'Got something, Frank?'
'Could be, boss. Not sure. This lad here, Alston.' He pointed at the screen. 'First off, swore blind he wasn't there. Then, when he saw that wasn't going to work, he tried fobbing us off with someone else's name. Got it out of him in the end. Reason, far as I can make out, he didn't want us looking at him any closer; he's been doing a bit of dealing. Nothing major. Small-time. Bottom feeder, at best. Someone higher up the chain drops him seventy quid to make a delivery, you know the kind of thing.'
Resnick nodded.
'What is interesting is the name he gave when he was trying to fob us off.'
He manoeuvred the mouse, made a couple of clicks, and a new name appeared on the screen.
Ryan Gregan.
Various bits and pieces as a juvenile: theft, robbery, one instance of aggravated burglary. Arrested in Manchester when he was sixteen, along with a seventeen-year-old youth and a nineteen-year-old man, and charged with possession of a firearm with intent to cause fear of violence. The case against him was dropped for lack of evidence, the other youth and the man found guilty and sentenced to three years and five years, respectively.
'I've asked around,' Michaelson said. 'Gregan's been questioned about two gun-related incidents since.
'Could be coincidence,' Resnick said.
'I don't know. Not exactly a name that rolls off the tongue.'
'Unless he's someone you know well.'
'Or have got reasons, maybe, for dropping him in the shite.'
'Either way, it won't hurt to bring Gregan in for a little chat.'
'Right, boss.' Michaelson's crooked teeth showed when he smiled.
Seven
Ryan Gregan's father had been born in Belfast, grown up around the Shankill, did little with his life beyond petty thieving and coming down hard on anyone smaller and weaker, which included Ryan's mother and several of his brothers and sisters. When Ryan was twelve years old, his old man smacked him round the back of the head once too often, and Ryan, big for his age, hit him full in the face with a convenient piece of two-by-four which he'd set aside for just such an occasion.
His father never touched him again; never said a word to him either, civil or otherwise. When Ryan, over in England by then and living with an aunt in Salford, just outside Manchester, heard that his father had been kneecapped by the paramilitaries for dipping his hands into the wrong pockets once too often, he bought a large Bushmills to celebrate and followed it with another.
He went dutifully back over each Christmas and Easter to see his mother. In Manchester, he fell in with a gang selling crack cocaine on Moss Side, Ryan one of the youngest, but not letting anyone else push him around; as far as his aunt knew, he was going off to college every afternoon, training to be a chef. When one of the Cheetham Hill gangs tried to take over a stretch of their territory, it didn't take much persuading for Ryan to step up and explain the ethics of the situation. Only instead of a primer on Aristotle or John Stuart Mill, Ryan made use of an obsolete Tokarev TT-33 pistol, a Russian copy that was the dead spit of a 1911 vintage U.S. Colt.
It did the trick. A few shots exchanged late one night, alongside Hulme Market Hall, Ryan discharging all eight rounds and making most of them count; no fatalities, a few flesh wounds, the moral victory theirs. Ryan liked the heft of the gun in his hand. He loved it. He learned everything about guns he could.
After that things got tasty, the feud with Cheetham Hill hotted up, and following a pitched battle running either side of the A57 motorway, a meeting to patch things up was called. Both sides went armed and the police were forewarned. Ryan and two others were arrested and when he was kicked free, he decided it was time to move on.
A few days after his seventeenth birthday, he followed a mate up to Glasgow, but, one way or another, he couldn't settle; too many reminders of home. He drifted for a spell after that, Newcastle, Birmingham, Sheffield and on down to Nottingham, nineteen now and shacking up in a squat in Sneinton, out near the railway line. Just till he could find something better, which turned out to be a two-room flat in Radford, right around the corner from the old Raleigh factory, long since flattened to the ground.
It was midway through the afternoon when Michaelson and Pike hammered on the door and Gregan came grudgingly downstairs, wearing a Manchester City T-shirt and an old pair of jeans, nothing on his feet, looking as if he'd just crawled out of bed.
'Ryan Gregan?'
'Who wants to know?'
'We'd like you to come with us to Central Police Station.'
'A party, is it?'
'Depends,' Pike said.
'I'll bring my guitar, then, should I?'
'Just shoes will do for now.'
'Oh, fine. I've this pair of new Adidas upstairs, just want breaking in.'
'Make it snappy,' Pike said.
Gregan honoured them with a smile and went back up to comply. It didn't take them long to realise he wasn't coming back down. Out through the rear window and legging it across wasteland for all he was worth.
Even with a good two hundred metres start, he didn't stand a chance against Michaelson's long, loping stride, a tackle any Rugby League forward would have been proud of bringing him to the ground.
Not so long ago, they might have shut Gregan away in an airless boxlike room and left him to stew for an hour or so, the isolation preying on his mind. Now any self-respecting delinquent knew enough, if that happened, to have the duty solicitor charging false imprisonment and, if a sausage roll and a can of Ribena weren't forthcoming inside the first twenty minutes, be prepared to petition The Hague about denial of his human rights.
So, everything by the book.
Something to eat and drink.
A doctor summoned to examine and treat the injuries sustained during arrest-cuts and bruising to the side of the face, left elbow and knee, all occasioned by DS Michaelson's flying tackle-Polaroids taken, dated, and signed.
And all of this done slowly, carefully, with punctilious attention to form and detail, all gaining time for a search warrant of Gregan's flat to be signed and executed, more perhaps in hope than true expectation, but one never knew…
As soon as he was ready, Gregan, with due representation, was ushered into an Interview Room with sound recording and video facilities and invited to take a seat opposite Michaelson and Pike.
It was Michaelson, Resnick thought, who had set this whole thing in motion and now, buoyed up as he was by successful pursuit and capture, it was only right that he should be given the chance to bring it home. And Pike- well, perhaps Pike was a more-than-adequate companion for the occasionally loquacious Michaelson-taciturn to the edge of rudeness, flat northern vowels in tune with his wedge-shaped head and stocky body.
For now Resnick was content to leave them to it and observe the proceedings from an adjoining room.
'Not smart, taking off the way you did,' Michaelson began.
Gregan shrugged.
'Guilty conscience, that's what it could make us think. Something to hide. Unless, of course, you simply fancied a run. Unquenchable thirst for exercise, that what it was?'
Gregan shrugged again, uncomfortable on his seat. Michael-son was forced to sit back from the table, unable to get his legs comfortably underneath.
'First hundred metres or so,' Michaelson said, in the same chatty tone, 'you were looking pretty good.'
'You reckon?' Gregan said.
'You've had no training? Any kind of coaching?'
Gregan squinted back at him. 'For running, you mean?'
'Running, yes.'
