After an hour, Henry hung up the phone for the last time and wiped his brow in mock exhaustion.
‘Just one more call to make, if you’ll excuse me.’ He stood up and took his mobile phone from his jacket pocket, leaving the room as he dialled Kate.
Out in the corridor he filled her in on what was happening. She already knew a lot because he had spoken to her earlier, but as part of the communication package between them he had felt obliged to call her again and tell her he was going to be very late coming home. Then, not really knowing why, he added that it might be better if he spent the night at his flat because it was so central, handy for the police station, and he would not disturb Kate or the girls by coming in late.
It was all rubbish, of course, but that ‘certain something’ had crept into Henry’s brain again. He experienced a vicious stab of guilt when Kate happily accepted what he was saying at face value, told him she loved him and asked him to ring her if he could — any time.
He ended the call with an irritated frown on his face. He returned to Jane’s office, replacing the expression with a more positive one.
‘Ready?’
She grabbed her coat. Henry was going to take her on the town in the hunt for an informant or two. As they descended the stairs, Roscoe asked, ‘Was that Kate you were talking to?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Oh,’ she said, and clicked her tongue on the roof of her mouth.
By 9 p.m. Ray Cragg, Marty and Crazy had made their way to the counting house. When he was there, Ray always thought of himself as the king counting out his money. Or to be more accurate, overseeing while others counted out his money for him.
The counting house was in the middle of a short dead-end terraced street in the town of Rawtenstall in east Lancashire. The houses had been built towards the end of the nineteenth century to accommodate workers at the nearby cotton mill on the banks of the River Irwell. Over a hundred years later the mill and the cotton business were long since gone. After having been abandoned and allowed to decay through non-use and vandalism in the decades following the Second World War, the shell of the mill had finally been flattened in the early 1990s. The demolition of its massive chimney had made national TV news. A new industrial park had replaced the mill and the cotton trade itself had been replaced by a variety of businesses and services, none of which would last half as long as cotton had done.
But the street remained. Two rows of houses with back yards and outside toilets, clinging perilously to the side of the Rossendale Valley. Even its original cobbles remained, now shiny and worn with age, use and weather. On damp, dank, foggy days it did not take too great a leap of the imagination to visualize those bygone days when cotton ruled: clogs clattering on cobbles, the mill chimney belching plumes of unhealthy smoke into the atmosphere, cholera and typhoid.
However, it had been touch and go for the survival of this street. Most of the surrounding streets had been demolished, grassed over, never to be rebuilt in any shape or form. The bulldozers had been ready to roll to flatten this last one. The required compulsory purchase orders had been served and all the residents, bar one stubborn old lady — ninety years old, who had lived in the street all her life and had never been further than Blackpool — had been evicted and rehoused. It was only a matter of time before the old lady popped her clogs and the bulldozers waded in. The council had been prepared to wait.
The street had been saved by Ray Cragg. He had spotted its location and potential, and had slipped some fairly hefty backhanders in the form of cash and B-list celebrity blowjobs to a couple of councillors ripe for the plucking.
It would be a crying shame to flatten the street, destroy history, wipe out our heritage. . at least that’s how the councillors lobbied on Ray’s behalf. The council were informed that a local businessman and general do-gooder (no name mentioned, obviously) wished to preserve the street, yet also modernize it and let out the properties to the local community at low rents.
What the council did not hear was the truth: that Ray Cragg had seen the street’s potential. A nice, little nondescript location, tucked out of the way, affording the privacy he craved, close to a motorway link giving him fast access to Manchester in one direction and the whole of Lancashire in the other. It was also extremely cheap.
Neither were the council told that he wanted to relocate his counting operation from Blackpool to Rawtenstall, somewhere easily guarded and controlled, away from the prying eyes and greedy intentions of his business rivals, where he knew who the neighbours were — somewhere like Balaclava Street, Rawtenstall.
The first job Ray had done when it became his was to ensure that the stubborn old lady died in the house she had been born in. He had enjoyed doing that himself, breaking into her house in the middle of the night, sneaking up to her bedroom, his face covered — appropriately enough — with a balaclava. His intent had been to terrify her to death, something he thought would have been easy. It did not happen as quickly as he had anticipated.
Her valiant old heart only packed in after he had dragged her from her bed, torn off her winceyette nightie, thrust the barrel of a revolver into her toothless mouth and told her he was going to rape her.
‘That is, unless you die, you old bitch,’ he’d growled into her hearing aid. ‘Die, die, die.’
She’d complied and Ray had placed her back into bed, covered her up and left her to be discovered by relatives three weeks later. It had been one of Ray’s proudest moments.
‘What are you smiling at?’ Crazy asked him.
‘Oh, nothing.’ Ray chuckled, shaking his head to rid himself of the memory of that night in the old biddy’s room. He had really enjoyed making her die. And no one, not even Marty, knew he had done it. It was his little, proud, secret.
Ray’s eyes roved round what had once been the living room of one of the terraced houses, but was now where the counting took place. There was no front window any more. A large piece of hardboard had been fixed on the outside of the window to make it appear as though it had been boarded up. Behind the board was a thick sheet of steel pock-riveted into the stone window frame. The rest of the room had been gutted. Four tables had been brought in, similar to decorators’ pasting tables, and one person sat at each of the tables.
Ray moved and stood behind one of these people, a woman by the name of Carmel. He watched her counting.
The week’s takings were looking very healthy indeed. Spread out on the four tables were four very large piles of cash. At each of the other tables was also a woman studiously separating the notes into respective denominations, piling them neatly and then counting them.
Ray Cragg glanced appreciatively at the stacks of cash, feeling a flush of excitement. A quarter of a million, he guessed. All in used notes. Not a bad week’s work by any standards. A million a month. Twelve million a year, conservative. All his hard work over the past four years had been worth it. The violence, the intimidation, the planning, the homework and the killing where necessary. He now virtually controlled the supply of drugs from Merseyside to Cumbria, and from Manchester north to Blackpool.
Sure there were a few gaps in the map, but he intended to plug them in time and become the undisputed king of the north.
And drug dealing wasn’t the whole picture. It was a vast part of his empire, but the running of illegal immigrants into the UK was becoming far more lucrative and far less dangerous.
He intended to have a couple more years with the drugs, but to keep building on the people-movement side of the business for another four years on top of that, then he would retire, maybe with thirty million stashed away. That was the figure, he estimated, that would see him out. He would take his mother to Florida and live a lazy lifestyle down on the Keys. Nothing too flashy — that wasn’t his style — just live off the interest, want for nothing, and chill.