He was lying in a flimsy metal-framed camp bed. He had drifted into unconsciousness again, a blissful state for his body which could no longer tolerate the excruciating pain from the badly infected wound.
Sat next to him on a stool, leafing through an old Woman s Own was the man Rider had quickly christened as ‘Curly’.
Munrow came into the room.
The stench hit him, clawed its way up his nose. Gangrene. He gagged and covered his nostrils with his hand. ‘How’s he doin’?
‘ Not good. Needs a doctor.’
Munrow eased the blood-stained sheet off Jonno’s body and exposed the leg. The true aroma of the wound whooshed up towards him like an invisible swarm of flies.
The leg was in very bad condition.
The bullet had lodged in the outer part of Jonno’s right thigh and the wound had quickly putrefied even though it had been repeatedly washed and cleaned. Now it was turning green and mouldy-looking, like Gorgonzola, and this was spreading rapidly through the muscles and into his groin. At the very least Jonno had lost his leg.
Munrow had been very reluctant to send Jonno to hospital or get a doctor to see him. That meant questions. Questions meant answers. Answers meant cops.
In the old days he would have brought in a friendly, paid-for GP. Now Munrow didn’t have the contacts.
Jonno moaned and smacked his lips, which were dry and flaking. His almost-transparent eyelids flickered open a fraction. He mumbled something that made no sense. Sweat rolled off his forehead. He was burning up inside. His eyes closed wearily. He turned his head to the wall.
‘ What we gonna do?’ Curly asked.
Munrow’s cold eyes looked sideways at Curly. ‘Dump him.’
Just after midnight Conroy was watching a pornographic video which had a weak and predictable storyline centring on the punishment of young schoolboys and occasionally their masters.
He was at his house in Osbaldeston.
Two bodyguards and their girlfriends were lounging about downstairs, probably snorting cocaine. Two more security guards and their Alsatians roamed the grounds outside.
Conroy was in the master bedroom, lying splayed out naked on the bed. His long hair had been freed from its pony tail. The huge TV monitor in the centre of the room was showing the video. He masturbated himself slowly throughout the feature presentation. Having watched the film a dozen times beforehand, it was his intention to hold himself back from shooting his load until the climax of the film, during a mass rape scene at the end.
It was one hell of a good film, calling for full audience participation.
And it was nearing the end.
Six trouserless boys were led uncomplaining into the headmaster’s study and told to bend over and touch their toes.
The headmaster picked up his cane and flexed it. The camera pulled back to reveal that he wore no trousers himself and was sporting a huge erection. Conroy quickened his pace. In a moment the police would swoop and the real fun would begin.
The phone next to his bed rang shrilly.
With a snarl of annoyance he picked it up, thankful he had not reached the point of no return.
‘ Yes? What the fuck do you want?’ he barked.
‘ Boss… ’ It was one of his guards. ‘We got trouble in town. Two of the clubs have been hit.’
‘ What?’ he screamed. ‘Who by?’
‘ The Thunderpoint and the Electric. All the doormen have been trounced.’
So it wasn’t the cops.
Conroy abruptly lost his appetite for self-fulfilment and young boys on film. He picked up the remote and pointed it at the TV, blacking out the favourite part of his favourite movie.
‘ Get a car sorted. I’ll be down in five. Get tooled up just in case.’
Conroy and his men were in Blackburn less than twenty minutes later. They went straight to the Electric which was within spitting distance of the railway station and was formerly a cinema.
He did not actually own the club outright, but held a fifty-one per cent stake in it, the remaining forty-nine per cent divided between Morton and McNamara through a complex series of financial manoeuvrings which kept their ownership as secret as possible. Conroy covered the door with his own men and this ensured that only his dealers had access to the clientele and therefore he had a stranglehold on the drug trade inside. The Electric was not a big club, holding a capacity of two hundred. Nevertheless he cleared about?1500 per week through it in drugs money alone.
It was very rare for him to put in a personal appearance at such a low level. He tried to keep his distance from the streets these days.
Dundaven usually dealt with things here and Conroy was a tad uncomfortable as he sat in the manager’s office and glowered at the head doorman who sat on the couch, a towel pressed into a nasty gash on his cranium. He had escaped lightly. The two other doormen had been whacked into oblivion and taken to hospital by ambulance.
The cops had been and gone, fobbed off by the manager, by the time Conroy arrived.
‘ What happened?’
‘ We didn’t stand a chance,’ the doorman whined. ‘They pulled up outside, two cars, three in each, balaclavas on. They were into us before we could do fuck-all.’
Conroy sighed. Men in balaclavas. Right up Munrow’s street.
‘ And..?’ he urged the man on impatiently.
‘ And they beat the living crap out of us with baseball bats or pick-axe handles — I don’t know which. You don’t really care when you’re being clonked. They both fucking well hurt.’
‘ Why weren’t you ready? I thought protection was your job. It’s what you’re paid for, isn’t it?’
The doorman looked sourly up at him. ‘Ready? Give us a break,’ he said. Although he knew he was talking to the boss, the pain in his head made him angry. ‘Why should we be ready for that?’
‘ Because I fucking pay you to be ready, you fucking wanker! Where were your bats?’
‘ Behind the cash counter. If we had them on us all the time the cops’d pull us. We keep’ em out of sight and only grab’ em when we need’ em.’
‘ You mean you didn’t need them tonight?’
‘ We was attacked — out of the blue. It weren’t like trouble was brewing.’
‘ Did they say anything?’
‘ No.’
Conroy sat back and crossed his legs. He was annoyed and worried at the same time. Fucking Munrow! This had to be down to him. It was times like this that Conroy needed Dundaven. He would have arranged to sort Munrow out in the most appropriate way. But with Hughie locked away, a vital link in his set-up had been severed.
Shit. How to get Munrow out of his hair? Then he remembered Tony Morton’s suggestion which, reading between the lines, went something like: Get John Rider to do your dirty work for you.
But how could he get Rider sufficiently riled with Munrow to take him out?
Conroy rolled his neck. It cracked obscenely.
‘ Let’s have a look at the Thunderpoint. See if it’s the same pathetic story,’ he said to his bodyguards.
It was.
But at least he had had an idea about Rider and Munrow. A double whammy. One which would sort both of them out.
They were ready for the piece de resistance.
Possibly the biggest club operating in Lancashire, that midweek night was the Salsa, near Fulwood, just off the M55. Out of town, plush, up-to-date with state-of-the-art sound and lighting, it was frequented by footballers, Manchester pop stars and other minor celebs. The Salsa was a good, well-managed, profitable club with a capacity of almost fifteen hundred with it usually reached on Friday and Saturday nights.
The Salsa was the jewel in Conroy’s crown. He owned one hundred per cent of it. A poor week netted him five grand in drug money alone. In entrance fees, which went through the books and were properly audited, the club grossed over?50,000 each week. Easily.
Conroy strove hard to keep it one of the best clubs in the north. It was the only one he ever visited. He often paid celebs to frequent it and give it the necessary credibility. You could almost guarantee to see somebody well-known, whatever night of the week. The off-chance of dancing on the same floor as a pop star or a five-million-pound footballer probably drew in an extra two hundred bodies a week.