There was laughter coming from the big office next to mine and I forced myself to get to my feet and join them all. Sharp had finally arrived and was holding court.
‘I was absolutely shitting it,’ he explained to a captive audience, consisting of Palmer, Kinane, Vince and Robbie. ‘My DCI called me into his office, introduced me to the brass, sat me down and said, “we’ve been watching you, DI Sharp. We’ve been watching you very closely in fact.”’
‘I didn’t know what to say, so I just said “oh right”.’
‘And he looked at me some more, and I’m sitting there expecting at any moment for him to say, “Detective Inspector Sharp, you’re under arrest”. Instead he said “Safe pair of hands” and I was still none the wiser, so he finally adds “that’s what I think, that’s what your colleagues say about you, so that’s what the Chief Constable is thinking. It might not be glamorous but it’s exactly what we need right now”.’
‘Well, at this point I’m looking at him like he’s been drinking or something but I just say, “Thanks very much,” and finally the Chief Super chips in and says, “So you’ll do it for us, Sharp? You’ll be our safe pair of hands?”’
‘And I say, “Of course, sir,” because I’m so bloody relieved not to be in handcuffs, but I still have no idea what he’s banging on about. Then he stands up, so I stand up and he says, “congratulations, Acting Detective Chief Inspector Sharp,” and he shakes my hand. I almost fell back down in my chair again. When I walked in there you could have cut the atmosphere with a knife. I thought they were all giving me the silent treatment,’ he said, ‘turns out they were all just really busy.’
‘I have to say that is fucking priceless.’ I told him.
‘That’s not the best bit,’ said Sharp.
‘Tell him the best bit,’ said Palmer.
‘What’s the best bit, Sharp?’ I asked.
‘I have been given a special brief,’ he said, ‘to combat organised crime and bring down the local gangsters. And guess who is top of his wish list?’
‘Me,’ I said.
‘You,’ he confirmed.
‘I think this deserves a drink,’ I told them and we poured one for everybody. When we were holding them, I raised mine and the others followed suit.
‘A toast,’ I said, ‘to Acting Detective Chief Inspector Sharp… acting being the operative word. May his quest to bring down the notorious gangster David Blake be a long and fruitless one.’
‘I’ll drink to that,’ Sharp told me with a grin, ‘and I strongly suspect it will be,’ and we clinked our glasses together.
It was a nice moment and I needed one. This was one less thing for me to worry about, but my troubles were a very long way from over.
This wasn’t just any old meeting. This was me getting everyone together to talk about Armageddon; a new scenario, which would see the business ticking along somehow without me. I even included Amrein and he showed up a few minutes later, because everyone needed to know how to work together if I was no longer around. We went through everything, starting with the Drop and the political connections Amrein had worked to our mutual advantage. Then Amrein left us and we covered every other aspect of our business and how I wanted it to be run if I went somewhere and never came back. At the end, when we had discussed the bits of our business too sensitive for the ears of our solicitor, I invited Susan Fitch to join us and we signed a bunch of papers that gave trusted members of my crew access to funds, property and corners of our business that up till now had been my sole preserve. I answered a lot of questions that day, but the toughest was explaining just why I had called them in to talk about all of this now. I told them we were at war with the Stevic brothers and I didn’t want them to be left high and dry if something should happen to me. Nobody seemed to suspect there was more to it than that.
The only question I couldn’t answer was the one that was bothering me the most; exactly what I was going to say to Yaroslav Vasnetsov when I was face to face with him once again and he asked me to take his first Joe into Russia.
43
I wanted to be on my own so I went for a drive. It was late and I should have been home, trying to catch up on sleep, but that wasn’t going to happen. I kept churning it over and over in my head. If my dad wasn’t my dad, who the fuck was? My mother wasn’t like that, she never had a boyfriend or a bit on the side the whole time I could remember, so who the hell could have got that close to her? Who did she have an uncharacteristic soft spot for? She didn’t know anyone except the men who came into the club and the members of Bobby’s crew.
Mum never really spoke about the lads in the firm. She thought they were all over-grown boys who couldn’t take care of themselves, let alone a woman. I can recall her moaning that none of them had a clue how to treat a lady and they were all such scruffy buggers but she never really talked about them that much, except to bad-mouth them. She had a grudging respect for Bobby, he employed her after all, even though she knew how he earned his money, but she would have never got herself mixed up with him. She had no way of knowing he had murdered her husband but Bobby Mahoney was married at the time and my ma wasn’t the sort to let herself end up as a gangster’s mistress. So I didn’t have to drive out the idea that I might have inadvertently murdered my father and was shacked up with my sister. My life was fucked up, but it wasn’t that bad. No, I knew Bobby wasn’t the one, but who was?
She did talk about Jinky Smith though and he was always dressed smart back then and, judging by his success rate, he certainly knew how to talk to a lady. Could she have fallen for his chat, I wondered? Had he given her a glass of wine, laid on the patter and somehow talked her into his bed? It was possible. She must have been bloody lonely without any male company. In fact, now I thought about it, she did mention Jinky more than the others in Bobby’s crew. But no, that was stupid, she never had a good word to say about the man, all she ever did was do him down. She was always calling him ‘god’s gift to women’ in that snide sarcastic… and hurt way all the time. She sounded hurt. All of a sudden I got a prickly feeling all over my skin, which came with a sudden memory, but not one that involved my mother. It was meeting Michelle again at Privado that night I walked in unexpectedly and how did she greet me, even though I knew she had always had a massive crush on me? Like I was some kind of tosser, that’s how. ‘Look what the cat dragged in’.
It was the hurt that comes from rejection, from knowing that no matter how much you like a guy, he isn’t into you, even though you’ve given him your body and tried to give him your heart. That was what I heard in Michelle’s voice and it was why I went easy on her. I now finally realised I was hearing the exact same thing in my mother’s words all those years ago. Every time I told her I’d seen Jinky, or he’d given me a couple of quid to run an errand for him, she’d roll her eyes and say ‘Huh, Jinky Smith thinks he’s god’s gift he does,’ and she’d do him down some more. I never understood why at the time but I did now. It sounds daft but that’s all it took to finally solve the mystery; a feeling deep in my gut, nothing more. All of a sudden, I just knew. I was so sure I’d have been willing to bet thousands on it. Jinky Smith was my father. I just never knew it, and neither did he.
Here I was, working with gangsters and spies all this time but it was my mother who came up with a cover story even I couldn’t crack for nearly forty years. All that bullshit about dad moving away, working down south, saving up so he could send for us. She invented it all. There were no letters. There were no phone calls and there could never have been a tearful reunion during that special week when Aunty Vi looked after Danny and I was conceived. God knows where she went but, if it really was London, it wasn’t to visit dad. He’d been dead for years and even she didn’t know it. She probably thought he’d just got tired of her and run off, leaving her with a bairn to bring up on her own. I wondered how many nights she’d lain awake wondering what happened to Alan Blake and where he ended up; the Merchant Navy, the Foreign Legion or just some bartending job in the smoke; not knowing he was buried under a supermarket car park just a couple of miles from where we lived.