Inside Straight (27 page)

I ignored that. "He won't give it up unless he's sure the investigation is over. He's not waiting on me, he's waiting on you. The money's going nowhere until he thinks it's safe."

Another shrug. "That can be arranged."

"When?"

"You got somewhere you need to be, Graham?"

I sipped my hot chocolate as a defensive manoeuvre. Did he know about the ships? "No, not anymore. I just thought you'd want this over with as soon as possible. I know I do."

"Well, I can arrange that. We can close it down."

"How?"

"Your mate Stevie Laird."

"Thought you said he was dead."

"All the better. Means he can't appeal."

I laughed, but there wasn't any humour in it. "That's what I thought."

"Well, then, we'll use him. Same story you tried to use on us. He was the inside man, he got cocky or greedy or just plain daft and whoever robbed the place killed him and dumped his body in the canal. Professional hit kind of thing. Whoever it was, they're long gone by now. We have no leads, so we're shutting it down. Nobody cares enough outside the Met to push us."

"And then what?"

"Then you go and collect what's rightfully yours."

I stared at him and shook my head. "I can't do it."

"Course you can."

"I can't go in there and beg for money I'm not going to be able to spend."

"That's the way it goes, Graham."

"No."

"Then you're going to go to prison, mate. We've been through this."

"And if I do what you're asking, I'm still going to go to prison, aren't I? And what happens then? I pick up the cash, you lot are all over me, I assume you're going to arrest me, yes? So you drag me off to the station, put me in a cell, send me off to prison while you nail Pollard. And then what? Moment he's arrested, I'm a dead man walking."

"He won't get to you."

"Come on, of course he will. You know he will. Don't treat me like an idiot, alright? I know exactly what'll happen. I'll go to prison and one night I'll get a shiv or a chib or whatever it is you're supposed to call them – a
knife
– in my belly and that's me dead." I leaned forward. "So I've got to ask you, what's in this for me?"

He pushed out his lips and then chewed the remnants of something in his mouth. "I can't make deals, Graham. That's something you need to talk to your brief about."

"I don't have one. Yet. Give me an idea."

He shrugged, gestured at the mug of coffee in front of him without really seeing it. "I can
try
for you."

"What does that mean,
try
?"

"It means try."

"That's it? If I go to prison, I'm a dead man."

Kennedy scoffed. "That's just Pollard trying to put the wind up you."

"If you truly believe that, then you clearly don't know the man. I've seen him. He won't go to prison, not if he can kill or buy his way out of it. Do you honestly think he's not going to try his level best to destroy every last bit of evidence against him? And do you not think that he'd
know
that you got to me?"

"He can't know."

"Even if he doesn't, it's enough for him to
suspect.
He's not going to take chances, is he?"

"Alright."

"Do you understand that, Kennedy? Or are you that stubborn that you can't entertain the possibility that you just killed me?"

"Hey." One hand up. "Calm down."

I laughed at him. He hated it. Hated that he'd turned into a cliché for a second there.
Calm down, calm down
...

He shifted in his seat. "Listen, Graham. Listen to me, alright? Personally speaking – and I'll be as honest as I can with you here – if you help us out and don't try anything stupid, then I'll make sure we treat you the best we can. I'm not going to promise you an amnesty or anything like that because it's not my promise to make. You probably wouldn't believe us if I made it anyway, would you?"

I shook my head.

"But if we get Pollard and we get him for a good long stretch – if you
help
us do that – then it'll look
very
good for you. Very good indeed. I mean, circumstances like that, I reckon our priority's going to be putting Pollard behind bars, I don't think we'll do much in the way of chasing you, if you know what I mean. First offence and all that, you might even get lost in the shuffle, end up with, what, a suspended, maybe. Something like that." He looked as if he were thinking about it a bit more. "Or even – listen to this – we could play on the fact that you were made to commit your crime under duress, yeah?"

"I was."

"Well, then. So you couldn't tell anyone about it. You were new at the casino, you didn't know who you could turn to, you had a history of nervous exhaustion—"

"No. Not that. I didn't have that."

"That's what I heard—"

"Then it's wrong." I stared at him. "I'm the best pit boss they've got."

"Still? You think so?"

I hadn't thought about that. All that thinking I'd been doing about this and it hadn't occurred to me that it didn't matter what kind of conviction I ended up getting, my career in the casino business was over. Not only would I be banned from Sovereign clubs, but I wouldn't be able to hold a gaming licence anymore. The rest of the clubs were no good. I couldn't even go on the ships.

It was over.

"And what if I don't cooperate?"

"If you
don't
?" Kennedy smiled. "If you don't, then we have nothing else to talk about, Graham."

"I would be safe then, though." I looked at Kennedy, stared right at him with eyes that stung and wanted to water. "If I went along with you, didn't say anything—"

"You already have."

"Nothing you can use. Not definitely, or else I'd be in custody right now and you'd be chasing Pollard without me. So you need me to get the money for you. You need proof."

"That's ideal, but it's not necessary."

"But it's
ideal
, yes. And you
want
ideal, because ideal keeps him in prison and necessary is easy to argue. You want your conviction. So what I'm saying is the sensible choice to make here is to get up and walk away and have you come after me. To keep my mouth shut, let you work for it for once. If you can't nail Pollard, there's no guarantee you'd be able to nail me. That would be the smart choice."

Kennedy thought it over, and started nodding slowly. "That would be the smart choice. That would be the
man's
choice. But then you're not much of a man, Graham, are you?"

I stared at him and sipped my hot chocolate, ate the rest of my biscuit. "No, I suppose not."

"So what are we talking about?"

I agreed to do everything he wanted me to do. And when we left he slapped me hard on the back and laughed as he returned to his car. The slap was too hard. It bruised me in one of the few places that wasn't already mottled and swollen. The laughter hurt more, though. It was a bully's laughter. I'd heard it too many times before.

The Manchester Met officially closed the Riverside robbery case on Friday 19th October 2012 and released a statement to the effect that they believed Stephen Laird was involved with the robbery at the Riverside, that they had good reason to believe he'd been involved with the robbers themselves, but with Mr Laird now dead, there was very little they could do but close the case for the time being. It was in the
Evening News
, all over the regional television, and it wasn't long before the burn phone bleated for my attention.

It was Jez. "Y'alright, mate?"

"What do you want?"

"Got a message from Mr Pollard, don't I, you lucky bastard?"

"And what's that?"

"He's said he's going to give you your cut."

"Really?"

"Yeah. No hard feelings, no grudges, nowt like that. Tell you something, if it was
me
you'd pulled that shit—"

"When?"

"Sunday." He gave me the address of a snooker club in Ordsall and told me to be there at seven sharp. "Alone."

"That shouldn't be a problem, Jez."

"I didn't think so. And hey, don't worry, mate. I won't let anyone touch you, alright? I know how you fuckin' hate that."

When I told Kennedy on Sunday afternoon, he laughed. He was messing around in a bag he'd brought with him. The contents clicked and clanked as he dug around inside. "A bloody good job too, considering you're going to be wired up the arse."

"You what?"

"What, you think I'm just going to let you walk in there without knowing what you're talking about?" Kennedy laughed again and opened the small metal case he'd brought out of the bag. "Come on, turn around."

I turned around and stared at the wall. Heath Ledger in full Joker make-up stared back. "You have nothing, nothing to threaten me with. Nothing to do with all your strength."

"What's that?"

"Nothing."

"Jesus, they kicked the shit out of you, didn't they?" He must've been looking at the bruises. Some of them had started to turn yellow.

He strapped the wire to me. It was small, lightweight, almost invisible. I barely felt it unless it nudged a bruise, and then it sent a small jolt of pain through my back. I wanted to tell Kennedy to move it up a bit, but then I didn't want to seem like a wimp, so I let it be.

He pulled down my shirt. "Now you know what you're going to do, right?"

I nodded.

"Let me hear you say it for the tape."

"Yes, I know what I'm going to do."

Detective Sergeant Hammond sat in front of a laptop, wearing headphones. He nodded. He had it.

"Good lad."

The idea was to do what I would've done anyway – walk in there with my head held high and take what was owed. It was simple. I didn't have to play any parts, didn't have to remember any lines, didn't even have to think about the police outside. They'd nab me the moment I left, which would then give them reasonable cause to kick down some doors. All I had to do was make sure Pollard said something about the robbery on tape, so they could identify him as the man giving me the money. Kennedy told me that they'd play on the fact that I was an idiot, and they'd been following me since they knew I was the inside man. So basically exactly what was happening, then, except I was supposed to be oblivious to half of CID trailing me like toilet paper stuck to my shoe.

I was the thick one. I was the idiot. I was the subnormal. I was the one who looked at myself in the mirror and cried because that was what fat little babies did when they didn't know what else to do. Like I said, I wasn't playing any parts. I just had to be myself.

Piece of cake.

I arrived ten minutes before the agreed time and sat in my Corsa. I could see another car parked up the road, one man in the driver's seat and another in the back. Up the other way, a large white Bedford was parked in the shadows. I wondered which one Kennedy was in. Over in the car, the driver appeared to be speaking to the man in the back. I wondered what they were saying – they didn't think I was important enough to make our communication two way – but I doubted it was flattering.

I cleared my throat and kept my voice low, my lips barely moving: "Just give me a minute, okay?"

I saw my eyes in the rear view mirror. They were pink with tears. I sniffed and wiped at them with the back of my hand. That wasn't me anymore. It couldn't be.

It was easy. A couple of minutes, a sustained clench of both bowels and bladder while I maintained low-level small talk, and then I'd be out of there.

And then?

No time for then. It was seven o'clock
now
.

I got out of the car and shut the door behind me. I crossed the street and stopped by the front door, hit a buzzer. It grated somewhere inside. I waited for acknowledgement, saw the small camera above my head.

A crackly voice asked me in a belligerent tone who I was.

"Graham Ellis." And then, because the owner of the voice appeared to be waiting for something more: "I'm here to see Mr Pollard."

A pause, then the buzzer grated again and there was the heavy click of the door as it unlocked. I pushed inside and went up a tight staircase that smelled of tobacco and rain and sported a carpet that hadn't been cleaned since Thatcher was in power. At the top of the stairs, there was another door that looked as if it belonged in a prison. Another buzzer sounded as I reached it, and I was allowed through into a small reception area. The snooker club was called The Rainbow Room, which conjured up images of corpulent businessmen sweating over skinny, strung-out strippers as they threw themselves around a skin-smeared metal pole. Thankfully that wasn't the case. In fact, from the smell in the reception and a brief glance at the main snooker hall through a chicken-wired glass pane, it looked like this place hadn't seen a woman in decades.

"What's your name again?" A small, lumpy man who looked like a partially shaved hedgehog sat behind the makeshift reception counter. He was chewing a match.