The Cover Up: A gripping crime thriller for 2018

‘Now. Stop wasting my time, Mr Bancroft,’ Sheila said, checking her watch as though she had some more pressing engagement to attend. ‘I wanna know who fed you information about me and I want to hear your proposal. No dicking around.’

‘I’m not giving you my sources,’ Bancroft said, grinning like a bloody eejit again. ‘But I will say this: I’ll run your drugs, protection racket, any girls, gambling … whatever. All the tough stuff, I’ll run and give you fifteen per cent. I take all the risk. You just sit back and take the money.’ He opened his arms, raising them up as though he had just announced he had found a cure for cancer to a hospital ward full of the dying.

‘Fifteen?!’ Conky said, hoping the arsehole could hear the derision in his voice.

Sheila stalked towards Bancroft, pushing her face right up against his. ‘You’re taking the piss. Shall I tell you what you can do with your fifteen lousy per cent?’

Sheila dipped her slender hand into the handbag. Bancroft’s eyes widened as she pressed her gun into his gut.

Conky held his breath. Would she shoot?

‘You can stick your offer right up your jacksy,’ she said, seeming to grow even more in stature. ‘You’ve wasted my time. Getting me down here, just so you can wave your dick at me before you try to shaft me for my business?’

‘No, I haven’t!’ Bancroft said. ‘The offer’s in good faith.’

‘Feel that?’ Sheila said, pushing the snub nose down towards his abdomen. Still out of the eyeline of Bancroft’s henchmen, who hung back, too far away to hear this exchange, Conky calculated. ‘That’s my dick you can feel.’ She raised her eyebrows and widened her eyes like an excited child, boarding a ride at a fairground. ‘If you want me to shoot my load, carry on with the insults, pal. Because you’re insulting me right now, and my dick feels a romance explosion coming on that won’t end well for you.’

‘Twenty per cent, then,’ Bancroft’s skin had paled to a sickly yellow now. His eyes darted to and fro, as though he was desperate to alert his boys to the danger he faced.

Conky could see Sheila click the safety off. ‘There you go again with the insults. How about you tell me the name of the grassing little shit who seems to think my business is his business?’

‘Twenty-five. There. That’s my best offer, Sheila. Twenty-five per cent to run your drugs and protection and that.’

‘Raise your hands where I can see them,’ she said. ‘Any last words?’

‘All right! All right!’ Bancroft did as asked, shaking his head vociferously at his two men, as they moved in towards him, guns drawn, aimed at Sheila and Conky. ‘Just mull it over, will you? It’s good business sense, and you know it. Please.’

Appraising the scene with the swift eyes of a militia man, Conky noted the innocent passers-by some hundred metres away. Made a split-second decision as to whether he could take out these two lumps and their bossman before the situation got out of hand. The specially manufactured prisms in the lenses of his Ray-Bans boosted his weak thyroid-eyes back to better than twenty-twenty vision. He could take them out, all right.

‘Put your guns away, lads,’ Bancroft said. A sheen of sweat glistened on his forehead. ‘Sheila here is just being cautious, aren’t you? It’s understandable.’

‘She’s taking the piss, Nige,’ the black guy said.

‘Stand down, Steve. And you, Trev. It’s okay. We’re all good. Sheila’s just going to chew over my offer, aren’t you, love?’

Conky could almost taste the adrenalin in the air. Blood rushed and roared in his ears. Here was the crux of the meet.

‘Love? Don’t you, “love” me, you presumptuous bastard,’ Sheila said, taking an all-important step away from Bancroft, though she still clutched the pistol in her hand.

Bancroft lowered his arms uncertainly. Gestured for his men to back down.

A young woman, clutching the hands of two small children, had started to cross the footbridge. She was moving closer by the second to the shores of the Lowry Theatre. Conky estimated that they had thirty seconds tops in which to negotiate a peaceful conclusion to the ill-fated proceedings. He was relieved to see the black guy shove his weapon back inside his coat pocket.

‘This meeting’s over,’ Sheila said, clumsily opening her handbag with the hand that clutched her gun. ‘Now, piss off back down the M6 with your proposition.’

But the white man-mountain in the leather donkey jacket was still aiming his gun at Sheila’s head. His colour was high. His eyes were glazed. Conky knew a man who had lost control when he saw one. The woman with the two small children was upon him, looking askance at the spectacle of a giant clutching a gun. When she screamed, Conky knew he’d left it too long to react.

Chapter 4 (#ulink_dae2e0fc-f220-530e-a851-a96f8279b925)

Paddy

‘Another pint, Marcus, kind sir!’ Paddy thrust his glass out towards the craggy-faced landlord, brandishing it beneath the short man’s nose as if it were a broken bottle. His words were slurring – he could hear that much. Had been for the last hour. But with every pint of bitter he drank, the reality of Kenneth Wainwright’s sad, shitty, low-rent world became more blissfully blurred around the edges; the ache of the scar where his body had been opened up with a boning knife by that little arsehole Leviticus Bell, posing as Asaf Smolensky, had dulled … just for a booze-numbed while.

‘You’ve had enough, Ken,’ the landlord said, grabbing Paddy’s wrist with an unforgiving hand. Stronger than he looked. ‘Go home and sleep it off, mate.’

Swaying slightly, Paddy calculated whether he should accept the rejection or square up to this pint-sized hard nut. He slapped several pound coins onto the sticky bar with his free hand. ‘My money not good enough for you?’

The landlord released his wrist. Looked down at the money. ‘Go home. Sleep it off. Come back later. Then I’ll serve you.’ His face softened only slightly, revealing a smile that was like a tight fissure in his bark-like skin. ‘Come on, Ken. You’re not worth much to me as a regular if you get knocked down on the way home cos you’re too pissed to see straight.’

Feeling his pulse thunder with adrenalin, the Paddy of old relished the invincible feeling of The Rage taking over his battered body. But the part of Paddy that was still just about sober dimly acknowledged that he was – for now – no longer the boss of South Manchester. He was not the King. At the insistence of Katrina – the almighty Sister Benedicta – he had taken on the threadbare mantel of Kenneth Wainwright willingly and for a reason. Lie low, Pad. Gather your strength. Sting those plotting, lying bastards when they least expect it. Destroy every last one of them. Tariq, Jonny, Conky, Lev, Gloria and Sheila. Sheila … bring that bitch to heel and reclaim her as your wife. His intentions, not Katrina’s. His sister had hoped he’d use the fresh start to make a new life for himself. But hadn’t she always played the controlling older sibling? Paddy, despite his new-found vulnerability, was in no mood to be ruled by another.

His sluggish, internal debate was interrupted by his phone ringing loudly. Buzzing its way across the beer-splattered mahogany, where it butted up against a washed-out bar towel. Katrina’s name on the display, of course.

‘Oh, bloody hell. Here we go.’

On the other end of the crackling line, Katrina’s voice sounded edged with hellfire and damnation. ‘Patrick! I got your message. You sounded drunk. Please tell me you haven’t burned through your week’s money already. And please tell me you’re not in that crumbling den of iniquity, The Feckless Oik’s Arms again.’

In the background, he could hear the noises of the nursing home that she ran with military bombast – the beeping of residents’ alarms; the monotonous verbal ramblings of old Rose, who tottered up and down the corridors all day long on her zimmer, repeating the same demented shit about needing the toilet, though she wore an inconti-pad so big that it barely fit inside her gusset. Swaying slightly on his bar stool, he imagined he could still smell the stale cabbage and cloying stink of soiled underwear.

He belched down the phone. ‘I can’t live on peanuts, Kat. Drop us hundred quid round, will you? Just til Giro day.’

There was a muffled noise on the other end – his sister, putting her well-scrubbed hand over the mouthpiece, perhaps, to stop the other nuns from eavesdropping. ‘I didn’t commit fraud to get you a new identity just so you could wash your chance of a new life into a barman’s swill bucket, Patrick O’Brien.’

Paddy tugged absently at the wadding that spilled out of the vinyl seat cover. ‘Piss off, Kat. You don’t have the first bloody idea what it’s like for a rich man to need state handouts. Do you know how little a sad bastard like Wainwright—’ In amongst the beer fumes, he realised he had slipped up. Eyed Mark the landlord furtively. ‘I mean, a man like me gets in disability benefit? I spent more on my aftershave than I get to live on for a week now.’ Damn. Another slip-up. Putting his mouth into gear before his brain was switched on. That’s what his Mammy would have said.

‘Patrick!’ The agitation in her voice was clear. Paddy had called the shots for decades. Now, suddenly, the jackboot was on the other foot. ‘I am not giving you extra money out of the nursing home’s coffers to fund death by cirrhosis of the liver. You’re turning into Dad.’

‘Thanks a bundle. Is that a no, then?’

The line went dead. Paddy smashed his phone onto the bar top, cracking the screen.

‘Right!’ the landlord shouted. ‘That’s it, Ken. Out!’

Surprised to find himself deftly manhandled by the landlord towards the door, Paddy pointed confusedly at him. ‘How did you get over the bar? Fucking … Spiderman!’

The other drinkers barely looked up from their pints, sitting as they were, in silence around three or four old tables that were dark-stained with ages-old stout spillage and nicotine from a bygone era. Cracked and dirty single-glazed windows barely shed light on the dump, with its swirling brown and lime carpet.

‘Shithole!’ Paddy shouted, shrugging the landlord off. Searching for words that came only reluctantly through the hoppy fog of beer-thoughts. ‘Shitty carpet.’

‘See you later, Ken,’ the landlord said, pushing him gently onto the street. ‘Go home and eat something.’ The door was closed firmly behind him.

Stumbling into the street, Paddy clutched at his stomach. Even now, after six pints, he could feel the ache of a body healing reluctantly.

A horn honked, loud and long. Then, an angry voice.

‘Get out of the way, wanker!’

Paddy jerked himself backwards onto the kerb, surprised that he had veered into the road and the path of a white van without realising. The driver had stopped abruptly, his passenger hanging out of the cab window, screaming at him with an angry red face, peeping out from a plaster-encrusted beany.