The Cover Up Read online

  She peed on the stick, feeling a rush of unexpected euphoria. Now, she had to wait.

  Sitting on that guest toilet, Sheila considered her situation. She had been careful. She had been cunning. She had taken the reins of Paddy’s business and had steered them down a better-hewn path that was more suited to the modern, digital age and an economy that relied on the service industries.

  ‘Why the hell have I still got Ellis James and Tax Bitch on my back?’ she asked the spotlights, sunk into the gabled ceiling.

  Toying with the silken panties that hung around her ankles, staring blankly at her painted toenails, she shook her head. Someone was stoking up the obsessed Ellis James like a bear agitating a beehive, hoping to bag a golden honey pot. And where James went, that frumpy cow Ruth Darley followed.

  ‘Bancroft?’

  Except Bancroft had a vested interest in keeping South Manchester running smoothly. He wanted to swoop in and absorb her going concerns as his own. The Boddlingtons wouldn’t sabotage her in this way either, because their priority was covering their own arses and keeping as far from Ellis James and HMRC as possible. And now she knew Tariq biblically, at least, she was certain he wasn’t the kind to go running to the police with tales. The Boddlingtons took by force or through negotiation.

  No. Somebody was trying to ruin her. But who? Could Katrina, in some fit of jealousy and need to avenge her brother’s death, be stirring the shit? Yes. Katrina.

  ‘I wouldn’t put it past that sneaky, hard-faced cow.’

  Two minutes were up. Squeezing her eyes shut and swallowing down the dyspepsia that roiled around her gut, Sheila took the pregnancy test up from the lip of the adjacent bidet. Took a deep breath.

  Here she was, standing at the edge of the precipice. A woman in her mid-forties; a woman being chased down a reproductive cul-de-sac by the passage of time and physical decay; a woman trying, after years of being nothing more than a high-end masturbatory aid to a bullying man, to make it in a world of men. Slavishly she had pandered to the last glorious sputter of her youthful hormones as they prepared to abandon her for good – had she screwed it all up when she screwed her business rival knowingly without using protection?

  ‘Please God,’ she said, though she wasn’t certain what she was asking God for.

  Looked down at the test. Two blue lines. Bold. Perfectly visible. No room for doubt.

  Sheila O’Brien was carrying Tariq Khan’s baby.

  Chapter 36

  Conky

  ‘I’m losing you,’ Conky muttered beneath his breath as he trailed some twenty metres behind Sheila. He wove his way in and out of the throng of pedestrians, all hurrying and scurrying to their places of work before the clock struck nine. ‘I can feel it in my bones. Tariq Khan with his hair and his abs. Bastard.’

  Sheila was wearing flats today. Unusual. She was dressed in uncharacte‌ristically loose clothing too. Sensibly attired for the freezing damp. Not like Sheila at all.

  Concentrate on the job in hand, for God’s sake! Stop feeling fecking sorry for yourself, man.

  Glancing across the road, he could still see the van driver, shadowing Sheila’s movements. He had followed the sneaky bastard from the car park by the MEN arena, on the flattened site of Manchester’s oldest, most iconic brewery, where the white van had cunningly sandwiched itself between two long-wheel-based Sprinters in an elevated section of the car park. Had Conky not been looking out for this bollocks, he would never have spotted him from the main car park below. The guy – a man in his fifties with a bad fake tan wearing a baseball cap at a ridiculous angle over what appeared to be white hair, dressed in grubby workman’s cargo trousers and work boots, all covered by an anonymous anorak – knew his stuff.

  Now, he slid into a café while Sheila disappeared into the building opposite – the one where she had just leased office space. How long was the mysterious workman going to sit there? Conky debated whether he too should venture into the café to wait it out until his next move. Would the man recognise him if he sat a few tables away? Possibly. With his distinctive appearance, every criminal north of London and south of Glasgow would spot him a mile off.

  Hanging back, browsing in a man’s boutique from which he had a good view of the workman, Conky avoided catching glimpses of himself in the mirror.

  ‘Can I help you?’ some trendy young shop assistant asked. The lad had a head full of glorious, gelled hair. He was staring at Conky’s confection of glued-on hairpiece with an expression that walked the border between admiration and disbelief.

  Unsure of what to say to a boy like that in a young feller’s shop like this, Conky opted to stare at the assistant’s footwear. ‘Your guddies are beezer. Can I try them in a size thirteen?’

  ‘My trainers?’

  ‘Well, I’m not talking about your fecking underpants, am I?’

  Positioning himself by the window, pretending to admire a suit, Conky noticed that the workman buried his head inside his tabloid newspaper when Gloria walked by. Interesting. Gloria could clearly ID this chump.

  It had been agreed beforehand that Sheila and Gloria would move about as frequently as possible in a bid to flush this guy out conclusively. Before the shop assistant had had the opportunity to bring the trainers out for him to try, Conky was on the move again, following the man who was following the two women.

  Down the cobbled King Street they walked until they reached a natural pause thanks to the traffic of Deansgate. Outside Kendals, the two parted company. Conky expected the man to follow Sheila but was surprised when he tailed Gloria. Odd. Popping in and out of various shops, the trail went cold when Gloria shook both of them off, disappearing somewhere in the pedestrianised St Anne’s Square. Dead end.

  The following day, Conky began his labour of love anew, this time picking up the white van man back on the trail of Sheila, who was also being followed by Ellis James. Again, Conky was forced to spend another few uncomfortable hours ducking and diving out of sight of both the van man and the shabby detective.

  ‘I wonder if this guy’s a cop,’ he mused aloud to Sheila on the phone. ‘Could be working for Ellis James.’

  ‘Not if he battered the living daylights out of Lev,’ she said.

  Fair point. Even the bent cops didn’t play dirty like that unless they got a nonce in the cells and thought they could get away with it.

  ‘Try to follow him home when he’s finished with me,’ Sheila said. ‘See where he lives or if he meets up with anyone.’

  Hanging up, Conky sensed from the brisk efficiency in Sheila’s tone that it wouldn’t be long before it was only business between them. He could feel their intimacy evaporating and with it, his hopes of living out his remaining years beside his dream woman. The woman he had always yearned to share his triumphs, failures and favourite novels with. Deep within him, there was a part of Conky willing to acknowledge that he and Sheila actually had very little in common at all, apart from history and an employer/employee bond. There had been chemistry. A spark of sorts had definitely ignited after Paddy’s funeral, when she had had him teetering on the edge of death in a hired apartment in Beetham Tower. But if Sheila had indeed embarked on a sordid affair with her opposite number, the quiet domesticity that followed a day’s toil at the coalface of the O’Brien criminal empire was clearly not something Sheila wanted to pursue longer term. The novelty of loving a devoted but ugly man had clearly worn off for her, though Conky’s abiding adoration of Sheila would never, ever wane. Of that he was certain. He would carry his love for her to the grave.

  Caught up in his thoughts of the inevitable grieving he must do for this enduring love-lost, Conky was surprised when the paths of Ellis James and the white van man diverged. Lev’s suspected attacker led Conky back to the Bramshott mansion.

  ‘Oh, now this is interesting. Let’s see what happens here.’

  The white van pulled up directly outside the house. Conky was careful to hang back outside the neighbours’ some four doors down to observe as the cheeky w
ee bastard removed ladders from the roof of his vehicle and hopped over the fence.

  ‘Come on. Turn round, you shifty fecker so I can get a good look at your bake.’

  Pondering what his next move was, Conky scurried over from the cover of his car to watch the man’s movements through a miserly gap in the dense laurel hedging. The wide Bramshott boulevard was the sort of exclusive place where all the households had the ominous black CCTV orbs hanging from poles in several locations on the periphery of their properties, which meant they could see the road as well as inside the manicured boundary. He’d be lucky if some nosey do-gooder didn’t call the police on him. Their kind certainly wouldn’t recognise a neighbour if one slapped them in the face with a proverbial wet kipper. Though they might ask if it had been responsibly sourced.

  Whistling. The van man was whistling something jaunty by Wham. Clambering up the ladder, carrying a mix of something in a bucket and a toolkit hanging around his thick waist. Conky’s lower legs screamed with discomfort as he crouched, watching what appeared to be a workman carrying out a simple repair job. Odd.

  The van man hung his bucket from the top of the ladder. Started to gouge out mortar in the brickwork just beneath the master bedroom where Sheila and Conky slept.

  Pointing? Was this lunatic actually fixing pointing that wasn’t in need of repair? The house had only been built a few years earlier. It was a state-of-the-art, contemporary mansion, with stylish grey oversized windows, a soupçon of dressed stone and red cedar cladding. The place would give Huf Haus an inferiority complex, so why’s this eejit fixing it?

  Barking and a woman’s voice made Conky jump.

  ‘You! What are you doing?’

  Conky turned around to find an elderly woman crossing the street. She was dressed in expensive-looking hot-pink gym gear: the kind that looked good on Sheila – a woman twenty years this old bag’s junior. Not wanting to alert the van man to his presence, he strode over to head Mrs Nosey Tits off.

  ‘Oh, good morning,’ he said. ‘I’m your neighbour. I’m just checking that your man there is doing the job he’s been paid to do for my partner, Mrs O’Brien.’

  The woman’s taut face barely moved. Too many face uplifts on this one, and Conky noted the type of boob job that looked preposterous on the young, let alone the elderly. ‘You’re not Mr O’Brien.’

  ‘Mr O’Brien sadly passed away in the spring. Or did the sizeable funeral cortège fail to pique your interest in the same way that a well-dressed man squatting by a bush did?’ He removed his glasses and treated her to The Eyes.

  As she baulked and started to come out with some claptrap about the Neighbourhood Watch scheme, Conky heard drilling on the other side of the hedge. What was that trespassing bastard up to?

  With Nosey Tits fobbed off, Conky returned to the gap. Whatever the man had done, he was now merely applying mortar neatly to the spaces between the bricks. The scraping noise as he took the excess mix off set Conky’s teeth on edge. He had had enough. Surreptitiously, he made his way to the gates and used his fob to open them. Noiselessly, they swished open. The man was still busy about his task. Good.

  Sprinting the fifty metres to the ladder, Conky shouted. ‘You! What the hell are you doing, you trespassing, stalking fecker?’

  Finally, the man turned to him. Like the nosey neighbour, he looked like an old man who couldn’t bear to give up on his youth. He still wore the baseball cap at a jaunty angle. Shiny faced and perma-tanned – the approximate shade of a cheesy puff. Not like any builder Conky had ever met. There was surprise in those wide eyes. ‘Oh,’ he simply said.

  Conky grabbed the bottom of the ladder and started to shake it.

  ‘Get off, you nutcase!’ the van man shouted.

  ‘I’ll get off when you tell me what the hell you’re doing up there.’

  ‘Pointing!’

  ‘The pointing doesn’t need doing, you shyster. And you’ve been following Mrs O’Brien, who owns this place.’ He started to shake the ladder from left to right.

  ‘Stop! Stop! I’m going to bleeding fall and break my neck.’ Clinging onto the top of the ladder with a white-knuckled grip, the man seemed sufficiently rattled. His cap fell off, revealing white hair beneath, impressively gelled into spikes that his headgear had not flattened.

  ‘Get down from there and speak to me, you lying arsehole.’ Flashing the man the stock of his gun, holstered against his body, Conky finally let go of the ladder, allowing the trespasser to descend.

  When he set foot on the ground, he came up short on Conky, though most men did. His breath was rasping. His hands shook. Whoever this guy was, he was an amateur. A pro didn’t show fear. Ever.

  Conky gripped him by the shoulder. Took his phone out of his coat pocket.

  ‘Say, “cheese!”’

  ‘What?’

  He snapped the guy’s photo and pinged it immediately in a text to Sheila, Gloria and Lev, asking if they recognised the man.

  ‘Now, why are you tampering with brickwork that hasn’t got a damned thing wrong with it? Why are you skulking around Sheila O’Brien’s garden and why did you beat Leviticus Bell over the head and leave him for dead? Who are you?’

  The man held his trembling hands up as a gesture of surrender. ‘My name’s Bob. I’m doing property maintenance. Honest.’

  ‘What’s with the stalking routine?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re on about.’

  ‘I’ve been following you, following Mrs O’Brien and Mrs Bell. Tell me what your beef is with Lev Bell.’

  ‘I haven’t been following a soul. I swear. If it looks like I have, it’s complete coincidence, mate.’

  To punch, or not to punch? It was hard to tell, studying the man’s clearly Botoxed face, whether he was lying or not. No discernible expression at all. Very perplexing for Conky, who preferred to leave nuance to the literature he read and to deal in absolutes when it came to his job.

  ‘Are you gonna let go of my shoulder, you big Irish ranch-pot?’

  Punch.

  Battering his fist against the trespasser’s jaw, Conky paused only to reiterate the question, ‘Why did you attack Leviticus Bell?’ He held the man tightly by the bib of his overalls, preventing any chance of escape.

  ‘I didn’t!’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’ A kick in the bollocks and a knee to the stomach had Bob, the uninvited maintenance man, spitting blood into the paling autumnal hydrangeas.

  ‘Please yourself, pal. But it’s the truth.’

  Conky hauled him up against the wall by his straps so that they were face to face. He pushed his glasses up so he could eyeball this stubborn ponce.

  ‘If you’re a builder with all that botulism filling out your wrinkles and those idiotic plucked eyebrows, I’ll eat my superior-quality hairpiece.’ He glanced down at Bob’s hands. ‘I’ve never met a manual labourer that had such clean fingernails for a start. You’re full of more shite than the sewerage works at Trafford Park. Who are you working for, you duplicitous fuck-trumpet?’

  ‘Myself. I’ve got a lickle property development company. Honest. And I look after my hands. Clean fingernails are very—’

  ‘Bancroft? Is that it?’

  Conky administered another blow to Bob’s belly when only silence ensued. He was about to do something unkind to the prick’s ears with a pair of pliers that he’d spotted in his tool belt when his phone pinged multiple times in his pocket. Dropping Bob to the ground, Conky read the response from Sheila.

  Never seen him before. Why? Is e’thing OK?

  Then from Lev.

  Can’t tell. Never got a look at twat’s face.

  Finally, the response from Gloria.

  That’s my boyfriend, Bob. Don’t touch him. I’m on my way.

  ‘You’re Gloria Bell’s feller?’ Conky frowned, wishing he’d paid more attention to the stream of consciousness, Bible quotes and other verbal diarrhoea that came out of Gloria’s mouth. ‘Gloria? Gloria Bell? She doesn’t have a feller.’


  ‘Yes she does,’ Bob said, dusting himself down. The bruising on his jaw was already starting to show purple. Swelling beneath the skin made his face appear even more stretched tight than before. ‘We met at speed-dating.’

  Taking a step back, Conky thumbed the gun in its holster beneath his coat. ‘Where?’

  ‘The big night club. You know? The famous one.’

  ‘M1 House?’

  ‘Yep. That’s it.’

  This unlikely turn of events felt like the intellectual equivalent of bad maths to Conky. A builder with a Botoxed face dating Pulp Friction, of all people. An apparent stalker and possible attacker of an O’Brien employee. A man too old for clubbing, who had been inside M1 House but who claimed not to be in the employ of Bancroft. None of it stacked up. There was an important part of the equation missing but Conky couldn’t put his finger on what that might feasibly be.

  Pinching Bob’s unpleasant button nose between his forefinger and thumb, Conky pushed him to his knees. ‘You expect me to swallow this crap? Mrs O’Brien doesn’t recognise your photo. So, how come you’re working on her house if she doesn’t know you from Adam?’

  With eyes clenched shut, Bob opened his mouth to respond. But his words were drowned out by the beeping of a car horn and the revving of an engine. The sound of squealing tyres in the street and more impatient horn-blowing heralded the arrival of Gloria. Conky opened the gate with a flick of the fob and watched with curiosity as her Mazda swished up the gravel drive, swerving just short of the grand entrance.

  ‘What in the Lord’s name are you doing, Conky McFadden?’ Gloria yelled, climbing out of her car. ‘Put Robert down.’

  Releasing his grip on the builder’s nose, Conky wiped his fingers on his overalls. ‘So he is called Bob.’

  ‘And he is my boyfriend!’ Gloria said, hands on hips.