. It suddenly struck me that one day I might drive out to this house and find Palmer gone without any explanation.

‘What’s on your mind?’ I asked him.

‘Jaiden Doyle,’ he said.

‘Oh yeah,’ I answered him dryly, ‘in all the excitement I’d almost forgotten about Doyley.’

‘At least we have footage of that one.’

‘Not much to go on though, was there? At least that’s what you told me.’

‘I did,’ he agreed, ‘but then I had another look and there’s something I want you to see.’

He turned the screen to show me the frozen, black-and-white image of Jaiden Doyle leaving the hotel. Palmer clicked on the arrow and the image started to move. I watched as Doyley walked away from the hotel. He managed a few steps and then a dark and indistinct figure stepped into the frame, carefully pointed a gun and shot Doyley twice in the back. Doyley fell to the ground, the man left the scene and the image froze once more.

‘What do you think?’

‘I don’t get you.’

‘Look again,’ he said, and I did.

‘What am I looking at?’

‘Who does he look like?’

‘The shooter?’

‘No, Doyley.’

‘Doyley?’ I asked, ‘what do you mean? He looks like Doyley.’

‘Okay,’ he said reasonably, ‘describe him then. Pretend you don’t know him.’

‘Why?’

‘Humour me.’

‘Alright. He’s about six feet tall, fairly slim build, short dark hair, wearing sunglasses, a smart jacket and trousers, for once, and a pair of black shoes. Er, that’s it.’

‘Who have you just described?’ he asked.

‘Doyley,’ I answered impatiently.

‘Yourself,’ he corrected me, ‘you’ve just described yourself, to a tee. I think we’ve been barking up the wrong tree. It was a botched job. I think the shooter that took down Jaiden Doyle thought he had you in his sights.’

I looked again at the frozen black-and-white image of the smartly-dressed, tall, slim man in the sunglasses and saw it anew. ‘Well, fuck me,’ was all I could say.

We sat in Palmer’s garden and drank a beer while we went over it again.

‘So, where do we go from here?’

‘You know what I would prefer?’ Palmer said.

‘You want me to leave the UK until you get to the bottom of this.’