The Drop

but this time he’d had a haircut and a shave, was dressed in a smart jacket and he laid off the sauce. He tidied himself up big style and the next time he was in one of our lap dancing bars, the girls were throwing themselves at him because they knew he was my brother. I even persuaded him to move out of his shit hole of a flat and take over my old apartment. After all, I wouldn’t be needing it where I was going.
    If they needed advice we used web phones, so much more secure than mobiles or landlines, or someone flew out to see me. Kinane, Palmer, Hunter and Danny took it in turns so the authorities wouldn’t become too suspicious of any frequent flyers. I came back to Newcastle from time to time to oversee things but it was deliberately infrequent and it became less and less over time. I’d set the thing up and told them what to do, how to handle themselves with the police, other villains, our employees, everything. If they did what I told them it would be sweet and the money would continue to roll in, just so long as they remembered my cut, same time every month, regular as clockwork. Another Drop that was never to be forgotten.
    Before I left the country, Detective Inspector Clifford hauled me in for a chat. I went voluntarily with my solicitor. She sat next to me in the interview room. We were complying with a request to assist the police with their enquiries. I’m afraid I wasn’t much help.
    ‘I am obviously aware that Bobby Mahoney has disappeared,’ I told Clifford and his tape recorder, ‘and it is deeply upsetting to me that my former employer, a respectable businessman after all, has vanished into thin air like this, but I have heard that hundreds of people go missing every year for no apparent reason.’
    ‘You’re trying to tell me that Bobby Mahoney has cracked up, lost the plot and gone walkabout?’ asked Clifford, while Sharp sat stone-faced beside him. Nothing ever came from that Police Complaints Commission visit. It wasn’t even about Sharp. Like I’d told him, he’d been worrying about nothing.
    ‘I think it just goes to show how little you really know anyone,’ I said. ‘Have you called the homeless hostels in London, just in case? It might be a good place to start?’
    ‘Are you taking the piss?’
    ‘Inspector, my client has attended this interview voluntarily,’ my solicitor reminded him, ‘he is merely trying to assist you in your missing person’s enquiry.’
    ‘It’s not a missing persons enquiry, it’s a murder investigation.’ His face was turning puce again, ‘one of the rumours doing the rounds on the streets of this fair city is that Bobby Mahoney is in fact dead and that a person or persons unknown is now running his empire.’
    ‘Indeed, well, where is the body?’ asked my solicitor and Inspector Clifford looked even more irritated.
    He turned his disparaging gaze back onto me. ‘So, what are you going to do, now that your employer has apparently fucked off?’
    ‘I am in the fortunate position that Mister Mahoney’s daughter is overseeing the family business for now, until we have news of his safe whereabouts. She has asked me to remain as Group Sales and Marketing Director, in the medium term, to assist her.’
    ‘Sales and M… ’ he clenched his teeth and shook his head, ‘so I take it you have no knowledge of another missing person’s case we are working on?’
    ‘I’d be glad to help of course but I’m not sure how… .’
    ‘A gangster from Glasgow called Tommy Gladwell, his wife and two bodyguards have also mysteriously vanished into thin air around the same time that Bobby Mahoney went AWOL. The difference being, we found blood on the ground outside his home.’
    ‘I can’t help you there Inspector. I’m afraid I’ve never met any gangsters, let alone one from Glasgow.’
    The Inspector took a deep breath and I got the impression it was only the presence of my eminently respectable, female solicitor that was keeping him from leaning over and smashing my face into the table.
    ‘Perhaps I can get your opinion on a little matter closer to home then,’ he persisted. ‘How about the violent turf war that has erupted on the Sunnydale estate?’
    ‘Oh, this I do know all about,’ I assured him.
    ‘You do?’ he seemed surprised.
    ‘Yes, after all it has been on the front pages of both The Evening Chronicle and The Journal , a dreadful business. I believe it involved the abduction and murder of some established heroin dealers.