Betrayed (9 page)

‘Damn right it is. Same hair. Definitely same face. It’s him. Fucking belter!’

Rosie’s eyes nearly popped when she saw the hat wedged under his arm.

‘Look, Matt. His hat. It’s got scrambled egg on it. He’s an inspector. Zoom in on his jacket. Get the buttons on the shoulder. I’ll need to check, but I’m sure two buttons is an inspector.’

‘Come in, Inspector Shiny Buttons, your number’s up. You’re nicked, big man.’ Matt grinned as he twisted the lens. ‘Oh I fucking love it when this happens.’

He fired off several more shots as they watched him put a black holdall into the boot of his car, then walk back round to the driver’s door.

‘Right. Just let him get out of the estate, and then we’ll follow him. On the main road we should be able to keep him in our sights. See where he goes. It will either be Ayr cop shop or Irvine. Any one of them will do nicely.’ Rosie smiled. ‘It’s a bit early to be going to a fancy dress party.’

They followed as he drove his BMW out onto the main road and up towards the edge of the town, then onto the A77 south.

They were still two cars behind him when he pulled off the road and into Ayr town centre. They followed until
he turned up a street towards the car park at Ayr police station.

‘Brilliant! Thank Christ we decided to come down. Come on, I’ll buy you a celebratory bacon roll,’ Matt said.

‘I told you – I’m a lucky reporter,’ she smiled as she headed back up onto the dual carriageway.

Rosie was surprised at how willing Liz was to take the risk. She’d agonised over the decision herself, part of her feeling guilty, the bigger part driven by the chance it might work.

Liz had phoned her as they were driving back from Ayrshire. Eddie McGregor had asked her to work behind the bar at a party in the Tavern tonight – a bon voyage party for the Rangers fans going off to Eindhoven tomorrow for the match. Rosie’s mind went into overdrive. The bus was leaving in two days, and it would be a chance to get pictures inside the hall upstairs that was used for UVF functions. Risky, but possible, and Liz was up for it.

Now, as they sat in her car in the derelict industrial estate in the East End, she watched Matt attach the secret video camera to Liz’s blouse.

‘Jeez. It’s tiny,’ Liz said. ‘Are you sure this will really take pictures?’

‘Definitely,’ Matt said, carefully securing the clip inside her blouse. ‘I’ve used it before. It works great for what we need.’

Liz smoothed down her blouse.

‘Can you see it?’ she said.

‘No,’ Rosie reassured her. ‘It blends in with the colours in your blouse. Can’t see it at all. You’ll be fine. Now let’s see if you can move around, because you’ll be busy behind the bar, and we have to make sure it stays on when you’re working.’

‘Christ. Don’t say that, Rosie,’ Liz snorted. ‘All I’d need is for it to drop into Eddie McGregor’s pint.’

‘Don’t even go there,’ Rosie said.

Liz made as though she was pulling pints, then stretched her arms as though reaching for the optics, the way she’d have to if she was serving behind the bar.

‘It’s fine. Not moving at all.’ She sat back down. ‘Right. Tell me what you want me to do.’

‘Okay,’ Rosie said. ‘You told us about the pictures with Rangers players on the walls up the staircase to the function hall. If you’re in early enough before anyone arrives, there’ll be nobody to see you going around there. So if you can, go slowly up the stairs and get the pictures captured on video.’

‘We can also take stills from the video footage,’ Matt says. ‘So don’t worry if you don’t have time to do a lot of filming. Just the crucial pictures.’

‘Yes,’ said Rosie. ‘And inside the function room, see if you can get any other pictures on the wall, the UVF emblems and stuff embroidered on the chairs and wall seating. Anything at all that has those connections. And of course, you’ll be talking to Eddie McGregor as the night goes on, so you’ll
capture anyone who is talking to him on camera. Plus it’s got audio, so you might get him and Jimmy.’ Rosie looked at her. ‘But only if it’s possible to do it discreetly.’

‘I’ll try my best, Rosie.’ Liz nodded.

‘I know you will. But the main thing here is for you to remember that if there is any problem at all, or you’re the least bit uncomfortable with it, just go to the loo and take it off. Are we clear about that?’

‘Of course,’ Liz said. ‘I’ll be fine with it. Honest. I can do this.’

‘Okay. Let’s have a practice with it. Make sure it works,’ Rosie said.

Liz reached inside her blouse and switched it on and Matt spoke towards the camera. Then she opened the door and got out of the car for a second.

‘Let’s have a look,’ Matt said, looking at it. ‘Works. Brilliant.’

‘Okay. Game on.’

Rosie glanced at Matt. Her stomach was in knots. Images of Gerhard Hoffman flashed into her mind, the dogged German investigative reporter who had helped her expose the scandal of refugees being killed for the illegal international tissue trade. Hoffman had been found murdered, suffocated with a plastic bag over his head in her hotel room in Belgrade a few months ago. She blinked his face away.

The three of them sat for a moment in the silence of Rosie’s car, staring out of the windscreen at the drab council
houses nearby with boarded-up windows and graffiti on every block. The rain sweeping across the streets made it look even more depressing.

‘What do you think has happened to Wendy?’ Liz shifted her body around, so she faced Rosie.

Rosie sighed. ‘I don’t know, Liz. That’s the truth. I want to think she’s done a runner somewhere, maybe was too scared to do anything about the rape, maybe too scared or sick about it to stay here.’ She paused. ‘But to be honest, I think if she’d done that she would at least have got in touch with you. Don’t you think?’

Liz nodded, then gazed out of the side window.

‘The longer it goes on, the worse it looks for her.’ She shook her head.

CHAPTER EIGHT

It was after seven by the time Rosie left the
Post
, having spent the past half hour in McGuire’s office with the picture editor, viewing Matt’s shots of Inspector Fraser Thomson. McGuire was delighted, but it was nothing without proof of his UVF involvement. He wasn’t convinced that Liz would be up to the undercover camera work, and they discussed other ways to investigate. He had agreed that the unmasking of the inspector was an unexpected bonus. ‘But don’t take your eye off the ball,’ he told Rosie. The Rangers buses and the coke smuggling were the big one. No pressure there then, Rosie told him as she left.

Driving home to her flat, Rosie wished she could have dinner with TJ and offload all her worries – just relax, drink too much wine, and talk. She missed the friendship as much as she ached for his touch when she reached across the bed in the middle of the night. She longed to be against the softness of his neck, listening to his reassuring words
when she was under pressure. She even missed watching how peaceful he was when he slept. She’d call him when she got home – it would make the night shorter.

Her mobile rang as she was getting out of her car behind her block of flats.

‘Don. How you?’

‘All right, Rosie. Where are you?’

‘Just about to go into my flat. Why? What’s up?’

‘I would have phoned you earlier, but I was tied up out in darkest Lanarkshire. You probably saw that car pulled out of a quarry in Coalburn? I’ve been chasing that most of the afternoon.’

‘I saw it. I was just glad it wasn’t Wendy.’

‘No, no. Two wee neds. Drug dealers. Not as big-time as they thought they were, evidently. Not much left of their heads.’

‘Good.’ Rosie was always glad when a scumbucket drug dealer was taken off the face of the earth. ‘Executed, I guess.’

‘Yeah. Point-blank. Forensic boys are doing the post-mortem now. Obviously there’s been a hit on them.’ He paused. ‘Listen. Fancy a quick drink, somewhere near you? I’m heading up that way anyway.’

Rosie locked the car. She could walk to a pub in Charing Cross in two minutes.

‘Meet you at the Bon Accord,’ she said. ‘I’m on my way.’

In the pub, Rosie looked at her watch, thinking how
nervous Liz must be feeling – she would be about to start work at the Tavern. She tried to push away the twinge of guilt.

‘One glass of fine red biddy for the lady.’ Don put a glass of wine down on the table and sat opposite her. He pulled his chair closer.

‘So, what’s the sketch, Don? Who are the guys from the quarry? I heard the names but they didn’t mean anything.’

Don lit a cigarette and swallowed the smoke.

‘Tommy Ritchie and James Balfour. They fancied their chances with the big boys. Moved in on Al Howie’s turf and were selling heroin, with their eye on the main prize because big Al’s not around. They thought they were just the boys to take over. But word is they were lured to a meet out in Coalburn by that wee bastard Bobby Gardner – he’s the wanker who’s looking after the shop while Al’s gone to ground in Spain … Well, after your investigation, he had to disappear.’ He smiled. ‘Anyway. So it’s obviously an ordered contract. Fuck them.’ He raised a glass. ‘To two more useless bastards getting what they deserved.’

Rosie clinked his glass.

‘Any ideas?’

‘Anybody’s guess really. Too well done and kept really tight to be any of the pricks around wee Bobby. We’re thinking UDA or UVF hit. Not IRA. Bobby’s a big Rangers man. But it seems like a Loyalist hit. They don’t leave any loose ends lying around.’

Rosie raised her eyebrows.

‘Well, they must have, because the cops have found the car and the bodies. Surely they weren’t meant to float back up to the surface of the quarry. Who found it?’

‘Local guy, out walking his dog. He stopped for a pee and saw on the horizon what he thought was the top of a car. He got the cops.’ He shrugged. ‘But you’re right. There shouldn’t be any loose ends if it was a proper hit.’

‘Why didn’t whoever did the job not just set fire to the car?’ Rosie asked.

‘Too much smoke. Out in the country it’s too quiet to start a fire. Would attract too much attention. They obviously thought the quarry would keep it forever. Might have seemed a good idea at the time, but it was a bad move. Especially in the warm weather. It hasn’t rained for the past week, and nobody could expect that in our summer. Water level must have gone down a bit.’

‘Any idea when it happened?’

‘Dunno yet. But these two wee toerags haven’t been seen for nearly a week. So I suppose it was on their last outing. We’re going through CCTV to see if they were spotted on the M74. They’re well out of their own patch, so they might have been coming up from down south with a stash. But there’s nothing in the car. So whoever did it cleaned them out.’

‘How sure can you be about an ordered hit, Don? You know what it’s like. We always hear these rumours – a
Loyalist hit is a good newspaper headline. But are these guys still operating to that extent these days? With the peace process and all that?’

Rosie knew they were, but she wanted to hear it from an official source.

Don looked at her, surprised. ‘Of course. You kidding? The Good Friday Agreement last year didn’t make much difference to these guys. They were never really about the Troubles. Well, maybe years ago, but not now. It’s all about thuggery and gangsters. It’s the same over in Belfast. But you must know that yourself.’

Rosie nodded. She knew. She’d been to Belfast many times during flashpoints over the years, and had built up a handful of connections on both sides of the divide. On one occasion when the peace process collapsed, she’d persuaded someone to give her a glimpse into the men who stood in the way of peace. She’d been taken by Loyalists to a secret location in a house in East Belfast for what they loosely described as a photo opportunity. She and Matt had been blindfolded and driven through a warren of housing estates, so that by the time they’d reached the house they had no real sense of what area they were in. Once inside the council house, she was struck by how normal everything had looked in the family home – kids’ school pictures on the wall, football trophies on the mantelpiece, and breakfast dishes piled up in the kitchen sink. Minutes later they were taken to a back room where two armed
men in full paramilitary jerseys stood with rifles, as a commander sat beneath a flag and read out a UVF statement. It was the usual diatribe you got from both sides, whether it was defending the union or fighting for a united Ireland. When they finished, the men in balaclavas marched out of the room and probably went back to whatever day jobs they had, in whatever life they lived before they’d come in the back door.

But over the years, it was becoming more and more obvious that the armed struggle wasn’t about Irish freedom or fighting to preserve Queen and country. It was gangsters, fighting to preserve their sordid little drugs empires under the banner of a cause.

‘Yeah. I do,’ she said. ‘But I didn’t think they were still at it so much over here.’

‘Of course they are. They have to pretend to have something to fight for. The fight is drugs, Rosie. That’s what it’s all about. The rest is sheer fucking hypocrisy.’ Don shook his head and ran a hand over his stubbly chin. ‘I’d rather have an ordinary bastard of a drug dealer than any one of these fuckers trying to shove politics down my throat. Politics went out the window years ago. Coke is the new cause. And worse still – crack cocaine. We’d never heard much of that stuff before until a couple of years ago, but now it’s here to stay. And that shit’s going to fuck with people’s heads big time. Tell you what. We get a crack cocaine problem
here and it will be like an explosion. It’s already starting to happen. We’re getting a few more busts every other week. So it’s here to stay. Doesn’t bear thinking about. And most of the market is controlled by the UVF and the IRA.’

‘Do you know who are the main players?’

‘Special Branch would tell you better. But there’s a few faces on both sides. That Eddie McGregor. He’s a UVF man. Big enough player these days. Special Branch know about him and others.’

‘I see. What about weapons? I take it weapons that get used across the water sometimes end up here, and vice versa?’