Settle the Score

Book 0: Manchester Underworld series

by Sam Tobin

Genres: Crime Fiction

Synopsis

Malton, Dean and Keisha return in Sam Tobin's fourth Manchester Underworld book!

Malton's in prison...

Keisha's on the run...

Dean's holding down the fort...

And it's all about to come crumbling down...

Pre-order now!

Craig Malton, the man who solves crime for criminals in Manchester's underworld, is banged up in prison - for a murder he didn't commit.

Journalist Ruth Porter is hungry for a story. Nothing good ever happens in Manchester. Until she discovers a string of murders that have recently been attributed to the notorious Craig Malton. There are lots of people that want Malton behind bars - and that's exactly why his arrest seems too convenient . . .

As Ruth investigates she soon becomes embroiled in a conspiracy far greater than she could ever have imagined. Who's behind the murders - and who are the after next?

Release date: June 27, 2024

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 384

Sample

Prologue

As soon as the older man came out of the bathroom it would be time to rob him.

Jake lay back on the bed and enjoyed the smell of freshly laundered sheets. His clothes were still scattered all over the floor of the bedroom. The darkly stained jeans and filthy anorak. Trainers held together with duct tape. They lay in jarring contrast to the pristine white of the hotel room carpet.

The older man had insisted Jake shower first. Jake didn’t object – it had been nearly two weeks since he’d showered at his former sheltered accommodation. He had to sneak in after being banned for stealing from the other residents.

Jake let his battered body sink into the mattress as he looked up at the ceiling. The sex hadn’t been anywhere near as rough as it usually was. But then usually this would happen in a side alley or if he was lucky the back seat of a car, parked on some deserted North Manchester industrial estate. To be taken to a swanky hotel, paid three times his rate and then get to do it on a king-sized bed was a rare luxury.

The older man’s aftershave had imprinted itself on the pillows. It smelled expensive and respectable. A dark, floral bouquet that spoke of wealth and solidity. The man’s clothes were folded neatly over a nearby chair, beside the large suitcase he’d brought up to the room with him.

Jake assumed he must be visiting Manchester for business. Maybe he had a wife and family and was taking advantage of being away to spend time with someone like Jake. Between the sheets, Jake had already given him one experience he wouldn’t forget, and when he came out of the bathroom Jake would get his knife and make sure he got another.

The older man had been in there for nearly ten minutes now. If he hadn’t taken his wallet in with him Jake would already be gone. But he could wait.

He looked round the room. There was a football theme. On the wall a framed Manchester City shirt bore Yaya Touré’s name and what looked like his signature.

Jake’s knife was in his bag on the floor with his clothes. He could get it whenever he wanted. There was plenty of time and it didn’t seem like the older man was coming out of the bathroom anytime soon.

He rose off the bed to take a closer look at the shirt. It was the 2013 season. Back then Jake had been only nine years old. He lived and breathed football. His parents had got him the home and away kits just so he had a spare kit to wear while the other one was in the wash. Jake was always out in the street kicking a ball. The Etihad was only down the road. It seemed inevitable that one day he’d be playing there himself.

That was before the drugs.

Jake heard the toilet flushing and he hurried back to the bed, lying down and doing his best to make his battle-scarred nineteen-year-old body look as inviting as possible.

He draped one arm over the side of the bed, ready to reach into his bag for the knife. He’d let the old man come back onto the bed, naked and vulnerable, ready for round two. Then before he knew what was happening Jake would have a knife at the man’s throat. By the time Jake was done the man would be heading back to wherever he came from, desperately inventing a story as to how he lost his wallet and phone and money. A story he could tell his wife and kids.

The bathroom door opened and, despite the best efforts of the extractor fan, a cloud of sweet-smelling white smoke wafted into the room. There in the middle of it, the older man stood for a moment looking at Jake. He was nearly good-looking but then there was something about his face, a haunted quality that lent him a darker air. He’d never once smiled since he’d picked Jake up by the canal-side.

Jake guessed he must be in his fifties but he looked younger. Where Jake’s body was rail-thin and riddled with scabs and tattoos, the man’s body was toned and lightly tanned. When they had sex, Jake almost enjoyed it.

Jake wasn’t gay, but to feel that kind of gentle intimacy wasn’t something that featured heavily in his line of work.

The older man started to approach. His bare feet padding across the thick pile of the carpet. The smell of his aftershave mingled with the clouds of white smoke. A decadent, heady aroma.

As the man knelt on the bed, Jake remembered himself. Unseen, his hand slid over the side of the bed, into his bag, searching for his knife. He kept eye contact with the older man, smiling seductively as his fingers rooted through the detritus of his bag. The half-drunk bottle of vodka, the shoplifted make-up palettes and phone cases. Where was that knife?

The older man was kneeling over Jake now. He stroked Jake’s sunken chest with one hand and – for the first time Jake could recall – smiled.

The man’s teeth were brown and rotten.

‘Looking for this?’ he said as Jake’s knife suddenly appeared in the man’s other hand.

Before Jake could even begin to panic, the man had slid the knife deep into his side.

Jake thought how strange it was that he barely felt the blade going in. He tried to look up into the face of the man who was murdering him but all he saw was a smothering darkness as the light in the room dimmed to nothing.

1

‘No offence, son, but you seem like you’re out of your fucking depth here. You understand what I’m saying, Dean?’

Dean did his best to nod politely as Janet Farr came to the end of yet another long, rambling monologue. Janet was pure south Manchester. Every other word out of her mouth was ‘fuck’ and she always made sure to end her sentences with a question to confirm the listener was following her free-form train of thought.

The Farrs lived in a house in Bredbury, just outside of Stockport. At one time, long ago, the place must have been some kind of farmhouse. Out in the open country with only a collection of strange, half-built outbuildings for company. Over time it had been enlarged and added to. Round the back of the house the garden was covered by a large, ground-floor extension with a grey uPVC conservatory and brand-new matching windows, the yellow expanding foam still visible around the joins.

But just as the house had grown, so too had Stockport, and now the Farrs’ ramshackle collection of buildings with its small plot of land dotted with several rusted-out cars, a dented Jaguar and other assorted junk was overlooked by a tower block to its rear while, across the road, a newly built estate of over fifty homes stood in sharp contrast to the amateurish chaos of the Farr homestead.

The effect was completed by the fact that every single one of the windows to the front of the house had been put through at one time or another and now three sheets of chipboard filled the gaps where the glass once was. If it wasn’t for the constant comings and goings, late-night parties and loud music, you’d be forgiven for thinking the place was abandoned.

This was where the Farrs called home.

The large, ground-floor extension had been built to accommodate a western-saloon-themed pub. Swing doors led from the front of the house into a room covered in wood panelling with various Confederate flags, guitars and posters hanging up on every available surface. Behind the bar there was a tap serving Budweiser and a shelf with nothing but Jack Daniel’s. The centrepiece of the room was the only wall free of clutter, which had been given over to a giant mural of a cowboy wrestling a steer to the ground.

The Farrs were thieves, opportunists and – of late – drug dealers and this was what they spent their ill-gotten gains on.

‘See, when we came to you we thought we were getting the other bloke. The coloured one,’ said Janet, leaning back into the built-in seating that ran along the walls of the ‘bar’. She was thin, almost boyish, but the way she held herself left no one in any doubt that she was far stronger than she looked. And if there was any doubt they had only to look at her face. A lifetime of corralling her family, augmented with Botox and fillers, had twisted Janet Farr’s face into a permanent scowl.

Dean had never seen her in any colour other than black. She was currently in head-to-toe black Balenciaga. It matched her mood perfectly.

The man she was talking about was Dean’s boss, Craig Malton. For the last three months Malton had been locked up in Strangeways prison on remand for murder. Malton had ignored Dean’s multiple requests for a visiting order or phone call and so, without any further instructions, Dean had done his best to carry on business as usual.

Day to day that meant managing Malton Security. A firm that employed nearly sixty people and ran doors for half the nightclubs, restaurants and bars in the city. On top of that, Malton Security guarded high-worth individuals’ homes, provided close protection and any other service you could imagine that lay in the grey area between lawful vigilance and semi-legal violence.

But what Malton was really known for was what Dean was currently engaged in. It was why Janet Farr had reached out in the first place. The security work was the official business, but what Malton really did was far darker.

Malton solved crimes for criminals. People who for whatever reason didn’t want to get the police involved. Kidnapped drug dealers, unsolved gangland killings, missing product. Whatever the issue, the Manchester underworld knew that if you had the connections and you had the cash there was nothing Malton wouldn’t do, nowhere he couldn’t go, no one he wouldn’t lean on, just so long as it produced results.

Malton had lived in Manchester his entire life. From a scrappy kid in Moss Side through to the power behind a multi-million-pound security firm. In that time he’d forged connections with the people who made Manchester work. The gangsters, the dealers, the slumlords, the corrupt politicians and the crime families who were the real power behind the city.

But Dean wasn’t Malton. Malton was a middle-aged, eighteen-stone, mixed-race wrecking ball of a man whose reputation alone got people talking without saying a word or lifting a fist. Dean was a nineteen-year-old, six-foot beanpole with good manners and a face that made people want to mother him. On the other side of the room the tinny sound of a karaoke track started up. Words appeared on the large TV hanging on one wall and Janet Farr’s daughter, Marie, got ready to sing.

Far from being distracted, Janet turned and cheered at the sound.

‘Go on, Marie!’ she hollered, clapping in support. Janet’s face shone with maternal delight through her perma-glare.

Despite how much trouble they were giving him, Dean found it very hard to dislike the Farrs.

Marie was built like her mother, slight but with a natural fighter’s posture. Always on the front foot. Fearless. Like her mother, her face was plumped up with fillers, but unlike Janet, Marie had led a life of having her every whim indulged by her mum. When Marie smiled it didn’t look like a prelude to violence.

Behind the bar, Carl Farr, Janet’s son, looked up from his phone – half interested. The most striking thing about Carl was his head, a giant, shaved boulder plastered with a permanently stunned-looking face. Carl was hugely fat but clearly terrifyingly strong with it. His hands were like paving slabs, stubby fingers fumbling at his smartphone.

As Marie started to sing, Carl went back to listlessly staring down at his phone and Janet turned back to Dean. Her face stopped smiling.

‘Over three months now since we was robbed. And what the fuck have you got to show for it?’

The truth was, with everything else he had on his plate, the Farrs and their missing drugs had fallen very low down his list of priorities. Right up until he’d been doorstepped at the Malton Security offices by Carl Farr with an offer to meet with his mum that Dean just couldn’t refuse.

Dean racked his brains. What did he have to show for it? The Farrs sat slap bang in the middle of the pecking order of Manchester’s drug economy. They were far below the rarefied air at the top where a handful of gangs and individuals with a global reach negotiated with South American cartels and European crime gangs to bring millions of pounds of uncut drugs into the country. But they were also several rungs above the hand-to-mouth street dealers who would be found in every part of the city, their pockets stuffed with tiny individual wraps and the filthy cash taken from the junkies they sold to.

From what Dean understood, the Farrs bought their cocaine in wholesale quantities from a UK-based seller, but they were responsible for bringing the product into the country.

The Farrs owned a garage, which gave them the perfect excuse to be shipping high-performance tyres into the UK. High-performance tyres that arrived stuffed full of drugs.

In order to keep at arm’s length from the risk of importing the kind of quantities of cocaine that would see you locked up for the rest of your adult life, the Farrs employed a courier who travelled to Rotterdam where he would pack the tyres with the drugs before heading back to the UK and awaiting the arrival of the delivery.

Once the shipment had cleared customs the courier’s job was then to remove the drugs before sending the tyres on their way to the Farrs’ garage in Manchester. Then, at a later date, he could deliver the drugs to the Farrs.

This way the Farrs had a plausible explanation as to why they were involved in bringing things into the country but could stay one step removed from the illegality of the process. Should the drugs be found before the tyres had passed through customs, they could plead ignorance. Should the courier be caught with the drugs on either side of the Channel, assuming he kept his mouth shut, there was nothing to tie him to the Farrs.

That was the plan, but three months ago, on the UK side of the Channel, someone had robbed the courier of the drugs from the latest shipment. Out of pocket to the tune of a couple of hundred grand, first the Farrs had blamed the importer, but when a number of subtle and not-so-subtle threats had failed to get them a refund, the Farrs had hired Malton to find those drugs. A week later Malton had been arrested and sent to Strangeways.

‘It would help if you could give me the name of the man you buy from,’ said Dean as politely as possible. This had become something of a sticking point.

‘And I fucking told you, I’m not a grass.’

Dean appreciated the Farrs’ respect for the basic tenets of criminality but it didn’t make his job any easier. Malton never let something like that get in his way. He thrived on the unknown. He told Dean that he’d rather people didn’t give him the information. People lied, people omitted, people had their own agendas. When Craig Malton got information out of someone, he knew that information was true.

Dean wished he could say the same. Where Malton relied on reputation and menace, Dean relied on curiosity and smarts. Unfortunately for Dean, two hundred grand of missing cocaine was a drop in the ocean as far as Manchester was concerned. Alongside the supercharged growth of the city’s skyline, cocaine consumption had skyrocketed. Coke was the Mancunian drug of choice and whoever had stolen the Farrs’ drugs would have had no problem whatsoever in moving the product on.

With the missing drugs yet to make their presence felt in the underworld economy, Dean was left with nothing.

Malton had taken a chance on Dean, given him a job, and trained him up as his second in command. In the time he’d been working for Malton, he’d been shot in the face, nearly beaten to death and he’d saved Malton’s life at least once. Malton had seen past Dean’s age and looks and recognised someone just as adept as he was at navigating the dangerous currents of Manchester’s criminal networks.

However much he wanted to walk away from the Farrs and their missing drugs, he couldn’t let Malton down.

‘I told them, move on. It happens,’ came a voice from behind Dean. He turned to see Janet’s son-in-law, Martin Farr, awkwardly negotiating the saloon doors that led into the room.

Marie was halfway through a Shania Twain number and turned, flirtatiously directing her singing towards Martin.

‘Fuck off, Martin,’ said Janet. ‘I tell you what, if my Mickey were here now he’d fucking slap you for that.’

Martin sat down across from Dean but with a safe distance between himself and his mother-in-law. That he’d ended up taking the Farr surname and working for the Farr business told Dean everything he needed to know about where Martin stood in the Farr family hierarchy.

Martin caught Dean’s eye and shared a look of patient exasperation. From the three months Dean had been dealing with the Farrs, he’d come to rely on Martin as the voice of reason.

As much as Janet rode her son-in-law, since Mickey Farr had got locked up for punching out a female police officer at a derby match it had been Martin running the show. The Farrs sold to a string of gangs who in turn supplied the street-level dealers. They were close to the violent, free-for-all of the lower levels but with just enough of a buffer to not get involved.

‘This is costing us money. For what?’ said Martin.

Martin obviously used steroids. His arms bulged out of his T-shirt, swarming with tattoos. His hairline was in retreat to the back of his head but he still had a youthful optimism about him, which showed in how he dressed – tight jeans, fashionable T-shirts and a padded gilet.

Despite all his toned muscle, Dean imagined the chubby, untoned arms of Carl Farr would snap Martin like a twig.

Dean hadn’t brought up just how much the Farrs now owed. Without results he felt guilty even mentioning it. One more thing that Malton would have easily taken in his stride.

‘Some cunt’s robbed me and I’m fucked if I’m letting that go. I want my fucking drugs, Martin. You understand?’ said Janet, turning on her son-in-law. ‘I paid for Craig Malton and I get this fucking kid?’ She turned back to Dean. ‘No offence, son,’ she said.

Dean nodded and kept quiet.

‘Thing is, I think you’re not even fucking trying. So I’ve had to take matters into my own hands. Sorry, love.’

For a moment Dean felt a flood of relief. Right now he was single-handedly running Malton Security. This side of the business was too much to be doing on top of all of that. If Janet Farr could help this along then he wasn’t too proud to accept assistance.

‘I had a word with my Mickey,’ said Janet with a smile.

On the other side of the bar, Marie missed the high note by miles.

‘See, he’s banged up with your boss – Craig Malton,’ Janet carried on. ‘No point giving you a kicking. Need you to get the fucking job done.’ She smiled. ‘But your boss, sat on his arse in Strangeways? I reckon he could stand to have a little reminder of who it is he’s fucking about with. Give you a bit of an incentive to get off your arse and find my fucking drugs.’ Janet turned to her son-in-law with a wickedly pointed Botox grin. ‘If that’s all right with you, Martin?’

Marie finished her song with a flourish. Carl kept on looking at his phone. Janet turned and applauded wildly. Dean said nothing. If what she was telling him was true, then things were about to get messy.

He almost felt sorry for Mickey Farr.

2

Malton had forgotten how much he enjoyed the flat, airless calm before the violence.

It had been three months since his arrest for murder and in that time the outside world had faded to an indistinct blur somewhere at the back of his mind.

It was a murder he hadn’t committed, but now that seemed somehow irrelevant. As did the events that had led up to his arrest. Now all that mattered was contained within the walls of HMP Manchester, the prison known to the world as Strangeways.

All his life Malton had lived in the shadow of Strangeways. As a young kid growing up in Moss Side he’d seen friends and family carted off behind the walls of the notorious Victorian prison. He’d later come to realise how it was only sheer luck that he hadn’t wound up there himself. Between stealing car radios and never backing down from a fight, there were more than enough reasons to send a sullen, mixed-race kid away to teach him a lesson. But he’d never been caught. Working first as a bouncer and then running his own security firm, he’d become well versed in exactly what it takes to walk the fine line between legal violence and illegal brutality.

Malton closed his eyes and listened to the din. The constant background noise of prison. That had been his first surprise. After the six hours or so it took to check him in through the modern visitors’ centre that had been built on the side of the old prison, he’d been led back several centuries to the true Strangeways. The sprawling Victorian gaol made of brick and steel. A tiny city-state of convicts within spitting distance of Manchester city centre. Hundreds of prisoners, bored, scared, angry, frustrated. All shouting themselves hoarse. Laughter, screams, threats and bestial noises. And outside the rain kept up its relentless drumbeat. The whole cacophony echoed off the hard surfaces, meaning that every waking moment was awash with hostile white noise.

It was impossible to make out any one sound in amongst the din. But Malton knew they were coming.

Back when he was on the outside he made it his business to know every movement of Manchester’s criminal classes. He was a living encyclopaedia of the Manchester underworld. From the drug gangs in North Manchester replaying the darkest moments of Nineties Moss Side, to the warring criminal firms of Salford flaunting their armed violence just as much as their wealth. All of Manchester existed in Malton’s head as a lurid map of sin, greed, brutality and money.

Thirty years entangled in that world had taught him that beyond violence and intimidation it was knowledge that carried the day. Knowing who had stolen from whom. Who was planning violent retribution and who was looking to get out for good. Knowledge let Malton stay one step ahead. It let a lone man navigate the lethal currents of the underworld and live to tell the tale. Malton was just one man. He had no muscle, no gang. He didn’t carry a gun. Malton had something far more important: knowledge.

But that was on the outside. In Strangeways there were only criminals. Murderers, rapists, drug dealers, wife beaters and worse. Every colour of human atrocity, packed together in a crumbling Victorian building. Locked away from the world but not locked away from each other.

Since his arrival Malton had started again. He had recreated his life outside in microcosm. Discovering prison gossip. Solving beefs and mediating between factions. The reputation he had outside carried inside the walls of Strangeways, gilded with the belief that he was now a murderer.

Malton didn’t correct that impression. It served him well. His cell was testament to that.

The room was small, smaller still for a man of Malton’s size. A stack of instant noodles was piled up on his dresser alongside tea, coffee, sweets and other small luxuries. He had no fewer than five different mobile phones hidden around the cell. Every cell now had a landline, but with calls monitored and numbers restricted, mobile phones were essential for prisoners who wanted to pick up their life outside while behind bars. But Malton didn’t eat his food or use his phones. He traded them and rented them and made sure that he was at the centre of prison life.

If the guards knew, they left him alone. Better to have someone like Malton keeping things calm than to crack down on him and upset the equilibrium. S Wing, where Malton found himself, had never been more peaceful.

Until today. Until he’d heard the rumour of what was coming his way. Three men, armed and under instructions to send a message by beating him to within an inch of his life.

The thought amused him.

He gave his neck an experimental flex. The thick, cable-like muscles stood to attention as they flowed down into his vast back and off to the thick, dense curves of his arms. His flimsy grey prison tracksuit could barely hold him. His hands rested on his knees, two broken cudgels that bore witness to a lifetime of conflict.

Malton stared at the wall opposite his bed. His expression was blank, almost meditative. His head was shaved, his features nearly delicate but then not quite. His skin a light brown – the mixed-race heritage that had made him who he was. A man always apart. Never belonging. Under his right eye was a thick scar. A memento from when he was starting out and had yet to become such good friends with brutality.

Outside, buried in Southern Cemetery, was the young man Stephen Page. The boy he was meant to have killed. He hadn’t seen that coming. He’d been too consumed with his own dead boy – James, his lover.

Malton had slept with men and women in his time but had only ever truly loved two people. One of them was his childhood sweetheart who, the last time they’d met, had tried to kill him. The other was James.

James who made Malton feel like he belonged somewhere. James who made Malton feel at home in his skin. James who was butchered. James whose killers Malton had been pursuing when he was arrested. He had been so blinded by his quest for vengeance that all the knowledge and insight that had kept him alive up to that point had simply fallen away to be replaced with all-consuming rage.

But that was outside. Inside, Malton didn’t have to worry about any of that. Inside, the world was far more simple, straightforward and nasty.

The heavy metal door to his cell opened and, without saying a word, three men entered, the final one closing the door behind him.

They were young, two white, one black. Barely in their twenties. Their bodies still slight and delicate, their youthful egos more than compensating for what their physicality could not do.

Malton saw that they each carried some kind of weapon. A prison knife made from a sharpened toothbrush, a block of wood, a jagged shard of Perspex from one of the countless broken windows.

‘Mickey Farr’s got a message for you,’ said the first man in the room. A blond kid with curly hair and the makeshift knife.

Malton stood up and for the first time a look of doubt crossed the men’s faces. Malton wasn’t tall but he was wide, his bulk filling the small cell. An immovable object. But he was more than that. His face was blank, a dark slab on which their fears were written for all to see.

‘I’ve got a message for Mickey Farr,’ said Malton, and flew at the three men.

3

Police tape surrounded Piccadilly Basin. A few minutes’ walk from the train station, the area had once been a hub for goods coming in along the canals on their way to the warehouses of Manchester. It had been the beating heart of the city’s trade.

Now it was a car park. The canals were still there, winding around the old warehouse buildings before disappearing beneath the city centre to emerge back into daylight in the Gay Village, but all that remained of Piccadilly Basin’s glory days was the large, stone archway that led to the scruffy patch of land where you could leave your car for just ten pounds a day.

Uniformed officers were doing their best to patrol the perimeter and keep back the handful of curious onlookers. It didn’t help that in the past few years several tower blocks and hotels had been built on the land surrounding the basin and now dozens of faces peered down from the flats and hotel rooms.

A small white tent had been erected alongside the canal, just before it headed underground, and a crime scene van announced that something serious was afoot.

Ruth Porter stood on a raised footbridge over the canal, which gave her a perfect view of everything going on. She saw the police vans that had brought uniform out to guard the scene. And she clocked the unmarked police car that had two plain-clothes detectives stood beside it, both urgently talking into their phones.

She held up her own phone and took some photos as. . .