Howard Linskey - The Dead

‘I like to play Angry Birds too,’ he smirked, ‘unless they got confused and thought that was a porn site.’ He laughed at his own weak joke, but nobody else did. The lawyer ignored him.

‘I appreciate that in these more liberal times it is not entirely uncommon for young, adult males to view porn online.’

‘You’re telling me,’ answered the footballer.

‘But not many would view the sites you look at for recreational purposes.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Girls being punished, adolescent girls being punished, schoolgirls being punished,’ the lawyer recited.

‘Oh, well yeah, but that’s bollocks isn’t it, they aren’t real schoolgirls and it’s all an act isn’t it? It’s just a bit of caning and naughty stuff before they get down to the real thing but it’s all basically harmless, you know, fake and that.’

The lawyer continued unabated, dispassionately rhyming off a list of extremely hardcore porn sites, ‘MILFs being punished, ex-girlfriends degraded, embarrassed girls stripped in public, real women groped in the street. Are they all basically harmless too?’

Golden Balls took a while to stammer an answer to that one. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘you don’t always know what you are going to get when you land on those sites do you? And if you use porn, which I do, a lot, as you said, you get a bit desensitised to the vanilla stuff.’ I could see at least two members of the jury squinting their incomprehension at that phrase. ‘So, you know, you try a bit more specialist material.’

‘Yes, I see, and your specialist stuff all seems to revolve around the theme of women being tied up, punished and degraded doesn’t it? You don’t like women very much do you?’

‘Course I do. I’ve had loads of them.’ His joke was greeted with a stony silence in the courtroom.

‘Indeed,’ said the lawyer and something about the way he was taking his time made me realise he was saving the best bit till last. He didn’t disappoint. ‘And what about the rape videos?’

‘Eh?’ was all Golden Boots could respond with.

‘The rape videos,’ repeated the lawyer and you could have heard the proverbial pin drop at that point, ‘the ones you used a search engine to find — the nasty videos that aren’t on the more conventional pornographic sites. I have viewed one of those videos, one of the ones you downloaded for your personal pleasure and I have to say it was completely sickening. But I will allow you to answer me, so we can hear your side of things. You can tell us why you downloaded a video which contained fifteen minutes of a woman screaming and sobbing while she was stripped and raped by two men in her own home, while a third man videoed the whole thing.’

‘I saw that by accident,’ protested the Premiership’s finest.

‘You went on that site by accident?’

‘Yes!’

‘Seventeen times?’

‘Look, I don’t think it was real or anything. I reckon she was just acting. I reckon they was all acting in all of them videos.’

‘Really,’ the lawyer went on, ‘so you like to watch video footage of men pretending to rape women? Why ever would you do that?’

When Golden Boots finally answered he did so in a very small voice indeed, ‘It was just a laugh, that’s all. I never meant nothing by it.’

‘It was just a laugh?’ repeated the lawyer, ‘no further questions.’

Susan Fitch told me that Golden Boots had no real motive for killing Gemma Carlton. She’d said it was the big flaw in the Prosecution case, but their barrister never even bothered to counter that. He didn’t just admit there was little motive. The way he portrayed it, motive was meaningless when dealing with someone as disturbed as Golden Boots. ‘We may never reach an understanding of the motive of this spoilt footballer for this violent act,’ he told the jury. ‘Was he slighted in some way by the young girl he had slept with, then discarded, as if she was little more than a piece of meat? Had she flirted with a teammate and made him jealous, did she gossip about his bedroom performance, leaving him open to scorn or ridicule, did she fail to comply with some degraded sexual request? We may never know but it is enough for us to realise that here is a man who has been denied nothing since the day he first signed professional terms as a footballer. He thinks he can have anything he wants, whenever he wants it. It is the Prosecution case that Gemma Carlton, in some way, however slight, managed to annoy, offend or irritate a man with a long history of casual violence, often against women, to such a degree that she became the victim of an assault that led to her death. He even managed to retain the presence of mind to don gloves before carrying out this heinous act of strangulation on his innocent victim, driving her out into the woods and dumping her body as if it were refuse.’

After that little speech, I sensed that Golden Boots was irretrievably fucked.

I was as certain as I could be that Golden Boots was going to be convicted of the murder of Gemma Carlton. Everything stacked up; the evidence all pointed to him as the killer; he’d slept with her, she’d been rebuffed and slagged him off, he’d argued with her, she was seen at his party that night and the DNA proved she’d been driven out to the woods in one of his cars, either by him or someone who was protecting him. The presence of her purse and mobile phone in his house was the final piece of evidence in the Prosecution’s favour but, every time I thought about it, I kept feeling the whole thing was just a bit too easy.

I know I shouldn’t have cared. I was off the hook, but I was thinking like Austin now. I didn’t want the man who had done this to be walking around the streets of our city while the wrong guy did time for Gemma’s murder. I thought about it all for a while and suddenly remembered the CCTV footage of Gemma in Cachet with that other girl before they met Golden Boots. We’d never had a satisfactory explanation from Gemma’s best friend for her absence from the party on the night her flatmate died. Louise Green had said fuck all to the DC who’d interviewed her, according to Sharp, and wasn’t very forthcoming when Kevin went to see her either, but I wondered if he had been asking her the right questions.

There was no particular reason why I found this whole thing unsatisfactory. I certainly had enough on my plate already but, like it or not, I was involved in Gemma Carlton’s case, which was probably why I found myself instinctively turning my car into the small street of terraced properties that housed the student digs Gemma had shared with Louise Green.

The girl who answered the door was not unattractive, but clearly thought she was. You could tell by the baggy sweater she wore, which did its best to disguise whatever curves she had. The leggings were shapeless too, like pyjama bottoms. She wasn’t much older than eighteen, but she looked like she’d given up already. Maybe it was the effect of sharing a flat with two very attractive girls like Gemma Carlton and Louise Green. She was telling the world she wasn’t interested in being pretty and girly, so there. She looked like the kind of lass who wrote long heart-felt poems late at night when she was alone but never showed them to anyone.

‘I’m here for a quick word with Louise,’ I told her and she turned away from me without a word, called her flatmate’s name up the stairs then left me standing on the doorstep.

Louise Green eventually padded down the stairs to greet me, a look of trepidation on her face. ‘What is it?’ she asked, before she stepped down off the bottom step.

‘I’d like a word if I may, about Gemma,’ I explained.

‘But I’ve already been through it all,’ she said, folding her arms across her chest defensively. She was dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt but was still wearing full make-up, and her hair had been straightened. ‘Are you with the police?’