J. Gregson - Brothers

The window beside the driver slid slowly down. ‘Hop into the back, Mr Tracey,’ the face said with false cheerfulness.

‘No way. You get out and we talk here.’

The big face beamed like that of a man with four aces in his hand. ‘You don’t have a choice, Steve.’ He grinned sideways at the invisible muscle beside him, then repeated, ‘Hop into the back, Mr Tracey.’

Steve opened the door, slid his bulk swiftly over the leather of the rear seat. One down already. But with his employer dead, he didn’t see how he could call the shots.

‘Boss wants to see you. You could be a fortunate man.’

They were the only words spoken in fourteen miles. They drove fast, over the moors on the A666 to Bolton, through the town and into the urban sprawl where it merged into greater Manchester. Tracey didn’t know this area and he was correspondingly more nervous. If they beat him up and pitched him out here, he wouldn’t know where to turn for help. If they shot him, there were plenty of places beneath water or concrete where they could dump his corpse so that it would never be seen again. Strange roads and strange buildings brought the sort of wild fears which you did not feel on your own patch.

He said nothing. They wouldn’t answer his questions and he wasn’t going to attempt any other sort of talk with men like this. They were alien, yet strangely like himself. They were acting under orders and they had no interest in him, unless he prevented those orders being carried out. He knew one of these men and that told him a lot. He thought he knew who they worked for. He wondered whether it was one of the two close-shaven, squat men he could see in front of him who had shot his boss. And then he wondered as he moved off his own patch and on to theirs whether they were going to shoot him.

It was a hut on a building site where they finally stopped. A strange, deserted, sinister place. Silent when it should have been noisy, quiet and motionless when it should have been busy with activity. The gorilla got out of the driving seat and looked at Tracey curiously. Strangely, his thickset shape and unintelligent features gave Steve reason to hope. This was low-level security, the kind of loyal, unquestioning thug he would have used himself for enforcement work, for scaring small people into a resentful obedience. If they’d been licensed to kill him or even rough him up, they’d have done it in a dark alley somewhere, not brought him here.

The man motioned towards the door of the hut, but he remained outside as Tracey entered and shut it carefully behind him. The man behind the desk inside the shed was as alert and watchful as he was, but he had affected the trappings of respectability. He was probably from Jamaica, in Steve’s view. He wore a three-piece suit, with a thin gold watch-chain stretched across his bulging chest. He clasped his well-manicured hands in front of him, as if anxious to show off his perfect nails to the man instructed to sit on the other side of the desk. Steve wondered if he would complete the parody by lighting a cigar, but he merely sat back and looked at the new arrival with a smile, relishing the situation.

He was a strange figure in a strange environment. Apart from his colour, he was a caricature of a nineteenth-century industrial baron in this dingy twenty-first-century setting. There was a chart on the wall with what seemed to be a plan of foundations for the buildings to be erected here. It had words scribbled across it which were illegible from where Steve Tracey sat. Lumps of drying mud from people’s boots littered the floor; a week-old tabloid newspaper lay in the corner of the shed. There was something ludicrous about the overdressed central figure which gave Tracey a sudden, unexpected spurt of confidence.

It wasn’t the big boss, as those idiots outside had said it would be. It was their boss, the man in charge of security for some organisation. A big concern, by the look of it. A well-organised business: this was a suitably anonymous place for a meet, whatever the dress affectations of the man conducting it. Tracey sat motionless and waited; he wasn’t going to let the man with the watch-chain know that he was nervous.

The man sat back, steepled his fingers, continued his impersonation of a different kind of executive. ‘Well, Mr Tracey. So your boss is dead. And your job was to protect him. Didn’t do a very good job there, did you?’

‘I offered to stay with him on Monday night. He said it wasn’t necessary.’

‘You didn’t kill him yourself, did you, Steve?’

‘Of course I didn’t! He’d be alive now if he’d allowed me to stay with him when he went outside Claughton Towers on Monday night.’

Watch-chain smiled. ‘I wouldn’t be too sure of that. You might have been dead meat yourself, Steve, instead of enjoying this conversation. You don’t mind me calling you Steve, do you?’

‘You can call me what you like. You’re in the box seat. You and your gorillas outside.’

‘Box seat. Yes, I suppose that’s so.’ He smiled contentedly, his teeth looking very large and very white in this ill-lit place. ‘But I have good news for you, Steve. I have been empowered to offer you employment. Generous thinking, that, after you failed in your last assignment. But then I work for a generous man.’

‘Lennon.’ Steve had been thinking furiously, trying to work out who could be behind his virtual kidnap.

Watch-chain looked a little surprised, even for a moment discomfited. ‘Best not to speculate at this stage, Steve. But I suppose you have a right to know who’ll be paying your wages. So yes, Mr Lennon. He’s prepared to take you on. He’s taking over most of your organisation following the unfortunate demise of James O’Connor. And he wants as smooth a transition as possible. So he’s prepared to take on you and whichever two of your staff you recommend. You’d be deputy to me, of course.’ He ran his hand lightly over the front of his waistcoat, fingering the watch-chain as if it offered him reassurance. ‘But you’d be second in line in our security department. It’s a very generous offer, if you ask me.’

Steve wanted to say that he didn’t ask him, that he’d had quite enough of this patronising nonsense. But this fellow was making a generous offer on behalf of his employer, offering a job to a rival in the same trade of violence. He was going to have to work with the Jamaican. If the man was vain enough to indulge in silly charades like this, he might even take over from him, in due course.

Tracey took a deep breath and stood up. There was no possibility of refusal. He knew too much about the empire of James O’Connor for that. If he opted out of work for the new ownership, he might well be eliminated. He thrust out his hand and said, ‘I accept, subject to proper remuneration. I’m sure I can rely on Mr Lennon for that.’

The man in the waistcoat winced again at Tracey’s mention of that name. He had planned to reveal it himself at this stage to this man who would operate in his shadow. But he stood up and thrust his hand forward. ‘Peter Coleman. Here’s to a long and successful working relationship.’

Middle management making a new appointment. Steve completed the bizarre playlet by shaking the big hand firmly, then closing his left hand over the right as the two big men came together. He wondered how many victims these hands had dispatched in the last ten years.

There had been a mill here once. It had been built in bright-red brick, with a square tower at one end, like that of a great church. A chimney had risen high at the other, dwarfing everything else around. The long terraces of low houses had been built in meaner brick, but they had been homes to many hundreds of people. The streets here had once reverberated with the sound of clogs clattering to work, hastening to beat the morning whistle at the factory gates, to shut their wearers in with the greater clatter of the steam-driven machines within the smooth brick walls.