Collusion jli-2 Page 6

  Lennon held his stare for a few more seconds. ‘Fair enough,’ he said. ‘What was the aggro between you and Crozier about? Off the record. You’re not under caution.’

  ‘That cunt’s been doing business with the Lithuanians.’

  ‘We know that already,’ Lennon said. ‘Everyone knows that. You’ve been doing business with them too.’

  ‘Not like this.’ Rankin shook his head. ‘I buy and sell with them, the usual trade, move girls about, sometimes get the odd bit of blow off them. They’re useful now and then, but that’s all. But we keep them out of our areas, them and the rest of the foreigners. Let the taigs have them for neighbours if they want, but keep them off my streets.’

  Too late, Lennon tried to hide his anger at the word. It had been a while since anyone had called him ‘taig’ to his face.

  Rankin paused, registering the offence. ‘What, you’re the other side of the house, are you?’

  ‘That’s neither here nor there,’ Lennon said.

  ‘Best cop I ever knew was a taig,’ Rankin said. ‘Put away a lot of people, that boy, including me. Twice.’

  Lennon ignored Rankin’s clumsy attempt at prettying up his bigotry. ‘You were telling me about Crozier and the Lithuanians.’

  ‘Aye, right. Rodney Crozier wasn’t just doing a bit of trading with the Liths, he was getting into bed with them in a big way. See, when Michael McKenna got his brains blown out a few months back, that left a big gap.’ Rankin stopped talking and tilted his head. ‘What?’

  Lennon’s jaw had tightened at McKenna’s name. ‘Nothing,’ he said.

  Rankin studied him for a moment before continuing. ‘Anyway, the Liths started moving in to his old places on the Lower Falls, the apartments he’d been running girls out of, but they needed muscle on the street.’

  ‘Not Republican muscle?’

  ‘No, see, McKenna’s higher-ups wouldn’t let their boys take up the slack. They’re too busy pretending to be politicians these days, they don’t want to get their hands dirty. They don’t want any of McKenna’s old shit sticking to them when it’s election time, you understand?’

  Lennon nodded. ‘I understand.’

  ‘Now, the Liths can’t go too deep into that part of Belfast, but those places around Broadway are wide open for them. So they’ve got Crozier’s boys doing the donkey work, and he’s getting a big slice for his trouble. He’s raking it in, and I’m left swinging.’

  ‘Surely there’s plenty to go around,’ Lennon said.

  ‘But he’s getting all the traffic off the motorway. All the punters from Lisburn, Craigavon, Lurgan, Dungannon, they just turn off at the roundabout and they’ve got all the action they want.’

  ‘So what was the meet with Crozier about?’

  ‘To see if I could talk sense to him,’ Rankin said. ‘Fuck knows why I thought he’d listen. He always was a thick cunt. All mouth, the big man so long as he had his boys to back him up. I thought if I got him on his own, just the two of us, we could be reasonable about it.’

  ‘Didn’t work out that way,’ Lennon said.

  Rankin clucked, smiled, and raised his hands. ‘Didn’t, did it? I had to try something, though. I even went to my handlers a while back to see if you lot would do something. I told them I’d do anything they wanted to get Crozier shut down, give them any dirt on him I could find. They said no, there wasn’t enough men or money to go after him like that. If I didn’t know better, I’d say Rodney Crozier was touting as well.’ Rankin fixed Lennon with a long hard stare. ‘Is he?’ he asked.

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ Lennon said. ‘You know as well as I do C3 tell us sweet fuck all.’

  ‘C3? That’s a fucking stupid name. Makes them sound like a car. They’re still Special Branch, same as before. So if you can’t tell me about Rodney Crozier, then tell me something else.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Why’d you flinch when I said Michael McKenna’s name?’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  A smile crawled along Rankin’s lips. ‘Yes you did. Don’t bullshit a bullshitter, son.’

  Lennon stood. ‘I think that’s all for now.’

  ‘Hang on,’ Rankin said, raising a finger at Lennon, his eyes narrowing. ‘You’re the cop that took up with McKenna’s niece, aren’t you? She had a child to you, didn’t she? That fairly stirred the shit among his boys. I heard they were ready for doing her, only McKenna wouldn’t have it.’

  Lennon leaned over Rankin until he could smell the stale remains of his aftershave. ‘Keep your mouth off that,’ he said.

  ‘I wasn’t surprised when I heard she fucked off out of it,’ Rankin said. ‘Took the child with her, too.’

  Lennon straightened. ‘What do you know about that?’

  ‘Only what I heard. Like I said, I know boys on the other side. They talk.’

  ‘What did they say?’

  Rankin grinned. ‘I’ve said too much already, son. Best I shut my mouth now.’

  Lennon leaned on the bed, his face inches from Rankin’s. ‘What did they say?’

  Rankin mimed zipping his mouth shut, his eyes twinkling.

  Lennon grabbed the lapels of his dressing gown and pulled him close so their noses almost touched. ‘What did they say?’

  ‘Easy, son,’ Rankin said, smiling. He put a hand on Lennon’s shoulder. ‘I’m only winding you up. They didn’t say much, it was all a bit confused, like.’

  Lennon released the lapels and let Rankin sit back. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Everyone thought she just got the frighteners when her uncle got hit, and that whole feud kicked off. But then I heard some other stuff, just rumours, you know?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like it wasn’t a feud,’ Rankin said. He smoothed his dressing gown over his chest. ‘Nobody could say for sure what it was, but it wasn’t a feud. Them three dissidents that blew themselves up had nothing to do with it, for one thing. What I heard, and don’t quote me, it was just the one man done it. Some fella just went clean buck mental and went after McKenna and McGinty and the lot of them.’

  ‘Bullshit,’ Lennon said. ‘There was an inquiry.’

  Rankin laughed. ‘Since when did an inquiry prove anything? Anyway, that’s what I heard. Might be true, might not. But that’s not all.’

  Lennon sighed. ‘Christ, just tell me.’

  ‘I heard the woman was mixed up in it, her and the wee girl. Your wee girl. Jesus, don’t tell me you didn’t know all this? Them Special Branch boys really don’t tell you fuck all, do they?’

  Lennon’s heart fluttered. ‘Is that it?’

  ‘It’s all I heard,’ Rankin said.

  Lennon backed towards the door, almost stumbled over the chair.

  ‘A thank-you would be nice,’ Rankin called after Lennon as he retreated from the room.

  11

  ‘Thomas McDonnell,’ the doctor called. A long streak of piss with a miserable face, he hovered in the waiting-room doorway.

  ‘That’s me,’ the Traveller said.

  The doctor nodded and walked away. The Traveller followed him. He’d used the Community Hospital in Armagh before, and the name Thomas McDonnell. They had a man of that moniker in the system somewhere, and health care was free up here, so the Traveller had no compunction about using it.

  Except the Accident and Emergency doctors were always so fucking miserable. He’d had a broken right hand treated in the A&E at Craigavon once. A boxer’s fracture, they called it. He swore blind he hadn’t got it by punching some poor bastard’s face in, but they didn’t believe him. He could see the contempt on every single person who treated him that night. All except that little auxiliary nurse. The night hadn’t been a total loss in the end.

  This doctor was no more affable than the rest of them as he examined the Traveller’s eye. It had streamed all last night, keeping him awake as he lay in the back of the Mercedes, and he couldn’t stop squinting and blinking as he drove north this morning.

  ‘What happened?’ the doctor as
ked.

  ‘Got something in my eye,’ the Traveller said. ‘Hurts like fuck.’

  The doctor bristled. The Traveller noticed the little pin in the shape of a fish on the doctor’s lapel. Jesus, he was a God-botherer.

  ‘How did it get there?’ the doctor asked.

  ‘Don’t know,’ the Traveller said.

  The doctor sighed. ‘Head back.’

  Before the Traveller knew what was happening, the doctor squeezed some orange stuff out of a little tube into his eye.

  ‘Fuck’s sake,’ the Traveller said, blinking.

  The doctor sighed again. ‘It’s just to help me see better. Let’s have a look.’

  He pushed back the Traveller’s upper eyelid and shone a light in. ‘Hmm,’ the doctor said. The mint on his breath masked something sourer.

  ‘What?’ the Traveller asked.

  ‘There’s a foreign body under the upper lid, looks like a little fragment of wood, and you’ve a minor corneal abrasion. The nurse will irrigate the eye to remove the object and apply some antibiotic ointment.’

  ‘Nurse?’ the Traveller asked.

  ‘Mm-hmm,’ the doctor said.

  ‘No, you do it,’ the Traveller said.

  The doctor released the Traveller’s eyelid. ‘No need,’ he said. ‘It’s quite simple. She’ll just pour a bit of saline solution into the eye to flush it out and apply an antibiotic ointment to stop any infection. The abrasion will heal in a few days.’

  ‘You do it,’ the Traveller repeated. He grimaced as whatever the doctor had put in his eye found its way to the back of his throat.

  ‘Really, there’s no need. It’ll only take a—’

  ‘You’re the doctor, you fucking do it,’ the Traveller said. ‘It’s my fucking eye. It needs a doctor. I’m not having some blade just out of school poking at it. You do it.’

  The doctor did his best to look authoritative. ‘Please moderate your language, Mr McDonnell. Nurse Barnes is a skilled and experienced A&E nurse. She’s done this a thousand times. And I’m not sure she’d appreciate being called a “blade”.’

  The Traveller lowered his feet to the floor. ‘You do it,’ he said.

  ‘Honestly, there’s—’

  The Traveller stepped closer, the doctor’s ear within biting distance, and whispered, ‘You. Fucking. Do it.’

  The doctor’s voice quivered. ‘Mr McDonnell, we won’t tolerate abusive behaviour in this—’

  The Traveller seized the back of the doctor’s scrawny neck in his left hand, and pinched his windpipe between the fingers and thumb of his right.

  ‘Are you going to do it?’

  The doctor staggered back, taking the Traveller with him. A swivel chair tipped and fell to the floor. The doctor swiped a pen holder, scattering its contents across his desk. He made choked ‘Ack!’ noises as his face reddened.

  ‘Are you going to do it?’

  A scream came from behind. The Traveller twisted towards the voice, the doctor’s throat still in his grip. The nurse in the doorway screamed again.

  ‘Fuck,’ the Traveller said.

  He kicked the doctor’s feet from under him and ran.

  12

  ‘I need a favour,’ Lennon said into his phone as he waited for the lights to change at the junction of the Lisburn Road and Sandy Row.

  ‘What sort of favour?’ Dan Hewitt asked.

  ‘I want to see some files,’ Lennon said. He held the phone between his ear and his shoulder as the lights changed and he released the handbrake. ‘Whatever you’ve got on the McKenna feud.’

  ‘No chance,’ Hewitt said. ‘You’ve no reason to see them. Not unless you’ve got a live investigation, and that mess was wrapped up months ago. What do you want them for?’

  ‘It’s something Andy Rankin said.’

  ‘What’s the feud got to do with him?’

  ‘Nothing, it was just something he mentioned. A rumour he’d heard. I want to check it out. Come on, you know I’m doing you a big favour settling for that GBH.’

  ‘And you’re getting back on an MIT in return,’ Hewitt said. ‘I think that makes us square.’

  Lennon struggled to concentrate on the road as he wove through side streets to get back to Donegall Pass. ‘I need to see them, Dan.’

  No you don’t,’ Hewitt said. ‘You want to see them. Not the same thing at all. I couldn’t let you have them even if I wanted to. I have to show a live investigation before I can pull the files.’

  ‘Shit,’ Lennon said. ‘There must be some way.’

  ‘If you want files on Rankin, I can maybe do something for you, within reason.’

  ‘How about if you cross-reference Rankin and McKenna? If there’s any match-up, can you give me the files? Crozier too. Rankin told me Crozier’s been taking over McKenna’s turf since he died. That ties it to my case.’

  Lennon listened to silence for long seconds until Hewitt sighed and said, ‘All right, I’ll see what I can do. A lot of it’ll be redacted, though. You’ll be looking at more blacked-out lines than anything else.’

  ‘Okay,’ Lennon said, ‘whatever you can get me.’

  ‘Give me an hour,’ Hewitt said.

  The thin file landed on Lennon’s desk ninety minutes later. He flicked through the photocopied pages, less than twenty of them. True to Hewitt’s word, most of it had been blacked out by thick lines drawn with marker pen. But not all of them were redacted in the original. Some of the pages smelled of solvent, the black lines fresh and slightly damp to the touch.

  A Post-it note clung to the inside of the folder. In Dan Hewitt’s neat script it said:

  Jack,

  There’s not much, but it’s the best I can do for you. Remember, Dandy Andy has done us a lot of good. Like I said, he’s a piece of shit, but a useful piece of shit. Shred these when you’re done.

  Dan

  Dandy Andy Rankin was indeed a piece of shit. Not only had he been leeching off his own community for years, but he’d also been spoon-feeding information to Special Branch, and more recently their new face, C3 Intelligence Branch. The first three pages were a profile complete with mug shots and a career summary, Dandy Andy’s Greatest Hits. Scanning the pages, Lennon could discern at least half a dozen assassinations that had been thwarted, five arms caches that had been discovered, and hundreds of thousands of pounds’ worth of Ecstasy, cocaine and cannabis shipments that had been stopped en route to Belfast.

  All this came at a price, of course. Rankin had been allowed to operate in relative peace. A single paragraph below the photos outlined his various enterprises. Those suits weren’t cheap.

  The following pages were the most interesting. Rankin had been passing bits and pieces of information on Rodney Crozier’s emerging relationship with Belfast’s Lithuanian gangs. The consolidation of the European Union alongside Northern Ireland’s stabilisation had drawn prosperity to this part of the world, but the criminals followed close behind.

  The South had seen it first, with Dublin’s underworld growing more vicious by the day. Gangland killings were now almost as frequent in the Republic as paramilitary killings had been in the North during the Troubles. Up here, the paramilitaries still kept control of the rackets; ordinary decent criminals didn’t have a look in, but competition from Eastern Europeans was starting to bite.

  The Loyalists had been cooperating with the Lithuanians for some time, now. They put up a front of resisting foreigners in Protestant areas, intimidating the hard-working immigrants who took the jobs no one else would, but behind closed doors they sucked up to the gangsters from Lithuania and elsewhere. Prostitution was one of the biggest earners for them, and the Liths had a good supply of young women from Russia, Romania, Belarus and Ukraine. None of that was news to Lennon, much as it shamed him. He flicked through a series of memos and transcribed messages, reading what hadn’t been obscured. Each mentioned McKenna at least once, but nothing substantial. Nothing he could link back to what Rankin had told him at the hospital.

  The f
inal section was a transcription of a meeting between Rankin and one of his handlers. Lennon scanned the few readable scraps that had been left.

  DATE: 05/09/2007

  LOCATION: Car park, Makro Warehouse, Dunmurry,

  Belfast

  INTERVIEWING OFFICER: DI James Maxwell, C3

  SUBJECT: Andrew Rankin, a.k.a. Dandy Andy Rankin

  Interviewing officer notes that Rankin was visibly agitated throughout the conversation, as evidenced by his fidgeting and chain-smoking.

  JM: What have you got for me?

  AR: Rodney bloody Crozier. I want him put away.

  JM: Jesus, Andy, not this again.

  AR: It’s this business with the Liths. He’s getting too big for his boots. He’ll be shitting all over me if it goes on much longer.

  JM: We’ve talked about this before.

  AR: And I’m going to keep talking about it till you fuckers get your thumbs out of your arses and do something about it. Ever since Michael McKenna got his stupid brains blown out, Rodney fucking Crozier’s been palling up to them, getting his—

  McKenna’s name scratched at Lennon. Everyone on the force knew Lennon’s connection to McKenna, even if it was history. A third of a page was blacked out. Lennon skipped ahead.

  —people talk, like. Crozier couldn’t have moved into that part of town if McKenna was still around.

  JM: And?

  AR: And if you lot don’t do something about it, I will. Fuck me, I never thought I’d see the day. One of our own running with the Liths, putting money in the other side’s pockets. I knew Rodney Crozier’s father. He’d turn in his grave if he saw who his son was doing business with.

  JM: Listen, our hands are tied. We can’t mount an operation of that scale just on your say-so.

  AR: Jesus, who runs the cops these days, eh? Who’s telling you to turn a blind eye to all this carry-on? That business with McKenna getting bumped off, then all the shit that—

  More lines scrawled over with black marker. The feud. The killings in Belfast. The bloodbath on an old farm near the border. The inquiry established that dissidents had ambushed the politician Paul McGinty there, and the investigation was concluded when three of them blew themselves up with their own bomb a few months later. A specialist forensics team had matched the remains of the guns in their car to the scene of the shootout.