Howard Linskey - The Dead

‘I can see how that might have started something,’ Palmer admitted.

‘They knew they could trust me after that. I started running errands, simple stuff, messages for other members of the crew. At first I didn’t understand the messages I was given but, as I got older, I worked them out. It didn’t matter. I was practically family and I wasn’t going to tell the police anything, was I?

‘Bobby kept telling me to “stick-in” at school, so I could go off and do something with my life. When I came back in the holidays he gave me bar work, which I was glad of. It was only when I finally left college and wanted to come back to the north-east that I seriously considered working for him. Times were changing and I knew he could use someone with half an ounce of brain; he was being advised by the likes of Jerry Lemon and Finney and they weren’t the brightest. Bobby was sharp as a razor, but he needed someone he could trust to hear him out and give him that second opinion.’

Back then, I knew I could earn more with Bobby than by joining some pseudo, blue-chip outfit straight from the milk round, then slogging it up the corporate ladder for years, before I started making any real money. Plus, I could stay in the north-east and there weren’t many jobs going for bright young things here when I came out of my degree course. It’s ironic when I think about it now but he was against it and I had to persuade him it was the right move. I often wonder what would have happened to me if he’d just told me to fuck off.’

‘There’s not a lot of point in dwelling on the “what-ifs”,’ Palmer advised me, ‘we’ve all got regrets but you can only play the cards you’re dealt.’

‘True enough,’ I agreed. I didn’t want Palmer to think I’d come over all weak and sentimental so I snapped myself out of it and said, ‘So, are we having a proper drink tonight or what?’

I got monumentally drunk that night. It was the only way I could deal with what I’d been forced to do to Matt Bell. I was going to help his little girl’s murderer to evade justice and, if I didn’t, I was finished. There was no way I could survive without that five million. Everyone in my crew thought less of me because of it, none of them understood how I could keep an oath sworn to a child killer, but this wasn’t some stupid pact that involved my name or honour. Emma was the most precious thing in my world and I had sworn on her life that I wouldn’t harm a hair on Baxter’s head. There was no way round that, because I wasn’t going to risk anything where my daughter was concerned, not even the slim chance that the words of my broken oath might come back to haunt me years from now, that I might somehow be responsible for some unspecified piece of bad luck that I would never forgive myself for. I knew that, if anything happened to my little Emma, my life was as good as over. Without her I’d be a basket case; worse than Matt Bell.

Palmer drank more sparingly than me, so he could stay alert. I drank like prohibition was going to start all over again the next morning. Palmer didn’t give me a hard time about Leanne’s father. He knew the dilemma I was facing, although I don’t think he could even begin to understand it, but then he wasn’t a father. I don’t remember much of that night but I do recall Palmer helping me to fall into a car driven by one of our lads, because my legs had gone completely. He must have got me home okay, because I woke the next morning in our spare bed, the sunlight burning my brain, which I’d already fried the night before. I woke with a start, just managed to get to the bathroom in time and puked down the toilet.

A couple of days after we told Sharp that Gemma Carlton had slept with Golden Boots and most probably attended his party the next night, when she was killed, the police raided the footballer’s house. Dozens of detectives and plain clothes officers descended on the place mob-handed early in the morning and dragged him groggily from his bed. They shoved the warrant in his face and made him sit on one of his big leather sofas while they went through the place, turning it upside down in the process.

‘I aint done nothin,’ was all Golden Boots could offer as they bagged up everything around him, including small amounts of class A drugs that the Premiership’s finest had been too stupid or lazy to find and dispose of when I warned him the police would be coming to see him.

‘That ain’t mine,’ he protested. Then he added, ‘I just shagged her. That’s not a crime,’ but it got him daggers from the two WPCs who were babysitting him.

‘This is a waste of my fucking time,’ he moaned, when the search had been going on for ten minutes, ‘and yours. Where are you going with that?’ as they marched past him carrying his personal computer, then informed him all of his cars had been impounded.

Golden Boots started to get angry then, ‘Not my wheels! What am I supposed to do without them?’

‘Get a bus,’ one of the unimpressed WPCs advised him.

‘I want to see a lawyer,’ he hissed at her through bared teeth, ‘now.’

‘Could you come this way please?’ asked a Detective Inspector politely and Golden Boots just blinked back at him, then finally rose to his feet and followed the detective upstairs and into one of the guest bedrooms. Four other plain-clothes officers were standing there and there was a box on the bed. It was nothing fancy by Golden Boots’ standards, just a plain storage box from a wardrobe.

‘Is this yours?’ asked the Detective Inspector.

‘Well it’s in my house so, duh,’ answered an increasingly irate footballer.

‘So it is yours?’ the detective persisted.

‘Yes.’

‘What’s it used for?’

‘For putting things in,’ he said, as if it was obvious.

‘What kind of things?’

Golden Boots shrugged, ‘Trainers, bits of kit, old DVDs, I don’t know. I don’t clean up after myself. I have people who do that.’

‘So there’s nothing in here that you want to tell me about before you take a look?’

‘No.’

The Detective Inspector used a gloved hand to raise the lid of the box and Golden Boots leaned forward to peer in. Inside was a purse and a mobile phone.

‘I’ve looked inside the purse. It’s Gemma Carlton’s and I’d be willing to bet the phone is hers too. So would you mind explaining to me how they ended up in a box, which was covered by a blanket and tucked away in a wardrobe in one of your bedrooms, eh?’

Golden Boots went loopy then.

‘You put that there! I didn’t put that there! You bastards! You’re fitting me up!’ Two burly detectives took an arm each and restrained him.

‘Do me a favour,’ answered the detective, ‘you think that two dozen of us got together and decided to plant evidence on you. This isn’t 1974 and we don’t fit people up. We just want to put the right man inside for Gemma’s sake and right now that is looking like you.’

‘Fuck you!’ screamed Golden Boots, as he struggled against the grip on his arms, but nobody was listening to him anymore.

The little lad was only eleven years old but young Tam already had the street smarts. He’d seen the men walk into the lock-up; five of them had gone in but only four came out. That would normally have been enough to alert the boy to keep his nose out of it and at no point would it have occurred to him to phone the ‘Five-O’, as the ‘Polis’ were commonly known on his Edinburgh estate. They could get to fuck. Round here, if a guy goes into a garage and doesn’t come out again he either deserved it, because he was a grass or got too greedy, or he was plain unlucky, because he came up against someone stronger. You never got a square go round here and everyone knew it.