The Dead db-3 Read online

  The Dead

  ( David Blake - 3 )

  Howard Linskey

  Howard Linskey

  The Dead

  ‘When sorrows come, they come not single spies,

  but in battalions’

  William Shakespeare

  1

  The dead are left with nothing, except the power to destroy the lives of those they leave behind. The girl’s body lay on dry land, her head lolling over the edge of the river bank. She was face up, her eyes open and her long, dark hair dipped into the water. The steady, regular movement of the current made the strands sway gently like tendrils. Her left arm trailed behind her, the fingertips of one white, slender hand suspended there, as if she were about to dip it into the cool water. Her appearance gave the illusion there might still be life left in her, but DS Fraser knew better.

  ‘Are you gonna call him?’ asked DC Thomas, ‘I reckon you should…’ and when Fraser frowned at him, he added an uncertain, ‘prob’ly’.

  Fraser gave the Detective Constable a withering look that managed to efficiently convey the words ‘don’t tell me how to do my job’ and Thomas retreated without another word, busying himself at the edge of the crime scene.

  Fraser watched the SOCOs as they went about their business. They moved slowly and methodically, taping off the area around the girl and the route her body had taken from the main road to her resting place here by the river bank. The river ran through a small copse at the edge of a farm around fifteen miles north of Newcastle, a dip in the land too deep to be cultivated that had been left to its own devices. The bushes were overgrown here and the tall tree branches stretched forwards to meet each other as if in greeting, forming a canopy of leaves that, in parts, blocked out the moonlight.

  It seemed she had been dragged from a car on the main road up above them. Whatever her killer’s initial intention, he must have panicked and simply thrown her body over the hedge and Fraser understood why. Whoever had done this probably intended to follow the girl down here to bury her or, at the very least, cover her with something, to delay the discovery of the body, but he would have felt exposed out there on the main road in the middle of the night. Any passing motorist could have clocked him and given the police a description of the vehicle, maybe even the registration number.

  He must have known every second magnified his chances of being caught, so he had heaved the girl over the hedge and driven away. Judging by the flattened grass and weeds this side of the hedge, the girl’s body hit the ground hard, then gathered momentum, rolling down the hill, before finally coming to a halt when the ground levelled off at the edge of the river, where she now lay, staring mournfully up at the stars.

  She’d been found by a man out walking his dog. Weren’t they always, thought Fraser? At least she hadn’t been there too long, before nature could get to work on her, breaking her body down; all those microbes, all that bacteria, the insects and the wild, gnawing animals. That was the thing about Mother Nature. She didn’t fuck about. It didn’t take long out in the open before you could become unrecognisable, even to your nearest and dearest.

  Fraser could tell she’d been a pretty little thing; long dark hair, brown eyes, fresh face, full red lips. Was that why she was killed, he wondered; a jealous boyfriend who’d been dumped and couldn’t cope with the crushing realisation that someone else would eventually have her? Sexual jealousy was as strong and likely a motive as any other, in Fraser’s experience, particularly when the victim was young.

  Fraser wondered if he would soon be interrogating another fucked up ex-boyfriend or if this time they had a random on their hands. Was this poor lass unlucky enough to be out, in her skimpy little skirt, with the oh-so-thin blouse, when a rapist or killer-for-kicks drove by and spotted her? Maybe the intention had been rape but the guy panicked afterwards, knowing she wasn’t going to go home and just forget all about it, so he’d made sure she could never talk. Perhaps it was the murder itself that got the killer off and sex had nothing to do with it? Shame they couldn’t just ask the victim, so they could find out whose face she’d been staring up into as she gave out her last breath.

  One of the SOCOs turned on the light he’d been assembling, then he turned to DS Fraser, ‘are you going to call him?’

  ‘Don’t you start,’ warned Fraser, but he was already reaching for his phone.

  Detective Inspector Robert Carlton had already grown weary of the black-tie do, long before his mobile phone began to vibrate silently against his chest from the inside pocket of his dinner jacket. He exhaled wearily, then reached for it. Carlton was feeling the after-effects of a heavy meal; duck and Armagnac terrine, chicken supreme with Jersey Royals and a generous portion of sticky toffee pudding for afters.

  ‘Carlton,’ he answered above the din in the room, caused by the chatter of two hundred police officers with copious amounts of beer and wine inside them.

  ‘Boss, it’s me,’ it was Fraser, that much he could make out but the rest was lost, drowned out by loud, braying laughter from the next table, a reaction to one of Superintendent Connor’s borderline racist jokes.

  ‘Hang on,’ Carlton commanded, ‘I can’t hear you.’

  He climbed to his feet and left the room, turning sideways as he did so to squeeze between fellow diners who, as always at these functions, were packed in too tightly, so that navigating his way between tables was like tackling an obstacle course. The room was sizeable and full to the brim with ranking police officers, each one looking for a leg up and feeling obliged to shell out on tickets for a charity dinner, which cost far more than the sum of this mediocre meal’s parts. Everyone was expected to support the latest cause adopted by the Northumbria Police Force to justify its obscene annual piss up, which would go on well into the early hours. Already there were some familiar faces looking distinctly worse for wear.

  Carlton was grateful to be free of the noise and stifling warmth of the dining room. He crossed the Royal Station Hotel’s lobby and went out through its main door. Only when he was on the steps outside and the cool air hit him, did he turn his attention back to the mobile phone in his hand.

  ‘I can hear you now,’ he told the Detective Sergeant.

  ‘Sorry to bother you, boss. I know you are at that black-tie do but I thought you’d want to know. It’s a young girl.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘The reason I’m calling. We found one; on the bank of a stream, out in the sticks. She was just lying there. No attempt to even hide the body.’

  This piqued Carlton’s interest. If he was ever going to make DCI he needed as many high-profile cases under his belt as he could get. He listened while Fraser gave him the facts. The girl’s approximate age, ‘somewhere between fifteen and twenty,’ it was always hard to tell with girls, particularly if they had a bit of slap on; what she was wearing, the usual clubbing uniform of short skirt and skimpy top, and the exact location of her body, a smattering of woodland with a stream running through it, a few miles north of the city. The site was about fifteen minutes’ drive from Carlton’s current location. Finally there was the suspected cause of death, which, from the abrasions on her throat and bulging, blood-shot eyes, looked like strangulation.

  ‘No ID?’

  ‘No purse or handbag, no credit cards, not even a mobile phone, just the clothes she was wearing. I wondered if you would like me to send a car… or I could just call it in?’ He meant if the DI had been drinking. Nobody could afford to have a pissed up detective at a murder scene, screwing everything up. Carlton had only had one pre-dinner pint and two small glasses of acidic white wine, which hardly counted.

  ‘Send a car,’ Carlton told the Detective Sergeant, ‘tell him to pick me up outside the railway station.’

  Fraser had been right t
o call him first. While the brass were sipping their Cognacs and singing ‘God Save the Queen’ before the charity auction, Carlton would get down there and stake a claim on the case. In his experience, pretty young girls being murdered attracted more column inches in the local papers and national tabloids than just about any other case. The middle-aged or elderly could be shot, stabbed, strangled, gassed, electrocuted or run over by trains and their story would be buried in the middle of the paper, but a pretty little thing with potential was a different matter altogether. If she was educated, wanting to become a lawyer or a doctor, or just about to go off and travel the world, then her death would be seen as even more tragic and the public couldn’t get enough of it. This could be front page news, only relegated further into the newspaper if the world’s economy was about to implode again or David Beckham had a new haircut.

  Carlton retrieved his raincoat from the hat-check girl and fished out the packet of cigs for the short walk up to the old Victorian railway station. It was a mild autumn night and he kept his coat draped over his arm as he walked, lit a cigarette and drew on it. Carlton was used to seeing bodies, many of which were in an advanced state of decay; he’d become hardened to it over the years. The bloke walking his dog had probably never seen a body in his life, unless it was a relative in a funeral home all tidied up and made to look peaceful. Murdered folk rarely looked at peace and the poor bastard probably yacked his guts up on the spot, just like Carlton had done when he saw his first floater, almost thirty years ago now. He’d been a beat bobby back then, one of the first on the scene when they fished that murdered hooker out of the Tyne. She’d been in there a while, smelled like a wound that had gone septic and, just when he thought he’d managed to force his lunch back down into his belly, something dark and slimy slid from her eye socket and he’d barfed up all over the ground in front of everybody.

  Carlton didn’t have to wait long before the unmarked car pulled over next to him and he took a last drag on the cigarette, dropped it onto the ground, stubbed it out with his foot and climbed in. DI Carlton was a busy man, with little time for reflection, but the short journey north allowed him to be alone with his thoughts for once. The driver, a DC in his forties, was an unambitious fella who would only speak when spoken to and Carlton was thankful he didn’t have to engage in small talk. His thoughts drifted back to the dinner that evening and what really stuck in his mind was the amount of moaning from his fellow officers; about the job, money, the whinging wife and ungrateful kids. By comparison he reckoned he was doing alright. Financially, he was through the worst of the early mortgage years. His oldest was out of university and had eased the strain on their finances a little. John might still need the occasional hand-out but that was nothing compared to funding a university education as far afield as Bristol. It was a shame about the girlfriend though. Helen had seemed like the one. At least John thought she was. They’d been together for three years, almost their entire time in college. She’d holidayed with the family and Carlton had started to view her as a future daughter-in-law. They were all shocked when she suddenly finished with him, with little in the way of an explanation. John was devastated and his dad didn’t know what to say to him. The poor lad was in bits but he would just have to get through it on his own somehow.

  At least Gemma had chosen to stay in Newcastle for her degree. The girls she was sharing with seemed nice enough and there was no heavy boyfriend on the scene to take her mind off her studies. He had hoped she might just stay at home but Gemma wanted her own independence and you had to let them go eventually. There were times, he had to admit, when they quite liked having the house to themselves again.

  Little more than a quarter of an hour into their journey, the driver took a left onto a dirt road that led to a couple of farmhouses, but the car came to a halt long before them, by a dip in the land. There was a clear sky and a bright full moon, but Carlton could make out little more than the tops of the trees from here. Fraser was waiting though, to take him down to the crime scene.

  ‘Hope it doesn’t ruin your shoes boss,’ he said, as Carlton exited the car.

  ‘Don’t worry about that,’ answered Carlton as he walked over the wet grass to the edge of the dip.

  DI Carlton and DS Fraser paused at the top of the hill to survey the scene below them. SOCOs were moving purposefully, illuminated by lamps on tripod frames, which shone brightly down on the body of the young girl.

  DS Fraser started to walk down the hill towards the scene but DI Carlton didn’t follow. Fraser turned back to see what was causing the delay and found his boss frozen to the spot, staring intently ahead.

  ‘What is it sir?’ asked Fraser. Then, when no answer was forthcoming, ‘sir?’ he asked again. Glancing back, he looked into the inspector’s eyes and was startled by what he saw there. Carlton wore a look of shocked incomprehension. The DI slowly opened his mouth then, abruptly, he let out a blood-curdling yell that made everyone at the scene start and immediately turn towards the sound.

  ‘Gemma!’ screamed Carlton, ‘Gemma! No!’ and to Fraser’s astonishment his boss charged past him and started running flat out down the hill towards the stricken girl. Fraser remained where he stood, as DI Carlton barrelled past a shell-shocked SOCO, then seemed to launch himself at the corpse, grabbing the body and pulling it towards him to enfold it in his arms. Fraser remained rooted to the spot while he watched panicked SOCOs attempting to pull the clearly insane Detective Inspector away from the murder victim, while he in turn clasped the dead girl to his chest with one beefy arm, fending them off with the other.

  It took three of them to drag Carlton away from the girl and they all ended up in the water, tumbling as they lost their balance while trying to deal with Carlton’s bulk. Even from this distance Fraser could make out the crazed and desperate look in Carlton’s eyes as he climbed to his feet and ran from the shallow water, back to the body, leaving the three other men dripping in his wake. He grabbed the girl once more and clasped her to him. The tiny body lolled like a doll in his arms.

  The three other men emerged from the water together.

  ‘Get away from me!’ ordered Carlton, all sense and reason gone from him now, as he pulled the girl’s flimsy corpse closer to him, ‘she’s my daughter, that’s my Gemma!’ and he began to weep, as he held the girl tighter still. The other men seemed to give up then. Perhaps they realised the crime scene was already hopelessly contaminated or maybe, like Fraser, they just couldn’t bear the sound of Detective Inspector Carlton sobbing like a child, as he rocked the lifeless body of his daughter in his arms.

  2

  There is really only one way out of this world for me. In a pine box. I wish I didn’t know that but I do. I’m not stupid. You can’t walk away from a life like mine. You don’t just retire and hand it all over to someone else or sell the business on as a going concern. There are too many people with a stake in the firm and if any of them ever believed I was looking to get out, they’d make sure I was retired permanently. You see, I can stay alive only as long as the people who work for me, and all the others I pay at the end of each and every month, reckon I am contributing. The minute I cease to add value to their lives they start questioning whether I am really anything more than a drain on their resources. There’s no sentiment in this business. As long as I am bringing in a lot more than I’m taking out, they are happy. If anyone starts to suspect I’ve gone flaky they will forget everything that has gone before and they will kill me. And I wouldn’t blame them either.

  So I can’t walk away, ever, and that’s my punishment. The day I pulled the trigger on my boss, Bobby Mahoney, was the day I was handed my very own life sentence. I just didn’t realise at the time that it will only ever be over for me when I’m a dead man. My flight back from Istanbul was delayed and that gave me plenty of time to think about how I ended up here. You don’t set out to be a gangster. At least I didn’t. I’m no Henry Hill and the road I travelled was long, tortuous and made up of a million little baby steps, each one
a decision that eventually, years later, led me here. There wasn’t just one turning point, a single chance to turn my back on this life before I fell too deeply into it. I know that now and often wonder what my life could have been, if I’d suddenly decided to just jack it all in, long before I became Bobby Mahoney’s indispensable right hand man, a Geordie Consigliere to the north-east’s most notorious criminal, a man who held the city in the palm of his huge, gnarled hand for more than three decades.

  Then, when Bobby was killed, I stepped into his shoes and found they were a perfect fit. I may not have the brute strength, fearlessness and raw fighting ability of Bobby Mahoney, but what I lacked in those departments I more than made up for with my ability to read people and work things out before they did.

  I had time to contemplate my situation because I was waiting for my suitcase to make an appearance on the carousel. I’d travelled first class but it was my suitcase that was acting like the diva, insisting on keeping me waiting and I was the last one there, apart from Palmer, my head of security.

  The Gallowgate Leisure Group has gone global. These days we are an offshore company that uses lawyers and bankers more than enforcers or hit men and I have to oversee all of it. I try to look the part of David Blake, Chief Operating Officer, but apart from a few expensive suits, I’m pretty much the same guy I’ve always been.

  In my business, you have to keep on growing and expanding, so you can earn the money you need to pay all of the people who will keep you away from prison or out of the grave. Bobby’s era of armed robbery and protection, of gaming machines, porno movies and illegal gambling may have been a brutal and bloody place but it has nothing on the world of international drug smuggling and money laundering I’ve been forced to take us into.