Bad Music 10
Some devil.
Dominic dropped Zlata off on the high street and then drove up to Springwell before turning onto Leam Lane, the old Roman Road that pointed straight toward South Shields, from Where Will Armstrong and his clan ran their small but lucrative criminal empire.
He crossed beneath the Felling Bypass, following a road that had originally led straight to Arbeia, a fortress at the very edge of Roman Empire, beyond which had been the Wall, then the wild land of the blue-painted Picts. But now the road dog-legged to the docks and then arrived at the ferry instead of a colonial military base. He parked the truck outside the Alum Ale House that sat right on the river bank, got out, locked the truck, satisfied again at the snick of the new lock, and walked to the front door.
Inside, the pub was empty save for the barmaid and a solitary man watching the TV. He approached the counter. ‘I’m looking for Will Armstrong.’
‘Never heard of him.’
He looked around. The man watching TV was nursing a coffee. Not a drinker then, he thought.
‘I’m an old friend,’ he said.
‘Still never heard of him.’
The man watching the TV said, ‘What do you want Will Armstrong for?’
‘I’m an old friend.’
‘Will doesn’t have any old friends.’
Dominic walked over and sat down facing him. ‘He does. Me.’
The man was about twenty-five years old, with cropped blonde hair. He kept his eye on the television. He said, ‘Who’s Me?’
‘Dominic Kerr.’
The man picked up the remote and paused the programme. ‘I heard of you.’
‘Where is he?’
‘Across the river.’
‘Scotland is across the river.’
‘What?’ The man looked at him now.
‘Be more specific.’
‘Ferry. Turn right. Turn left at the chippy.’
‘Will’s got business on the north side now?’
The man gave an odd smile. ‘We own the neck of the Tyne.’
Which confirmed him as one of Will’s sons. ‘Thankyou,’ Dominic said. The man turned on the TV. Dominic rose, left the pub and walked past his truck and towards the ferry.
Twenty minutes later, he stepped onto the pier on the north side of the river. As instructed, he turned right, walking between riverside apartment blocks and a row of artisanal shops. Eventually he arrived at a greasy spoon café where, inside, a ruddy-faced man was reading a tablet. Dominic pushed the door open, stepped inside and approached the counter. ‘Two teas, please, two chip butties,’ he said to the woman behind the glass-topped counter.
He walked over to where the man sat. Without looking up at Dominic, the man said, ‘Should have let me order. I don’t pay.’
Dominic sat down. ‘Will,’ he said.
‘Dominic.’
There was a period of a few seconds silence as Will Armstrong closed down his tablet, then he looked up at Dominic and said, ‘I hear our boys are running together.’
Zlata walked up the steps to the front door, let herself in. She went straight into the kitchen and dumped the eggs and bacon in the fridge, fresh bread in the breadbin, a new jar of coffee on the table. In the living room she could hear Chess growling and barking. She followed the noise until she could see what was going on. ‘Angus,’ she said.
He was lying on the floor wrestling with Chess, playing tug with one of his toys, hiding it beneath his body, throwing it into the air. The two of them were grappling and wrestling and both of them growling and barking; they looked blissful. She shook her head. Two puppies, she thought.
He looked up, smiled. ‘Hey Z.’
‘Two young lads doing daft stuff,’ Will said.
‘If that’s all it was, I wouldn’t worry, Will, but it’s cocaine. Wholesale. I’ve had a visit from the cops and representatives of two different gangs at my door.’
‘I had that Pakistani cop at the Alum yesterday.’
‘She’s Sikh.’
‘There’s a difference?’
‘There is to them. What did she say.’
‘Tried to prod something out of me. I said I’d give her all the info she’d ever need in exchange for a blowjob.’ His eyebrows raised a little, and with his pink face and reddish stubble face it made him look like one of the minor devils. ‘She wasn’t happy.’
The tea and butties arrived. They stopped talking to eat. When Will was nearly finished, he said, ‘I offered to pay. Fair’s fair.’ He shook his head, swallowed the last of his food. ‘Still wasn’t happy.’ He looked at Dominic, giving him that old leery smile. ‘She tried to kid a kidder, Dom, I mean, what else am I going to do?’
Dominic nodded. His own butty was barely half-consumed. He put it down. ‘What are we going to do, Will?’
‘I heard they sold a kilo to Chucky Graham,’ Will said, slurping his tea. ‘And he paid good money.’ He considered. ‘Thing is, he won’t want to pay good money next time.’
‘I had some old-school Romanian called Lala at my door.’
‘Heard of him. Drugs, underage girls, burglary gangs. He runs the car washes and turkish barbers.’
‘All of them?’
‘Everything between the rivers, and five miles either side.’
‘Competitor?’
A shake of the head. ‘The days of me wholesaling marijuana and extorting honest business folk are long over. Cocaine I never touched in the first place; never fancied Marbella, or twenty years in chokey. I run properties now. Students. Buy a derelict house, give it a lick of paint. Eight rooms, eight students, rent up front. They pay, they’re clean, and the university backs their debts if they do a runner. Guaranteed income.’
Dominic didn’t doubt that Will ran property, but he doubted he was out of the crime game. ‘I heard the government offers top money to house migrants.’
Will frowned. ‘I’m a former criminal, Dominic, not a fucking traitor.’ He picked up his tea mug, swirled it.
‘I had a representative of the religion of peace visit me,’ Dominic said.
‘They’re involved?’ Will said, looking up.
‘I believe it was their drugs that our boys stole.’
Will stroked his chin, fingernail rasping against the stubble. ‘You thinking we need to fish our boys out of these dark waters they’re swimming in?’
Dominic nodded. ‘This has got the potential to be worse than anything we ever did.’
Will gave Dominic a dark look. ‘I doubt that, Dominic. I doubt it very much. Just because we drowned our secrets in the north-sea, doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten what we did.’ He drank off the last of his tea. ‘But you’re not here looking for advice from an old pal, are you?’ He put his mug down on the table, wiped his stubbly mouth with a sleeve. ‘You’re here to get a sniff of the old days, to remind you of who you are, so that you’re ready for whatever it is that you might have to do.’
Dominic tilted his head, looked at his old friend, his voice cold. ‘I don’t need to visit you to put credit in that account, Will. It’s always in the black.’
Will looked back, just as steady. Then he smiled. ‘There you are, Dom. Thirty years gone by in a flash, and there you are, like nothing has changed, like you always were.’
Zlata washed up the coffee cups and the plates. She couldn’t figure Angus. He seemed to run two separate programs at once. She knew what Dominic had told her, that he was wild and violent and risk-taking, but to her he was always friendly and gentle and scrupulously polite. Playing with the dog, he seemed careless, unworried, child-like almost, not the wild criminal that both police and drug dealers were supposedly searching for. And like his father, he loved music. He played piano so well, the times she’d heard him play. Things just seemed to come natural to him that he never stopped to consider their value. She’d met men like him back home; walking blithely through the world like infinitely dangerous children. Her country was full of them now. Her brother Ihor had been like that towards the end. She wondered if that was the devil’s true plan, to produce such men, and she went to cross herself but her thoughts were interrupted by a knock at the front door. She waited. Chess was no longer growling or barking. She heard the knock again. Drying her hands, she walked through to the front room. Angus wasn’t there. Chess was sitting on Dominic’s chair, alone, panting. She went to the front door and when she opened it there was a tall, handsome African-Caribbean man standing there.
Dominic drove back the same route, thinking that maybe Will was right. He’d needed just a sniff, the barest taste of the old days, to focus his mind. But then again, he thought, Will Armstrong wasn’t the first person he’d go to if he needed help. And he needed help. Nothing had happened yet, but it was going to, he could feel it.
At the back of his mind, some unconscious threshold was met, and without pausing to consider, he indicated right, crossed the dual-carriageway, and pulled up in a Travelodge car park. He opened the glove box, and from the very back, hidden beneath insurance documents and old receipts, he took out an ancient phone and a power cable. Plugged it into the system he’d rigged up. After five minutes, it was charged enough for a light to switch on.
He searched his memory.
He dialed a number.
‘Hello,’ she said.
‘I’m Detective Minto,’ he said, and showed her his warrant card, ‘I work for the National Crime Agency. I’m hoping to speak to Dominic Kerr?’
‘He’s not in right now,’ she said. She glanced at her wrist watch. ‘He shouldn’t be too long.’
‘I’d really like to speak to him. Is it possible for me to come in and wait?’
He seemed pleasant, and Zlata knew that English police were to be trusted. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Come in.’
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