Read Online A Cold Killing (Rosie Gilmour) by Anna Smith - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Anna Smith
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the paperwork. She’d booked it over the phone with a credit card in one of several aliases she’d used in recent years as she travelled the world hiding Rab Jackson’s money in offshore accounts from Jersey to the Cayman Islands. She had three different passports for that kind of travel, and two she kept for her own personal use. She couldn’t believe how easy it was to defraud her way around banks, hotels and airlines. Money opened every door – especially in banks, where the suits were only vaguely interested in where it came from, as long as you had stacks of it and were lodging it with them. She had safety-deposit boxes in banks from Amsterdam to Paris to Malaga, where she kept wedges of cash in sterling for her own use, just in case the shit ever hit the fan. Which it just had.
She crossed the car park to the taxi rank and headed for the city, asking the driver to drop her in Hyndland Road, close to where her flat was. Ruby had bought the two-bedroom flat in Dudley Drive three years ago, working on the basis that the West End wasn’t the kind of place you ran into the lowlifes employed by Jackson’s prodigy, Tony Devlin. The foot soldiers lived in the high-rise flats or the run-down council-housing schemes like Drumchapel or Possilpark or Maryhill, where they were handy for their smackhead customers queuing at the door morning, noon and night. Their dens were kitted out with slick TVs, stereos, all mod cons, their wardrobes bulging with designer clothes – all of it blagged from shoplifters and fraudsters. And they lived side by side with decent, ordinary families who busted a gut to try to keep their children out of the clutches of the drug dealers, gangsters and loan sharks who had most of the neighbourhood on the end of a debt that could never be repaid. The lieutenants, slightly higher up the food chain, would be holed up in some of the shiny new city-centre developments, either in the Merchant City or downtown, overlooking the River Clyde, bought by their bosses with laundered drug money and rented to them for next to nothing but on paper for several hundred a month. They were the guys who did anything they were told, organized shootings, beatings or slashings for unpaid drug debts. They’d be used to travel up and down to Manchester, Liverpool or London, making drops or picking up drugs in bulk. The chances of seeing any of this bunch in Dudley Drive, with its neat tenement flats side by side in uniform anonymity was minimal. You seldom saw your neighbours and nobody asked any questions. That was perfect for Ruby.
She walked briskly down the street and into the second-floor flat. It felt good to enter the broad hallway and go into the living room, with its old wooden floors and Rennie Mackintosh replica fireplace, and its big, solid bay window. This was the closest thing she’d ever had to a home since she was a kid. But there were no real signs of herself in it – except for one print of two small sun-burnished children on a beach somewhere in Ireland. She’d bought it years ago because it reminded her of happy days with Judy and her mother. She went into the kitchen and turned on the cold-water tap, let it run for a while, then took a glass out of the cupboard and drank it, enjoying the taste of the pure Scottish water she missed when living abroad. She filled the kettle and switched it on, then went down the hallway and into her bedroom. She sat on the king-size bed and opened the wardrobe doors, running her hand over the half a dozen blouses, tops and jackets on hangers. Seven or eight pairs of shoes. This was just about all she had. A wave of loneliness washed over her. Pick it up, she told herself. No more of that shit. She closed the wardrobe doors.
*
Ruby flopped on to the big sofa with her feet up on the coffee table and opened her laptop. She signed into one of her email addresses and it pinged with two new emails. She knew who it would be even before she opened it, and she cursed herself
She crossed the car park to the taxi rank and headed for the city, asking the driver to drop her in Hyndland Road, close to where her flat was. Ruby had bought the two-bedroom flat in Dudley Drive three years ago, working on the basis that the West End wasn’t the kind of place you ran into the lowlifes employed by Jackson’s prodigy, Tony Devlin. The foot soldiers lived in the high-rise flats or the run-down council-housing schemes like Drumchapel or Possilpark or Maryhill, where they were handy for their smackhead customers queuing at the door morning, noon and night. Their dens were kitted out with slick TVs, stereos, all mod cons, their wardrobes bulging with designer clothes – all of it blagged from shoplifters and fraudsters. And they lived side by side with decent, ordinary families who busted a gut to try to keep their children out of the clutches of the drug dealers, gangsters and loan sharks who had most of the neighbourhood on the end of a debt that could never be repaid. The lieutenants, slightly higher up the food chain, would be holed up in some of the shiny new city-centre developments, either in the Merchant City or downtown, overlooking the River Clyde, bought by their bosses with laundered drug money and rented to them for next to nothing but on paper for several hundred a month. They were the guys who did anything they were told, organized shootings, beatings or slashings for unpaid drug debts. They’d be used to travel up and down to Manchester, Liverpool or London, making drops or picking up drugs in bulk. The chances of seeing any of this bunch in Dudley Drive, with its neat tenement flats side by side in uniform anonymity was minimal. You seldom saw your neighbours and nobody asked any questions. That was perfect for Ruby.
She walked briskly down the street and into the second-floor flat. It felt good to enter the broad hallway and go into the living room, with its old wooden floors and Rennie Mackintosh replica fireplace, and its big, solid bay window. This was the closest thing she’d ever had to a home since she was a kid. But there were no real signs of herself in it – except for one print of two small sun-burnished children on a beach somewhere in Ireland. She’d bought it years ago because it reminded her of happy days with Judy and her mother. She went into the kitchen and turned on the cold-water tap, let it run for a while, then took a glass out of the cupboard and drank it, enjoying the taste of the pure Scottish water she missed when living abroad. She filled the kettle and switched it on, then went down the hallway and into her bedroom. She sat on the king-size bed and opened the wardrobe doors, running her hand over the half a dozen blouses, tops and jackets on hangers. Seven or eight pairs of shoes. This was just about all she had. A wave of loneliness washed over her. Pick it up, she told herself. No more of that shit. She closed the wardrobe doors.
*
Ruby flopped on to the big sofa with her feet up on the coffee table and opened her laptop. She signed into one of her email addresses and it pinged with two new emails. She knew who it would be even before she opened it, and she cursed herself
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