The Dead db-3

by Howard Linskey

  But now Remzi has had enough. He wants to quit and enjoy his old age. That’s why I’m asking my brother for advice. I keep him well out of harm’s way these days, since it is my fault he’s in that wheelchair. He stopped three bullets and came close to dying. Danny will never walk again because of me, he’s a civilian, but I still respect his opinion.

  ‘I’m taking over the whole thing,’ I said, ‘paying him a lump sum for the consideration, taking it all in-house.’

  ‘What about his contacts?’

  ‘We’ll take on some of his people, the ones with the know-how. They’ll keep up the contacts and we’ll ensure the money keeps on coming but, without Remzi’s cut and a few other savings I can think of, we should be considerable amounts of quids-in.’

  ‘Why not?’ he asked, ‘that Russian connection is the future.’

  Danny was right. We’ve been pushing product into the east, opening up a cast-iron supply chain with contacts in the Russian mafia Remzi introduced me to.

  ‘That’s what I figured. I’ve just got to negotiate a little golden handshake and he will duck out; the lucky fucker.’

  We talked through the practicalities of taking Remzi’s empire off his hands until we finally ran out of things to say about it. I was pleased Danny was so on the ball. He’d had a very tough time of it these past couple of years. It took him a long while to come to terms with the fact that he would never walk again but I reckoned a lot of his recent improvement was down to the unarmed combat known as wheelchair basketball.

  ‘I’ve got a day lined up at our hotel for that charity gala dinner we’ve been talking about.’ I said.

  ‘Great,’ but then I told him the date and his smile faded.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked, ‘I thought you were mad keen to do this.’

  ‘I am, it’s just…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, that’s my birthday like,’ he seemed a bit uncomfortable mentioning it, as if it was unmanly to care that it was your birthday at his age.

  ‘Yeah, well, we can have a beer on the night,’ I said, ‘at the dinner I mean.’

  ‘S’pose,’ he said, but I could tell he was narked because he thought I didn’t give a shit about his birthday.

  ‘So how have you been? Lately I mean?’ I asked for two reasons; firstly to change the subject away from his birthday but also because I was genuinely concerned about him.

  ‘I still have my bad days,’ he admitted, ‘but I’m a lot better than I was. You know that.’

  He was right. When he first took those bullets in the spine, I was terrified he was going to die on me. As soon as I realised he would make it, I had a different problem. He kept telling me he’d have preferred to die rather than face life paralysed and I know he blamed me for it. If he hadn’t been working for the firm then he would still be walking. It was a visit I organised from two former members of the parachute regiment, who’d had their legs blown off by roadside bombs, that finally started to convince my brother his life wasn’t over. That was just the beginning though. The rest has been a daily struggle that I think he’s finally starting to win.

  ‘I’ve settled for where I am and who I am,’ he said. ‘Don’t get me wrong, I’d have the use of my legs back in a second,’ and he clicked his fingers to illustrate his point, ‘but, I’ve thought about this a lot and I’m probably a better person these days than I was before… you know… all this.’

  ‘You are slightly less of a cunt than you were,’ I conceded.

  ‘Thanks. Anyway, life is reasonably sweet,’ then he added a little self-consciously, ‘I’ve been seeing a bit of that Linda.’

  I couldn’t place her for a moment, ‘Linda that works the bar at the Cauldron?’

  ‘Fuck no,’ he laughed, ‘she looks like Andy Murray in drag.’

  I laughed, ‘actually, you’re right, she does a bit.’

  ‘Then credit me with some taste. No, I’m talking about Linda who dances for us at Cachet.’

  ‘That Linda? Fuck me Our young’un, how did you manage that?’

  ‘Used me charm bro, used me charm,’ he said smugly and I was pleased for him.

  ‘I would have bet against you landing her if you’d used Rohypnol but, well done. What is she though? Nineteen?’

  ‘No,’ he scoffed, ‘she’s twenty-four.’

  ‘I wondered why you kept her on. You usually retire them at twenty. So only half your age then? Reckon it’ll last?’

  ‘Don’t know, don’t care, life’s too short to worry about that shite isn’t it? How many relationships do you know that last forever. Look at you and that Laura bird.’

  ‘You have a point.’ Was there actually a time when I had considered me and my mad ex Laura to be a permanent item? If there was, it was a lifetime ago.

  ‘Anyway, we’re just enjoying ourselves and we can still do stuff, you know sexually and that. I don’t mind you asking.’

  ‘Asking? I wasn’t asking and I won’t be. Whatever you and her get up to in the wee small hours has got fuck all to do with me.’

  ‘I’m only saying that I can still do stuff. I know some of the lads think I can’t but I can and…’

  I put my fingers in my ears at that point and started chanting, ‘La, la, la, la, la, I’m not fucking listening, la, la, la, la.’

  Trouble with Our young’un is he is almost impossible to embarrass, so he just rose to the bait, ‘she’s got a load of toys and she does all sorts of stuff with them. Did I ever tell you how she does this thing with her finger…’

  ‘Oh Christ no, I’ve gone blind, shut up man before I puke. Have another pint for fuck’s sake.’

  He laughed, ‘You’re just a prude, that’s your trouble. No, I’m heading off after this one.’

  ‘Bloody hell. You’re a changed man Danny. It must be that young lass of yours.’

  ‘It isn’t just that,’ he informed me ruefully, ‘hangovers aren’t much fun when you’re hauling yourself around in one of these things. Were you planning on stopping like? I wouldn’t have thought this was your sort of place.’

  ‘No, it’s okay. I’ve got to be off too.’

  ‘Back home to wor lass?’

  ‘Not just yet.’

  ‘She hasn’t seen you for a fortnight.’

  ‘I know,’ I admitted, ‘but I need a word with Sharp. I’ll head home after that.’

  His face became a grimace, ‘oh god.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re not still…’ and he didn’t finish but he gave me a look like I was some new species of idiot he’d only just discovered.

  ‘What?’ I repeated.

  ‘You know what,’ he informed me, ‘and you know my view an’ all, so I don’t know why you are bothering to tell me.’

  ‘I know your view but I thought it might have altered since we last spoke.’

  ‘No,’ he said firmly, ‘it hasn’t. I can’t see what good could come of it.’

  ‘Well, as always, Our young’un, I respect your opinion.’

  ‘Aye and, as always, you’ll fuckin’ well ignore it,’ he told me as I drained the last dregs of my pint.

  I was up on the roof of the Cauldron staring out at the night sky and I was here to meet Sharp. Down below me, the city was bustling along, lights gleaming from every window. Detective Inspector Sharp was my main man in Northumbria Constabulary. We had a few on the payroll but Sharp was our best-paid operative and his expertise and information had helped dig me out of more than one hole before now. He liked to meet me here because the building was right on the edge of Chinatown and he could access it through the big Chinese restaurant next door. He would simply flash his warrant card at the waiters then come up the fire escape.

  He was looking stressed when he arrived but I didn’t have time to ask after his well-being and I was keen to get home to Sarah. Sharp was the best I had at finding people but, surprisingly for him, he’d drawn a blank this time.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said when he’d concluded his explanati
ons, or were they just excuses?

  ‘I thought finding people was your speciality?’

  ‘It was,’ he protested, ‘it is,’ and he shrugged, ‘but you might have more luck with some of the old crew.’

  ‘Why me?’

  ‘Hey, I’m not being lazy. They just don’t like talking to coppers, you know how those old villains are, always think they are gonna be fitted up for something they haven’t done.’

  ‘Whatever could have given them that idea?’

  ‘Aye well, that was then, this is now. In the seventies if you were banged up for something you didn’t do, it probably meant you’d gotten away with a lot of stuff that you did.’

  ‘So you’ve not found out anything?’

  ‘Only what we know already; your father left town suddenly one day, a couple of years before you were born. There was some sort of job down south, by all accounts, and he never returned home but he kept in touch with your ma for years afterwards. There’s people who’ve corroborated this. She used to go off and see him and always assumed the family would get back together in the end. Then one day, as the story goes, the calls and the letters from your father stopped and he disappeared for good.’

  ‘I was about two years old when that happened.’

  ‘It looks like he left your ma in the lurch to bring up two little boys on her own while he fucked off out of it. He wouldn’t be the first or the last to do that, would he? But there are no records of the man anywhere.’

  ‘So it’s possible something bad happened to him down south?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s possible,’ he admitted, ‘or he could have changed his name and emigrated to Australia. We just don’t know.’

  I had never cared about what happened to my father before now. I had always taken the view that, since he walked out on ma, Danny and me when I was little and I don’t have any memories of the man, I didn’t give a fuck what became of him.

  Then we had Emma and it changed my view almost overnight. I could never imagine a time when I would be happy to sit down and have a pint with the old git, assuming he was still alive, but I was curious to know what happened to him and to hear from his own mouth why he did what he did, mainly because of Emma. I wanted to be able to tell her something about him, to be capable of answering her questions about her grandfather when she grew older, so I’d asked Sharp to look into it for me. Danny figured we should just leave it as a mystery, because there was nothing the guy could say to either of us that we would actually want to hear.

  ‘So you reckon members of the old crew might know what really went off before he left the city?’

  ‘I dunno, yeah, maybe,’ he admitted, ‘he used to hang round their old haunts and didn’t Bobby’s crew always know everything that went on?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I admitted, ‘but there aren’t many of them left,’ I reminded him, ‘they might all be dead…’ I was going through a list of old names in my head; Geordie Cartwright, Jerry Lemon, Mark Miller, Hunter, Finney and the man himself, Bobby Mahoney; all dead, every last one of them and I was responsible for more than one of those deaths.

  ‘There must be somebody,’ he said.

  ‘Maybe. Leave it with me. I’ll ask around.’ We stood there for a while looking out at the skyline until I said, ‘out with it then.’

  ‘What?’ he asked.

  ‘Whatever it is that’s bothering you. You’re still here and I thought we were done.’

  He exhaled, ‘I think I am being investigated.’

  ‘You always think that,’ I reminded him.

  ‘Yeah, I do,’ he said, ‘but what if it’s true this time? You still attract a lot of interest. Maybe someone followed you and saw me with you.’

  ‘Then you explain it away. I’m your high-level source, remember, your grass who’s selling everyone else down the river.’

  ‘That story might have held when you worked for Bobby Mahoney but who’s bigger than you these days? No one,’ he told me without waiting for an answer.

  ‘You sure they are watching you?’ I asked and he nodded emphatically.

  ‘I’ve been hearing things,’ he said, ‘they’ve been asking questions about me, speaking to colleagues, some I haven’t worked with in years. What else could it be but them thinking I’m bent? I reckon they are onto something. It’ll be ten years minimum if I’m caught, more maybe,’ he said.

  ‘I know,’ I replied.

  ‘So I need you to take this seriously,’ he urged me, sounding a little panicked.

  Detective Inspector Sharp didn’t strike me as the kind of man who would go quietly off and do ten years without cutting a deal and the only thing he had to bargain with was me. I figured I’d probably get life for that.

  ‘I am taking this very seriously Sharp,’ I told him, ‘believe me.’

  Basically, if Sharp went down, well, he would have to go.

  5

  I was wide awake, my body clock skewed by a doze on the flight home from Istanbul. As soon as I got in I went straight upstairs, because I knew Sarah was waiting for me and I was ‘on a promise’. The light was still on in our bedroom and I walked in to find Sarah lying on the bed, but she wasn’t alone. Our little girl was fast asleep next to a fully-clothed Sarah, who was passed out like she’d been drugged.

  ‘Hold that thought,’ I muttered to myself and trudged off to the spare bed.

  I left Kinane to stew in the cells overnight, so he’d know I was pissed off with him. He was bailed late the next morning and we picked him up off the street. He climbed slowly into the passenger seat next to Palmer, who drove away, then he turned back towards me, like he was trying to weigh up my mood. I must have looked pretty narked because Joe did something that he almost never did. He apologised.

  ‘Soz,’ he said.

  ‘What?’ I was being deliberately awkward. His form of apology made him sound like a surly teenager, so I was determined to treat him like one.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he told me, ‘but those two little cun…’

  ‘Deserved it?’ I interrupted him, ‘of course they did. They were vermin. A small part of me enjoyed kicking that little bastard in the face but I know that it achieved nothing and so should you. There’s hundreds like him and his mate in this city Joe, hundreds. Now do you want to become a one-man vigilante group, trawling the streets of Newcastle, looking for wankers like them and administering punishment beatings for the rest of your days or do you want to work for me instead?’

  For a moment I thought he was going to argue with me but then he seemed to think better of it. ‘I know you are right,’ he told me, ‘I do, honestly. It’s just,’ he groaned then, like he was reliving the moment when they cut us up, ‘I can’t bring myself to take shite from scummy little fuckers like them.’

  ‘No one says you have to Joe but beating them up on the side of the road, in front of three dozen passing cars, is just taking the piss. The police have to do something about that, no matter who you are and we are supposed to be keeping a low profile.’

  ‘I know, I know,’ he held his hands up, ‘I’m sorry. I am. It won’t happen again.’

  ‘It had better not.’ I told him.

  ‘Can you fix it?’

  ‘I’ll do my best, but you’ll have to go to court and you might have to plead guilty to something.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘There are too many witnesses for it to be called self-defence. You put that lad in the hospital and who’s ever going to believe they attacked you. Look at yourself man,’ I sighed, ‘no, you’re guilty and you are going to plead and apologise to the court. We’ll get the lawyers to come up with a convincing bit of bullshit about why you snapped that day and how you were provoked by them. That’s as good as it gets.’

  ‘But I’ve been inside,’ he reminded me. He was worried that might get him another custodial sentence.

  ‘That was years ago. I’ve already talked to Susan Fitch. You went inside but you’ve reformed your life since then. You’ve been an honest, upstanding member of soc
iety, who has worked in the entertainment industry as a night club manager ever since. You put your troubled past behind you.’

  Susan Fitch was our solicitor. She had been looking after members of the firm for nearly twenty years now and the police hated her for it.

  ‘What if they don’t buy it?’ he asked me, ‘what if they send me down?’

  ‘Then you’ll have nobody to blame but yourself,’ I told him, and he looked like he wanted to hit me this time, ‘I’ll do my best. I can’t promise anything more than that.’

  ‘You’ll be right Joe,’ Palmer chipped in, ‘no sweat.’

  ‘Pull over here,’ I told him because I had just spotted the familiar, balding, paunchy figure of Henry Baxter emerging from his apartment block. He was edging cautiously towards the kerb, like a blind man approaching a pedestrian crossing. Our accountant had been with us for more than two years now but he still treated Newcastle like it was chock full of muggers and murderers, who could leap out on him without warning at any time. We pulled over. He spotted us and climbed into the back seat next to me.

  ‘Good morning gentlemen,’ he said, his jowly face contorted into a yawn.

  ‘Sorry, am I keeping you up?’ I asked.