Howard Linskey - The Dead

‘And?’

‘She’s on there alright. A few t… t… times.’

I had mixed feelings about that. On the plus side, at least we might pick up some clues about who Gemma Carlton had been hanging out with before she died, but confirmation of her presence in our club linked her to me, however loosely. It could be claimed I’d met her there or seen her across a crowded room and realised she was Carlton’s daughter, which would be one more piece of circumstantial evidence to add to the police case that was doubtless building against me.

‘What did you see?’ I asked Robbie. ‘Was she with someone?’

‘Er… you need to come over and take a look at something.’ He seemed reluctant to tell me more over the phone.

‘What have you found Robbie?’ I demanded.

‘A smoking g… g… gun.’

I picked up Kevin Kinane and arranged for Sharp to meet us at the old call centre. We huddled around the monitor as Robbie tapped away at his keyboard and brought up the right images. ‘Mark found this from the camera on the main door,’ he tapped another key and up came black-and-white footage of the scene outside Cachet on a busy Friday night. ‘It’s from the night before the girl was killed.’

There was a queue of youngsters waiting patiently to get in. Because the club was doing so well, it would have been a long wait but our doormen kept everybody in line and anybody who acted up would be refused admission, so the line moved forward slowly and steadily but in good order.

‘There,’ said Robbie, as a group of girls was allowed in and the two behind them were asked to stand and wait their turn at the front of the queue. One was tall with long dark hair and the other was a petite brunette in a white coat, wearing a short skirt. I looked closely at her face. From the photographs I’d seen, this looked like Gemma Carlton to me

‘What do you think?’ I asked.

‘It’s definitely her,’ Kevin Kinane replied.

The girls were finally permitted to enter and they disappeared off the screen. ‘Now we go inside,’ said Robbie. He tapped his keys again and up popped a view of the interior of the club. He paused it and said, ‘There’. We watched the girls squeeze through the crowd. ‘We keep losing sight of them,’ he told us, ‘but I’ve tracked them using all of the cameras in Cachet and I spliced the footage together.’ It was like watching a film edited to show only the two leads. The girls slowly made their way through the club, ‘they don’t go to the bar,’ and we watched as they walked around the dance floor, ‘they don’t hit the dance floor,’ he explained pointlessly, ‘then we lose them again until…’ We cut to a view of the VIP bar. The camera that pointed down on to the lift which transported guests away from the great unwashed to the VIP lounge showed it slowly rising, the door opened and the two girls emerged with big excited grins on their faces.

‘So they went up there on their own, but who were they meeting?’

‘The whole VIP bar is a blind spot,’ Robbie told me. ‘I know, I know, I’m having it looked at. There’ll be a new camera there tonight,’ he assured me, ‘anyway, you have to wait a while for another sighting, two hours to be exact,’ the view changed again.

It was the same scene by the lift door, but with different people standing around chatting and drinking. Robbie pointed at the screen again. Sure enough, Gemma’s friend came into view, a little unsteadily. She turned back towards Gemma, who was following her, but she wasn’t alone. Gemma Carlton had her arm linked with a man’s and she was laughing like she’d had at least a couple of bottles of our finest. I couldn’t see his face though.

‘Who’s that?’ asked Sharp and we continued to watch as the three of them walked towards the lift.

‘His back’s to us,’ I said, and for a moment I thought we’d never see the face of the man Gemma left Cachet with, but then the lift doors opened. The group waited for it to empty and they stepped inside. Then they turned around so they were facing outwards. Gemma reached forward to press the lift button and then finally we saw the face of the man she left our club with on the night before she died.

‘Jesus,’ I said, ‘that’s Golden Boots.’

Things had not been going all that well for Golden Boots, not that you’d notice it from the way he carried himself. As far as he was concerned, he was still Billy Big Bollocks, an unlikely media darling with legions of Twitter followers, a blog and a weekly tabloid newspaper column, ghost written of course. He never had to worry about having enough time for all of this verbal diarrhoea, because he rarely played any football these days. If he wasn’t suspended for kicking, punching or head-butting opponents on the pitch, or his own teammates on the training ground, there were always the scuffles with members of the public he met on his regular nights out.

On the rare occasions that Golden Boots was not in trouble of one sort or another he was injured, his ageing joints struggling to cope with the wear and tear of a decade of top flight football and a history of poor refuelling choices; mainly a preference for beer and cocaine over fruit juice and pasta. His long-suffering club had grown tired of paying the man eighty thousand pounds a week to not play football and were desperately trying to offload him to anyone who was willing but, amazingly, there were no takers.

When I went round to see Golden Boots, I took Joe Kinane with me. I knew that would concentrate what little mind the Premiership’s finest possessed, because he was shit scared of Kinane, with good reason. A little while back, our late but legendary enforcer, Finney, almost broke both of his legs because he tried to get violent when we interrupted a minor drug deal he was doing with Billy Warren, one of our dealers. Now, by way of making amends, he ‘does a bit of business’ with us, as he puts it, selling heavily-cut cocaine at ludicrous prices to a group of his Premiership mates.

We both get something out of this; we get the money, for Golden Boots it’s the chance to pretend he’s a gangster in his spare time and he loves the kudos that comes with being a ‘face’.

The guy who answered the door didn’t look like an athlete. He was sporting a three-day stubble and, even at this hour of the afternoon, he looked a bit out of it. His eyes were glassy and he was sniffing, but he didn’t have a cold. As usual, he pretended to be pleased to see us but I knew he dreaded our little visits. He showed us into his cavernous house.

‘What do you reckon?’ he asked, all smiles, as we stopped before the centrepiece that dominated the huge hallway in his new home; it was a statue of himself. The sculptor had carved him life-sized, in bronze, kitted out in the England shirt he had worn just once during his mockery of a career.

‘How much did that cost you?’ I asked him.

‘Forty grand.’ He said it like it was nothing.

‘It’s fucking hideous, even by your standards.’

Golden Boots laughed nervously because he thought I was joking. ‘I like it. I think he’s caught me just right.’

‘You’re s’posed to be dead before they put a statue up,’ said Kinane menacingly, ‘them’s the rules.’

‘Yeah, well, I ain’t dead yet, am I?’ answered Golden Boots and Kinane just narrowed his eyes and smiled at that, which made the footballer look even more nervous.

We sat on huge leather sofas in his games room, which was the size of most people’s houses. There was plenty of space for the ubiquitous snooker table and a bar. He didn’t deny knowing Gemma Carlton when we questioned him and admitted he had heard about her death.

‘I can’t believe it,’ he told me, ‘murdered like that,’ but I couldn’t say he was exactly grief stricken.