‘Are you going to do it?’
A scream came from behind. The Traveller twisted towards the voice, the doctor’s throat still in his grip. The nurse in the doorway screamed again.
‘Fuck,’ the Traveller said.
He kicked the doctor’s feet from under him and ran.
12
‘I need a favour,’ Lennon said into his phone as he waited for the lights to change at the junction of the Lisburn Road and Sandy Row.
‘What sort of favour?’ Dan Hewitt asked.
‘I want to see some files,’ Lennon said. He held the phone between his ear and his shoulder as the lights changed and he released the handbrake. ‘Whatever you’ve got on the McKenna feud.’
‘No chance,’ Hewitt said. ‘You’ve no reason to see them. Not unless you’ve got a live investigation, and that mess was wrapped up months ago. What do you want them for?’
‘It’s something Andy Rankin said.’
‘What’s the feud got to do with him?’
‘Nothing, it was just something he mentioned. A rumour he’d heard. I want to check it out. Come on, you know I’m doing you a big favour settling for that GBH.’
‘And you’re getting back on an MIT in return,’ Hewitt said. ‘I think that makes us square.’
Lennon struggled to concentrate on the road as he wove through side streets to get back to Donegall Pass. ‘I need to see them, Dan.’
No you don’t,’ Hewitt said. ‘You want to see them. Not the same thing at all. I couldn’t let you have them even if I wanted to. I have to show a live investigation before I can pull the files.’
‘Shit,’ Lennon said. ‘There must be some way.’
‘If you want files on Rankin, I can maybe do something for you, within reason.’
‘How about if you cross-reference Rankin and McKenna? If there’s any match-up, can you give me the files? Crozier too. Rankin told me Crozier’s been taking over McKenna’s turf since he died. That ties it to my case.’
Lennon listened to silence for long seconds until Hewitt sighed and said, ‘All right, I’ll see what I can do. A lot of it’ll be redacted, though. You’ll be looking at more blacked-out lines than anything else.’
‘Okay,’ Lennon said, ‘whatever you can get me.’
‘Give me an hour,’ Hewitt said.
The thin file landed on Lennon’s desk ninety minutes later. He flicked through the photocopied pages, less than twenty of them. True to Hewitt’s word, most of it had been blacked out by thick lines drawn with marker pen. But not all of them were redacted in the original. Some of the pages smelled of solvent, the black lines fresh and slightly damp to the touch.
A Post-it note clung to the inside of the folder. In Dan Hewitt’s neat script it said:
Jack,
There’s not much, but it’s the best I can do for you. Remember, Dandy Andy has done us a lot of good. Like I said, he’s a piece of shit, but a useful piece of shit. Shred these when you’re done.
Dan
Dandy Andy Rankin was indeed a piece of shit. Not only had he been leeching off his own community for years, but he’d also been spoon-feeding information to Special Branch, and more recently their new face, C3 Intelligence Branch. The first three pages were a profile complete with mug shots and a career summary, Dandy Andy’s Greatest Hits. Scanning the pages, Lennon could discern at least half a dozen assassinations that had been thwarted, five arms caches that had been discovered, and hundreds of thousands of pounds’ worth of Ecstasy, cocaine and cannabis shipments that had been stopped en route to Belfast.
All this came at a price, of course. Rankin had been allowed to operate in relative peace. A single paragraph below the photos outlined his various enterprises. Those suits weren’t cheap.
The following pages were the most interesting. Rankin had been passing bits and pieces of information on Rodney Crozier’s emerging relationship with Belfast’s Lithuanian gangs. The consolidation of the European Union alongside Northern Ireland’s stabilisation had drawn prosperity to this part of the world, but the criminals followed close behind.
The South had seen it first, with Dublin’s underworld growing more vicious by the day. Gangland killings were now almost as frequent in the Republic as paramilitary killings had been in the North during the Troubles. Up here, the paramilitaries still kept control of the rackets; ordinary decent criminals didn’t have a look in, but competition from Eastern Europeans was starting to bite.
The Loyalists had been cooperating with the Lithuanians for some time, now. They put up a front of resisting foreigners in Protestant areas, intimidating the hard-working immigrants who took the jobs no one else would, but behind closed doors they sucked up to the gangsters from Lithuania and elsewhere. Prostitution was one of the biggest earners for them, and the Liths had a good supply of young women from Russia, Romania, Belarus and Ukraine. None of that was news to Lennon, much as it shamed him. He flicked through a series of memos and transcribed messages, reading what hadn’t been obscured. Each mentioned McKenna at least once, but nothing substantial. Nothing he could link back to what Rankin had told him at the hospital.
The final section was a transcription of a meeting between Rankin and one of his handlers. Lennon scanned the few readable scraps that had been left.
DATE: 05/09/2007
LOCATION: Car park, Makro Warehouse, Dunmurry,
Belfast
INTERVIEWING OFFICER: DI James Maxwell, C3
SUBJECT: Andrew Rankin, a.k.a. Dandy Andy Rankin
Interviewing officer notes that Rankin was visibly agitated throughout the conversation, as evidenced by his fidgeting and chain-smoking.
JM: What have you got for me?
AR: Rodney bloody Crozier. I want him put away.
JM: Jesus, Andy, not this again.
AR: It’s this business with the Liths. He’s getting too big for his boots. He’ll be shitting all over me if it goes on much longer.
JM: We’ve talked about this before.
AR: And I’m going to keep talking about it till you fuckers get your thumbs out of your arses and do something about it. Ever since Michael McKenna got his stupid brains blown out, Rodney fucking Crozier’s been palling up to them, getting his—
McKenna’s name scratched at Lennon. Everyone on the force knew Lennon’s connection to McKenna, even if it was history. A third of a page was blacked out. Lennon skipped ahead.
—people talk, like. Crozier couldn’t have moved into that part of town if McKenna was still around.
JM: And?
AR: And if you lot don’t do something about it, I will. Fuck me, I never thought I’d see the day. One of our own running with the Liths, putting money in the other side’s pockets. I knew Rodney Crozier’s father. He’d turn in his grave if he saw who his son was doing business with.
JM: Listen, our hands are tied. We can’t mount an operation of that scale just on your say-so.
AR: Jesus, who runs the cops these days, eh? Who’s telling you to turn a blind eye to all this carry-on? That business with McKenna getting bumped off, then all the shit that—
More lines scrawled over with black marker. The feud. The killings in Belfast. The bloodbath on an old farm near the border. The inquiry established that dissidents had ambushed the politician Paul McGinty there, and the investigation was concluded when three of them blew themselves up with their own bomb a few months later. A specialist forensics team had matched the remains of the guns in their car to the scene of the shootout.