The Dead

by Howard Linskey

  He looked like he was struggling to control his emotions then but I didn’t see guilt or shame in his eyes, only anger and spite.

  ‘She was going to tell. The silly, little bitch was crying and she wouldn’t stop and she kept saying “I’m going to tell” over and over again. She said it to me,’ he paused to let that sink in, ‘so what choice did I have?’

  I looked at the man I’d had on my payroll for nearly three years and decided there and then to forget about everything I’d said to Palmer and Kinane. Baxter may have known a lot about my organisation but we would just have to live with that, because I’d made my decision.

  ‘You’re on your own, Baxter. From now on you can take your chances with the state-appointed, fresh-from-his-law-degree, apprentice lawyer they are going to give you, then you can stand there in the witness box and you can explain to those twelve jurors that the little girl you raped was just a cock tease. Then you can tell them how you had no choice but to kill her because she was going to tell on you and we’ll see what happens shall we? Good luck with that, you sick sack of shit.’

  He didn’t like that, and his face took on the look of a spoilt child who’s just had his toys taken off him. I’d already reasoned that the police would be more interested in sending a child-killer down than giving him a deal in return for information about me and, no matter how much he hated me now, Baxter wasn’t about to trade that for nothing in return. He’d stay quiet out of spite.

  ‘If you were in our lock-up right now I’d let Kinane sort you out with his tool-box and he’d give you the full treatment. He’d keep you alive for days. You’d better hope they lock you up in solitary forever because if you ever get out I’ll make sure that happens, and do you know what, the police wouldn’t give a shit. The Chief Constable would probably shake me by the hand. They wouldn’t waste a minute trying to track down your killer. Not one. Jesus, you don’t even know how sick in the head you are, do you? That’s the really sad bit.’

  It took a considerable effort, but I got to my feet. I was intending to lamp Baxter round the head for good measure before I walked away. I’d have to apologise to the screw and give him some extra wedge later, for the embarrassment I caused him, but I was pretty sure he could pass it off as an assault by another prisoner and I was relishing the fact that I was about to inflict some pain on this bastard.

  ‘Sit down!’ he barked at me, ‘you’re going nowhere,’ and the shock of his certainty deflected me from thumping him, at least for the time being. Then he said, ‘Not unless you want to kiss goodbye to your five million pounds.’

  I took a long hard look into Henry Baxter’s eyes, so I could tell if he was bluffing, then I sat back down again.

  17

  ‘I am going to stay quiet and calm while you explain to me exactly what you have done, Baxter.’

  ‘It’s very simple, he said, ‘I knew they would come for me, as soon as they got my DNA because of that stupid driving offence. I knew they would be back. I went to a lot of trouble to evade that same test ten years ago when they did it on every man for miles around.’

  ‘I’ll bet you did Baxter. Did you pay someone off or just disappear for a while? Actually, don’t tell me, I don’t want to know.’ Baxter was lucky he did time for fraud back when they weren’t big on taking DNA from everyone who went inside. He was a white-collar criminal who stole some money, not a high-risk danger to the public.

  He chose to ignore me. ‘I knew I’d have at least a week before the results came back but I had nowhere to run to and no real money. I wouldn’t last six months on the lam in any civilised country with an extradition treaty, and men like me weren’t built to live in mud huts halfway up the Amazon. It would be worse than this place. So I needed a little life insurance policy; something that would get your attention and secure your help. I changed the access information for that bank account in the Caymans. Your money’s still there, but you can’t get it. Not without my help.’

  ‘Your money is perfectly safe,’ Baxter continued, ‘but I am the only one who can release it for you, which I am prepared to do,’ he pronounced the last bit like he was doing me a huge favour, ‘in return for something from you.’

  ‘Baxter you are going to give me my money regardless of whether I help you or not, because we both know that I could have you killed in here.’

  ‘I actually seriously doubt that,’ he said, and when I gave him a look he continued, ‘you’re hardly going to murder me here in front of your tame prison officer and, in case you have forgotten, I am a Rule 45, segregated prisoner. I’m in solitary. That’s what they do to the “nonces”.’ Baxter did that stupid thing with his fingers that denotes speech marks and rolled his eyes at the absurdity of his prisoner classification as a sex offender.

  ‘You are a nonce Baxter,’ I told him, ‘you raped and murdered a little girl. There’s not a man in this nick that wouldn’t torture you and kill you for the fun of it. They hate cunts like you in here and, come to mention it, people aren’t too fond of your sort out there either. You wouldn’t last ten minutes outside these walls. Solitary is the only place where you are safe, for now.’

  He gave me a sour look, ‘And that’s my point. While I’m locked up on my own in a wing that is wholly populated by sex offenders, none of your usual contacts can get to me. Because, forgive me if I’ve misread this situation, the firm does not tolerate nonces and won’t do business with them. Frankly, even if you did, there’s no one on my wing more than five foot six. Have you seen them when they line up for their lunch? All of them; pathetic, seedy little men,’ and he looked disgusted, as if he himself was excluded from that group. ‘I know the firm has people in here but they’re on C wing with all the other killers, armed robbers and enforcers. I also know you’ve paid people to get rid of men you don’t need any more but I’m no Toddy, oh yes, I’ve heard that story. He didn’t see it coming did he? But I do see it coming and I don’t care, because you are not going to kill me, you are going to get me out of here, otherwise it’s bye-bye five million pounds and, oops, I seem to have no more money to pay my suppliers, or the men on my payroll, and you wouldn’t want that, would you? If that happened, you’d be about as popular in Newcastle as I am.’

  I was hating this and hating him. Partly because of what he had done but mostly because he was right. I wasn’t sure I could get at him on a solitary section of a sex offenders’ wing. That was the whole point of separating the nonces in the first place and, even if I could have Baxter killed in here, it would lose me my five million. Without that money I wouldn’t be able to trade for very long before I was struggling to meet our commitments and I dealt with people who were a hell of a lot scarier than the tax man.

  ‘You’re going to get me out of here,’ he told me.

  ‘How?’

  ‘That’s your problem, but you’d better work it out and fast. That five million is locked up safer than the Bank of England and if I go down you’ll never see a penny of it.’

  ‘You killed her. You just told me that and there is DNA evidence linking you to the dead girl.’

  ‘I’ve admitted nothing, not to the authorities and that’s what counts. To them I have denied everything except teaching the girl to play the piano. I gave her a few unofficial lessons and I could easily have come into contact with her then. You can pass on your DNA by shaking hands.’

  ‘Not that kind of DNA, Baxter. Not the kind they are going to cite in court.’

  ‘Then find a way to discredit them, Blake. Get me off and get me free and I’ll be out of here. Then I’ll give you your money back. You have my word.’

  ‘Your word?’

  ‘Yes,’ he assured me, ‘I am a man of my word.’

  ‘Of course you are,’ I said, ‘how could I forget that? You’re a proper English gent.’

  ‘Don’t take the moral high ground with me Blake. I may have killed a girl but not because I’m sick in the head. I’m not a psychopath. She was going to tell the police and get me locked up for a very
long time. You, on the other hand, have had numerous people killed for exactly the same reason. It’s all about self-preservation in the end. We are just two sides of the same coin, you and I. We both dare to do what is necessary to survive.’

  ‘Don’t compare yourself to me Baxter.’

  ‘Why? Because it hurts? It’s true, isn’t it? How many people are in their graves because of you, Blake? Why don’t you admit you have killed people when it proved necessary? Or do you struggle to look at yourself in the mirror these days? Is that why you are so bloody coy?’

  ‘Shut up!’ Before I had even thought about it consciously my fist shot out in a jabbing motion and crashed hard into his nose. He’d been leaning forward too far and I hit him with a blow that was packed with anger. Baxter’s head jerked back and he let out a high-pitched cry as it fell forward again and he put his hand up to his face. He looked down in horror at the blood on his palm – more was pouring from his nose.

  The prison officer rushed towards us in a panic. ‘Get back there,’ I ordered him angrily and he froze in his tracks, unsure what to do.

  ‘You’ll pay for that Blake,’ Baxter told me, his voice a nasally whine, as he wiped the blood and snot from his battered nose. ‘That’ll cost you fifty grand; to get me back on my feet when this is over.’

  He got out of his chair and walked to the door that would take him back to the safety of his cell in solitary, then he turned back and reminded me, ‘You think about everything I’ve just said. It’s not as if you have any other option.’

  18

  ‘How did it go?’ asked Palmer as I climbed back into the car outside Durham nick.

  ‘Great,’ I said, ‘we had a lovely little chat.’

  ‘And we’re cutting him off,’ he reminded me, ‘once we unravel everything?’

  ‘It’s not going to be that simple.’

  Further discussion was interrupted by the sound of Palmer’s mobile ringing. He answered it, grunted and handed the phone to me. ‘It’s Robbie.’

  ‘We’ve been through the CCTV footage,’ he said, ‘hours of it.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘She’s on there alright. A few t… t… times.’

  I had mixed feelings about that. On the plus side, at least we might pick up some clues about who Gemma Carlton had been hanging out with before she died, but confirmation of her presence in our club linked her to me, however loosely. It could be claimed I’d met her there or seen her across a crowded room and realised she was Carlton’s daughter, which would be one more piece of circumstantial evidence to add to the police case that was doubtless building against me.

  ‘What did you see?’ I asked Robbie. ‘Was she with someone?’

  ‘Er… you need to come over and take a look at something.’ He seemed reluctant to tell me more over the phone.

  ‘What have you found Robbie?’ I demanded.

  ‘A smoking g… g… gun.’

  I picked up Kevin Kinane and arranged for Sharp to meet us at the old call centre. We huddled around the monitor as Robbie tapped away at his keyboard and brought up the right images. ‘Mark found this from the camera on the main door,’ he tapped another key and up came black-and-white footage of the scene outside Cachet on a busy Friday night. ‘It’s from the night before the girl was killed.’

  There was a queue of youngsters waiting patiently to get in. Because the club was doing so well, it would have been a long wait but our doormen kept everybody in line and anybody who acted up would be refused admission, so the line moved forward slowly and steadily but in good order.

  ‘There,’ said Robbie, as a group of girls was allowed in and the two behind them were asked to stand and wait their turn at the front of the queue. One was tall with long dark hair and the other was a petite brunette in a white coat, wearing a short skirt. I looked closely at her face. From the photographs I’d seen, this looked like Gemma Carlton to me

  ‘What do you think?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s definitely her,’ Kevin Kinane replied.

  The girls were finally permitted to enter and they disappeared off the screen. ‘Now we go inside,’ said Robbie. He tapped his keys again and up popped a view of the interior of the club. He paused it and said, ‘There’. We watched the girls squeeze through the crowd. ‘We keep losing sight of them,’ he told us, ‘but I’ve tracked them using all of the cameras in Cachet and I spliced the footage together.’ It was like watching a film edited to show only the two leads. The girls slowly made their way through the club, ‘they don’t go to the bar,’ and we watched as they walked around the dance floor, ‘they don’t hit the dance floor,’ he explained pointlessly, ‘then we lose them again until…’ We cut to a view of the VIP bar. The camera that pointed down on to the lift which transported guests away from the great unwashed to the VIP lounge showed it slowly rising, the door opened and the two girls emerged with big excited grins on their faces.

  ‘So they went up there on their own, but who were they meeting?’

  ‘The whole VIP bar is a blind spot,’ Robbie told me. ‘I know, I know, I’m having it looked at. There’ll be a new camera there tonight,’ he assured me, ‘anyway, you have to wait a while for another sighting, two hours to be exact,’ the view changed again.

  It was the same scene by the lift door, but with different people standing around chatting and drinking. Robbie pointed at the screen again. Sure enough, Gemma’s friend came into view, a little unsteadily. She turned back towards Gemma, who was following her, but she wasn’t alone. Gemma Carlton had her arm linked with a man’s and she was laughing like she’d had at least a couple of bottles of our finest. I couldn’t see his face though.

  ‘Who’s that?’ asked Sharp and we continued to watch as the three of them walked towards the lift.

  ‘His back’s to us,’ I said, and for a moment I thought we’d never see the face of the man Gemma left Cachet with, but then the lift doors opened. The group waited for it to empty and they stepped inside. Then they turned around so they were facing outwards. Gemma reached forward to press the lift button and then finally we saw the face of the man she left our club with on the night before she died.

  ‘Jesus,’ I said, ‘that’s Golden Boots.’

  19

  Things had not been going all that well for Golden Boots, not that you’d notice it from the way he carried himself. As far as he was concerned, he was still Billy Big Bollocks, an unlikely media darling with legions of Twitter followers, a blog and a weekly tabloid newspaper column, ghost written of course. He never had to worry about having enough time for all of this verbal diarrhoea, because he rarely played any football these days. If he wasn’t suspended for kicking, punching or head-butting opponents on the pitch, or his own teammates on the training ground, there were always the scuffles with members of the public he met on his regular nights out.

  On the rare occasions that Golden Boots was not in trouble of one sort or another he was injured, his ageing joints struggling to cope with the wear and tear of a decade of top flight football and a history of poor refuelling choices; mainly a preference for beer and cocaine over fruit juice and pasta. His long-suffering club had grown tired of paying the man eighty thousand pounds a week to not play football and were desperately trying to offload him to anyone who was willing but, amazingly, there were no takers.

  When I went round to see Golden Boots, I took Joe Kinane with me. I knew that would concentrate what little mind the Premiership’s finest possessed, because he was shit scared of Kinane, with good reason. A little while back, our late but legendary enforcer, Finney, almost broke both of his legs because he tried to get violent when we interrupted a minor drug deal he was doing with Billy Warren, one of our dealers. Now, by way of making amends, he ‘does a bit of business’ with us, as he puts it, selling heavily-cut cocaine at ludicrous prices to a group of his Premiership mates.

  We both get something out of this; we get the money, for Golden Boots it’s the chance to pretend he’s a gangster in his spare time an
d he loves the kudos that comes with being a ‘face’.

  The guy who answered the door didn’t look like an athlete. He was sporting a three-day stubble and, even at this hour of the afternoon, he looked a bit out of it. His eyes were glassy and he was sniffing, but he didn’t have a cold. As usual, he pretended to be pleased to see us but I knew he dreaded our little visits. He showed us into his cavernous house.

  ‘What do you reckon?’ he asked, all smiles, as we stopped before the centrepiece that dominated the huge hallway in his new home; it was a statue of himself. The sculptor had carved him life-sized, in bronze, kitted out in the England shirt he had worn just once during his mockery of a career.

  ‘How much did that cost you?’ I asked him.

  ‘Forty grand.’ He said it like it was nothing.

  ‘It’s fucking hideous, even by your standards.’

  Golden Boots laughed nervously because he thought I was joking. ‘I like it. I think he’s caught me just right.’

  ‘You’re s’posed to be dead before they put a statue up,’ said Kinane menacingly, ‘them’s the rules.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I ain’t dead yet, am I?’ answered Golden Boots and Kinane just narrowed his eyes and smiled at that, which made the footballer look even more nervous.

  We sat on huge leather sofas in his games room, which was the size of most people’s houses. There was plenty of space for the ubiquitous snooker table and a bar. He didn’t deny knowing Gemma Carlton when we questioned him and admitted he had heard about her death.

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ he told me, ‘murdered like that,’ but I couldn’t say he was exactly grief stricken.

  ‘I saw her on the Friday night,’ he confirmed, ‘down at Cachet. I remember that and I remember her. She was a hottie and she knew the score. We had a couple of bottles of the good stuff in the VIP bar then I took her and her mate back to mine for the party. In the end I chose her. Her mate wasn’t too chuffed about that but I doubt she’d have killed her over it.’ At least his ego didn’t extend quite that far, ‘I mean there are always plenty of lasses around but I figured this one was worth the effort.’