‘Do you know much about him?’
‘What is this? Twenty questions? Where is he?’
‘Dead.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Dead.’
‘When?’
‘Fourteen years ago — give or take.’
‘That’s nonsense.’
‘Cross my heart.’
The bastard couldn’t be dead. He couldn’t be dead for two good reasons.
Firstly he had been running the show since I was put in prison and secondly no bastard that I wanted that much dies on me before I could kill him. Christ, he had been keeping me in check since I got out. He had…
I looked at Martin and things became a little clearer.
‘There never was a man called Carl Dupree,’ I said.
The smile was back.
‘Go on,’ he said
I shuffled uneasily.
‘There was never a Carl Dupree? Is that right?’
‘Not quite, but you are on the right track.’
‘You?’
A smile.
‘You.’ I said again. ‘There is no Dupree and you are sitting here. You are sitting in Dupree’s seat.’
‘Keep going.’
‘No Dupree. Then it was you…’
‘Keep going.’
The bastard was going to split his cheeks if he grinned any harder.
‘It was you all along?’
‘Well done. Give the man a cigar.’
The floor seemed to slip and I had to grab the table to stop falling to the floor. Martin was behind it. Behind it all. I felt sick — deep down sick.
I stared at the table trying to get my thoughts in order.
‘Why?’ I stammered.
His smile widened. I didn’t think it was possible, but he found a few more millimetres of curl in his lips.
‘You figure it.’
I had a feeling that the last thing I wanted to do was figure it all out. I tried to unscramble my head and what emerged was not a sweet place in anyone’s language.
‘You ran the whole show?’ I said. ‘You did it all?’
‘You could say that.’
‘Shite!’
‘You think so?’
‘Martin I’m not into this game. Just fucking tell me what is going on?’
‘Simple really.’ He took another slug of whisky. ‘Revenge really.’
‘Revenge — for what?’
This time he laughed hard. Very hard.
‘You don’t know. You really don’t know.’
‘I have no idea what the fuck is going on. Revenge over who? Me?’
‘Who else?’
‘For what?’
‘What do you think?’
I let go of the table and tried to get on board the train.
‘For what I did in Glasgow with Read?’
‘Well done.’
‘What, twenty fucking years ago? You’ve done all this for something that happened two decades ago?’
‘Of course. Why else?’
‘For grassing you up to Read?’
‘A hole in one my son.’
‘But I brought you down to London. You did bloody well out of London.’
‘So did you. Did you think I was just going to let you roll me over and do nothing? When you grassed me up, you shat on my life from a height you can’t believe. I was completely shafted. I had to leave Glasgow. Leave everything I had behind. Every bloody thing. You had no idea how well I was doing. Our breaking and entering was just the start. I was on the verge of a hell of a deal and you dropped Read on me. He was a serious heavyweight and you set him on me like a dog on a bone’
‘Jesus Martin. I stopped you robbing the bastard’s house. Think what would have happened if I hadn’t.’
‘Bollocks. You turned turtle to save your own neck. You knew you were dead meat once he found out you had been in his house. I’m not fucking stupid. If I’d seen his name on the list from Rachel I would never have gone near it.’
He had stood up and his face was starting to match the deep red glow of the room.
‘You have no clue as to what I had to promise to get back. It was easy for Rachel — she just waited a while and went back. But when I tried to go back it seems that I wasn’t so easily forgiven and three of his morons took great pleasure in putting me into the Southern General for two weeks.’
‘I’d been in London working my way up the ladder when I heard the wind was blowing a new way so I made a call to Read and promised him the earth if I could move back. With the sniff of a London gang coming north I reckoned whatever debt I owed Read would be buried with him when things changed — and I was right. When you rolled up at the front door again I saw my chance.’
‘But you were my number two in Glasgow. I called you down to London and you came.’
‘Like a lapdog. I might have hated your guts but the money was bloody good. When you said to go south, I knew I could swing it to my advantage. It was easy. You were losing it. You were starting to believe in your own hype — all that Riko crap. People were laughing at you behind your back. It was the easiest thing on the planet to convince everyone that you were becoming a liability. Once you took over the whole gaff you went off the deep end and people started to talk seriously about moving you on. The old man might have been a bastard but he was fair. You were acting like a tit.’
‘So who was Dupree?’
‘An out of work actor who owed me thirty grand and had a drug habit to support. Good wasn’t he? Me and Spencer simply sat in the background and pulled the strings.’
My head was getting sore with this.
‘Spencer as well? Shit. So why didn’t you just off me and have done with it?’
He began to pace the room.
‘I wasn’t going to let you off that easy. No fucking way. I wanted to see you suffer. I so wanted to see you suffer. And I also wanted what you had. So when you pulled me down to London after topping the old man, Spencer and I went into overdrive. We set you up like a turkey at Christmas. You played along like a gem. You went nuts over the Dupree stuff. You became obsessed. We couldn’t have dreamed you’d be so stupid. All we had to do was dump anything that had our name on it and then hand over everything else to the police.’
‘You told me that you had no choice in the witness box.’
‘I didn’t. I needed to do it to make sure you went down. By then you were so hated that I thought someone might take you out. Prison saved you. I had a few guys on the inside watch your back for the first few years.’
‘Look after me? I took a kicking every second day at the start.’
‘And you would have been on the morgue slab after a week if my guys hadn’t stepped in.’
‘Fourteen years Martin. Fourteen fucking years.’
‘Not long enough. If it was down to me you would have rotted in there.’
