Howard Linskey - The Dead

The only question I couldn’t answer was the one that was bothering me the most; exactly what I was going to say to Yaroslav Vasnetsov when I was face to face with him once again and he asked me to take his first Joe into Russia.

I wanted to be on my own so I went for a drive. It was late and I should have been home, trying to catch up on sleep, but that wasn’t going to happen. I kept churning it over and over in my head. If my dad wasn’t my dad, who the fuck was? My mother wasn’t like that, she never had a boyfriend or a bit on the side the whole time I could remember, so who the hell could have got that close to her? Who did she have an uncharacteristic soft spot for? She didn’t know anyone except the men who came into the club and the members of Bobby’s crew.

Mum never really spoke about the lads in the firm. She thought they were all over-grown boys who couldn’t take care of themselves, let alone a woman. I can recall her moaning that none of them had a clue how to treat a lady and they were all such scruffy buggers but she never really talked about them that much, except to bad-mouth them. She had a grudging respect for Bobby, he employed her after all, even though she knew how he earned his money, but she would have never got herself mixed up with him. She had no way of knowing he had murdered her husband but Bobby Mahoney was married at the time and my ma wasn’t the sort to let herself end up as a gangster’s mistress. So I didn’t have to drive out the idea that I might have inadvertently murdered my father and was shacked up with my sister. My life was fucked up, but it wasn’t that bad. No, I knew Bobby wasn’t the one, but who was?

She did talk about Jinky Smith though and he was always dressed smart back then and, judging by his success rate, he certainly knew how to talk to a lady. Could she have fallen for his chat, I wondered? Had he given her a glass of wine, laid on the patter and somehow talked her into his bed? It was possible. She must have been bloody lonely without any male company. In fact, now I thought about it, she did mention Jinky more than the others in Bobby’s crew. But no, that was stupid, she never had a good word to say about the man, all she ever did was do him down. She was always calling him ‘god’s gift to women’ in that snide sarcastic… and hurt way all the time. She sounded hurt. All of a sudden I got a prickly feeling all over my skin, which came with a sudden memory, but not one that involved my mother. It was meeting Michelle again at Privado that night I walked in unexpectedly and how did she greet me, even though I knew she had always had a massive crush on me? Like I was some kind of tosser, that’s how. ‘ Look what the cat dragged in’.

It was the hurt that comes from rejection, from knowing that no matter how much you like a guy, he isn’t into you, even though you’ve given him your body and tried to give him your heart. That was what I heard in Michelle’s voice and it was why I went easy on her. I now finally realised I was hearing the exact same thing in my mother’s words all those years ago. Every time I told her I’d seen Jinky, or he’d given me a couple of quid to run an errand for him, she’d roll her eyes and say ‘Huh, Jinky Smith thinks he’s god’s gift he does,’ and she’d do him down some more. I never understood why at the time but I did now. It sounds daft but that’s all it took to finally solve the mystery; a feeling deep in my gut, nothing more. All of a sudden, I just knew. I was so sure I’d have been willing to bet thousands on it. Jinky Smith was my father. I just never knew it, and neither did he.

Here I was, working with gangsters and spies all this time but it was my mother who came up with a cover story even I couldn’t crack for nearly forty years. All that bullshit about dad moving away, working down south, saving up so he could send for us. She invented it all. There were no letters. There were no phone calls and there could never have been a tearful reunion during that special week when Aunty Vi looked after Danny and I was conceived. God knows where she went but, if it really was London, it wasn’t to visit dad. He’d been dead for years and even she didn’t know it. She probably thought he’d just got tired of her and run off, leaving her with a bairn to bring up on her own. I wondered how many nights she’d lain awake wondering what happened to Alan Blake and where he ended up; the Merchant Navy, the Foreign Legion or just some bartending job in the smoke; not knowing he was buried under a supermarket car park just a couple of miles from where we lived.

Of course there was one guy who knew all along what had happened to the man I have always called dad and I wasn’t thinking of Michael Crowe. Bobby Mahoney knew, because he had Alan Blake killed. The answer to the question why my law-abiding mother ended up working in Bobby Mahoney’s clubs all those years was finally answered. He employed her because he felt guilty for robbing the woman of her livelihood when he put her old man in the ground. The gangster in Bobby Mahoney reasoned he had no choice but to kill the bloke who’d stolen from him, the sentimental patriarch in him felt the only decent thing to do for his wife was to give her a job.

When mum invented that bullshit story about going off to London to meet up with dad, Bobby must have wondered what the fuck she was playing at. When she started to show signs of being pregnant he would have worked it out right enough. I wondered if he tagged who the father was? Probably, knowing Bobby. I doubt if Jinky gave it a second thought. Bobby wouldn’t have broadcast the fact that he’d had Alan Blake killed, so if Tina Blake was getting back with her husband, that was none of Jinky’s business. He would have moved on to the next girl by then.

‘If it wasn’t for other men’s wives, I’d still be a virgin,’ he’d told me. He was probably only nice to me because he liked my mum, not because he suspected he was my real father.

‘I’ve managed to get you a place,’ I told Jinky, and he stared back at me uncomprehendingly. ‘I know some people from a housing association that specialises in ex-cons. It’s called the Second Chances centre. They provide jobs for the young ones and, in special cases, housing for the older ones.’

‘Special cases?’ he asked, presumably wondering how he could qualify for any form of special treatment after the life he had led.

‘Well you’re clearly not one, are you, Jinky?’ I agreed, ‘but it’s a system like any other and we both know that a system can be played.’ There was a glimmer of recognition there. ‘Wheels can be oiled, favours called in, so that’s what I did.’

‘Right,’ he said, eyes sparkling.

‘Anyhow, they’ve found you a flat and it’s way better than this one,’ Jinky looked a little surprised at that. He seemed to suddenly take in the squalor of his flat as if he was noticing it for the first time. ‘It’s in a good area too, with no druggies hanging around outside your front door. All you have to do is meet the guy who runs the scheme and make a reasonable impression.’ His face dropped at that and he looked down self-consciously at the clothes he was wearing. ‘Don’t worry about that,’ I told him, ‘I’ll sort you out with some new threads and we’ll get you a haircut. As long as you turn up sober and looking smart, the apartment’s yours.’

‘But what about the rent?’ he asked me. ‘I haven’t got a pot to piss in, man.’

‘It’s all taken care of. The Second Chances scheme is legacy funded,’ he frowned again, ‘it means everything’s paid for by rich people who die and leave some of their money to the centre.’

‘Nice of them,’ he observed disbelievingly.