The Dead

by Howard Linskey

  ‘Bound to have,’ confirmed Kinane.

  ‘I killed six men for Bobby Mahoney and one woman,’ Crowe admitted suddenly, snapping out of his bible-speak. ‘I think about them every day and pray to God to earn his forgiveness.’

  ‘He might forgive you but Northumbria Constabulary most definitely will not,’ I reminded him.

  ‘What do you want from me?’

  ‘I want you to tell me about another man you killed, Alan Blake.’

  ‘What do you want to know?’ he asked, ‘and why do you want to know it?’

  ‘I want you to admit that you killed him. I know it already, but I want to hear it from you.’ I was bluffing the man. Armstrong sounded convincing but I didn’t know if he was right about Crowe’s role in my father’s disappearance. ‘Then I want to know why he was killed and where he is buried.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I have my reasons. They’re not your concern.’

  ‘And if I tell you, you’ll leave me to continue my work here?’ he asked me.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  It took the Reverend Michael Crowe a long time to summon up the nerve to talk about it. He wasn’t the only one who was nervous. I had to hide the way I was feeling inside. I was so close to finally understanding what had happened to my father after all of those years of wondering. I had to resist the urge to shout at Crowe to come out with it.

  Finally he said, ‘I was a different person then.’ He was explaining or rather justifying himself, ‘Godless, lost, in great pain. I drank and took drugs and I did terrible things for money. Bobby Mahoney ordered me to kill Alan Blake because Blake had stolen from him. The man I was then never thought to question that.’

  ‘Alan Blake stole the Stuart & Brown payroll and tried to keep it all for himself?’ I prompted.

  ‘Yes,’ Crowe seemed relieved I knew a little of it already.

  ‘How did he do that?’

  ‘Bobby’s lads were trying something new. Instead of them all disappearing with the money after a job and lying low, they reckoned it would look better if they handed it straight to someone else and were seen in public shortly after. There were two getaway cars that day; one for the men and one for the money. That way the lads could be seen sitting in a pub in the city-centre minutes after they’d pulled the job, which put the police on the wrong track.’

  ‘Not a bad idea, but why was Alan Blake trusted with the money?’

  ‘I doubt he was anybody’s first choice but someone will have vouched for him. Usually no one was foolish enough to steal from Bobby Mahoney.’

  ‘But he was, and he got away with it to begin with. Why did he come back?’

  ‘How do you mean?’ he answered.

  I realised there was no point asking the Reverend why my father had blown his cover and returned to the north-east years after stealing from Bobby. Crowe might have been anointed by God, but he wasn’t a mind reader.

  ‘Where did you find him?’ I asked instead.

  ‘He was hiding out in a friend’s flat in Scotswood. The friend was away in Northern Ireland with the army. We were told where he was staying and I went down there.’

  ‘How did you kill him?’

  ‘With a knife.’

  ‘And what did you do with the body?’

  ‘Got it out of there and buried it where Bobby told me.’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘On a building site. There was a trench already dug, part of the foundations of the new supermarket they were building. His body is under the car park.’

  ‘Thanks for the information.’ I told him, and he just couldn’t help himself. He had to ask me.

  ‘Why ask about Alan Blake now, after so many years? What was he to you?’

  ‘I’m David Blake,’ I told him, ‘Alan Blake was my father.’

  ‘Jesus Christ.’

  ‘Won’t help you,’ I said, ‘I told you that already.’

  42

  The Reverend Michael Crowe must have given up a longer than usual prayer to his God when we left him sitting in the kitchen unharmed. I couldn’t see the point in killing the man. He might have admitted to the murder of my father, but he didn’t order it. The man who did that was already dead, killed by me years later, an irony I’d been wholly unaware of until now. When I left that church I walked up to the car and before I climbed in I leant against it and took a few deep breaths. I felt like something invisible was crushing me all of a sudden, robbing me of breath. I’d been getting feelings like this more and more lately. I didn’t need a doctor to work out they were some sort of stress-related panic attacks, but there was fuck all I could do about them. Who wouldn’t have panic attacks in my world?

  ‘You alright?’ asked Kinane.

  ‘Hunky fucking dory,’ I told him and climbed into the car.

  ‘This would have been a big deal once,’ I told Joe Kinane. We were looking down on the red brick, flat-roofed so-called supermarket, closed down now and awaiting redevelopment; which was code for ripping it all down and starting again from scratch. This building would have been the pride and joy of the supermarket chain’s family once, these days it was the embarrassing uncle. It had probably been opened by a local celebrity back in the seventies; a TV presenter or ‘comic’, now it waited for the bulldozers.

  ‘There’s a Tesco near us five times the size of this,’ said Kinane, confirming why it would soon be consigned to memory.

  We walked across the car park and I couldn’t help wondering if we really were walking on my father’s grave. There was no real reason for Crowe to lie about that. When we reached the front door of the supermarket we stopped, because it was boarded up and we could go no further. I was wondering why I had even bothered to come down here. Myself, I didn’t want a gravestone or a shrine of any kind for Emma to feel guilty about if she didn’t come to visit me every week. They could burn me and scatter the ashes on the pitch at St James’ Park when nobody was looking. As I stood on my father’s final resting place, I felt nothing at all. Kinane looked troubled though.

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’ I asked.

  Kinane looked at me, then he glanced back at the front of the supermarket. There, on the wall, was a faded wooden plaque with a metal plate on it. There was an inscription and I took a step forward so I could read it. I was right. The place had been opened by a northern comic but that wasn’t the bit that made my blood boil. There, under the comic’s name, was the date the place had been opened and it was four years before my father had finally disappeared.

  ‘Get back round to that lying bastard,’ I told Kinane, ‘and get Peter and Chris to go with you. I want you to give that Reverend a proper going over. The kind even his precious God would flinch to look at.’

  I knew Kinane could handle the job of beating the truth from Michael Crowe without me and I didn’t want to waste any more time on this fool’s errand involving the fate of my father. There were things I had to put in order before the mad Russian oligarch realised I was going to be of no use to him. I wasn’t exactly drafting my last will and testament here but it certainly felt like it.

  I caught up with Joanne in the park. Emma was in her pushchair chomping on a bright red ice lolly. I gave my little girl a kiss and she smiled but went back to slurping on her lolly. I asked Joanne to walk with me.

  ‘I’ve got something for you,’ I said. Joanne had her rough edges, but she’d always been straight with me, a friend to Sarah and great with Emma. I reached into my inside jacket pocket, took out an envelope and handed it to her. She stopped pushing the buggy. She looked shocked.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘It’s not your P45, if that’s what you’re thinking. You’ve been terrific with Emma and a big help to Sarah. This is just…’ I’d rehearsed this conversation in my mind but now I was a bit stuck for words. Joanne wasn’t a member of the firm, she was practically family… ‘look upon it as an insurance policy… in case our circumstances alter. If Sarah or me… and Emma obviously… if anything were to cha
nge. Say we had to move away or something like that.’

  ‘And you couldn’t take me with you?’

  ‘Precisely,’ I said. ‘Obviously we would want to but if we couldn’t.’ I was glad she was thinking in terms of moving house or country and not the very real prospect that her employer could wind up dead at any point. ‘I want you to have some security and it’s my way of saying thank you for helping Sarah when she’s not been feeling too great, you know.’

  She nodded, ‘So what is it, like? A season ticket to the Wonga-Dome?’

  ‘The deeds to your flat.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The apartment is yours, legally, you own it. It’s fully paid up. From now on you can decide if you want to keep it, sell it, move a bloke in with you, whatever.’

  ‘But I can’t…’

  ‘Yes you can,’ I told her and when she tried to give the envelope back to me, I took both her hands in mine and repeated, ‘yes… you… can… and I want you to. You’ll be doing me a favour. This is one less thing for me to worry about and, believe me, right now I need that.’

  ‘I don’t know what to say.’

  ‘Good.’ I kissed her on the cheek, waved to my daughter and said, ‘I’ll see you both at tea time. I’ve got a meeting.’ And I left Joanne standing there clutching her brown envelope.

  Sharp was late for our meeting, very late, but I wanted him to be there, so I made everybody wait. When Joe Kinane walked in I took him away from the rest of the guys and into my office so I could speak to him privately.

  ‘We gave Crowe a proper beating like you told me,’ he explained, ‘he was loudly renouncing his God when we left him. I kid you not.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He stuck to his story, never deviated from it once, told us over and over again that Alan Blake had stolen the proceeds from the wages robbery. Bobby had realised he was stalling on handing it over and he got suspicious. He thought Alan Blake might be planning to leave the country. Apparently he bought a car from Hunter and that was the final straw. Bobby sent Crowe round to retrieve the money and kill him. The Reverend reckons he knifed the man in his bed while he slept, then took his body down to the supermarket site and dug a hole in the foundations and dropped him in. We used to do that sort of thing back in the day, before we got the pig farm.’

  ‘And you are sure he wasn’t lying?’

  ‘About as sure as I can be,’ he told me.

  ‘But that doesn’t make any sense. My mother was in touch with him for years after…’ and I stopped then, because it suddenly hit me in a flash. I was an idiot, a complete fool and I needed to stop acting like one in front of Kinane. I could feel my face burning with the embarrassment of it and I had a sick feeling deep in my stomach. ‘Fuck him anyway,’ I said, in as dismissive a manner as I could manage, ‘it doesn’t matter. It was years ago and we’ll never know the real truth, so what do I care.’

  ‘Right,’ he replied and when I said no more he finally left me to it.

  ‘When Kinane had gone I sat down in my desk chair and stared out of the window. Considering I always prided myself on being the clever one, the guy who worked things out before anyone else, it had taken me a very long time to finally see what had been blindingly obvious for years. Reverend Crowe had been telling the truth; Alan Blake never left Newcastle for a job down south. He was killed back in 1972 and buried under that supermarket car park, which meant my mother had lied to me all of my life because, whoever Alan Blake was, he could never have been my father.

  There was laughter coming from the big office next to mine and I forced myself to get to my feet and join them all. Sharp had finally arrived and was holding court.

  ‘I was absolutely shitting it,’ he explained to a captive audience, consisting of Palmer, Kinane, Vince and Robbie. ‘My DCI called me into his office, introduced me to the brass, sat me down and said, “we’ve been watching you, DI Sharp. We’ve been watching you very closely in fact.”’

  ‘I didn’t know what to say, so I just said “oh right”.’

  ‘And he looked at me some more, and I’m sitting there expecting at any moment for him to say, “Detective Inspector Sharp, you’re under arrest”. Instead he said “Safe pair of hands” and I was still none the wiser, so he finally adds “that’s what I think, that’s what your colleagues say about you, so that’s what the Chief Constable is thinking. It might not be glamorous but it’s exactly what we need right now”.’

  ‘Well, at this point I’m looking at him like he’s been drinking or something but I just say, “Thanks very much,” and finally the Chief Super chips in and says, “So you’ll do it for us, Sharp? You’ll be our safe pair of hands?”’

  ‘And I say, “Of course, sir,” because I’m so bloody relieved not to be in handcuffs, but I still have no idea what he’s banging on about. Then he stands up, so I stand up and he says, “congratulations, Acting Detective Chief Inspector Sharp,” and he shakes my hand. I almost fell back down in my chair again. When I walked in there you could have cut the atmosphere with a knife. I thought they were all giving me the silent treatment,’ he said, ‘turns out they were all just really busy.’

  ‘I have to say that is fucking priceless.’ I told him.

  ‘That’s not the best bit,’ said Sharp.

  ‘Tell him the best bit,’ said Palmer.

  ‘What’s the best bit, Sharp?’ I asked.

  ‘I have been given a special brief,’ he said, ‘to combat organised crime and bring down the local gangsters. And guess who is top of his wish list?’

  ‘Me,’ I said.

  ‘You,’ he confirmed.

  ‘I think this deserves a drink,’ I told them and we poured one for everybody. When we were holding them, I raised mine and the others followed suit.

  ‘A toast,’ I said, ‘to Acting Detective Chief Inspector Sharp… acting being the operative word. May his quest to bring down the notorious gangster David Blake be a long and fruitless one.’

  ‘I’ll drink to that,’ Sharp told me with a grin, ‘and I strongly suspect it will be,’ and we clinked our glasses together.

  It was a nice moment and I needed one. This was one less thing for me to worry about, but my troubles were a very long way from over.

  This wasn’t just any old meeting. This was me getting everyone together to talk about Armageddon; a new scenario, which would see the business ticking along somehow without me. I even included Amrein and he showed up a few minutes later, because everyone needed to know how to work together if I was no longer around. We went through everything, starting with the Drop and the political connections Amrein had worked to our mutual advantage. Then Amrein left us and we covered every other aspect of our business and how I wanted it to be run if I went somewhere and never came back. At the end, when we had discussed the bits of our business too sensitive for the ears of our solicitor, I invited Susan Fitch to join us and we signed a bunch of papers that gave trusted members of my crew access to funds, property and corners of our business that up till now had been my sole preserve. I answered a lot of questions that day, but the toughest was explaining just why I had called them in to talk about all of this now. I told them we were at war with the Stevic brothers and I didn’t want them to be left high and dry if something should happen to me. Nobody seemed to suspect there was more to it than that.

  The only question I couldn’t answer was the one that was bothering me the most; exactly what I was going to say to Yaroslav Vasnetsov when I was face to face with him once again and he asked me to take his first Joe into Russia.

  43

  I wanted to be on my own so I went for a drive. It was late and I should have been home, trying to catch up on sleep, but that wasn’t going to happen. I kept churning it over and over in my head. If my dad wasn’t my dad, who the fuck was? My mother wasn’t like that, she never had a boyfriend or a bit on the side the whole time I could remember, so who the hell could have got that close to her? Who did she have an uncharacteristic soft spot for? She didn�
��t know anyone except the men who came into the club and the members of Bobby’s crew.

  Mum never really spoke about the lads in the firm. She thought they were all over-grown boys who couldn’t take care of themselves, let alone a woman. I can recall her moaning that none of them had a clue how to treat a lady and they were all such scruffy buggers but she never really talked about them that much, except to bad-mouth them. She had a grudging respect for Bobby, he employed her after all, even though she knew how he earned his money, but she would have never got herself mixed up with him. She had no way of knowing he had murdered her husband but Bobby Mahoney was married at the time and my ma wasn’t the sort to let herself end up as a gangster’s mistress. So I didn’t have to drive out the idea that I might have inadvertently murdered my father and was shacked up with my sister. My life was fucked up, but it wasn’t that bad. No, I knew Bobby wasn’t the one, but who was?

  She did talk about Jinky Smith though and he was always dressed smart back then and, judging by his success rate, he certainly knew how to talk to a lady. Could she have fallen for his chat, I wondered? Had he given her a glass of wine, laid on the patter and somehow talked her into his bed? It was possible. She must have been bloody lonely without any male company. In fact, now I thought about it, she did mention Jinky more than the others in Bobby’s crew. But no, that was stupid, she never had a good word to say about the man, all she ever did was do him down. She was always calling him ‘god’s gift to women’ in that snide sarcastic… and hurt way all the time. She sounded hurt. All of a sudden I got a prickly feeling all over my skin, which came with a sudden memory, but not one that involved my mother. It was meeting Michelle again at Privado that night I walked in unexpectedly and how did she greet me, even though I knew she had always had a massive crush on me? Like I was some kind of tosser, that’s how. ‘Look what the cat dragged in’.