‘Well, he was over the limit.’
‘Is this legit?’ I was asking Sharp if Baxter really had been drink-driving or if it was some ruse by the police to bring him in and question him about me.
‘Seemingly so; I made enquiries and he was pulled over by uniform for driving erratically. It’s a bit of a coincidence him being taken in like that and you getting dragged there a few hours later though.’
‘Maybe that’s all it is. I can’t see Henry Baxter disappearing into the witness protection programme because he’s been pulled over for drink-driving, can you?’
‘No,’ he admitted, ‘but stranger things have happened. Anyway, he’ll be bailed later.’
‘I’ll keep an eye on him,’ I promised. ‘Oh, and I nearly forgot. There’s something else you can do for me. I need to find a man called Jinky Smith.’
‘Who the fuck is he when he’s at home?’
‘One of the old guard, like you suggested, so ask around. Start earning your money.’
‘Yeah, alright,’ he mumbled, ‘but if I run out of luck I might not get to spend any of it.’
There wasn’t much more to be said and we both fell silent as the old guy with the walking stick finally drew level with us. His progress up the hill had been tortuously slow and he looked incredibly weary. I knew how he felt.
With everything that was going on I could have done without the next meeting I’d arranged, but I’d promised Joe Kinane, and I didn’t piss that man off lightly. Today we were going to sit down with his eldest lad.
Kinane had three sons, all of them carved out of something like granite, and each one of them named after a famous Newcastle United player; Kevin, Peter and Chris; Keegan, Beardsley and Waddle, though he regretted that when Waddle eventually signed for Sunderland. He even attempted to use Chris’ middle name for a while, but unsurprisingly it didn’t stick. He had a daughter too. She was married with kids and had nothing to do with our business.
‘What did you call her then?’ I asked him once, ‘No girl ever played for the Toon.’
He laughed, ‘I suggested Jackie, after Jackie Milburn, but wor lass went mental at me,’ and he grimaced at the memory. ‘We called her Carol in the end.’
Kevin Kinane was an enormous bloke whose fearsome appearance was enhanced by his smashed-in teeth. A while back he had been set upon by some heavily-armed thugs who worked for a dealer of ours who had gone decidedly native. Braddock’s men couldn’t resist smashing the unarmed Kevin in the mouth with a gun, leaving him with a hole in his teeth and earning him the nickname ‘Christmas’, as in ‘all I want for Christmas is my two front teeth.’ He had a couple of false ones fitted but didn’t take to them, so he simply discarded them and went around with a gap instead. When Kevin smiled it made him look even more sinister than before.
I had been giving Kevin Kinane more responsibility lately, to see if he could handle it. He had gone from overseeing our distribution of H at the Sunnydale Estate to effectively controlling the entire operation across the city. I could trust him because he was Kinane’s eldest son and as close to family as I had working for me.
‘Our Kevin wanted a word,’ Joe told me as they sat down in my office at the Cauldron. I could see the impatience in Kevin’s eye. Already his dad was interfering.
‘Let him speak for himself, Joe.’ I said, and Kinane sat back in his chair looking edgy, like he was itching to put words into Kevin’s mouth for him. Kevin shot his father a glance that clearly meant ‘back off and leave me to it’.
‘What did you want to see me about?’ I asked, though I knew already.
‘The future,’ he told me, before quickly adding, ‘of the firm. If you ask me, H has had its day. There’s no profit growth potential there. We’ve bottomed out and it will never get any bigger. We should be concentrating our efforts in other directions.’
‘Such as?’
‘More coke, some ketamine, a bit of E, but mostly it’s the coke. Blow is where it’s at.’
‘I agree with you. So what does that tell you?’
‘Give up the heroin. It’s high risk and the profits aren’t big enough to justify the jail sentences that go with it. The estates are beyond saving, so cut the dealers adrift and let them fight it out between them till there’s a top dog. You don’t need the hassle and we can always wholesale to whoever’s left standing.’
I watched Kevin Kinane intently. There was intelligence there. His dad was a powerful force but he didn’t have the smarts of his three sons. Maybe they’d actually attended school or perhaps they got it from their mum. More than likely they’d had to live by their wits on the streets for so long they’d developed a natural instinct for this kind of thing.
‘You are right Kevin, H is pretty much dead. There’s no real future or growth there and we should concentrate less on it. We can scale down, take an arm’s length view and put our mind to other areas where we see long-term potential. That’s smart thinking.’
‘Cheers,’ he said.
‘But you are only half right,’ I told him, ‘we need to keep control of the heroin trade in Newcastle and it worries me that you don’t understand why.’
‘To keep order,’ interrupted Joe Kinane, and we both gave him a look this time.
‘I’ll come back to that,’ I told them. ‘Firstly, we still get valuable revenue from H and we can’t do without it yet. We are not a PLC and we don’t have to have growth every year to keep shareholders satisfied. H is still a high-profit, sizeable revenue business in this city. Why give it to someone else when it took us so long to nail it down in the first place?’
‘We can still make money out of the wholesale, without getting our hands dirty,’ Kevin told me. ‘I thought that was what you wanted.’
‘I do want that, but I know I can never have it. If we wholesale to whoever is left standing, as you put it, we’ll end up with another Braddock running the place, not paying us on time, buying from other firms when it suits him, and his boys will be running riot. Joe is right, we have to keep order on those estates. They might be absolute shit holes but not everyone on them is vermin. We have to stop teenagers from hosing each other every time there’s a trivial argument about respect or we’ll end up like those estates in Peckham and Hackney. They’ve got kiddy gangs doing stabbings and drive-bys instead of business. We still have some rules; no crack cocaine, no getting kids high, no pimping girls out to pay for their habits, no unnecessary violence for the sake of it and no mindless killing. This is one of the main reasons the police tolerate us. They don’t like us. They will lock us away if they can get the evidence but always, at the back of their minds, they know we keep order and they ask themselves what would emerge in our place if they took us all down tomorrow.’
‘I didn’t think of that,’ he conceded, and I liked that he hadn’t tried to pretend he knew it all.
‘Then there are more sentimental reasons. I still love this city and I don’t want Newcastle turning into the South Central Projects.’
‘Fair enough,’ he had conceded my point, but I could tell he was deflated. Kevin thought I didn’t value his opinion, but only a fool wants to be surrounded by ‘yes-men’. Where was the value in that? I needed people who would challenge me about the best way to run the firm, as long as they did what I told them once I’d made up my mind.
‘You’ve done a good job for me, Kevin,’ I told him, ‘you deserve a bigger role in the firm. I want you to take on more responsibility for me.’
‘Just name it’, he said, and I could see the look of quiet satisfaction on Joe’s face. He’d got what he wanted. I didn’t mind that at all because Kevin Kinane had potential.
‘I will,’ I told him, ‘we’ll talk again soon. There is one thing you can do for me today though; get the lads together at the Mitre tonight,’ he nodded, ‘and leave us to it for a bit will you. I need a word with Joe.’
11
The whole firm turned up at the Mitre. We filled the upstairs bar of that old pub and the ancient floorboards creaked under the weight of so many huge blokes. We opened the bar so they could all have a few pints and Vince was in charge of the ancient vinyl jukebox. That used to be Hunter’s job. Once, we’d have been treated to a diet of eighties rock, which never let up. Now that he was gone, Vince had assumed the mantle of DJ and his choices were just as archaic, though different to Hunter’s. You wouldn’t think it to look at Vince, with his suit and tie and permanent presence at our bars and clubs, which churned out endless R amp;B, that his taste was really indie, bordering on Goth. That evening, while we waited for all of the lads to turn up, we got Echo and the Bunnymen, Teardrop Explodes, The Alarm and Hazel O’Connor. Then he started cranking out the really Suicidal Sid stuff with The Sisters of Mercy and The Mission before The Smiths finally took the biscuit with There Is A Light That Never Goes Out.