Howard Linskey: The Drop

Bobby was right though, which didn’t make me feel any better. It was my responsibility to make sure the Drop got there. I’d been careless, and now I was in deep, deep trouble. How the fuck was I going to find Cartwright and get the money back? It would probably be easier to raise the money for the Drop myself by Monday – and that would still be impossible, even with my talents.

Bobby was right in another way too. Nobody took from him. If somebody got away with that he was finished. The message it sent out would be clear. Bobby had turned into a soft touch, somebody who could be taken on or taken out by an ambitious rival. He simply couldn’t afford for that to happen. So he had to get the money back and punish the person who’d stolen from him. The punishment would have to match the crime and stealing the Drop was one down from raping his late wife’s corpse, so the thief was going to wind up dead – but not before Finney had spent a long time making him see the error of his ways. Suddenly I was terrified. If I couldn’t find Cartwright, I couldn’t retrieve the money and I couldn’t discover who was responsible, it was going to be me staring into the business end of a nail gun, because Bobby would have to show the world that somebody had paid for ripping him off.

‘Pull over,’ I said to Finney in a panic.

‘What? Now?’

‘Just pull over!’ I managed to get the passenger door open just in time. I leaned out and sicked up the horrible airline meal they’d given us, all over the side of the road.

‘Jesus,’ hissed Finney, ‘mind my upholstery!’

As soon as we hit the Bigg Market, I tried to light a cigarette but my hand was shaking so badly the match burned down to my fingers and I had to start again. All around me in the square, drunken youngsters were propelling themselves towards the next night spot, some more steadily and silently than others. Close by, a girl fell on her arse and her friends shrieked with laughter. She cackled along too because she wouldn’t be feeling that bruise until the morning. In a doorway of a pub that had long since closed, a very pissed-up teenager was trying to pull a couple of young lasses by dancing in front of them, even though he could barely stand by now. He tried a couple of moves then stopped, his head lolling like a Thunderbird puppet.

The girls thought it was hilarious, ‘Eeh,’ said one, ‘you’ll get all the ladies tonight with those moves.’ They both laughed at him and walked away, leaving him staring uselessly into the space they had just occupied like he couldn’t quite work out where they had gone.

There was a lot of noise, a lot of shouting, most of it good natured. One young couple were having a violent row about something or nothing but there was a good deal of laughter coming from the long queue of early-darters at the taxi rank. I reckoned Finney and I were the only sober people in the Bigg Market by this hour.

Finney asked, ‘Where now?’

In an uncharacteristic move, I told him, ‘fuck knows,’ and immediately regretted saying it. Finney had already seen me so frightened I was throwing up out of his car, so I had to at least look like I wasn’t entirely losing control. I’d blamed that on dodgy Thai food but he hadn’t looked convinced. ‘Everywhere.’ I told him emphatically, ‘he drinks round here, always has, never liked the Quayside, it’s too modern for him. Speak to everybody. We need to know when anyone saw him last.’ I was already thinking that if Mandy didn’t know where he was then nobody would. I was worried he’d left the country along with all of Bobby’s money. ‘Some of his pubs will be shut by now but we’ll go to all the ones that stay open late, speak to the lads on the door and the bar staff, ask them if any one has seen Geordie Cartwright.’

‘Right,’ he said.

‘I think we should split up. We’ll cover them twice as fast,’

He looked at me, ‘not trying to run out on me are you?’

‘Do I look that fucking stupid?’

As soon as Finney left me, I rang Laura. Her mobile trilled for what seemed like an age. Where was she? It was normally stapled to her ear.

While I waited for her to answer I ran the whole saga of the hotel back through my mind. Laura had offered to make the booking, ‘I’ll do it David, you’ve already sorted out the flights, found all the nice restaurants and changed the currency, so I’ll do this.’ I’d been touched that she appreciated my efforts and was looking to lend a hand, not taking me for granted.

Of course, when weeks then dragged by and, guess what, the booking had not been made, I was starting to feel very differently about her offer. All I heard was ‘I’ll do it later, I’m tired,’ as if I wasn’t, or ‘work has been a bastard this week’, as if I spent my days auditioning teenaged porn stars.

I could have picked up the phone or gone on the web and sorted it in minutes but no, she wouldn’t let me do that either, even though I offered to take the task back off her hands. It eventually became a cause of real friction between us. Every night I would bring up the subject and every night I would chose a different way to raise it; jocular, teasing, impatient, pissed-off, very pissed-off, then finally up to Def Con Two. It was only then, when I was literally screaming at her, ‘why can’t you just make the fucking booking?’ that she finally snapped.

‘Alright, alright, stop bloody going on and on about it! Jesus!’

‘I would stop going on about it if you would just bloody do it. You’re like a teenager who won’t tidy her room!’

She stormed off and did the job on the internet in all of about twenty minutes. It was a lot longer than twenty minutes before she spoke to me again.

Trouble was, when Laura had first said, ‘I’ll book the hotel,’ I distinctly told her to make the booking in both our names.

When Laura finally answered her mobile I asked, ‘It’s me, when you booked the hotel, did you book the rooms in both our names like I asked?’

‘Eh? Er, I don’t know, yes, I think so, why?’ ‘You think so or you did so? This is important.’

‘I can’t remember,’ she wailed, ‘you’d been shouting at me. I don’t know and I’m very tired. Where are you?’

I ignored her question, ‘you don’t know?’

‘No, I don’t know, which bit of that last sentence did you not understand?’

‘I could have been killed tonight because you didn’t do what I asked. Bobby was trying to find me and when he phoned the hotel they had no record of me staying there. He didn’t think to ask if they had a Laura Collins in their hotel because he probably can’t even remember your surname. Jesus, I don’t understand you sometimes. It was the only thing I asked you to do!’

‘Oh shut up David,’ she shouted, ‘stop exaggerating. Your boss is not going to kill you.’

My God, was she deliberately trying to wind me up? ‘Have you forgotten who I work for?!’

‘No! I haven’t!’ she shouted, ‘in fact I am sick of hearing about it!’ That was a bit rich, since I had to listen to every banal detail of her working day the minute she walked through my door each evening.

‘You stupid bitch!’ I screamed at her. My answer was the dead sound of her mobile being switched off, ‘Laura? Laura!?’ I didn’t know why I was still shouting at her. She had already gone.

I’d had a shit evening. By now we were well into the early hours and getting nowhere. Finney and I had spoken to everyone and come up with zilch. My eyes were burning with tiredness. I was just starting to contemplate getting home for a few hours shut-eye to shake off the jet lag and start afresh in the morning, when the mobile began to vibrate in my jacket pocket. It was Vincent phoning from Privado.