Howard Linskey - The Dead

If it was news to me that my father might have done a job for Bobby Mahoney, it was an even bigger shock to hear he had taken all of the cash. If that was true, it was no wonder he had to leave the city in a hurry, but why hadn’t Bobby tracked him down if he stole from him? Why would he keep employing my mother afterwards, unless he thought my dad might come home for her one day and he would be waiting, keeping her close to him like that, so he could spring a trap? Shit, why would he ever trust me? Didn’t it worry him that I could be a chip off the old block? It didn’t make any sense.

I knew my father had left Newcastle on a train two years before I was born and now I knew why. I also knew he had managed to keep the contact with my mother going for more than four years before disappearing forever. I’d always thought he was a low-life who didn’t give a shit about my brother and me, but maybe his final disappearance was more sinister than I had realised. Did Bobby trick an address out of my ma, or did my father put his head above the parapet by stupidly coming home and Bobby finally reckoned with him. This wasn’t what I was expecting to find when I first started digging into my father’s life. That old guy had given me a hell of a lot to think about.

‘Have you considered my offer?’ asked Henry Baxter, as if his proposition was a perfectly reasonable one. We were back in the visiting area for another private audience, while the prison guard watched me nervously. Baxter’s nose was bruised and swollen where I’d punched him.

‘Yes.’ I felt sick inside having to eat humble pie in front of this twisted man.

‘And?’

‘I’ll do my best to get you out,’ I told him, ‘but only to get my money back. Just so we understand each other.’

He pondered this for a moment.

‘No apology, I note,’ he told me sniffily, as if he really thought I was going to say sorry for bloodying his nose, ‘but there is one final thing. It’s quite important actually.’

‘What is it?’

‘You don’t think I’m just going to walk out of court and go off with you and Kinane so you can torture me into giving you the passwords and account numbers you need, then kill me, do you? That’s not the way it’s going to work. You are going to let me go and when I have left the country, only then will I send you the information you need to access the …’

‘Not a chance. There’s no way I’m letting you leave the country, or even this city, without giving me access to the money. I want to see proof that we’ve retrieved it before I let you go. Then you can disappear forever for all I care.’

‘Then we have a problem, because I obviously don’t trust you to let me go. I suspect that once you have your money, you will allow Kinane to kill me.’

‘That’s a risk you’ll just have to learn to live with, if you want my help.’

‘No.’

‘Then you’ll stay here and rot.’

‘And you’ll lose five million pounds. How long will you be able to continue to pay your suppliers, or the men who work for you, with a hole that size in your accounts?’

‘Then we both have a problem.’

He went quiet for a moment, as if he was thinking it all through, then he said, ‘Are you a superstitious man, Blake?’

‘Not especially.’

‘But you’re a father and you care deeply about your daughter? I mean you wouldn’t be human if you didn’t. Don’t look at me like that. I’m merely stating the obvious. If you wish me to leave the courtroom with you when this is over, to give you the information you require, then I need you to swear an oath.’

‘What kind of oath?’

‘I want you to swear that neither you, nor any of your men, will attempt to kill me or harm me in any way, that you will release me once you have the information you need and leave me to my own devices.’

‘Fair enough.’

‘And I want you to swear this on the life of your infant daughter Blake. If you are prepared to do that then we might just have a deal.’

I walked out of that nick feeling like I needed to take a long, hot shower. Is this what it’s like when you make a pact with the devil, I wondered?

There was one more thing that was troubling me.

I had absolutely no idea how to get Baxter off his murder charge.

None whatsoever.

We were sitting in Susan Fitch’s smart, Grey Street office, surrounded by leather-bound law books, the musty smell of them filling the room, when she asked me, ‘You want my firm to represent Mr Baxter?’

‘No, Mrs Fitch,’ I answered, ‘I do not want your firm to represent Baxter.’

I was surprised when she exhaled in relief at that.

‘Thank heaven for small mercies,’ she said, ‘right now that man’s name is poison. But, if you don’t want us to represent him, then what do you want?’

‘I want you to get me someone who will. This must be at arm’s length,’ I explained.

My solicitor sat back in her chair and thought for a while. I could tell Susan Fitch spent money on her clothes and hair but she was starting to look a little weathered these days. Her face was lined and pale from a life spent too much indoors, poring over the books that imprisoned her. ‘Tall order,’ she admitted, ‘but I could probably find someone somewhere who’s desperate enough.’

‘Not just someone. Baxter has to be acquitted.’

‘Tall orders I can do, but miracles are not my forte, Mr Blake.’

‘Why is it so hard to get him off?’

‘A number of reasons,’ and she began to count them off on her fingers. ‘Your employee knew the girl and the police can prove that; he lived near her at the time of her murder and gave piano lessons to a number of other young girls in the area. The police have established that, as well as a roster of regular clients, he had unofficial sessions with a number of young girls, including some of the victim’s friends and they think that Leanne Bell may have been one of them. Now that he is under arrest, they will be interviewing every girl he has ever spent a moment with and something will come up, be under no illusions about that. If Baxter gave them sweeties or booze in return for the tiniest glimpse of their training bras then he is irredeemably and deservedly fucked. If they were promised money or weed, if he so much as looked at a girl in a funny way or set his hand gently down upon her knee, to show his approval at a nicely-rendered bit of Debussy, then he is doomed.’

‘You could be right.’

‘Then there is the man himself. I have met your accountant on a number of occasions and he is not the kind of fellow who instils confidence, nor can I imagine him charming a jury. Baxter is a rude, arrogant, bigoted, singularly unattractive man. I found him dirty, vulgar and sleazy and he sweats a great deal. Frankly, he looks like a child killer, or a jury’s idea of one, and that’s how they are likely to regard him. But that’s just my opinion and none of that matters too much when set against the big, clinching factor.’

‘The DNA?’

‘The DNA,’ she agreed, ‘most people only have to hear there is DNA evidence linking someone to the scene or the victim and that’s it; the prosecution gets their conviction. Most jury members won’t have the faintest clue about the science. They don’t know and they don’t want to know. If there’s a professor on the stand with some letters after his name, telling them the mathematical odds against DNA evidence being incorrect are immense, you can almost see them nodding in agreement.’

‘And the odds are?’

‘Hundreds of millions to one,’ she assured me.

‘So how do you challenge that kind of evidence?’

‘You don’t. As far as I’m aware, you can’t, and I wouldn’t be willing to try. This is a no-win case if ever I saw one.’