The Dead

15

Long gone were the days when we recorded CCTV on grainy videos to be wiped and recorded over, until all you could see was a snowstorm of white flecks on the screen. These days Robbie had it all linked in to a digital network. At the offices of our watchers, in a former call-centre, he and his team could summon up footage from any one of dozens of cameras that covered our sites, twenty-four-seven, all over the city.

‘Robbie, I need you to take a look at the CCTV footage for Cachet, inside and outside the building,’ I ordered, as I handed him the ten-by-eight of Gemma Carlton.

Robbie was a slight young man with an old-fashioned, straight haircut that looked like his mother had combed it for him that morning. ‘What am I looking for?’

‘Any sign of the girl. I’ve been told she used to go there. I want it confirmed. Find out who arrived with her and, more importantly, who she left with.’

‘What timescale are we looking at here?’

‘I don’t know. Start with the past month.’

‘A month? That’s a lot of footage. Any idea what nights she went out? Just weekends?’

‘No, she was a student, so it could be week nights.’

‘Shit.’

‘What’s the problem?’

‘That’s a lot of footage. Say four hours a night, six nights a week for a month. That’s a hundred hours of tape on one camera alone and we’ve got a dozen, looking for a single girl among a shedload.’ He picked up the ten-by-eight, ‘and she looks like a hundred other girls we get in there every night. Do we know what she was wearing when she went to Cachet? That might help narrow it down, a bit.’

‘No,’ I told him, ‘but we think she was a regular and we’ve seen her name on the guest list for the VIP lounge, so concentrate on two cameras for now. Get your lads to look out for her in the queue at the main door. You take the one that faces the lift to the VIP area. You can go through it at twice the normal speed and just pause it…’

‘Every time I see a fit, young brunette stepping into the VIP lounge?’ he said dryly. ‘That won’t take long.’

I was starting to get pissed off with Robbie’s attitude. I paid him very good money that nobody else would have given him, not after his prison sentence. We’d rescued Robbie through the Second Chances centre and handed him the opportunity to make more than an honest day’s pay for some dishonest work that did not involve getting his hands dirty. He was a computer whiz kid, an IT geek who could summon up a live feed from any CCTV camera in Newcastle because he had hacked into the city’s main frame, but I needed to remind him who paid his wages.

‘Have I given you anything else to do, Robbie?’

‘What?’

‘Is there somewhere else you would rather be right now?’

‘No,’ he protested, ‘it’s just…’

‘What job do I employ you to do?’ I interrupted and he froze. He could tell I was pissed off with him.

‘IT sp… sp… specialist,’ he stammered. Robbie had a stutter, but it only showed when he was nervous.

‘No Robbie, not the one on your business card,’ I told him, ‘your real job.’

His voice was a squeak, ‘I’m a watcher,’ he managed, ‘for the f… f… firm.’

‘So get on with it,’ I ordered, ‘and stop moaning.’

‘I’m not moaning,’ he protested, ‘I’m just saying…’

‘And of course, the quicker you start…’ I prompted, ‘or do I have to ask Kinane to come up here and keep an eye on you to make sure you’re not slacking?’

‘No, no, I’m on it,’ he assured me, simultaneously tapping away at his keyboard so he could summon up the necessary footage, but then he remembered the other part of my instruction and he called, ‘Mark! Get over h… h… here… now. I need you to plug into the footage for camera s… s… seven on the main door of Cachet. We’re looking for a g… g… girl.’

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.’