Howard Linskey - The Dead

I called Sharp and got him out of bed. I arranged a crash meeting with him, then got Palmer to come and pick me up. My head of security drove me quickly out of the city, heading north, glancing into his mirrors now and then to make sure we weren’t being followed by any plain clothes plod. When he had convinced me we were alone, I got him to turn the car around and drive south until we reached the Angel of the North. Palmer stayed in the car. Sharp was already waiting for me and he wasn’t happy to be there.

‘It’s a bit bloody public this, isn’t it?’ he hissed, as he filed in next to me and we began a slow walk towards the two hundred tonnes of rusting steel that constituted the Angel. His eyes were all over the place, as he checked out the bushes for surveillance teams, but we were virtually alone here at this hour. It was a cold, misty morning that would deter any but the most hardy.

‘Yeah, you’re right,’ I said, ‘that old bloke with the flat cap walking his dog has got to be with SOCA. Get a fucking grip, Sharp, it was your idea for us to meet here in the first place.’

‘That was ages ago. Before I was convinced the bastards were out to get me.’

‘The bastards are out to get all of us,’ I informed him, ‘and this time it’s me they’re after, not you, so listen up, because this is important.’

We stood a few yards from the Angel, which towered sixty feet above us, and I briefed Sharp on everything the Detective Superintendent had told me about the murder of Gemma Carlton; including the police assumption that I was responsible for her death.

‘But that’s crazy,’ Sharp said, ‘you’d never be that daft.’

‘Or that evil,’ I reminded him, ‘you forgot that bit.’

‘Aye, well, that too,’ he conceded.

‘I’ll need you on this big style.’

‘I’m on it already, and so are forty other detectives, but nobody told me they were linking you to it. Jesus,’ he shook his head, ‘they know, don’t they? They know I’m your man on the inside. That’s why they’re not telling me anything.’

It was a possibility, but I couldn’t allow Sharp to be deflected by self-doubt. ‘That’s bollocks. They only hauled me in last night and they didn’t get any sense out of DI Carlton until recently. You’ll be briefed. I’ve no doubt about that. You’ll be expected to come up with the evidence to put me away.’ Then I told him about Austin’s request for me to investigate the case in parallel with the police operation.

‘That’s a bit unusual isn’t it?’

‘Highly unusual, but Austin is worried they only have one line of enquiry and he doesn’t believe we did it. He thinks the real murderer is going to walk. He might hate us but he doesn’t want the girl’s killer to get away with it, does he? I want you to straddle both investigations; ours and yours.’

He didn’t say anything to that and I could sense there was something else. ‘What is it?’ I asked him.

‘It might be nowt,’ he said, ‘but the timing’s interesting.’

‘What?’

‘Henry Baxter was arrested last night.’

‘Was he? For what?’

‘Careless driving and driving with excess alcohol.’

‘He was pissed?’

‘Well, he was over the limit.’

‘Is this legit?’ I was asking Sharp if Baxter really had been drink-driving or if it was some ruse by the police to bring him in and question him about me.

‘Seemingly so; I made enquiries and he was pulled over by uniform for driving erratically. It’s a bit of a coincidence him being taken in like that and you getting dragged there a few hours later though.’

‘Maybe that’s all it is. I can’t see Henry Baxter disappearing into the witness protection programme because he’s been pulled over for drink-driving, can you?’

‘No,’ he admitted, ‘but stranger things have happened. Anyway, he’ll be bailed later.’

‘I’ll keep an eye on him,’ I promised. ‘Oh, and I nearly forgot. There’s something else you can do for me. I need to find a man called Jinky Smith.’

‘Who the fuck is he when he’s at home?’

‘One of the old guard, like you suggested, so ask around. Start earning your money.’

‘Yeah, alright,’ he mumbled, ‘but if I run out of luck I might not get to spend any of it.’

There wasn’t much more to be said and we both fell silent as the old guy with the walking stick finally drew level with us. His progress up the hill had been tortuously slow and he looked incredibly weary. I knew how he felt.

With everything that was going on I could have done without the next meeting I’d arranged, but I’d promised Joe Kinane, and I didn’t piss that man off lightly. Today we were going to sit down with his eldest lad.

Kinane had three sons, all of them carved out of something like granite, and each one of them named after a famous Newcastle United player; Kevin, Peter and Chris; Keegan, Beardsley and Waddle, though he regretted that when Waddle eventually signed for Sunderland. He even attempted to use Chris’ middle name for a while, but unsurprisingly it didn’t stick. He had a daughter too. She was married with kids and had nothing to do with our business.

‘What did you call her then?’ I asked him once, ‘No girl ever played for the Toon.’

He laughed, ‘I suggested Jackie, after Jackie Milburn, but wor lass went mental at me,’ and he grimaced at the memory. ‘We called her Carol in the end.’

Kevin Kinane was an enormous bloke whose fearsome appearance was enhanced by his smashed-in teeth. A while back he had been set upon by some heavily-armed thugs who worked for a dealer of ours who had gone decidedly native. Braddock’s men couldn’t resist smashing the unarmed Kevin in the mouth with a gun, leaving him with a hole in his teeth and earning him the nickname ‘Christmas’, as in ‘all I want for Christmas is my two front teeth.’ He had a couple of false ones fitted but didn’t take to them, so he simply discarded them and went around with a gap instead. When Kevin smiled it made him look even more sinister than before.

I had been giving Kevin Kinane more responsibility lately, to see if he could handle it. He had gone from overseeing our distribution of H at the Sunnydale Estate to effectively controlling the entire operation across the city. I could trust him because he was Kinane’s eldest son and as close to family as I had working for me.

‘Our Kevin wanted a word,’ Joe told me as they sat down in my office at the Cauldron. I could see the impatience in Kevin’s eye. Already his dad was interfering.

‘Let him speak for himself, Joe.’ I said, and Kinane sat back in his chair looking edgy, like he was itching to put words into Kevin’s mouth for him. Kevin shot his father a glance that clearly meant ‘back off and leave me to it’.

‘What did you want to see me about?’ I asked, though I knew already.

‘The future,’ he told me, before quickly adding, ‘of the firm. If you ask me, H has had its day. There’s no profit growth potential there. We’ve bottomed out and it will never get any bigger. We should be concentrating our efforts in other directions.’

‘Such as?’

‘More coke, some ketamine, a bit of E, but mostly it’s the coke. Blow is where it’s at.’

‘I agree with you. So what does that tell you?’

‘Give up the heroin. It’s high risk and the profits aren’t big enough to justify the jail sentences that go with it. The estates are beyond saving, so cut the dealers adrift and let them fight it out between them till there’s a top dog. You don’t need the hassle and we can always wholesale to whoever’s left standing.’

I watched Kevin Kinane intently. There was intelligence there. His dad was a powerful force but he didn’t have the smarts of his three sons. Maybe they’d actually attended school or perhaps they got it from their mum. More than likely they’d had to live by their wits on the streets for so long they’d developed a natural instinct for this kind of thing.