The Dead

by Howard Linskey

  Mark ambled over and said, ‘A girl? In Cachet? That doesn’t narrow it down.’ He’d obviously not heard a word of the conversation I’d had with Robbie, who quickly interrupted him.

  ‘Sit down, log on and shut up,’ and he slid Gemma Carlton’s photograph over to the desk he wanted Mark to occupy, before adding, ‘just g… g… get on with it. It’s important.’

  Mark looked a bit startled, but when he saw the look on my face he did exactly what he was told.

  ‘Call me when you find something.’ I ordered and I left them both tapping away furiously on their keyboards.

  ‘How’s Biggus Dickus?’ asked Palmer, when I joined him outside. That was his affectionate name for Robbie after the friend of the Roman with the stammer in Life of Brian.

  ‘He’s not moaning,’ I told him, ‘he’s just saying.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I assume you put him straight.’

  ‘You protected him while he was on the inside, he’d never get another job anywhere else and we reward him handsomely for his expertise, so this is payback time. I expect him to come up with something. Otherwise what is the point of having him?’

  Kinane was up before the magistrates that morning and he was still baffled by it. ‘I don’t understand,’ he told me in the corridor outside the courtroom, ‘I thought you’d just fix this.’

  ‘I tried,’ I told him, with what I hoped sounded like exasperation at the judicial process, ‘but it’s not as simple as that. There were too many witnesses for this to just go away. You did torture the bloke in broad daylight on the hard shoulder of a busy main road. The police have a queue of people who ID’d you and none of them reckon it looked the least bit like self-defence.’

  He looked chastened at that, ‘Yeah, I know but…’

  ‘There isn’t a but,’ and I sighed, ‘you’re going to have to plead guilty. You won’t be doing any prison time, that’s all been worked out, but it’s the best deal I could get you under the circumstances and, if you moan at me about it, I’ll withdraw my help and you can take your chances on your own.’

  ‘All right, okay,’ he held up his huge hands, ‘I’ll plead guilty.’

  The public gallery was surprisingly busy that morning. I put in an appearance even though I don’t normally go anywhere near a court when one of my lads is up on a charge but I wanted to see this. Palmer was with me, plus Vince and a couple of the other members of the crew, including Chris, Peter and Kevin.

  The bloke I’d hired was one of Susan Fitch’s colleagues and he did a good job. ‘Joseph Kinane is a hard-working, family man with no previous convictions,’ he told the Magistrates confidently, because the record of Kinane’s short jail sentence in the seventies had mysteriously failed to reach the Magistrates, thanks to the help we’d enlisted from the Court Clerk. Magistrates are all amateurs so you don’t really have to buy them. They rely on the Court Clerk for all of their legal advice, including sentencing guidelines, so if you can get at the clerk you’re half way there and we knew a couple who were malleable.

  ‘He was unreasonably provoked, then attacked by two young men with a string of convictions between them,’ added the solicitor, ‘both of whom, I should add, were driving without the usual impediments of road tax, insurance or even a licence between them.’

  That got a frown from the bench. ‘There has also been some considerable doubt cast as to who exactly grappled with the young man who then fell and sustained a broken jaw. Witnesses have described another man who left the scene suddenly without waiting for the police to arrive.’

  I didn’t mind him saying that because no one really got a good look at me, and Kinane had already sworn blind he was the only one in the car that day. ‘I was on my way to visit my elderly mother,’ he had explained, ‘who has been quite poorly lately.’

  ‘The final factor I wish you to take into account,’ the lawyer instructed the bench, ‘is the failure of either of the young men who claimed to be victims of the alleged assault to take the trouble to attend today’s proceedings.’

  ‘Someone must have had a word,’ Palmer whispered to me.

  Kinane pleaded guilty to the less serious charges and the Magistrates accepted this, which meant he didn’t have to go to Crown Court. He waited for his fine to be handed down but I knew that would never teach him a lesson, so I’d arranged a more suitable punishment.

  Kinane looked almost bored as the lady magistrate, a dead ringer for Margaret Thatcher, lectured him on the importance of personal responsibility in a civilised society. Magistrates are like politicians, you have to distrust the motives of anyone who actually wants the job and I could tell she was enjoying every minute of this. I don’t think he heard a word of it until she reached the bit about the sentence. At this point he straightened, so he could hear how much he had to pay.

  The Thatcher clone told him, ‘We have decided not to hand down a custodial sentence Mr Kinane…’

  ‘Right,’ he said, ‘thanks.’

  ‘… conditional upon your agreeing to attend a minimum of ten sessions of anger-management counselling.’

  Kinane quickly interrupted, ‘Do you not want a fine like?’ he asked her, ‘I’ve got money. I’m not a doley, I can pay yer knaa.’

  ‘No,’ she told him witheringly, ‘we do not want a fine Mr Kinane. We want you to seek professional help in order for you to be better able to control your temper.’

  ‘Mr Kinane accepts this gracious offer,’ the lawyer quickly responded on his behalf before Kinane lost that famous temper once again. At that point he looked over at us and realised we were all desperately trying to keep control. Palmer was doubled up and laughing silently, his body shaking with mirth. Vince had a grin on him like a Cheshire cat and I just about managed to stifle a smirk, but he knew he’d been had and he scowled at us all.

  ‘That will fucking teach you,’ I told him, as I handed him his pint in Rosie’s bar afterwards, ‘not that ten hours of anger management is ever going to cure you of being a cunt.’

  ‘Bastard,’ he muttered, as he took the pint, ‘you’re all bastards, in point of fact’.

  I had known that the worst punishment that could have been handed down to Joe Kinane, aside from prison, was one in which he was forced to sit in a group, while admitting out loud that he had anger issues and it all stemmed back to his childhood because his mummy never cuddled him. This would be a form of living hell to a man like Kinane, who had bottled up every negative emotion he’d had in his life and thought the only proper way to handle a problem was to ‘fucking deal with it’.

  The wind-ups and piss-takes would have gone on a lot longer if Palmer hadn’t walked back in at that point after taking a call outside in the street. He looked at me and shook his head, which could only mean one thing; more bad news.

  We stood outside Rosie’s bar, which sits in the shadow of St James’ Park, the huge, white footballing cathedral right in the middle of our city.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked him.

  ‘It’s Baxter,’ he told us, ‘he’s been arrested.’

  ‘Again?’ I couldn’t believe it. ‘What’s he done now?’

  ‘Fuck me,’ snorted Kinane, ‘doesn’t put a foot wrong in years and now he’s picked up twice in seven days. The man’s a one-man crime-wave. What are they gonna charge him with now? Littering with intent?’

  ‘Murder,’ said Palmer.

  Sharp had learned his lesson from our last meeting. This time, when I called him, he didn’t grumble. He met me in the small apartment block we keep in the city, to accommodate guests of the firm and for crash meetings like this one.

  ‘Tell me about Henry Baxter,’ I said, ‘that’s my prime concern right now.’

  It was pretty amazing to think that being wrongly accused of the murder of a detective’s daughter could actually be priority number two, but I was having a very bad week.

  ‘When Baxter was arrested for drink-driving they did all of the usual stuff for someone as far over the drink-drive limit as he was,’ Sharp
explained to us. ‘They breathalysed him, fingerprinted him, then took a buccal swab from his mouth before they let him back on the streets. It was purely routine, and so was the cross-checking of the DNA sample. We do it for everyone because it works. We had one guy who was picked up after a brawl in a pub car park. It turned out he’d done an armed robbery fourteen years back and left his DNA at the scene when he’d given the building society manager a smack in the mouth to make him behave. He must have cut his hand on the bloke’s broken teeth because a tiny smattering of his blood ended up on the counter top. We matched the samples and now he’s doing sixteen years for it.’

  I could see Kinane looking uncomfortable. I knew he’d be recalling all of the armed robberies and punishment beatings he’d been involved in over the years. There were probably microscopic traces of Joe Kinane’s DNA all over this city.

  ‘That’s fascinating Sharp, but what has that got to do with Baxter and a murder?’

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘but it’s the same thing. When Baxter’s DNA was taken it was matched by the computer to a cold case. They reckon he’s the perp. He must have done it. The odds against it are millions to one.’

  ‘Baxter? A murderer? I seriously doubt that,’ I told Sharp.

  Kinane chipped in then, ‘Who’d he kill? A tax inspector?’

  ‘No,’ answered Sharp, ‘a little girl.’

  16

  To my complete disbelief, Henry Baxter was placed on remand in Durham nick, to await trial for the murder of a thirteen-year-old girl named Leanne Bell. He soon got word to us.

  ‘I am not going anywhere near Durham nick,’ I told Palmer. I was about to meet the owners of that York hotel I wanted to buy. The heat might have been on us since the death of Gemma Carlton, but we still had to keep the business going. They were due at our Quayside restaurant and I didn’t need the prospect of a cosy prison visit at the back of my mind. ‘I have to put as much distance between me and that child-murdering prick as possible, particularly now. Surely you understand that?’

  ‘Course I do, obviously.’ Palmer looked like he was about to continue but Kinane cut him off.

  ‘If it was down to me, we’d have him shanked in the showers,’ my enforcer told me, ‘and not like Toddy. I’d get someone to fillet him, so he died slow. I’d want him screaming in agony when he finally went. He deserves it for what he did to that girl.’

  ‘Careful Joe,’ Palmer chipped in, ‘we don’t know for sure that he’s guilty.’

  Kinane gave Palmer a vengeful look.

  ‘We really don’t,’ my head of security reminded him, ‘all we know is he was picked up for drink-driving, they took a DNA swab and let him go, we hear nothing for days and the next thing we know he’s lifted off the street on a ten-year-old murder charge and banged up in Durham.’

  ‘Sounds pretty straightforward to me,’ grunted Kinane.

  ‘So you are one hundred per cent certain this isn’t some crafty SOCA plot to get Baxter to come over all supergrass, are you? Because I’m not.’

  Kinane snorted like he thought that was ludicrous, but he didn’t say anything more. Palmer continued, ‘He knows stuff, Joe. Baxter knows damaging things about us, so the last thing we should do is cut him adrift. What else has he got to bargain with?’

  ‘Palmer’s right,’ I admitted reluctantly. Kinane turned to face me then, with anger in his eyes. ‘He is,’ I assured him, ‘we can hate Baxter all we like but we shouldn’t cut him loose completely. Not yet. We need him to keep thinking we are on his side while we quietly dismantle everything he set up, so nothing can be traced back to us. Then, once we have done that, we’ll drop him like a hot rock and he can rot in prison for the rest of his miserable life.’

  ‘I’ll drink to that,’ Kinane nodded, finally getting my point.

  ‘So you’ll go and see him?’ asked Palmer.

  ‘No I won’t, not personally’ I told him, ‘I thought I’d spelled that out.’

  Palmer nodded, ‘You did, but he’s having none of it, and he knows where all the bodies are buried. You just admitted as much yourself.’

  ‘So I have no bloody choice?’

  ‘That’s about the size of it,’ he confirmed.

  Durham jail is a Category B closed prison, which means the inmates are not the highest risk, but escape is meant to be made very difficult for them. Men like Henry Baxter, who are on remand awaiting trial, are usually held as Category B prisoners. Durham is no cake-walk though. A decade ago its seven wings had the highest suicide rate of any prison in the country, and there are more than nine-hundred inmates housed within its walls.

  We drove up to the huge nineteenth-century building with trepidation. Not because I was scared of the place. It was our link with a probable child killer that was alarming me. It was all I needed right now with the murder of Gemma Carlton hanging over us.

  ‘You’d better wait here,’ I told Palmer, as I surveyed this forbidding building. ‘If I know Baxter he’ll be jumpy enough as it is without seeing you.’

  Baxter was scared; terrified in fact. I could see it in his podgy, sweaty face and piggy eyes, as he walked into the stifling room, uncombed hair sticking up in a Tintin quiff.

  ‘There’s no one else here,’ I assured him, ‘except him.’ Baxter glanced over at the tame prison guard who stayed a discreet distance from the table I had chosen. We were in the visitors’ area, but visiting hours were long over. I didn’t want my conversation with Baxter to be public.

  We used Amrein to get me some private time with Baxter. Prison officers are pretty easy to buy. They earn fuck all, so they are particularly susceptible to a little extra bunce for a seemingly innocent bending of the rules. That’s how you start them out, by giving them a few hundred quid to turn a blind eye to some weed or a mobile phone being brought in. What they usually don’t realise is that, once they are on the pay roll, it’s impossible to come off it. If they’ve broken a rule, they are ours. When they try to duck the next favour we need, we remind them they’ve already broken the law by accepting our money and how easy it might be for someone to find that out.

  Baxter sat down opposite me. I glanced at our tame warder and he backed away, ambling over to stand in a corner. Now we could talk freely. Baxter looked as if he expected me to start things off; ask about his well-being perhaps, make sure he was getting three squares a day and his copy of the Telegraph delivered each morning. I wasn’t about to do that.

  ‘You start,’ I told him, then I stayed silent, while he gathered his thoughts.

  ‘You’ve got to get me out of here,’ he told me, then he waited for my response.

  I couldn’t help but laugh at that one. ‘Sure I will Baxter,’ and I nodded at the screw. ‘I’ll get him to have a word with the governor and he’ll let you out. You’ll be back in Newcastle in time for afternoon tea at the Copthorne.’

  ‘Stop pissing about,’ Baxter hissed, ‘this isn’t funny. You don’t know what it’s like in here. You don’t know the way I’m being treated. Like an animal.’

  ‘Oh sorry, I didn’t realise. That was insensitive of me.’ He looked a bit baffled by that answer. ‘Though maybe, just maybe, you should have thought of that before you raped and strangled a thirteen-year-old girl. I had you pegged as a lot of things, Baxter, but a nonce wasn’t one of them.’

  He opened his mouth to reply and I braced myself for the denials. I wondered what tactic he would choose. It wasn’t me, it was someone else who looked like me, the DNA test was wrong, it’s a set-up, she was fine when I left her. Instead Baxter surprised me with a half-snort, half-laugh.

  ‘Rape?’ and he shook his head as if that was the funniest thing ever. ‘Ha, you’ve got to be joking,’ then he rolled his eyes, ‘not with that one.’

  I was side-swiped by that answer, like I’d been hit with a sucker punch I didn’t see coming. It took a moment to recover my train of thought. Whatever morals I had left, and I didn’t have many, Baxter had managed to offend them.

  ‘You’re saying the girl
was willing?’

  ‘I’m saying it wasn’t rape,’ he told me impatiently, through gritted teeth.

  ‘Well either it was rape or she was willing Baxter. There’s no in-between.’

  ‘Course there is,’ he told me firmly, ‘there just comes a point when all the cock teasing has to end, when all the treats and the attention has to lead to something in return. She understood that, at least that’s what I thought.’ He even managed to sound indignant.

  ‘Oh I get it Baxter. You gave her some sweeties, maybe a bit of pocket money and that entitled you to have sex with her, even though she was only thirteen?’

  ‘Yes, well,’ he looked a bit uncomfortable at that, ‘that one was thirteen going on…’

  ‘Fourteen?’ I offered. ‘Fifteen maybe? Or was she thirteen going on sixteen, so you got it into your head that she was fair game did you? How old were you at the time? Forty-five? Not exactly Romeo and Juliet, is it?’

  ‘I’m saying that age is no real indicator,’ and he jabbed his finger at the table-top, ‘and this one was older than her age. You know what they say,’ and he arched his eyebrows at me, ‘if they are old enough to…’

  ‘Complete that sentence and I swear I will smash your sick face into this table and I will keep on doing it.’

  That shut him up. I glanced at the prison guard. ‘By the time he legs it over here to save you, you’ll be a fucking vegetable, eating puréed meals for the rest of your sad, child-raping life. You got that?’

  He eyed me carefully like he was wondering whether I was just bluffing, but whatever he saw in my face made him back down. ‘There’s no need for threats,’ he told me quietly.

  I had to take a deep breath to control my anger and remind myself where I was, before I continued, ‘Let’s just pretend for a moment that you haven’t committed rape or, at the very least, even using your version of events, statutory rape. Shall we do that, Baxter? Even then, there is one obvious flaw in your defence.’ He looked at me like he couldn’t quite see it. ‘You killed her,’ I reminded him quietly.