The Damage (David Blake 2) (19 page)

‘You’re horrible,’ she told me, ‘why don’t you fuck off?’

‘You know what,’ I said, ‘I think I will.’ And I took a last look at her, ‘you’re a bit old for me.’ And I left her to digest that comment. She crossed her arms over her chest defensively and padded off towards the footballers by the pool. We could see she was telling them all how horrible I’d been to her and a couple looked like they wanted to do something about it but they soon simmered down when they saw Kinane standing there next to me. Instead one of the footballers came up behind her and pulled her shorts and bikini bottoms down to her knees. She squealed as she tried to grab them and, while she was pulling them back up, his friend pushed her into the pool. They all burst out laughing.

‘They’re vermin,’ said Kinane, ‘all of them, every last one. They think they can do anything they want.’

‘So do we,’ I reminded him.

‘But we’re not like that,’ he reasoned, ‘you can’t say we’re like that.’

‘No,’ I conceded, ‘we’re not like that.’

We watched as the brunette splashed to the opposite end of the pool and tried to climb out of it while trying to pull her clothes back on. Her make-up had run till she had panda eyes and her hair was a dripping mess. None of the girls went to help her and the group was laughing at something else by then.

Kinane was right. We weren’t like that. It comes to something when footballers behave worse than gangsters and nobody does a thing about it. The girl ran round the pool and disappeared into a side door of the house.

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B
illy lay back on the soft pillow on the hotel bed, staring contentedly up at the ceiling. Billy Warren had never had money before. Not proper money. He’d never been minted. Not like this.

Sure, he’d done a few decent deals with the Premier League lads, and that was money for old rope. Some of these guys earned thirty, forty grand a week, more even, yet there was one thing none of them could buy in the shops. Billy could provide that, and it wasn’t just the drugs either. He gave them the gangster glamour they all craved. That’s why Billy had the nerve to look Golden Boots in the eye and, straight-faced, give him a price for a kilo of blow that regular cokeheads would have laughed their cocks off at. Golden Boots had looked at him for a moment then answered, ‘So, when do we get the stuff?’ in a mockney voice that proved he’d been watching too many Danny Dyer DVDs.

These guys wanted people like Billy Warren at their parties. They wanted to nudge their mates and nod at Billy, who’d be standing at the edge of the room, then say, in a world-weary voice, ‘that’s my dealer, he’ll sort you out.’ And they’d watch as their friends traipsed over, looking like virgins walking up to a hooker, about as scared and excited as it is possible to be, hoping to pick up a bit of something forbidden.

That’s the kind of thrill you need when you play football every week in front of tens of thousands of foul-mouthed fuckers, earning a weekly wage that would be the windfall of a lifetime to most people in the process. When you have a stunning model or a singer for a girlfriend, yet
she’s
the one who never takes her eye off you in a club, because she knows there’s a wall of fanny queuing up to take her place the minute her back’s turned. What else is there to excite you when you don’t have to try to score goals, not when it comes natural and always has done, when you can shag every girl you meet, and you have a garage full of Ferraris, Porsches and Astons? Billy had seen the cars, some of them with just a few hundred miles on the clock before the owners got bored with them and moved on to the next flavour of the month their mates are driving into the training ground. Billy has seen Bentleys and Maseratis gathering dust, their owners too stupid even to put a cover over them. So what do you do when you have already earned more money than you could ever spend and you’re twenty-two years old? Where can you possibly get your thrills from then? Billy, that’s where.

Doing something forbidden, something where the risk is so high that if they were caught their whole world could come crashing down around them is about the only thing that gets them truly hard. They are like the bank manager who defrauds his company, then leaves his wife and kids to run off with a Ukrainian hooker less than half his age; or the married career politician who goes looking for rough trade on Clapham Common, getting a blow job from a complete stranger who might mug him or kill him. Billy knew enough about life to know that the best thrills are the ones that come with a little bit of risk, because it makes the pay-off all the sweeter at the end.

Billy Warren spent his free time at parties with spoilt, twenty-something millionaires and their hangers on; as drug dealer to the stars he should have been rolling in it. Instead, because of the tight leash Blake had him on, he was lucky if he made a few quid out of it.

The longer this went on, the more he began to resent David Blake. Who was he anyway? Just one of Bobby’s ‘yes’ men. He wasn’t hard. It was Kinane who did all of Blake’s dirty work for him.

Then Peter Dean had showed up at Billy’s flat with his plan. All Billy had to do was set Blake up and he was in for a massive score. It would make the coke deals with Golden Boots look like nowt by comparison. And the beauty was the upfront part of the deal; half as soon as he approached the hit man and half once Blake was removed from the scene. It was amazing. He was being paid a shedload of money to get rid of the one man who had stopped him earning a decent living for the past three years. Talk about sweet.

Finding the hit man hadn’t been difficult. Everyone in Billy’s world knew what Jack Conroy did for a living. When it came to sitting down with the guy and talking to him though, that was when Billy had earned his money. Sitting in the apartment of a man who had killed countless other men gave him the creeps. Then Conroy had turned down the job.

‘What do you mean, man?’ asked Billy, ‘the money’s bloody amazing.’

‘It is,’ agreed Conroy, ‘but I don’t shit where I eat.’

Baffled by this response, Billy made sure Conroy understood that their conversation had never happened. Conroy just laughed, ‘don’t worry, Billy. I’m like a grave. Nothing gets out.’

Billy left Conroy’s place in a hurry, then spent a good while racking his memory, trying to dredge up someone else who could take Blake out for them. Then he remembered Tate, a borderline psychopath who’d killed two mental Albanians for Bobby because they’d been trying to take over his vice operation and weren’t prepared to do a deal or listen to reason. Tate had managed that easy enough, so he was surely the right man for this one. Billy had gone to see him and, as soon as the money was mentioned, Tate signed on.

With the first part of the job done, Peter Dean came to see him and he paid what was owed. Dean looked nervous, and well he might, but there was nothing to link Billy to the hit and he decided to use some of that money to lay low for a while. First he booked himself into the poshest hotel in town under a fake name and turned off his phone. Then he went shopping for some new threads down the fancy shops with all of the labels. New shoes, suit, shirts, even socks and underwear. He’d gone for all of the brands his Premier League clients favoured; Moschino, Prada, Armani, Boss and a pair of Ferragamo shoes. He paid cash, and made the bemused girl who served him cut the tags off everything while he was still wearing it, then plonked his old gear on the counter, telling her, ‘shove that lot in the bin, pet’.

Next stop was a jewellers for an Omega. He could feel its reassuring weight on his wrist when he walked and it made him feel like a player. He went back to the hotel and waited for news on Blake. The sirens outside told him the hit had gone ahead so he turned on the radio to BBC Newcastle and waited. Sure enough, the news report announced there’d been a shooting in the Quayside and two men were believed dead. Two men? That rattled Billy. He decided his best bet was to hole up in the hotel for a few days, living off room service and watching porn on the in-house service. He wasn’t too worried at this point. He just thought he should probably keep his head down till the dust settled and he found out exactly what had happened.

Trouble with porn, though, is that it isn’t as good as the real thing, and he was flush now, so he called down to the concierge. He’d heard they could get you anything and, sure enough, the bloke gave him the number of an up-market escort agency.

‘Escort agency’, Billy sniffed, they were still hookers when it came down to it. He dialled them anyway.

‘I want a bird,’ he informed the woman who answered, ‘actually, no, make that two birds, but they’ve got to be quality.’

‘All of our escorts are exceptional ladies for men of discernment sir,’ the refined voice assured him.

‘Yeah, right, well, that’s what I want then,’ he told her, ‘what you said. How much?’

The woman gave him a price for each girl. There was a cost per hour and a cost for the whole night. The cost for the whole night was colossal but he had the readies and he had promised himself something a bit special; the kind of night Premier League players had every Saturday.

‘Alright, you’re on,’ he said and he told her the name of the hotel he was in, before adding ‘I want a blonde and a brunette,’ then, almost as an afterthought, ‘the blonde has to have big tits and the brunette’s got to have long legs.’

‘I’ll see what I can do, sir,’ said the woman with little enthusiasm.

‘And they’ve got to be mucky, I mean, proper filthy,’ he said, before adding, ‘in bed like.’

‘Sir, I don’t think you understand our role here. We simply arrange the company of our girls and they provide their time.’

‘Company?’ asked Billy in disbelief. ‘Time? I don’t want company love, it’s a shag I’m after and for what you charge it ought to be fucking guaranteed!’

‘Anything you arrange between yourself and the girls is entirely at their discretion,’ she told him, seemingly between gritted teeth. This sounded more promising, but Billy wasn’t entirely convinced.

‘Right, I see, but just make sure they’re broad-minded like. Don’t send them if they are not prepared to go down on each other when I tell them to.’

There was a click and she was gone.

‘Bollocks,’ said Billy out loud. It seemed there were still some things that money couldn’t buy in this town. He should have known better than to choose some poncin’ arsed agency. It didn’t leave him many options though. It was a bit of a risk ringing one of the old timers but, really, where was the harm? He used the hotel phone to call Tommy Bailey.

‘Two mucky birds, eh Billy? No problem, if you have the cash.’

‘Oh I’ve got the cash Tommy, don’t you worry about that.’

Now Billy was lying on the bed, still dressed in his new gear, looking the part, a proper Face. He was no longer Billy Warren, small time coke dealer, figure of ridicule in Bobby Mahoney’s firm, the one they took the piss out of and treated like shit all the time.

There was a gentle knock on the door then. It was Tommy Bailey’s girls and they were bang on time too. That was the other advantage of paying for birds, you didn’t end up waiting around for them for ages. Billy sat up, then took a deep breath. God he was going to enjoy this. For the first time in his life two very fit lasses were about to get stark naked and do anything and everything he asked them to, and all because he had the wedge to make it happen. It would be the kind of night his millionaire footballers were always bragging about. Well it wasn’t going to be them in the middle of a fanny sandwich this time. It was going to be Billy Warren; Player, Face, Top Boy.

Billy got up from the bed and took his time before answering the door. These girls weren’t going anywhere, after all. He took a long look at his reflection in the full-length mirrors on the wardrobe doors, pulled down his jacket and smoothed it against him, then smiled to himself. He walked towards the door and opened it, still smiling. Then, abruptly, his smile vanished.

‘Now then Billy,’ said Joe Kinane, ‘what have you been up to?’

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T
he lock-up we used for this kind of thing was an old red-brick building with a low roof, a steel door and no windows. The place was an out-building, situated yards from a former electricity sub-station that had served the rural community round here before it closed down years ago. We picked the site up for next to nothing with a view to converting it, but we delayed starting the work when house prices dropped. For the time being it served as a useful destination for men like Billy Warren. Here we could have a quiet word, knowing no one could hear a thing because it was miles from anywhere.

Kinane went to collect Billy as soon as we got the call from Tommy Bailey. Now Billy Warren stood in the empty out-building, beneath the glare of a single, bare light bulb, squinting at me and rocking nervously back and forth on his heels. When he moved the bulb cast exaggerated shadows on the floor behind him. Billy knew why he was here but he was trying to act like he was an entirely innocent party. He didn’t quite have the balls to challenge me about it though.

‘Nice suit, Billy,’ I told him.

‘Eh? Oh yeah, thanks.’ Then he mumbled, ‘been saving for it,’ and he looked down, not meeting my gaze.

Only Billy Warren would be stupid enough to go on a spending spree as soon as he pocketed the money he was given to set up a hit. If there had been an ounce of doubt about his guilt, it was removed as soon as we got word from Tommy Bailey that Billy was ordering up hookers two at a time and shipping them out to a four-star hotel.