The Cover Up: A gripping crime thriller for 2018. Marnie Riches

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СКАЧАТЬ that was all down to Paddy,’ Sheila said, rubbing Frank’s bony shoulder as a gesture of solidarity, though he shrugged away from her touch. ‘And he’s gone. You’ve done well to get this place open again. Sod that bullying arsehole. He’s just a memory. To hell with the past, Frank. You own one of the country’s biggest super-clubs and you do it well. All the outrage in the papers from worried middle-class parents made kids who were desperate for a walk on the wild side wanna come back! M1 House is edgy and cool. You’re cool! Have faith in yourself, chuck.’

      Sighing heavily, the crow’s feet around Frank’s eyes seemed to deepen. The shadows on his face seemed to lengthen. The Adam’s apple bobbed up and down, sticking out of his scrawny neck as though a malign spirit had taken up residence in his throat and was trying to punch its way out.

      ‘I’m not so sure,’ he said. ‘Just when I got the Boddlingtons off my back, and I’m getting back on my feet with the club, there’s been a few new faces around. I’ve got a bad feeling about it.’

      Sheila snapped the lid of the laptop shut. ‘New faces? How do you mean?’ She studied Frank’s face for signs of drug-fuelled paranoia and hippy bullshit.

      ‘You got new lads working for you? Dealing in here?’

      ‘A couple of temporary workers, doing a bit of this and that. We’re struggling to find the staff since Paddy got stabbed. A couple of the lads got caught in the crossfire when the Boddlingtons did over the cannabis farm. Quite a few have just lost their nerve and said they were going straight. I can’t exactly stop them. Or blame them.’

      ‘Paddy would have had them killed before he’d let them go,’ Frank said, running a thin finger around and around the rim of his half-pint glass.

      ‘I’m not Paddy,’ Sheila said, pressing her lips together tightly. Stifling an outburst. ‘And that’s precisely why I’m trying to build up me and Gloria’s cleaning business and do these new start-ups. White-collar crime, Frank. It’s less risky. It’s more forward-thinking. It’s how the rich get richer. All that gun-toting bad-boy crap is Paddy’s legacy. I’ve got a functioning brain and a beating heart, Frank. I can’t fill my days, sitting on my backside, sewing a fine seam like some merry widow. My Amy and Dahlia have grown up and flown the nest. One at uni. One a lawyer in the City. I need something more than nail bars and chardonnay and I don’t want my daughters having their inheritance seized by the coppers and dying of shame if I go down. Now, who were these new faces? You got any security footage of them?’

      Taking her laptop bag with her, Sheila followed Frank up the winding staircase to the echoing vastness of the main club. Here, the house music that the DJ played reverberated off the empty, gleaming dance floor – sanded down and refinished not once, but twice, to remove the life’s blood of those who had fallen at the hand of that slippery eel of a Fish Man, the Boddlington gang enforcer, Asaf Smolensky. Glancing at the DJ booth, she expected to see her nephew standing there, all muscles and bronzed-Adonis-handsome, with his cans pressed to his ear. Young Jack, Manchester’s golden boy, waving at his Aunty Sheila. In his stead, there was just some young, trendy-looking black guy she didn’t recognise – up from London no doubt – and the chubby, middle-aged sound engineer, perched behind a mixing console on the other side of the club.

      As Frank disappeared through to the backstage area, Sheila noticed the tanned man in overalls, marking a spot on the wall with a pencil. He wore a baseball cap at a ridiculous angle for a middle-aged man. Wielded a measuring tape with clean hands that looked out of place on a manual labourer. The thought that he was somewhat familiar drifted in and out of her head so rapidly that it left no trace whatsoever. Her brother-in-law was always having work done to a building that was now tantamount to a memorial to Jack.

      ‘Here we go,’ Frank said in his office, pulling several sheets of paper out of his desk drawer. ‘I had Otis, the security feller, come up with these. Pictures from the footage.’ He pushed them across the desk towards Sheila. Tapped on the heads of two men – one black with dreads, one white with a crew cut, both man-mountains – who, even given the poor quality of the CCTV stills, clearly stuck out as far older interlopers among the firm, lithe bodies of the partying youngsters.

      Sheila noted a shiftiness to the men’s eyes – perhaps imagined, given how grainy the images were. But the tense way that they held their bodies gave them away as dealers, not dancers. And who the hell wore quilted bomber jackets on a sweaty dance floor?

      ‘They’re not any of my temps,’ she said, digging at the back of her molars with her tongue, feeling some kale left behind from the badly blended smoothie that Conky had made her. A for effort. C for execution. ‘Give them to me. I’ll see what Conks thinks. He knows everyone. If it’s a rival crew, he’ll be on it like flies on dog shit.’

      Click-clacking her way across the dance floor, clutching her fur gilet close around her slender body against the cold air of the vast unheated super-club, Sheila pondered how she might offload the responsibility of the dirtier side to the business elsewhere. Heading into the triple-height vestibule, she contemplated the meeting she had yet to attend that day at the head office of a commercial airline. Ably assisted by Gloria, she would deliver a pitch to the airline’s board members for the contract to clean European-bound aircraft at several airports in the north. She imagined speaking authoritatively, dressed just on the business side of provocatively. She would use a breathy, sexy, irresistible voice. She was sure that flashing a little titty, in addition to their competitive rates and immaculate reputation, would land the lucrative deal.

      In fact, Sheila was so caught up in her fantasies of success and the residual enthusiasm over her speed-dating venture that she only barely registered the white van parked outside M1 House. Nor did she realise that the man in the overalls with the stupid baseball cap was following her onto the street. And when her phone rang out with the full-bodied Pop Queen warble of Adele, Sheila was so baffled by the Brummie accent of the unfamiliar caller at the other end, she failed to notice that the man in the overalls, who did in fact own the white van, was standing right behind her.

       Chapter 2

       Gloria

      ‘Is he looking?’ Gloria asked Winnie, who, as usual, was sitting to her right at the end of the pew. No response. She elbowed the old woman gently. Whispering loud enough so that a couple of the elderly men in front turned around and grimaced at her disapprovingly. ‘Is he looking?’

      ‘No, dear.’ Winnie shook her head, tickling Gloria’s ears with a flurry of petrol-coloured feathers. Waving a lace fan slowly up and down in the stuffy place.

      It was a wonder she could see anything from under that hat. ‘Are you sure?’

      ‘I’m old, dear. Not blind. Hush! Pastor’s speaking.’

      Irritated that her studied cool and feigned disinterest wasn’t working, Gloria faced forward again. Trying desperately to catch the pastor’s eye once more by pushing out her chest and batting her eyelashes.

      No response.

      The fine man standing in the pulpit, preaching to the swollen ranks of the congregation with vim, vigour and pleasantly developed triceps when he raised his hands to praise Jesus, had not cast so much as a glance her way since the start of the Sunday morning service. And there was Kitty Fried Chicken, still sitting at the front in the spousal hot-seat, wearing a beret, looking like some cross between Jabba the Hut and a black Che Guevara in BHS’ best. Still clinging on to that fine man of God like the oniony stink of sweat СКАЧАТЬ