The Dead

by Howard Linskey

  ‘Then the police told us they’d found her,’ he paused to let that sink in, ‘after two months,’ then he looked at me closely before telling me, ‘I had to identify her. I couldn’t put my wife through that.’

  ‘I’m very sorry,’ I said, ‘for what that’s worth, and I know it isn’t much.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you can imagine how that felt?’ he asked me.

  ‘No,’ I replied truthfully, ‘I can’t.’

  ‘And you don’t want to?’

  ‘No,’ I agreed, ‘I don’t.’

  He seemed relieved that I hadn’t tried to bullshit him and he sighed, ‘Nobody does. I can’t say I blame them. They feel for you but they don’t know what to say. What is there to say? We didn’t get invited to too many parties after.’

  ‘They were all there for the funeral mind,’ he continued, ‘I’ll give them that; all the friends and relatives. The church was packed. Loads of people we didn’t even know turned up that day. My wife thought that was lovely. Lots of strangers outside the church to pay their respects. I thought they were ghouls, grief-tourists intruding on our pain. I wanted to scream at them to piss off, but I knew it would upset my wife, so I stayed silent. My little girl’s funeral was on the evening news. The presenter was very solemn, for about a minute, then they cut to the football results, like everything was alright again. I couldn’t believe anyone could actually care about the football when my Leanne was lying cold in her grave and her killer was still out there.’

  I didn’t say anything. I knew he wasn’t done yet.

  ‘When the funeral was over, we gradually lost touch with the friends and the neighbours. They didn’t want to come round any more. The ones with kids must have felt guilty that it wasn’t their little boy or girl, or maybe they thought our bad luck would rub off on them. You know the worst part? I used to lie awake at night and wish it on them instead. Isn’t that awful? I used to wish that sick man had taken another little girl, anybody’s, I didn’t care whose, just not mine. I’d see lasses in the street about the same age as Leanne and I’d resent them because they were still walking around when she couldn’t and I’d dream about another reality where it was one of my neighbour’s kids whose funeral we’d all attended.’

  ‘My wife wanted to try again, after a while, for another child I mean, but I just couldn’t. I felt like we were trying to replace Leanne, betraying her somehow and I wouldn’t go along with it. Eventually she wanted to tidy all of Leanne’s things up, put them in boxes and “move forward” as she called it. Even the counsellor said that might be for the best, that it might stop me from living in the past. I wanted to smash his face in for saying that to me.

  ‘It was never going to work for my wife and me after that. She once told me, after the divorce, that every time she looked at me, my face reminded her of Leanne and it broke her heart,’ and he gave me a humourless smile. ‘What chance did we have, eh?’

  ‘I can’t imagine what you have been through, Mr Bell, I really can’t. None of us can. But I know you came here for a reason, so what is it that you want from me?’

  ‘Henry Baxter worked for you.’

  ‘Yes, but obviously I never knew… please believe that. I would never have…’

  ‘You never knew that he was a child murderer, you mean?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  He shrugged. ‘How could you know? They’re not like the psychos on the films, are they? Child killers look quite ordinary. Otherwise we’d see them coming and warn our children to stay away from them, but we certainly didn’t see him coming. He lived a few streets away but we didn’t know what a monster he was. The police didn’t even bother to interview him at the time. I’d lie awake at night knowing he was out there somewhere, whoever he was, getting on with his life, unpunished, enjoying himself, perhaps even planning to do it again.’

  I could have told him that Baxter served prison time for fraud since then but I didn’t think he’d view that as any form of justice, so I kept silent.

  ‘Baxter is no friend of mine, you can be assured of that.’

  ‘But he has hired a new legal team,’ he told me, ‘expensive ones, the best. The police were surprised he was able to do that. They thought you might have had something to do with it.’

  ‘I don’t know why they would think that. He’s not been with me that long.’

  ‘Can you look me in the eye and tell me you are not the one paying for the fancy lawyers, Mr Blake? Can you do that?’

  ‘I don’t wish to offend you, Mr Bell. You’ve been through a great deal and every man in this room feels for you, but I don’t have to look you in the eye and say anything.’

  ‘No,’ he admitted, ‘I suppose you don’t. I would like to ask you for something though… I know you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to but…’

  ‘I’ll help if I can.’

  ‘Don’t protect Henry Baxter. He killed my daughter. The police know it, the CPS know it, I know it and you know it too. The DNA evidence proves it and I want justice for my darling girl. She was thirteen years old when Baxter murdered her, she’d have been twenty-three now, married maybe, perhaps with a kid of her own. I might have been a grandfather. I understand you are a father too, Mr Blake. The police told me you have a daughter, so now I am appealing to you, as one father to another, not to help Henry Baxter. Please, I’m begging you in fact.’

  I knew that every eye in the room was on me. I could feel Kinane staring at me intently and Matt Bell’s gaze didn’t leave mine for a moment.

  ‘Family money,’ I told him, ‘that’s how he can afford his fancy lawyer, Mr Bell. Henry Baxter will get no help from me,’ I assured him and felt one step closer to hell when that poor man’s shoulders slumped in relief and he thanked me.

  25

  I don’t think I had ever needed a drink as much as that night. We started in the Bigg Market and worked our way down towards the Quayside, stopping in all of the old pubs I used to drink in when I was younger. I didn’t want to think, I just wanted to drink and talk about anything other than the man who had just called to see me. Palmer must have sensed that so he stayed off the topic.

  ‘What was it like growing up around here?’ he asked, while we sank a couple in the Duke of Northumberland. ‘It must have been hard if your ma was on her own?’

  ‘It was, I suppose. My mum never really had much. Not material stuff. She didn’t want for anything later in her life though. I made sure of that.’

  ‘Must have been good for her to have you around,’ he said.

  ‘She could be a difficult woman to help. She wouldn’t let me give her money and if I bought her stuff I could tell she didn’t like it if it wasn’t Christmas or her birthday.’

  ‘Then one day I had a great idea. Mum was looking tired. So I hired a cleaner to help her round the house. I thought she’d be chuffed. She didn’t say much about it at first but I assumed she needed time to get used to it and she’d come round in the end, once she felt the benefit of all the hours she saved. Instead the cleaner called me up after a few weeks and told me there was no point going round anymore as the place was always spotless.

  ‘I went straight round to my ma’s to have a go at her. “What’s the point in me paying someone to clean your house if you just carry on doing it yourself?” I asked her.

  ‘My mum looked a little flustered, but she shouted back at me, “well I don’t want her thinking I live in a pig sty, do I?”’

  Palmer chuckled. ‘How did a woman like that end up working for Bobby Mahoney?’

  ‘Well, it’s not as bad as it sounds,’ I said, ‘she never actually killed anyone. Bobby just used her on the door of the really rough clubs and she’d do the occasional armed robbery.’

  He laughed at that image. ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘I do, yes,’ and it was something I’d thought about over the years and never really got to the bottom of, ‘my mother always struggled to get by, she always had more than one job on the go because, even whe
n my dad was around, he couldn’t hold one down. She lost count of how many places he worked. Somehow she must have met Bobby or someone who worked for him and got a job behind the bar in one of his boozers. I think steadily, over the years, she did more and more work for him and less for other people so, by the time I can remember, she was full time at his places. I think he liked her, they all did apparently, she had something about her, didn’t take any shit from any of them. It made them respect her. It kept them on their toes.’

  ‘So is that how you got into this then?’ he asked me, ‘because of your mum?’

  ‘God no, she’d have freaked if she thought I’d end up like them. I mean she knew I worked for Bobby but I always gave it a bit of spin. She was the main reason I used to have those business cards with ‘Sales & Marketing Director – Gallowgate Leisure Group’ written on them. It gave me a veneer of respectability.’

  ‘Do you think she fell for that?’

  ‘Not deep down, but I think it helped her deal with it and she knew I wasn’t muscle, so maybe she thought I wouldn’t be in harm’s way. If that makes her sound naive then so was I. I used to believe it too, remember?’

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘I didn’t sign up for Bobby when I was a bairn. They would tolerate me in the bar between opening hours, if she was tidying or helping the manager clean the lines. She knew the cellar work better than the men. So I’d sit there at one of the tables when the pub was closed in the afternoon, drawing or playing with soldiers, until she was done. Bobby and the crew understood she had to keep me with her. There was no one else. He didn’t seem to mind. He was a big, scary bloke, particularly for a nipper like me, but if he saw me sitting there he’d come over and give me a stern look and say “Your mother’s working, so make sure you sit there quiet like and divvent work yersell.”’

  ‘What’s that mean?’

  ‘Basically, behave. So I’d nod my head and he’d just go, “good lad; help yourself to a bag of crisps, just the one, mind,” and I’d get to go behind the bar and get my crisps. When I think now of all the stuff I’ve seen and done, good and bad, since that time, I still look back and think that was the ultimate. I mean I was getting free crisps from the man himself right, from behind Bobby Mahoney’s bar and he was letting me. It didn’t get better than that.’

  ‘So how did you start working for him?’

  ‘It was a few years later and it started when I saw something I shouldn’t. He used to have this old snooker hall, it’s not there anymore. It was cheap and anyone could play down there. I was in with a friend once, messing about. We were so small we virtually had to stand on a box so we could reach the tables and we could hardly pot a ball, but we were learning and thought we were cool and grown up, you know. Anyway, one day we were playing on a table that a flash twat called Harry Cassidy liked to use, so he kicked us off. He was a local hard knock who didn’t work for Bobby and he didn’t ask us nicely. My mate was daft enough to complain that we’d paid for the table so Cassidy cuffed him one and he went off crying. The old man who ran the place made himself scarce because he was frightened of Cassidy. For some reason I stayed. There was this massive open cupboard set back in the far wall where they stored all of the old kit that was falling apart; cues, triangles, bits of broken cushion, so I just climbed up there and sat it out until they were done, so I could get back on the table later, all the while looking daggers at Cassidy. I wanted to be the next Hurricane Higgins and Harry Cassidy wasn’t going to stop me. Anyhow the place emptied because of Cassidy, so he was there with his mate, who was a sort of poor man’s enforcer.

  ‘Next thing, two blokes walk in. I knew from being with me ma that they were members of Bobby’s firm. Jerry Lemon and Jinky Smith. Both tough guys, but Jerry was a fucking psycho. Not a big bloke, but he had that menace, you know.

  ‘Now Harry Cassidy is a villain but he’s not daft, he knows who these guys are, so he’s immediately wondering if they are after him but they just nod and grunt their hellos and start setting up on the table next to him to play a frame, so he relaxes and so does his minder. They must have been playing fifteen minutes or so, Cassidy and his minder on one table, Jerry Lemon and Jinky on the next one and, even at my age, I must have only been eight or nine, I had an instinct that it was about to kick off. I don’t think Cassidy did, which is one of the reasons you’ve never heard of him.

  ‘Jerry Lemon is bent over his shot and I can hear him even from my little cubby hole in the far wall. He’s chuntering on to Jinky, “Eeh you’ve left us nowt man, you spawny bastard,” that sort of thing. He goes down on the shot then he comes back up again, takes another look, shakes his head, goes down again, comes back up. While this is happening, Cassidy’s minder bends down on a shot and Jerry suddenly flips his cue around and brings the thick end down hard on the back of the bloke’s head. He goes down like someone just pulled the plug on him, out like a light. I’d never seen anything like it before. I’d witnessed a few fights in the school playground, obviously, but not violence like that. It was shocking but somehow exciting too. Before the bloke has even slumped to the floor, Jerry is after Cassidy shouting “Come here you!” and Cassidy tries to leg it but he can’t, because Jerry is coming for him one way and Jinky from the other side of the table. He’s trapped then, down on the floor on the blind side of the table, where I can’t see him anymore, but Jerry and Jinky gave him a good kicking while Jerry explained the reasons for his beating. I didn’t hear it all but I do distinctly remember the words “Bobby” and “Mahoney” being mentioned as the kicks went in on this helpless bloke. He looked in a right mess when they finished and do you know what I was thinking all the while they were doing it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Good,’ I admitted, ‘you hit my mate, you fucking deserved that. I think I even had this confused thing going on in my young mind where I actually thought they were giving him a kicking because he’d hit my pal, like Bobby was a good guy beating up a villain for hurting a kid, as if he was Batman or something, only he sent his men to do it instead.’

  ‘Anyhow, when the beating was over, Jerry turned round and finally spotted me sitting at the back of this dark cupboard, watching it all.’

  ‘Oh dear.’

  ‘Oh dear, is right. I was the only witness and I was terrified. “What you doing there?” he starts shouting at me but thank god Jinky was with him because he said, “That’s Tina Blake’s kid, isn’t it?” and that took the wind out of Jerry’s sails, because me ma was family and he knew Bobby liked her. They made me climb down out of the cupboard and Jinky took me away from Jerry and explained how Cassidy was a very bad man who was going to do some really bad things and hurt people, so they had to hurt him first to stop him. I lapped that up because it went along with my Bobby-Mahoney-as-masked-vigilante theory. Next thing, Jinky has taken a pound note out of his pocket and given it to me. A quid note was a lot back then. He tells me that’s for being brave and a reward for never saying anything to anyone about this, then he gives me a message and tells me to run to the club and give it to Bobby. He tells me “If you dae it right, Bobby will give you another pund.” So I run off to deliver the message. I can’t remember the words but it was something vague like, “the problem’s over”. I see Bobby and tell him. He smiles at me, ruffles my hair, says I’m a good lad and, true to Jinky’s word, gives me another quid. It was a grand day’s work.’

  ‘I can see how that might have started something,’ Palmer admitted.

  ‘They knew they could trust me after that. I started running errands, simple stuff, messages for other members of the crew. At first I didn’t understand the messages I was given but, as I got older, I worked them out. It didn’t matter. I was practically family and I wasn’t going to tell the police anything, was I?

  ‘Bobby kept telling me to “stick-in” at school, so I could go off and do something with my life. When I came back in the holidays he gave me bar work, which I was glad of. It was only when I finally left college and wanted to come b
ack to the north-east that I seriously considered working for him. Times were changing and I knew he could use someone with half an ounce of brain; he was being advised by the likes of Jerry Lemon and Finney and they weren’t the brightest. Bobby was sharp as a razor, but he needed someone he could trust to hear him out and give him that second opinion.’

  Back then, I knew I could earn more with Bobby than by joining some pseudo, blue-chip outfit straight from the milk round, then slogging it up the corporate ladder for years, before I started making any real money. Plus, I could stay in the north-east and there weren’t many jobs going for bright young things here when I came out of my degree course. It’s ironic when I think about it now but he was against it and I had to persuade him it was the right move. I often wonder what would have happened to me if he’d just told me to fuck off.’

  ‘There’s not a lot of point in dwelling on the “what-ifs”,’ Palmer advised me, ‘we’ve all got regrets but you can only play the cards you’re dealt.’

  ‘True enough,’ I agreed. I didn’t want Palmer to think I’d come over all weak and sentimental so I snapped myself out of it and said, ‘So, are we having a proper drink tonight or what?’

  I got monumentally drunk that night. It was the only way I could deal with what I’d been forced to do to Matt Bell. I was going to help his little girl’s murderer to evade justice and, if I didn’t, I was finished. There was no way I could survive without that five million. Everyone in my crew thought less of me because of it, none of them understood how I could keep an oath sworn to a child killer, but this wasn’t some stupid pact that involved my name or honour. Emma was the most precious thing in my world and I had sworn on her life that I wouldn’t harm a hair on Baxter’s head. There was no way round that, because I wasn’t going to risk anything where my daughter was concerned, not even the slim chance that the words of my broken oath might come back to haunt me years from now, that I might somehow be responsible for some unspecified piece of bad luck that I would never forgive myself for. I knew that, if anything happened to my little Emma, my life was as good as over. Without her I’d be a basket case; worse than Matt Bell.