The Dead

20

The Blinky Eye Bridge stretches across the River Tyne, linking Newcastle’s Quayside to Gateshead’s posh end; the bit with the Baltic contemporary arts centre and the seventy-million-pound Sage building. The Blinky Eye is designed for pedestrians and its official name is the Millennium Bridge. The kid in me still thinks it looks like the jaw bone of a giant whale with one bit sticking up and the other half resting on the ground. It gets its nickname because the top half can fall back and the lower bit flip up, so that both parts are out of the way when ships want to pass through it. Then it drops neatly back down again to let the common folk walk over it once more. Since it weighs more than eight hundred tonnes, that is no mean feat of engineering.

Because the bridge is more than a hundred metres, from one side of the river to the other, the mystery man couldn’t have picked a more out-in-the-open location to meet me than this one. He was late though, and I spent my time scanning passers-by to see if I could clock him. Palmer watched over me from the Newcastle side of the bridge, just in case.

From his wheezy voice and the fact that he was likely to be a contemporary of Jinky’s, I was expecting an older man and that’s exactly what I got. I spotted him a mile off and immediately relaxed. His progress across the bridge was spectacularly slow, each step measured, like a child pacing out a treasure map. He straightened when he finally reached me and I let him catch his breath. I was no doctor but I reckoned he had a year, at best.

‘Fags,’ he said and, for a second, that looked like all the explanation I was going to get, ‘fucked me lungs up,’ he added. ‘I’m only bloody sixty.’ He looked like he was having trouble dealing with what he knew was inevitably coming his way.

‘If they don’t get you, the booze and the birds will,’ I said and he let out a grim laugh at that.

‘True enough.’

‘You’ve got some information for me,’ I reminded him, ‘we can start with your name, if you want paying that is?’

‘Alreet,’ I could tell he was reluctant to concede even that, ‘it’s Paul Armstrong.’

‘Sit yourself down man,’ I told him and he sank gratefully into one of the metal bench seats on the bridge.

‘So, what do you know?’

‘I worked for your old mate, Mickey Hunter, when he had the garage, the one he peddled his used motors out of.’ Every few words he took a breath and I could tell each one hurt him, so he was economical with them.

I nodded, not because I knew the place but I was aware of Hunter’s dealership. The cars were so hot they virtually drove themselves out of there. He had it for years and it was a classic front for all of his other business, but it was gone by the time I really knew the lads in the firm, replaced by the old body shop he kept underneath the railway arches that knocked dents out of cars and acted as a front for his real role as quartermaster to our firm. After Hunter was killed we never left the job of supplying our weaponry to just one man any more. It was another area of security we had tightened up. I couldn’t run the risk of one guy knowing everything we’d been up to.

‘So you were with the firm?’ I asked.

‘Not really,’ he admitted, ‘I mean we all were a bit, you had to be, but I was on the outside looking in. I did some stuff for Bobby now and then but nowt that would really get me into bother with the law. I remember your dad though. I remember him well.’ And, just when I thought all I was going to get was some pointless reminiscences he added, ‘And I saw him the day before he disappeared. I reckon I must have been one of the last to see him in fact and it was all very strange like.’

He had to stop for breath again — the delay was frustrating.

‘What was so strange about it?’

‘Your dad bought a car from Hunter. He went from being broke one day to minted the next but there was nothing unusual about that, if he was in on one of Bobby’s jobs.’

‘My father never actually worked for Bobby,’ I told him, because that’s what everybody had always told me.

‘He was never a full member of the crew, but he did jobs.’

‘You reckon?’ I wasn’t so sure about this, but he was.

‘I’m telling you man. He did stuff for Bobby, on and off like, that’s how he started people out, to see how they got on. You didn’t just sign up overnight. You had to prove yourself before you got the big wedge.’

‘How do you know all this, if you weren’t a full member of the crew?’

‘Because Hunter was my gaffer for years and I saw them all come and go.’ It was a reasonable enough explanation but I had still never heard anything about my dad working for the firm before.

‘So what did he do for Bobby then?’

‘Whatever needed doing. You ought to know what that means.’ I did and didn’t need it spelling out. ‘Anyway, your dad bought the car from Hunter but when he headed south the next day, he left it behind.’

‘Eh?’

‘It was a Cortina Mark 2, only a couple of years old. Nice motor for the time. He paid cash. I was there and I watched Hunter count it out, then they shook hands on the deal.’

All of a sudden he seemed to be finding his breath. It was as if the excitement of telling his story had overridden his condition for a while.

‘Alan said he would come back and collect it later, because he had some business to sort out in town first, but he never came back for the car. It stayed on the forecourt. Later on, everybody was saying that Alan Blake had left the city and gone down south for a job in London. Didn’t even stop long enough to collect his wife and bairn he was in that much of a hurry.’

‘If he’d done something for Bobby, summat worth the cost of a car, the law could have been sniffing round,’ I offered, ‘maybe that’s why he left so quickly.’

That would explain why my dad skipped town and left ma and Danny behind and why he might have had to stay away for a couple of years, if it was something serious.

‘But here’s the bit that doesn’t ring true. They said he went on the train. Now, if he was planning a new life, with or without his wife and bairn, would he really buy a Ford Cortina one day and a train ticket the next, no matter how flush he was?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘he wouldn’t. What happened to the car?’

‘It stayed on the forecourt for weeks, then Hunter sold it.’

‘You mean he sold it again?’

‘Aye that’s exactly what I mean.’

‘And there’s no way my da could have returned later and got his money back?’ I knew Hunter well enough to know that last bit was unlikely.

‘Hunter? No chance, he was tight as arseholes,’ he shook his head. ‘I worked there all day and he never came back. I thought it was odd when he didn’t collect his new car because the next day was a Sunday and we weren’t even open on a Sunday. You weren’t allowed to be, back then.’

‘And you never said anything at the time,’ I asked, ‘to Hunter, I mean, or anybody else who was spreading this story about my dad leaving on a train?’

‘I did ask Hunter about it, yeah, stupidly.’

‘Why? What did he do?’

‘Nothing,’ he replied, ‘but then that nutter Jerry Lemon came up to us the next Saturday neet when I was having a few pints in town, he telt me I had a big mouth. He said “Careless talk costs lives”, you knaa, like that old poster in the war. He telt me to remember that, if I wanted to keep my teeth.’

Jerry would often go around threatening people on Bobby’s behalf, so this fella asking questions about my dad’s car must have meant something. Maybe that was why he had to leave Newcastle. Had he upset Jerry Lemon or did he somehow manage to tread on Bobby’s toes? Whatever happened it can’t have been too serious but it was big enough for him to quit town in a hurry, and for him to stay away for a good while.

‘So you stopped asking?’

‘God yes,’ he said, ‘it was none of my business.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘I suppose it wasn’t, but Jerry Lemon’s long dead.’

‘Aye, well, if he wasn’t, I wouldn’t be standing here talking to you now, would I?’

‘Fair enough,’ I told him. ‘Is there anything else you want to tell me?’

‘Well, it’s obvious isn’t it,’ he said, then added, ‘they must have killed him.’

‘That’s one way of interpreting it,’ I admitted, but I knew what he didn’t. My dad had fled the city right enough and now I was closer to understanding the reasons why, but he had still been in contact with my ma for years after. I wasn’t even born when my dad jumped on that train and headed south, but the old timer wasn’t to know that.

‘Can you think of any reason why he might have fallen out with Jerry?’

He opened his mouth to speak, but his breath caught in his throat again and the coughing started up once more. I waited and tried to be patient but I wasn’t expecting much from him if I was honest. The business with the car was intriguing enough but the old git didn’t have the full story, so I doubted he would shed any further light on the mystery.

When he finally finished coughing he told me, ‘Aye, I knaa all right,’ and he seemed puzzled that I didn’t.

‘Well,’ I told him, ‘out with it then.’

‘It was ‘cos of the job they did together. The one that went wrong.’

‘The one that went wrong?’ I repeated dumbly, trying to get my head round it, ‘what job was that then?’

‘The robbery of the Stuart amp; Brown payroll,’ he said, ‘haddaway man, you must have heard of that one? You know, the engineering company?’

I shook my head. ‘So you’re saying my dad was in on a wages snatch?’ He nodded. ‘And it went pear-shaped?’ He nodded again.

‘Well, you could say that.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘It was ‘cos of your dad,’ he told me.

‘Why what did he do?’

‘He buggered off, didn’t he?’ the old bloke told me, ‘and he took all of the money with him.’