‘Use that joke a lot do you?’ I asked him.
He ignored me. ‘So he lays down for us and starts bleating; names, dates, places, money, grams and kilos. Yeah, they were shifting kilos, the cocky buggers. He gave us a name and we busted him, that bloke gave us a name and we busted him too, and so on, all the way up the big, long, greasy pole right to the very top. You see, nobody wants to be the only one doing life. You’d have to be a right mug, so you sneak on the guy who’s giving you orders and taking home more money than you for less risk, in theory,’ he added the ‘in theory’ like it was darkly significant, ‘there’s a kind of resentment that we find quite easy to tap into. Before you know it we’d got all the lieutenants, knocked them down one by one like dominoes, till the Marshalls had no one left to do their dirty work for them. Then we came after the brothers, see. Did you hear what they got in the end?’
‘Ninety-nine years.’
‘You do remember,’ he said triumphantly.
‘Of course, he had a good eye for the headlines the old “hanging judge”. I thought at the time it was quite a coincidence how his carefully considered sentences all added up neatly to ninety-nine years.’
‘Terry Marshall got thirty-two years,’ and he whistled like he was impressed, ‘minimum recommendation was twenty-five. The judge may have liked headlines but he had a good sense of humour an’ all. There’s Terry standing in the dock at his age and he says “I can’t do all that time” meaning he is going to be long dead by the end of his sentence and do you know what the judge said. “Do your best,” and DI Clifford laughed until he almost choked. “Do your best?” You should have seen the look on poor Terry’s little face. I mean imagine it, you’ve robbed and thieved and battered and murdered till you are at the top of the whole shitty pile and how do you spend your last days; sharing a tiny cell for twenty-three hours a day with a mugger and a rapist until you finally die. He’s got to be asking himself every hour of every day what was it all for?’ he paused to let that sink in, ‘that’s how it ends for people like him – but it doesn’t have to be like that for everybody who works for the top boys.’ He leaned forward like he was sharing a conspiracy with me. ‘You know Bobby Mahoney is on a list don’t you? I mean right at the top of that list, along with a few cockneys, a couple of Scousers and some Jocks I could mention.’
I tried to look blank, ‘New Year’s Honours?’
‘SOCA’s hit parade.’
SOCA or the Serious Organised Crime Agency, was created with the merger of the National Crime Squad and the National Criminal Intelligence Service, to become an organisation the tabloids had taken to referring to as the British F.B.I. They were meant to tackle drug barons, people traffickers and large scale money laundering.
‘It’s like top of the pops,’ DI Clifford continued, ‘only you don’t want to be in their chart and I wouldn’t be surprised if Bobby isn’t number one with a bullet. The man most wanted. You know they have a list of all the major players in organised crime right across the country and they are gunning for them all. They are going to get them too. You know who’s in charge at SOCA, the former head of MI5, Britain’s Counter Intelligence service, the spooks. They fought the cold war, the IRA and Al Qaeda so they are going to make mincemeat of your lot.’
‘So why are you even here?’ I asked, ‘if they are that good, you can just sit back and relax and watch while the show happens all around you.’
‘I am here to offer you a way out. Your only way out, come to mention it. Cooperate with me and when the wheels do come off, as they will, spectacularly, you’ll have at least one friend who can put a word in for you when it matters. Otherwise you’ll be just another pretty boy getting gang-raped in the showers at Strangeways.’
‘Cooperate? How exactly?’ I asked him calmly.
He straightened, full of adrenalin now. He was doing a selling job on me and I could tell he was pretty sure I was interested, ‘tell me what you know and maybe it will be easier for Bobby if his local nick does the arresting. I might even be persuaded to bust him on lesser charges just as long as it takes him off the streets. We could focus on his role in the vice game and play down his little drugs empire?’ He said that last bit like I should be impressed he knew we were shifting drugs. Well whoop-tee-doo. He folded his arms smugly and sat back in his chair.
‘Know what I think?’ I asked him, ‘honestly want to hear it?’
‘Go on,’ he urged me.
‘You’ve got nothing and you’re shit scared. You’re worried that SOCA are going to carry out some huge bust up here on your new doorstep and you’ll be left standing there like the ugly bird at the party no one wants to dance with.’ He seemed a bit taken aback to be spoken to like that.
‘How long have you been a DI, Clifford? A bit too long I’d say, from the look of you. Bet you were the star Detective Constable weren’t you, but then most of them are fucking numpties. Maybe you were even a fast-tracked DS but somehow it hasn’t happened for you has it? You were standing on the dockside in your cheap suit and you’ve missed the boat? And what’s all this ‘we’?
He didn’t say a word. He just sat there trying to rein in his fury. I think he was actually trembling with rage at that point. I wondered if I was about to be on the receiving end of a bit of good, old fashioned Police brutality.
‘It’s alright Clifford,’ I told him, ‘you don’t have to worry, you’re not really my type. Now why don’t you fuck off out of my face and take the other Chuckle Brother with you. My wine is getting warm.’
He pointed his finger at me as he rose from his seat, ‘you won’t be laughing.’ he said, jabbing it at me, ‘you… won’t… be… fucking… laughing… ’ it wasn’t exactly Noel Coward but I was surprised he could string the words of a sentence together the way he looked. I guess I’d touched a nerve. I don’t normally like to rattle the cages of the local law enforcement and I try to keep it from turning personal. They’ve got their job to do and we’ve got ours and I never want to give them any more incentive to come after us than they’ve already got, but this cocky fucker needed taking down a peg for thinking he could turn me into a grass. I reckon he’d be up half the night churning my words over in his head, wondering if they were at least partially true.
Clifford walked out, leaving DS Sharp to trail after him. Sharp went a bit over the top, turning back to me, and shouting, ‘we’ll be back!’ but I supposed he had to play the part.
ELEVEN
It was dark and cold and threatening rain as I climbed out of the car outside my apartment. I couldn’t wait to get inside in the warm but then Vince called, ‘I’m at Mirage. You need to come down here and see something.’
‘Now? It’s not my brother again is it?’
‘Not this time.’
‘It better be important Vince, it’s late and I’m knackered. I’m not coming down there if some prat’s glassed someone on the dance floor. You can handle that.’
‘No it’s not that,’ he assured me, ‘I wouldn’t bother you with that.’
‘Well what then?’
‘It’s hard to explain over the phone,’ he said, ‘you’re better off coming down here, believe me.’
‘Okay,’ I said, ‘I’m on my way.’
I climbed back into my car.
I called Finney and picked him up on the way over to Mirage. It was a venue we had a full share in, part bar, part nightclub. The idea was to get the young ‘uns into the bar with cheap happy-hour offers then, when they were pissed and happy, encourage them to pay to get through a set of double doors into the night club. The music was good, the crowd wasn’t too rough and we made decent money out of the place. Obviously our own boys manned the doors on both the bar and the club, so I couldn’t imagine anything that could have gone seriously wrong in there.
‘You don’t think one of Benny’s lads has gone ape and killed some muppet do you?’ asked Finney.
‘I hope not,’ I said, ‘the paperwork would be a nightmare. They’d close us down for sure.’
