End Game

Book 3: Kerry Casey

by Anna Smith

Genres: Female Sleuths; Crime Fiction

Synopsis

THE WHITE-KNUCKLE FOLLOW UP TO FIGHT BACK - GRIPPING FROM START TO FINISH! 'MARTINA COLE FANS WILL LOVE THIS' SUNDAY MIRROR Physically and emotionally battered after the shocking events of Fight Back, Glasgow gang leader Kerry Casey must pick herself up and get straight back into the fray. When London gangsters William 'Wolfie' Wolfe and his tough-talking daughter Hannah approach her with millions of pounds worth of stolen diamonds and offer her an alliance in return for helping to sell them, she jumps at the chance to have someone on her side for a change. But there were more than diamonds in the loot Wolfie stole, and its former owners will stop at nothing to get it back. Kerry and Hannah must stay one step ahead of their new enemies - while Kerry spots the opportunity to settle an old score of her own...

Release date: February 6, 2020

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 254

Sample

He was screaming, but behind the duct tape it was no more than a muffled choking sound. Only his crimson, sweating face and the fear in his bulging eyes told of the terror. His ankles were bound tight, and they’d taped his hands across his chest and secured them fast to his body. Like the corpse the sick psychos planned to make him. Wolfie struggled and thrashed as much as he could inside the white satin-lined coffin, but all that happened was that his heart pounded so hard it felt about to burst in his chest. He saw them coming towards him with the coffin lid. They were actually going to fucking screw it down. He could hear the whispers and sniggers. He looked up at their faces so he would remember every single one of them. The whispering stopped, and all he could hear was the blood rushing in his ears as the lid was placed over the coffin. Pitch black. Then the sound of the screws being turned, and he tried to gulp in a breath of air. But there was none.

Wolfie had had no idea where he was at first when he’d come to after being clobbered on the head in the multi-storey car park earlier. But he’d swiftly realised he was in some fucking funeral parlour. And he wasn’t one of the mourners. His head had been thumping from the blow on the temple that had brought him to his knees, and from the corner of his eye he had seen it was already swollen. Not that it seemed to matter now. He closed his eyes, and for a moment he could see himself as a young man, a girl on his arm, the free, happy charmer that he’d been all his life. And the grief that had overwhelmed him when he’d lost her. Christ! His life really was flashing in front of him like they said it did. Then the face of his darling daughter, Hannah, the beauty she had turned into, and his sadness that the last time he had seen her she had been sitting opposite him in a prison visiting hall, her face thinner, but her eyes as dancing with rage and determination as ever. She was getting out this morning and they’d been going to disappear, the two of them, far away, for a new life. They were rich beyond belief. This shouldn’t be happening.

The diamond heist had been his fucking idea in the first place. He was the guy who had masterminded the whole operation. He was the man who had put himself on the line, working away inside the bank for the past three months, observing, checking, making pictures and plans of every movement of every member of staff: when they clocked in, when they clocked off, when the alarms went on. And, most importantly, it was him who had managed to sniff out the security numbers to get into the vault. So the success of the whole operation hung completely on him. And these fuckers, who were now about to either bury or cremate him, could never have pulled the heist off without him.

What kind of treacherous bastards did that? There was no honour amongst thieves any more – that was the problem. All lowlifes these days, cardboard gangsters who talked the talk, hawking their heroin and coke, trafficking women, selling kids as slaves. And they were just going to rub him out like he was some old has-been – once they got their hands on the safety deposit boxes that would not just make them millions, but, as it would turn out when they saw the contents, would also make them bombproof. That was why he hadn’t told them the truth about where he’d stashed the gear. And he would take that secret to his grave if he had to. Which was looking pretty imminent. He tried to control his breathing. If this was it, then he was fucking sure he wasn’t going to go out screaming and thrashing, and have his cold-blooded murderers dining out on the story of how William Joseph Wolfe met his end a snivelling wreck. And who knows, maybe there was something better on the other side. He could hear piped music. Piped fucking music! ‘Nearer My God to Thee’. Jesus fucking wept!

Then suddenly, the crack of gunfire. One shot, two, then the familiar ratatat of machine-gun fire. His heart stopped. The plinking of glass shattering, groans and angry, urgent shouts. Someone banging hard on the coffin. He kicked with all his might and gagged as he tried to shout. The sound of the lid being hacked and battered and finally prised open, and daylight on the face of big Tommo Gourlay. Wide-eyed and flushed, Tommo leaned in and ripped the masking tape off his face.

‘Halle-fucking-lujah! What took you cunts so long?’ Wolfie rasped, breathless.

‘Sorry, boss. Trouble trying to find the right fucking funeral parlour.’

Kerry had thrown a party at the house for everyone in the Casey family. They were forty million quid up from the sale of the Colombians’ cocaine they had nicked from the truck bringing it over from Spain, after lying in wait for it in an industrial estate in Manchester. Billy Hill’s men had been standing by when the shoot-out started, and they had jumped straight in the back of the truck like a team of professionals, moving the massive haul of cocaine and getting out before the cops came. In the weeks that followed, Billy had shifted it to buyers he’d lined up, just as he’d promised he would. The money was a windfall, over and above the healthy earnings the Casey organisation already amassed on a weekly basis from their various businesses. The coke money had been squirrelled away by the Casey accountants who would then drip it into the hotel complex on the Costa del Sol under the name of the company set up to build the hotel and acquire more property in Spain and the UK. They were already looking at high-end restaurants along the Marbella coast which they could plough money into as a legitimate, expanding business empire. That side of their business was all squeaky clean.

For a few moments Kerry stood alone at the far side of the room, focused on the faces that had become so important to her – the people who were now her family. Most of them career criminals – killers, hitmen, robbers, whose life stories were mapped out in the scars on their faces. All of them loyal to the Casey family, and several among them who had murdered on their behalf. The body count after Manchester had been five dead, including Frankie Martin – Kerry’s brother’s trusted friend and right-hand man, who had ended up betraying him to his killers. Kerry tried to pretend she hadn’t relished settling that score. But the biggest scalp of all had been down to Jake Cahill. The story of how he took out Pepe Rodriguez would go down in history among these people and their friends. But few people would ever dare talk to Cahill about it, and as he stood by the window in conversation with Jack and Danny, Kerry could see that people were in awe of him. No doubt Jake would slip out of the room later without a fuss, and Kerry probably wouldn’t hear from him again until she needed his help. That was his way.

From across the room, Kerry saw Sharon Potter, the woman who’d fled to the Casey family after her husband, Manchester hood Knuckles Boyle, tried to have her executed. It was Sharon who’d delivered Boyle to the Caseys, in revenge for the murder of Kerry’s brother Mickey, and then her mother, who died in the bloodbath at Mickey’s funeral. When she looked back on that now, so much had happened in such a short space of time that Kerry sometimes struggled to remember her life before she’d come back to Glasgow; her life before she’d taken over as head of the Casey family. Sharon, who had moved among gangsters and hoods most of her life in Manchester, had proved to be a solid friend and confidante, and had become a crucial part of the Casey empire. Sharon looked at Kerry then came towards her.

‘You look miles away, girl. You all right?’

‘Yes.’ Kerry held up her glass of mineral water. ‘On my third glass of this. I could fairly sink a large gin and tonic though!’

‘Yeah.’ Sharon sipped from her gin and tonic, and Kerry could see she was quite tipsy. ‘Well you’ll be the only one without a hangover tomorrow.’ She looked around the room. ‘Everyone’s having a good time, I think. I’m just so bloody glad to be alive.’ She glanced over at Jake Cahill then back at Kerry. ‘I owe Jake my life, Kerry. Totally. I’ll never be able to repay him for what he did. If he hadn’t dropped Rodriguez at the moment he did, you’d probably have got sent my head in a box, same as O’Driscoll.’ She shuddered.

‘Best not to even think that way,’ Kerry said. ‘Good times are ahead. No news from Vic yet?’

Kerry knew that Sharon hadn’t heard from her lover Vic, who had been driving the truck full of cocaine for Rodriguez, after the carnage at the industrial estate in Manchester. The last she’d heard was when he called from the boat the night before they docked to give her all the information so that the Caseys could hijack the truck. Kerry had seen him during the bedlam of the shoot-out, and assumed he’d got away. But so far they’d heard nothing. That had been six weeks ago. Kerry felt for Sharon because she knew she had strong feelings for Vic after they’d rekindled an old love that went back a long way, to Sharon’s days in Manchester.

Sharon shook her head sadly.

‘Nope. I’m worried about him. I’m sure he’ll know by now that Rodriguez is dead, so maybe he’s worried that he’ll get linked to double-crossing the Colombians. In that case he’d have to lie low for a bit. But I’m surprised he hasn’t even sent a message or made a call. Danny said he knows for sure he got away after the shooting and before the cops arrived, so he must be out there somewhere.’ She shrugged. ‘Tell you what, though. I’m just going to have to leave it at that. Not much I can do. And we’ll have a lot on our plates in the next few months.’

‘We sure will.’ Kerry nodded.

‘What about Vinny? You heard anything?’

‘No. I suppose he’s gone back undercover.’ She paused, half smiling. ‘Probably trying to track down the cocaine.’

‘Well. Good luck to him on that.’ Sharon raised her glass. ‘I’m off to mingle. That old rascal Billy Hill is trying to chat me up. What is it with these old guys? He’s quite funny though.’

Kerry watched as she walked off, then Marty Kane came across to talk to her. Marty had been the Casey family lawyer as long as she’d known him, and he’d been a close friend of her father Tim, who he’d kept out of jail as he built up his empire. He was the most respected criminal lawyer in Glasgow, but he sailed close to the wind, defending known hoods and hard men who had murdered and robbed their way through life. He was more than the Casey lawyer now – he was a trusted family member, as embedded with them as any of the other hoods in this room. That association with the Caseys had brought him to his knees just a few weeks ago, when the Colombian cartel kidnapped his little grandson, and for a terrifying week there was a real fear they would never see him again. It had almost broken Marty and his family. It was Kerry and her men who had rescued the boy and brought him back, leaving behind a trail of bodies and a seething Pepe Rodriguez determined to wipe out the Caseys.

Marty looked more relaxed tonight than she’d seen him in weeks. He clinked his glass to hers.

‘You all right, Kerry?’

‘Yeah. I’m good, Marty. Parties are not really a fun spectator sport for non-drinkers, but I’m happy enough. How’s the family? I feel we haven’t had a chance to speak since all of that happened. Seems like we’ve been under siege for months, even though it’s only been weeks.’

‘I know,’ Marty replied. ‘It’s been a tough few weeks for my family. I know they see Fin’s kidnapping as my fault, and I know they’ll never forgive me for it. Joe’s wife has been traumatised and is bursting his head about moving far enough away to be safe, but so far Joe has resisted. I hope he doesn’t move. Apart from us not seeing the boys so much and being in their lives, Joe has really been doing well since he’s taken over the main thrust of the practice from me. He’s getting quite a name for himself as a top defence brief. He’s very able and gaining respect.’

‘A chip off the old block. You must be very proud.’

‘I am.’ Marty grimaced. ‘But he’s a different generation, Kerry, and I’m not so sure his wife will be as easy-going as my Elizabeth was when I was on the frontline, working flat-out. It’s different these days. Elizabeth did all the hard work, running the home for us and making it a great place for Joe to grow up, but Joe’s wife is very different. And I think they’ve both had a real awakening when they almost lost Fin.’

Kerry gave Marty a supportive smile, but she could see how he would have no real influence in Joe’s family. She felt the weight of responsibility for his trouble.

‘I’m so sorry, Marty. I wish there was something I could do.’ She touched his arm. ‘Try not to worry about it. I’m sure it will all work itself out. Give them time.’ She said it more in hope than anything else.

From over Marty’s shoulder Kerry saw Jack and her uncle Danny come towards her, drinks in hand.

‘One of the good days, eh, Kerry?’ Danny raised his glass and took a sip. He was looking happy and relaxed.

Kerry smiled.

‘Yep. Not been too many of them in recent times, but let’s hope we’ve turned a corner.’

For a moment all four of them stood surveying the room full of people, the laughter and the chatter. Then Danny took a step closer to Kerry.

‘Kerry, sweetheart, seeing as the four of us are here right now, I wanted to run something past you. Because there might be a bit of urgency in it.’

Kerry arched her eyebrows, glancing at all three.

‘Don’t give me any bad news, Danny. Not today.’

Danny put a hand up.

‘No. No. Not bad news. Actually, something that has been put to me by a very old friend and associate, and I wanted to see what you thought.’ He paused for a beat as all eyes were on him. ‘It’s a proposition.’

Kerry felt herself sigh inside, but her face showed nothing.

‘Let’s hear it then,’ she said, looking at Danny.

‘Right.’ Danny sipped his drink. ‘Very old friend of mine, well, of mine and your father’s actually. William Wolfe. You ever hear his name? William Joseph Wolfe? Wolfie?’

Kerry gave him a puzzled look. Her father never confided in her who he worked with or even really what he did, and because she had been away in Spain from her teens, she had had no idea who he was involved with – though she guessed none of it was legal.

‘Can’t say I have,’ she replied.

‘Wolfie,’ Marty said, a smile spreading on his face. ‘Is that old bugger still around?’

‘And how,’ Danny quipped. ‘Haven’t seen him in years, and seldom hear from him apart from the odd phone call and chat maybe once a year. But we go back a long way – me, your dad and Wolfie. Could write a book on it, the things we got up to.’ He leaned in a little. ‘His speciality is cracking codes, safes, et cetera. Like your father, only more sophisticated, dare I say better.’

‘Where’s he from? Is he Glasgow?’

‘No,’ Danny said. ‘Cockney as they come, Wolfie. Part of the London mob back in the day, but he went freelance, and we did a lot of work together – here and down south, the three of us. Some big jobs.’

Kerry had heard a few stories from Danny over dinners and nights at his house over the years, but they had never really stayed in her mind. It was only in recent months, since she’d been back home, that she could really see how far the Caseys had come and who they had been. How they had got there had come home to her in the first few sharp days, when suddenly she had found herself ordering hits on killers, and had been astonished that there were plenty of people out there who were available to do it.

‘Anyway,’ Danny said. ‘Wolfie calls me up yesterday morning and asks if he could have a meeting in Glasgow. I was driving back from Manchester at the time and wanted to tell you about it in person rather than talk to you on the phone. Wolfie wants to meet you, Kerry, as you’re the daughter of his old mucker. He says he has a major proposition for you and for the Caseys that could make us very rich.’

Kerry puffed out a sigh.

‘We’re already rich, Danny. And we’re trying to move on.’

‘I know, I know. But this would make us even richer, and for not much effort. But not only that, Wolfie said he has information, stuff that could make us all bombproof with the cops.’

Marty looked puzzled.

‘Bombproof? What’s he talking about?’

‘He hasn’t said. Just said that he has evidence. Tapes and stuff. Photographs. Incriminating pictures of people in high places.’

‘Oh aye,’ Kerry said, a little sarcastic. ‘Like we’re in the mood to go blackmailing cops? I don’t think so, Danny. But what else is he saying?’

Danny glanced over his shoulder as though afraid someone could hear, then lowered his voice as they all leaned in.

‘You know that Hatton Garden heist a few weeks ago? The diamonds? We were in the middle of all our own shit, so we probably didn’t pay attention to it.’

‘Yeah,’ Kerry said as everyone nodded. ‘The strongboxes and diamonds. Course. It’s been all over the news. Must have taken some pluck to carry that off the way they did.’

Danny nodded. ‘Yep. Sure did. Wolfie was only at the centre of the whole shebang, the sly old fucker! Sixty bloody two, he is, and he’s in there on the biggest robbery the UK has seen since the Great Train job.’

‘Really? He was part of the heist? So why is he telling you?’

‘Because the bastards he worked with have all turned on him. He says he got the gypsy warning that they were going to cut him out of it, like he was some old bastard past his sell-by date. But he says the heist was not only his idea, but that he masterminded the whole robbery.’

Kerry still looked puzzled.

‘So why tell us? What can we do?’

‘He stashed the stuff away when he heard they were planning to shaft him. Hidden it in some very secret locations, and he’s going on the run before they come after him again. They’ve already tried to murder him. And if he doesn’t get off his mark, they’ll try again. Once they get the gear and all the stuff they nicked, they’ll get rid of Wolfie. He sounded well stressed out.’

‘I’ll say he is,’ Kerry said, not quite believing what she was hearing. The last thing she needed right now was to become embroiled in a feud with even more gangsters who had pulled off the robbery the whole country was talking about. She glanced from Marty to Danny to Jack. ‘Guys. We’re supposed to be leaving all this shit behind us and going legit.’

‘I know,’ Danny said, looking a little deflated. ‘It’s just that Wolfie’s such a good mate, Kerry, and I think he’s in trouble. He wouldn’t have called me if he wasn’t in real bother. If he’s calling me, it’s because he’s shit scared to talk to anyone else, because everyone is looking for him.’

‘Has he family?’

‘A daughter. Hannah. About your age.’ He paused. ‘She’s in jail. Or just out.’

‘Jail for what?’ Marty asked.

‘Manslaughter.’

‘Jesus!’ Kerry said, rolling her eyes. ‘Charming!’

‘She killed one of the guys who put a bomb in Wolfie’s wife’s car and blew her to bits,’ Danny added quickly, his face serious. ‘That was about seven or eight years ago. Hannah went after him, and Wolfie said she vowed to get all of them responsible.’ Danny looked a bit perplexed. ‘I suppose that sounds a bit complicated, but all I’m doing is running it past you as I said I would.’

They all stood for a moment, nobody saying anything, Kerry trying to get her head around it. All she could really see was a woman in jail for a revenge killing, and that was the part she could identify with. That could have been her. If the Casey family hadn’t all been there to pick her up after her mother died at Mickey’s funeral, she could have been that girl who went out to hunt down the killers in the midst of her grief. This guy, Wolfie, was important to Danny, and he’d been important to her father all those years ago. That made him matter to her. Before she could stop herself, she spoke.

‘Okay. Let’s meet him then. Can’t do any harm, can it. He’s an old family friend. He deserves that much.’

Danny looked relieved and Jack smiled as he put his glass to his lips.

‘Well said, Kerry.’

Kerry glanced over their shoulders and around the room, and hoped to Christ she wasn’t getting herself into something even deeper than she’d just got out of.

Hannah Wolfe checked her watch for the umpteenth time since she’d woken up. Fifteen minutes to go. In fifteen minutes her cell door would open and she’d walk out without so much as a backward glance. She would walk down the corridor behind the prison officer, the rhythmic clicking of her heels on the stone floor tapping out her steps to freedom. She’d go through the two locked doors, past the other cells, then down the hall, where other prisoners would look on, burning with envy that it wasn’t them. They’d be about to start a new day like any other day, like tomorrow and all their tomorrows until their day came and they could walk this walk just like Hannah. Of course, some of them would never see that. Like old Nellie McDade who had taken an axe to her husband’s head the day after she discovered his affair with the bitch down the road he’d been teaching to drive. Or teenager Joanne Carr, who had stabbed the playground bully to death, and was detained at Her Majesty’s Pleasure, meaning she would probably never see the light of day. But others, the drug dealers and fraudsters, the whorehouse madam, the hapless drug mules, the violent women who shot and robbed and strangled, would one day be walking out just like her. Truth was, she would miss them.

Hannah had done her time, but her quest for revenge was far from over. The five years she’d spent inside were a small price to pay for the satisfaction of seeing one of the men who’d murdered her mother take a swan dive from the twelfth-storey window of his London flat. One down, one to go, she’d told herself, as she’d waited in his flat long enough to watch him splatter onto the pavement below. The jury had believed her convincing performance of self-defence, and the charges had been reduced to manslaughter. As she was led stone-faced from the dock, she’d bitten back tears when she saw her father standing in the front row, trying not to cry, his heart now crushed not once but twice.

She was glad when the click of her cell door opening shook her from the gloom. She stood up from her bed, pulled on her leather bomber jacket, and slung her rucksack over her shoulder.

‘You ready for this, Hannah?’ the prison officer said from the doorway.

‘I was born ready,’ Hannah quipped back, defiant.

The prison officer shook her head and half smiled but didn’t speak as she turned and walked down the hall with Hannah at her heels.

When the prison doors were opened, Hannah took a breath and stepped outside into the soft drizzle. She stood on the steps for a moment, enjoying the rain on her face, her eyes scanning the car park, watching for her father to appear as planned. But he didn’t. A twinge of anxiety lashed across her gut. This wasn’t right. Her father was meticulous about time, to the point of obsessive. He was never late. And he would never have been late today. He would have been here at least an hour ago. She felt immediately exposed as her eyes again flicked across the car park, suddenly feeling a threat from every shadowy figure she could see sitting behind a steering wheel. She watched for any movement, but there was none. She was on her own. The aching deflation after weeks of anticipation took the wind right out of her sails. But Hannah stiffened her shoulders and zipped up her jacket as she walked down the stairs and headed towards the bus stop outside the prison gates.

It was an hour and a half to London on the bus, and Hannah sat gazing out of the window, making sure she didn’t make eye contact with anyone who came on and would want to exchange small talk. She pushed her hand in to the zipped pocket of her jacket and counted the notes without taking them out. She had thirty quid, enough to get her to her flat to dig out her old phone SIM card and the bank cards her father had left for her. Then she would go to the phone shop and buy a new mobile. Without a phone, she had no way of contacting anyone. First-world problems. Again, the niggle in her stomach. What if something had happened to her father? William J Wolfe h. . .