The Drop

Bobby,’ said Jerry Lemon, ‘I was only saying… .’
    ‘Maybe you should do a bit less saying and a bit more thinking. Do you reckon word won’t get round that we went up there to have it out with Arthur Gladwell face to face on his own patch?’ Course it will. Every grass in the city will be onto it by now. We’ll have been picked up on CCTV arriving at the station. That shows we’ll stand, against anyone. Anyone,’ Bobby stared out of the train window and he carried on addressing Jerry without even looking at him, ‘why don’t you do something useful for a change. Go down to the buffet car and get us all a drink.’
    I was beginning to think it was worth the journey to Glasgow just to see Jerry Lemon get slapped down like that.

TWENTY-SEVEN
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    W e were back to square one. We had nothing; just a photofit of a petty criminal from Glasgow and a Russian connection we didn’t understand. It was doing my head in. I wasn’t getting anywhere. Bobby still didn’t have his money and, more importantly, I hadn’t found out who was behind his ‘troubles’, as Arthur Gladwell so tellingly referred to them.
    I was at home watching the football when the phone rang. Out of the blue, Joe Kinane called me. His happiness was in direct contrast to my mood.
    ‘I just thought I’d give you a ring about my lad,’ he told me.
    ‘How’d he get on?’
    ‘Beat it,’ he said.
    ‘Really?’ this was more than I could have hoped for, ‘that’s brilliant. What happened?’
    ‘Self-defence,’ he said laughing, ‘which it was of course, kind of, but that lawyer of yours was the dog’s. She took the other guy apart.’
    ‘Told you,’ I said.
    ‘Aye, well, he got a more comprehensive beating from her than he ever did from my boy. It helped that she seemed to have a lot of information about his character, stuff he wouldn’t want a jury to hear. Turns out he wasn’t a very nice bloke,’ he said dryly.
    ‘You don’t say? Amazing what a good lawyer can turn up.’
    ‘It is,’ and he laughed, ‘anyway, I just wanted to thank you for putting me onto her.’
    ‘My pleasure mate,’ I told him. I was glad he was expressing his gratitude discreetly. If anyone was listening into this, all they could accuse me of was knowing a good lawyer. ‘That’s in return for all the help and guidance you gave me when I was a snot-nosed kid.’
    ‘Aye, er sorry about that like,’ he said.
    ‘Don’t worry about it Joe.’
    ‘Well, I owe you one,’ he told me before he rang off, ‘if I hear anything about that other thing, anything at all, I’ll let you know.’
    ‘Cheers,’ I said. Maybe he would turn something up but somehow I doubted it. We had every man in our outfit on it permanently and not one of them had come up with anything worth a light.
    I had never seen Sharp so rattled before. My tame DS was shitting it. It was not a good start.
    ‘I can’t meet you here,’ he hissed at me after I ordered a drink a few feet from him in Rosies.
    ‘I thought I was your major criminal source,’ I said, playing his game and not looking directly at him. Instead I stared at the mirror in front of me then up at the weird assortment of ghoulish mannequin heads that were arrayed on a ledge above the bar. They didn’t really fit in with all of the framed football shirts on the walls. The bar staff were busy bottling up and the pub was quiet so this nonsense was do-able but I seriously doubted if it would fool anyone for long.
    ‘It’s not funny.’
    ‘I never said it was,’ I assured him, ‘where then?’ I took a big gulp of my beer.
    ‘The Angel,’ he said, ‘one hour - but don’t be surprised if I don’t show.’
    ‘You’d better show,’ I warned him and I took another large swig of beer.
    He turned to face me then and he looked wild eyed, ‘you don’t get it, you don’t know what’s going on. They’re everywhere, all over the station, asking questions, questions about me.’
    ‘Who is?’
    ‘Police Complaints Commission. They’ve been in with my gaffer all morning.’
    ‘Maybe it’s him they’re interested in?’
    ‘No chance, not him. He’s a fucking android.’
    I drained my pint, ‘like I said, he sounds like heart attack material,’ I told him, ‘and so do you, now get a grip.’ I put my empty glass down on the bar and left him to it.
    By the time I’d driven out of the city, parked and trudged up to the monument with the wind whistling