Free Collusion by Stuart Neville Page A

to silence for long seconds until Hewitt sighed and said, ‘All right, I’ll see what I can do. A lot of it’ll be redacted, though. You’ll be looking at more blacked-out lines than anything else.’
    ‘Okay,’ Lennon said, ‘whatever you can get me.’
    ‘Give me an hour,’ Hewitt said.
    The thin file landed on Lennon’s desk ninety minutes later. He flicked through the photocopied pages, less than twenty of them. True to Hewitt’s word, most of it had been blacked out by thick lines drawn with marker pen. But not all of them were redacted in the original. Some of the pages smelled of solvent, the black lines fresh and slightly damp to the touch.
    A Post-it note clung to the inside of the folder. In Dan Hewitt’s neat script it said:
Jack ,
There’s not much, but it’s the best I can do for you. Remember, Dandy Andy has done us a lot of good. Like I said, he’s a piece of shit, but a useful piece of shit. Shred these when you’re done .
Dan
    Dandy Andy Rankin was indeed a piece of shit. Not only had he been leeching off his own community for years, but he’d also been spoon-feeding information to Special Branch, and more recently their new face, C3 Intelligence Branch. The first three pages were a profile complete with mug shots and a career summary, Dandy Andy’s Greatest Hits. Scanning the pages, Lennon could discern at least half a dozen assassinations that had been thwarted, five arms caches that had been discovered, and hundreds of thousands of pounds’ worth of Ecstasy, cocaine and cannabis shipments that had been stopped en route to Belfast.
    All this came at a price, of course. Rankin had been allowed to operate in relative peace. A single paragraph below the photos outlined his various enterprises. Those suits weren’t cheap.
    The following pages were the most interesting. Rankin had been passing bits and pieces of information on Rodney Crozier’s emerging relationship with Belfast’s Lithuanian gangs. The consolidation of the European Union alongside Northern Ireland’s stabilisation had drawn prosperity to this part of the world, but the criminals followed close behind.
    The South had seen it first, with Dublin’s underworld growing more vicious by the day. Gangland killings were now almost as frequent in the Republic as paramilitary killings had been in the North during the Troubles. Up here, the paramilitaries still kept control of the rackets; ordinary decent criminals didn’t have a look in, but competition from Eastern Europeans was starting to bite.
    The Loyalists had been cooperating with the Lithuanians for some time, now. They put up a front of resisting foreigners in Protestant areas, intimidating the hard-working immigrants who took the jobs no one else would, but behind closed doors they sucked up to the gangsters from Lithuania and elsewhere. Prostitution was one of the biggest earners for them, and the Liths had a good supply of young women from Russia, Romania, Belarus and Ukraine. None of that was news to Lennon, much as it shamed him. He flicked through a series of memos and transcribed messages, reading what hadn’t been obscured. Each mentioned McKenna at least once, but nothing substantial. Nothing he could link back to what Rankin had told him at the hospital.
    The final section was a transcription of a meeting between Rankin and one of his handlers. Lennon scanned the few readable scraps that had been left.
DATE: 05/09/2007
LOCATION: Car park, Makro Warehouse, Dunmurry,
Belfast
INTERVIEWING OFFICER: DI James Maxwell, C3
SUBJECT: Andrew Rankin, a.k.a. Dandy Andy Rankin
    Interviewing officer notes that Rankin was visibly agitated throughout the conversation, as evidenced by his fidgeting and chain-smoking.
JM: What have you got for me?
AR: Rodney bloody Crozier. I want him put away.
JM: Jesus, Andy, not this again.
AR: It’s this business with the Liths. He’s getting too big for his boots. He’ll be shitting all over me if it goes on much longer.
JM: We’ve talked