‘ Until then.’
Corelli hung up. Dakin was left holding a dead phone to his ear for a few seconds before he realised there was no one else at the other end. ‘We are on a roll, honey,’ he said enthusiastically to Cathy.
‘ Sweetie,’ she purred.
‘ Don’t spare the horses, James,’ Dakin instructed his driver.
The Bentley slid onto the motorway and its speed soon hovered around the 100 mph mark.
Lenny Dakin was forty years old. He was a Scot, born and raised in the slums of Glasgow. Right from the start he had gone into crime, establishing a gang of young hoodlums who terrorised the neighbourhood, putting old people and shopkeepers in fear of their lives and property.
In his teenage days he had had two run-ins with the Scottish police which resulted in prosecutions; one was for petty theft for which he was convicted and the other was for a robbery where he got off at court. He was fifteen then and hired one of the best, and most bent, criminal lawyers in Scotland, showing how successful he was, even then. He was arrested on numerous other occasions, but with no end result.
By the time he was twenty, Lenny had become one of those self-styled gangland bosses for which Glasgow is famous. For a good eight or nine years he was very much the king of his wing of the castle. He was into everything in a small-time way: bribery, extortion, prostitution, burglary, theft and handling stolen goods. It was all pretty unsubtle stuff. He controlled his part of town very nicely thank you, but he didn’t reckon on the big boys moving in. Which they did in ruthless style.
There was a bitter underworld feud between Dakin’s gang and two others who had come together to oust him. It was the time of the ‘Clyde Murders’, as the press liked to call them. Eight people were found dismembered throughout Scotland, all villains, and not one murderer caught, but each body linked to Dakin and his sordid war.
In the end it got too much for him. He had a lot of muscle, but not as much as the other two gangs put together. Dakin knew when he was beaten. He held a summit meeting in secret with the other two gang leaders and came to an agreement — namely, that he would give up the struggle, put his men under their control, cut his own losses and split. Alive.
He’d realised he was close to becoming another one of the Clyde bodies.
He moved south to Manchester where his sphere and scale of operations expanded dramatically.
In a loose partnership with Brown, whom he’d met previously (the criminal underworld is a small underworld), he embarked on a series of violent armed robberies throughout the north-west of England, mainly with Securicor vans as targets. It was very big stuff, as Dakin intended it to be, netting them more than two million pounds in a period of less than nine months.
This was to be the financial bedrock of their empire.
Dakin had previously decided where the true fortunes were to be made in crime — drug dealing. And he set about achieving his goals with a vengeance.
He and Brown made several journeys to Australia and the Far East where they established contacts, couriers and routes. After some initial blunders, mainly as a result of not bribing the right officials, business began to boom. Their first ever deal grossed them a profit of over one million pounds. By the end of their first two years in operation they had amassed over five million pounds each.
This time Dakin planned everything carefully.
He was never in a position where he could be compromised, and if he ever felt he was in any danger he dropped the deal or made a killing. Three doubtful couriers who knew too much and talked too loudly got bullets in the back of the head.
He also invested wisely in legitimate businesses with real profits, real management structures and good accountants who were paid excellent money to launder drugs profits through these businesses and offshore companies that existed in name only. He owned a small chain of supermarkets, six chemists, a dozen newsagents, several specialist wine importers, four pubs and a discotheque.
But his business relationship with Brown was always on shaky ground.
Their characters were not really compatible.
Dakin, tough, businesslike, careful; Brown, flash, unpredictable, volatile, careless and unprofessional.
Some of these things Dakin could forgive, but he suspected Brown of two serious transgressions, neither of which he could prove.
One was that he short-changed on deals.
The other was that he had bedded Cathy Diamond.
Brown’s lack of professionalism was his undoing; things came to a head during negotiations with Corelli.
Dakin had realised that even more money was to be made by dealing with the Colombian drug cartels. They were much more organised than the Asian drug barons, whom Dakin could never truly bring himself to trust. Something about their manner. He always expected a knife in the back.
Feelers put out amongst the international criminal fraternity led him and Brown to Corelli’s organisation, which acted as wholesalers for Colombian operations in Florida.
Talks began slowly and tentatively between Corelli and the Britons, though they never actually spoke to the big man himself, only his distant intermediaries. One of these was Danny Carver.
It was during the course of these negotiations that Carver struck up a friendship with Brown. They were very much alike, sharing the same taste in cars, women and gambling.
Neither was happy with his lot.
Carver was ambitious to make it alone.
Brown was continually getting pain and grief from Dakin for the smallest thing and he’d grown to hate the man. He wanted out.
The result was they engineered a side deal which failed to include either Corelli or Dakin.
When Dakin discovered the deception — and the amount of money involved — he secretly flew to Florida where he had an urgent meeting with Corelli. Here, he told him the facts as he knew them: behind their backs, Carver and Brown were about to make twenty million pounds sterling, conservative estimate.
Corelli had nodded sagely. He knew of Carver’s disloyalty. It had been going on for some time now. Other deals had been struck and Carver had been warned several times, but this was the last straw. Corelli had shown remarkable restraint so far. Now it was time to act. Corelli promised to dispose of both Carver and Brown, for the sake of the business, nothing personal, then to resume talks with Dakin.
He had been true to his word.
Dakin was impressed and a little overawed. Now it was up to him to show Corelli that he was also a man of his word and get the best criminal lawyer in the country to act for the hit man. Fuck the expense.
Firstly, though, he had a little problem of his own to sort out.
The Bentley was driven to Dakin’s modernised farmhouse in the Ribble Valley, set high on the banks of the river, overlooking the ancient Roman fort of Ribchester.
The first thing Dakin did was call his solicitor, to whom he paid a great deal of money as a retainer. After a polite threat from Dakin ‘I’ll cut yer articles off’ — the less than enthusiastic solicitor promised he would make his way to Blackpool and engage himself to act for Hinksman.
After this brief conversation, he summoned his driver and said one cold sentence to him.
‘ Get me Reeve.’
Gerard Reeve, dressed in only his underpants, held back the curtains and peered out of the hotel window. It was mid-morning and the Lake District village of Grasmere was milling fairly busily with its tourist trade, most of which centred on its main asset — William Wordsworth.
Just below the village, the lake itself lay gently and serenely, like a sheet of smoke-blue glass, unruffled and beautiful.
Reeve stared intently out, searching for something that could give him a clue. Anything. A car which did not seem to fit, a man perhaps, who did not give the impression of being a tourist. Anything to warn him that Dakin had caught up, because he knew that Dakin was after him. He did not have to be told he was on the run, and until he could leave the country he would always be in danger.