Brothers' Tears by J. M. Gregson Read Free Book Online Page A

front of him who had shot his boss. And then he wondered as he moved off his own patch and on to theirs whether they were going to shoot him.
    It was a hut on a building site where they finally stopped. A strange, deserted, sinister place. Silent when it should have been noisy, quiet and motionless when it should have been busy with activity. The gorilla got out of the driving seat and looked at Tracey curiously. Strangely, his thickset shape and unintelligent features gave Steve reason to hope. This was low-level security, the kind of loyal, unquestioning thug he would have used himself for enforcement work, for scaring small people into a resentful obedience. If they’d been licensed to kill him or even rough him up, they’d have done it in a dark alley somewhere, not brought him here.
    The man motioned towards the door of the hut, but he remained outside as Tracey entered and shut it carefully behind him. The man behind the desk inside the shed was as alert and watchful as he was, but he had affected the trappings of respectability. He was probably from Jamaica, in Steve’s view. He wore a three-piece suit, with a thin gold watch-chain stretched across his bulging chest. He clasped his well-manicured hands in front of him, as if anxious to show off his perfect nails to the man instructed to sit on the other side of the desk. Steve wondered if he would complete the parody by lighting a cigar, but he merely sat back and looked at the new arrival with a smile, relishing the situation.
    He was a strange figure in a strange environment. Apart from his colour, he was a caricature of a nineteenth-century industrial baron in this dingy twenty-first-century setting. There was a chart on the wall with what seemed to be a plan of foundations for the buildings to be erected here. It had words scribbled across it which were illegible from where Steve Tracey sat. Lumps of drying mud from people’s boots littered the floor; a week-old tabloid newspaper lay in the corner of the shed. There was something ludicrous about the overdressed central figure which gave Tracey a sudden, unexpected spurt of confidence.
    It wasn’t the big boss, as those idiots outside had said it would be. It was their boss, the man in charge of security for some organisation. A big concern, by the look of it. A well-organised business: this was a suitably anonymous place for a meet, whatever the dress affectations of the man conducting it. Tracey sat motionless and waited; he wasn’t going to let the man with the watch-chain know that he was nervous.
    The man sat back, steepled his fingers, continued his impersonation of a different kind of executive. ‘Well, Mr Tracey. So your boss is dead. And your job was to protect him. Didn’t do a very good job there, did you?’
    â€˜I offered to stay with him on Monday night. He said it wasn’t necessary.’
    â€˜You didn’t kill him yourself, did you, Steve?’
    â€˜Of course I didn’t! He’d be alive now if he’d allowed me to stay with him when he went outside Claughton Towers on Monday night.’
    Watch-chain smiled. ‘I wouldn’t be too sure of that. You might have been dead meat yourself, Steve, instead of enjoying this conversation. You don’t mind me calling you Steve, do you?’
    â€˜You can call me what you like. You’re in the box seat. You and your gorillas outside.’
    â€˜Box seat. Yes, I suppose that’s so.’ He smiled contentedly, his teeth looking very large and very white in this ill-lit place. ‘But I have good news for you, Steve. I have been empowered to offer you employment. Generous thinking, that, after you failed in your last assignment. But then I work for a generous man.’
    â€˜Lennon.’ Steve had been thinking furiously, trying to work out who could be behind his virtual kidnap.
    Watch-chain looked a little surprised, even for a moment discomfited. ‘Best not to speculate at