The Cover Up Page 19

  The Underground network ran at too fast a pace for Youssuf. He struggled to negotiate the ticket turnstiles, finding himself trapped on the wrong side of the unyielding gates with a queue of impatient passengers stacking up behind him.

  ‘Come on, old man!’ he heard some youth say.

  Youssuf turned around, ready to give the youngster what-for with a shake of his walking stick but baulked when he spotted a tall man with dreadlocks and terrible acne scarring, some hundred yards away at the mouth of the large, subterranean concourse. He was making straight for him.

  Calm down, you old duffer. Youssuf jabbed his ticket into the machine yet again, praying it would be accepted this time. It was spat out the other end. The gates remained shut. He chanced another look round at the dreadlocked man, willing himself to accept that it was just a coincidence that the bowels of London contained a man who simply looked similar to his attacker. It’s just that the lad from the coach has followed you down here.

  But it wasn’t. They locked eyes. Youssuf realised this time that it was the dreadlocked black man that had tried to kidnap him. His instincts had been correct.

  ‘Let me through!’ he shouted to the attendant. ‘Quickly!’

  Barrelling past the disgruntled passengers, pushing them out of the way with his stick if they wouldn’t yield, Youssuf shuffled in his sandals at some pace towards the wide gates that allowed access for those bearing bulky luggage and pushchairs. His attacker was gaining on him.

  ‘Hurry!’ he told the attendant. Should he ask for help? But then he would have some explaining to do to the police and he wasn’t ready yet. He had to give this fellow the slip somehow. ‘I’m late!’

  Finally, he was through. He squashed himself in through the bottleneck of people at the top of the escalator. Realised, when he saw the vertiginous drop, that he would never be able to trot down the left side of the steep moving stairs with his stiff old legs. He clung to the rubber banister on his right, peering upwards. There he was! Dreadlocks was scanning the ranks of people descending to the Victoria Line. Starting to make his way down. Youssuf kept his head down. He’d have to think fast.

  ‘Oi!’ his pursuer shouted. ‘Khan!’

  Chapter 26

  Lev

  Lev pulled the black tracksuit bottoms and polo neck on. The balaclava was tight and itchy but did the job. He would have to stuff that into his parka pocket on the way there. And he’d have to leave the coat in a bush somewhere until after the job was done. It was too bulky for a task that demanded stealth.

  Looking in the mirror, he puffed air out through his cheeks. Rolled the balaclava back up so it was perched on his head like a black, knitted johnny. What a tool.

  ‘Come on. Do it for the boy.’

  Except there was still the issue of what to do with a sleeping toddler at 3 a.m.

  With his mother still in hospital, Lev realised with some regret that he didn’t have a soul in the world he could rely on. He had begged Sheila O’Brien to take Jay, but had been met with a frosty, ‘What do you think my house is? A bloody crèche?’

  Even with his new-found knowledge of her liaison with Tariq, Sheila had cunningly manoeuvred him into a position where he would be in her debt. Yet again. Everyone had a sodding price tag, including him. Now, he was faced with a tough choice: decline to do the job and miss out on the money to buy a new life for him and Jay, or plonk his precious son onto his skank of a babymother with whom he was at war. Some damned choice!

  ‘Jay-Jay!’ he said in soft, sing-song tones. ‘Come on, Jay. It’s a new day. Time to get up! Time to get up!’ An instruction dressed up as a gentle homespun nursery rhyme.

  The boy’s eyes fluttered open. A smile, followed by a piercing shriek as Jay caught sight of the strange black headgear. Flashbacks to when he had cried incessantly during his illness. Lev shuddered at the memory of being stuck in a godforsaken A&E side room with a dying child, screaming so much he had vomited himself dry.

  ‘Come on, lad,’ he said, smoothing the skin on Jay’s velvety forehead. ‘Just a bit longer and you and your old dad will be home and dry.’

  The taxi sped off into the black of night. This was not the sort of place where the mainly Asian drivers liked to hang around, even during daylight hours. Too many pissheads ready to stagger up to the driver’s side window, leaning in and telling them to get back to wherever they came from, with booze-fume breath that could take out an elephant. Now, as they stood by the kerbside, Lev’s lifeline was reduced to two red pinpricks in the distance, disappearing round a corner towards Cheetham Hill, leaving the two of them stranded.

  ‘Mam!’ Jay said, pointing up at the double-height block of maisonettes. ‘Mam, mam, mam!’

  This particular corner of the Sweeney Hall estate had been thrown up in the late seventies. Long Battenberg-slabs of dwellings, sandwiched one on top of the other, above a row of garages that were now all burnt out, kicked in or had been sealed off by the coppers after some nefarious drama had played out in the shadows. Two or three security lights sputtered over the open brick stairwell and the odd one still shone on the galleried landing.

  Above where Lev now stood, clutching Jay to his chest, only one or two lights shone in the windows of the maisonettes on the upper level. The dull thud of drum and bass told him it was more likely to be a dealer’s pad than the sign of some hospital porter just returned home.

  Ascending the stairwell, Lev knew he was on Boddlington turf. Clutching Jay’s head beneath his chin with a protective hand, he held his breath as he rounded a corner on the piss-soaked stairs, his synapses flaring with anticipation.

  Above him on the next flight, there was a pungent stink of marijuana and the glow of a spliff being inhaled. Footsteps as the smoker came down to meet him.

  ‘Wanna buy some gear?’

  Lev sized the lanky kid up in his flashy designer streetwear. Assessed him to be no more than fourteen. Fifteen, at a push, with high-top clad feet that seemed too large for such a puny body.

  ‘Get out the way, son.’ He pushed the boy aside, letting him hear from his disparaging tone that he didn’t have time for playing soldiers on the stairs.

  But the boy was all ganja-gobshite, getting up in his grill. Poking. Gesticulating. All, ‘Who d’you think you pushing, you fucking knob? This be my staircase, innit?’

  The young dealer reached inside his puffa.

  Lev grabbed the dealer’s scrawny hand inside his own, squeezing hard, forcing the kid to drop the semi-automatic pistol he’d started to withdraw. He kicked the piece through a sizeable hole at the base of the stairwell’s wall where floodwater was designed to run during heavy rains.

  ‘Ow! You broke me hand! You bastard.’ The dealer was doubled up.

  Lev grabbed him by the collar. Stared into his washed-out face. Smelled the weed on his breath. ‘Know who I am?’ He pulled the hood of his parka down to reveal the lightning bolt, shaved into his buzz cut.

  The boy merely shot him a pained look as Lev released him.

  Lev continued on his climb, grinding the spliff out beneath his foot on the damp brick step. ‘That’s right. So, show some fucking respect or I’ll have to give Tariq a call. Dozy little twat.’

  Leaving the Boddlington pretender behind to lick his wounds, he arrived at the door to Tiffany’s mother’s place. It was unlocked, as usual. A light was on in the kitchen. From his vantage point in the dark, he could see Tiffany, sitting at the kitchen table, chugging on a can of lager. Her mother was stood at the stove, frying chips with a cigarette hanging out of the corner of her pruned mouth. Even at 3 a.m., here was a side to the city that never slept.

  ‘It’s only me,’ Lev shouted from the hall. The smells of cigarette smoke, beer and stale lard curled out from the kitchen to greet him immediately.

  ‘You’ve got a cheek,’ Tiffany said, not moving from where she sat. She lit a cigarette and blew the smoke towards Lev. Failing to look at her child, as if he were merely a figment of Lev’s imagination. ‘What the hell do you
want? You said you’d see me in court!’

  ‘Mam! Mam!’ Jay held his arms out, straining to reach his mother. Saw the lack of response in her eyes and instinctively turned towards the older woman. ‘Nanananana!’

  ‘Does our Jay-Jay want a plate of chips off his nana?’ Maria asked, smiling with her eyes as she dragged on her L&B. Seemingly oblivious to the war of attrition that raged between her daughter and her grandson’s babyfather.

  Lev eyed the half-empty bottle of Scotch among the culinary detritus on the worktop and realised why. This is a mistake. Just leave. You can’t let these stupid, pissed-up cows look after baby Jay.

  His common sense told him to backtrack, but, as ever, the prospect of a better future loomed large like the first grey light of dawn on an otherwise dark horizon. A future not eked out in some damp, council shithole like this.

  ‘I need you to watch him for an hour,’ he told Maria, turning his back on the once bodacious but now emaciated frame of Tiffany. ‘Just an hour, and I’ll be back. I’ve got work to do and there’s nowhere else. My mam’s in dock. It’s a long story. Can you take him?’ He spoke fast, knowing his desperation would be audible, even to a brain-dead old boozer like Maria. At least Maria could hold her drink.

  He glanced back at the staircase, noting that Tiffany still hadn’t asked her mother to install stair-gates. The social worker would have a field day when he fed that little nugget back.

  ‘Not a problem, Lev, cocker.’ Maria started to coo and fuss over Jay. ‘Give this lovely baby boy to his nana.’

  ‘You’re a cheeky bastard!’ Tiffany said, standing abruptly and scraping her chair on the vinyl tiles.

  ‘Take no notice of her!’ Maria said, winking at Lev; abandoning her chip pan to blow a raspberry on Jay’s stomach. She was rewarded by a squeal of delight.

  ‘Ta.’ It’s fine. It’s an hour. Get in. Get the phone. Get back. He can survive an hour.

  Taking a kitchen chair, Lev placed it at the foot of the stairs. ‘Keep an eye on him. Don’t let him past the stairs and keep the front door locked!’

  He released the latch and pulled the door behind him, praying he was doing the right thing.

  The fire station where the call to the firebombed builders’ merchants had come from was a short black cab journey away. Twenty minutes, tops, across the border from Boddlington turf into the O’Brien heartlands. Lev was careful to have the cabbie drop him two streets away in front of an anonymous-looking 1930s house in a side street, away from the main road.

  Would the fire station be occupied? He had got Sheila’s computer-student whizz to take time out of developing her world-class online-dating site to hack into the local council’s town planning office. For a nerdy little shite like that, sourcing the fire station’s blueprints had been child’s play. More to the point, Lev had been able to work out that the secure room containing the evidence locker was upstairs, at the back of the building.

  With the fire station in sight – the sole source of light in an otherwise still-slumbering area – Lev took the burner out of his parka. Dialled 999 and asked for the fire service. Gave the details of a blaze two miles away. Hung up, when the operator asked for his name.

  It was a gamble.

  His heart bounced inside his chest like a ball being slammed against a wall. The probability that his little plan would backfire was high. Wasn’t there another fire station on the far side of this postcode?

  ‘Please let this work, for God’s sake!’ He looked up into the velvet blackness of a fine, cold night’s sky, wondering that the stars glittered like diamonds above this run-down area of south Manchester just as they glittered above the legends of Hollywood or the Himalayas or the pyramids and their eternally sleeping royalty entombed within. ‘Please God!’ He intoned to his mother’s sweet Jesus – a god he wasn’t sure about at all.

  The solitary light that shone in the first floor of the station spread throughout the building. The giant doors to the garaging lifted to reveal the big red trucks. Lights flashing. Men in their full regalia, clambering aboard. No sirens at 3.30 a.m., but the trucks pulled away and roared up the hill into the distance.

  Now, Lev had his chance.

  Leaving his parka in the bushes, he jogged over to the fire station with his balaclava pulled down over his head. Skulking in the shadows. It was likely there were some staff members left behind.

  I can’t believe I’m doing this. I must be mad. If I get copped, I’m going away.

  Lev crept around to the rear, looking for a way into the building. He spied the giant wheelie bins against the back wall. Felt for the crowbar he had stashed in his waistband. You can do this, man. Think of getting that skank out of Jay’s life for good and getting as far away from the O’Briens and the Boddlington bullshit as you can. Fresh start. Do it for the boy.

  Pulling himself onto the wheelie bins was easy. Back here, he surely couldn’t be seen. There was a high-rise block some three hundred yards away, but just beyond the fire station fence, there was only a poorly lit car park. Above the bin was a small obscured-glazed window. Almost certainly a toilet. Producing the crowbar, Lev levered the old wooden frame open enough to slide his gloved fingers inside and lift the latch. Glad of his brutal regime at the gym, he pulled himself up and through the small aperture with relative ease. Dropped down, as expected, onto a cistern that smelled of freezing cold, backed-up shit from lacklustre plumbing and possibly a trace of cheeky cigarette smoke.

  Outside of the cubicle, Lev could hear a television playing low. He peered cautiously through a crack in the door. Heard the sound of whistling and the clanking of cups. A tap running. Whoever had been left behind was washing up. Good.

  Lev visualised the blueprints. Found his bearings. Padded off to his left. Tugging the irritating balaclava eyeholes to the side, he looked up at a door, expecting to see a sign for evidence. But the locked room was not there. It was merely a store.

  Wrong direction, silly arse. You’re remembering the plans back to front!

  Retreating in near silence, hardly daring to breathe, he bore right. Found himself in full view of the person in the main area – an older man, thankfully with his back to Lev. He was indeed washing up, now singing some old 80s song at full tilt. Shit. Lev froze. Despite willing his feet to move, he found himself rooted to the spot, just staring at the back of this man who might turn around at any moment, spot him and blow the whistle.

  Move it, you tit. You’re no use to Jay-Jay in Strangeways.

  Slinking along the wall and back out of sight, Lev finally found the door he sought. Tried the handle. It was locked. He took two specialist picks from the pocket of his jogging bottoms – tools of the trade that he’d borrowed from one of the lads who worked in the cannabis farm with him – and inserted them into the lock. Sweat was seeping from every pore in his face into the itchy acrylic of the balaclava. He willed his hands not to tremble.

  The clanking in the kitchen had stopped. Lev held his breath as something inside the lock’s mechanism gave way and clicked. He turned the handle. Good. He let himself inside, pushing the door to behind him. Took out a pocket torch. Shone it onto the shelves. Quickly, for god’s sake! Before they all come back. Looking for something that might be labelled O’Brien Construction or O’Brien Builders’ Merchants.

  The evidence seemed to be arranged in date order. Lev looked for the date on which the firebombing had taken place. Found a Perspex box, labelled with the details he sought. Bingo. Opened the box, praying he would find the phone.

  Please be there. Please, god. Please.

  But there were only the fragmentary remnants of a home-made explosive by the looks of it. Some wires. That was it. No phone.

  ‘Hey! Who the hell are you?’

  The light went on, rendering Lev momentarily blind. Holding his hand before his eyes, he could make out the old guy from the kitchen. Adrenalin took over. Lev pulled the crowbar from his trousers, brandishing it before the man.

  The man screamed. Calling for he
lp. He backed out of the doorway with his hand aloft.

  ‘Don’t hurt me!’

  Catching sight in his peripheral vision of the fast getaway he so needed, Lev elbowed the man aside and sprinted to the fireman’s pole. Dropping the crowbar, he grabbed it, wrapping his legs around it and slid to the bottom.

  ‘Come back here, you bastard!’ the man shouted after him.

  But Lev was fast. He sprinted across the unattended garaging, out of the fire station lights and away into the darkness. Only once the adrenalin had subsided did he realise with a heavy heart that he would not be receiving a penny of this mission’s handsome pay.

  When he eventually made it back to the Sweeney Hall maisonette, strutting in his parka as though he had merely been for a stroll, it was already 4.45 a.m. The suggestion of the sun coming up brightened the sky. But when Lev reached the door to Tiffany’s mother’s place, he was alarmed to find it ajar.

  ‘Jesus! What did I say about leaving the frigging door open?’

  With a thundering heart and a throbbing head, wondering if his infant son might be lying dead at the bottom of the stairwell at the far end of the block, Lev pushed the door open.

  ‘Maria? Maria! Jay! Tiff!’

  No sign of Maria.

  Striding through to the living room, however, he frowned at the scene that lay before him. Tiffany was sitting in the middle of the floor with a screaming Jay.

  ‘Me Mam went to the offy for fags,’ was all she said.

  Lev ran to his son, lifting him from the carpet.

  ‘What the bloody hell is going on? Why’s he crying? He stinks of shit. Didn’t you change him, you lazy bitch?’

  His attention was drawn to the glowing embers of a cigarette in the ashtray beside Tiffany, who merely contorted herself into the lotus position and started toying with her lank hair with her left hand.

  Jay was screaming, clutching at his arm. Tiffany held a cigarette butt. Click.