Howard Linskey - The Drop

‘And you never thought to ask him where he was going to get the money for that amount of blow?’

‘It was none of my business was it?’ protested Billy, ‘he said he would get the guy his money but that I had to set up the meet with our footballer for that same day.’

‘So he’d pay the Russian for the coke and sell it on through you to Golden Boots straight away for a nice, quick profit?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Did he say why it had to be so quick?’

Billy shook his head, ‘That was his business.’

‘So you reckon you didn’t know he was stealing money from Bobby Mahoney to fund this deal?’

“Course not!’ he said, ‘I would never have allowed… ’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ I interrupted, ‘so what happened?’

‘Cartwright dropped the coke off like he said he would. I set up the meet but I had to call it off at the last minute.’

‘Why?’

‘Well it turned out our client had to play in a reserve match at short notice so he couldn’t come by after all. In any case, Cartwright didn’t come back,’ he shrugged.

‘Cartwright didn’t come back,’ I said, ‘because Cartwright was being killed, most probably by his Russian mate.

‘Jesus,’ said Billy his eyes widening, ‘he got killed for a few grands worth of coke?’

‘No Billy,’ I told him patiently, ‘he got killed because of the money he was holding for Bobby, which was worth a lot more than a couple of Ks of coke.’

‘Oh Christ,’ he turned pale, well, even more pale, ‘what can I do? Name it man, anything. What can I do to make this right?’

‘Can you contact this Russian?’

‘No, it all went through Cartwright.’

‘I don’t know then Billy,’ I said regretfully, ‘you’re in the shit now and no mistake.’

‘I knew I shouldn’t have listened to Cartwright,’ he was rocking back and forth on his sofa like a traumatised soldier. ‘I knew it.’

I let it sink in for a while so even a man as stupid as Billy Warren could work out how much trouble he was in. When he was good and scared I told him, ‘okay, you want a way out of this,’ I said, ‘here’s what you’re going to do. You are going to phone up Golden Boots and get the deal back on. Only this time you won’t be making anything because Finney will be standing behind you when you hand it over. Do that and make a few more deals with the Premiership’s finest and we’ll see if Bobby will let you be square, eventually, as long as you keep your nose clean.’

‘Yeah, yeah, of course man, anything – but how will I get him back in here after what you did to him? He was shitting himself when he left.’

‘Which is precisely why he’ll come back and buy your coke. Tell him Finney here is still mad at him and if he doesn’t want to spend the rest of his days contemplating the tragic, premature end to his playing career he’d better turn up and do the business. It’s not as if we’ll have trouble finding him. Just remind him we know where he’s going to be every Saturday afternoon.’

We were sitting in Bobby’s office at the Cauldron. It was sunny outside but the blinds were drawn. It could have been any hour of the day or night.

‘So Geordie Cartwright was freelancing?’ asked the big man.

‘So it would seem,’

‘To pay off gambling debts?’ added Bobby.

I nodded. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘I should have known he was chucking his money away.’

‘Maybe you should,’ he said and he was right to. I was still kicking myself for not knowing about Geordie’s little weakness. ‘But these days you can lose a fortune without even leaving your house. I’ve heard about guys pissing away their life savings on the internet while the missus is asleep in the room next door. I never would have imagined it though, Geordie Cartwright brought down by gambling. He was a good bloke, in the old days. It’s no way to end up is it?’

‘No.’

‘And we can’t find this Russian? What about your bent DS?’

‘He’s on it but no, there are no leads yet.’

Bobby was swirling a scotch thoughtfully in his glass. ‘What brought these people to my city? What makes them think they can take the piss out of me? Who’s feeding them their information?’

‘That’s what we’ve got to find out.’

‘That’s what you’ve got to find out,’ he told me firmly, ‘and fast.’

It’s three hundred miles from Newcastle down to Surrey. We spent most of them in silence. We never had that much to say to each other anyway, Finney and me. I didn’t particularly like the guy but then who said I had to – I was just glad he was on my side.

The BBC news came on the radio; the usual mix of economic doom-mongering and British army casualties from foreign wars, ending with a supposedly light-hearted story about some senile, old bloke from Sevenoaks who’d managed to drive his car straight into a river and somehow survived.

Finney listened to the story with interest.

‘Why would you call a place Sevenoaks?’ he said, ‘daft name that.’

‘Because there used to be seven big oaks there.’ Did Finney ever read anything but the sports pages?

‘Used to be?’

‘Six of them blew down in the hurricane in the 80s.’

‘Really?’ he seemed to find that highly amusing.

‘Yep.’

‘That’s brilliant,’ he said, ‘you call a place fucking Sevenoaks and six of the cunts blow down?’

Finney drove the whole way and I was glad of it. It gave me some time to think things through, away from Bobby, away from Laura, away from the whole bloody business.

After a while I stopped churning over the mystery of Geordie Cartwright and the missing money and started mentally preparing myself for my meeting with Amrein and how I was going to explain the late arrival of the Drop.

‘That Amrein,’ said Finney like he’d been thinking about it for a while, ‘he’s on a good screw isn’t he? I’m not even sure what we get for our money when you think about it?’

I grunted in a non-committal way that I hoped would satisfy Finney. I didn’t want to have to try and explain to him what we got out of the Drop.

The Drop was an insurance policy. It was a bribe and a sweetener. The Drop bought influence and intelligence. It granted us permission to do business on our patch. The Drop was all of those things rolled into one and more.

The organisation we paid had been around for a long time. It had very long arms and a big reach. It didn’t have a name and there were no accounts filed in Companies House. We paid cash and we always paid punctually, except for this last time.

So what did we get out of it? Well for starters, if we didn’t pay they’d come after us – or at least someone else would, with their blessing. You can look at the Drop as a tax that we stumped up and if we didn’t there’d be a big queue of people willing to pay it, as long as they were allowed to take on an operation the size of ours. The Drop was a considerable amount of money but it was nowhere near the profit we made on a yearly basis. If it was, we wouldn’t pay it, simple as that. We’d take our chances on our own but we’d know there was a big outfit out there, devoting a lot of time and energy into bringing us down and we could do without that kind of conflict.

It was not all negative though. We got a lot out of the Drop, including some priceless information. Amrein’s people had an uncanny knack of finding things out, like the name and address of a key prosecution witness in a trial for example. They could tell us if we were on the hit list of someone in authority or if we had dropped below their radar, if the police had a big investigation going on about an aspect of our business or if they were happy to leave us alone since we were the devil they knew. People don’t seem to realise that a lot of organised crime is allowed to exist because the alternative would be disorganised crime, otherwise known as complete anarchy. Police forces don’t like amateur gangsters killing each other every week over a bag of heroin. It makes their turf look lawless and their crime stats go through the roof, which means their top boy is never going to become head of Scotland Yard. Instead they prefer to allow somebody who knows the score to control and regulate a bit of illegal trade. That way nobody gets hurt, particularly innocent bystanders. The police hate it when some housewife or harmless middle manager gets their heads blown off because a drive-by went horribly wrong. They are less bothered when a known heroin dealer is found face-down in the Tyne if that’s what it takes to keep the peace. The police are like everybody really. What they want most of all is a quiet life and we try to give it to them.