The Dead

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Two of our pubs had their licences rescinded on trumped-up accusations of exceeding their licensed hours and providing illegal gambling on-site.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.’

‘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.