The Damage (David Blake 2)

by Howard Linskey

  He paused while he waited for me to answer and frowned when I said nothing. ‘What’s the matter Blake? Feeling ashamed are we? I doubt that. You’ve got to have a heart to feel shame. I mean, come on, your lot don’t give a fuck who you kill.’ He turned back to look at me and frowned again. I was still trying to digest what he’d just told me. Then DI Carlton did a funny thing. He actually smiled.

  ‘He didn’t know,’ he sounded triumphant, ‘look at his fucking face. He didn’t know!’ and he shook his head in wonderment. ‘Well, how about that. You look like someone just punched you in the guts, Mr Blake. You look a bit sick.’

  ‘Should we bring you a bucket, Mr Blake?’ asked his Detective Sergeant, with a sneer. ‘Don’t want you to make a mess all over those expensive shoes of yours.’

  Carlton wasn’t through yet. ‘What’s the matter? Was Frank Braddock’s old girlfriend not meant to be caught in the crossfire? You telling us your lads fucked up and shot a civilian when they were only supposed to take care of Braddock?’

  ‘You do look a bit rattled Mr Blake,’ added the DS. They were enjoying this. ‘Feeling a bit remorseful about causing the death of an entirely innocent girl?’

  ‘Is there something you want to tell us?’ prompted Carlton. ‘Well, is there?’

  I steadied myself before I said, ‘I’ve nothing to say to any of you, nothing at all.’

  45

  .......................

  For a few days after they told me Simone had been killed, I actually thought I was going a bit mad. I didn’t leave my hotel room. The more I thought about it all, the more I was convinced my head was going to explode. I even started blaming the God I don’t believe in for my bad luck. What the fuck had I ever done, I asked him and myself? All I ever tried to do was my best, for my family, for my friends, for the people who depended on me. Everything I did, I did for them. And this was what I got in return. I kept playing the last few seconds of Simone’s life over and over in my mind. Did she die instantly, or did she suffer? Had the rounds from the shotgun made a bloody mess of that pretty face of hers, like DI Carlton said? Was she frightened? Did she scream before she died?

  There were a few dark days I can tell you but, in the end, I realised it really wasn’t my fault. I didn’t order Kinane to kill her. She just chose the wrong moment to step into Braddock’s car, that’s all. Call-me-Tanya’s story is as sad and simple as that. She never once told me he was the guy who got her so messed up, so how was I to know she’d be there that night? For fuck’s sake, I was the one who was trying to save her. Why would a woman like Simone fall in love with a man like Braddock? What the hell did she see in him, apart from the danger – the danger that cost her everything in the end?

  There was a stage when I was thinking so much about Simone and poor Danny that it felt like my brain couldn’t cope with it all anymore, but I got through that low point and carried on. What choice did I have? There are still too many people who rely on me, who need me to make the right choice, for me to just switch off from the world. If I do, everything would come crashing down around me.

  Simone’s picture appeared in all of the papers, unsurprisingly, because she was a young, beautiful and tragic victim. The newspapers all printed stories on her, but they couldn’t make up their minds how to describe her. Some ran pieces saying that she was a bright, educated young woman who had inexplicably befriended a man with a secret life she was wholly unaware of. To back this up, they printed accounts from a friend of hers who said she thought he was a property developer. But others ran much darker stories about the perils of drug addiction, safe in the knowledge that you cannot libel a dead person. They quoted anonymous sources who said Simone snorted cocaine in nightclub bathrooms and even at tables in bars, which was clearly a crock of shit. I mean, Simone did a bit of coke now and then but she was hardly likely to snort it in a crowded wine bar.

  Her father was widely quoted on his desire to start up a charitable trust in her name. The Simone Huntington foundation would devote considerable resources, pledged by her dad and his city backers, to getting young men and women off drugs. There would be school visits to persuade children to refrain from using them altogether. ‘Perhaps then,’ her father was quoted as saying, ‘my daughter Simone will not have died in vain.’

  Not long after I read that piece I got a call from Palmer, ‘it’s here,’ he said, and I could hear the relief in his voice, ‘the shipment’s finally arrived.’

  ‘Right,’ I said and hung up. It looked like I wouldn’t have to kill the Turk after all. The heroin drought was over.

  The trial of Ron Haydon came and went with astonishing speed. He was an embarrassment to the region and his party, in particular those who’d backed him or worked for him for the past twenty-nine years, all of whom either abandoned him or turned on him. Everyone just wanted this case to be over and for Ron to go away.

  Someone persuaded Ron Haydon that it might be better to plead guilty under the circumstances and, seeing no way out, this he duly did. The media consulted the legal world and the consensus was that he would get a couple of years in prison.

  The judge accepted his plea and made a long speech about the seriousness of the crimes, pointing out that they were not just illegal in themselves but a breach of the public trust and that, as an MP, he was expected to be ‘whiter than white’ in the eyes of both the law and the electorate. This made me smile, as most people I know think politicians are all in it for themselves; spend their entire working lives lying, to ensure they don’t contradict official party policy, and have their noses stuffed so deeply into the trough it’s amazing they don’t choke to death on their own greed.

  Ron was told a custodial sentence was almost inevitable, then bailed until sentencing. Finally he was allowed to leave the building with his wife and son, to face a posse of cameramen eager to capture the exact moment of his downfall for posterity. I was there too, standing on the steps of the court room, right where he could see me.

  It was early evening by the time he emerged to a broadside of flash bulbs, and he tried to walk down the steps with as much dignity as he could muster. His wife clung to his arm to support him, which would have taken some courage on her part as he was being bombarded with questions like, ‘what happened to the money Ron?’, ‘what did you spend the cash on Ronnie?’ and jibes of ‘what did you do Ron-Ron?’ all of which he studiously ignored, but you could easily see the hurt and humiliation in his face. Photographers walked backwards in front of him, snapping away with their cameras like he might suddenly disappear and rob them of tomorrow’s front page. He was halfway down when he saw me standing there. Ron stopped, looked at me, opened his mouth as if he was about to say something, thought better of it, and gave the tiniest of nods before walking on. It was the nearest I would get to an admission of defeat.

  Detective Sergeant Wharton made the front pages too. The copper who was paid to arrange the disconnecting of the CCTV in the Quayside, so I could be gunned down with no witnesses, received a bit of a shock one morning when the BBC called to tell him he was the subject of that evening’s Panorama programme. It seemed he was part of a small group of detectives in the north east of England who had been taking money from crime barons, one of whom was formerly based in Glasgow and now resided in a Thai prison.

  The BBC are a thorough lot. Once they were tipped off about Wharton they set to work. They had footage of him having cosy conversations with the Gladwell brothers, shaking hands and drinking together, and film of Wharton extorting money from drug dealers, together with recorded phone conversations of him agreeing to intimidate a witness in a murder trial. To seal it all, there was hidden camera footage of DS Wharton snorting coke and kissing one of his many mistresses in a seedy club. Wharton refused to cooperate with the BBC and instead jumped into his car and fled, leaving his wife and two kids in their semi-detached, wondering what the hell had just hit them. Fortunately the programme’s contents had been leaked in advance to the Northumbria constabulary who, thoug
h acutely embarrassed by its allegations, weren’t about to be humiliated further by their inability to arrest their own man. He was picked up at the end of his street and charged with a wide variety of offences. They reckon he will get at least ten years.

  My visits to Danny became harder and harder. It was the consultant who broke the news to him that he would never walk again so at least I was spared that. The doctors talked to him about eventually moving from the hospital to a rehabilitation centre about sixty miles from Newcastle. The idea was to work as hard as possible to restore as much movement as they could, using physiotherapy and all manner of high-tech electric pulse machinery. In Danny’s case this seemed to be a complete waste of time. He had already given up.

  As soon as I knew he was paralysed I threw money at the problem. I didn’t skimp on anything. I got medical reps in who must have thought it was their lucky day. Everything they tried to sell me I said ‘Yes’ to and never once tried to beat them down to get a deal. Then I got the builders round and they set to work. I had them double-up their work gangs and I paid bonuses for early completion, but I made sure the work was sound. I didn’t want anything to come off in someone’s hand when the job was done.

  When the work was finished, I’d transformed Our young’un’s house. It had everything; ramps at the front and back and there was a lift that he could wheel a chair into that took him upstairs. He had special showers on both floors and beds that moved up and down then sank to floor level at the touch of a button. I put plasma TVs in each room, along with anything else I could think of that might keep him amused or occupied.

  When it was done I showed Our young’un the photographs of the conversion. ‘Thanks’ he said like I’d just brought him that morning’s paper. I was a little annoyed at first. Not everyone comes home from an accident to that kind of set-up. I reminded myself what happened to Danny, for a man like him, who’d been a soldier, who liked getting around town, who enjoyed pubs and girls and his mates around him, well, it was about as bad as it could be for him.

  Eventually he said the words I knew were coming and had dreaded hearing. ‘You should have left me where I was, bro. I’d have been happier than this.’

  He meant I should have left him to carry on slowly drinking himself to death, shambling round the seedier pubs of the city for the rest of his life. No job, no friends to speak of and no prospects. Now he told me he would have been better off like that, ‘at least I could walk,’ he reasoned. I couldn’t think of anything to say in reply to that.

  ‘I can see you don’t want me around at the moment, Danny,’ I told him, ‘and I understand why. You blame me for this.’ He didn’t contradict me. ‘Maybe you’re right too. I’ll leave you in peace, but there are some people I want you to meet first.’ I went out through the door without another word but I didn’t close it. I wasn’t going to introduce them to Danny. I figured it would be better if they did that without me around.

  Sergeant Johnson and Corporal Connelly had been back from Afghanistan a while now, but not so long that they’d have fully come to terms with what happened to them. Both were victims of an IED, ‘which sounds like a venereal disease, I always reckon’ Corporal Connelly said, which was when I knew he was the right man for me. Most importantly, they were both former members of the Parachute Regiment.

  I nodded at them then and they took that as the signal to go in; Sergeant Johnson hobbling on crutches because he had one leg blown off in Afghanistan and Corporal Connelly in his wheelchair because he had lost them both. They’d taken the trouble to wear their uniforms to come and visit Danny and for some reason that made me feel tearful.

  ‘Hello brother,’ called Corporal Connelly to Danny, as he wheeled himself into the room. ‘No, it’s okay, don’t you get up on our account!’ and he started laughing at his own joke. I knew that if there was anyone Danny might listen to in his despair it would be these guys. They were my last hope.

  I was sitting in the first-class lounge at Heathrow, waiting for my flight to be called. I had a newspaper open, lying flat on the table in front of me. There was a picture of Alan Gladwell next to the headline ‘British Paedophile gets record sentence in Bangkok Hilton’.

  ‘Bangkok Hilton’ is the catchy little nickname for Bang Kwang Prison, six miles outside the Thai capital. Seven thousand inmates, all lifers, spend fifteen hours a day locked down in cells there, each containing two dozen people. Being a new arrival, Gladwell will have to spend his first three months in leg irons.

  The newspaper article explained how ‘evil sex tourist’ Alan Gladwell ‘preyed on underage boys by offering them money and gifts in exchange for sex,’ which was of course true. The piece continued that he shot videos, then offered the boys to other middle-aged, white westerners as part of a sophisticated but twisted paedophile ring that had just been busted wide open by the Royal Thai Police. Of course that last part was not true and neither was the assertion that ‘Gladwell was carrying large quantities of heroin when he went through Bangkok International Airport’ because the heroin wasn’t his. That had been planted on him by Pratin’s highway patrol man when his car was pulled over.

  There was no need to bribe the customs men. They were actually only doing their job and the tip-off they received came from Pratin. When the customs guys found the H and the photos of Gladwell with the young boy, they made him a top priority case. He eventually managed to get hold of a lawyer and the British Embassy, who rather stiffly commented that he would receive ‘the usual consular assistance’ due to him, but he could hardly deny everything could he? I mean it was him in those photos after all and, if he was guilty of that, then he could just as easily have been guilty of peddling drugs and heading up a paedo ring. We had some very nice, convincing material planted onto a memory stick which Pratin ‘found’ in Gladwell’s hotel room. There wasn’t much outrage expressed against the Thai authorities when Gladwell was arrested and charged, even from the men in his own firm, who were still trying to come to terms with the fact that they had been ‘working for a poof’ all this time, as Fallon put it. The man clearly didn’t make any distinction between sex with consenting adult males and sex with conspicuously underage boys, but I did, and so did the judge in Thailand. The two things they hate most in that country are drug dealers and Western paedophiles, hence the sentence Alan Gladwell received. Forty-two years in jail. Everybody agreed the sick bastard deserved it.

  Neither of the remaining Gladwell brothers was the sort to go quietly. Fallon had convinced them Amrein wanted a meeting to discuss their joint stewardship of the city. On the way to that meeting they were diverted to a warehouse at the edge of Glasgow where Fallon’s boys tortured them until they gave up the details of their money. Then they were both beaten to death with pickaxe handles and their bodies dropped into the Clyde, so that everybody knew there was a new man in charge of the city.

  We now have half of the Edinburgh drug trade and a significant share in Fallon’s entire Glasgow operation, though I prefer to see myself as a sleeping partner in the latter. I’ll leave Fallon to get on with it, just so long as he pays me my dues every month – and he will too, because he knows what will happen if he doesn’t.

  I glanced down at the blurred picture of Alan Gladwell and wondered if I could even contemplate what it must be like to be in his shoes right now. Forty-two years. There’s no way he can last that long in a place like the Bangkok Hilton and I very much doubt he would want to. It’s ironic. He wanted me dead, and now he must be praying for death every minute of each new day.

  EPILOGUE

  ......................................

  Hua Hin

  As soon as I saw the compound up ahead I knew something was very badly wrong. Usually the gates were closed, and one of my Gurkhas would be walking the perimeter, with another just inside the metal gates. Today the gates weren’t just unlocked, they were gaping wide open and our bodyguards were nowhere to be seen. My first thought was Sarah.

  I didn’t have time to worry if it was a tra
p. I’d seen a fair number of my enemies killed or jailed lately but there were still plenty of people in this world who might want me gone. The easiest way to hurt me was to come at me through Sarah. I drove straight into the compound.

  As my car passed through the gates and rolled swiftly along the driveway, I looked frantically to left and right and saw no one. Where the hell was Jagrit? If he and his men had been taken out by someone, I didn’t give much for my chances. I parked as close to the front door as I could, leapt out of the car and went into the house. I stopped in the hallway and listened. Absolute silence.

  ‘Sarah?’ I didn’t shout, just said her name loud enough for her to hear if she had been in the living room or upstairs in a bedroom. No reply. I started to get a feeling of complete dread. I was already responsible for Simone’s death and my brother being paralysed. If anything had happened to Sarah I didn’t know what I would do. Maybe I deserved to lose her, but she didn’t deserve this.

  ‘Sarah?’ I called her name this time, loud enough for anyone in the house to hear it. I ran up the stairs, two at a time. Her bedroom door was open and I burst in to find…Nothing. The place looked normal, no signs of a struggle, but no trace of Sarah either. My mind was churning over every possibility. Jagrit had realised there was a threat and they had gone. He just hadn’t bothered to tell me about it. No. That was impossible.