‘This is Gemma Carlton,’ I said.
‘Nice,’ answered Peter Kinane approvingly.
‘She was.’
‘Oh.’ That shut him up.
‘Two nights ago she was killed. This poor lass was murdered and her body dumped.’
I told them everything I knew about the manner in which she died, described the location of the body and gave them all the relevant information. Once they’d digested the fact that a pretty, young thing had been senselessly murdered, I dropped the bombshell.
‘There’s one other thing. Gemma Carlton was the daughter of Detective Inspector Robert Carlton.’
I watched them all for their reaction. They all knew DI Carlton and what he was trying to do to us. I wanted to be sure that none of them had a fucked-up idea of what constituted justice in our world and had taken matters into their own hands. Instead all I saw was a sea of shocked faces.
‘I want this picture circulating. I want everyone to see it. You ask around. This isn’t about business, so the normal rules do not apply. It doesn’t matter what you have heard about her old man or what he has said about me. I don’t care that he wants to put all of us away for a long time. His daughter didn’t deserve this and neither did he. No one does. You got that?’
There was some unintelligible mumbling at that but they were all in agreement.
‘I want you to find the fucking low-life who did this thing. Firstly, I want this done because it’s the right thing to do and that ought to be reason enough.’ I let them digest that and, when there were no dissenting voices, I continued. ‘Right now the Polit are all fired up and they want to crack heads. They are bad enough when someone comes after one of theirs, so you can imagine what they will be like when it’s the only daughter of one of theirs. They are short on brains and common sense at the best of times and they are not thinking straight. They have no leads so they’ve got a very foolish idea into their empty heads. They think that, since Carlton was investigating us, maybe we were somehow responsible for this evil thing.’
My lads are pretty hard to shock, they’ve seen plenty of stuff between them, but you could tell they were floored by this one. There was a sound like a collective sharp intake of breath. Then all of a sudden it was like I was a politician being heckled from the floor, but it was only the competing cries of, ‘No fucking way!’, ‘Hadaway and shite man!’, ‘Have they gone fuckin’ mental like?’ and a half dozen other similar shouts that were lost in the angry din. They were furious and resentful, as I knew they would be, and I ran the risk that this would weaken their determination to find Gemma’s killer, but I needed to let them all know exactly what was at stake here.
I had to hold up my hands to restore order, ‘I know,’ I assured them, ‘I know, and I share your anger and disgust, but they are hurting right now and not thinking clearly. So it’s our job to find the real killer and hand him over.’
‘Fuck that,’ said Kinane, ‘when we find the cunt, we’ll slice him to pieces.’
‘No Joe, we won’t. You’re not thinking either. How is slicing him up going to persuade the police we had nothing to do with it? No, as much as it might disgust us, we hand him over and give them their man. He’ll get a life sentence and it will be hard time, the hardest there is. They’ll realise we are not the men they think we are, for what that’s worth. and it’s not much. Like it or not though, until we catch this sick bastard, normal business will be impossible for any of us, so that’s another reason we need to clear this up, and fast. That, and the fact that someone has put a poor, young lass in the ground and is still out there somewhere. Let’s make sure she’s the last one he kills.’
There were murmurs of agreement at that one. ‘You work your districts, you ask around and I want someone on this twenty-four-seven who can feed all of it back to me.’
‘I’ll do it,’ replied Kevin Kinane without a second’s hesitation, ‘like you said, we can’t do any normal business till it’s sorted and we don’t want some sicko out there walking around our city.’
I admired his eagerness to take this on for me and I knew that might be worth something. I figured this would require leg work and tenacity. It needed someone with the energy to keep at it and Kevin Kinane wanted to prove himself to me. This was his chance.
‘Good lad Kevin,’ I said, ‘you meet me daily until this is over. All of you, I want every scrap of information feeding into Kevin. We’ve some bent law on our books that’ll help but they need leads and we are the people to provide them.’
Joe and I left the Mitre and drove back into the city together. ‘What do you reckon?’ I asked him.
‘Not a glimmer.’
‘There’s nobody?’
‘Every one of them was shocked rigid man,’ he assured me, ‘as I told you they would be.’ There was indignation in that last bit.
‘Yeah, okay, you were right. I’ll give you that, but our boys aren’t saints so I needed you to look them in the eye while I spoke to them, but if you are telling me there is no one…’
‘Listen to yourself man,’ he snapped at me, ‘this is us. We are not some drug cartel from Bolivia, we have rules, remember? They might not be written down anywhere but we have rules and everybody knows them.’
‘Yeah,’ I admitted, ‘you’re right,’ and when he said nothing in reply, I added, ‘I’m sorry. I am. I didn’t really think any of our crew was capable of… but I had to be sure. That’s why I asked you, because I trust your judgement. Remember Joe, I have to think the unthinkable sometimes.’
‘Yeah,’ he answered, ‘I s’pose so.’ But I could tell he still had the hump with me.
‘Let’s get a drink Joe,’ I suggested, ‘after that I need one.’
12
The next week was one of the longest I’ve ever experienced. We got more police harassment in seven days than we’d had in the previous three years put together. Some of our guys were lifted off the streets of the Sunnydale estate, on suspicion of dealing, even though we never kept the money or the stash anywhere near the man, so there was no real evidence. It didn’t matter. They were held overnight so they couldn’t do any business.
Two of our pubs had their licences rescinded on trumped-up accusations of exceeding their licensed hours and providing illegal gambling on-site. Even our sports injury clinic was closed down on suspicion that it may have been providing sexual services in exchange for money; something that everyone in the city already knew and hadn’t cared about for years. The massage parlour had been ticking over nicely without offending anyone in authority but now the police were hitting everything they knew about. I could get all of them back up and running soon enough but it was a hassle and I realised that Austin was right. This would only end if I found the real killer.
My meetings with Kevin Kinane took on extra significance and he didn’t disappoint me. At first we had to filter a lot of crap about the girl, taking no time at all to dismiss outlandish theories, which ranged from her being a notorious five-hundred-quid-a-night hooker who’d upset an obsessed client, to her dad being her actual killer because he’d been sexually abusing her for years and she was about to tell her mum.
‘I reckon it’s all bollocks,’ Kevin assured me and I was glad he wasn’t taken in. ‘Sharp says there’s nothing to any of it.’
‘What kind of person makes this shit up?’ I asked when we’d discussed yet another stupid theory. ‘Did Sharp speak to the brother?’
‘Yeah but he didn’t have any ideas. He’s devastated apparently and he seems normal, if that’s what you’re asking?’
‘That is what I’m asking,’ but I didn’t really expect to learn that she’d been topped by her own brother.
‘Sharp says he’s clean,’ he informed me.
‘That’s good enough.’
It took Kevin a few days to come up with anything we could actually trust. ‘Some of the lads on the doors do remember her,’ he told me. ‘You know how we rotate the boys around our places. More than one said they’d seen her.�
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‘They recognised her?’ This seemed strange, considering she was only a young lass and hardly a veteran of the club scene.
‘Yeah, so I checked on our newest places first, the ones the young lasses like. I started with Cachet. They remember her down there.’
I didn’t want to hear that. ‘Shit, really? We get bloody hundreds in Cachet every weekend. Are they sure about her?’
‘I checked. She was a regular, down there most nights, mid-week as well as the weekend.’
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. This meant that Gemma Carlton really did have a link to me, however tenuous, and the police would soon pick up on it, if they hadn’t done so already. ‘How the bloody hell could a student afford to pay her way into Cachet every night?’
‘That’s just it,’ he seemed reluctant to give me the bad news, ‘she didn’t. They used to wave her through into the VIP lounge. She had one of our passes with her name on it.’
‘Fuck. Who gave her that then?’ This was getting worse.
‘I checked the register and her name was on our records as a platinum card holder but it doesn’t say who signed it out to her. We’ve been slack at that,’ he admitted, ‘I’ve given them a bollocking.’
‘Jesus, did Danny not know her?’
He shook his head.
‘Find out who’s responsible for this. Somebody must know someone who knows something. Keep at it.’
‘Will do boss.’
I drove home from one difficult conversation and straight into another. I was late, I was tired, worried and preoccupied and the last thing I needed was Sarah in the mood to talk.
‘I’d like to speak to you,’ she said, as soon as I walked through the door and she looked serious.
‘Can I get a drink first?’ She nodded and I poured my drink while she waited for me to sit down with it. ‘What is it?’
‘I’ve been thinking,’ she informed me, ‘a lot.’
‘About what?’
‘My dad.’
‘Oh, I see.’
‘And I think I’m ready to hear it. I think I need to hear it, in fact.’
‘Hear what?’ I genuinely had no idea what she was going on about.
‘What happened to him?’
‘Eh? What do you mean?’ This was the conversation I had always dreaded. ‘You know what happened to him.’
‘I don’t, not really. I only know what you told me.’
‘Which was?’ I knew what I’d told her but I was stalling.
‘That he was gone,’ she reminded me, ‘that he was never coming back.’
‘What else is there?’ I asked dumbly.
‘I know it was hard for you,’ she admitted, ‘you were there. I know how difficult that must have been.’
‘I don’t think you do,’ I snapped and realised I was taking stressed gulps of my drink. It was half-gone already.
‘But it has been hard for me too,’ she continued, ‘I never got to see him, to say goodbye. I spend so much time thinking about him and sometimes I feel like he isn’t really dead and…’
‘He’s dead Sarah,’ I assured her, ‘believe me. Your father is dead and he isn’t coming back. You don’t need to know anything more than that.’
‘What happened Davey?’ she asked me. ‘You say I don’t need to know, but I do.’
‘You do know. Alan Gladwell happened. He bundled your dad and Finney into a car and he took them away.’ I held up my hands so she knew that was all there was to it. Just talking about this was enough to make me feel sick. I hated lying to Sarah, but what choice did I have? I couldn’t tell her the truth.
‘I want to hear it all,’ she said.
‘No, Sarah, you don’t, trust me on that.’
‘I didn’t know why I’d been feeling the way I was but then I saw a documentary about families who had lost loved ones in Afghanistan and Iraq and how they needed to hear the details from the friends of the dead soldiers or their commanding officers. They couldn’t move on until they had the image of what actually happened in their heads. They wanted closure.’
I suppose I should have made something up real quick, but I just couldn’t do it. God knows I’d had enough time to prepare myself for her questions but I had always hoped they might never come.
‘Closure?’ I asked her lamely. ‘That’s just some psycho-babble American bullshit.’
She flared at that. ‘No David, it’s not. I need you to tell me what happened to my father. That’s not bullshit. It’s real.’
‘Yeah, well, it’s a bit too fucking real.’ I went to take another sip of my drink and realised it was empty. ‘I was there, remember?’
I got to my feet and she watched me with a hurt look on her face. I needed to get out of there. I needed to leave that room and it had to be now, but I didn’t have a good reason so I had to make one. I decided to look shocked and upset, which wasn’t hard because that was exactly how I was feeling inside.
‘I can’t believe you just sprang it on me like this with no warning,’ I rounded on her, ‘like you just expect me to relive the whole thing because you are suddenly ready. Well I’m not.’
She got to her feet too but I was already out of there. ‘Where are you going?’ she called after me.
‘Out!’ I managed and if she did reply I didn’t hear the words because I was too busy slamming the door behind me, glad to be outside in the cold and breathing in great gulps of air as I headed for my car.
I didn’t go home that night. I stayed in our hotel on the Quayside. I didn’t really sleep though. I spent most of the night lying awake, wondering why Sarah suddenly wanted to know all the details of her father’s death. Occasionally I heard raised voices from the street down below, as clubbers stumbled out on to the streets looking for taxis and couples had half-hearted drunken arguments they’d have forgotten about in the morning. I envied them that. I knew I should have spun Sarah some yarn about Bobby dying bravely in a hail of bullets, or collapsing of a heart attack after a beating, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Did I believe Bobby Mahoney would somehow be looking down on me from wherever he was, judging me while I lied to his only daughter? No, but it just didn’t feel right.
The next morning I went straight to the Cauldron. I didn’t call Sarah because I didn’t know what the hell to say to her.
13
The Cauldron wasn’t open to the public but the lads were lounging about in the bar. Soon they would have things to do and debts to call in. This was the calm before the daily storm.
Peter Kinane is a nice enough bloke, for a thug, and he’s bright too, despite inheriting the brawn of his dad, but sometimes I think he’s too sensitive to operate in our world. Peter had just been dumped by some lass he’d been shagging for a while and he was gutted. He’d been stupid enough to admit it too and the lads began to taunt him mercilessly. He hadn’t yet learned the golden rule about our world. You’ve got to be able to take it, no matter what they say to you.
‘I’m telling you man, she was a munter,’ Kevin Kinane announced when the subject of his brother’s ex came up in conversation again.
‘No she wasn’t,’ Peter protested weakly from a seat in the corner of the bar. Joe Kinane was watching it all with detached amusement, his other son Chris, the quiet one, sitting next to him. Palmer, Vince and some of our more established faces were all enjoying the sledging.
‘She had a canny pair of tits on her,’ conceded Kevin, ignoring his younger brother. ‘If you could have transplanted them onto a skinny bird, Keira Knightley maybe, then they would have looked good, but on her, well, they were a waste of a nice pair of puppies, if you ask me.’
‘Oi!’ warned Peter, ‘I am in the room!’
‘BOBFOC,’ said Palmer quietly.
Peter rounded on him and demanded, ‘What’s that supposed to fuckin’ mean?’
Palmer shrugged, ‘body off Baywatch, face off Crimewatch.’ He then repeated the word, ‘BOBFOC’, to ensure Peter took in his meaning. Peter Kinane looked
like he was about to start throwing punches.
His elder brother Kevin was gleeful. ‘He’s been upstairs in his room for weeks now, wank-stalking his ex on Facebook.’
‘No I fucking haven’t!’ replied Peter Kinane, seriously flustered now.
‘I caught you looking at her pictures on your laptop the other day, admit it man.’
‘So what,’ said Peter, ‘I was only bloody looking. It’s not a crime is it?’
‘No Peter, to be fair it’s not,’ I assured him because I was thankful for the distraction of this banter and when his face brightened a little I added, ‘it’s just a bit pathetic.’
‘Hey, howay man, don’t you start an’ all,’ he told me.
‘How long’s it been Peter? Since the break up?’ asked Palmer rhetorically, ‘three weeks? Oh well, never mind eh, because three weeks is the critical point.’
‘How’s that like?’ asked Peter, as Palmer reeled him in.
‘Well, if she really wasn’t shagging someone else behind your back when she dumped you…’
‘She wasn’t,’ Peter assured him.
‘She will be by now.’
‘Fuck off! Will she shite. She’s not like that.’
‘Yes she is Pete,’ said Vince, playing along with it.
‘They all are,’ announced Palmer solemnly, playing the wind-up to perfection, ‘you might think your lass is made of sugar and spice and all things nice but right now, even as I speak and you’re fretting about her, some big, hairy-bollocked bloke is up to his nuts in her.’
Peter launched himself at Palmer then, knocking the table between them to the ground, upending our beers in the process. We were creased up and we carried on laughing as an enraged Peter Kinane chased Palmer round the room, throwing haymaker punches that my bodyguard would have dodged easily if he hadn’t been laughing so hard himself.
The Dead Page 7