Every Night I Dream of Hell

by Malcolm Mackay

Genres: Mystery

Synopsis

Longlisted for the Theakston's Old Peculiar Crime Novel of the Year 2016.

From the award-winning author of The Glasgow Trilogy, comes Every Night I Dream of Hell, a dark and thrilling Glaswegian crime drama.

Nate Colgan: a violent man; 'smart muscle' for the Jamieson organization. Someone to be afraid of. But now, with its most powerful individuals either dead or behind bars, things within the Jamieson organization are beginning to shift. When Nate, long working on the fringes of the business, is reluctantly appointed its new 'security consultant', he can little imagine how things are about to unravel . . .

It begins with an execution, a message; and soon the various factions within the organization are sent into chaos. But out of the confusion comes one clear fact: a new group has arrived in Glasgow, and in their quest for power they are prepared to ignite a war. But who is behind the group? And why has the calculating Zara Cope – the mother of Nate's child – suddenly appeared back in town?

Meanwhile DI Fisher, buoyed by his recent successes in finally jailing some of the city's most notorious criminals, is prowling on the edges of these latest battles, looking for his chance to strike before all hell breaks loose . . .

In Every Night I Dream of Hell Malcolm Mackay takes us deep into a world of violence, fear and double-crossing that grips until the final page has been turned.

Release date: April 11, 2017

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 304

Sample

1

“People are terrified of you. You’ve given them good reason. We know how valuable that is.”

I sat listening and didn’t say anything. This was the preamble to the subject that mattered: business. I already knew what was coming next. We were sitting in Kevin Currie’s office, and I was listening to him speaking someone else’s words.

“I don’t need to tell you that there’s a lot of stuff going on, a lot of stuff that needs to be sorted out,” Kevin went on.

I liked Kevin, but he was wasting my time. I knew there was a lot that needed sorting. He knew it. If he’d stuck his head out the window to alert a passer-by, there was a good chance they would already have known. Peter Jamieson ran the criminal organization Currie was a major part of, but Peter Jamieson was in jail. That meant people were trying to pick scraps from the organization, profit from temporary vulnerability while it still existed.

“There’s a lot of little stuff,” Kevin went on, “but even that’s become more complicated. A man with your reputation, you can simplify all that. That’ll be the first thing we want from you.”

There were shelves on the wall behind Kevin, and most of them were filled with what looked like folders. Supposed to make him look like the legitimate businessman nobody was dumb enough to believe he was. Maybe once he could fool people, but not since Jamieson went away. That change had made Kevin a bigger player than ever, one of the group of men running the organization day to day. So the neat little office of a legit businessman probably wasn’t cutting it anymore.

But it wasn’t the folders I was watching. There was a little gold trophy at the end of one of the shelves, tucked in behind a leaning folder. Looked like the sort of thing you would give a mediocre amateur sportsman. I couldn’t stop myself wondering what that was for. Kevin wasn’t a sportsman; he was a guy in his late forties getting slowly fat and jowly.

“None of that sounds like a problem,” I said. I wasn’t looking to sound nonchalant, but he was reading from a not particularly interesting script.

It was obvious what had happened, I probably don’t even have to tell you. Peter Jamieson knew that I, Nate Colgan, was already doing work for the organization, and doing it well. He knew that he needed someone with a reputation to start throwing some weight around on his behalf, scare away the vultures. The serious attacks needed more defending than I could provide alone, but getting rid of the opportunists would remove the sense of weakness. So he made a call to Kevin, told him to hire me permanently and told him what to say.

“I didn’t figure it would be,” Currie said, nodding his head and letting his relief show. “We need good people around us right now, Nate, we really do. Feels like we’re taking shots from every side and I don’t know where the next one will come from.”

“Anything new?”

He looked left and right, like someone might have snuck into that cramped little office. “There is something. I mean, Jesus, you know what people are like, always complaining about something or other, but this seems different. We’ve had a couple of guys complaining about being pushed off their patch. Couple of other guys seem to have crossed over.”

“To?”

“Don’t know. That’s the problem. Well, we sort of know. Outsiders. Can you believe it? Like there aren’t enough local sharks in the water. Some English guy seems to be trying to pick off business in the city.”

“You have an ID?” I asked. Knowing who the threats were was a big part of my job, and this was the first I had heard of this one. For the first time since I arrived in the office, Kevin had my interest.

“Just a name, Adrian Barrett. You heard of him?”

I shook my head, which I didn’t like doing.

“English guy, like I said. We’re trying to work out where he was before, who he might be working for, if anyone. Seems like he’s putting the word around that he’s in charge, but that could be a screen. The guy in charge doesn’t turn up to do the donkey work, does he?”

Asking me, because he didn’t know for himself. Kevin ran a counterfeit operation, a good and profitable one. The man knew how to run a business, let’s make that clear right now. But he hadn’t been involved in the dirtiest corners of the business until Jamieson’s arrest pushed him there. Now he was up to his armpits in the filth and didn’t know where to swim for safety.

“Not usually,” I said. “Depends how big he is to start with, I suppose.”

“Aye, well, he’s becoming an issue. Everything’s becoming a fucking issue.” He was shaking his head and looking tired. The small things were mounting up, because the organization wasn’t a well-oiled machine anymore. It was causing the sort of frustration that coaxed a rare sweary word out of Kevin’s usually pristine mouth. “We have so many things we need to clean up,” he went on. “There’s stuff that still hasn’t been done from months ago, stuff we should have gotten out of the way but we were too busy keeping our heads down. There’s new stuff coming along all the time. You’ll have to get on top of a lot of that.”

“Sure. What’s my title?”

“You’ll be security consultant, the job Frank MacLeod was doing before he disappeared,” he said. “You remember old Frank?”

I smiled a little and nodded. If you’ve been in the business in Glasgow at any point in the last forty years, you know of Frank MacLeod. I’d been in it for nineteen years, since I was eighteen. Disappeared was business speak for killed off and buried without the body ever being found. We knew he had been murdered on Jamieson’s orders by a hitman called Calum MacLean, who then told his interesting little story to the police. But they couldn’t peg the killing on Jamieson in any way, so that was another crime for which he wasn’t convicted, despite the few for which he was.

“You’ll be providing security advice for the club, some pubs, some bookies, some of the legit stuff that Jamieson has. You don’t have to do anything though; the security mostly takes care of itself. We have people for that. Just put in the occasional appearance; I think that was all Frank used to do. Make sure the legit employees know your official job title in case the police ask them.”

That all made sense, but I’ll admit I was a little uncomfortable having to step into Frank’s shoes. I wasn’t going to be doing his job, not his real job. He was a hitman, and that was a line I’d never crossed. But people would see me doing the “security consultant” job he did and they would make the comparison. They would think I was now as important as Frank had been, and that would make me a target.

“Listen,” Kevin went on, “there’s a job I want you to start with, and I don’t want you to laugh.”

I raised my eyebrows. When you’re a freelancer, you can be choosy if you really want to be. Won’t do much for your reputation, and your reputation is what’s going to get you work, but it’s up to you what jobs you do. If you can afford to say no and you want to say no, then go ahead and say no. Not when you’re an organization man. When you’re on the payroll, you have to do the jobs you’re given.

“I want you to go round and kick seven bells out of Kirk Webster. I know that’s a pathetic place to start, but it still hasn’t been done and it needs to be.”

“Is that all that needs to be done?”

“Well”—Kevin shrugged—“for now it is.”

I stood up and I shook his hand, like a new employee delighted to get through the job interview. There was something about that little office that made me want to play at being legit. That feeling had passed by the time I was out on the street, getting into Ronnie’s car.

He had his little Astra parked in the single line of parking spaces in front of Currie’s place. The car was too clean, I thought, maybe too new as well. It was a work car that nobody should ever spot. We were in Hillington, not far south of the river in an industrial area full of engineering firms and warehouses. Currie’s was a single-story white building, brick front and corrugated roof, the office at the back of a large warehouse, surrounded by respectability on a street lined with trees. Nothing to suggest that the warehouse was crammed with tremendously illegal goods.

“So?” Ronnie asked me.

“I’m on the payroll.”

“And me?”

“My first job will be to hire you in a security role. Congratulations.”

He started the car and we pulled away, me telling him about Kirk as we went. I’ll tell you about Kirk in a minute, but first I want to tell you about Ronnie Malone. I’d met him a good time ago, when he was working in a grubby little hotel near Central Station. He was there for Currie, helping his men get rooms for whatever little business they wanted to hide from others. He was wasted there.

Ronnie was smart, and smart shouldn’t be left booking rooms in a half-empty hotel for barely important counterfeiters and suppliers. I persuaded Currie to move him into my employ, let me work him into something more usable.

“You come and work with me, and we’ll make good money together,” I had told him. “You’ll have cash, you’ll have interesting work, you’ll have the chance to move up fast.”

He’d looked at me like he was trying to find the world’s politest way to say no. I wasn’t there to hear no, however polite, so I leaned a little more heavily.

“All you’re getting now is beer money, but you still go down if someone points the finger at you. You’ve helped dangerous people do terrible things. The dough you’re making isn’t worth that. Let me help you make more, help make the risk worthwhile.”

He still looked reluctant, but he was a good boy, smart enough to realize that yes was the correct answer. So he came to work for me, and he was doing a decent job of it. Had a few little missteps, but every kid does when they’re starting out. Kid: Ronnie had just turned twenty-six a few weeks before Currie put us on the payroll.

He drove me back to my house. “You go look up Kirk Webster, find out what rock he’s living under. Come pick me up when you’ve found him. I’ll handle him. It won’t be a two-man job.”

We were still at the point where Ronnie was doing the set-up and I was doing the dirty work. The process of educating him on how to get bloody was a slow one. He had to learn, because that was his job, but you don’t rush a kid into it if you don’t have to. I was taking my time, teaching him, because I enjoyed it that way.

2

I had a small terraced house in Balornock, on a long curving road in an area that wasn’t quite as rough as it looked at a glance. Used to have the Birnie Court flats looming at the end of the road, looking ready for a fight. They had picked one with a demolition team and were gone by the time this happened. My house was the sort of place you would accept a man on a low income lives in. I wasn’t on a low income, but I was happy for the world to make its usual assumptions and move quietly along. I needed just enough space for me and my few possessions and I wasn’t fussy about location, location, location.

Don’t get me wrong, I would have liked to share my home with someone else. More than one, actually, but there was no way I was going to let that happen. I was bursting with faults, some of which I may find time to tell you about, but that kind of selfishness wasn’t one of them. I would have loved to have my daughter living with me, but I knew she was better off living with her mother’s parents. I wasn’t the man to bring up a young girl. And I would have liked to have a woman in my life, but that wasn’t happening either. I was short-tempered, generally surly and lugging around a reputation that made me good at my job and bad at everything else. People were scared of me, and that cut bad as well as good.

There was someone sniffing around, a girl I liked, a girl I admired. Her name was Kelly Newbury, and because I liked her I was making a conscious effort to stay away from her. She wanted the security a relationship with me could give her. Have me be scary on her behalf. It was an invitation to trouble and other good things that I couldn’t afford to get tangled in. Not with all this going on.

I took a sly look up and down the street as I made my way up to the front door because the habit of caution is a priceless gift. There was nothing out of place that I could spot, even if my eyesight isn’t as good as it once was. It’ll have to stay below its best because a guy like me doesn’t turn up to his work bespectacled.

I pushed open the front door and stepped inside, already seeing something I didn’t like. There was a folded piece of notepaper lying on the mat just inside the door that someone had put through my letter box when I was away getting gainfully employed. In the few seconds it took me to pick up the piece of paper I wracked my brains trying to think of any good news I had received in this way. None, ever.

Just needed a glance at the handwriting to know that this was more than bad news. This was a disaster waiting to happen. This was Zara Cope’s handwriting. Messy but confident, her name scrawled across the bottom of the paper, the Z much bigger than the rest of it, like a dyslexic Zorro.

I sighed my disapproval loudly to the empty corridor and wandered through to the living room. Putting music on always made it less likely that I would lose my temper, so I sat with a guitar being gently strummed in the background and read the note.

Nate,

I was at your door but I guess you’re not home.

I don’t have your number so I’m leaving this note instead.

We need to meet. There are things we have to discuss,

like the delivery I made for you some time ago.

Remember that? There are other things to talk about as well.

Zara

There were little digs in there that were designed to annoy me. Let’s start with the “I guess you’re not home” comment, as though I was hiding behind the fucking couch to avoid her. Even mentioning the delivery was uncharacteristically stupid. What if someone else had found the note before I got to it? And saying there were other things to talk about was just a cheap tease. There was a lot more to the letter than the words.

She was desperate, was the first obvious thing. Mentioning what she had delivered to me before she was arrested was her charmless little shot at reminding me I owed her money. I didn’t need to be reminded; the money was sitting in an account waiting for her to adopt it. The sooner she got it out of that account and into one of her own the happier I would be. I didn’t want it anywhere near me. The money had started out its life attached to Lewis Winter, a walking catastrophe who had strolled to his early death when Zara was with him.

I should maybe give you a little history lesson at this point. Zara was the mother of my nine-year-old daughter, Rebecca. Zara hung around the business, using her looks and her smarts to make herself a fine little living. Or a living, anyway. She was a cut above the usual hangers-on, sharp as anything that’s ever cut me. I fell for her hard; we moved in together; she had Becky. Didn’t last though, and it was mostly my fault. Zara was twenty-one, looking for a fast life, and I was an angry and dangerous twenty-eight-year-old who wouldn’t accept the world not constantly bending to my will. We were too young. She ran, and I let her. Becky went to live with Zara’s parents, and it’s been that way since.

Zara shacked up with Lewis Winter, a mid-level dealer, and when he was knocked off she came to me with some of his dirty cash and the last of his supply. The drugs needed selling and the money needed hiding until the dear Scottish police service kindly stopped looking for it. I did what I could to help her, because that seemed like the right thing to do for the mother of my child, and because I still didn’t know how to say no to Zara Cope.

She was a special woman, one who had a power over me no other person has ever had. That didn’t help her a damn when she got a three-month sentence for perverting the course of justice. Slap-on-the-wrist stuff for someone inside the industry, but she was no more than a hanger-on, and the sentence would have hit her hard. She got out and went off the radar for a while, didn’t even come looking for her money. I knew she’d been away from the city for a lot of that time because I kept an eye out for her. Now, evidently, she was back. And yes, I did recognize her handwriting after all those years. There was almost nothing of her I had forgotten.

I turned the piece of paper over and saw that she’d scrawled a phone number on the back of it. A mobile number, underlined twice as though that would be the clincher if I was undecided. I was going to call her; she would gnaw at the back of my mind if I didn’t. She could also cause trouble for me, and I had enough of that to keep me company already. Zara was on first-name terms with some of the skeletons in my closet, so I had to keep her smart mouth shut. And she knew that I’d organized the sale of drugs on her behalf, and the cleaning of the money it raised.

If you’re interested in how, I had taken that little stash of drugs and dirty money she turned up on my doorstep with to Ross Kennedy to handle. He worked most closely with Angus Lafferty, Peter Jamieson’s biggest drug importer, but his loyalties were made of smoke. He bought the drugs from me for less than their street value but as much as I could get in a hurry. He also cleaned the money for me, because making dirty things look respectable was always his greatest talent. Since then the money, about four and a half grand in all, had been gradually filtered into an account I’d opened to house it, waiting for Zara.

I was looking at that number and looking at the phone, wanting to call and wanting to crumple up the paper and pretend she had never existed. But I was going to call, both because I had to and because I wanted to hear her voice. I wanted to know that she was doing okay. Since she’d left the city she’d left my professional radar, so I had no idea what sort of state she was in.

The phone rang for a while before she answered it and I heard her voice, cold and flawless.

“This is Nate,” I said to her hello.

There was silence on the other end, the kind of heavy pause that insinuated horror. She wanted me to call so I was calling; it was up to her to say something next.

“You got my note.”

“It was inside my front door, so yeah.” Talking to Zara always ripped me in half. Part of me wanted to be nice to her, let her know that I still cared. The other part wanted to make sure that she kept her distance, stayed away from me and stayed away from Becky. That was the part that usually won, because protecting Becky from Zara’s influence was my priority.

“Yeah. Well, we need to talk. I take it you still have the money you owe me?”

Needling away, emphasizing the word owe as though she had done me a favor. She hadn’t; she had nearly led the police to me and had indirectly tied me to Lewis Winter through his product. It was a dangerous thing to be tied to a man whose murder was part of the MacLean confessions. It was hard to think of the last time Zara had done me a favor. Becky, I guess.

“The money I raised, cleaned and hid for you is sitting in a bank account, waiting.”

“Good.”

“You want the bank details? We can make this nice and simple and you can take the money without any fuss.”

This was me giving her the opportunity to keep her distance, something I didn’t really want but that I thought we were both smart enough to understand was the best option. But she didn’t keep her distance; she kept barreling right on into my life.

“I want to see you,” she said, like it was a sudden revelation. “We should meet up. There’s stuff we need to talk about.”

I sighed, but I kept it light enough to make sure she didn’t hear. I wasn’t looking to provoke. Maybe ten percent of my worry was about my own feelings at seeing her again, another twenty was about whatever trouble she was going to try and drag me into, and the other seventy was the ever-present fear that she would want to talk about Becky. Whatever the split, it was still a hundred percent of worry.

“Where and when?” I asked. I knew I was walking into trouble; this isn’t me looking back and thinking I could have done something different. I knew it then every bit as much as I know it now. I went along with it because that was all I could do. The alternative was no, and no meant conflict with a dangerous woman at a dangerous time.

“Um, Wednesday, how about? I can come round to yours.”

“No,” I said, a little too quick and a little too hard. “Wednesday, fine, but we’ll meet somewhere.”

“Neutral territory, huh? Fine, if that’s what you want. You know the Greek place right on George Square?”

“I do.”

“Midday?”

“Fine.”

She made a big effort to sigh down the phone at me. “It’s always a pleasure to talk to you, Nate.”

She sounded like she was about to say something else but she stopped herself and I heard a door closing in the background.

“You have company,” I said.

“Yeah, well, maybe now I have a chance of a grown-up conversation. I’ll see you on Wednesday.”

I hung up without saying goodbye because I was feeling petty. Resentful might be a better word for it, and disturbed by the fact that I was jealous of whoever was having the conversation with her right now. Some new man in her life, hopefully giving her a good sort of life. I looked at the letter and I thought about its desperate contents, and I knew that whatever he was giving her, it wasn’t a good life.

3

We were sitting in a car park outside a big plain white building. Big windows, could have been a building for just about anything, but the sign sprawled across the wall said it was for a telephone company.

“Call center,” Ronnie told me, sitting in the passenger seat. “He’s something technical in there. I don’t know what. Supposed to be quite senior. I think that’s because most of the other people working there are students. Lot of short-term people. From what I can tell, he knocks off at five every day, goes straight home on the bus, doesn’t leave the flat when he gets there.”

“That usual for him?”

Ronnie shrugged. “No idea, but it’s what he’s doing now.”

I nodded. We both guessed that wasn’t the life Kirk Webster had been living before he grassed up Peter Jamieson and John Young; just the life he was now stuck with. He was hoping that keeping his head down was going to help him stay out of trouble, like trouble ever walks past you because you don’t look it in the eye.

Kirk had helped the organization by placing fake calls in the records to implicate some people, removing real calls from the records to protect others. A simple precaution, but it was illegal and it was all about hiding much more serious crimes. The police knew it, because Calum MacLean told them, but it’s never enough to know something. They needed more proof than they had, and they managed to get Kirk’s name. They questioned him; he cracked like a dry biscuit and told them everything he knew. That added to Jamieson’s sentence and played a big part in John Young’s sentence. Young was Jamieson’s right-hand man, and the most senior organization man Kirk had met. Now Kirk had to be punished.

“That’s what he looks like,” Ronnie told me, holding his phone across to me. “You’ll not have trouble picking him out.”

Wasn’t a brilliant picture, but it showed me a thirty-year-old guy in a tracksuit, dark hair with a mini Mohawk. He looked ridiculous, easy to pick out. A man not smart enough to understand that the concept of keeping your head down included keeping your head restrained.

“Right, you can leave it with me,” I told Ronnie.

I got out of the car and walked halfway across the car park to where mine was parked. A couple of minutes later Ronnie pulled away and went off to do whatever things he killed time with. He had a girlfriend, Esther, who he lived with, and it seemed like he had a good little circle of friends. I wondered how long all of that would last. As secrets grow, friendships shrink.

The boring part of the job, sitting there and waiting for someone else to stick to their schedule. Which he did, emerging from the building at about ten minutes past five, walking quickly, looking around without ever knowing what he was looking for. He was scared of everything, and that was why he couldn’t see the danger. You get so wrapped up in believing that every shadow is about to jump at you that you can’t pick out the real threat.

I let him get well ahead, then drove to his flat. He lived in Greenfield, a line of old council flats running down a side road with a bashed and bedraggled bus shelter at the corner. There weren’t many cars on the street so parking was easy. I stopped at the top of the street, with a view of the bus stop down at the bottom. I could have made more effort to hide away, but your effort matches your need. I didn’t need to die of effort outwitting Kirk Webster.

Took another ten or fifteen minutes of waiting for the bus to stop and Ki. . .