Cath Staincliffe - Dead Wrong

‘Listen,’ I made my voice hard, ‘you telling me that you didn’t do it is not enough. I need an account of what happened and I need it on the record. Especially if you intend to disappear later. If I go back with just your word and no proof to back it up, they’ll be pulling your grandma in for questioning before the week’s out. I need your statement. You say Luke was set up, I need proof. And if you haven’t got the guts to come back and tell-’

‘They’d kill me!’ He became agitated.

I switched on the tape. ‘Who’d kill you?’

‘You don’t get it, do you? They’d kill me. I go anywhere near Manchester, I’m dead.’

‘Who? Why? Look -just tell me what happened,’ I said gently.

He rocked back and forth on the bench a couple of times. Was he going to bolt?

Then he began to talk. ‘We were coming out, been a good night, one of the best. All this energy, you know, no grief. Everyone’s flying. Luke needed to throw up, he’d been mixing it, too much booze. We were gonna meet him outside, on the corner.’

We? Him and Ahktar? I didn’t interrupt.

‘There’s these two guys, this big guy and another one. We’re just going past them and one of them, the shorter one, grabs Ahktar from behind. He’s got his arm up his back and he’s holding his face so he can’t turn round. At first I thought they were fooling around but then they hustled him into the alley. I’m going “Hey, hey, what are you doing, man? Get off him.” They thump him in the guts and I get my knife out, right?’ He swallowed, coughed violently and rubbed his hands on his thighs. The sun was hot. I felt a bead of sweat trickle down my side.

‘This guy turns and he moves so fast, he’s twisting my arm, nearly breaks my wrist and I drop my knife.’

‘Where’s the other one?’

‘Still got Ahktar, he’s got his arms round his neck, holding him up. The one by me, the big one, gets the knife and…shit.’ He squeaked the last word and fished in his pockets. Pulled out a packet of Benson & Hedges. It wasn’t a cigarette he lit up but a small joint. Oh great, I thought. Now he gets busted for smoking dope before I get the full story. But no one blinked an eyelid. He dragged hard, sucking the smoke and holding it deep in his lungs. He erupted in a fit of coughing again.

‘He’s bending down, right?’ His voice was tight. ‘And he’s just got the knife and Ahktar kicks out, kicks him in the face, hard. The guy rears up, he’s screaming and…it happens so fast he sticks the knife in Ahktar. Then, I can’t remember, it was all going off at once.’ He took another toke, held it in, released a stream of smoke.

‘What did Ahktar do?’

‘He smiled,’ there was a note of disbelief in Joey’s voice. ‘The guy lets go of him and starts jabbering on. Ahktar sits down.’

‘What was he jabbering about?’

‘I didn’t get it all. Lot of it was Punjabi or whatever.’

‘They were Asian?’

He nodded. ‘But he was swearing, at his mate. “You fucking prat,” he said, “we weren’t supposed to do him, just a little warning. You stupid cunt, you stupid, stupid fucking cunt.” He’s really going mental. I shouted to them to get an ambulance and I called Ahktar. He’s slumped over. I tried to get near but the guy that done it’s between us. I’m calling, “Ahktar, Ahktar,” and the guy stares at me. I say, “He needs an ambulance, he could die, man.” He just stares at me, really freaky, then the little one starts screeching again, really losing it. “You done wrong,” he’s going, “you done wrong, man. What’s he gonna do when he finds out?” On and on he goes till the big one tells him to fucking shut up. I could see all this blood soaking through Ahktar’s jacket and I legged it. I wanted to get help. The big guy comes after me.’ He shuddered and drew hard again on his joint. ‘He pulled me back into the alley. He got me real close and said he’d find me. if I breathed a word he’d find me and he’d kill me. He asked me if I understood. I said yes. Then he got my hand. He twisted my finger back.’ He rubbed his little finger, looking at it as he spoke. I could see it was slightly crooked. ‘It snapped, he broke it.’ Joey began to shake. ‘He asked me again if I understood and I said yes. Christ, it fucking hurt. Then he broke the other one next to it. I was crying, right, and he slapped me. Told me to shut up. He said if he ever heard of me, any whisper about it, he’d find me and he would kill me very slowly, bit by bit.’ Joey paused. ‘I went home,’ he said flatly, ‘I rang an ambulance up on Oxford Road. Then I went home.’

I recalled Mrs Deason, the fleeting gesture she’d made with her hands, on the brink of telling me what they’d done to Joey’s fingers.

‘Did you go to hospital?’

‘No. My gran, she strapped them up.’

I watched the bowlers for a while. The gentle banter as one player missed her stroke. Joey ground the roach out underfoot. Coughed some more.

‘And Luke? When the ambulance arrived they found Luke with Ahktar. Unconscious.’

He shook his head. ‘They set him up.’

I wondered how. Had Luke come looking for Ahktar and been given a timely blow to the head, or had they found him by chance, passed out perhaps. A suspect of convenience. They must have wrapped his hand around the knife to get the prints.

I asked Joey to describe the men. He did, and I quickly recognised the picture that he drew of the larger man, the one who had used the knife. Rashid Siddiq. Killer turned witness.

‘I got to go.’ He made a move.

‘Hang on, I’ve a few more questions.’

‘Christ,’ he rocked with impatience. The dope didn’t seem to have settled him any. He sniffed again. Summer cold or cocaine eating away his nostrils? Joey D was a mess.

‘Why do you think they killed Ahktar?’

‘It was an accident,’ he said simply. ‘They were meant to give him a warning about something, that was all. The guy just went ballistic when Ahktar kicked him.’

And if he hadn’t had your knife, I thought, the blow wouldn’t have been fatal.

‘If you talked to the police,’ I began.

‘No way.’ He went rigid. ‘I already said, no police, no lawyers, nothing.’

‘You could get protection,’ I said.

‘Oh yeah?’ he said sarcastically. ‘Twenty-four-hour guard, safe house, you reckon? All that for me? No way.’

‘What would they want to warn Ahktar about?’

‘Search me.’ He twitched again, an involuntary movement as though his skin were alive. ‘Look, I got to go.’

‘I’ve nearly finished. You hadn’t heard anything about Ahktar getting involved in anything?’

‘Dodgy? No. Bit of a nerd really, Ahktar. Nice guy but he wanted to be a lawyer, lot of studying. He partied at weekends, getting happy with the rest of us but that’s all.’

Secretly, I agreed. His recreational drug use was not reason enough for the heavies to come along and threaten him.

‘Do you remember Zeb having a go at you that night, in the club?’

‘Yeah.’ He was puzzled by my interest.

‘What was that about?’

‘He wanted a loan – he owed a lot of money. He was trying it on, promised to pay me ten per cent interest. I have this trust fund,’ he explained. ‘I told him no way, might as well flush it down the bog, never see it again. So he tries getting all heavy, threatening me, says he’ll put me out of business. I laughed at him. I’m only getting stuff for friends, I’m not a dealer, for chrissakes.’

‘Did you ever get stuff from Zeb?’

‘Once, maybe twice. And a couple of times he gets some from me. Dunno why, he could get more than I ever saw. Reckon he’d been helping himself, got a bit greedy, needed to top the bag up. He’d be paying over the odds getting it from me – last in the chain you get the highest mark-up. No head for business.’ Joey was serious. We could have been talking about building society flotations.