The Damage (David Blake 2) Read online

  ‘There’s a thought that keeps me awake at night; I have to be lucky every time, they only have to get lucky once.’

  David Blake is a worried man. He should be enjoying the high life now he’s Newcastle’s ‘Top Boy’, the man who controls everything in the city that’s worth controlling. He lives in exiled luxury, while his brother Danny and trusted right-hand men, Palmer and Kinane, take care of business and make sure no one steps out of line. The money keeps on rolling in and Blake is sharing his life with the girl that he loves, Sarah Mahoney. Shame he had to murder her father to save his own skin, but at least she doesn’t know anything about that.

  Blake never wanted to be boss, but who else is savvy enough to deal with all of the firm’s problems; like Braddock, the rogue drug dealer, who’s keeping too much of the take, and ‘The Turk’, Blake’s new source of ‘product’ who’s taken a million Euros down-payment on a shipment that never arrives. Newly-crowned Glasgow crime lord, Alan Gladwell, wants to do business with the firm, and the deal makes sense, but can Blake really trust the man whose brother he brutally murdered. Then there is his obsession with the beautiful but troubled Simone, who chooses to work in one of the firm’s massage parlours when she is so much better than that.

  When one of his men takes two bullets in the back and someone tries to kill him, Blake struggles to stay in control.

  From the heroin-laced high rises of Newcastle to the seedy back streets of Bangkok, in a world of contract killers, corrupt politicians, bent detectives, coke-snorting footballers, fixers, hookers and pimps, Blake is in a race against time to find his potential assassin and discover the truth in The Damage.

  Howard Linskey has worked as a barman, journalist, catering manager and marketing manager for a celebrity chef, as well as in a variety of sales and account management jobs. He has written for newspapers, magazines and websites on a number of subjects. The Drop is Howard’s debut novel, published by No Exit in 2011.

  Originally from Ferryhill in County Durham, he now lives in Hertfordshire with his wife Alison and daughter Erin.

  Howard is a long-suffering Newcastle United fan and Mike Ashley is not on his Christmas card list.

  Critical acclaim for The Drop

  ‘Linskey delivers a flawless feel for time and place, snappy down to earth dialect dialogue mixed in with unrelenting violence and pace. A Tyneside Dashiell Hammett to put Martina Cole firmly in her place.’

  – Peter Millar, The Times

  (chosen in his Top 5 Crime Thrillers of 2011)

  ‘writing that leaps off the page in its lacerating forcefulness…a classic British gangster novel that evokes and matches some of the best writing in the genre’

  – Vic Buckner, Crime Time

  ‘The Drop is overflowing with the grit that defines the very best of British gangster fiction’

  – Mike Stafford, Bookgeeks

  ‘Howard Linskey does for Newcastle what Ian Rankin has done for Edinburgh’

  – Sam Millar, New York Journal of Books

  ‘a brutal, hard-hitting debut which opens up Newcastle’s dark, violent underbelly like a freshly-sharpened stiletto’

  – Simon Kernick

  ‘a razor-sharp debut and Linskey is sure to be at the forefront of Northern crime writing in 2011. A writer to keep an eye on.’

  – Nick Quantrill, Harrogate Festival website

  ‘a very successful first novel’

  – Chris Shepherd, newbooks magazine

  ‘Plainly put The Drop is a brilliant slice of modern Brit Grit’

  – Brian Lindemuth, Spinetingler Magazine

  – Best Mystery/Crime Fiction 2011

  ‘A fast-paced, hard-boiled tale that zips along’

  – The Crack

  ‘Linskey has a knack of expressing a mindset with clarity, humour and realism which along with the earthy vocabulary combines to create a marvellous tale.’

  – Crimesquad

  ‘A cracker of a tale unrolled with great understatement but loaded with verve and pace. The backdrop is brutal, harsh and downright fatal for some, the characters jump right off the page, and I found the book difficult to put down. No Exit Press has found a real winner.’

  – Adrian Magson, Shots

  ‘An absolutely cracking debut novel’

  – bestcrimebooks.co.uk

  ‘A deftly written crime thriller, which really shows off Linskey’s skill at storytelling’

  – Luca Veste, Guilty Conscience

  ‘Brilliant. Gangster writing at its best.’

  – Paul Cleave – winner of the Ngaio Marsh Award

  Also by Howard Linskey

  The Drop

  For Erin & Alison, as it ought to be

  CONTENTS

  Title

  About the Author

  Critical acclaim for The Drop

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Epilogue

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ...............................................

  I would like to thank the following for their support and friendship during the writing of this book; Adam Pope, Andy Davis, Nikki Hurley, Gareth Chennells, Andrew Local and Stuart Britton. Thanks also to David Shapiro and Peter Day.

  A very big thank you to Ion Mills at No Exit for publishing The Damage. Thanks to Alan Forster for the cover design and Claire Watts, Chris Burrows, Jem Cook and Alexandra Bolton at No Exit for their hard work on my behalf. A massive thank you to Keshini Naidoo for her intelligent and insightful editing.

  I have huge respect for the team at Marjacq Literary Agency, particularly my agent Phil Patterson, whose time, help, advice and friendship are greatly appreciated by me. Thanks also to Isabella Floris for her efforts in foreign markets and to Luke Speed for his work on the TV option. A special thank you goes to David Barron and Stevie Lee at ‘Runaway Fridge’ Productions.

  Finally, a massive thank you to my loving wife Alison and beautiful daughter Erin, for their love, faith and support, which means everything to me.

  PROLOGUE

  ...............................................

  Glasgow

  The body was propped up in a sitting position on the park bench, head back, arms splayed wide, as if the victim had been trying to embrace someone right before the bullet struck. The entry wound was the soft tissue of the right eye, leaving the rest of the face completely intact. If it were not for the dark, bloody hole where the eyeball had been you might have thought the victim was merely dozing. From the back it was a different story
. The high calibre round, meeting little resistance, had gone through the man’s skull, tearing off the back of the head and taking most of his brains with it. The exit wound was a gaping, ragged and bloody mess the size of a grapefruit.

  Detective Constables Jason Narey and Eamon Walker had been the first officers on the scene and Narey had winced when he saw the damage. The only positive thing about dying like that, reasoned Narey, was that you wouldn’t know a bloody thing about it. You’d be here one second and gone the next, dead in less than the time it took someone to click their fingers.

  It was a strange sight. Most victims of gunshot wounds ended up lying on the ground. This one was still seated on the wooden bench he’d been occupying when the bullet struck, causing everyone around him to scatter, screaming in panic as they ran from the park. Someone managed to retain the presence of mind to call Strathclyde Police to tell them the Sandyhills Sniper had struck again. As luck would have it, Walker and Narey were nearby, following up a lead in an unrelated case and, from what Narey could make out, there was nothing here to contradict the caller’s assessment. Everything about the crime scene indicated this killing was down to the sniper.

  The municipal park was eerily empty now except for the two Police officers and the murdered man. The detectives proceeded cautiously at first, even though they both knew the killer would be long gone by now. That was the MO of the sniper. Set yourself up so you are well hidden, select a target somewhere off in the distance, preferably a face in a crowd, to cause maximum hysteria after the shot, then take them out. There’d been three previous attacks, on seemingly random and entirely innocent victims. As soon as the shot was taken, the sniper disappeared into thin air, leaving no clues for the Police to pick up on, not even a spent cartridge. The only real evidence they were left with was the bullet, which invariably passed through the body of the victim and was found nearby, embedded in the first solid object it met. Ballistics reckoned the ammunition in the earlier killings was .308 and Narey had no reason to doubt they’d find an exact match to that calibre in the undergrowth somewhere close to this poor sod.

  Both men had taken a cursory look at the victim but you didn’t have to be a GP to know he was way beyond anyone’s help, so they retreated, to spots some distance away, standing either side of the body, their primary aim to secure the scene against any pain-in-the-arse-passers-by or make-a-name-for-themselves-journalists whilst they waited for the SOCOs to arrive.

  Narey chose a spot by some trees, just in case. The sniper might be long gone but twelve years in the force had taught him to be cautious. Narey could still see the victim clearly enough from this vantage point. He looked like someone sleeping off a liquid lunch but the gelatinous brain matter plastered over the wall behind him told a different story.

  ‘Poor fucker,’ he said.

  ‘Wouldn’t want to be the one that’s got to clean this up,’ Walker called from his spot at the opposite end of the open ground between them, ‘he certainly picked the wrong day for a walk in the park.’

  Narey couldn’t argue with that. If the victim had stayed in that afternoon or gone round the shops instead, he’d still be alive now, for this crime was about as indiscriminate as it gets.

  The guy on the bench looked to be in his early forties, appeared respectable enough for this part of Glasgow and was dressed casually, in t-shirt and combats.

  Narey wondered if the corpse had a wife somewhere. There’d be kids most likely and friends, colleagues from work, mates down the pub and all of them would be shocked rigid when they found out what happened to this guy. He was unlucky enough to have become the fourth, entirely random victim of the Sandyhills Sniper. These motiveless attacks, on unconnected victims from distances of hundreds of yards away, had shocked Glasgow into a kind of paralysis. People were afraid to be out on the streets, some were too scared to go to work and even pubs were reporting a downturn in business.

  And the Press, as always, were sticking the knife in, ‘Baffled Police left clueless,’ being just one of the more helpful headlines that morning, followed by the strapline ‘Police can’t guarantee Sniper won’t kill again,’ as if anybody could guarantee that. Now there was a fourth victim, which meant the tabloids were going to have a field day. Fucking journalists, all they ever did was sneer. He’d love to get some of them to try and find the bloke responsible for this and see how they got on. They’d be bloody clueless, the lot of them.

  Everyone was freaked out by this killer, because they knew they had just as much chance of being picked off by him as the next man. The Sniper didn’t care who he killed. So far there had been a van driver, filling up his vehicle on a busy petrol station forecourt in Sandyhills, which is why the Press had dubbed the killer the ‘Sandyhills Sniper’ even though he shot people from all corners of the city. Next, a middle-aged business woman in a trouser suit was gunned down walking home from work during the evening rush hour, closely followed by a young guy shot from his bike while he pedalled down the middle of the street on his way to get his exam results; straight As of course, the Press loved that bit and now this, a fourth victim in ten days; a poor, harmless bloke out for a stroll in the park on a Sunday afternoon.

  Thank God they had McGregor on the case. Narey’s boss, legendary Detective Chief Inspector Robert McGregor already had a theory. He reckoned the perpetrator was copying the Beltway Sniper attacks of 2002, when thirteen luckless souls were gunned down randomly in Washington and Virginia by a nut job called John Allen Muhammad. ‘We’ve definitely got ourselves a copycat,’ DCI McGregor told a room packed with detectives, who were hanging on his every word, shortly after the second murder victim was positively identified.

  At least the brass had been sensible enough to put their top man on it, temporarily commandeering McGregor from his duties looking into Glasgow’s gangland killings. Everyone knew McGregor would want this case. He may have been brought back to his native city to tackle the gangs, following a stint breaking up firms in London, but he would relish being reassigned until this one was cleared up, ‘And cleared up it shall be,’ he assured the officers in the briefing room.

  Now here he was, striding purposefully down the hill towards them. Trust McGregor to get here before the SOCOs, his entourage of medium-ranking detectives trying and failing to keep up with him; tall, strong, powerful, his trade-mark, long, dark raincoat flapping behind him in the breeze. No wonder the tabloids called him ‘The Caped Crusader’.

  As McGregor drew closer, Narey straightened until he was almost at attention. There was something the guvnor possessed that made you strive to do a good job for him, almost made you want to be a better man after you’d been in his vicinity. Narey supposed that was called leadership. McGregor wasn’t like other senior officers. All they worried about was managing their own careers but it was obvious McGregor cared passionately about the job and he had an incredible instinct. People said he could think like a gangster and was hard enough to take them down himself, being unafraid to get his hands dirty or his knuckles skinned. The stories about him were legendary. What man in the force wouldn’t respect that in a boss?

  DCI McGregor drew alongside Narey, his burly frame almost blocking out the light. Some of the detectives were out of breath from the yomp across the park but McGregor looked like he’d just stepped from his car.

  ‘Jason,’ he said, ‘how’s the family?’ There was warmth in the question and it caught the younger man by surprise. After all, there were surely bigger priorities.

  ‘Good, thanks boss,’ a quadruple murder on his hands and McGregor still had time to ask after his well-being, amazing. Frankly he was astounded the guvnor could even remember his name, let alone the fact that he had a family.

  ‘How old’s your little girl? Eight?’

  ‘Yeah, she is,’ beamed Narey, ‘you’ve got a good memory boss.’ McGregor was probably able to recall the name and age of the kids of every man in CID.

  ‘My advice? Enjoy the next five or six years before she starts running you ragge
d. Now,’ he commanded, as if suddenly remembering they were all there for a reason, ‘lead the way.’

  I’d be proud to, thought Narey but he managed to avoid saying it, instead he said ‘Mind how you go there, Sir. It’s a bit slippy,’ but DCI McGregor was already clambering down the grassy bank towards the victim.

  ‘Beat the SOCOs to it, did we?’ McGregor snorted. ‘Probably still struggling into their little white gimp outfits,’ and there were chuckles at that. ‘Let’s take a look at this body shall we? Don’t worry, I won’t touch anything,’ he added, his tone drippingly ironic, as if they thought he might start frisking the corpse. This attitude would never have been tolerated in any other officer but McGregor would get away with it, as he always did.

  They stopped a few yards from the body and the whole party waited patiently for McGregor to take a look, then deliver his verdict. He didn’t disappoint. ‘A middle-aged bloke out on his own walking in the park,’ he began, speaking softly, as if to himself, ‘is he dodgy, I wonder? We should check that. Just because he’s unlucky enough to become the latest victim of the Sandyhills Sniper doesn’t mean he wasn’t out here looking for kiddies to fiddle with, leaving a trail of Werther’s Originals right up to the back seat of his Rover 75.’ They all laughed lightly at the chief’s gallows humour. ‘But I doubt it. I think we’ll find this poor fucker is probably divorced, not his idea either, and it wasn’t his weekend with the kids. He probably didn’t know what to do with himself until it was time to go to his local.’

  Narey hadn’t thought of it like that but, all of a sudden, it seemed to fit. The boss had painted a vivid and believable picture of the victim, based on little more than a glance, and Narey found himself trusting in it unreservedly. Why else would a man be wandering in the park on his own, unless he was missing his kids?