Crusaders Read online

  ‘Does she know, though? You’ve other wee girls on the go?’

  ‘Not off me. She knows the score, but. I’ve always telt her, “First duty in my life is that firstborn child.”’

  ‘Sweet, is she? Your wee girl?’

  Stevie grimaced. ‘Takes after her mother.’ His daughter presented her cheek to be kissed with the same Nordic air of reluctance.

  ‘Aye well.’ Caldwell foraged in his shirt pocket for his Zippo. ‘You’re conscientious, Stevie. Seems to me, but, you might want to … vary your habits a bit? I wouldn’t have so many haunts if I were you. Same pubs, same bookies. If you’ve different beds you can sleep in, sleep in them. It’d suit you to be a little more elusive. Except when I need you, of course.’ He grinned. ‘I’m not just talking your domestic, it’s good business too. Keeps your luck fresh. Luck’s a huge part of all this.’

  Stevie nodded gloomily. Increasingly he turned it over in his head, this notion of luck – from whence it came, on whom it was bestowed, whether it ever served hard notice of its departure.

  ‘You can put yourself in places where you’re liable to be lucky, Stevie. If you’re a creature of habit – then the joker’s always got a chance of lying in wait for you. You get busted for nonsense. Cos the stars had time to line up against you.’

  ‘Divvint start wi’ that talk, man.’ Stevie winced. It was bad enough that Karen was a head-case for charts and astrology, forever muttering darkly as if the topic were an improvised weapon she could wheedle into his guts.

  ‘Okay, fill me in then. How are your boys? All the parts working?’

  ‘Nee bother.’ Stevie shrugged. The new starts in the minicab firms and the second-hand car lots were doing fine. The number of doorways of the bars and the clubs – graduate school – were ever increasing, and Stevie was taking on a few allegedly more experienced lads whom he might have queried harder in the past. But there seemed hardly the time for fine discrimination any more.

  ‘It’s just, it’s like – everybody wants a piece of us, man,’ he said finally.

  Caldwell set down his wine glass. ‘You’re breaking my heart tonight, Stevie. Look. Expansion’s not a luxury in business, it’s a necessity. It’s a matter of survival. Myself? I’d rather not bother. Much rather the simple life. But it’s a fact, you can’t get off the train when it’s rolling. The good news is the life you get. Right? You can have a piece of anything, once you’re big enough. And they all tell me they want my boys in. Well, not all of them, but, you know …’ Caldwell placed a manicured paw on Stevie’s coat sleeve. ‘So, aye, I know it’s more work for you, but it’s worth it, right? Isn’t it? Come on. Who’s your pal, eh? Who’s your buddy?’

  Stevie threw Roy a forbearing look that seemed to delight the older man, for he grinned broadly. ‘That’s right. Is there anything you’d not do for me, Stevie? If I asked you nice enough?’

  ‘I wouldn’t touch your old cock.’

  Caldwell chuckled into the rim of his sea-dark Rioja. ‘Aye, well there’s other candidates there, son. Less of the old and all, eh?’

  *

  Weighing all things, Stevie knew he had no cause for grievance against his paymaster. Their association had carried him a mile north of Hoxheath to his own detached house in clean-swept Fenham. He had sorely needed a bigger drum for his goods, not to mention better security. With due regard for his new neighbours, he sought and secured a double garage, one bin for his handy new Lexus, the other for a pro set of benches and free weights.

  Roy urged him always to make his money grow, even offering the services of some shady accountant. Stevie deigned to purchase a local off-licence on an untroubled stretch. He granted Roy’s insistence that in business no stone should be left unturned, no opportunity spurned. Construction was booming about Newcastle – Stevie could see it with his own eyes, even in benighted Hoxheath, where ground was getting broken for some sprawling new City College campus. If builders raised scaffolding in such a blighted zone, the site was surely in need of protection from marauding charver kids – that much was common sense. He consulted Roy, who vehemently agreed this was a job for Sharky’s Machine, that the boys should go round forthwith. But Stevie wanted the job personally. For when the company signage was lofted up on the perimeter fence, he recognised the name of Jim Doggett’s old firm, albeit linked by ampersand to some new partner.

  Stevie presented himself at the site first thing, his stomach growling in the wait to acquaint Doggett with his nemesis. Alas, he found only one harassed foreman, whom he browbeat at leisure for a quarter-hour, firmly boring through his hapless stammer that there were already contracts in place, shift teams, alarms, surveillance. ‘Your site’s bigger than that, man. And I’m telling you, there’s neebody else can guarantee your security. Nee-fucking-body, y’understand?’ He never raised his voice, much less a hand, and left knowing that he had made the correct impression. The tax was paid weekly when he dropped by, though he never saw sight or heard protesting word of Jim Doggett – the sole dissatisfaction in an otherwise happy transaction.

  That was how it went in Hoxheath. Round Fenham way, Stevie wished to be better thought of by his neighbours. He had his own definition of fair play in life – it had been wisdom dearly bought – and he was resolved to act like it amounted to something. Offering a little cash to the good of St Mark’s Church was a simple act of auld lang syne, for Stevie well remembered how its wooden pews had once been a bed to him. On certain afternoons, if at a loose end, he strode over to the church and through the doors and took a seat, where there was peace and solitude and pale soothing light. The iron, he was sure, had done more than pack his muscles – it had taken his head to elevated places, instilled some stirring thoughts. The silence and decorum of St Mark’s he also found conducive to same. When other churchy folk were present, he was less sure of his welcome, for he could tell they assumed a great deal of his character from the shadow he cast. But he could face himself squarely in the bathroom mirror. What I am, he would tell his reflection, what I do, I am a regulator. It was a term he had gleaned from cowboy films, and it never failed to restore his spirits.

  *

  After a spring morning spent watching his three-year-old daughter behold him as though he were a burglar, Stevie dialled Roy’s number from the Lexus and was given perplexing details of a new gig. In wheezing amusement Roy described the Damask Rose, a sauna-and-massage place on Westgate Road that had gone begging after the busting of an elderly madam who had failed to renew her subscription with the local constabulary. There seemed to be no qualms about new management stepping into her stead – a move that appeared to amuse Roy still. ‘Don’t know what possessed me on this one, Stevie son. Would you believe I was raised at the foot of the kirk?’

  ‘All I knaa, Roy, everybody likes a bit naughty.’

  ‘Is that right?’ Caldwell cackled back down the line.

  The first time that Stevie mounted the rickety stairs he had an odd flutter in his gut, for he couldn’t picture what a bordello looked like in this day and age. In fact, it was a bog-standard second-floor flat, three poky bedrooms fitted with heavy blinds and painted in clashing colours as to offer a choice of mood to the punter. It was, he saw, an elementary task to appoint one beefy lad to patrol the narrow hallway. A mumsy woman was perched on a high stool in a galley kitchen, keeping a register, directing traffic, while a few polite and listlessly semi-clad ladies watched telly in a parlour. Stevie was vaguely fascinated by them – just girls, really, from Poland and Bulgaria – but he found he got on better with the mumsy manager, always ready with a joke and a plate of oven chips when he called to take the tax.

  In the wake of one such drop-by, contemplating a solitary cod supper at the wheel, Stevie received a Roy summons to drive out of town by the Coast Road and join him and a pal at some bar in Whitley Bay. The tide was frothing on the blowsy seafront when he parked the Lexus. The venue, he discovered, was a private members’ club, a queer sort of joint – mauve walls, tigerskin-print seats, a
nd mounted paintings of bosomy females in loincloths basking with panthers or curled up in the coils of pythons. But it was private, for sure, and there, at Roy’s bidding, Stevie shook hands with a flabby walrus of a man, one Jonjo Fitzgerald, who proceeded to witter on incessantly about Newcastle United – the genius of Kevin Keegan, the dead-eyed prowess of Andy Cole. Roy seemed to tolerate it, though Stevie had never taken him for a sportsman, and when Fitzgerald had drunk up and waddled out, Roy looked at Stevie like a cat with moist whiskers and informed him that Fitzy’s day job was as a detective inspector with Northumbria Drugs Squad. That, Stevie decided, was the most surprising thing he had heard in all of 1993.

  ‘What’s a policeman, Steve, but a human man doing a job? He’s more in common wi’ you or me than Joe Bloggs out there empties bins for a living.’

  ‘Detective inspector, but …’

  ‘There’s no’ a lot of point getting pally with PC Plod. You’re not much improving your influence there. Them boys, they’ll talk to you happy enough, but you don’t get much for your money.’ Some indigestible thought had occurred. ‘And some of them bastards, the young uns – awful devoted to the good old cause. Wee caped crusaders, dudley-do-rights. Fitzy there was just telling me about some boy got stuck on his team, some cunt-stubble. Didn’t like what he saw, went behind Fitzy’s back to his super. Next day he found these blades of grass in his desk drawer. Then, get this for cold – someone stuck a wee photo of his kiddie to the office whiteboard.’

  Stevie frowned. ‘What’s that about, then?’

  ‘Ah, well, it wisnae a picture he’d ever seen.’

  Caldwell reclined into the tigerskin, raised an eyebrow, drummed fingers on his thigh of his good Italian pants. Stevie nodded. Truly, in a war of such nerves, there was but one side to be on.

  ‘By the by, do you fancy the match on Saturday?’

  Stevie smelled a rat. ‘What, United match?’

  ‘Aye, United–Liverpool. Fitzy wanks on, I know, but I’ve started going a bit myself. It’s good entertainment. Good atmosphere. Cut above Tannerdice, I have to say. Do you fancy it?’

  ‘Roy, man, I was brought up red and white.’

  ‘Sunderland? They’re muppets, aren’t they?’

  Stevie struggled for a rebuttal. His dad had been one to declare he was Sunderland until he died, but where was his dad now? The place looked a little smarter these days, at least north of the Wear in Fulwell, where his nana was eking out her days. But Wearside was the distant past, of which he remembered naught but rancour, unfairness and disloyalty. And, if he was honest, he liked how Keegan’s United played.

  ‘Aye well, it’s top division football, I suppose.’

  So he accompanied Roy to St James’s Park and saw Newcastle trounce the Scousers with three identical goals from the imperious Cole. It occurred to him anew that a man could get used to anything.

  *

  1994 kicked off poorly – a rank odour round the pubs and clubs for months after the fatal shooting on New Year’s Eve of a highly rated bouncer, one Viv Graham of Rowland’s Gill, who was said to have got above his station. The council and police were soon insisting on a register of all doormen working in Newcastle. Stevie had twenty-odd men on the books of Sharky’s Machine, serving thirty or more premises. Now there was the drear prospect of hard questions being asked of each and every employee – and, all ‘diversification’ aside, Stevie needed those doors. He now had real cause to rue a twelve-month suspended sentence for assault he had received in late 1990. The plaintiff had got all that was coming to him, certainly in respect of his loutish conduct inside Club Zeus, but the law had been blind to Stevie’s motive and overly attentive to some admittedly wince-inducing CCTV footage. That prior conviction now, very abruptly, spelt the end of Stevie’s term on the doors. The lads threw him a party in the back of the Gunnery, and they raised their glasses solemnly.

  Stevie was pensive that night. For some time, he knew, he had been above the blunt graft of the doors, more engaged in Roy’s tax collecting – in business. The old walk of life, its habits and denizens, had never been cosy. Always there had been the procession of gadgies making distant threats, big-mouthing in pubs about how Steve Coulson wasn’t long for the world. Customary had become the calls or furtive approaches from associates to tell him that his name was being cursed to the heavens in the Loose Box, taken in vain at the Block and Tackle. Stevie knew he had attained such eminence that a lot of that shite was to be disdained for the small-dick Dutch courage that it was. Just sometimes, though, face-to-face it had to be. He would note the address, track the offender, see how much they liked it up them in front of their mates, if mates they had. Sometimes it was enough to appear, like a bear with a sore head and a low growl, right in the midst of whoever’s slovenly excuse for a local, and to point a sharp finger.

  ‘Fucking show us respect, you.’

  ‘Aw but he respects you, Stevie, totally man. There was nowt meant by it, not a bit …’

  Respect. It was all a lot of fucking bollocks. The whole stinking sham made Stevie’s temples pulse. He had begun to feel the gravity of his mid-thirties, to count the furrows of his brow, to look into remedies for sciatic pain.

  His friend Roy’s unprompted response to these unvoiced woes was to put down money on a club called Teflon, a Quayside joint by the city end of the Swing Bridge. Stevie was to be manager, his name over the door. The move into management was logical, timely, not to say a blessing. How swift and glad was his embrace of the routine, assuming a black single-breasted suit and an open white shirt, strutting the buffed floors vodka-tonic in hand through the calm early hours of trade! And at a stroke he was a businessman, albeit one just as happy swapping the fine duds for his pub suit, his Gold’s Gym sweatshirt and arse-frayed denims, at whatever time suited.

  *

  On the first day of 1996 that felt like springtime – a morning nipping at the extremities, yet blessed with a hazy sunshine, effulgent over Nuns Moor Park – Stevie took in the view at leisure from his bedroom window, prior to blending a protein shake and heading to his garage number two for a brisk half-hour’s workout. He was due to rendezvous with Roy on the far side of Town Moor at eleven. It could be something or it could be nothing, but he would be locked and loaded as ever.

  In the gloom of the garage he hunkered and stretched out on the cool vinyl of the bench, drew in breath, then launched his assault on the four-hundred-pound bar-bell – one furious set, then the strain of another, the torture of a third. He trained almost entirely at home now. Over the winter a fellow called Porter had been shot and killed by some radgy as he left the shed at Morton’s. Stevie had a boxer’s heavy bag suspended from the ceiling of the garage, and he pounded it for five solid minutes. He was steeled for combat, should the enemy appear.

  Back upstairs he showered and dressed – black jeans and boots, clean gym vest and hooded sweat-top. When he donned his good leather coat, smelled the fine hide, felt its form wrap close about him, it was though he were assuming not so much an apparel or an armour as a secondary skin. The leather had a rigidity that Stevie considered akin to his mindset: pliant, but unpierceable. It was his right and proper raiment.

  In the driveway he unlocked the Lexus and peered over the road, expectant of locating his lookout, the day’s volunteer from his Charver Squad, as he called those lads. There indeed was the kid in the backward baseball cap, poised like a bush-cat up on the pedals of his bike. Stevie nodded, the kid coolly returned the favour. They were good kids, surprisingly susceptible to his attention and consideration. He gave each a mobile and solemn instructions, and he had yet to be let down. If anyone was loitering around his main places of business, he got the call. One more line of defence.

  He took the North West Radial, a ten-minute drive, and pulled into a space near Exhibition Park. Striding into the grounds he felt a fine familiar stirring, a sad sort of fondness for the lovely biting cold of old Newcastle. There was no place like it. Other so-called hot spots had no atmosphere
fit to compare, not that he had seen. He didn’t romanticise the trouble-zones, the half-done demolition and the dog dirt and the Sunday morning snowdrift of burger-boxes down the street. But that was just people for you. He played his part in clearing things up, keeping the city upright and orderly, ready for business.

  And now he could see Roy, loitering near the bandstand by the foot of a beech tree, clad in a dark cashmere coat, mobile phone pressed to his ear, his lately acquired black labrador Buster padding about at his heels. As he neared, Roy clocked him and nodded but continued his business. ‘Aye, so a shade under five? The right side, consigliere. No, no problem, Barry, son. I am guided by you in all things. It’s like all these things – could be something, could be nothing, I don’t mind either way.’

  ‘You buying a used car?’ said Stevie once the phone was consigned to the coat pocket.

  ‘No, no, son, I’m donating to the Labour Party.’

  That sounded like prime Roy bollocks.

  ‘You alright?’

  ‘Nee bother.’

  ‘You’d a visit the other day? At Teflon?’

  That was correct. Stevie had thought it a matter on which he might keep his own counsel rather than trouble the boss. Now, regrettably, it looked to be the matter at hand. For a year or more there had been no problem with the law, at least nothing of the sort experienced by venues with less auspicious connections. Last week, though, there had been a snide visit from some DI, wanting to interview all door staff in relation to complaints from unidentified patrons. Who this buckshee copper imagined himself to be was a matter for more thought, but for the time being it was clear that a certain understanding was no longer being honoured quite so rigorously. Thus did Stevie conclude his report. Roy looked grim. ‘I wonder, but. Fitzy’s not talking to me. Someone’s maybe pulling someone else. Somewhere in the bloody chain.’

  ‘Some cunt-stubble?’