For Those Who Know the Ending Read online

  FOR THOSE WHO KNOW THE ENDING

  MALCOLM MACKAY

  CONTENTS

  Characters

  12.46 a.m.

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  1.11 a.m.

  1.29 a.m.

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  1.29 a.m.

  1.32 a.m.

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  1.44 a.m.

  1.51 a.m.

  1.54 a.m.

  CHARACTERS

  Charlie Allen – Charlie and his cousin Ian keep their street-dealing business mostly outside of Glasgow. Tried to work the city before and got their fingers burned, and they’ll only go in again for the right deal.

  Ian Allen – A chubby little fellow who runs a successful street-dealing business with Charlie. Everyone thinks they’re brothers, and it’s too much work to correct them all.

  Chris Argyle – There aren’t many who have a better importing business than Argyle. What he needs are dealers to distribute, and then he can seal a deal with a major organization.

  Brian ‘BB’ Bradley – Bright young muscle, throwing his weight around for a living. If he makes no mistakes he might survive long enough to get as disillusioned as the veterans who give him his orders.

  Nate Colgan – You wouldn’t tell him he wasn’t the toughest man in Glasgow to his face. Security consultant for the Jamieson organization, and it’s a job with increasing complications.

  Rebecca Colgan – If there’s anyone in Glasgow who truly believes in the goodness of Nate Colgan it’s his daughter Rebecca. If there’s one person he truly loves back, it’s her.

  Aiden Comrie – He’s worked the street for years, hoping his big break will come. Setting up a drug deal between Argyle and the Allens would be huge. This is his moment.

  Liam Duffy – He might be young, but don’t underestimate his ability. He wouldn’t be a senior man for Chris Argyle if he didn’t know exactly what he was doing.

  Dale Duggan – To look at him you would think he was nothing, and that’s the point. If you don’t look at him twice you’ll never see the guns he delivers to buyers.

  Lisa Fitzgerald – She knew what Gully did for a living when she married him, but all these years later she thought he was out of that world. She hoped he was, anyway.

  Sally Fitzgerald – Lisa and Gully had wanted a child for so long, and they only had Sally for eight years. It broke them both, and they’re still trying to put the pieces back together.

  Stephen ‘Gully’ Fitzgerald – Back in the day, if you worked in Glasgow’s underworld, Gully was the man you feared punishment from most. He’s older now, but being scary is like riding a bike to him.

  Alison Glenn – Usman’s great, and she does like spending time with him, but she worries about her job, about her long-term prospects. She’s feeling the pressure.

  Peter Jamieson – He built one of the biggest criminal organizations in the city, and just because he’s in prison doesn’t mean that he isn’t still in charge.

  Marty Jones – Started out as the sort of pimp and moneylender that everyone despised. Has grown into the sort of pimp and moneylender that people in the business have no choice but to respect.

  Akram Kassar – It’s not serious criminality, moving counterfeit goods around and trying to make a bit of slightly dishonest cash. He tries to put some work his little brother Usman’s way when he can.

  Usman Kassar – Don’t be fooled by the youthfully goofy appearance, he’s a smart kid. The kind who can plan big things, and keep those plans to himself until it’s time to do the job.

  James Kealing – An industry veteran, running a bunch of warehouses he and his terrifying father started and keeping his profile low and profits high.

  Przemek Krawczyk – The criminals he works for in Glasgow take their orders from Eastern Europe, so when they told him to look after Martin Sivok, he did. But he can only babysit so long.

  Alex MacArthur – The oldest of the old organization bosses, a man clinging on to power while the young wolves eye up control of what he built.

  Ronnie Malone – Nate had never had a protégé before, a young man he could teach the ways of the business. He took Ronnie under his wing, and it turned out to be a mistake.

  Joanne Mathie – She wasn’t looking for a relationship, but Martin makes her happy and she wants to make the best of that, even if the circumstances are . . . complicated.

  Skye Mathie – Her mother has a boyfriend and that’s pretty disgusting to begin with. Her mother seemingly preferring that boyfriend over her, well that just isn’t fair.

  Sarah McFall – She’s the senior woman that the Allens use for all their important negotiations. Smart, but that’s never enough, you have to be tough as hell too, and she is.

  Kelly Newbury – She seems to want to become the woman in Nate Colgan’s life, and she’s quickly becoming a key employee for the Jamieson organization.

  Don Park – Of all the people lining up to replace Alex MacArthur, none has a better chance than Park. If he could set up his own drug network with Argyle and the Allens, he’d be halfway to power.

  Martin Sivok – He came to Scotland from the Czech Republic through necessity, not choice. Now that he’s here he wants to build a life, and working in the criminal industry is the only way he knows how.

  John Young – He was Peter Jamieson’s right-hand man, and the same police investigations that swept Jamieson to prison caught Young too.

  12.46 a.m.

  It’s been almost two hours. His legs are cramping. The plastic strips have dug into his wrists where he’s pulled at them. Martin’s become accustomed to the dark now. He can see the small door they came in. He can see the loading-bay shutters beside it they should have left by. There’s little in the warehouse itself, metal shelves pushed back against three walls and a large empty floor space. Not quite empty. There’s a man dressed in black, tied to a chair by thin plastic strips. Martin.

  The cut on the top of his shaved head seems like it’s stopped bleeding. Either that or it’s become numb. The balaclava he was wearing is gone. He didn’t take it off, and he can’t see it anywhere. The blood had run down the side of his neck, trickling down inside his clothes. He had wriggled to try and scratch the itch, but that was no use. Now the blood has dried and his clothes are sticking to it. When he shakes his head slightly, he doesn’t feel any more liquid movement up there, just the dizziness of effort. That’s a positive. Cling on to that.

  He’s leaning forward, now that it seems his head will let him. Tried this a few minutes ago and the pain that shot behind his eyes demanded he lean back again. Spent the next few minutes fearing that crack to the head had done him permanent damage. Bloody hell, that hit was harder than it needed to be. He’s looking down at the straps round his ankles. These aren’t as noticeably tight as the ones round his wrists. Tight enough. A second strap looped through the first and into a small metal hoop in the floor. All to guarantee that he’s not going anywhere.

  Not that he could anyway. His hands tied behind him, his shoulders starting to burn. He doesn’t have the strength for struggle. Two hours. Shouldn’t take half this long, not if they knew what they were doing. The waiting is making it worse. Forcing him to sit still, knowing they’re out there. Knowing they’re on their way to kill him.

  Martin Sivok has been in the country for a little over a year. Born in Czechosl
ovakia, raised in the Czech Republic. Worked minor jobs in Brno based around dealing. Then the minor jobs got major. Working for a gang that had connections all across Europe. It paid well, and he was willing to take the risks that well-paid work requires. But risks run fast. They catch up with you; so he left in a hurry. Had some help getting out from his former employers. That same gang had connections in Western Europe, told him they had some work for him in Scotland. Sure, Scotland, why not? Glasgow seemed all right, mostly because there was nobody here trying to arrest or kill him. Wasn’t where he had been planning to spend a few years, but so what? Hadn’t been planning anything at all. Life was a wide open field and he was young enough to wander into any corner of it.

  He’s moving again. Trying to wriggle in the seat to take some pressure off his shoulders, see if he can dim the pain. Trying to loosen the straps a little, but that’s only making things worse. The plastic is digging into the flesh and he can feel it cut his wrist. Now a dribble of blood, running down into the palm of his hand. Feels the blood on his numbing fingers. He’s sighing, for all the good it’ll do.

  Weird how dry his mouth is. He’s licking his lips but his tongue isn’t moist enough to help. He hasn’t shouted, and he won’t. No point when there’s nobody to hear him. There’s something, a slow drip it sounds like, coming from behind him. Must be raining again, the water running through a hole in the roof of the warehouse. Big bloody surprise that it’s raining in this city. It’s a cold night, but he still has his jacket on. Another small mercy. So that’s his coat keeping him warm and he’s not bleeding from the head any more. Two positives to focus on.

  Plenty of negatives to ignore. Being tied to a chair in a warehouse in Clydebank in the middle of the night isn’t a cheerful way to pass the time. Knowing that someone’s about to turn up with the intention of killing you and the ability to make it happen. All of it a set-up, carefully constructed by others. And Joanne, sitting back at home, waiting for him to return, aware that this might be the night when he doesn’t.

  Martin’s closing his eyes. He’s been trying to stop himself from doing that for the last hour. Close your eyes and you don’t know when you’ll open them again. Maybe you never will. And if you do, your mind might be too addled to react properly to what’s happening. Stay awake and stay alert. He can’t, he’s too sore and too tired and too drained. Too aware of what’s to come this night to want to think about it.

  1

  They weren’t as big and impressive as they had claimed. Not in Scotland, anyway. He knew how well connected they were in Eastern Europe because he’d seen it first hand. Worked those long-established and deep-running networks and made good money from them. But here he was, Martin Sivok, thirty-one, short, stocky and standing in a foreign country. He needed their connections to help him now if he was going to survive the upheaval working for them had brought about. They got him some work. Some. Like, a little. Crappy jobs for crappy money.

  Back in Brno they had been the biggest gang in town and had enough strength to make sure they stayed that way. A healthy percentage of the high-value drugs coming into the city and the region passed through them. Money flowed in with it, and Martin got his cut because Martin did some very dirty jobs for them. They liked him, they valued him. That’s why they helped him get west and get safe when he was running from the police.

  They tried to find him work, but it wasn’t the same when they stepped outside of their own territory. There were other people in Glasgow, people who had been here a long time. Outsiders were growing rapidly in influence, but there was an old guard fighting to protect what had always been theirs. The gang that brought him across, they weren’t looking for trouble with the old guard. Working with them in supply, rather than against them in distribution. Making less money but avoiding any real conflict, for now at least. It was a different tactic from the norm, and one that meant Martin and his skills had nowhere to play in Glasgow.

  So he was bounced back to the bottom of the heap. Nobody wants to be down there in the gutter of the criminal industry, not for long. Even kids starting out, their motivation is to get upwardly mobile. Get into the clouds where the money and influence are hidden. Well Martin had been up there already; he had just lost altitude. Meant learning the ropes in the new place; going back to school.

  Learn who’s who, that’s important. Work out who you can do jobs for and who you can’t. Who you can trust and who’ll throw you overboard as soon as they’ve used you. Who has a long-term future in the city and who’s one step away from their ending. Work out who’s fighting wars against who so that you can try and benefit from the inevitable work conflict provides. Oh, and work out what the fuck these people are saying. His English was pretty good before he got here, been speaking it in bits since high school. Watched a lot of American TV and listened to a lot of music sung in what he thought was the right language. First day off the plane in Glasgow and he realized he’d learned the wrong English.

  Took a while to get used to everything, but he did. He completed the often menial jobs they provided for him and made very little money along the way. He was practically living off his savings the first time he met Usman Kassar. He had mentioned his situation, a couple of times, to an absurdly hairy Polish guy with good English that seemed to be running things for the old gang hereabouts.

  ‘There must be other things you could get me. I have done much more than this, back home. I can do it again.’ Hinting at the high-value work he had made a living from.

  ‘I know what you did,’ the hairy man said, shrugging. His name was full of Z’s andY’s, but Martin could never remember in what order. ‘There’s nothing here. People here, they have their own men like you. Men they trust. Men they’ve known for years. They don’t trust you.’

  ‘I could do that work for you.’

  ‘We aren’t doing that here, and we won’t be. I’m not teasing you here, kid. We have a good thing going that we won’t screw up. London, sure, other cities maybe. But we have a deal in Glasgow. A good one. There are others though. As long as you aren’t working against us, you don’t have to only work for us.’

  That was disheartening. He’d been working for one gang for more than ten years, worked their toughest jobs back home. Now he was out of sight and out of mind. Hey, you want to go work for someone else you go knock yourself out. He felt dismissed. They’d brought him here as a courtesy, a thank-you for all the profitable work he’d done for them in the past, but they probably assumed he’d find work with someone else right away. He had clung on to them for too long.

  Joanne Mathie knew what she’d be coming home to. She’d spent the previous evening stocktaking at the bookshop and spent the night at her sister’s. Had warned her daughter Skye she’d be back at ten o’clock the following morning, and any piles of partygoers better be cleared by then. Joanne would have been surprised if Skye had kept her word, so there was no shock when she opened the front door and found a sickly teenage girl blocking the corridor. Skye had thrown a party, and thrown the house around with it.

  Joanne stepped over the girl in the corridor and went looking for her daughter. There were people in the living room and the kitchen, half of them asleep and the other half wishing they still were, nursing all kinds of headaches. Strangers asleep in various rooms and various positions. There was beer on the carpet and what looked like a bloodstain on the kitchen table that she didn’t want to think about. Couldn’t find Skye. Went upstairs looking for her. Found her in her bedroom, still under the quilt with a gormless-looking soul lying next to her.

  ‘You get up,’ Joanne shouted at her, before turning to the boy, ‘and you get out.’

  The boy did as he was told, not so much as a goodbye as he pulled on some clothes and sprinted for freedom. Joanne stood over the bed while Skye made no effort at all to move.

  ‘What?’ Skye shouted.

  ‘I tell you you can have a party but I’ll be back by ten so get the place cleaned up. That was all I asked of you. Have you taken a wee
peek at a clock?’

  ‘Just get out of my room,’ Skye said petulantly, pulling the quilt over her head.

  ‘This is the last time,’ Joanne shouted, slamming the door behind her as she walked out of the room.

  Went into her own bedroom and paused. A stocky, shaven-headed young man lying on the floor at the bottom of the bed, all on his own. Looked like he’d managed to have a happy enough time, aided only by a bottle and three cans lying beside him. Joanne kicked him good and hard on the ankle. A man lying on the floor of her bedroom uninvited, a kick was the least he deserved. He sat bolt upright, growling something in a language that may have been foreign or may have been drunken Glaswegian.

  ‘Out,’ Joanne said harshly, pointing at the door.

  He got up and made to leave, pausing when he saw her begin to tidy up the mess he’d made. Walked back across and insisted on picking up everything he’d left on the floor, apologizing in broken English. Went downstairs with her, picking up more rubbish as he went. Refused to leave until he had helped her move furniture back into place, including tipping two sleeping people off the sofa and barking at them to leave when they dared complain. He had the place cleaned and cleared in a little over forty minutes. She felt obliged to offer him a cup of coffee.

  Said his name was Martin, from the Czech Republic, and emphasized the fact he was single. Joanne was thirty-nine, tidy dark hair, a pretty face, and short, which suited Martin. Truth was he had no idea where he was and had no money for a taxi so leaving wasn’t a tempting option. They chatted for almost an hour, Joanne enjoying this straightforward little man. He was smart and self-effacing, but there was an unmistakable edge to the quiet confidence that radiated from him. An ordinary face with eyes that routinely hinted at far more than was spoken.

  He visited the house the following day, and things moved fast. Joanne was old enough to know her mind and not debate it. She liked Martin and Martin liked her so they spent a lot of time together. Three months after meeting and he had practically moved in.