Born Bad: A gritty gangster thriller with a darkly funny heart. Marnie Riches

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       Chapter 11

       Conky

      ‘Have a drink, Conks,’ Frank shouted over the thud, thud, thud of the garage music. Thrusting a bottle of Cristal in his general direction, so that the foaming liquid sploshed onto his suit trousers.

      Conky pushed the bottle away. Stood abruptly, sick of being penned into that damned VIP area, surrounded by a wall of gyrating young girls dressed like cheap strippers, though the club had only just started to fill up in earnest. Early birds, catching the worm. All of them, on the lookout for a man with a fat wallet, a small dick and lack of moral fibre. He hated it. This was nothing more than a prison made from fat silken rope instead of bars.

      ‘No. Thanks all the same.’

      Frank looked momentarily crestfallen. ‘But we’re celebrating.’

      ‘The boss is celebrating,’ Conky said, looking over at Paddy, who was in the process of pouring champagne onto the cleavage of a blonde girl, sitting on his lap. Licking it off, as though that was merely hors d’oeuvres for the main course, which would inevitably be enjoyed in the back room of the club later. Poor bloody Sheila. ‘I don’t see why you’re so happy, Francis.’

      But Frank wasn’t listening. He shrugged. Smiled. Swigged from the bottle himself and started to dance along to the deafening music as though he hadn’t a care in the world. A harmless prick, but a prick nonetheless.

      Checking his watch, Conky assessed with some relief that it was time to escape the childish, hedonistic bullshit of M1 House. He didn’t bother excusing himself. Paddy would not thank him for the interruption.

      Pushing his way through the phalanx of sweaty bodies, careful to avoid having his hair arrangement knocked by the dancing, prancing kids’ flailing arms, he wondered how life would be once he was no longer in the employ of the O’Briens. Frank had offered to keep him on, but he sure as hell had no intention of working for that gurning buffoon.

      Outside, the air was fresh and smelled only a little of diesel from the passing buses and taxis. The night reverberated with the beat of the music, as though the club contained within it a giant throbbing heart, trying to burst its confines. Conky lit a cigarette and exhaled heavily.

      ‘Three months,’ he told the pink haze of the city’s sky. ‘After twenty long years.’

      In three months Paddy would be up, up and away, Thailand- bound – Sheila on his arm, which would be more than enough for any man under normal circumstances – hell, he’d be happy to spend his life in Glasgow’s Gorbals or Runcorn if Sheila was his – and without a care in the world. Until then, Conky had agreed to work out his notice for severance pay that was more than generous. No doubt he would be paid his six-figure sum out of the first mill he was about to take receipt of from those arseholes, Jonny Margulies and Tariq Khan. Conky McFadden – an independently wealthy man. What a thought! He would somehow launder it to pay off his mortgage, raised ten years ago on a lacklustre end terrace in Didsbury, using fake payslips from O’Brien Construction Ltd.

      Paddy was a generous benefactor. Too generous. And that was the problem.

      On the drive to meet the Boddlington bosses, Conky took a detour, slowing the Jag as he traversed the city’s invisible borders into Parson’s Croft. Peering down street after anonymous street of Victorian terraced housing, where Degsy and his girls dealt drugs. From here to the outskirts of Wythenshawe, every shitty pub operated as a hub where locals would go to receive Maundy Money even on a Thursday from their monarch. Those were places where disputes were solved, work was asked for, respects and dues were paid. The shopkeepers whom Conky collected protection money from paid up on time. The disloyal and disobedient СКАЧАТЬ