Even so, Ma looks genuinely surprised. Tyneside has as lively a gangland scene as any other provincial city, yet murder remains the exception rather than the rule. Round here they still talk in hushed tones about the killing on a Wallsend street of Viv Graham, a local hard man renowned for extortion and racketeering – and he was gunned down twenty years ago.
‘I wondered if you’d heard anything,’ Bernice says.
‘No, pet,’ she says thoughtfully. ‘I haven’t.’
‘What about your boys?’
‘Believe me I know everything they know – and they don’t know anything.’
‘Well, if you do . . .’
‘You’ll be the first to know, Bernice.’
And Seagram knows that she will, because Ma Breaker appreciates that even though they are your sworn enemies, the police can also be your best friends.
Ryan Breaker emerges from the kitchenette carrying two mugs of tea. He’s overfilled them and the contents are slopping over the carpet as he treads cautiously towards Ma’s desk, as if walking a tightrope on a particularly windy day.
‘Just put them there, son,’ Ma says, watching as Ryan painfully lowers the dripping mugs onto the desktop then stands grinning with inane triumph. Ma stands and clubs him across the back of the head with an open hand.
‘Now get a dishcloth and mop up that fucking mess,’ she says.
In the Star & Garter public house in Benwell, pleased to be among sinners at last, Father Lawrence Meagher buys a bottle of Guinness and a cheese sandwich and sits down at his usual seat in the corner of the lounge. It is twenty past midday; the pub is a quarter full of old men in flat caps. A couple of young lads are shooting pool in the far room, and a dishevelled drunk is hunched on a bar-stool cradling what looks like a pint of piss.
It is good to be here, he thinks. All morning he has been trapped in the community centre judging the annual painting competition organized by the toddlers group, which meets there every week. Ever since he read about a three-year-old whose childish watercolour had fooled art experts, Father Meagher has taken a close interest in the competition. How much had that girl’s picture been valued at, he pondered as he made his way round each new exhibit? Fifty grand? Sixty? Sadly, as his brief tour ended, he again had to resign himself to the fact that if he was to make his fortune in the art world, it would not be by exploiting the toddlers of St Joseph’s Community Centre. My House, by Kaden, aged two, bore the same hallmark as Humpty Dumpty, by Rihanna, aged four: a formless splat of powder paint issued from the brush of a talentless child.
‘Morning, Father,’ says one of the flat caps, looking up from the seven dominoes he holds expertly in the swollen knuckles of one hand.
‘Fred.’
‘You in for a game?’
‘Not today, thanks, Fred. How’s Mary?’
‘Not so good, Father. Not so good.’
‘Sorry to hear it. Tell her I’m asking after her, will you?’
‘Will do. Will do.’
Painstakingly, Father Meagher picks at the layers of clingfilm around his sandwich, then scrunches the plastic into a small ball and drops it on the table. He lifts the lid of the soggy white bun. A solitary cross-section of withered tomato lies squashed on the square of processed cheese like something monstrous you would find under a stone. He quickly closes the sandwich and takes a bite. All he can taste is margarine. He chews until it is a bolus of paste in his mouth, then swallows it whole to avoid it making contact with his tastebuds. He pours half of the Guinness into a glass and rinses away the detritus that has clung to his teeth.
A TV at the far end of the bar is showing horse racing from some deserted, fogbound venue. The prices for the twelve thirty scroll across the screen as the camera searches for runners and riders in the gloom.
‘Afternoon, Father.’
Father Meagher groans inwardly as Vos sits down on a stool opposite. But he has had plenty of practice at pretending to smile today.
‘Mr Vos. How are you?’
‘Not so bad.’ Vos jabs a thumb at the TV set. ‘Are you having a flutter?’
‘No,’ says Father Meagher. ‘It’s a mug’s game. I prefer online poker if truth be told. Have you played at all, Mr Vos?’
‘Can’t say I have.’
‘You should try it. Very exciting. Very addictive, though.’ He takes a sip of his stout. ‘So what can I do for you? One of my flock gone astray again?’
‘As if you’d give a fuck, Father. Have you read the papers recently?’
Father Meagher nods. ‘Ah yes. The fellow in the footballer’s garden. Very mysterious. Do you know who he is yet?’
‘Maybe.’ Vos pulls a photocopied mug shot of the dead man from his coat pocket and passes it over the table. ‘I was wondering if you might have seen him around.’
Father Meagher squints at it, winces, then shrugs. ‘He’s not one of mine. By the look of him I’d suggest you’d be better off asking at the mosque.’
‘His name is Okan Gul. Turkish, out of Amsterdam. Works for one of the local gangs over there. Apparently he’s been doing some business on Tyneside.’
The priest attempts to return the mug shot, but Vos raises his hand. ‘You keep it. Show it to your parishioners, see if they know anything.’
‘I trust you’ll be making a donation to the church roof fund in return?’ Father Meagher says with a glint in his eye.
‘Let’s just say I’ll keep turning a blind eye to your out-of-hours collections.’
The priest laughs and brushes stray crumbs from the bobbles on his jumper. ‘You’re an evil man, Mr Vos.’
‘It takes a man of the cloth to know one, Father,’ Vos says. He makes to leave, but the older man puts a hand on his arm.
‘Why don’t you stay for a while longer,’ he says. ‘You look like you could use a drink. And maybe a listening ear.’
‘Is this your idea of confession?’
‘I’m off the clock,’ Father Meagher says. ‘At least as long as I’m in here.’
Vos sits. The priest calls across to the bar for two whiskies.
‘I haven’t seen you since your sergeant got himself hurt.’
‘He didn’t get himself hurt,’ Vos says. ‘Terry Loomis shot him.’
‘I was sorry to hear that, truly I was.’
The drinks arrive: two fingers each and a small jug of water. Father Meagher dilutes his drink almost imperceptibly.
‘But things didn’t end up too clever for Jack Peel, neither,’ he says.
‘No,’ Vos says. ‘They didn’t.’
‘Hell of a way to go, I imagine. Headfirst onto a hard surface. Just enough time to contemplate your fate.’
‘I guess so.’
The priest takes a sip. ‘Rumour has it you pushed him, Mr Vos,’ he says.
Vos looks at him dispassionately. ‘Well, you know what rumours are like, Father. Funny, though – at the time I recall it was just me and Jack Peel on that fire escape.’
‘Like the ’66 World Cup Final, eh? If everybody who said they were at the match was telling the truth, the attendance would have been fourteen million.’
He picks up his glass again and raises it in a toast.
‘To Geoff Hurst,’ he says.
Vos drains his whisky and stands up. ‘Thanks for the drink, Father,’ he says.
Mayson Calvert has a particularly annoying habit of humming through his nose when he works, but as the new girl in the office, Ptolemy is reluctant to tell him to shut up. She wouldn’t mind if he was humming a tune she knew, but it seems to be emerging fully formed out of Mayson’s head – a complex, multi-tempo, often atonal symphony for the nostrils. And it appears to have no end; for more than two hours now he’s been sitting at his computer, fingers dancing on the keyboard, humming his bloody tune and driving Ptolemy mad.
But perhaps, Ptolemy thinks, it’s only maddening because of her own frustration. While Mayson has been humming, she has been wading through a stack of paperwork, laboriously transcribing digits and notes onto a database and wondering why, if Vos was looking for a number cruncher, he didn’t recruit someone from the Fraud Squad or, better still, some keen school kid with a GCSE in statistics.