The Cover Up Page 25

  ‘It’s a pity there’s no spaces outside,’ Sheila said, scouting the busy street ahead. ‘But it’s probably best we don’t park where that bloody camera can catch us.’ She pointed to a CCTV unit that was strapped high on a lamp post, angled down towards the entrance to the vaults. ‘I reckon that damned thing is why HMRC is about to pounce. I reckon it’s caught me going in and out of the safety deposit place once too often with big bags.’

  Lev squinted up at the camera, following its trajectory downwards to the anonymous-looking entrance. ‘How we gonna do this? They’re not going to let me take your shit out, are they? Not unless you give them permission.’

  Glancing at Jay in the back seat, Sheila’s red-rimmed eyes narrowed. ‘Bring Jay and the pushchair. There’s a massive golf bag in the boot. Use that and all. Follow me in after a minute. Act natural.’

  Uncomfortable with the notion of using his son to aid and abet the movement of unlaundered drug money, Lev shook his head in silence. Rolled his eyes. What option did he have? How much cash would be in a rubble sack, stuffed to the brim? Certainly the hundred grand she’d promised him. ‘Bugger it. Let’s go.’

  Idling on the street corner, he watched Sheila drape her handbag over her arm and trot into the facility as though she owned the place.

  ‘Look at that, Jay,’ he said to his son. ‘All the confidence in the world. That’s how I want you to be when you grow up, love.’ The boy clapped his hands together, pointing at a ‘nee-naw’ that drove past with sirens blaring. ‘Losers like your dad just can’t strut like that. Even if one day I win a million on the lottery …’ He continued his train of thought in silence, certain the sickly stink of poverty would always cleave to him, even if he were clad head to toe in the very finest of designer togs. The cumbersome chip on his shoulder that was part of his genetic inheritance from Gloria and his father would always prevent him from flying. But he was determined that for Jay, it wouldn’t be so.

  Full of purpose, he followed Sheila a minute later, carrying the trolley and the golf bag, slung across his body, carefully navigating his way down a winding stone staircase. He passed through one iron-barred gate after another as the buzzer entry system bade him down, down, down to Manchester’s discretely guarded hoards. Finally, he and Sheila met at the bottom.

  ‘I’ve squared it,’ she said, nodding and smiling at what appeared to be a dour-faced jailor, carrying the largest bunch of keys Lev had ever seen. ‘They know you’re helping me because of my back problem.’ She smiled. Two rows of radiant whitened teeth like strip lighting being switched on in that gloomy subterranean place.

  Alone among the safety deposit boxes, Sheila led Lev to a box that was more the size of a large cupboard. ‘In here. Just get it all stacked in the golf bag and on the trolley. No looking at what’s here and no questions asked. Right? Act natural.’

  ‘Yeah, you keep saying that. Easier said than done!’

  Jay had started to cry, presumably freaked by being in such an enclosed space. Perhaps he sensed that they were deep below the city, on a par with the remnants of the secret, subterranean old Manchester – a now long-forgotten network of tunnels, abandoned shops and even a disused tube station that had been buried beneath the relatively new layout above. Perhaps Jay was sensitive to the city’s artifice, with the grit and grime of the truth lying just beneath a shiny surface. Either way, he was making a right racket, pressing his hands to his ears as though the pressure of the air at that depth was too much for his delicate little lugholes.

  ‘Don’t worry, Jay-Jay. We’ll be out of here in a minute.’ Lev could feel the sweat rolling down his back as he hoisted the rubble sacks from the vault, stashing one in the basket beneath the pushchair and one beneath Jay’s bottom, meaning the boy was perched uncomfortably too high in his seat, reminiscent of some scene from the Princess and the Pea. He shoved another two into the golf bag. ‘There’s no room for the last one,’ he told Sheila.

  Sheila tugged on the waistband of his jogging bottoms. ‘In there.’

  ‘A rubble sack full of cash?’ His whisper was more of a shout.

  ‘Do it. Zip your coat up over it. Come on, for Christ’s sake! Earn your keep.’

  His muscles screamed in complaint as he lugged the golf bag and the heavily laden pushchair back up the stairs to street level. All those years of bench-pressing in the gym had nothing on this.

  With Sheila already waiting in the car, Lev was careful to pull his hood over his face and to put up Jay’s rain hood on exiting the vaults. The last thing he needed was Ellis James on his case, asking why a part-time cleaner and suspected gang member had showed up on the council’s CCTV footage, leaving a place where the legitimately rich stashed their goodies.

  ‘Let us in!’ he said, knocking on the passenger door of the Nissan.

  Odd that Sheila got out and opened the boot but hadn’t unlocked the passenger side for him.

  ‘In there,’ she said, indicating where the golf bag and the bag down his jogging bottoms should go. ‘And the one that Jay’s sitting on.’ Smiling encouragingly.

  ‘I thought that sack was gonna slice my bollocks off, getting up them stairs.’ He chuckled whilst quietly acknowledging the unsettled feeling in his stomach, realising it had nothing to do with the well-being of his tackle. Something was off.

  With four bags stashed in the boot, he started to undo the clip on the straps of Jay’s pushchair.

  ‘Not so fast,’ Sheila said.

  Her face was set hard. All deadly serious, now.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘You can get the tram.’

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘If you think I’m driving you to my new hidey-hole, you’re having a laugh with yourself. I’ve got help at the other end. You can get the tram or bus or a taxi, even. You’ve got a hundred K in the basket of that pushchair. You can afford a black cab!’

  ‘Tight cow,’ Lev said to himself, manoeuvring the sluggish pushchair along a quiet backstreet towards the rebuilt St. Peter’s Square, where the trams were finally stopping again. Thankfully, the rubble sack was completely hidden from view in the cleverly constructed basket beneath the pushchair. He hoped it would hold the weight of all that paper. The last thing he needed was a sack of twenties and fifties blowing across town.

  He was just about to tell Jay what Daddy had decided to make for tea when he registered a white van pulling up behind him, depicted in the reflection of a plate glass window on the office block up ahead. At first, he thought nothing of it. Vans like that were everywhere. Jay threw his beaker onto the ground and started to cry.

  When Lev stooped to pick the beaker up, the muscular, hairy arms that grabbed him from behind took him by surprise. One arm around his torso. One over his mouth. Kicking out, unable to yell, he found himself dragged backwards into the deep shadows of a secluded office block loading bay. Jay, strapped in his pushchair, lay within sight but beyond reach. Brakes off, slowly rolling backwards down the backstreet’s incline towards the dual carriageway. But Lev could do nothing.

  The stinging blow to his head stopped his thoughts dead at ‘Jay!’

  Chapter 35

  Sheila

  Sorry bout the maze. Let me tek you to Blackpool on nice date. Mek day of it n see the lights. Luv Bob. x

  Gloria held the phone up, encouraging Sheila to re-read the message for the fourth time in ten minutes.

  ‘Go on. What do you think? Good, eh?’ Grinning from ear to ear and with a glow that exceeded the wattage of the kitchen chandelier, Gloria looked like a woman who was getting laid regularly for the first time in decades.

  ‘Yeah, yeah. I already said. I’m really glad for you.’

  ‘What on earth is up with you, Sheila? You’re being really nowty and you seem out of breath.’

  Avoiding her business partner’s scrutiny, Sheila retreated to the other side of the kitchen, putting the kettle on and rummaging through the cupboards to find the ginger biscuits. Good for nausea, it had said online. ‘Nothing. I’m
fine. Except you were on my case the minute I got home. I wish you’d been that enthusiastic when we were supposed to be viewing office space.’

  On Sheila’s return home, after the swift drop-off at her mother’s where she had stowed the rubble sacks of cash in the old coal-hole and swapped cars, leaving the Nissan for her mother to return to the car-hire place, Gloria had been waiting at the gates. She had been parked up in her Mazda, itching to show her this declaration of enthusiasm and Bob’s possibly significant use of the word ‘luv’.

  ‘Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer. Romans 12:12,’ Gloria said, beaming at the screen of her phone. ‘After a lifetime of tribulation and prayer, I think, I’m finally going through my “hope phase”, Sheila.’

  ‘Lev told me Bob left you in a field and buggered off.’

  Gloria closed her eyes melodramatically, spreading her newly manicured fingers on the worktop. ‘That was a misunderstanding. He had a sudden work commitment.’

  ‘Oh, and you didn’t?’

  ‘Please don’t ruin it.’

  Sheila was about to launch into a rebuke about Gloria’s new-found rebelliousness when the buzzer went. She frowned. Conky, who was currently giving the O’Brien dealers a briefing on what to do if they spotted Bancroft’s interlopers on their turf, wasn’t expected home for another couple of hours. Was this it? Was this the HMRC crackdown? Had she been fed wrong information by her man on the inside about the raid? Her breath coming short, she made her way to the hall and checked the screen to see who was at the gate.

  ‘Lev?!’ And he looked in a bad way. Doubled up. Throwing up, from what she could see. Behind him was a cab. It sped off, leaving Lev alone.

  Calling Gloria to her aid, Sheila pressed the button to open the gates. Pulled her thickest cardigan from the coat stand and crunched her way briskly down the drive, wrapping the twenty-ply cashmere tightly around her against the chill.

  Lev was on all fours at the end of the drive, dry-heaving. Beside him, Jay was trying to climb out of his pushchair, unsecured. When Lev looked up, Sheila saw that the left side of his head had been bleeding heavily. The flow had covered his scalp, face, neck and shoulders in claret-coloured blood.

  ‘Jesus! What the hell happened?’

  Gloria was right behind her, hands flapping. ‘Oh good Lord. Good Lord. Oh dear. Good Lord.’ She reached out towards her son but withdrew her hand. Reached in. Withdrew, grimacing at the blood.

  ‘Help,’ Lev said, heaving anew and bringing up bile onto Gloria’s chunky court shoes.

  ‘Oh, really!’ Gloria took a step backwards, staring at the mess. Holding her nose.

  With her left hand, Sheila grabbed Jay by the upper arm and coaxed him back into his pushchair. With her right, she took out her new phone and dialled Conky’s number. He picked up after only two rings.

  ‘Sheila. Are you—?’

  ‘Get round here straight away. And get Fitzpatrick. It’s urgent.’

  ‘The doc?’

  ‘Yep. Lev’s in a bad way. Head injury. But we don’t need paramedics and 999 knowing our business.’

  Sinking to her knees, she held Lev by the shoulders. ‘A private doctor’s on his way, Lev.’ She raised her voice, wondering if he could hear her or make sense of what she said. Tried to make eye contact.

  ‘Man hit,’ he said. His speech was slurred. He started to gag. ‘Hit head.’

  ‘Help me get him inside,’ she told Gloria.

  But Gloria seemed to be in shock, a puzzled expression on her face as she studied the splatter pattern of bile on her shoes.

  ‘Gloria!’ Sheila yelled. ‘Bring Jay in. Now!’

  Wondering if the fledgling life in her belly would cope with the exertion, Sheila somehow managed to strong-arm Lev up the drive and into the house. Counting the minutes until Conky and Fitzpatrick showed – only moments between them. Their respective cars crunched and skidded up the long gravel driveway.

  ‘Is he gonna be all right?’ she asked, as the discreet private practitioner cleaned Lev’s head wound.

  ‘He needs a CT scan to check for a bleed on the brain.’ Fitzpatrick’s breath smelled of stale coffee. His clothes had a whiff of hospital corridors and medicinal alcohol about them. He fitted a blood pressure cuff around Lev’s arm. Pumped it up and stood for several seconds in sombre silence while he took Lev’s pulse. ‘His blood pressure’s in his boots. He needs fluids.’ He shone a penlight into his eyes. ‘Pupils are dilating fine, though. We should get him over to the hospital as soon as—’

  ‘This needs handling with sensitivity,’ Conky said – a commanding presence, as he stood, legs astride, filling the doorway to the guest bedroom. ‘The lad’s been attacked, possibly by a business rival. We don’t need the authorities sticking their oar in. That’s why Mrs O’Brien pays you through the nose, so she does.’

  Fitzpatrick nodded, rubbing his eyes – prematurely haggard, but not for a heart surgeon who burned the candle at both ends, juggling NHS clinics and private practice with removing the odd bullet or stitching the odd head wound on the side for Manchester’s bad boys. ‘Bring him to my private rooms. We’ve got a scanner on-site. I’ll get him scanned tonight and we’ll see what’s what.’ A nod and a wink and his palm was greased with a cool couple of grand. ‘But in the meantime, if his condition deteriorates and he gets drowsy or starts vomiting again, get him to A&E immediately.’

  After some thirty minutes, Lev had started to pull round in earnest. His speech was gaining clarity. Gloria had finally calmed down. She was sitting in the easy chair in the corner of the guest room, bouncing Jay on her knee, feeding him ice cream to ease the boy’s teething pain. But still, Gloria was pointedly looking anywhere but at her own son, seemingly unable to process her own feelings about Lev’s head wound, Sheila assessed. Or perhaps just being a cold-hearted bitch.

  ‘Did you see who did it?’ Sheila asked, perching on the edge of the bed.

  Lev fixed her with hazy eyes. ‘Nah. Whoever it was came at me from behind.’ He spoke slowly, as if considering every word were an effort. ‘But I did clock a white van pull up, reflected in a window. And now I think of it, there was the same kind of van parked in that street, when you picked us up after the meet with the copper.’

  A white van. Sheila mentally hit ‘control F’ to find all incidences of a white van in her memory’s files. Hadn’t she seen a white van knocking around town in almost every office-to-let she had visited? Hadn’t there been a white van outside M1 House? Could she remember its driver? No. And white vans were everywhere. But hadn’t she regularly seen one hanging around outside the house?

  ‘I’m being followed,’ she pronounced.

  ‘White vans are ubiquitous, She,’ Conky said, advancing into the room. Leaning against the dressing table with his arms folded and his glasses perched on his forehead.

  ‘Even my boyfriend, Bob, drives a white van when he’s working, Sheila,’ Gloria said, beaming at the very mention of the word ‘boyfriend’. ‘It’s just a coincidence.’

  ‘I don’t believe in coincidences,’ Sheila said. She turned to Conky. Realised that what she was about to ask of him would scupper her blissful indulgences with Tariq for at least a week. But then, perhaps if Conky suspected anything of her affair, this would allay his suspicions. ‘I want you to trail me for the next few days. Me and Gloria, if you can. Get one of the other lads on her.’

  ‘But the feller came after me,’ Lev said. ‘He left me for dead and all. The only reason I’m still here and Jay-Jay’s pushchair didn’t roll into traffic was a couple of smokers outside the next office block. They heard Jay crying and ran out to help. In the nick of time! He was just about to go under a frigging bus.’

  ‘Could this feller have been after the … thing I’d given you?’ Sheila asked, sensing that Conky and Gloria had pricked up their ears. But the nosey sods could whistle if they thought she was about to clarify her financial arrangements with Lev.

  Lev closed his eyes. ‘It’s all sti
ll there.’

  Sheila could feel Conky’s eyes boring into the back of her head. ‘Listen, if your ex-scrubber had been savvy enough to put a hit out on you, she would have taken Jay.’

  ‘That strumpet’s too slothful and money-grubbing to hire a hit man!’ Gloria said. ‘The desire of the sluggard kills him, for his hands refuse to labour. All day long he craves and craves, but the righteous gives and does not hold back. Proverbs 21:25–26.’

  ‘Shut it, Mam,’ Lev said. ‘Just take a fucking day off, will you?’

  Patting Lev’s hand, Sheila continued. ‘I reckon it’s more likely this van driver has been after either me or your mother. I’m not sure why they’ve gone after you today, but I’m pretty certain I have been followed. For months. And I didn’t think anything of it. He’s got to be one of Bancroft’s.’

  ‘I’ll happily trail you, Sheila,’ Conky said. ‘I wouldn’t want to jeopardise the safety of the woman I love for a nanosecond.’ Suddenly he was standing right next to her with a hot, territorial hand on her shoulder. ‘But catch yourself on! I’ll be finding out all your lady secrets, won’t I? He he.’ Wink, wink.

  There was jocularity in his voice but Sheila could detect uncertainty and hurt beneath the faux chuckle. He’d seen Tariq leaving that hotel. She was sure of it.

  Later, with the house finally empty of guests and Conky away to M1 House to staffing issues with the O’Brien dealers and Frank – the riotous noise of the three Bells now merely experienced as tinnitus – Sheila ascended to the en suite in the guest room at the top of the house, where she knew she would be undisturbed. She took out the pregnancy test she had bought earlier.

  ‘Who am I kidding?’ she asked her reflection in the mirror above the sink. She already had that pinched look that she had acquired at the start of all her previous pregnancies. Five in total. Paddy had thumped three out of her. She winced at the memories, feeling his erstwhile wrath ricochet across her already bloated abdomen. The two pregnancies that had endured had grown into Amy and Dahlia, of course. But Sheila was experienced enough to know the signs. ‘I already know the result.’