The Damage (David Blake 2)

by Howard Linskey

  Palmer and I watched as Mason strolled back to his apartment on the edge of town. They were nice flats, just a few exclusive properties in a small block that had been built on the site of an old hotel. The apartments were occupied by commuters, young professionals who were never there during the daytime. There was no concierge, but there was an underground car park, which made it perfect for our needs. I sent a text message.

  I was at the wheel of the car, so I could let Palmer out. He waited until our man walked through the front door of his apartment block then he left and went after him.

  *

  Palmer took the stairs slowly and quietly, making sure he would not be heard. He was in no hurry. He was just back-up, in case the guy caused any trouble that Kinane and his boys couldn’t handle. He was armed though, and he took the gun out of a sports bag he was carrying and hid it behind a short raincoat that was folded over his arm.

  He was about to round the corner that would bring him to his target’s apartment when he heard the sound. It echoed down the corridor towards him, unbearably loud in the confined space of a corridor of a near-empty building. It was the unmistakeable sound of a pump action shotgun being made ready to fire. As Palmer came around the corner, he saw Mason standing by the door of his apartment with nothing more lethal in his hands than the keys to his front door. There were two Beretta shotguns trained directly on him by Kinane’s sons and Joe himself was advancing on the man with a pistol in his hand. There were large holdalls on the floor to hide the shotguns. Blake’s text had been the signal to release them. Mason held up his hands high in a gesture of surrender. Palmer tried to read him. Did he seem scared, rattled maybe? No, the look he wore was one of complete resignation.

  Somehow the whole thing had gone according to plan and they had lifted the assassin without firing a shot. He was unarmed, outnumbered and, judging by David Blake’s mood, his future was as bleak as could be imagined. There was just one thing that troubled Palmer. It was the look on his face – a calm, implacable look that seemed to say ‘I knew this moment was going to come one day’.

  Kinane walked right up to Mason and hit him hard with the hand that contained the pistol. It crashed into the side of his head with a sickening impact and he went down on one knee and put a hand up to the deep cut there. Kinane pulled the guy up by the lapels of his fancy suit. Blood was oozing down the side of his face. Kinane pushed him towards the door to the car park.

  It was a risk doing it this way. There was always the possibility they’d be disturbed by someone pushing a leaflet through a door, or a resident coming home, but they’d reasoned this was their best chance. Sometimes you just had to do the daring thing that no one expects, particularly if you are going to take out a guy like this. He clearly hadn’t expected to be lifted on his own doorstep. They clattered down the metal steps and out through the door that opened onto the car park. It was empty except for a silver Mercedes. Palmer guessed it belonged to the man they had just knocked senseless. The only other vehicle in the underground car park was a Transit van with blacked-out rear windows. The side door was dragged open and the semi-conscious man hauled inside. Both hands were cuffed to the metal racking on the far wall of the van and his feet were bound together with the kind of plastic cuffs the Police use. He was blindfolded and gagged. Even so, Kinane’s sons sat on the bench seating opposite him with their shotguns ready. No one was going to take any chances with this one.

  33

  .......................

  I followed the van all the way back to the old electrical plant. It parked up a few yards from the lock up and I stayed in my car for a moment and watched as the side door slid open. Kinane and his sons came out of the van and they dragged Mason out with them. They tore off the blindfold and he blinked at the light. Mason didn’t look scared. His hands were still bound and there was dried blood on the side of his face but he walked unaided towards the lock up, past the newly-delivered breeze blocks and the cement mixer. Kinane started it up and it rolled round and round, making a convenient noise to mask any sounds that might come from inside the lock up. I climbed out of my car and followed them in.

  I waited till Kinane took off the handcuffs and replaced them with an iron manacle that went round our man’s left wrist. This was attached to a thick, linked chain ten feet long that stretched from a post cemented into the floor. He was tethered like a dog now. Kinane and Palmer walked back out while Kinane’s sons stayed and covered the guy with their shotguns.

  ‘Who paid you to kill my brother?’ I demanded, ‘or are you going to tell me you have no idea.’

  He snorted, ‘I don’t know,’ at least he didn’t deny it, ‘we never know. That’s how it works. The job is sent, the money is wired. It’s all done electronically.’

  Jesus, he didn’t even have a cut-out. He could have been lying, but I doubted it and I didn’t want to waste my time trying to find out.

  ‘You laughed,’ I said and he looked up at me without comprehension, ‘when you walked out of the bar after you shot my brother, you pointed your gun at that young girl, and then you said “Bang” and you laughed.’

  ‘What of it?’

  ‘You gunned down my brother and you leave the place laughing. How do you think that makes me feel?’

  He looked down at his feet then like he was ignoring me. ‘Why you don’t just cut the chat and do what you have to do?’

  ‘Kill you, you mean?’

  ‘If you’ve got the balls.’

  I couldn’t fucking believe this guy. I knew he was crazy from what Palmer had said about him but it was clear to me now that he had a death wish.

  ‘What if I choose to take my time? What if I get my guys here to beat the shit out of you in shifts for days, then I’ll come back and stomp on the bones they’ve broken. How does that sound? I reckon we could keep you alive for a week, maybe two, before your heart finally gives out.’

  ‘Like I said,’ he mumbled, ‘you do what you’ve got to do.’

  ‘Reckon you’re pretty hard core, don’t you? You think you can cope with everything we throw at you, like this is some big heroic final test. Is that right?’

  ‘Think what you want to think.’

  ‘What if I get my men to pour a can of petrol over you, burn you alive in here and listen to your screams through the open window? What do you say? Does that sound like a good way to go to you?’

  ‘You won’t hear me scream.’

  ‘Really? You sound pretty sure of that. You must be hard core. Burned alive and he goes without a whimper. But don’t worry, it’s alright. I’m not going to kill you,’ I told him.

  ‘Yeah,’ he answered, ‘course you’re not,’ before adding, ‘I don’t give a fuck.’

  ‘You made that pretty clear. You’ve got your “it’s all bullshit anyway” speech all worked out for me, haven’t you, and that thousand-yard-stare is a dead giveaway. I knew it as soon as I saw you. You can’t wait for it to finally be over, but you are too gutless to do it yourself. You had to wait till we came along to do it for you. Mission suicide. But like I said, I’m not going to kill you.’

  Kinane walked in with a pack containing two dozen bottles of water covered in plastic wrapping. He dropped it on the floor within the guy’s reach. Mason looked at it but, if he was wondering what it was for, he hid it well.

  ‘I’m going to leave you here to think about what you did,’ he frowned at me then, but I still don’t think he understood. Palmer walked in and threw a large box of chocolate bars on the ground near the water.

  ‘Okay,’ he said. Did I imagine it, or was his voice cracking slightly? ‘When you come back, we should talk. I could make a deal…’

  ‘No talking, no deals. I’m not coming back.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ he told me, and he looked at the water and the chocolate bars trying to make sense of them.

  ‘I’m leaving you here,’ I informed him, ‘chained up. I am going to leave the water and the food too, but not because I’m a nice guy. I wa
nt you to have them here with you, so you take a very long time to die. You’re going to want to die when you’ve been down here for a while but you won’t be able to stop yourself from drinking the water and eating the food, and that’s what I want. That way you’ll last a long while. I want you to think about how you ended up lying here with no hope, because that’s how you left my brother. He’s in a hospital bed right now, he can’t move and he has no future. I’m going to show you how that feels.’

  ‘You’ll never break that chain. You probably think you can and I’m sure you’ll try, but I’m telling you now there’s no chance. You are never leaving this room and you won’t see daylight again. When we leave here the door will be locked and padlocked on the outside. Then my lads will take the breeze blocks and the cement and they will seal up the door. No one will come because no one knows you’re here and it’s private land. You can scream all you like. I want you to scream, but no one will hear you. You are going to die in here but not before you’ve had a long time to think about what you did to my brother. I’m pretty sure you will be more than crazy by the time you eventually die – and that won’t give my brother his life back, but knowing it will bring me some comfort.’ All the time I’d been talking I was watching him, and now I could see the realisation slowly sinking in. He didn’t look so calm now.

  ‘I have two hundred thousand pounds in an account. Let me go and it’s yours,’ there was desperation in the words now because he knew it was a long shot.

  ‘Keep it,’ I told him, ‘see how much good it does you down here.’

  He started tugging at the chain then, pulling hard. It didn’t budge. Palmer and Kinane walked out of the room, followed by Kinane’s sons. I took one last look at the man who had destroyed my brother. I wanted to remember his fear and desperation. I wanted to see it written all over his face. He was still tugging at the chain.

  ‘Please, don’t leave me in here…please,’ his voice was a croak and there were tears in his eyes, ‘don’t do this.’

  I walked towards the door.

  ‘Kill me,’ he urged me, ‘kill me now…’

  ‘I just did,’ I said and I took one last look at him. He knew the talking was over. I stepped outside the room and, as I closed the door, I heard him cry ‘No!’ Then I closed it firmly shut and clicked the heavy padlock in place. I threw the key away into the bushes. I nodded at the guys and they started to bring the heavy breeze blocks over to finish the job.

  Kinane and Palmer joined me in the car and we drove away without a word.

  34

  .......................

  It was the morning of our big meeting with Alan Gladwell. Today I had to decide whether I was going to share the proceeds of Edinburgh’s drug trade with him – or decline his offer and risk going to war with the Gladwells. I had the TV on in the background while I showered and dressed in the apartment but I wasn’t giving it much attention.

  The news was all about Leon Cassidy that morning. It was the only story receiving any real coverage. The day before, he had been found guilty of all five murders and the Press were finally able to unleash all of their hyperbole on the Sandyhills Sniper, without fear of prejudicing the trial or risking a libel case. Cassidy was a misfit, a loner and a loser they told us. He was inadequate and lived in his own world. Former school friends and work mates queued up to denounce him with small, seemingly insignificant stories that, in hindsight, seemed like clues that they’d been sharing their lives with a killer all along. He’d blanked them, looked right through them, had a bit of a temper over silly little things, which clearly showed he was a nut job. Cassidy had been kicked out by the military, then by his wife, and couldn’t hold down a normal job, and so it went on.

  I was brushing my teeth with the door open, so I could hear the Strathclyde Police press conference. Their top brass could hardly contain their sense of satisfaction at the life sentence handed down to Cassidy.

  I didn’t really listen to the words of the Chief Constable. He was spouting the usual crap about ‘the most important thing today is the sense of closure for relatives of the victims. Our hearts go out to the loved ones whose lives have been forever altered by the wicked and senseless acts of Leon Cassidy,’ I walked back into the room while he was finishing his piece, ‘I know it is some consolation to his loving wife Judy and their two wonderful children that Detective Chief Inspector Robert McGregor died bravely doing the job that he loved, protecting the citizens of his home against criminality of all kinds.’ Every word must have been written by the press office in advance because it contained all of the pat phrases we’d heard a million times before.

  I was buttoning my shirt when they finally allowed the arresting officer to have a word with the Press. When I heard his voice I stopped what I was doing and turned back towards the screen. I watched him intently. Detective Inspector Stephen Connor was a wiry man in his late forties, with a shock of white hair and a broad Glasgow accent. In other words, a working-class boy made good. He told the assembled journalists, ‘the streets of our city are safe again, thanks to the conviction of the so-called Sandyhills Sniper. I would even go so far as to say that everybody in Glasgow can sleep sounder in their beds.’ Connor went on to field questions from the Press but I couldn’t focus on what he said. I sat down heavily on the sofa and tried to think, my thoughts churning. I was dimly aware of a noise somewhere that was not coming from the TV set and eventually realised that my mobile was ringing.

  The meeting with Alan Gladwell was reconvened at the same venue. Virtually his whole crew was there, and so was ours, with the exception of Hunter and Danny. I’d had about an hour’s sleep the night before, so my tolerance for bullshit was non-existent. When Amrein started to recount the main points of the previous meeting’s discussion, I interrupted him.

  ‘Mind if I say something Amrein, before you go through everything again?’ I asked.

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘I’d like to tell you a little story I heard once, Alan,’ and I looked him in the eye, ‘mind if I do that?’ I didn’t allow him to reply, ‘it’s all about a man who went a bit crazy last year and started shooting people at random. You’ll remember it. After all, it happened in your backyard.’

  ‘Of course I remember it. It was the biggest news story in Glasgow for years. You’re right he was crazy, sick in the head in my opinion. Killed a couple of people who didn’t deserve it.’

  ‘More than a couple. He shot four civilians, but that’s not what got him the biggest coverage, was it?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘It was the big cheese Police Officer he gunned down that got the tabloids really in a spin. What was it they used to call him? DCI Gangbuster?’

  ‘I don’t read the newspapers,’ Alan said, coolly.

  ‘Well then you’ll just have to take my word for it. His real name was Detective Chief Inspector Robert McGregor. His speciality was taking down heavy-duty crews and locking up long-established crime families. His methods were a bit rough; a bit of blackmail, intimidation, paying large amounts of government money to grasses, then whisking them away into the witness protection programme. But the thing about him was, he got results. Every time he took a firm down he made sure it was his face on the Ten O’Clock News. Some even said he was a future Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.’

  ‘Yeah, I’d heard of the bloke.’

  ‘I bet. The thing is, to the likes of you and me, DCI McGregor was a problem. He had a very good record of putting people like us out of business and his last port of call was Glasgow, where he told everybody who’d listen that he was going to take down the crime barons. Trouble was, he was so high profile he was untouchable. No one could get near him and, if anyone ever tried, the outrage would have been colossal. A firm like yours would have been rolled up in five minutes if you’d killed him. You and everybody else in your outfit would have been doing life before you knew it.’

  ‘I agree,’ he said calmly, ‘so what’s your point? The bloke who kill
ed him was all over the Breakfast News this morning.’

  ‘Except that we know it wasn’t actually Leon Cassidy.’

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘Leon Cassidy. The man the police got for it, the fella the jury convicted, the one the judge gave a life sentence to. He wasn’t the shooter.’

  Alan Gladwell smiled as if I was a conspiracy theorist, ‘of course it was him. They found the bloody rifle at his flat. Like I said he was a sick fuck. I mean if it had just been that copper he’d shot then I’d have given him a medal, but he took out innocent civilians in the process.’

  ‘Collateral damage,’ I told him. ‘In the larger scheme of things, they didn’t matter.’

  ‘You reckon?’ and he frowned at me, ‘listen pal, this is all very fascinating but we haven’t got all day. There’s an entire fucking city waiting for you to make up your mind…’

  I managed to ignore and interrupt him at the same time, ‘Yeah, I reckon, they were chaff, cannon fodder, the PBI,’ and when he looked blankly at me I explained, ‘the Poor Bloody Infantry, you know, the ones who get sent into battle by the generals, sacrificed for the greater good.’

  He was looking confused, so I carried on.

  ‘Isn’t that the way you viewed it, Alan? Leon Cassidy was the perfect patsy, your very own Lee Harvey Oswald. He couldn’t hold down a job, had a history of mental problems, was booted out of the army as a young man, but not before he had weapons training. There were previous convictions for assault, a failed marriage and a lost custody battle, even a restraining order from the wife. You couldn’t have invented a better suspect; a ticking time bomb just waiting to go off. Then one day he does – he becomes the ”Sandyhills Sniper”, gunning down a man on a petrol forecourt. No one sees him, all they hear is the shot. The next day he does it again. He’s an impatient little psychopath is Leon. He waits all his life to commit a murder then he does two in twenty-four hours.’