‘I’m not a fucking Paki – not like you, Parekh.’
‘Not sure your stepdad sees it that way, but hey ho, that’s neither here nor there. He’ll take it out on your mum and you know it. So, you need to shimmy back under whatever rock you’ve been living under and stay there. We had a deal, remember?’
‘You can’t make me go. This is my home.’
Nikki took another step forward, her chin jutted up, her face distorted in a scowl that betrayed her feelings. ‘You are a poison that we don’t need here. You will go. And you’ll go tonight. Tell Franco we won’t accommodate him here. Not then, not now and not ever.’
Bluster fading, Deano stepped back off the kerb, landing in a puddle, with a ‘For fuck’s sake.’ He jumped back onto the pavement, his mouth open in a snarl. ‘You can’t do this to me, Parekh. You just fucking can’t. I can’t move till Franco says.’
Nikki stepped back and twisted her mouth into a smile. ‘’Course I can. You know I can. But I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. Maybe you just forgot what I have on you, eh?’
Deano kicked the post box. ‘He’ll kill me. Franco will kill me.’
‘Really? And I care about that because …?’
‘Give us a break.’
‘No bloody way. You had your chance. You blew it when you brought ecstasy and MDMA to our streets. Then you did something even more stupid when you double-crossed Franco. Wonder what he’d do if he found out you’d been skimming off the top, eh? So …’ Nikki smiled. ‘You pay the price. Get off my fucking estate and take your drug-dealing boss with you. This is non-negotiable.’
She turned to cross the road, pulling her hood back up over her sleek dark-brown hair, then, as if in afterthought, she turned back. ‘Or of course I could make sure that package is delivered. Up to you, Deano. Up to you.’
‘Why do we always need to come here?’ Sajid waved two fingers in the air signalling to Gordon, the owner, that they’d have their usual and followed Nikki over to a booth with worn but clean seating. Nikki grinned. He said this every time they came to The Mannville Arms, but the truth was he loved it – Saj just liked to moan.
The gleam from its buffed wooden walls caught the light from the vintage glass lamp that cast a yellow hue over the equally well-polished table. The faint smell of beeswax contributed to the old-fashioned feel of the pub. Nikki slid into the side facing the doorway. ‘You know you like it here. So stop moaning. It’s one of the few pubs left in Bradford where you can get real ales.’
‘The Fighting Cock, The Sparrow …’ Sajid began counting them off, one by one on his fingers.
‘Yeah, I know. But I’m a creature of habit and Gordon and Nancy need all the trade they can get.’
Apart from Nikki and Sajid there were only five others in the entire bar. Old Stevie who propped up the corner most nights and the regular Monday night dominoes tournament in a table in the snug. As Nikki positioned a beer mat before each of them, Gordon ambled over, a tea towel draped over one shoulder, his rotund belly preceding the rest of him by a good couple of feet and two pint glasses of Cannonball, one in each hand. Nikki often wondered how he maintained balance. Gordon was a man of few words and most of them were unintelligible grunts which seemed to signify anything from, ‘hallo’ to ‘goodbye’ to ‘nice to see you’ to ‘fuck off, you’re barred’. His wife Nancy was his opposite in every respect. Almost as short as Nikki, and skinnier, she could and would, given half a chance, talk the proverbial hind leg off any four-legged creature that deigned to enter her domain. Her saving grace was that she was an expert reader of human nature and seemed able to gauge exactly what each of her customers wanted, whether it was a sympathetic ear, a babble of meaningless tittle-tattle or a serious confab over one of her rare whiskies, reserved only for her favourite customers. Nikki had partaken of said whisky a fair few times in the past.
With a grunt, which Nikki took to mean ‘enjoy your drinks’, Gordon placed both glasses on the mats, took a packet of salt and vinegar crisps out of his pocket and tossed it on the table, before beating a slow and rolling retreat.
Sajid took a long sip, wiped the froth off his mouth with the back of his hand and grinned. ‘Can’t stay long. Langley’s got a surprise lined up. It’s our anniversary. A year.’
Nikki’s lips twitched. He looked so damn proud of himself, which was more than he’d looked at the crime scene. ‘Yeah, well, you could’ve fooled me earlier, Saj. Poor Langley, he must be a saint to put up with the huge wedge you drive between the two of you in public.’
Sajid picked up his glass and had another sip. ‘Well, truth is he is getting pissed off with me. Says I’m ashamed of him.’ He looked at Nikki a slight frown marring his forehead. ‘I’m not ashamed of him, no way. It’s just like … complicated.’
Complicated family life was nothing new to Nikki, but she really felt for Sajid. He was clearly in love with Langley – they’d been living together for a year now, but he still kept their relationship secret, in case his family found out. Every so often, the strain of that reared its ugly head. She nudged Saj’s arm. ‘God! Surprised he managed to put up with you for so long. You should be the one treating him.’
‘Ha bloody ha.’ He took another swig of his beer. ‘Langley’s spitting. Springer and her sidekick Bashir caught that skeleton case we were called out to earlier. Turns out it’s a murder, skeleton had its head smashed in. Lang says Springer’s being an arse already.’
Nikki snorted. She’d had run-ins with ‘The Spaniel’ before and always tried to give her a wide berth. Thankfully, cold cases and current investigations rarely overlapped. ‘Now why doesn’t that surprise me? The woman’s a bitch.’
‘Yeah, well, they found a passport on the body, so it looks like it’ll be all tied up soon.’
‘Lucky Spaniel. She’ll be wagging her tail at that, won’t she? She doesn’t like to get her hands dirty, that one.’
Stuffing a handful of crisps in his mouth, Sajid studied her. ‘So, you gonna tell me what all that was with Deano?’
Nikki sighed. She trusted Saj. They’d worked together for years now, since before he’d met Langley, and they’d been through a lot together, but this thing with Deano and by extension, Franco, was personal. Of course, Sajid knew about the E on the streets and it was a pretty fair assumption that Franco and his cronies were behind it. Sajid was aware that Nikki had evicted both Franco and Deano from Listerhills the previous year and, if the details were a bit sketchy, he wasn’t going to complain. He probably thought she was just cleaning drugs off the streets.
However, her reasons for keeping schtum about the whole Franco and Deano thing were nothing to do with her job – no, it was personal. This was about her family and she kept family matters close to her chest. Now though, she couldn’t decide whether to trust him with Haqib’s involvement. Maybe that was pushing his loyalty a step too far. By rights, she should have taken Haqib in for carrying the amount of shit he had, but then Charlie had been the one in possession, not Haqib. ‘Got a load of Es and they link back to Deano. Needed to make him aware we didn’t want his shit here. I’ll get a couple of uniforms on him tomorrow, hassle him a bit, make it hard for him to deal.’
‘Franco back too?’
Nikki drained her glass, plonked it down and rolled her shoulders. ‘Yep, looks that way.’
Sajid studied his half-full glass for a few seconds, then, ‘You gonna tell me where the Es came from?’
‘Got a lead. Some local lads, but they ran before I got them. At least they’re off the streets, eh?’ She knew her partner didn’t believe