To Die For (26 page)

‘I was after Beckett from the word go. You think I’m stupid enough to think a dumb fuck like you’s gonna out-think Beckett?’

‘You were stupid enough to hire him,’ I said. I expected Cole to explode. He didn’t. ‘You didn’t choose him, did you?’

‘You’re boring me.’

‘It wasn’t about the money. Beckett didn’t rip you off for a million cash.’ The corner of his eye flickered. ‘Am I still boring you?’

Slowly, in a voice that sounded like far-off thunder, he said, ‘Go on.’

‘He didn’t care about the money. He had a million quid, untraceable. He could’ve hightailed it to Ireland, or Scotland or Spain. But he stayed in London.’

‘Why?’

‘Because he wanted you wasting time. He was waiting. And he thought he didn’t have long to wait.’

‘Waiting for what?’

He kept his eyes on mine, and they were cold and his eyelids were half closed, as if he was having trouble staying awake, but behind all that there was a kind of murder bubbling slowly and I could understand why people were afraid of him; and I had the feeling that he knew the answer already, had known for a long time.

‘He was waiting for you to die,’ I said. ‘Waiting for the Albanians to finish you off.’

Earring twitched and, from the corner of my eye, I saw Blondie wipe a hand over his mouth. I tensed for an instant, moved on to the balls of my feet. Cole kept his eyes on me. It was a chance, an opening. I might not get another. Drop the left shoulder, spin round left in a curl, right foot out, right arm through the air, hand, palm-up, chopping on Blondie’s carotid. He’d drop like that, and I’d have the 9-mil before the others could react.

I watched Cole. He didn’t seem to be aware of any of us. Blondie could’ve handed the gun to me and Cole wouldn’t have cared. I knew then I had nothing to fear from him. I let go of the idea of fighting my way out of this.

‘Albanians,’ he said.

‘I heard on the news about a gunfight. That was the Albanians, wasn’t it? They’re after you.’

‘Yeah.’

‘It was a hit,’ I said. ‘On you. A takeover. A coup. The whole thing.’

He nodded, but his face was grim.

‘Who?’

‘Who suggested Beckett?’ I didn’t need him to answer that. I needed him to start thinking. ‘It was Wilkins, wasn’t it?’

‘What makes you think that?’

‘He was there the night of the job, in the casino. He could’ve fixed it so the traceable cash was fed to Beckett who gave it to Kendall who used it to set me up.’

‘It’s not Wilkins,’ he said.

‘He’s taking over your firm.’

‘He’s not taking over my firm. He’s not going to do anything again. We found his body yesterday.’

Christ. If Wilkins was dead...

I had to think. The pain in my shoulder was easing up, but my head was getting cloudier. It felt to me like the air was getting thicker, closing in on me. I flexed my arm as best I could. Earring shifted his balance; Blondie brought the gun up and lowered it when he saw I wasn’t going to strike. They were uneasy, these two. If the rest of Cole’s men were like this, he was in trouble.

‘Who killed Wilkins?’ I said.

‘Fucking Albanians. Who else?’

‘Paget.’

‘What?’

‘It must’ve been. I thought Wilkins was using Paget. I was wrong. Paget was using him.’

‘The fuck you on about?’

‘You sent Paget to find me.’

‘What of it?’

‘Did you send him to kill me?’

‘Course I fucking didn’t. Why would I do that? I wanted you alive.’

‘In Islington, Paget caught up with me, tried to take my head off. Didn’t he tell you?’

‘No.’ Cole’s voice was low, barely above a whisper.

My head was still foggy and it took me a moment to understand what was going on. When I understood, I said, ‘This isn’t news to you, is it? You knew about Wilkins. You knew you were being stitched up. You went to my flat. Yeah, sure you did. You found those men I’d left there. That’s why there was nothing on the news about them.’

Cole stood with his shoulders forward and his head lowered some. He glowered at me, his mouth drawn tight. He looked like a bull about to charge. He took a breath and straightened up. We stood there, me waiting for something to happen, Cole glowering and clenching his jaw, Blondie and Earring fidgeting, unsure what was happening but knowing that things were bad. After a while of standing around like a dance formation, I said, ‘I want to know what the fuck is going on.’

Cole blinked and looked at me as if he’d forgotten who I was. He glanced over at Blondie.

‘Give me the gun,’ he said. Blondie handed it to him. ‘Get out. Both of you.’

They were reluctant, but they went. When they’d gone, he said, ‘Sit down before you fall down.’

I sat. He put the gun into his jacket pocket. He walked up and down a bit with his head lowered and his hands clenching into fists and unclenching. When he’d worked off some of the left-over anger, he stopped in front of me and said, ‘Yeah, I was at your flat. I found those two blokes. The boy was all right, except for some breaks. We cleaned it up, got rid of the body, paid off your landlord, what’s-’is-name – ’

‘Akram.’

‘Yeah. I asked the boy some questions, dumped him at hospital, told him to keep quiet.’

‘Why?’

‘Not for your benefit. If the coppers had found them, they’d’ve started looking for you and I couldn’t have that. I needed to get to you myself.’

‘If you questioned the boy, you knew what was going on.’

‘I knew some of it. There’s more to this than you realize.’

‘Maybe you could fill me in.’

He wandered off to a corner of the room and came back with an old chair. He dropped the chair before me and sat down. When he did that, he leaned forward for a moment, put his head in his hands.

‘What a fucking mess,’ he said.

He sat up straight, took a deep breath.

‘I’ve been having trouble for about a year. The law hit a few of my places; some of my jobs got compromised. Someone was undermining me, I knew that. I thought it was Garner. It had to be him or Wilkins. Whoever it was, they were doing a fucking good job. I was in danger of going under.’

That was what Eddie had told me.

‘Then the Albanians came to you,’ I said. ‘Offered you a load of smack.’

‘Right. I don’t handle that shit, but I knew I could pass it on at a decent profit. It was a good chance for me to get out from under, a last-ditch thing. I took it, but I didn’t have the money up-front and they wouldn’t wait long. I was going to fund it with a couple of jobs. One was with Ellis and his mob. Another was the casino job with Beckett. Both got turned over.’

‘Ellis?’ I said. ‘The Brighton job?’

‘Yeah. That was my thing. I used Ellis, but it was my job.’

Ellis. What the fuck was happening?

‘I was on the job with Ellis before that,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I know.’

‘That must’ve been why they used me for the casino job. Beckett must’ve realized you’d find me the link between both jobs.’

‘After the casino job went arse-up, I looked into it. As you say, you were the only connection between them, aside from me. I asked around about you. I didn’t think you were involved, but I had to be sure.’

‘Now you know.’

‘Sorry about the arm.’

‘Forget it.’

‘I made a mistake about you. I thought you’d be too stupid to mastermind this shit. You’re not stupid, are you?’

I felt stupid. He didn’t speak for a minute. When he finally did, it was in a quiet voice, and there was something like regret in there, as if he knew he was at the end.

‘I became lazy,’ he said. He looked down at his gut. ‘I became fat. I’ll admit that. It was all too easy. I should’ve seen what was happening before.’

‘They were subtle,’ I said, thinking that they’d out-subtled themselves.

‘Yeah. Subtle. And I was fat. I was too big to take face-on. I had too many connections, too many men. So they hit me slowly, bit by bit until I was in real fucking trouble. Fucking maggots feeding off me. Are you there yet?’

‘The Albanians came to you with this load of heroin,’ I said. ‘You took the smack, but you couldn’t pay up-front so you planned a couple of jobs short-term to pay them off. Paget and Wilkins tried to take advantage of that.’

‘Yeah. It was their chance, these maggots. All they had to do was spoil those jobs and let the Albanians take me out. They sit back and watch it happen, then step in at the end, make a deal with the Albanians by handing over the cash they fucking stole from me.’

I got it then.

‘That was their mistake,’ I said.

‘Mistake?’

‘You were still dangerous to them; you could still realize what was happening and get them before the Albanians got you. So, they had to muddy the waters a bit, throw you a few scapegoats, and at the same time take your lifelines from you.’

‘They turned over Ellis,’ he said. ‘And you say that’s when they chose to use you?’

It went back further than I’d realized. Back, back. Always back. I was like an animal caught in a trap, and the past was the snare. The more I pulled, the tighter I got caught.

‘I only worked with Ellis the one time,’ I told Cole. ‘The next job Ellis did, they got turned over. Paget and Wilkins must’ve found out I was in on the previous job. They got Beckett for the casino job, and told him to get me on board so they could set me up. Those two jobs go south and people are going to think I’m dirty. They tell Beckett that I’m the one who’ll take the blame. They tell him that you’re on your way out and that when you’re gone he can come up for air and have a large slice of the money he stole.’

‘So what happened? Where did they go wrong?’

‘They rushed it. That Albanian deal was an unplanned chance to finish you off, but they had to act quickly. They fucked up. After the casino job, they just had to wait for me to leave my place and then plant the money there. But I didn’t leave my place for a couple of days. When I did, they tried to get into the wrong flat – Kendall must’ve had a copy of my old key. I’d moved, but Kendall didn’t know that. They had to get a new key from my landlord and try again. They were running out of time and they rushed it and I caught them.’

The muscles in his jaw flexed. I heard a car pass by outside.

‘What was their plan if they’d planted the money on you?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe the police would’ve received an anonymous call. Or maybe Paget would have killed me in the flat, with a couple of men loyal to you as witnesses when he found the money. Maybe they would just disappear me and then you could find the money in my flat. You were supposed to think I’d double-crossed Beckett, taken the money and legged it. You were supposed to waste your time looking for me. Instead, I got away and took their evidence with me. Then they started panicking. Paget has been running around trying to tidy it all up. I saw him at Kendall’s. He went there to kill him. He tried to kill me. He got to Beckett and Walsh and Jenson.’

‘How?’

‘Wilkins fixed Beckett up with a safe house, had someone on the inside.’

‘Who?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘It matters to me.’

‘Beckett went for children,’ I said.

‘They used a child?’

‘They’re not Samaritans.’

‘What about this Simpson thing? Why’d he get topped?’

‘I don’t know. I think he lost his bottle when he found out we were robbing you. He seemed nervy during the robbery. Maybe they’d planned to kill him anyway. Jenson and Walsh might not have known what was going on either.’

‘And Kendall?’

‘He thought he was working with Beckett alone. Beckett thought he was working for Wilkins. Wilkins was probably involved, but if he’s dead, it looks like Paget was running it.’

Cole ran a hand through his hair. He was sweating.

‘Christ,’ he said. ‘What a fucking mess. What you say makes sense. But you’re wrong about something.’

I didn’t think I was wrong. I said, ‘Yeah?’

‘The Ellis job. You worked with Ellis on the job before the Brighton one? Before it went sour?’

‘I told you.’

‘Did you know you were supposed to work on that next job too? The Brighton one’

I took a second to work that through. I felt that snare tightening some more. I said, ‘What?’

‘I made some inquiries; I checked with Ellis. He told me that he used you because his man Caine was fucked up over some woman.’ I nodded. I was feeling cold. ‘Well, Ellis didn’t trust him for the Brighton job either, so he was going to use you for that too. Caine wormed his way back on at the last minute and they dumped you.’

My mind was whirring. I couldn’t make the parts fit. I must have looked confused because Cole smiled, if you could call it that.

‘You thought you were in this by accident,’ he said. ‘You thought they picked you for the casino job because you were associated with Ellis, and therefore the Brighton job. You were wrong. Weren’t you, boy? It was the other way round. They chose Ellis for the Brighton job – my job – because you were already working with him. They’ve been fitting you up right from the start.’

My throat was parched. My hands were sweating.

‘Who decided to use Ellis?’ I said.

‘Wilkins. I left – ’

The smaller door smashed open. Earring stumbled in, panic all over his sweating face. He hit the floor. Cole jumped up. I jumped up. It was dark outside and headlights flashed past the door and lit up the warehouse like flares, throwing wild shadows everywhere, and I heard vehicles screech on tarmac. Earring was scrambling to his feet, tugging at his pistol.

‘They’re here,’ he said, his voice cracking with fear.

Car doors slammed.

‘How many?’ Cole said.

‘Lots.’

‘Close the door,’ Cole said.

Earring had his pistol out and was fumbling with it, trying flick the safety off.

‘Close the door,’ Cole said again, his voice even.

‘Don and Jules,’ Earring said. ‘They’re still out there.’

There were single shots from a semi-auto which seemed far away, and then the air crackled with fire from several automatic weapons.

‘Close the fucking door.’

Earring dropped his piece and ran for the door. A man I didn’t recognize hit the door as Earring got there. He tried weakly to push his way in. His white shirt was sodden red, his face was white. Earring opened the door and the man fell in. Dozens of rounds slammed into the door and sent splinters of wood into Earring’s arm. He yelled out. Cole screamed at him, ‘Close the fucking door.’