The Damage (David Blake 2) (23 page)

‘But you won’t do that?’

‘Never,’ she told me, ‘no one gets that.’

She sipped her wine some more, looked at me as if waiting for a comment and when I didn’t say anything she said, ‘One guy kept going on at me, saying I was liking it. “Loving it,” in fact, “You’re loving this, darling”,’ and she snorted at his stupidity, ‘he actually thought I was getting off on him because I was wet. I laughed at him and told him “you’re dreaming pal. That’s just the KY.” I shouldn’t have done that. He didn’t like it, me laughing at him. Men don’t like being laughed at. They take themselves too seriously, especially in bed. I thought he was going to hit me. Reckon he probably would have as well, if he hadn’t been worried about Max and what he might do.’

‘I guess you meet some strange guys.’

‘There’s this one guy has an appointment with me once a week, all he wants to do is look at my feet. Not interested in any other part of me, just my bare feet. Doesn’t need to see me naked, just looks at them for a while, plays with himself, gets off and leaves.’

The starters arrived at that point. If the waiter overhead that last snippet he did a good impression of someone who hadn’t. There was foie gras for me; something leafy and expensive with a slice of parmesan on top, which looked like it came straight out of a salad bag from Morrisons, for her.

‘What if I found you something better’ I asked, ‘for the same money?’

‘Like what?’

I shrugged, ‘I don’t know yet, but I’m pretty certain I could utilise your talents in a better way,’ she looked at me suspiciously, like I was proposing to sell her to an Arab sheik or a Russian billionaire, ‘with your clothes on,’ I added.

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I don’t want you to,’ she was in defiant mode again.

‘Why don’t you want me to help you?’ I asked calmly.

She frowned at me again. ‘You think I’m something I’m not.’

‘You can read my mind now, can you?’ I retorted. ‘So, what do I think you are then?’

‘Something broken you can mend. Something damaged you can fix with your money.’

‘But it’s not that simple?’ Maybe she had me pegged, but I was still sure I could help her.

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

She sighed, ‘because I’m fucked in the head.’

It was hard not to laugh at that. She sounded like a drama-queen teenager, but I knew that arguing with her in this mood was pointless. Instead I just smiled at her and said, ‘Eat your rabbit food.’

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

T
he following afternoon, I walked into the Strawberry Pub, where Kinane was waiting for me with the news. He was sitting in the corner on his own. I sat down next to him. He’d already bought the beers.

‘Toddy’s had a jolt,’ said Kinane sadly.

My heart sank, ‘How long?’

‘Twenty-one years, minimum recommendation fourteen,’ and he shook his head, ‘he’ll be in his fifties before he gets out, even if he only serves the minimum.’

‘Christ,’ I said. Toddy had been incredibly unlucky and now his whole life was ruined. There was nothing I could do about him spending his best years inside, but at least he hadn’t spilled. If he had I’d have been in there instead of him. ‘Make sure he’s looked after, as much as we can.’

‘There’s his lass,’ Kinane reminded me, ‘he’s been shacked up with her.’

Toddy knew we’d pay out to look after her, but I wondered how long she’d stay around, realistically, once she realised the sheer hopelessness of it all. I mean, if she wanted kids.

‘And his old mum?’

‘Obviously,’ I agreed. This was the one thing you had to do when your men went inside. It would cost us a lot of money to put a mum and girlfriend on our payroll with no return from them, but I had no option. It wasn’t just the right thing to do. Not doing it would send out the wrong message to everyone who worked for us. ‘David Blake doesn’t give a fuck about us if we’re caught, so why should we give a fuck about David Blake?’ At least we could get word to Toddy not to worry about his ma having a roof over her head, her bills paid and a few bags of groceries left on her back step every week.

I nodded at the third pint on the table.

‘Where’s Palmer?’ I asked.

Palmer was outside having a fag, leaning against the side wall of the pub. He’d been smoking more lately. I joined him.

‘You thinking about Toddy?’

‘Can’t get my head around it,’ he admitted, ‘so much time. I mean, you only get one life,’ and he shook his head, ‘ stuck in the same place, no drink, no woman, shit food, surrounded by psychos and rapists. I’d go out of my fucking mind.’

‘It’s the risk we take,’ I said and immediately regretted how harsh that sounded. ‘We’ll do everything we can for him,’ cursing myself for talking like a doctor who’d just announced he was going to do his best for a terminally-ill patient.

Let me tell you how unlucky Toddy was. A bust rear light cost him fourteen years jail-time. He was driving down to the Sunnydale estate with three kilos of H hidden in the boot of his car. It was early evening and the daylight was starting to fade, so he turned his lights on. He was carrying the stash but he had nothing to worry about because there are never any coppers round there. It’s a complete no-go area. The Police can’t patrol it after dark without being attacked. They get pelted with missiles from the balconies if they even try to leave their cars, so they’ve given up on the place, unofficially of course. Officially they are tasked with ensuring the same level of law and order exists in the notorious Sunnydale estate as it does in Northumberland Street, but you don’t see any one dealing H outside Marks & Spencer’s. Virtually everyone in those estates is addicted to something; alcohol, pills, solvents, cocaine, heroin or methamphetamine, you name it. Hardly anyone has a job, unless you count nicking, which I don’t. There are one or two decent people living there, but the vast majority are low-life vermin who just want to get high all of the time so they can forget about their shit lives. That’s where we come in. It’s a simple case of supply and demand and, as I keep telling our lot, if we weren’t supplying them someone else would. At least with us there’s order, and we keep the stupid gang feuds under control.

So Toddy drove down there without a care in the bloody world. He didn’t even notice the marked Police car parked up by the side of one of the high-rises but, for no other reason than bum luck, it chose that moment to pull out and drive down the same road as Toddy. He noticed it then, of course, it was right behind him. The next thing he saw was the flashing lights and there was a short burst of the siren as he was pulled over. He must have thought about doing a runner at that point, but where could he go with them right up his arse, radioing for back-up? Nowhere; so he figures they won’t find anything, or we can smooth it out if they do, so he takes a gamble and rides it out. Toddy pulled over. I wonder if that is what he regrets most now; that, or the fact he came to work for me in the first place.

It was two coppers, both very young and polite at first, everything was all ‘Good evening sir, did you realise you have a broken rear light, sir?’ and he’s all ‘I’m sorry officer, no I didn’t. I’ll get it seen to at the first available opportunity.’ Maybe it was his manners that made them suspicious. Police officers aren’t used to apologies on the Sunnydale estate. Whatever it was, they asked him to please get out of the car. At this point Toddy was still gambling that he didn’t look like a wrong ‘un, so he climbed out and stood there with his hands on the roof of his car, while one of them searched it and the other asked for ID. There were a few rudimentary questions about where he had come from and where he was going, but nothing a pro like Toddy couldn’t handle. Of course he would have been nervous when the one doing the searching started poking around in the boot, but there’s a compartment in the side for the stash, which is specifically designed so that you shouldn’t be able to open it if you don’t know what you’re looking for. But somehow, the copper doing the searching manages to pop open the hidden compartment – and what does he find when he manages this? Three kilos of street-level-purity heroin.

Before Toddy could react, they slammed him hard against his car and cuffed his hands behind his back, bundled him into the back seat of the police car and radioed into the cop shop. They were so excited, acting like they’d just won the lottery and Toddy was reeling, looking at serious jail-time.

When news of his arrest broke, the shit hit the fan big time. Even their own senior officers didn’t know whether to promote these two, give them a medal, or fire them for some ill-defined breach of the Police code. And us, well we went into overdrive. We’re phoning lawyers, Amrein’s people and bent Police, wanting an explanation for all of this from someone. After all, we pay a lot of money to ensure this kind of thing can never happen. We were wondering if we had a grass who had tipped off these two young coppers about Toddy’s stash.

It turned out to be just plain old, rotten bad luck. The two coppers who picked up Toddy were a couple of wet-behind-the-ears dimwits who’d come straight out of training and been sent out together because they were getting on a Sergeant’s nerves. Normally they wouldn’t be allowed anywhere near a squad car without the supervision of a jaded veteran but, because he wanted a quiet life that afternoon, he told them to take one out and patrol. It was a mid-week match day and he instructed them to make sure no away fans were organising fights in secret locations on the wasteland down by the river. They fell for this bullshit and went off looking for ‘Faces’ from the away fans’ firm.

After an hour or so of staring at concrete, watching weeds growing out of it, they decided to ‘use their own initiative’, as one of them put it in his report. They picked the roughest estate they’d heard of and drove down there, parked up, somehow avoided being lynched by the local plebs and waited for the first car that came past with a light out before pulling it over. Poor bloody Toddy wasn’t even arrested by a crack team from SOCA or the drug squad, just a couple of virgins in blue uniforms.

I knew Palmer had been thinking about Toddy. We all had. He’s a good bloke, and he did the right thing, he said nowt. And what did that mean for him? It meant he took the full brunt of a judge’s fury and was handed a sentence that made him out to be the drug lord of Sunnydale. The Chief Constable stood outside the court afterwards and praised his fearless young officers to the skies, the fucking hypocrite.

Once the press coverage has died down, all we will have left is Toddy, stuck inside for a long stretch, with plenty of time to wonder what he could have done differently that day that might not have involved him going to prison. He’ll be cursing his luck and thinking about his woman, knowing there is no way that any lass on this planet is going to stay faithful to a jailed drug dealer for fourteen years. Before too long, she’s going to be in another man’s bed. I mean, if she’s a good ‘un she might wait a while; six months, maybe even a year, but it’s going to happen eventually and he knows it. That’s just the way it is and there’s absolutely nothing Toddy can do about it, not when he’s on the inside.

Three days after Arthur Gladwell’s funeral, we had a sit-down. The atmosphere was no more respectful than normal.

‘You still here?’ Ray Fallon asked Kinane across the conference table of the Copthorne Hotel. ‘I heard you’d retired years ago.’ Fallon was Kinane’s opposite number and as legendary in Glasgow as our Joe was in Newcastle. The Gladwells didn’t do all of their own dirty work. They left some of it to the six-foot-four steroidal bouncer who was taunting Kinane. Fallon’s inky prison tats on his bulky forearms and biceps stretched as he jabbed his finger accusingly at my enforcer. Fallon’s nose had been broken so many times it was almost flat against his face and his eyes were filled with hate. He was baring his teeth like an attack dog, which was basically what he was.

‘I’ll retire you if you come a bit closer. I’ll tear your fucking arms off and beat you to death with them, you cunt,’ Kinane growled.

‘Maybe twenty years ago you could have,’ Fallon admitted, ‘but then I was only ten. What were you? Forty?’

‘Twenty years ago?’ Kinane pretended to ponder the question. ‘I was busy bitch-slapping benders from Glasgow with big mouths. It’s a hobby of mine.’

‘Alright you two,’ I interrupted them, ‘we’ll get a ruler out later and measure both of you to see who has the bigger cock, but right now put your handbags down and behave yourselves.’

I looked over at Alan Gladwell, who smiled to himself, then nodded at Fallon, who looked a bit aggrieved to have been silenced by me. We were here to discuss business, not start a brawl in one of Newcastle’s nicer hotels. The main players sat down, including Alan Gladwell, Fallon and the remaining Gladwell brothers, Malcolm and Andrew. Amrein was between us, acting as the chair of the meeting. His bodyguards lined the walls of the room to ensure the two sides couldn’t suddenly launch themselves at one another. ‘Shall we begin?’ he asked.

I looked at Alan Gladwell. He was watching me intently and I was struck by how much he resembled his old man, unlike his older brother Tommy. He had the same long nose as Arthur, eyes like a rodent and the coarse stubble of a five-o’clock shadow on his chin.

‘Amrein approached me about this meeting. He said you wanted to discuss some business with us and I agreed to hear you out. I’ll listen to what you have to say, but there’s something we need to do first.’