Читать книгу Shadows: The gripping new crime thriller from the #1 bestseller - Paul Finch - Страница 15

Ordinary Joe Lazenby didn’t particularly want to go home that evening.

Immediately after the incident in Hogarth’s Cocktail Lounge, he drove aimlessly around the town for perhaps an hour. All along of course, he’d known that there were higher powers in this world he’d infiltrated. Yet, things had gone so smoothly for so long that he’d begun to feel, perhaps not invincible, but certainly a master of his own destiny. During the working day, he headed up a relatively lowly admin department at Crowley Technical College. He earned a reasonable wage from it, and he was treated with civility and taken fairly seriously by the academics on campus, even if in truth he suspected that they thought him a jumped-up little jobsworth who was no more than a glorified paper-pusher. But he made an okay living. He owned a large detached house on Coxcombe Avenue, which was on the Cotely Barn estate on the edge of Crowley golf course, an affluent part of town; he drove a decent enough motor – a metallic beige Ford Galaxy; and he and his family went on a nice holiday once a year – cruising was the in-thing currently, and they’d so far done the Western Med, the Eastern Med, the Caribbean and next August they were looking forward to doing the Norwegian fjords. On the surface, everything was hunky-dory.

But in actual fact, this commonplaceness was the problem.

For quite some time, Joe Lazenby had been deeply frustrated by his none too awe-inspiring status. Throughout his adulthood, he’d felt that, unless he was to diversify into something much more lucrative, and dare he say it, dangerous, he was never going to fulfil his lifetime’s ambition, which was to be a man of substance, of ingenuity, of latent but undeniable power.

And so he had diversified, and it had been a rocky road – he’d taken chances, both financial and actual, first getting into the drugs-importation market through former school-friends who’d long ago taken to crime and shipped their produce in through the Liverpool docks. But having earned the trust of his Colombian suppliers by providing all the cash required upfront and on time, and wowing them with tales of his previously untapped middle-class market, he had completely divested himself of those awkward, insolent middlemen. Lazenby got a huge kick from this alone, convinced that his forward-planning was second-to-none, and that his nose for a deal and an innate working knowledge of the real world made those elitist, muddle-headed book-dwellers at the college shrink to childlike insignificance. He’d been running his low-key op for three years now, the money had poured in, and the respect he’d so long yearned for had finally arrived; perhaps not up there in the surface world, but certainly among those who mattered.

And then today had come along.

When Lazenby got home that night, he couldn’t settle. His wife, Geraldine, had already made dinner. He was late and so it had gone cold, but she didn’t comment about this because she knew he was putting in such enormously long hours at the college these days – at least, that was what he told her – which meant they were far better off financially than they’d ever been before.

After dinner, Lazenby kissed his two children, Maggie and Joseph junior, and Geraldine put them to bed. The normal process now would be for Lazenby and his wife to shower, change into their pyjamas, slippers and dressing gowns, and snuggle up on the sofa in front of the real-flame gas fire and mid-evening TV, sipping mugs of cocoa and commenting casually on the events of their respective days; Geraldine cosy in her knowledge that they were living the middle-class dream, Lazenby cosy with thoughts of his secret but ever-expanding empire.

But tonight when Geraldine came back downstairs changed, her husband was still in his work clothes and sitting stiffly in one of the armchairs. He looked pale-faced and distracted, and even though watching the day’s second instalment of Coronation Street, he clearly wasn’t following the events on screen; his eyes were almost glazed. When Geraldine tried to speak to him, he was curt to the point of being dismissive. A few minutes later he apologised, explaining that he’d had a tough day and that there were some difficult decisions to make in the department. She perched on the chair’s armrest and tried to cuddle him, cooing that it would be all right, that he was a good departmental boss and that he knew what was best for everyone. She even tried to massage his shoulders through the back of his suit jacket, but he remained rigid as a board, his eyes locked on the TV screen despite not seeing anything that was happening there.

‘It’s just, I wish …’

He’d been about to say: ‘I wish things were as normal as that. That all I had to do was either sack someone or put them on a warning, or something.’

But even if he had said that, it would have been a lie. Because deep down he didn’t wish for normality at all. He wanted his dukedom back; he didn’t want to suddenly be a servant again.

Which started him on a new train of thought: How much of a servant would he actually be?

The Crew must see some value in him, otherwise they’d have – what was it McCracken had said? – had the meeting ‘out back’. That encounter could have been a lot more frightening, and perhaps considerably more painful. Maybe this meant that an equal partnership still awaited him somewhere up the line? Assuming he proved his worth.

But how far up the line? How much would he have to demean himself to make this happen?

How much more humiliation could he go through when he’d thought he was past all that?

But then, did he even have a choice? It wasn’t as if Frank McCracken had been negotiating. If anything, he’d been laying down ground rules. And how had McCracken even known that Lazenby would be in Hogarth’s, or who he was for that matter? Had they been following him?

Lazenby’s anxiety grew exponentially, his shoulders stiffening even more under his wife’s fingers.

‘My God, Joe … you really need to try and relax,’ she said.

Lazenby couldn’t answer; his mouth was dry, his teeth locked.

They clearly knew everything about him. How else would they have closed in on his business affairs so quickly? But there was still no need to panic. This was the Crew, after all, not some bunch of drugged-up nutcases. But even so, why make it easy for them?

Abruptly, he stood up.

‘What’s the matter?’ Geraldine asked. ‘I didn’t hurt you, did I?’

‘No, it’s fine.’ He walked across the room, opened the door and went out into the hall. When he reappeared, he’d donned an anorak over his suit. ‘I’m going for a drive.’

‘Joe, what’s the matter?’ she pleaded. ‘Tell me what’s bothering you.’

‘It’s nothing … it’s really nothing. There are some things I need to work out, and to do that I need to get some peace and quiet. Okay?’

She regarded him worriedly. ‘Do you want me to get Mrs Gallagher to sit in, so I can come with you? We can talk about it.’

‘For Christ’s sake, no … it’s fine!’

As he climbed into his Galaxy on the drive, he realised that that parting shot had been far sharper than he’d intended it to be. He loved Geraldine and the kids. He loved everything about his family. They were the ones he was doing this for. He wanted them to share in the dream, even if they didn’t know about it. And by the look on Geraldine’s face after he’d snapped at her, he’d upset her, which he regretted – but that couldn’t be helped at present.

As he drove out of Coxcombe Avenue and onto Mulberry Crescent, and then onto Leatherton Lane, the main thoroughfare connecting Cotely Barn with central Crowley, he wondered if he was now about to do something he’d come to regret even more.

Only slowly, after driving a mile or so, did he finally conclude that he probably wasn’t.

The Crew hadn’t become who they were through cowboy antics. Okay, working on the basis they already knew everything there was to know about his operation, it was safe to assume they would soon twig what he was up to now – if not tonight, probably as soon as tomorrow. And they wouldn’t like it; it would certainly inconvenience them, but perhaps, being arch-professionals, they’d expect nothing less. Surely, they’d anticipate that he’d try to protect his own corner at least a little bit? It might even impress them, and from his own point of view, though it would be no more than a gesture – as effective an act of defiance as flipping them a V-sign – he might even feel that he’d regained a little bit of what he’d lost.

In truth, he might regain even more than that.

He and McCracken had been talking in round numbers earlier on. The Crew might know an awful lot, but it wasn’t as if they had access to his secret accounts, for God’s sake.

Unless they’d hacked him.

That was an ugly thought. It would also explain a lot. But all Lazenby could do was shake it from his head. What would be would be, and anyway, unless they were still following him, there was no way they could know what he was up to at this moment. He checked his rear-view mirror, but it was half past nine at night: the streets, which were dark and wet from the rain that had fallen earlier, were deserted.

‘It could be you’re flattering yourself,’ he said under his breath. These guys ran what amounted to an underworld corporation. ‘Don’t kid yourself into thinking you’re so important that they’ll watch you every minute of the day.’

He told himself this with growing conviction. It was a realistic assessment of the way things were. But his hands still sweated on the steering wheel. Until this evening, everything had been fine. Now his road felt much, much darker.

When he arrived at the Bellhop Industrial estate, it was nearly ten.

At this time of night, there was nobody around, the corrugated metal warehouses and workshops all standing in darkness, their windows and entrances covered by roll-down security shutters. There would be CCTV in operation, of course, but Lazenby was not an unfamiliar figure on the site – he’d been a regular visitor in the three years since he’d taken out a lease here for one of the privately rented lock-ups – so if anyone was watching from a security office somewhere, or a mobile patrol made an unexpected drive-by, his presence, even at this hour, would draw no comment.

In truth, if you wanted absolute certainty that your goods were in strong safekeeping, the Bellhop wasn’t the ideal spot – there were certainly safer facilities in Crowley, but having lots and lots of officialdom around would hardly have suited Lazenby’s purpose. In any case, from the outside, the lock-ups here looked like old garages and so were unlikely to be tampered with by opportunist thieves, while those who knew there were personals stored here would also know that, because of the low rates, it was mostly rubbish: old furniture, moth-eaten clothes, a few corroded car parts. Slim pickings indeed. Nothing worth bothering with.

From Lazenby’s perspective, such anonymity was ideal. Because in his private little depot, along with various knick-knacks he’d installed to provide window-dressing, he also stored the bulk of his product, and just in case there was ever a real emergency, a supply of liquid cash.

On this occasion, he approached with more trepidation than usual, turning his Galaxy slowly into the narrow lane between the last two rows of lock-ups, half expecting to find the roll-down door to No. 17 jemmied open and all his goods, or what remained of them, scattered on the tarmac – though an inner voice kept telling him that this was unlikely. No one knew that he kept his stash here. Even among his electronic records, all of which were meticulously coded, there wasn’t a single reference to it, and he’d taken out the lock-up lease under a fake identity. The only way the Crew could have come to know was if they’d been following him around, and while he suspected they’d done a bit of that, surely they hadn’t been doing it for weeks on end; he hadn’t been here for at least a month and a half.

He rounded the corner and halted, his headlights flooding the straight ribbon of tarmac running ahead of him, the brick backs to the penultimate row of lock-ups on the left, the row of garage-like doors on the right. It was bare of life. The shutter on No. 17, which was three doors down, was locked in place, as it should be.

Relieved, Lazenby edged his Galaxy forward. The motion-sensitive lights overhead activated. So far so normal. He drove past his own unit, and parked across the entrance to No. 16. Climbing out, he looked around and listened. The only sound was a distant thrum of night traffic. There were no voices, no metallic clatters as other shutters were opened or closed.

He peered once more to the far end of this particular lane, seeing only the distant boundary wall. Satisfied, Lazenby opened the back door to his car, took out the overlarge sports bag that normally travelled there, and emptied his unused squash gear into the footwell; he hadn’t played squash in ages, and only kept his kit in the car as cover for keeping the bag, which he always wanted handy in case of occurrences like this. He took his keys from the ignition, closed the car and locked it, and, squatting down, opened the padlock at the base of the shutter.

The shutter wasn’t heavy and he was able to lift it easily, its own momentum pulling it up the last few feet, at which point a steel catch clicked into place.

The interior of the lock-up was rectangular, about twenty-five feet by twelve, enclosed by breeze-block walls. When he hit the light switch, an electric bulb shuddered to life, exposing what he thought of as his ‘knick-knacks’ but which, in reality, was a clutter of junk expanding wall to wall and comprising all the odds and ends he’d assembled over the last few years: from disused garden furniture and dated, dust-coated office-ware, to boxes of second-hand books that he’d bought cheaply at auction for this sole purpose. Even the hooks on the walls had come in handy, and now dangled with rusted, cobwebby tools, both of the garden and DIY variety.

The good stuff was right at the back, but even if some intruder managed to navigate his way through to that distant point, all he would see, jammed between a rusty fridge and a stack of propped-up bamboo matting, were two ratty old armchairs. The one on the left had a cardboard box crammed with video tapes on top of it, but underneath this, and underneath the cushion, the chair’s base had a false bottom, and a hidden compartment in which there was a steel strongbox containing twenty rubber-band-wrapped blocks of clean twenty-pound notes, each one totalling around £8,000, an overall sum of one hundred and sixty grand. The chair on the right was weighed down by a long-broken television, but the strongbox concealed inside it contained the real gold in Lazenby’s stockpile: eight one-kilo bricks of cocaine wrapped in cellophane, the street value of which came to just under half a million pounds.

He unzipped his sports bag and went first to the chair on the right, loading the bag with the eight bricks of coke. When he’d finished, he moved to the chair on the left. One-sixty K wasn’t humongous money in gangland terms, but it would serve to give him some kind of safeguard, a final fall-back if everything else went pear-shaped. He got it all into the bag, which was now heavy and cumbersome, but he was still able to zip it closed and lug it back through the junk and out into the fresh air, where he humped it round to the Galaxy’s boot.

He wasn’t overly keen on taking this stuff home with him, but it would only be for one night – tomorrow he’d find somewhere else, somewhere better.

‘That would be ours, wouldn’t it?’ a muffled voice said.

Lazenby spun around, startled.

Two men faced him from about ten feet away.

He hadn’t heard them approach, which was probably no surprise given that he’d been banging around inside the lock-up, lost in his thoughts. But even if he had, it didn’t look as if there’d have been much he could do – their intentions were pretty clear.

The one on the left was of average height and broadly built, while the one on the right was equally broad but a little taller. Both wore dark clothing, including black leather jackets, but also scarlet woollen ski-masks with holes cut only for their eyes. Each was armed with what looked distinctly like a sub-machine gun, the two weapons levelled on him.

Strangely, almost as quickly as the shock had hit Lazenby, it subsided.

All along, he’d perhaps expected something like this. It hadn’t seemed terribly probable, not in that safe, average, everyday world that Lazenby’s success had lulled him into believing he still occupied. But there’d still been that constant, nagging doubt, which is why the stuff had been ready to move at a moment’s notice.

‘What … what do you mean, this is yours?’ he stammered, breathing hard from his exertion. He hadn’t yet given up on the idea that a deal could be made. Maybe they were simply testing him here?

‘Just what we say, arsehole,’ the taller one said. ‘The bag.’

As if to emphasise that this wasn’t a joke, the shorter one raised his weapon to chest height and squinted along its barrel. Helpless to do otherwise, Lazenby rocked forward on the balls of his feet, and hurled the heavy sports bag over the two or three yards between them.

The taller one let his firearm swing from a shoulder strap while he hunkered down and tugged the holdall’s zip open. Almost immediately, he glanced up. Lazenby could only see his eyes – which were colourless in the dimness – but he had no doubt there was a smile behind that woollen visage.

‘Good lad,’ came the voice.

The taller one drew something out of his jacket pocket, which, when he unrolled it, turned out to be a black canvas sack. Almost casually, he began cramming the blocks of cash inside it.

‘Seriously?’ Lazenby said as he watched. ‘This is the whole plan? A chicken-feed robbery? I thought you guys were supposed to be businessmen. Have you any idea how much money we could make if we reached some kind of agreement?’

They didn’t bother to reply.

Lazenby’s sweat rapidly cooled in the October night. His thoughts swam like directionless fish. There was still no need for despair. They weren’t for playing ball at present, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t do in due course. These two were just crude muscle, no doubt; a pair of paid thugs. Making deals didn’t figure in their remit. And that really could not be the end of it. The Crew hadn’t got to the top of the criminal tree by knocking off a bit of bent gear here and there.

But throughout these ruminations, Lazenby increasingly found himself distracted by how small their canvas bag was. It didn’t look big enough, not for the coke as well. And indeed, once the money was loaded, the bag was zipped closed and kicked backward into the shadows. Lazenby watched, increasingly bemused, as the taller bandit now zipped up the original sports bag, with the coke still inside it, and tossed it back into the lock-up.

Were they simply here to teach him a lesson then? Taking every spare penny he had as a down-payment on future deals? He supposed that might be one underworld method.

But then something even more bewildering happened.

The taller bandit walked around to the other side of the Galaxy, bent down and picked something up. There was a metallic snick – the sound a cigarette lighter makes when being struck – followed by a burst of wavering light. When he came back, he was carrying a two-pint glass bottle full of greyish liquid, with a burning rag stuffed into the neck.

‘What the fu …’ Lazenby shouted, diving out of the way as the guy flung it into the lock-up.

It exploded furiously, the blazing payload engulfing the old clothes, the decrepit furniture, and the bag containing the cocaine.

‘Are you fucking nuts!’ Lazenby screamed, scrambling back to his feet and trying to approach the open doorway, but inevitably being driven back by the heat of the flame-filled interior. ‘There’s over four-hundred grand’s worth of dope in there!’

He never noticed the reply coming – in the shape of a sub-machine gun’s walnut stock, which slammed into the side of his jawbone with such force that he literally saw stars as the world cavorted around him, and the damp tarmac rushed up to his face.

As Ordinary Joe Lazenby lay there, groggy, only half aware of the hot blood filling his mouth, a wool-clad face appeared next to his ear, and whispered: ‘Not anymore.’