Howard Linskey - The Dead

‘You are right Kevin, H is pretty much dead. There’s no real future or growth there and we should concentrate less on it. We can scale down, take an arm’s length view and put our mind to other areas where we see long-term potential. That’s smart thinking.’

‘Cheers,’ he said.

‘But you are only half right,’ I told him, ‘we need to keep control of the heroin trade in Newcastle and it worries me that you don’t understand why.’

‘To keep order,’ interrupted Joe Kinane, and we both gave him a look this time.

‘I’ll come back to that,’ I told them. ‘Firstly, we still get valuable revenue from H and we can’t do without it yet. We are not a PLC and we don’t have to have growth every year to keep shareholders satisfied. H is still a high-profit, sizeable revenue business in this city. Why give it to someone else when it took us so long to nail it down in the first place?’

‘We can still make money out of the wholesale, without getting our hands dirty,’ Kevin told me. ‘I thought that was what you wanted.’

‘I do want that, but I know I can never have it. If we wholesale to whoever is left standing, as you put it, we’ll end up with another Braddock running the place, not paying us on time, buying from other firms when it suits him, and his boys will be running riot. Joe is right, we have to keep order on those estates. They might be absolute shit holes but not everyone on them is vermin. We have to stop teenagers from hosing each other every time there’s a trivial argument about respect or we’ll end up like those estates in Peckham and Hackney. They’ve got kiddy gangs doing stabbings and drive-bys instead of business. We still have some rules; no crack cocaine, no getting kids high, no pimping girls out to pay for their habits, no unnecessary violence for the sake of it and no mindless killing. This is one of the main reasons the police tolerate us. They don’t like us. They will lock us away if they can get the evidence but always, at the back of their minds, they know we keep order and they ask themselves what would emerge in our place if they took us all down tomorrow.’

‘I didn’t think of that,’ he conceded, and I liked that he hadn’t tried to pretend he knew it all.

‘Then there are more sentimental reasons. I still love this city and I don’t want Newcastle turning into the South Central Projects.’

‘Fair enough,’ he had conceded my point, but I could tell he was deflated. Kevin thought I didn’t value his opinion, but only a fool wants to be surrounded by ‘yes-men’. Where was the value in that? I needed people who would challenge me about the best way to run the firm, as long as they did what I told them once I’d made up my mind.

‘You’ve done a good job for me, Kevin,’ I told him, ‘you deserve a bigger role in the firm. I want you to take on more responsibility for me.’

‘Just name it’, he said, and I could see the look of quiet satisfaction on Joe’s face. He’d got what he wanted. I didn’t mind that at all because Kevin Kinane had potential.

‘I will,’ I told him, ‘we’ll talk again soon. There is one thing you can do for me today though; get the lads together at the Mitre tonight,’ he nodded, ‘and leave us to it for a bit will you. I need a word with Joe.’

The whole firm turned up at the Mitre. We filled the upstairs bar of that old pub and the ancient floorboards creaked under the weight of so many huge blokes. We opened the bar so they could all have a few pints and Vince was in charge of the ancient vinyl jukebox. That used to be Hunter’s job. Once, we’d have been treated to a diet of eighties rock, which never let up. Now that he was gone, Vince had assumed the mantle of DJ and his choices were just as archaic, though different to Hunter’s. You wouldn’t think it to look at Vince, with his suit and tie and permanent presence at our bars and clubs, which churned out endless R amp;B, that his taste was really indie, bordering on Goth. That evening, while we waited for all of the lads to turn up, we got Echo and the Bunnymen, Teardrop Explodes, The Alarm and Hazel O’Connor. Then he started cranking out the really Suicidal Sid stuff with The Sisters of Mercy and The Mission before The Smiths finally took the biscuit with There Is A Light That Never Goes Out.

Finally, when Spear of Destiny’s They’ll Never Take Me Alive faded away, I gave Vince the nod. Everybody had assembled by now so he turned off the jukebox. I needed to speak before they all got too pissed to listen. I drew the lads in close and held up the black and white, ten-by-eight that Austin had given me so they could all see it.

‘This is Gemma Carlton,’ I said.

‘Nice,’ answered Peter Kinane approvingly.

‘She was.’

‘Oh.’ That shut him up.

‘Two nights ago she was killed. This poor lass was murdered and her body dumped.’

I told them everything I knew about the manner in which she died, described the location of the body and gave them all the relevant information. Once they’d digested the fact that a pretty, young thing had been senselessly murdered, I dropped the bombshell.

‘There’s one other thing. Gemma Carlton was the daughter of Detective Inspector Robert Carlton.’

I watched them all for their reaction. They all knew DI Carlton and what he was trying to do to us. I wanted to be sure that none of them had a fucked-up idea of what constituted justice in our world and had taken matters into their own hands. Instead all I saw was a sea of shocked faces.

‘I want this picture circulating. I want everyone to see it. You ask around. This isn’t about business, so the normal rules do not apply. It doesn’t matter what you have heard about her old man or what he has said about me. I don’t care that he wants to put all of us away for a long time. His daughter didn’t deserve this and neither did he. No one does. You got that?’

There was some unintelligible mumbling at that but they were all in agreement.

‘I want you to find the fucking low-life who did this thing. Firstly, I want this done because it’s the right thing to do and that ought to be reason enough.’ I let them digest that and, when there were no dissenting voices, I continued. ‘Right now the Polit are all fired up and they want to crack heads. They are bad enough when someone comes after one of theirs, so you can imagine what they will be like when it’s the only daughter of one of theirs. They are short on brains and common sense at the best of times and they are not thinking straight. They have no leads so they’ve got a very foolish idea into their empty heads. They think that, since Carlton was investigating us, maybe we were somehow responsible for this evil thing.’

My lads are pretty hard to shock, they’ve seen plenty of stuff between them, but you could tell they were floored by this one. There was a sound like a collective sharp intake of breath. Then all of a sudden it was like I was a politician being heckled from the floor, but it was only the competing cries of, ‘No fucking way!’, ‘Hadaway and shite man!’, ‘Have they gone fuckin’ mental like?’ and a half dozen other similar shouts that were lost in the angry din. They were furious and resentful, as I knew they would be, and I ran the risk that this would weaken their determination to find Gemma’s killer, but I needed to let them all know exactly what was at stake here.

I had to hold up my hands to restore order, ‘I know,’ I assured them, ‘I know, and I share your anger and disgust, but they are hurting right now and not thinking clearly. So it’s our job to find the real killer and hand him over.’

‘Fuck that,’ said Kinane, ‘when we find the cunt, we’ll slice him to pieces.’