The Drop

of Ks of coke.’
    ‘Oh Christ,’ he turned pale, well, even more pale, ‘what can I do? Name it man, anything. What can I do to make this right?’
    ‘Can you contact this Russian?’
    ‘No, it all went through Cartwright.’
    ‘I don’t know then Billy,’ I said regretfully, ‘you’re in the shit now and no mistake.’
    ‘I knew I shouldn’t have listened to Cartwright,’ he was rocking back and forth on his sofa like a traumatised soldier. ‘I knew it.’
    I let it sink in for a while so even a man as stupid as Billy Warren could work out how much trouble he was in. When he was good and scared I told him, ‘okay, you want a way out of this,’ I said, ‘here’s what you’re going to do. You are going to phone up Golden Boots and get the deal back on. Only this time you won’t be making anything because Finney will be standing behind you when you hand it over. Do that and make a few more deals with the Premiership’s finest and we’ll see if Bobby will let you be square, eventually, as long as you keep your nose clean.’
    ‘Yeah, yeah, of course man, anything - but how will I get him back in here after what you did to him? He was shitting himself when he left.’
    ‘Which is precisely why he’ll come back and buy your coke. Tell him Finney here is still mad at him and if he doesn’t want to spend the rest of his days contemplating the tragic, premature end to his playing career he’d better turn up and do the business. It’s not as if we’ll have trouble finding him. Just remind him we know where he’s going to be every Saturday afternoon.’
    We were sitting in Bobby’s office at the Cauldron. It was sunny outside but the blinds were drawn. It could have been any hour of the day or night.
    ‘So Geordie Cartwright was freelancing?’ asked the big man.
    ‘So it would seem,’
    ‘To pay off gambling debts?’ added Bobby.
    I nodded. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘I should have known he was chucking his money away.’
    ‘Maybe you should,’ he said and he was right to. I was still kicking myself for not knowing about Geordie’s little weakness. ‘But these days you can lose a fortune without even leaving your house. I’ve heard about guys pissing away their life savings on the internet while the missus is asleep in the room next door. I never would have imagined it though, Geordie Cartwright brought down by gambling. He was a good bloke, in the old days. It’s no way to end up is it?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘And we can’t find this Russian? What about your bent DS?’
    ‘He’s on it but no, there are no leads yet.’
    Bobby was swirling a scotch thoughtfully in his glass. ‘What brought these people to my city? What makes them think they can take the piss out of me? Who’s feeding them their information?’
    ‘That’s what we’ve got to find out.’
    ‘That’s what you’ve got to find out,’ he told me firmly, ‘and fast.’
    It’s three hundred miles from Newcastle down to Surrey. We spent most of them in silence. We never had that much to say to each other anyway, Finney and me. I didn’t particularly like the guy but then who said I had to - I was just glad he was on my side.
    The BBC news came on the radio; the usual mix of economic doom-mongering and British army casualties from foreign wars, ending with a supposedly light-hearted story about some senile, old bloke from Sevenoaks who’d managed to drive his car straight into a river and somehow survived.
    Finney listened to the story with interest.
    ‘Why would you call a place Sevenoaks?’ he said, ‘daft name that.’
    ‘Because there used to be seven big oaks there.’ Did Finney ever read anything but the sports pages?
    ‘Used to be?’
    ‘Six of them blew down in the hurricane in the 80s.’
    ‘Really?’ he seemed to find that highly amusing.
    ‘Yep.’
    ‘That’s brilliant,’ he said, ‘you call a place fucking Sevenoaks and six of the cunts blow down?’
    Finney drove the whole way and I was glad of it. It gave me some time to think things through, away from Bobby, away from Laura, away from the whole bloody business.
    After a while I stopped churning over the mystery of Geordie Cartwright and the missing money and started mentally preparing myself for my meeting with Amrein and how I was going to explain the late arrival of the Drop.
    ‘That Amrein,’ said Finney like he’d been thinking about it for a while, ‘he’s on a good screw isn’t he? I’m not even sure what we get for our money