I didn’t say much. I just sat there and listened and figured now was probably the right time to ask for my lawyer. They’d got it all so wrong but couldn’t see it and there was no way I was going to convince them. I was the devil right now. Carlton was going to put me inside so I killed his daughter to derail him. It was outlandish, it was ludicrous and completely untrue but they weren’t in any mood to be convinced.
‘If you really believe I am capable of this, if you actually think I ordered it, or could ever persuade any of my men that it was a good idea, then nothing I can say will alter your view, but I did not kill this poor girl. Now I want my lawyer.’
‘You can have your lawyer,’ said the heavy-set man, who had silently entered the room while I was speaking, ‘but first I’d like a word, if I may.’
I had never met Detective Superintendent Alan Austin but I knew of him and he was fully aware of me. I recognised him from TV footage of police press conferences, like the one they were about to have for Carlton’s daughter. He turned to the DS who had attacked me, ‘I could hear you all the way down the corridor, Fraser,’ he told the man calmly, ‘go and get yourself a coffee,’ then he added pointedly, ‘in the canteen.’
DS Fraser grudgingly left the room and Austin picked up a chair and brought it with him.
‘Get him his lawyer,’ he ordered the DI. ‘And give us five minutes,’ he added. ‘Well, go on,’ he said, and all of them slunk reluctantly from the room.
‘Perhaps they think you might try to kill me,’ said Austin, who rightly assumed he did not have to introduce himself to me, ‘or they reckon I’m on your payroll. That’s the rumour, you know. That you’ve bought and paid for half of the CID round here.’ I didn’t answer. I just let him say his piece. ‘Now then, this is a right horrible mess, isn’t it?’
‘You don’t seriously think I would kill a policeman’s daughter just to stop him from investigating my company?’
‘No, I don’t,’ he admitted, ‘but there are a large number of people here who do because Carlton told them it was you. Some of them are very senior indeed.’
‘Jesus Christ!’
‘On the record, we are exploring several lines of enquiry.’
‘And off the record?’
‘It’s all about you. The brass have got it into their collective heads that Gemma Carlton was most likely killed because of her father’s investigation into an organised crime firm.’
‘That is fucking preposterous. Whatever you might think about my company, we are not the Cosa Nostra.’
‘I know,’ he told me, ‘I have explained that I do not think you, or anyone linked to you, is likely to have committed this crime, but that is not a popular view here right now. The word has gone out to investigate Gemma’s murder and to find a link with you. You have a motive, all they need is the evidence linking you to Gemma and they will find it.’
‘Manufacture it, you mean. They have already made up their minds,’ his silence confirmed this.
‘It’s not a question of manufacturing anything,’ he informed me, ‘you know how this works. There is always plenty of evidence out there, some of it cast-iron, a lot of it circumstantial, but if there is a political will from the CPS to build a case and present it effectively to a jury of laymen…’
‘Meaning thickos and simpletons they’ve dragged in off the street.’
‘…then they will get their conviction. You know that’s how it can work.’
‘I do,’ I conceded, ‘so why are you here? What do you expect me to do about it?’
‘That’s up to you but, if you really want them to stop thinking you had anything to do with Gemma Carlton’s death, then I’d say it is fairly obvious what you have to do.’
‘Find the real killer?’
He nodded.
‘And just how do you expect me to do that?’
‘Use the men in your… company,’ he told me, ‘they can go places we can’t, talk to people who might not normally be too forthcoming to police officers. They might find it easier to persuade people to be more open, but I’m not going to tell you how to go about it. I’m just asking you to help me find the man who killed a young girl I have known her whole life. We are all hurting very badly right now. I have my own private view of you and your organisation Blake, and you probably wouldn’t care to hear it, but I don’t believe you are stupid enough or so far beyond redemption that you would arrange to have an innocent girl murdered to throw my colleague off your scent.’
I didn’t answer him for a while. Instead I tried to think of ways I could persuade the police I had nothing to do with this girl’s death, without actually investigating the case myself, but I couldn’t come up with any.
‘Alright,’ I said, ‘give me everything you’ve got on the poor lass that I don’t already know, anything that could help me find the man who did this. My guys will look into it,’ he nodded his agreement. ‘I’ll find the killer and bring him to you.’
‘Make sure you do,’ he cautioned, ‘he’s not much use to us dead.’
‘He’ll be no use to me at all if he’s dead. I want him breathing and talking. I need him to explain this had nothing to do with me.’
‘One last thing, Blake,’ he told me, ‘no patsies, fakes or mentally-ill suspects, no losers coerced into confessing to a murder they didn’t commit because you put pressure on them or their families. We’ll see straight through that and you’ll have blown your last chance of salvation. I kid you not.’
I noted he was fond of biblical terms like salvation and redemption and wondered if that was significant. Was Detective Superintendent Austin a bit of a bible basher? ‘Just leave it with me,’ I assured him.
10
By the time they released me, it was getting light. I called Sarah and told her not to worry. ‘It’s all a bunch of nothing.’ I’m not sure she believed me.
I called Sharp and got him out of bed. I arranged a crash meeting with him, then got Palmer to come and pick me up. My head of security drove me quickly out of the city, heading north, glancing into his mirrors now and then to make sure we weren’t being followed by any plain clothes plod. When he had convinced me we were alone, I got him to turn the car around and drive south until we reached the Angel of the North. Palmer stayed in the car. Sharp was already waiting for me and he wasn’t happy to be there.
‘It’s a bit bloody public this, isn’t it?’ he hissed, as he filed in next to me and we began a slow walk towards the two hundred tonnes of rusting steel that constituted the Angel. His eyes were all over the place, as he checked out the bushes for surveillance teams, but we were virtually alone here at this hour. It was a cold, misty morning that would deter any but the most hardy.
‘Yeah, you’re right,’ I said, ‘that old bloke with the flat cap walking his dog has got to be with SOCA. Get a fucking grip, Sharp, it was your idea for us to meet here in the first place.’
‘That was ages ago. Before I was convinced the bastards were out to get me.’
‘The bastards are out to get all of us,’ I informed him, ‘and this time it’s me they’re after, not you, so listen up, because this is important.’
We stood a few yards from the Angel, which towered sixty feet above us, and I briefed Sharp on everything the Detective Superintendent had told me about the murder of Gemma Carlton; including the police assumption that I was responsible for her death.
‘But that’s crazy,’ Sharp said, ‘you’d never be that daft.’
‘Or that evil,’ I reminded him, ‘you forgot that bit.’
‘Aye, well, that too,’ he conceded.
‘I’ll need you on this big style.’
‘I’m on it already, and so are forty other detectives, but nobody told me they were linking you to it. Jesus,’ he shook his head, ‘they know, don’t they? They know I’m your man on the inside. That’s why they’re not telling me anything.’
It was a possibility, but I couldn’t allow Sharp to be deflected by self-doubt. ‘That’s bollocks. They o
nly hauled me in last night and they didn’t get any sense out of DI Carlton until recently. You’ll be briefed. I’ve no doubt about that. You’ll be expected to come up with the evidence to put me away.’ Then I told him about Austin’s request for me to investigate the case in parallel with the police operation.
‘That’s a bit unusual isn’t it?’
‘Highly unusual, but Austin is worried they only have one line of enquiry and he doesn’t believe we did it. He thinks the real murderer is going to walk. He might hate us but he doesn’t want the girl’s killer to get away with it, does he? I want you to straddle both investigations; ours and yours.’
He didn’t say anything to that and I could sense there was something else. ‘What is it?’ I asked him.
‘It might be nowt,’ he said, ‘but the timing’s interesting.’
‘What?’
‘Henry Baxter was arrested last night.’
‘Was he? For what?’
‘Careless driving and driving with excess alcohol.’
‘He was pissed?’
‘Well, he was over the limit.’
‘Is this legit?’ I was asking Sharp if Baxter really had been drink-driving or if it was some ruse by the police to bring him in and question him about me.
‘Seemingly so; I made enquiries and he was pulled over by uniform for driving erratically. It’s a bit of a coincidence him being taken in like that and you getting dragged there a few hours later though.’
‘Maybe that’s all it is. I can’t see Henry Baxter disappearing into the witness protection programme because he’s been pulled over for drink-driving, can you?’
‘No,’ he admitted, ‘but stranger things have happened. Anyway, he’ll be bailed later.’
‘I’ll keep an eye on him,’ I promised. ‘Oh, and I nearly forgot. There’s something else you can do for me. I need to find a man called Jinky Smith.’
‘Who the fuck is he when he’s at home?’
‘One of the old guard, like you suggested, so ask around. Start earning your money.’
‘Yeah, alright,’ he mumbled, ‘but if I run out of luck I might not get to spend any of it.’
There wasn’t much more to be said and we both fell silent as the old guy with the walking stick finally drew level with us. His progress up the hill had been tortuously slow and he looked incredibly weary. I knew how he felt.
With everything that was going on I could have done without the next meeting I’d arranged, but I’d promised Joe Kinane, and I didn’t piss that man off lightly. Today we were going to sit down with his eldest lad.
Kinane had three sons, all of them carved out of something like granite, and each one of them named after a famous Newcastle United player; Kevin, Peter and Chris; Keegan, Beardsley and Waddle, though he regretted that when Waddle eventually signed for Sunderland. He even attempted to use Chris’ middle name for a while, but unsurprisingly it didn’t stick. He had a daughter too. She was married with kids and had nothing to do with our business.
‘What did you call her then?’ I asked him once, ‘No girl ever played for the Toon.’
He laughed, ‘I suggested Jackie, after Jackie Milburn, but wor lass went mental at me,’ and he grimaced at the memory. ‘We called her Carol in the end.’
Kevin Kinane was an enormous bloke whose fearsome appearance was enhanced by his smashed-in teeth. A while back he had been set upon by some heavily-armed thugs who worked for a dealer of ours who had gone decidedly native. Braddock’s men couldn’t resist smashing the unarmed Kevin in the mouth with a gun, leaving him with a hole in his teeth and earning him the nickname ‘Christmas’, as in ‘all I want for Christmas is my two front teeth.’ He had a couple of false ones fitted but didn’t take to them, so he simply discarded them and went around with a gap instead. When Kevin smiled it made him look even more sinister than before.
I had been giving Kevin Kinane more responsibility lately, to see if he could handle it. He had gone from overseeing our distribution of H at the Sunnydale Estate to effectively controlling the entire operation across the city. I could trust him because he was Kinane’s eldest son and as close to family as I had working for me.
‘Our Kevin wanted a word,’ Joe told me as they sat down in my office at the Cauldron. I could see the impatience in Kevin’s eye. Already his dad was interfering.
‘Let him speak for himself, Joe.’ I said, and Kinane sat back in his chair looking edgy, like he was itching to put words into Kevin’s mouth for him. Kevin shot his father a glance that clearly meant ‘back off and leave me to it’.
‘What did you want to see me about?’ I asked, though I knew already.
‘The future,’ he told me, before quickly adding, ‘of the firm. If you ask me, H has had its day. There’s no profit growth potential there. We’ve bottomed out and it will never get any bigger. We should be concentrating our efforts in other directions.’
‘Such as?’
‘More coke, some ketamine, a bit of E, but mostly it’s the coke. Blow is where it’s at.’
‘I agree with you. So what does that tell you?’
‘Give up the heroin. It’s high risk and the profits aren’t big enough to justify the jail sentences that go with it. The estates are beyond saving, so cut the dealers adrift and let them fight it out between them till there’s a top dog. You don’t need the hassle and we can always wholesale to whoever’s left standing.’
I watched Kevin Kinane intently. There was intelligence there. His dad was a powerful force but he didn’t have the smarts of his three sons. Maybe they’d actually attended school or perhaps they got it from their mum. More than likely they’d had to live by their wits on the streets for so long they’d developed a natural instinct for this kind of thing.
‘You are right Kevin, H is pretty much dead. There’s no real future or growth there and we should concentrate less on it. We can scale down, take an arm’s length view and put our mind to other areas where we see long-term potential. That’s smart thinking.’
‘Cheers,’ he said.
‘But you are only half right,’ I told him, ‘we need to keep control of the heroin trade in Newcastle and it worries me that you don’t understand why.’
‘To keep order,’ interrupted Joe Kinane, and we both gave him a look this time.
‘I’ll come back to that,’ I told them. ‘Firstly, we still get valuable revenue from H and we can’t do without it yet. We are not a PLC and we don’t have to have growth every year to keep shareholders satisfied. H is still a high-profit, sizeable revenue business in this city. Why give it to someone else when it took us so long to nail it down in the first place?’
‘We can still make money out of the wholesale, without getting our hands dirty,’ Kevin told me. ‘I thought that was what you wanted.’
‘I do want that, but I know I can never have it. If we wholesale to whoever is left standing, as you put it, we’ll end up with another Braddock running the place, not paying us on time, buying from other firms when it suits him, and his boys will be running riot. Joe is right, we have to keep order on those estates. They might be absolute shit holes but not everyone on them is vermin. We have to stop teenagers from hosing each other every time there’s a trivial argument about respect or we’ll end up like those estates in Peckham and Hackney. They’ve got kiddy gangs doing stabbings and drive-bys instead of business. We still have some rules; no crack cocaine, no getting kids high, no pimping girls out to pay for their habits, no unnecessary violence for the sake of it and no mindless killing. This is one of the main reasons the police tolerate us. They don’t like us. They will lock us away if they can get the evidence but always, at the back of their minds, they know we keep order and they ask themselves what would emerge in our place if they took us all down tomorrow.’
‘I didn’t think of that,’ he conceded, and I liked that he hadn’t tried to pretend he knew it all.
‘Then there are more sentimental reasons. I still love this city and I don’t want Newcastle turn
ing into the South Central Projects.’
‘Fair enough,’ he had conceded my point, but I could tell he was deflated. Kevin thought I didn’t value his opinion, but only a fool wants to be surrounded by ‘yes-men’. Where was the value in that? I needed people who would challenge me about the best way to run the firm, as long as they did what I told them once I’d made up my mind.
‘You’ve done a good job for me, Kevin,’ I told him, ‘you deserve a bigger role in the firm. I want you to take on more responsibility for me.’
‘Just name it’, he said, and I could see the look of quiet satisfaction on Joe’s face. He’d got what he wanted. I didn’t mind that at all because Kevin Kinane had potential.
‘I will,’ I told him, ‘we’ll talk again soon. There is one thing you can do for me today though; get the lads together at the Mitre tonight,’ he nodded, ‘and leave us to it for a bit will you. I need a word with Joe.’
11
The whole firm turned up at the Mitre. We filled the upstairs bar of that old pub and the ancient floorboards creaked under the weight of so many huge blokes. We opened the bar so they could all have a few pints and Vince was in charge of the ancient vinyl jukebox. That used to be Hunter’s job. Once, we’d have been treated to a diet of eighties rock, which never let up. Now that he was gone, Vince had assumed the mantle of DJ and his choices were just as archaic, though different to Hunter’s. You wouldn’t think it to look at Vince, with his suit and tie and permanent presence at our bars and clubs, which churned out endless R&B, that his taste was really indie, bordering on Goth. That evening, while we waited for all of the lads to turn up, we got Echo and the Bunnymen, Teardrop Explodes, The Alarm and Hazel O’Connor. Then he started cranking out the really Suicidal Sid stuff with The Sisters of Mercy and The Mission before The Smiths finally took the biscuit with There Is A Light That Never Goes Out.
Finally, when Spear of Destiny’s They’ll Never Take Me Alive faded away, I gave Vince the nod. Everybody had assembled by now so he turned off the jukebox. I needed to speak before they all got too pissed to listen. I drew the lads in close and held up the black and white, ten-by-eight that Austin had given me so they could all see it.
The Dead Page 6
