The Crooked Beat Read Online Free PDF Page B

damage. ‘Who did it?’
    ‘It doesn’t matter.’
    ‘How many of them?’
    ‘What does it matter?’
    ‘I want to know.’
    He eventually answered. ‘Just the one. You don’t need an army to sort me out these days.’
    ‘Who was it?’
    ‘No idea.’
    ‘You’d never seen him before?’
    ‘Never.’
    ‘What did he look like?’
    He described the man. It could have been any number of men in the city. He was lying to me. He knew exactly who’d worked him over. I’d been wrong in thinking that he’d taken the cigarettes from Niall’s lock-up, but something wasn’t right.
    Gillespie pushed his glass towards me. ‘Getting them in or what? Bitter.’ He gestured to his mate who had walked in. ‘His is a lager.’
    I told him to find a table before ordering the drinks. I left the lager for his mate on the bar and walked across the room to him. I put the drinks on the table and sat down.
    ‘What about the cigs?’ he said. ‘Found them yet?’
    ‘Not yet.’
    He shrugged. ‘They can keep kicking the shit out of me if they like. It won’t change anything.’
    I watched as he sipped at the drink I’d bought him. He was right. He had nothing to lose. Niall and Peter Hill had plenty to lose. I showed him the photograph of the man I’d seen at St Andrews Quay. ‘Does he look familiar?’
    He glanced at it before quickly turning away. He passed the photograph back. ‘No idea.’
    I held it back out to him. ‘Do you want to have another look?’
    ‘No point.’
    ‘I don’t believe you.’
    He picked his drink up. ‘Can’t tell you what I don’t know.’
    He was definitely rattled. I stood up and walked back to the bar. I showed the photograph to Gillespie’s mate. ‘Any ideas?’
    He glanced at it and nodded before shouting across to Gillespie. ‘That’s Alan Palmer’s lad, isn’t it? Carl?’ He passed me the photograph back. ‘Nasty piece of work, the pair of them, that’s for sure.’
    I thanked them. Hull really was like a large village at times.
     
    I’d done what I could for now. I headed back to my flat. It was one of five in a converted house on Westbourne Avenue. I sat down for a moment in my living room in the hope I could make sense of what had happened during the day. My mobile vibrated. I took it out of my pocket and read the text message. Niall had told Ruth he’d been mugged. I doubted she believed him, but if that was the official line, I’d play along with it. I needed to eat, so I heated up a tin of soup. I found some bread to accompany it and sat back down. I needed to make some connections between what I knew. My concentration was broken by the noise of the buzzer to my flat. I put the soup down and walked over to the window. A car drove off, loud music escaping from its open windows. I couldn’t see who was at the door, so I went into the kitchen and picked up a pan. It was the best I had to hand. I left my flat and walked down the stairs to the front door and carefully opened it.
    It was Connor. ‘Can I come up?’ he said.
    I relaxed and closed the door behind him. Back in my flat, I put the pan away and found two bottles of beer.
    ‘Did your mate just drop you off?’ I asked.
    ‘That was Milo.’
    I’d fed him bottles of milk when he was a baby. Now I was feeding him bottles of beer. And it didn’t feel all that long ago. Debbie and I had regularly looked after him so Niall and Ruth could enjoy a night out. Those had been happy days. We’d played along with the situation, wondering what it’d be like to have a child of our own. Her death in a house fire had put an end to that.
    ‘I’m worried about Dad,’ Connor said, drawing me back to the present.
    I swallowed a mouthful of lager. ‘He’s working hard. He’ll have the bar ready in no time. Once it’s open, he’ll be fine.’
    ‘What if nobody comes?’
    ‘People always want a drink.’ Niall was a proud man. I admired the fact he’d worked hard all his life and stuck at things. Loud factories and