‘On whose say-so?’
‘Well,’ he looked at me dumbly, ‘yours.’
‘Mine?’
‘He said you’d asked him to get a piece in case things got a bit hairy down south like.
‘He said what?’
‘That’s what he said. You mean you didn’t… ’
‘No,’ I said, ‘I didn’t.’
‘Christ, I’m really sorry man,’ he told the wall behind me, ‘but it sounded legit. I mean I’ve known Cartwright as long as I’ve known any of you and, well I mean, why would he lie?’
‘That’s the big question,’ I wasn’t really annoyed with Hunter. It’s not as if we have written orders or signed requisition sheets for his bent weaponry, and he could hardly phone me on a land line and say ‘is it true you asked Geordie Cartwright to get tooled up in case you had a spot of bother with some southerners?’ We didn’t work like that. A lot of what we did, strangely enough in our game, was based on trust, that and the fear of a sickening retribution afterwards if you were caught doing something that was against Bobby’s interests. So what would drive a mild bloke like George Cartwright to get a Sig Sauer from our armourer and collect the Drop all on his own?
‘When was this? What time?’
‘Last Monday afternoon… No, Tuesday; I remember because the Toon were playing their cup replay that night and we were talking about it. We didn’t think they’d get a result… And of course they didn’t… They were knocked out… So we were right like.’
I held up a hand, ‘yeah, yeah, did he say anything else? Was there anything odd about the way he was handling himself?’
‘Well he seemed a bit distracted I suppose, looking back on it.’
And I understood why he was distracted. He was scared -but what would scare him so much he needed a gun? Answer that question and we were closer to the truth. Whatever it was, the gun hadn’t done him any good in the end of course. Geordie Cartwright still wound up dead.
FOURTEEN
The massage parlour was an understated little building that looked like a doctor’s surgery, perched at the end of a residential street in an area that was almost but not quite the suburbs. Its frosted glass windows and discreet signage, which indicated it was the place to go to with a sports injury, was intended to ensure no one objected too much to its presence.
I didn’t know what the neighbours really thought about having a knocking shop on their doorstep but they didn’t make too much of a fuss about it. The whole operation was designed to be as discreet as possible, to avoid attracting the attention of the police or any self-appointed moral guardians in the neighbourhood.
To be fair, we ran a good, clean operation. All the girls were volunteers and there was absolutely no trafficking of any kind. We only put willing lasses into jobs like that. The police knew it was a brothel, everybody did, but they didn’t give a shit.
I walked in first, so as not to startle Barry Hennessy, aka Maggot, but it looked like he wasn’t there. Instead we were met by Elaine, our housekeeper. She took the bookings, vetted the clients as they walked in and looked after the girls, making sure they were all right, earning money and paying us our proper cut. It was 30 quid to get through the door, which included the straightforward massage, not that anyone ever wanted just that. The rest was negotiable with the girls but a basic service, including a BJ and a shag would set you back another £100, which was cheaper than dinner for two in a lot of Newcastle’s restaurants these days. The girls kicked another £20 back to the house, so we took 50 quid for providing them with a safe, secure environment where they wouldn’t get beaten up, ripped off or arrested for soliciting. They took home £80 a punter and with a steady stream of clients they could earn upwards of £300 a shift. Put another way, that’s £60,000 to £70,000 a year for lasses who would rather be doing this than earning minimum wage on a check-out till.
The girls here weren’t drug addicts or nymphomaniacs. They were paying off debts their no-account blokes had left them with, putting themselves through college or bringing up their kids, feeding and clothing them, and they were doing okay but it wasn’t exactly Pretty Woman. It’s not what I’d have called easy work having some fat, sweaty Herbert lying on top of you and it certainly wasn’t for everyone but they didn’t have to do it. They could leave whenever they liked. We never held a gun to anyone’s head or kept anybody against their will and they weren’t that hard to replace.
‘He not in?’ I asked Elaine.
‘He was,’ she replied, ‘I’ll fetch him,’ she wandered away down the corridor and we watched her go. Just as she reached the end I saw Maggot coming the other way. He clocked us, spotted Finney and his eyes went wild then he turned round and pegged it. Whatever Finney had done to him last time, Maggot wasn’t up for a repeat performance.
‘Maggot!’ I shouted, ‘don’t fucking run. Christ.’ I took off after him. Finney was the hardest man on our books but he was no athlete. He wouldn’t be able to catch Maggot when he was pegging it away like the devil himself was after him.
I tore down the corridor and Elaine flattened herself against the wall as I hurtled by. I went through a door that had a little lounge area beyond it. No sign of Maggot. Two bored-looking girls in smart black cocktail dresses were sitting there sipping tea, waiting for their next John. We didn’t want them sitting round in their skimpies. It made the place look less respectable. They looked up and I was about to ask them which way Maggot was headed when, ahead of me, a door banged and I ran on down a little flight of stairs that led to the showers, sauna, jacuzzi and the tiny rooms the girls took their clients into.
‘Shite.’ There were too many doors, they all looked the same, white painted, deliberately neutral and I didn’t know where any of them led to. Fuck it, I thought and I ran right through the one that looked most likely to be the back door.
I nearly knocked over the naked girl who was in the middle of giving a middle-aged business type a hand job on his lunch hour. Nadia looked at me like I’d gone mad. He almost had a coronary. ‘Oh fuck, no please. I’m sorry. I only wanted a massage. She grabbed me. Please, let me go,’ he pleaded.
‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘it’s alright, I’m not the police.’
‘Shut up Tony,’ she scolded him sharply, properly aggrieved at being accused of a sexual assault, ‘he’s one of us,’ then she turned to me and hissed, ‘are you going to fuck off?’
‘Back door?’ I gasped and she pointed.
This time I tried the door first before I opened it. When I got a crack of daylight I went through, just in time to see Maggot at the other end of the back yard, rounding the corner which would take him out and down the side of the building. Predictably he ran straight into Finney, who’d come round the front at a more leisurely pace. Maggot swore and skidded to a halt like some cartoon character in a chase scene. I half expected smoke to come from the heels of his shoes. He turned back, saw me and realised he had nowhere left to run. Maggot backed away from Finney, heading for the crumbling brick wall that covered three sides of the back yard. His eyes were darting around as he desperately searched for somewhere to go.
‘What you going to do now Maggot?’ asked Finney, ‘shit bricks and build a wall?’
Finney saw him eyeing up the actual walls like he was about to attempt to climb them.
‘Don’t be fucking stupid. You’re going nowhere,’ barked Finney. Maggot was terrified. When I drew near I noticed for the first time that he had a large red mark in the centre of his forehead. It looked pretty permanent, the kind of scar you are never going to lose completely.
‘Look at you,’ said Finney, staring at the red spot he had presumably inflicted, ‘you look like a fucking Hindu or something,’ Finney advanced on Maggot, ‘never, ever run away from me again you cunt,’ and Finney gave Maggot what he would have described as ‘a little slap’.