‘You swore to me!’ Baxter pleaded, ‘You swore an oath on the life of your child! You can’t let him touch me!’
‘I swore I wouldn’t harm or kill you Baxter,’ I reminded him, ‘I swore none of my men or anyone hired by me would harm or kill you. Mr Bell doesn’t work for me and I haven’t hired him to do anything. I merely agreed to his request to give him a little alone-time with you, one on one, just the two of you.’ All the while I was speaking Matt Bell was removing items from the tool box and setting them down. Baxter was struggling hard against the cuffs, but he couldn’t free himself. ‘I think a man deserves that, don’t you? He deserves the chance to look his daughter’s killer in the eye and make him suffer. That’s what I call justice.’
Bell turned to me and I told him, ‘You have five hours. Whatever is left after that my boys will dispose of but don’t take a minute more.’
‘Nooo!’ Baxter was shouting. ‘Pleeease no!’
Bell ignored him. ‘I won’t, and thank you.’
‘Nobody will ever find him,’ I told Leanne’s father, ‘they won’t even look, but we’ll make sure there’s nothing left to find.’ I meant that we would take Baxter’s body off to the pig farm. Baxter knew that too and his eyes widened even further. Sweat was plastered all over his forehead.
‘Don’t do this!’ squealed Baxter. I could tell by the smell in that warm room that he’d already soiled himself, but Bell didn’t care. He was past caring about anything now except the time he was about to spend alone with the man who’d killed his daughter.
I walked over to the table and picked up the airline ticket. ‘You won’t be needing this,’ I told Baxter, then I turned to Matt Bell.
‘When it’s over, take Baxter’s money and go abroad somewhere. Stay away for a while.’ He nodded like he understood but I knew he just wanted me to leave. I could tell he was eager to get started.
Baxter was swearing and pleading, almost frothing at the mouth now as he rocked from side to side, desperately trying to break free. ‘I think it’s time to shut you up, Baxter,’ I said and Bell reached for the gaffer tape. I watched as Baxter struggled but he couldn’t prevent it from being wrapped tightly round his mouth to stifle his screams. Not that anyone would have heard him out here in any case.
Kinane, Palmer and I watched as Bell slowly walked back to the table and selected the claw hammer. I got the impression he had given this day a great deal of thought. Baxter’s terrified eyes widened even further as Bell stepped towards him once more, raised the claw hammer and brought it down fast and hard, striking a sickening blow to Henry Baxter’s kneecap. His loud but muffled screams were almost too much, even for me.
‘You deserve this, Baxter,’ I told him, ‘remember that, all the while it’s happening to you and, by the way, the tool box was my idea, but castrating you before you die was his. Goodbye, Baxter.’
I turned away and walked through the door with Kinane and Palmer. We heard the muffled screams of the child killer all the way back across the warehouse floor. They grew more and more desperate and were only finally stifled when the huge outer door was pulled shut behind us.
‘Why didn’t you tell me you were going to let that little girl’s old man at Baxter?’ asked Kinane when we were back in the car on the road to the city.
‘Because I needed Baxter to see you angry and resentful,’ I told him, ‘otherwise he would have been deeply suspicious and would never have released the five million. This way everyone wins.’
‘Except Baxter,’ added Palmer, ‘and that’s the way it should be.’
Amrein had arranged for someone who looked remarkably like Henry Baxter to meet us in Newcastle and take the airline ticket and Baxter’s passport, which we had quietly lifted from his apartment. The next day he flew from Newcastle to Luton, then took a train into London and the Underground to Heathrow. From there he caught a flight to Bangkok. With Baxter’s passport, he sailed through Customs. When he touched down in the Thai capital he checked into a hotel for a few nights and ate in several restaurants, leaving a paper trail for anyone curious enough about him to enquire, then he checked out one morning and vanished. Henry Baxter disappeared forever. No one ever saw him again and nobody cared. He was just another dubious westerner lost in the fleshpots of Bangkok.
The death of Leanne Bell became another unsolved cold case, destined to lie on file for decades. It was the best solution for everyone and, with Baxter seemingly exiled abroad, no one could point the finger of suspicion at Leanne’s old man when he also went missing for a while. One of our lads cleaned up the mess and got rid of the body. He was a veteran of the firm and he didn’t say too much about it but he did confirm one thing; what he found there proved to him without doubt that every minute of the last five hours of Henry Baxter’s pathetic life was spent in unendurable agony.
36
We’d barely seen the back of one murder trial before we were embroiled in another, but this time I suspected the accused might not be guilty. I didn’t like Golden Boots, not many people did, but I didn’t have any great desire to see him banged up for life for a crime he hadn’t committed; having said that, I far preferred it to be him than me.
His barrister seemed to be struggling to combat the CPS case.
‘The prosecution is big on circumstantial evidence and the accused’s character, or lack of it,’ Susan Fitch had observed, ‘but they are weak on motive. He has to concentrate on that. As far as I can see they have yet to conclusively establish any kind of motive for the killing of Gemma Carlton and if they can show he had no reason to murder the girl then they are halfway there’.
She was right about one thing; when the trial started, the Prosecution tore straight into Golden Boots’ character.
‘Do you watch pornography on the internet?’ asked their barrister.
Golden Boots, wearing a suit and tie for possibly the first time in his life, shrugged, ‘Doesn’t everybody?’
‘But you watch a lot of it, don’t you?’
The footballer sniffed, ‘Not as much as you probably.’
That earned him a ticking off from the judge before the lawyer continued.
‘The police did a check on your internet history. They found a great deal of pornography. In fact I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that was pretty much all they found.’
‘I like to play Angry Birds too,’ he smirked, ‘unless they got confused and thought that was a porn site.’ He laughed at his own weak joke, but nobody else did. The lawyer ignored him.
‘I appreciate that in these more liberal times it is not entirely uncommon for young, adult males to view porn online.’
‘You’re telling me,’ answered the footballer.
‘But not many would view the sites you look at for recreational purposes.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Girls being punished, adolescent girls being punished, schoolgirls being punished,’ the lawyer recited.
‘Oh, well yeah, but that’s bollocks isn’t it, they aren’t real schoolgirls and it’s all an act isn’t it? It’s just a bit of caning and naughty stuff before they get down to the real thing but it’s all basically harmless, you know, fake and that.’
The lawyer continued unabated, dispassionately rhyming off a list of extremely hardcore porn sites, ‘MILFs being punished, ex-girlfriends degraded, embarrassed girls stripped in public, real women groped in the street. Are they all basically harmless too?’
Golden Balls took a while to stammer an answer to that one. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘you don’t always know what you are going to get when you land on those sites do you? And if you use porn, which I do, a lot, as you said, you get a bit desensitised to the vanilla stuff.’ I could see at least two members of the jury squinting their incomprehension at that phrase. ‘So, you know, you try a bit more specialist material.’
‘Yes, I see, and your specialist stuff all seems to revolve around the theme of women being tied up, punished and degraded doesn’t it? You don’t like women ver
y much do you?’
‘Course I do. I’ve had loads of them.’ His joke was greeted with a stony silence in the courtroom.
‘Indeed,’ said the lawyer and something about the way he was taking his time made me realise he was saving the best bit till last. He didn’t disappoint. ‘And what about the rape videos?’
‘Eh?’ was all Golden Boots could respond with.
‘The rape videos,’ repeated the lawyer and you could have heard the proverbial pin drop at that point, ‘the ones you used a search engine to find – the nasty videos that aren’t on the more conventional pornographic sites. I have viewed one of those videos, one of the ones you downloaded for your personal pleasure and I have to say it was completely sickening. But I will allow you to answer me, so we can hear your side of things. You can tell us why you downloaded a video which contained fifteen minutes of a woman screaming and sobbing while she was stripped and raped by two men in her own home, while a third man videoed the whole thing.’
‘I saw that by accident,’ protested the Premiership’s finest.
‘You went on that site by accident?’
‘Yes!’
‘Seventeen times?’
‘Look, I don’t think it was real or anything. I reckon she was just acting. I reckon they was all acting in all of them videos.’
‘Really,’ the lawyer went on, ‘so you like to watch video footage of men pretending to rape women? Why ever would you do that?’
When Golden Boots finally answered he did so in a very small voice indeed, ‘It was just a laugh, that’s all. I never meant nothing by it.’
‘It was just a laugh?’ repeated the lawyer, ‘no further questions.’
Susan Fitch told me that Golden Boots had no real motive for killing Gemma Carlton. She’d said it was the big flaw in the Prosecution case, but their barrister never even bothered to counter that. He didn’t just admit there was little motive. The way he portrayed it, motive was meaningless when dealing with someone as disturbed as Golden Boots. ‘We may never reach an understanding of the motive of this spoilt footballer for this violent act,’ he told the jury. ‘Was he slighted in some way by the young girl he had slept with, then discarded, as if she was little more than a piece of meat? Had she flirted with a teammate and made him jealous, did she gossip about his bedroom performance, leaving him open to scorn or ridicule, did she fail to comply with some degraded sexual request? We may never know but it is enough for us to realise that here is a man who has been denied nothing since the day he first signed professional terms as a footballer. He thinks he can have anything he wants, whenever he wants it. It is the Prosecution case that Gemma Carlton, in some way, however slight, managed to annoy, offend or irritate a man with a long history of casual violence, often against women, to such a degree that she became the victim of an assault that led to her death. He even managed to retain the presence of mind to don gloves before carrying out this heinous act of strangulation on his innocent victim, driving her out into the woods and dumping her body as if it were refuse.’
After that little speech, I sensed that Golden Boots was irretrievably fucked.
37
I was as certain as I could be that Golden Boots was going to be convicted of the murder of Gemma Carlton. Everything stacked up; the evidence all pointed to him as the killer; he’d slept with her, she’d been rebuffed and slagged him off, he’d argued with her, she was seen at his party that night and the DNA proved she’d been driven out to the woods in one of his cars, either by him or someone who was protecting him. The presence of her purse and mobile phone in his house was the final piece of evidence in the Prosecution’s favour but, every time I thought about it, I kept feeling the whole thing was just a bit too easy.
I know I shouldn’t have cared. I was off the hook, but I was thinking like Austin now. I didn’t want the man who had done this to be walking around the streets of our city while the wrong guy did time for Gemma’s murder. I thought about it all for a while and suddenly remembered the CCTV footage of Gemma in Cachet with that other girl before they met Golden Boots. We’d never had a satisfactory explanation from Gemma’s best friend for her absence from the party on the night her flatmate died. Louise Green had said fuck all to the DC who’d interviewed her, according to Sharp, and wasn’t very forthcoming when Kevin went to see her either, but I wondered if he had been asking her the right questions.
There was no particular reason why I found this whole thing unsatisfactory. I certainly had enough on my plate already but, like it or not, I was involved in Gemma Carlton’s case, which was probably why I found myself instinctively turning my car into the small street of terraced properties that housed the student digs Gemma had shared with Louise Green.
The girl who answered the door was not unattractive, but clearly thought she was. You could tell by the baggy sweater she wore, which did its best to disguise whatever curves she had. The leggings were shapeless too, like pyjama bottoms. She wasn’t much older than eighteen, but she looked like she’d given up already. Maybe it was the effect of sharing a flat with two very attractive girls like Gemma Carlton and Louise Green. She was telling the world she wasn’t interested in being pretty and girly, so there. She looked like the kind of lass who wrote long heart-felt poems late at night when she was alone but never showed them to anyone.
‘I’m here for a quick word with Louise,’ I told her and she turned away from me without a word, called her flatmate’s name up the stairs then left me standing on the doorstep.
Louise Green eventually padded down the stairs to greet me, a look of trepidation on her face. ‘What is it?’ she asked, before she stepped down off the bottom step.
‘I’d like a word if I may, about Gemma,’ I explained.
‘But I’ve already been through it all,’ she said, folding her arms across her chest defensively. She was dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt but was still wearing full make-up, and her hair had been straightened. ‘Are you with the police?’
I didn’t confirm or deny it, I just said, in an authoritative voice, ‘I’ve been in the court all week. I just have some questions for you about the night Gemma died. Is it okay if I come in?’ and I crossed the threshold before she could reply.
‘Alright,’ she said doubtfully, ‘we can talk in my room.’ I guessed she didn’t want the mousy friend listening in, so I followed her up the stairs. She led me into a tiny room with a bed, a desk and a wardrobe, but not much else. There were piles of clothes on the bed, but little evidence of study.
‘I’ll make us a brew,’ she suggested, ‘tea or coffee?’
‘Tea’s fine, thanks; milk, no sugar.’
While she was gone I looked around the room, but there was nothing of any note. I walked over to the window and stared out at the rooftops. It was a grey day with ominous-looking clouds hovering. A moment later I heard the back door open and watched as Louise Green came out in a hurry. I noticed she had her coat on and she didn’t look as if she was putting the rubbish out. She dashed out through the back gate and was gone.
‘Fucking bitch,’ I said aloud and I turned to go after her, only to find the slight, mousy-looking girl waiting for me on the landing. She gazed at me intently.
‘You the police?’ she asked me, ‘or some sort of private eye?’
‘Private,’ I said. I should have knocked her out of the way and shot down the stairs after Louise Green but there was something about the way this girl was looking at me, with a combination of interest and nervous hesitancy, that made me wonder if I might actually get more out of her. She looked like she had something to say.
‘I’m David, by the way. My mates call me Davey,’ and I held out my hand to her. She shook it limply.
‘Theresa,’ she told me.
I smiled at her, ‘I popped round to ask your mate there a few questions but she went to put the kettle on and… well it looks like she isn’t coming back.’
‘I’ll make the tea,’ she said and I followed her down the stairs. ‘You won’t
get anything out of Louise,’ Mousy told me, ‘she’s too scared.’
‘Scared of what?’
‘Taking the blame.’
‘What for?’
‘Everything she’s been up to with Gem,’ she looked like she couldn’t wait to twist the knife into the girl who ran out on me.
‘You mean the drugs?’ I offered.
She didn’t want to put it into words. ‘All of it; being out every night, not bothering with essays or studying, going to the clubs where the footballers hang out all the time, not coming home after, all of that.’
When we reached the cramped kitchen she took two clean mugs from a cupboard and made tea. We sat at a small table opposite one another.
‘Must have been lonely for you if they were never around.’
‘I didn’t care.’ And I realised I had the chance to exploit this girl’s loneliness and isolation.
‘So it was Louise leading Gemma astray then? Not the other way round, like some people are saying?’
‘Who’s been saying that? Gemma was really nice,’ she took a reflective sip of her tea, before adding, ‘at first.’
‘Until all Louise wanted to do was party.’
‘She just wants to get drunk and be with boys the whole time. I didn’t. I came here to get a degree. Gemma was the same to begin with but she only really moved out of her parents’ house because they were strict with her. They didn’t like her going out, always wanted her home early, you know.’ It sounded like the classic case of a girl who hadn’t been allowed to do much suddenly finding herself off the leash and not knowing when to stop. ‘And Louise can be so…’
The Dead Page 21
