Brennan shook his head. ‘Some kind of personnel vendetta? Boyle waited twenty years to get even?’
‘Not quite. Let’s move on to Stephen Kenning. Bit more straightforward, that one. No one likes a grass. He’d sold Kerridge and Boyle down the river on that drugs deal. Even if there was no risk of them being implicated, they must have taken a financial hit. A decent enough motive for icing Kenning. But it turns out there’s a bit more. Kenning is also a Hulme alumnus. The original school of hard fucking knocks. Turns out that Kenning and Boyle were bosom buddies as teenagers. They’d drifted apart over the years. But I’m told that Boyle still thought of Kenning as a mate, pretty much up the point where he shafted the drugs deal.’
‘Did Kenning know he was shafting Boyle?’
‘Who knows? But the effect’s the same, either way. From what I know of Pete Boyle, there’s no way he wouldn’t have taken in personally.’
‘Okay, so Boyle had a personal link with Tallent and Kenning. What about the third guy, Sheerin?’
‘Surprise, surprise. Same again. Another graduate of the University of Hulme. Rough contemporary of Boyle’s. Interesting one, this, though. Couldn’t find much connection at first. No evidence they’d known each other. So I did more digging. Eventually found an older guy who’d been mates with Boyle’s mother. Single parent. Tough as nails, by all accounts. Father had fucked off before Boyle was born, assuming that she ever knew who he was. Anyway, rumour was that Sheerin’s old man had had some sort of fling with Boyle’s mum. Treated her badly. Thought of himself as a hard man, but got short shift when he tried any rough stuff. So ran off with the housekeeping money or some such. Old codger I spoke to wasn’t too clear on the details, but reckoned that Boyle would have reason not to be too enamoured of the old bastard. Or of his son.’
‘So you’re saying that all these three, one way or another, had bad blood with Boyle? Sounds a bit tenuous as a motive for murder.’
‘Of course. But that wasn’t the motive for the murders. That was just the reason why these three particular poor buggers got chosen.’
‘So what is this? Boyle gets out of prison. Sees his hoped-for empire beginning to disintegrate. Barbarians at the gate, all that. So sends out some warning messages. That the idea?’ Brennan looked sceptical.
‘Pretty much. These three were well chosen. Whoever employed Tallent would be one of the interlopers into Kerridge’s lucrative sex-trade operations. Sheerin was doing business for one of the gangs who’ve been drifting into Kerridge’s traditional territories in Cheetham Hill. As for Kenning – well, like I say, no one loves a grass. There’ve been a few other incidents as well, less serious than these three. Premises getting torched. The odd beating up. One or two serious Saturday night injuries.’
Brennan’s expression hadn’t changed. ‘You realise that serious Saturday night injuries aren’t that uncommon in central Manchester? It’s a trend even our lot have managed to spot.’
‘Yeah, unlike any of this.’ Salter bent down from the table and lifted a laptop bag on to the table. He unzipped it, fumbled inside for a moment, and then pulled out a plastic wallet stuffed with papers. ‘I’ve been through a stack of those cases. Some I’ve dismissed. A couple of the fires look like genuine accidents or insurance jobs. Some of the beatings are just muggings or domestics of one sort or another. But I’m left with maybe eight or nine incidents, apart from our three biggies, which I could link back to Pete Boyle.’ He pushed the wallet across the table towards Brennan. ‘Have a look.’
Brennan pulled out the papers and flicked quickly through them, stopping every now and then to read one of the reports more carefully. Eventually, he looked up. ‘Okay. I don’t deny it’s interesting. But Boyle’s a big fish in this pond. You could probably link anything back to him if you tried hard enough.’
‘Three murder victims who grew up within half a mile of him? One went to school with him? Another’s dad screwed Boyle’s mum, in more ways than one? Hell of a coincidence.’
Brennan nodded. ‘Let’s say you’ve convinced me. Or half-convinced me. Where are we going with this?’
‘This is why you’re here. The secondment. It’s why I wanted an experienced investigator. Someone local, with decent inside knowledge. Someone who could pull the right levers, if need be, with the local police.’
‘I’m flattered,’ Brennan said. ‘Though I’m not sure you’ve got the right man. If I pull any levers at the moment, it’s likely just to bring a bucket of crap down on my head. I’m not exactly flavour of the month.’
‘They’ll forgive you soon enough once you’re not under their feet as a permanent fucking reminder.’ Salter leaned back in his chair and watched Brennan carefully. ‘I think we’ve got full-scale fucking gang warfare going on here. Boyle’s taking out or warning off all his competition, one by one, step by step. It’s diverse enough that it slips under the radar of you local plods – here, North Wales, Derbyshire, wherever the hell it is. But it’s targeted so that no one on the receiving end of it will have much doubt what it means. And as an added bonus he’s settling a few old scores on the way.’
‘What about Kenning? The grass. He wasn’t competition.’
‘You reckon? Word was that Kenning didn’t turn Queen’s evidence out of the goodness of his heart, but because he’d been promised a nice little nest-egg by someone who wanted to corner the market.’
‘I saw the place he was living,’ Brennan countered. ‘Must have been a fucking small nest-egg.’
‘It’s a sad world. People don’t always deliver on their promises. One of our dirty little secrets. That the life of a superannuated supergrass isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.’ Salter pushed back his chair and stood up, in the manner of one indicating that the meeting was coming to an end. ‘So. You game for it?’
‘I’m still not entirely clear what it is,’ Brennan said.
‘We’re trying to build a case against Boyle. It’s been a slow process. Not least because we fucked up so spectacularly last time. So this time we want to do it absolutely by the book. I want you to act as evidence officer. Work through what we’ve got. See if it stacks up. Tell us where the gaps are and what we need to do to fill them. I can give you some intelligence resource from my team, though not much. We’ll give you authorisation to work with the local plods, so you can finagle any information you can from them. Though good luck with that.’
‘I’m an experienced investigator. But I’ve not worked in your environment before. You must have people around who’ve got more of a track record in that kind of work.’
Salter nodded, smiling, as if this was a question that he’d been waiting for. ‘Maybe. But we’re stretched to the fucking limit. I’ve a national team, trying to juggle major operations from here to sodding Portsmouth. Half my lot are so wet behind the ears they’ve barely been weaned, and most of the other half are the kinds of alcoholics and deadbeats who couldn’t swing a return back to proper policing. I’ve got a clutch of officers working undercover that I’m not even supposed to talk about. And I’m not even based up here. I spend half my life stuck in the fucking ivory tower in Westminster filling in forms and writing reports so my superiors can prove to the politicians that we’re not squandering their tax money on liaison trips to the fucking Bahamas, or whatever it is that they think we do when they’re not looking.’ He paused and took a breath. It sounded like a prepared speech, or at least a speech that Salter had delivered before. ‘That’s why I need someone like you, up here, who can get some real nitty-gritty work done.’
Brennan pulled the wallet of papers back towards him. ‘Okay. I’ll give it a shot.’ He looked up at Salter, with what looked like genuine amusement on his face. ‘After all, given what I’ve come from, it’s not like I’m got much fucking option, is it?’