Howard Linskey - The Dead

‘No Joe, we won’t. You’re not thinking either. How is slicing him up going to persuade the police we had nothing to do with it? No, as much as it might disgust us, we hand him over and give them their man. He’ll get a life sentence and it will be hard time, the hardest there is. They’ll realise we are not the men they think we are, for what that’s worth. and it’s not much. Like it or not though, until we catch this sick bastard, normal business will be impossible for any of us, so that’s another reason we need to clear this up, and fast. That, and the fact that someone has put a poor, young lass in the ground and is still out there somewhere. Let’s make sure she’s the last one he kills.’

There were murmurs of agreement at that one. ‘You work your districts, you ask around and I want someone on this twenty-four-seven who can feed all of it back to me.’

‘I’ll do it,’ replied Kevin Kinane without a second’s hesitation, ‘like you said, we can’t do any normal business till it’s sorted and we don’t want some sicko out there walking around our city.’

I admired his eagerness to take this on for me and I knew that might be worth something. I figured this would require leg work and tenacity. It needed someone with the energy to keep at it and Kevin Kinane wanted to prove himself to me. This was his chance.

‘Good lad Kevin,’ I said, ‘you meet me daily until this is over. All of you, I want every scrap of information feeding into Kevin. We’ve some bent law on our books that’ll help but they need leads and we are the people to provide them.’

Joe and I left the Mitre and drove back into the city together. ‘What do you reckon?’ I asked him.

‘Not a glimmer.’

‘There’s nobody?’

‘Every one of them was shocked rigid man,’ he assured me, ‘as I told you they would be.’ There was indignation in that last bit.

‘Yeah, okay, you were right. I’ll give you that, but our boys aren’t saints so I needed you to look them in the eye while I spoke to them, but if you are telling me there is no one…’

‘Listen to yourself man,’ he snapped at me, ‘this is us. We are not some drug cartel from Bolivia, we have rules, remember? They might not be written down anywhere but we have rules and everybody knows them.’

‘Yeah,’ I admitted, ‘you’re right,’ and when he said nothing in reply, I added, ‘I’m sorry. I am. I didn’t really think any of our crew was capable of… but I had to be sure. That’s why I asked you, because I trust your judgement. Remember Joe, I have to think the unthinkable sometimes.’

‘Yeah,’ he answered, ‘I s’pose so.’ But I could tell he still had the hump with me.

‘Let’s get a drink Joe,’ I suggested, ‘after that I need one.’

The next week was one of the longest I’ve ever experienced. We got more police harassment in seven days than we’d had in the previous three years put together. Some of our guys were lifted off the streets of the Sunnydale estate, on suspicion of dealing, even though we never kept the money or the stash anywhere near the man, so there was no real evidence. It didn’t matter. They were held overnight so they couldn’t do any business.

Two of our pubs had their licences rescinded on trumped-up accusations of exceeding their licensed hours and providing illegal gambling on-site. Even our sports injury clinic was closed down on suspicion that it may have been providing sexual services in exchange for money; something that everyone in the city already knew and hadn’t cared about for years. The massage parlour had been ticking over nicely without offending anyone in authority but now the police were hitting everything they knew about. I could get all of them back up and running soon enough but it was a hassle and I realised that Austin was right. This would only end if I found the real killer.

My meetings with Kevin Kinane took on extra significance and he didn’t disappoint me. At first we had to filter a lot of crap about the girl, taking no time at all to dismiss outlandish theories, which ranged from her being a notorious five-hundred-quid-a-night hooker who’d upset an obsessed client, to her dad being her actual killer because he’d been sexually abusing her for years and she was about to tell her mum.

‘I reckon it’s all bollocks,’ Kevin assured me and I was glad he wasn’t taken in. ‘Sharp says there’s nothing to any of it.’

‘What kind of person makes this shit up?’ I asked when we’d discussed yet another stupid theory. ‘Did Sharp speak to the brother?’

‘Yeah but he didn’t have any ideas. He’s devastated apparently and he seems normal, if that’s what you’re asking?’

‘That is what I’m asking,’ but I didn’t really expect to learn that she’d been topped by her own brother.

‘Sharp says he’s clean,’ he informed me.

‘That’s good enough.’

It took Kevin a few days to come up with anything we could actually trust. ‘Some of the lads on the doors do remember her,’ he told me. ‘You know how we rotate the boys around our places. More than one said they’d seen her.’

‘They recognised her?’ This seemed strange, considering she was only a young lass and hardly a veteran of the club scene.

‘Yeah, so I checked on our newest places first, the ones the young lasses like. I started with Cachet. They remember her down there.’

I didn’t want to hear that. ‘Shit, really? We get bloody hundreds in Cachet every weekend. Are they sure about her?’

‘I checked. She was a regular, down there most nights, mid-week as well as the weekend.’

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. This meant that Gemma Carlton really did have a link to me, however tenuous, and the police would soon pick up on it, if they hadn’t done so already. ‘How the bloody hell could a student afford to pay her way into Cachet every night?’

‘That’s just it,’ he seemed reluctant to give me the bad news, ‘she didn’t. They used to wave her through into the VIP lounge. She had one of our passes with her name on it.’

‘Fuck. Who gave her that then?’ This was getting worse.

‘I checked the register and her name was on our records as a platinum card holder but it doesn’t say who signed it out to her. We’ve been slack at that,’ he admitted, ‘I’ve given them a bollocking.’

‘Jesus, did Danny not know her?’

He shook his head.

‘Find out who’s responsible for this. Somebody must know someone who knows something. Keep at it.’

‘Will do boss.’

I drove home from one difficult conversation and straight into another. I was late, I was tired, worried and preoccupied and the last thing I needed was Sarah in the mood to talk.

‘I’d like to speak to you,’ she said, as soon as I walked through the door and she looked serious.

‘Can I get a drink first?’ She nodded and I poured my drink while she waited for me to sit down with it. ‘What is it?’

‘I’ve been thinking,’ she informed me, ‘a lot.’

‘About what?’

‘My dad.’

‘Oh, I see.’

‘And I think I’m ready to hear it. I think I need to hear it, in fact.’

‘Hear what?’ I genuinely had no idea what she was going on about.

‘What happened to him?’

‘Eh? What do you mean?’ This was the conversation I had always dreaded. ‘You know what happened to him.’

‘I don’t, not really. I only know what you told me.’

‘Which was?’ I knew what I’d told her but I was stalling.

‘That he was gone,’ she reminded me, ‘that he was never coming back.’

‘What else is there?’ I asked dumbly.

‘I know it was hard for you,’ she admitted, ‘you were there. I know how difficult that must have been.’