Alex Walters - Nowhere To Hide

Salter smiled again, and this time there was a little more evidence of humour in his eyes. ‘Yeah, I’ve got a few ideas. You know much about the prostitution scene in south Manchester? Professionally, I mean.’

Brennan ignored the jibe. ‘Not really my field,’ he said. ‘No shortage of it, though, from what I understand.’

‘That’s one way of putting it. It’s the usual mix – from desperate junkies on street corners to the more upmarket escort stuff. Amounts to the same thing in the end, though. It’s the middle ground I’m interested in.’

‘Professionally, you mean?’ Brennan said. ‘You mean the massage parlour type places?’

‘Massage parlours. Brass-houses. The places one step up from the poor buggers on the streets. Again, it’s what you might call a mixed economy. Some sole proprietors plying their sleazy trade in one or two establishments. Some who’ve done a bit better for themselves. High street chains, if you like. Of course, it’s a very competitive environment.’

‘Important to build your market share,’ Brennan agreed. ‘You’ve seen some turf wars, then. Recently, I mean.’

‘There’s been a bit of expansion over the last year or two. Mostly immigrant groups – the Chinese have always been big in Manchester and there’ve been some Romanians making a splash recently.’

‘Not exactly your territory, all this. I don’t see your lot busting massage parlours.’

‘We leave that to you local plods. We’re more interested in what the parlours are being used for. Apart from the obvious, I mean. Drugs. Money laundering. People trafficking. A lot of our targets see brothels as their retail outlets.’

‘So you reckon that what happened in Wales was one of your targets putting the squeeze on the competition?’ Brennan said. ‘Would this be about your famous Jeff Kerridge again?’

‘Yeah, another little thread in Kerridge’s big commercial web. Again, we don’t know for sure. Kerridge was much too smart to get himself directly mixed up in that kind of world. Everything was a step or two removed. But, one way or another, Kerridge had established his own little network of high street boutiques.’

‘Except that Kerridge remains dead,’ Brennan pointed out. ‘So if someone’s putting the squeeze on, it’s not him.’

‘That’s the thing about Kerridge’s sad departure,’ Salter said. ‘It really tossed the cat among the pigeons. Lots of jockeying for position. All the more so as Kerridge’s supposed number two, Pete Boyle, was temporarily out of commission at the time.’

‘Way I heard it,’ Brennan said. ‘Kerridge and Boyle weren’t all that chummy towards the end anyhow?’

‘You heard right. It was a question of who’d screw the other one first. But Boyle saw himself as the heir apparent. Trouble was, he wasn’t the only one.’ Salter laughed. ‘Once Kerridge popped his clogs, various parties stepped into the breach pretty quickly, even before Boyle was back walking the streets. Chief among them, Mrs K.’

Brennan raised an eyebrow. ‘Kerridge’s wife?’

‘The fragrant Helen. Not a lady to be underestimated.’

‘So you think all this is linked? Kenning and Sheerin and these two poor bastards in Wales. Collateral damage in the war of the Manc succession?’

‘Something like that.’

‘Bit thin, isn’t it? I mean, you could well be right. But these were the kinds of buggers who made enemies every way they turned. Might have been a dozen people wanted to take them out.’

‘Might have been. But Pete Boyle definitely did.’

‘You reckon?’

‘Done a bit of digging,’ Salter said. ‘Called in a few favours from a few scrotes. Informants.’

‘Imagine our lot would have done the same. Not aware they found much.’

‘Maybe not. But they didn’t know the question to ask. They didn’t think to ask about Pete Boyle.’

‘Boyle’s a big player in these parts,’ Brennan pointed out. ‘Especially now that Kerridge has gone. His name would have come up.’

‘No doubt. But there’d be no direct connection between any of these cases and Boyle. Or Kerridge, for that matter. Not even Kenning the grass. I only made the link between Kerridge and that drug ring after the event. We hadn’t got it pegged as one of Kerridge’s outfits – still haven’t, officially. It was only after I’d made the link between Kenning and Boyle that I went back and checked the detail of the case Kenning had been involved in. One or two of the players who went down were second-level associates of Kerridge’s. It doesn’t prove for certain that Kerridge had a finger in that particular pie, but I’d wager money on it.’

Brennan frowned. ‘I’m not following this. You’re saying that these cases are all linked to Boyle. But that it’s not a direct business link.’

Salter was smiling broadly now. He had the air of a magician who was in the process of pulling off a particularly neat piece of misdirection. ‘Not quite. Boyle’s got a real business interest in all three cases. But that’s not why they were picked.’ He leaned forward and pulled Brennan’s file towards him, then flicked through the pages until he found the short report on Mo Tallent. ‘Tallent,’ he said. ‘Petty thief and grifter. Spent most of his adult life living in sunny Rhyl, for reasons best known to himself. But born and brought up in less sunny Hulme. Left in his early twenties. Partly because, for one reason or another, he’d seriously fucked off Peter Boyle. And, trust me, Peter Boyle is not someone you want to antagonise.’

Brennan shook his head. ‘Some kind of personnel vendetta? Boyle waited twenty years to get even?’

‘Not quite. Let’s move on to Stephen Kenning. Bit more straightforward, that one. No one likes a grass. He’d sold Kerridge and Boyle down the river on that drugs deal. Even if there was no risk of them being implicated, they must have taken a financial hit. A decent enough motive for icing Kenning. But it turns out there’s a bit more. Kenning is also a Hulme alumnus. The original school of hard fucking knocks. Turns out that Kenning and Boyle were bosom buddies as teenagers. They’d drifted apart over the years. But I’m told that Boyle still thought of Kenning as a mate, pretty much up the point where he shafted the drugs deal.’

‘Did Kenning know he was shafting Boyle?’

‘Who knows? But the effect’s the same, either way. From what I know of Pete Boyle, there’s no way he wouldn’t have taken in personally.’

‘Okay, so Boyle had a personal link with Tallent and Kenning. What about the third guy, Sheerin?’

‘Surprise, surprise. Same again. Another graduate of the University of Hulme. Rough contemporary of Boyle’s. Interesting one, this, though. Couldn’t find much connection at first. No evidence they’d known each other. So I did more digging. Eventually found an older guy who’d been mates with Boyle’s mother. Single parent. Tough as nails, by all accounts. Father had fucked off before Boyle was born, assuming that she ever knew who he was. Anyway, rumour was that Sheerin’s old man had had some sort of fling with Boyle’s mum. Treated her badly. Thought of himself as a hard man, but got short shift when he tried any rough stuff. So ran off with the housekeeping money or some such. Old codger I spoke to wasn’t too clear on the details, but reckoned that Boyle would have reason not to be too enamoured of the old bastard. Or of his son.’

‘So you’re saying that all these three, one way or another, had bad blood with Boyle? Sounds a bit tenuous as a motive for murder.’

‘Of course. But that wasn’t the motive for the murders. That was just the reason why these three particular poor buggers got chosen.’

‘So what is this? Boyle gets out of prison. Sees his hoped-for empire beginning to disintegrate. Barbarians at the gate, all that. So sends out some warning messages. That the idea?’ Brennan looked sceptical.