Howard Linskey - The Dead

‘Perhaps when we are done here,’ I admitted, ‘we’ll just call the police and give them the information they need on all of those cold cases they’ve got on file from the seventies. They’ve got retired coppers working on them part-time and they love it because, no matter how old the case, they’ve always got a good chance of linking a suspect to a corpse due to the DNA. Must be your worst nightmare that Crowe? I mean, when you were killing folk nobody had heard of DNA. Bit sneaky of them to change the rules like that, eh? Not very sporting. I reckon we’ll start with the four people I know you killed for Bobby. I’ve been asking around you see. Should we tell them about James Connor? Or Martin Pearce?’ There was recognition in his eye at those names. ‘Maybe Patrick Donnelly will ring a bell with them or Susan Carter; poor lady was strangled in her bed one night because she knew the names of a gang who’d carried out a bunch of armed robberies and she was going to give up the lot of them. Bet the police kept her night clothes and bed sheets all these years.’

‘Bound to have,’ confirmed Kinane.

‘I killed six men for Bobby Mahoney and one woman,’ Crowe admitted suddenly, snapping out of his bible-speak. ‘I think about them every day and pray to God to earn his forgiveness.’

‘He might forgive you but Northumbria Constabulary most definitely will not,’ I reminded him.

‘What do you want from me?’

‘I want you to tell me about another man you killed, Alan Blake.’

‘What do you want to know?’ he asked, ‘and why do you want to know it?’

‘I want you to admit that you killed him. I know it already, but I want to hear it from you.’ I was bluffing the man. Armstrong sounded convincing but I didn’t know if he was right about Crowe’s role in my father’s disappearance. ‘Then I want to know why he was killed and where he is buried.’

‘Why?’

‘I have my reasons. They’re not your concern.’

‘And if I tell you, you’ll leave me to continue my work here?’ he asked me.

‘Yes,’ I said.

It took the Reverend Michael Crowe a long time to summon up the nerve to talk about it. He wasn’t the only one who was nervous. I had to hide the way I was feeling inside. I was so close to finally understanding what had happened to my father after all of those years of wondering. I had to resist the urge to shout at Crowe to come out with it.

Finally he said, ‘I was a different person then.’ He was explaining or rather justifying himself, ‘Godless, lost, in great pain. I drank and took drugs and I did terrible things for money. Bobby Mahoney ordered me to kill Alan Blake because Blake had stolen from him. The man I was then never thought to question that.’

‘Alan Blake stole the Stuart amp; Brown payroll and tried to keep it all for himself?’ I prompted.

‘Yes,’ Crowe seemed relieved I knew a little of it already.

‘How did he do that?’

‘Bobby’s lads were trying something new. Instead of them all disappearing with the money after a job and lying low, they reckoned it would look better if they handed it straight to someone else and were seen in public shortly after. There were two getaway cars that day; one for the men and one for the money. That way the lads could be seen sitting in a pub in the city-centre minutes after they’d pulled the job, which put the police on the wrong track.’

‘Not a bad idea, but why was Alan Blake trusted with the money?’

‘I doubt he was anybody’s first choice but someone will have vouched for him. Usually no one was foolish enough to steal from Bobby Mahoney.’

‘But he was, and he got away with it to begin with. Why did he come back?’

‘How do you mean?’ he answered.

I realised there was no point asking the Reverend why my father had blown his cover and returned to the north-east years after stealing from Bobby. Crowe might have been anointed by God, but he wasn’t a mind reader.

‘Where did you find him?’ I asked instead.

‘He was hiding out in a friend’s flat in Scotswood. The friend was away in Northern Ireland with the army. We were told where he was staying and I went down there.’

‘How did you kill him?’

‘With a knife.’

‘And what did you do with the body?’

‘Got it out of there and buried it where Bobby told me.’

‘Which was?’

‘On a building site. There was a trench already dug, part of the foundations of the new supermarket they were building. His body is under the car park.’

‘Thanks for the information.’ I told him, and he just couldn’t help himself. He had to ask me.

‘Why ask about Alan Blake now, after so many years? What was he to you?’

‘I’m David Blake,’ I told him, ‘Alan Blake was my father.’

‘Jesus Christ.’

‘Won’t help you,’ I said, ‘I told you that already.’

The Reverend Michael Crowe must have given up a longer than usual prayer to his God when we left him sitting in the kitchen unharmed. I couldn’t see the point in killing the man. He might have admitted to the murder of my father, but he didn’t order it. The man who did that was already dead, killed by me years later, an irony I’d been wholly unaware of until now. When I left that church I walked up to the car and before I climbed in I leant against it and took a few deep breaths. I felt like something invisible was crushing me all of a sudden, robbing me of breath. I’d been getting feelings like this more and more lately. I didn’t need a doctor to work out they were some sort of stress-related panic attacks, but there was fuck all I could do about them. Who wouldn’t have panic attacks in my world?

‘You alright?’ asked Kinane.

‘Hunky fucking dory,’ I told him and climbed into the car.

‘This would have been a big deal once,’ I told Joe Kinane. We were looking down on the red brick, flat-roofed so-called supermarket, closed down now and awaiting redevelopment; which was code for ripping it all down and starting again from scratch. This building would have been the pride and joy of the supermarket chain’s family once, these days it was the embarrassing uncle. It had probably been opened by a local celebrity back in the seventies; a TV presenter or ‘comic’, now it waited for the bulldozers.

‘There’s a Tesco near us five times the size of this,’ said Kinane, confirming why it would soon be consigned to memory.

We walked across the car park and I couldn’t help wondering if we really were walking on my father’s grave. There was no real reason for Crowe to lie about that. When we reached the front door of the supermarket we stopped, because it was boarded up and we could go no further. I was wondering why I had even bothered to come down here. Myself, I didn’t want a gravestone or a shrine of any kind for Emma to feel guilty about if she didn’t come to visit me every week. They could burn me and scatter the ashes on the pitch at St James’ Park when nobody was looking. As I stood on my father’s final resting place, I felt nothing at all. Kinane looked troubled though.

‘What’s the matter with you?’ I asked.

Kinane looked at me, then he glanced back at the front of the supermarket. There, on the wall, was a faded wooden plaque with a metal plate on it. There was an inscription and I took a step forward so I could read it. I was right. The place had been opened by a northern comic but that wasn’t the bit that made my blood boil. There, under the comic’s name, was the date the place had been opened and it was four years before my father had finally disappeared.

‘Get back round to that lying bastard,’ I told Kinane, ‘and get Peter and Chris to go with you. I want you to give that Reverend a proper going over. The kind even his precious God would flinch to look at.’