Howard Linskey: The Dead

I paid DCI Sharp half a million pounds to go along with it and he was convincing. After all, he had a lot riding on it. Even my own lads believed it, by all accounts. They were a little upset to begin with but Vasnetsov was gone and there was no one else to take revenge against. Since they weren’t daft enough to go to war with an entire country, they reorganised and settled down and, after a while, it was business as usual, just as I had predicted.

I looked after Palmer too. He was the only other member of my crew, apart from Danny, who knew the truth. As well as getting me the fake passports from one of his old contacts, it was Palmer who approached the FSB, to broker my deal. When Vasnetsov’s people gave me the location of our meeting, Palmer passed it to them in a dead-letter drop. Helsinki was a dream come true for the Russians, since Finland is on their border.

An investigative journalist would later win awards for his report into the Vasnetsov case. He revealed the Russians were able to locate the oligarch’s estate using one of their sixty orbiting, Cosmos-class, military satellites, to monitor the area around Helsinki and track the progress of the British businessman’s hire car from Vantaa airport, which led them straight to Vasnetsov’s estate.

The commando team flew in below radar from a base in Russia outside the city of Vyborg in the Isthmus of Karelia, just a hundred and thirty miles away. They set down a few miles from their target and yomped overland so nobody heard the helicopters till the firefight was over. Fortunately, Major Uri and his men were happy for me to be pretend-dead as opposed to the real thing. Maybe they thought I had no reason to own up to the deal I’d made with them and they were right. Vasnetsov might have been rotting in a Siberian prison but he still had a lot of money and a long reach. There was no way I could just resume my old life in Newcastle and I didn’t want to. If Vasnetsov didn’t get to me, sooner or later someone else would.

Sarah played her part to perfection, she really did. She was the grieving partner, the single mum left alone just a few short years after her dear old dad had disappeared. The local plod wanted to turn her into a poster-girl for the crime-doesn’t-pay lobby. They came round the house for days afterwards making cups of tea, helping themselves to the biscuits, while they offered Sarah all manner of state-funded help because they didn’t want to think of Emma missing out if times got really hard. All they wanted in return was a breakdown of everything Sarah knew about my business. Why waste a perfect opportunity to arrest everyone who ever knew or worked for me? That way they could really clean up the city.

Trouble was, Sarah turned out to be a complete airhead; a dumb blonde who knew nothing about my line of work. She admitted she knew I was a bit dodgy but, according to her, she didn’t know where the money came from.

‘And I never asked neither. I didn’t want to know.’

The way she spun it, all she cared about was buying new clothes and having lunch with her mates. Now she had no idea what she was going to do. After a couple of weeks, the police stopped watching her, convinced she was a waste of effort. They had her tagged as a gangster’s WAG whose biggest worry before now was wondering exactly when and where to get her nails done.

When a WPC went round the house a couple of months later, to ask some routine follow-up questions, she was surprised to learn that Sarah had gone. The furniture was still there and most of Sarah’s possessions but she hadn’t been seen in days and nor had her little girl.

Rumours abounded; Sarah had turned her back on the dirty money and gone down south to start a new life, earning an honest wage from a proper job. Some said she’d waited till the heat died down then left with suitcases full of cash she’d been squirrelling away for a day like this.

There was a more outlandish notion that it was all a put-up job and David Blake was very much alive, still controlling things in exile, pulling the strings from a country hundreds of miles away, but then they used to say that about Bobby Mahoney and no one ever saw him again.

The rumour of Sarah’s death was the one that really took hold. Detective Chief Inspector Sharp made sure it was the strongest line of enquiry pursued by Northumbria Police. Sharp assured everybody that contradictory reports of Sarah leaving the north-east suddenly and of her own free will were just disinformation, put out by parties who wanted to ensure the authorities didn’t delve too deeply into her disappearance.

My deal with Sharp was a sweet one for both of us. He agreed to do three more years as a DCI, before suddenly retiring early on health grounds; we agreed stress. Only then will he receive all of the money I’ve promised him, in return for sending the investigation down a series of blind alleys, while we made a different life for ourselves under new names at the other end of the world.

Auckland is a beautiful place; a laid-back haven, eleven thousand miles from home, where they still speak the same language we do. The weather in New Zealand is great, the people friendly and there’s plenty to do. Emma loves it already and Sarah and I are just happy to have fallen off the grid. Last night we both slept without nightmares for the first time in a long while, despite the absence of bodyguards at our rented house. We kept our first names, so Emma doesn’t get completely confused, but have a new surname on the passports Palmer provided for us all.

I’d been skimming off the top for a while now, stashing the cash, because I knew this day had to come, sooner or later. I didn’t get to the magical four million, because I had to look after Sharp and Palmer, but I wasn’t too far away in the end and I don’t need to be flash out here. I just want to keep my head down and live a real life.

You see I always knew it would never be over for me until I was finally dead. Well, I’m a dead man now right enough, but that was the easy part. Want to know the tricky bit? Staying dead. That’s the act I’ve got to pull off; for me, for Sarah, for our little girl.

I said we were like magicians in our firm, making people look the other way while we pull off our trick and that’s just what Sarah and I have done. There’s an art to that; distraction, misdirection, sleight of hand.