Crossing the Line by Catriona King

Author:Catriona King [King, Catriona]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781796953527
Google: JxM-xQEACAAJ
Amazon: B07NSB6FM2
Goodreads: 44018711
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: 2019-02-14T00:00:00+00:00

****

Warehouse Lane. The Cathedral Quarter, Belfast.

“Fuck me, that was a nightmare.”

The businessman nodded languidly to the girl dancing in front of him adorned in a confection of sequins, gauze and little else as he listened to Rory McCrae, making, when he could be bothered to, neutral responses to the rubbish being spewed down the phone into his ear.

McCrae continued raving, convinced that he had an interested audience, although if he’d possessed even slightly more than the amoebic intellect he did have then he would have worked out that his associate, partner being too grand a word and implying a formality to their arrangement that didn’t exist and an equality that definitely didn’t, wasn’t listening to a word he said.

“Those fuckin’ cops bringin’ the boss wi’ them wuz bad enuf, but leavin’ him here after they left was downright crule.”

On ‘cops’ the businessman’s ears pricked up, and by ‘boss’ he was pulling himself up straight in his chair, his deafness to the Loyalist’s ranting suddenly being cured by the ‘cocktail party effect’, a phenomenon whereby even in a noisy environment such as a party we always hear important words, such as our names, ‘sex’, ‘murder’ and so on.

On this occasion ‘cops’ and ‘boss’ had done the trick, resulting in the businessman waving away the girl in front of him with a nod to his minder that said “sign her up.” He turned his full attention to his caller, cutting across McCrae’s, “An’ the boss is still the bastard he alays wuz, even if he duz believe in God now an’ have scraggy hair -” with, “Police?”

“Aye, cops. Like I said...”

The response was given in an absent-minded tone, as if having ranted about them at length Craig and Liam had now somehow ceased to exist.

“... Murder caps. They wuz askin’ about Decker Smyth.”

The man’s voice cooled. “Exactly what about Derek Smyth?”

McCrae kept digging his hole, blissfully unaware that the temperature had just dropped.

“Ach, jest how I knew that Decker wuz deed. That’s awl.”

“You told them that you knew?”

“They worked it out, musta guessed. They asked how I knew, so I told ’em I gat a call from one of my men in Mahon.” Suddenly sensing disapproval he hastened to add, “After he’d seen the cops there, like. Nat that any of my lads, us, had killed him, like.”

A single word response added to his stress.

“Us?”

The word was imbued with so much venom that it made Rory McCrae want to drop the phone and run, but instead he dug even deeper.

“No, I didn’t say us. I’m jest sayin’ it now, like, tee you. ’Cos like, the cops asked me how many UKUF lads wuz in Mahon.”

He prayed that it was enough to get him a reprieve; the businessman might be associating with him to their mutual gain at the moment, but normal service would soon resume and with it the threat of reprisal if he had done anything wrong.

After a moment’s silence the man spoke again.

“The police were curious about your men.”

McCrae rushed to answer the non-question.

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