Mick Shallicker found Frank McCracken on a bench on a lawn outside an open fire-exit at the rear of St Winifred’s. It wasn’t a particularly relaxing place; there were a few straggly flowerbeds, and then a car park, from which vehicles came and went constantly. And McCracken didn’t look particularly relaxed, perched stiffly with ruffled hair and a grizzled jaw, wearing only slippers, pyjama bottoms and an NHS-issue dressing gown draped over his bare shoulders to accommodate the sling and bandages.
‘I wondered when you were going to show up,’ he said sourly.
Shallicker stood there awkwardly. ‘Seems the Old Bill don’t consider you worth guarding any more.’
‘I suspect because I’m not actually giving them anything.’
‘You okay to be outside?’
‘They’ve moved me to a recovery ward. If I’m good for that, I’m good for the fresh air … at least, there’s no chance of concealed microphones out here.’
Shallicker nodded thoughtfully. ‘How’s Charlie?’
‘Apparently, she’s going to be all right.’
The big guy looked relieved. ‘That’s good.’
‘But she’s had major surgery, so it’s going to be a long one. Six months, maybe.’
‘Shit.’
McCracken looked up at him. His voice grated as he spoke. ‘I’m more concerned about what the blue fuck’s been going on elsewhere!’
Shallicker raised his hands. ‘First of all, I had no choice … I had to bring you here. I thought you were going to kick it.’
‘I’m not concerned about that. I mean O’Grady.’
‘Well … it was him, Frank. We both saw him.’
‘We’re never likely to see him again, are we! Just tell me it wasn’t you, Mick.’
‘Course it wasn’t.’
‘Because I’d expect schoolboys to do a better fucking job than that.’
‘Yeah, well …’ Shallicker gestured that he would sit if that was okay. McCracken moved up and he plonked himself down. ‘You’re more right about that than you realise.’
‘In what way?’
‘First of all …’ Fleetingly, Shallicker seemed tongue-tied. It was a new experience for McCracken to see his gigantic minder so uneasy, and he wasn’t enjoying it. ‘First of all … I shat myself after I’d brought you here. I knew I should’ve gone looking for one of our own sawbones, but like I say, I thought you’d had it, Charlie especially. Anyway, I didn’t want to hang around waiting for Wild Bill to come to me. So, I went to him … well, I rang him. Told him what had happened. He ripped me a fucking new one, as I thought he would. But he was less pissed off when I told him the shooter was O’Grady, and that it was retaliation for you putting the muscle on him over an earner. He told me to leave it to him.’
McCracken shrugged. ‘There’s nothing wrong with this picture so far … and yet we’ve still ended up with a situ where I might get nicked.’
‘They’ve nothing on you, Frank—’
‘Fuck’s sake, Mick!’ McCracken would have gesticulated angrily had he been able to raise his arm. ‘That bus job was cowboy stuff. They’ve got the bodies, they’ve got the gun that was used against me … which puts us straight in the frame for conspiracy. They’ve even got the body of an innocent bystander. A bus driver, for God’s sake! What did he do wrong?’
‘Think he was just there … just inconvenient.’
‘Inconvenient? This is the kind of amateur shit these eighteen-year-old pushers round Longsight and Moss Side are always pulling. I’m amazed no dozy twat filmed the whole thing on his mobile and then lost it outside a fucking cop shop.’
‘You’ve got it right about the age, at least.’
McCracken glanced round at him. ‘I’m not following.’
‘Wild Bill wanted a big lesson taught. So he sent the Ripsaw Man.’
‘The Ripsaw Man,’ McCracken said with slow disbelief. ‘The same guy who’s carried out a hundred clean hits in the last ten years? Who’s been so clean, in fact, that most people on our network don’t even know he exists, let alone the fucking coppers? That Ripsaw Man?’
Shallicker shrugged apologetically. ‘It was Bill’s idea. He said O’Grady had overstepped the mark big time, and that it had to be special.’
‘It was special all right! What went wrong?’
‘What went wrong is it wasn’t the Ripsaw Man who filled the contract. From what I’ve heard, he’s looking to retire.’
‘So, who did it then?’
‘Seems he’s been training up his daughters.’ Shallicker shrugged again. ‘Wild Bill knew about it, liked the idea – said it was cute, two pretty slips of lasses carrying out nasty hits for him. But previously, he’d said only when they knew their stuff. Anyway, when he sent the contract through last night, there was a note on it: “The kids are all right.”’
McCracken’s astonishment was growing steadily. ‘And is he aware they were nowhere near all right … that it was a total fuck-up?’
‘All I know is that they’ve been practising, and Bill had been told they were almost good to go – and he wanted to see if that was true.’
McCracken pondered this, not believing for a second that Wild Bill would take such a chance without having an ulterior motive, and now thinking it far more likely that he himself was being served up, maybe as a punishment for letting one of his own victims get the better of him.
‘Look, Frank …’ Shallicker attempted some consolation. ‘If that gun’s any use to the cozzers – it’s been burned, remember, probably inside and out – it wasn’t like you fired it. It’ll bring a bit of heat down, but not very much …’
‘Any heat is too much,’ McCracken retorted. ‘And the fact an innocent guy got chopped as well means that it won’t be minor heat. Like it or not, the gun will link it to us … and to these stupid young bitches. And if they’re so pathetic as to have left it there in the first place, they could have left other stuff too … which the forensics teams will find. Christ, if this isn’t a fuck-up enough! I mean, how do we know they won’t talk? GMP have brought the Serious Crimes Division in. You know how good they are when it comes to asking questions. These two stupid kids’ll be meat and drink to ’em.’
‘Come on, Frank …’ Shallicker still tried to lighten it. ‘We don’t know they’ll talk.’
‘And we don’t know they won’t. And we can’t afford that.’ McCracken’s good fist clenched till his knuckles cracked. ‘Think about it, Mick. It’s not just this incident. It’s all of them … every job Ripsaw’s ever done for us. Think how many that is. And these two bitches aren’t just his daughters, they’re his students, his protégées. They’ll likely know everything.’
Shallicker looked uncertain how to respond, but the penny was slowly dropping. ‘Shit,’ he said. ‘You don’t really think …?’
‘They’ve got to go.’
‘What?’
‘You heard me,’ McCracken said. ‘They’ve got to go.’
The minder dug out his mobile. ‘You want to get on the blower to Wild Bill?’
‘He’ll say no. He’ll have to. Because if he doesn’t he’ll lose face … it’d be admitting that he made a mistake.’
‘But if it’s this serious …’
‘Wild Bill’s losing it too, Mick.’ McCracken’s face was pale and tense. ‘I’ve been saying that for a while. He was always a nutter, let’s be honest. But now it’s getting serious. Look at those three lunatics he sent after our Lucy last year. They levelled half the town and didn’t hit a single target.’
Shallicker thought this through, and as usual, it was a lengthy process.
And this time he’s so bent on trying to bring me down, that he’s endangered the entire organisation, McCracken almost added. He doesn’t like someone who tells him stuff he doesn’t want to hear, especially when it’s right.
But he withheld those charges in case it made him sound a touch too paranoid.
Shallicker shrugged. ‘So they’ve got to go? Seriously? Without the board okaying it?’
‘Wild Bill owns the board … so how else?’
The big guy looked even more discomfited. Small-time wipe-outs were no real issue and were nearly always left to the discretion of Crew underbosses. But names, associates, coppers, judges and the like were a different story.
‘What about Ripsaw?’ he asked.
McCracken stared at him. ‘Well … work it out. Anyone who’s so blinded by the amazingness of his two kids that he can’t see how fucking stupid they are is never going to give permission to have ’em topped, is he?’
‘So?’
‘So, he goes too.’
Shallicker looked incredulous. ‘Ripsaw and Wild Bill go right back …’
‘That’s why we don’t cough to it. Perhaps we can make it look like O’Grady’s crew.’
‘No one’d believe that. They’re small time.’
But from McCracken’s expression, he wasn’t worried what anyone else might think.
‘Listen. Frank.’ Shallicker dropped to one knee so that he could lean close. ‘Ripsaw may look like a fat retiree who mows his lawn all day, but he’s well organised. This won’t be easy.’
‘That’s why I want you to handle it. Pick a team who won’t fold under Bill’s questioning afterwards. Tell ’em they’ll all be on quadruple time.’
Shallicker stood back up. He looked troubled, but less so than before. Ultimately, it was Frank McCracken he owed everything to. ‘You absolutely sure about this?’
‘We’re in the frame for a double homicide, Mick. You maybe more than me. At least, I can argue I was in the operating theatre. Where were you … the guy who dumped me at the hospital, the guy who’d already engaged in a gunfight with one of the blokes who later got murdered?’
‘Okay.’ When Shallicker pondered it in those terms, it made perfect sense. ‘When?’
‘The sooner the bloody better. Just get it done. And like I say, take a team who know what they’re doing.’