gangster, so I knew the impact violence and fear can have on a man like Amrein.
‘Good,’ I nodded my satisfaction, released my grip from his shoulder and actually patted him on the cheek, like he’d been a good little boy listening to Daddy. ‘I’m glad you feel that way,’ I concluded, ‘because I wouldn’t want to see you end up like him,’ and I nodded towards the summer house.
Amrein peered at the summer house, trying to work out what I was on about. He walked a little closer, squinting into the sunshine through those wire framed spectacles. It took him a moment or two to make out the dark shadow through the glass. Then I heard him shout ‘Jesus Christ!’
‘One last thing,’ I told him, ‘that story you gave me about having a man in HUMINT who knew we had somebody ratting to SOCA but not who it was. That was bullshit. I didn’t buy it then and I don’t buy it now. If he knew we had a rat he’d know who it was. You kept the name back to make me go looking for him. To distract me, while Gladwell was coming after us.’
I wasn’t certain but it looked like a little dark patch had formed on the groin of his expensively tailored trousers.
‘I want that name and I want the proof. Let’s call it a gesture of good faith. You’ve got one week.’
I walked away then, back across that enormous lawn with the birds chirruping happily in the trees above me, leaving Amrein still staring at the summer house where Tommy Gladwell’s severed head sat neatly on the sill, peering back at him through the window.
THIRTY-NINE
Iphoned Arthur Gladwell on the morning of his son’s memorial service. ‘How did you get this number?’ he asked me. He sounded in a state.
‘Doesn’t matter how I got it. Do you know who you are talking to?’ We’d not met that often and he was unlikely to remember my voice.
There was a long pause before he finally admitted, ‘No.’
‘No but I know everything about you. It’s Tommy’s memorial today but you’ve got other sons, daughters, grandchildren… ’ He didn’t utter a word while I told him the names and addresses of everyone that was near and dear to him, right down to the nursery his youngest grandchild went to four mornings a week. I had to hand it to Sharp. He’d done a thorough job.
‘How do you want to end this?’ he asked me when I was done, his voice breaking.
‘It’s already over. I just want to make sure you understand that. Your son’s dead because he was stupid. He thought he could come down here and take over a long established concern but Bobby wasn’t having it. Stay out of our city Gladwell – or we’ll kill your whole family, including the grandbairns, and no one will ever find your body either. Understand?’
‘Yes,’ he said softly.
And I hung up.
It was a German Shepherd that finally found the body. A bloke out walking his dog told the police and his local paper that the dead man had a badly scarred face and a needle sticking out of his arm. Everyone agreed it was just another sad but unsurprising case of a junkie, so far out of it he’d taken too much for his poor little body to cope with. The newspapers duly reported the death of a career-criminal called Andrew Stone, a professional burglar who had accidentally killed himself with heroin. They did include a quote from a so-called friend who swore blind that Stone had never touched heroin before. This friend even suspected foul play, but the tone of the article made it clear the reporter didn’t believe such a farfetched theory. The gist of the article being, it was never too late to become an addict and the results were almost always tragic. Andrew Stone’s death was just another senseless, drug related tragedy in the squalid tenements of Glasgow.
A week later, Amrein delivered the name we were looking for, along with incontrovertible, documented proof lifted from the files of SOCA itself; the name of our rat.
I looked at it and did a double take, then I felt a little surge of relief. At least we were spared another execution. Northam, our harmless, little bent accountant was going to shop us all. Apparently he had failed to keep up with the times and SOCA managed to trace some of his dodgy international cash transfers, as they went from an uncaring bank in Luxembourg to a blind-eye-turning clearing house in the Caymans and finally arrived, laundered more times than a whore-house bed-sheet, into an account run by every criminal’s favourite accomplice in Geneva. You’ve got to love the Swiss. If their bank accounts were good enough for the Nazis then, they were good enough for us. A bank that welcomes Herman Goering is hardly going to blanch at the prospect of Bobby Mahoney as a client.
Trouble was, the investigators were getting a little smarter and we should have kept up. Once they were able to prove to Northam he was ruined, he rolled over like he was having his tummy tickled, offering to tell them everything; names, dates, places and amounts, everything a judge and jury could ask for. He’d have sent us all down to save his own arse. Fucking accountants.
And to think I’d even felt sorry for him lying there with a bullet in his brain. It turned out Tommy Gladwell just saved me a job. Finding another accountant wasn’t going to be hard. They were ten a penny, especially bent ones. I just had to make sure the next one was more scared of me than the law.
Well, there would be no trials now, what with the chief witness for the prosecution disappearing like that. It made me realise that if, Tommy Gladwell hadn’t come along we would have carried on obliviously for a few more months, until the fateful day when we were all nicked. It made you think.
A couple of days later, I read a lead article in
There was a period of transition. The word had to slowly get round that the personnel may have changed but the organisation was intact, rejuvenated in fact, by new blood. I made sure the people who mattered all knew where the authority now lay to do business with us.
The new organisation was tighter and more ruthless. Our whole outlook was geared around making sure that what was done to Bobby and Finney could never happen to us. We increased the muscle, used Kinane and his sons, plus the boys from their gym. They weren’t greedy and they owed me for elevating them; most of the time they seemed pretty grateful just to be out of the wilderness.
I gave a lot of responsibility to Palmer. After all, he’d come good against the Russians so I owed him and he showed no signs of wanting to be boss. He didn’t need the hassle – but then I used to say that too, so I would be keeping a closer eye on him in future.
Before I left, he told me, ‘there’s a rumour doing the rounds that Jerry Lemon underestimated you. Word on the street is you had him killed because he showed you up in front of everybody down at the snooker hall. They say you are not a man to be fucked with.’
I did nothing to contradict that rumour.
I also gave more responsibility to Hunter, because he’d done well when I’d needed him and he knew where the bodies were buried, or at least where the pigs lived that ate the bodies. I made sure all of these men had plenty of money in their pockets, and jobs that made them feel like a face around town. I paid better than Bobby. It was my insurance against the kind of resentful, blind ambition that brought down Bobby Mahoney after nearly thirty years as king of the Midden.
It made my brother. Whatever self respect he’d lost on that battlefield, he got back when I put him in charge of some of our dirty laundry. People started seeing him round the city in our clubs and casinos but this time he’d had a haircut and a shave, was dressed in a smart jacket and he laid off the sauce. He tidied himself up big style and the next time he was in one of our lap dancing bars, the girls were throwing themselves at him because they knew he was my brother. I even persuaded him to move out of his shit hole of a flat and take over my old apartment. After all, I wouldn’t be needing it where I was going.
