‘It’s me,’ it was Sharp, ‘I’ve been making calls like you said and I think I’ve finally turned something up.’ Unsurprisingly, he seemed eager to please after our last meeting.
‘And?’
‘A big Russian bloke with a shaved head rented a farmhouse out in the sticks. It sleeps half a dozen people and you know, I thought, how many groups of big Russian blokes can there be on their holibobs in Tyneside.’
‘That’s them alright.’
He gave me the address.
‘Thanks,’ I said, ‘while you’re on I need another address. It’ll be easier to find but you can’t give it to any one who’ll want to link it back to you later, so don’t use your police computer.’
There was a pause while he digested my meaning. ‘Name?’ he asked. I told him.
I was almost back to my car when I phoned Palmer again and gave him the address Sharp had supplied for the Russians.
‘You’re going to be working this weekend,’ I replied.
‘What’s the plan boss?’ he asked nonchalantly.
‘Wait till I have a word with Bobby,’ I told him.
‘Fair enough.’
I hung up and opened the door of the car. I was about to climb in when two huge blokes suddenly appeared from nowhere. One blocked the door I was about to open and the other appeared from behind me. I hadn’t heard a thing and they were on me so fast I couldn’t even think about walking away. They were both big guys with shaven heads. They looked exactly like the guys who’d steamed into Benny the doorman. The same guys who’d murdered Jerry and George. I was trapped.
I knew immediately that I was fucked. I’d been stupid and careless. I was so exhilarated that I’d landed grey hair, so full of my own clever-clogs instinct that I’d parked my car in a side street by the club. That was fine in daylight, but by the time I’d walked out again it was dark and there was no one around. I’d made it easy for them.
The guy behind me pressed a gun into my side, ‘get in the car,’ he ordered me in heavily-accented English. He sounded Russian alright.
Instinctively I looked about me for help or some way to escape but there was no one else around and I could hardly call out. It would have been the last sound I ever made, ‘don’t be stupid,’ he told me, ‘now get in before we hurt you. You drive.’
So I got in. What option did I have?
It was all I could do to start the car, my hands were shaking so bad. My mind was racing as I tried to work out what they wanted from me, where they were taking me and what they intended to do to me when we got there.
If they planned to drive me to a remote spot and kill me like George Cartwright, I would rather at least try to get away now. Smashing the moving car into oncoming traffic or a lamp post at speed seemed about the only option left to me. I didn’t fancy my chances of hurting these two like that without seriously damaging myself in the process but I knew I might not come up with a better plan. It crossed my mind that if they’d wanted me dead, they could have easily killed me in the quiet side street. So, I was still alive and I told myself that was a good thing, as I edged the car away from the club and out into the traffic.
‘Don’t do anything crazy,’ the same guy told me, ‘ve vont to talk, that’s all.’
All very reassuring except I’d used that line myself on people Bobby wanted a little word with – and some of them had ended up face down in the Tyne with their fingers missing. The Russian said they didn’t want to kill me but his word meant nothing. There really are worse things than death.
They drove me through the city and out the other side, telling me when to turn and, though they didn’t explain where we were going, it worried me they hadn’t bothered to blindfold me or shove me in the boot. I wondered why they weren’t concerned about me knowing where I was going. Maybe I wouldn’t be coming back.
The place was another disused factory. It looked lifeless, like it hadn’t produced anything for months, another victim of the downturn.
There was a Porsche Cayenne with blacked-out windows parked outside. They made me stop by a pair of big metal doors then pushed me out of the car. They took my phone and my wallet and shoved me forwards through those same doors, which clanged shut behind me. I was now in a large, windowless room, but the electricity was still connected and I blinked at the bright strip lights above me.
There, in the middle of the room, stood a familiar figure. Tommy Gladwell, Arthur Gladwell’s oldest boy, was smiling at me, looking about as pleased with himself as it was possible to be. He had the other two big Russians with him. Palmer had managed to get the right story out of the bloke we’d lifted at the gym. Whatever my man from the SAS had done to him, it had worked. He had told Palmer everything and suddenly it all made sense to me; Weasel-face and the Glasgow connection, even Tommy’s black eye. It wasn’t tired old Arthur Gladwell, the king of his city, who’d been gunning for us. It was Tommy, his eldest lad, the prince-in-waiting who’d grown tired of the wait. He was a gangster without an empire, too impatient to stand by until his dad finally croaked. He needed his own city to run, so now he was taking ours.
‘What the fuck do you want?’ I asked him, though I knew the answer to that already. I was doing my best to sound hard even though I didn’t feel it. I would have given every penny I had to see Finney march through those big metal doors at that moment with a shotgun, with Bobby at his side. I wondered where they were and if they had any inkling of what was going on. Was there any chance they might get here before it was too late?
‘Well first I want to give you a message,’ Tommy Gladwell told me cheerfully then he glanced at the Russian who’d forced me into my car, ‘Vitaly,’ he said simply. Without a second’s pause the guy punched me so hard in the guts I doubled up rapidly and fell face first onto the ground. I went down so fast I didn’t even put a hand out to stop my head from smashing into the concrete floor. I tried to get up but the Russian had hit me with such force I couldn’t even move. I felt blood trickle down my forehead. The pain was like nothing I’d ever experienced before. Christ, this bloke knew what he was doing.
‘That’s from my lad Stone,’ he told me, ‘the fellah you put in hospital with a broken jaw. He’s got more stitches in his face than an eiderdown,’ I made a note to get even with Stone if I ever got out of this mess, which right now seemed unlikely. ‘You’re lucky,’ said Gladwell, ‘he wanted me to break your jaw and carve your face up, an eye for an eye and all that, but I told him I needed to have a little chat with you first. Maybe there’ll be time for breaking jaws later.’
‘You’re making a big mistake,’ I told him when I finally got enough breath back to speak.
‘Am I?’ he asked ‘what do you reckon? Do you think Finney will come after me with his nail gun?’ he laughed and so did his Russians.
‘You won’t be fucking laughing when he does,’ I said and they hauled me to my feet.
‘There’s something I want to show you,’ he said, ‘come on!’
Two of them picked me up, their big hands wedged under my armpits. They moved so fast I was being dragged along, the tips of my shoes scraping against the concrete as I was propelled to the other end of the room. They were still laughing, in obvious high spirits, sure of themselves. The door up ahead was wooden and they used my head to barge it open, rattling my teeth and stunning me in the process. Inside was a smaller room, which contained a little row of offices to one side.
It was pitch dark, so they flicked on the light in the first office to illuminate the scene. At first I could barely register what it was. It looked like some big animal had been mangled at an abattoir. Then it hit me with a sudden shock of realisation and I knew, just knew, that we were lost. There was no hope for any of us.
It was Finney – or what was left of him when the Russians had all had their fun. His eyes were open wide and staring back at me but there was no life left in them. His face had been mutilated with what looked like a serrated knife, and the flesh around the wounds was red and swollen and puffed up like he had taken a hell of a beating. His hands and legs had been fastened to the big metal chair with handcuffs around each wrist and ankle. Someone had had the foresight to cement the chair into the ground beforehand because they knew from his reputation how hard he would have fought. Christ, how he would have struggled to get at them.
It looked like he had been tortured to death at first but then I noticed the ligature around his neck, which had bitten tightly into the skin. They’d finished him off with some sort of wire garrotte. It explained the open, sightless eyes that I couldn’t tear my gaze from. Someone had calmly stood behind him and tightened it round his neck until Finney finally choked to death.
