The Cover Up: A gripping crime thriller for 2018

It had started with a scuffle. A little pushing and a testosterone-fuelled hokey-cokey where neither had conceded ground to the other.

‘No guns,’ Frank had prayed quietly to a God that never seemed to listen. ‘Please don’t let them have sodding guns.’

The transition from minor altercation to full-on fisticuffs had taken less than a minute. Otis, his burliest bouncer, had taken a right hook from one of the guys with dreads that had sent him flying backwards into a podium like an ungainly clown.

Now, Degsy had pulled a gun to best the Asian lad’s knife in an underworld rendition of rock, paper, scissors. Shit, shit, shit. The lying, lanky arsehole was armed to the teeth. Should he stop the music? Should he call Conks, after all?

Frank withdrew a baggie of coke from the pocket of his jeans. Took a hefty pinch of the white powder and deposited it on the back of his sinewy hand. Snorted what he could. Rubbed the rest around his gums. The effect was instant. Pharmaceutical Columbian courage followed soon after.

‘Right, you bastards,’ he said to himself, pulling the sleeves of his old James T up in some deluded act of strong-arm bravado. ‘Nobody messes with an O’Brien.’

Ignoring his racing pulse and the feeling that his legs were liquefying, he crossed the club, heading towards the scrum. No need for that big Northern Irish bollocks. Not tonight. Remember Jack. Don’t make this all for nowt. He approached one of the white rogue dealers from behind.

‘Get out my sodding club!’ he screamed in the man’s ear, grabbing him tightly by the scruff of his neck. Turning his collar into a garrotte. Kneeing him in the sweet spot on the backs of his legs so that they buckled.

Frank was a warrior, now, posthumously defending his son’s honour. Heard his own voice, hoarse and venomous above the music.

‘Who’s your boss? Tell me or I’ll rip your bleeding head off.’ Fingers in the man’s kidneys.

‘Fuck you!’ the dealer shouted, elbowing Frank in the stomach.

There was a flash of metal as the Asian lad stabbed one of the bouncers. Fists flew. It was carnage.

‘Back off, or I’m gonna blow you all into next Wednesday!’ Degsy yelled, waving his piece at the interlopers.

But the guy with the dreads and bad acne scarring was suddenly upon Degsy, waving a semi-automatic. ‘Drop the gun, Manc twat, or I’ll put a bullet in your ugly head!’ His death threats were levelled in a sing-song accent like some nightmarish nursery rhyme.

Degsy and Dreads both clicked their safeties off. A stand-off. Not good.

Frank was dimly aware of the shrieking of the clubbers on the fringes of his ill-fated dance floor and of the speed-daters who were clattering up the iron staircase from Jack’s Bar below, fleeing the scene. Gloria Bell’s face in among them, somewhere. An overwhelming sense of déjà vu and fear that his club-owning days were finished bore down on him. But his melancholy musings were interrupted by the unmistakeable growl of Conky McFadden, striding through the phalanx of onlookers.

‘Hands in the air, you scabby wee turds or I’ll take the lot of yous out!’

Who the hell had called the Loss Adjuster? The bouncers, almost certainly.

Upon them now and casting a long shadow over the interlopers like an avenging dark angel, Conky held a SIG Sauer before him. The music had stopped, as if to pay respectful tribute to the fabled Loss Adjuster’s appearance on the charged scene.

‘Do you remember me?’ he bellowed, bearing down on dreads-with-a-gun. Striding right up to him, as though his opponent clutched a child’s toy weapon. Pressing the nose of his gun right into the dealer’s jaw. With his free leather-gloved hand, he removed his shades with a flourish. His bulging eyes shone with obvious professional glee. ‘Do you know who I am?’

Dreads dropped his pistol. Held his hands up. Swallowed visibly. ‘Yeah.’

‘Get out of this club and get on a train back to Birmingham, like the yokels you are,’ Conky said, encasing Dreads’ throat in a large hand. ‘Tell your eejit boss Nigel Bancroft that if any of you set foot in South Manchester again, you’ll be going home in Tupperware stacking boxes. And you make sure he understands fully that if I see his ponce’s bake in O’Brien territory again, I’ll shoot some fucking wrinkles in him that Botox will never remove.’

Realising that he had been holding his breath all the while that Conky had been speaking, Frank straightened himself up. Inhaled. Exhaled. He acknowledged with some bitterness that he’d been unable to control what went on in his own environment. He felt the humiliation neutralise the bravado in his body. But his pulse thundered on apace and for a moment, as pain travelled up his left arm and encased his tired heart in pure, uncut agony, he wondered if he too would be going home in a wooden overcoat.

‘Frank. Are you okay?’ Conky’s voice, close by.

Clutching his arm, Frank dropped to his knees. I’m coming, Jack. I’m coming.

Chapter 8 (#ulink_7e1a89b1-392a-5f4c-9825-87acaa4bda3e)

Tariq

‘I’m not coming in,’ Jonny said. His voice was gruff and thick with sleep.

Tariq imagined his business partner lounging in bed or, perhaps, sprawled on the sofa in his den. Par for the course, these days.

‘Aw, come on, Jon. For God’s sake! You’ve been in work twice in a fortnight. When you do come in, you hole yourself up in your office with the Fish Man.’ Tariq held his phone in one hand, pouring muesli into a bowl with the other. He could feel Anjum’s eyes on him, scanning his every move for signs of subterfuge. The kitchen felt several degrees colder with every second that she scrutinised him. He lowered his voice, turning his back to her, hoping the sound of her mashing egg mayo for the children’s packed lunches would be enough to drown out the finer points of his conversation. ‘Plotting. That’s all you do. Plotting revenge. Like that’s going to bring Mia back!’

Screwing down the plastic muesli sack deftly, he replaced the box inside the cereals cupboard. Irritated that the flaps wouldn’t quite fold shut, destroying the neat line of the cereal packets. Taking the muesli out again, he jostled the phone in one hand and rummaged for the sellotape in the stationery drawer with the other.

‘Hold on,’ he said, exasperated. Setting the phone down, he detached a length of tape with his teeth and strapped the wayward flaps shut – the way he liked it. At least he could impose order on a cardboard box, if on no other area of his life. ‘Now. What was I saying?’ Eyeing his wife as she smoothed the eggs onto bread for Shazia and Zahid and buttered toast for his father, he imagined agitation, rising in waves from the top of her hair. She wore a chignon today – styled tightly against her skull, mirroring the tight expression on her unmade-up face. Only animosity between them now that she finally knew how he and Jonny really made their handsome living. ‘So, you’re staying at home. Again?’

‘Yeah. I’ll be in tomorrow.’

‘I won’t hold my breath.’

Tariq was just about to hang up when he remembered the point of the call. ‘Wait! Before you go … You ever seen a black guy with dreadlocks and a big white guy with a dirty blond crop working for the O’Briens?’

There was silence, followed by a yawn. ‘No.’

Glancing at the finance pages of the newspaper, laid out on the breakfast bar, Tariq yet again scanned the article that reported on multi-millionaire Nigel Bancroft’s expansion into corporate property, north of Birmingham. He tapped the photo of the bland-faced playboy in his collarless, pin-tucked dress-shirt and jazzy leather-trimmed evening jacket, posing for a professional shot at some post-polo-match charity ball. ‘What do you know about Nigel Bancroft?’

On the other end of the phone, Jonny smacked his lips. A rustling sound as he rolled over in bed, perhaps, preparing himself for nothing more taxing than spending yet another day obsessing over the possible Margulies blood on Leviticus Bell’s hands while Tariq did all the work.

‘Runs the Midlands, doesn’t he?’

‘Yep.’ Tariq walked to the fridge. Scowled at the selection of milk in the door, staring in disbelief at the almond milk. Sweetened! He took out the carton, shaking it at Anjum with a questioning look on his face.

There was a hint of mischief in his wife’s eyes. A smile, playing at the corners of her mouth. Had she deliberately bought him the sweetened milk, knowing he wouldn’t drink it? Knowing that if he resorted to using the wrong milk, it would set him on edge for the rest of the day?

‘Look. I don’t know any more than you about Nigel-whatever-his-name-is,’ Jonny said. He hung up then, leaving Tariq staring at the word ‘sweetened’ with a bad taste in his mouth.

Had the men who had tried to snatch his father from the car wash forecourt been Sheila’s soldiers? Or had they heralded the arrival in Manchester of a sortie that had been despatched on a reconnaissance mission by an enemy force from beyond the Staffordshire hills?

He set the phone down. Held the almond milk out gingerly, as if it contained plutonium. ‘Darling, what’s with this?’ he asked Anjum. ‘You know I’ve cut out processed carbs.’

She slammed the plate of toast onto the butcher’s block counter in front of Youssuf with some force, sending the toast scudding onto the wooden surface. ‘You know where Tesco’s is, darling.’

With a bemused expression, Youssuf looked from Anjum to him, then to Shazia and Zahid. His father smiled at his grandchildren with a shrug and a wink, though Tariq could see the discomfiture behind those milky eyes. The children merely giggled in response, thinking their old Daada funny; not for an instant picking up on the bitter acrimony between their parents in that kitchen.

Sighing, Tariq poured the wrong milk onto his muesli, wincing inwardly as the sickly-sweet taste registered on his discerning palate as a culinary affront. Damned if he was going to give his wife the satisfaction of not drinking it.

‘What have you got on the cards today, my love?’ he asked, willing her to make nice for the sake of the kids.

She peered at him through her Prada glasses, narrowing her eyes. ‘Oh, you know … preparing asylum cases for trafficked girls …’ She raised her voice. There was an edge to it. Even the children fell silent. ‘Who have been forced into slave labour by morally bankrupt, money-grubbing hypocrites and subjected to systematic abuse by men who see them as nothing more than commodities made from flesh.’ Anjum sat down primly at the breakfast bar and took a violent bite of her apple, gnashing her molars together without moving her laser-like gaze from him.

Tariq felt a twinge of corresponding pain in his groin. He swallowed hard, wishing that time-travel back to the winter – the time when his secret had still been safe – were feasible, or that if parallel worlds were really a possibility, another Tariq Khan existed, still living a harmonious family life with a wife who still believed he was nothing more than a respectable, hard-working businessman. He pushed away the bowl of unpalatable muesli, realising that Anjum would never unsee the trafficked Slovakian girl in her offices or unhear the story of her enslavement at the hands of the Boddlington bosses.