The Dead

27

Fallon got the next train from Edinburgh down to Newcastle. It’s a beautiful coastal route but he didn’t spend any time looking out at the North Sea. He met me in a private room at our hotel on the Quayside where he briefed me about McGlenn. I asked him if he had managed to work out who was behind this outrage.

‘Serbians,’ he announced with bemusement, like he might just as well have been saying Martians, ‘fucking Serbs, over here, on our patch. What the fuck?’ The last part was a rhetorical question.

‘I don’t get it,’ I told him, ‘we pay Amrein to avoid this kind of shit. Why aren’t the local plod all over these Serbs?’

‘That’s exactly what I have been trying to find out. There’s a lot of them, fair dues, but they are led by three brothers who’ve set themselves up openly in a big old house in Pilton. The fucking cheeky, big, brass balls on these guys.’

‘So they’re protected?’

‘How else can they be doing this?’ he asked.

‘But who’s covering for them?’

‘I was hoping you’d be able to tell me.’

‘I’ll set up a meet with Amrein,’ I assured him.

‘Good,’ he told me, ‘because I want to know who I’ve got to kill to end this.’

‘Do these Serb brothers have a name?’

‘Stevic,’ he told me.

When Golden Boots was taken in for questioning he stuck to the story he’d given Joe Kinane and it wasn’t his lengthy interview with the police that finally provided the breakthrough they were looking for. He was released on police bail while forensic tests were carried out.

When the tests came back, the most damning results came from the boot of one of his nine cars; his Aston Martin Vanquish. Fibres taken from the boot of that car proved that Gemma Carlton had been inside it. This must have been the vehicle someone used to take that poor girl down to the woods and dump her there.

Gemma had slept with Golden Boots the night before she died then trashed him twenty-four hours later when he hadn’t bothered to spare her the time of day. According to Kevin, several witnesses were sure they’d seen her at his house that night but he denied seeing her at all. Her purse and mobile phone had been found at his house, hidden in a wardrobe, and his car had been used to dump the body. There were also long passages of time where neither he nor his entourage could convincingly account for his whereabouts. He claimed he was in bed with another girl but she either didn’t exist or was reluctant to come forward. It didn’t help that he hadn’t a clue what her name was, so the police couldn’t trace her. Golden Boots was charged with Gemma Carlton’s murder. The Press loved it.

The evidence linking Golden Boots to Gemma Carlton’s death just kept on coming. A lot of the credit for that had to go to Sharp and Kevin Kinane who worked well together, tirelessly going over every lead, tracking down witnesses and questioning them. There were civilians, as we call them, who responded best to the softly-softly approach of the local plod and Sharp went to see them. Then there were the local villains who felt they had to keep their mouths zipped when the police were involved, so it was sensible to send Kevin in to speak to them. They soon thought twice about their vows of silence when Big Kev had a word. These two got the right result; an end to police suspicions that her death was all down to me. According to Sharp, even Carlton came around to the view that Golden Boots must have done it when he was presented with the evidence.

It certainly seemed that Golden Boots had a case to answer, but there was something about this that was really nagging at me. Perhaps I had just seen far too many of those old American private-eye shows when I was a nipper, but the one thing Golden Boots seemed to lack was a motive, or at least a strong one. He’d shagged Gemma Carlton, so she hadn’t resisted his advances and, like every girl he ever met, he’d quickly grown bored of her, then dumped her. She hadn’t taken too kindly to that but, well, so what? Golden Boots didn’t care. He was already onto the next bird. The prosecution was going to try and say he had flown into a jealous rage because she was seen on the arm of another man the next night, or he had taken badly to her implying he had a cock like a marshmallow and the sexual sophistication of a baboon. Again I didn’t think he would give a fuck about any of that and it certainly wouldn’t put off other gullible young lasses. The CPS might try to claim that during a row in the privacy of his bedroom, he had become so incensed that he lost all control and strangled her but, afterwards, retained the presence of mind to hide all of her stuff and get rid of the body, or persuade someone he trusted to do it for him. A jury might buy that, particularly when the theory was linked to all of the physical evidence, like her handbag and phone being in his house, but I just couldn’t see it. They would say he was a spoilt brat, used to getting anything he wanted, that he didn’t know when to stop. He was all of that, and more, but why would a lass like Gemma Carlton get under his skin?

Then again, what did I really know about Golden Boots anyway? Maybe he did do it, perhaps he really was that stupid and, frankly, it didn’t matter that much now that the police had finally stopped thinking her death was down to me. I even got a ‘thank you’ from Detective Superintendent Austin.

I met Amrein in Durham city, eighteen miles and a world away from Newcastle. At least it would have felt that way if Henry Baxter hadn’t been on remand in Durham nick awaiting his trial. It was a beautiful sunny day, attracting the usual groups of elderly bus-trip tourists and student lovers to the Cathedral square at the top of the hill. We walked through it, then took the steep path down to the river, cloaked by the overhanging trees, where it would be harder for anyone to listen in. Palmer tailed us at a discreet distance, with Amrein’s bodyguard walking next to him. Things had calmed down with Amrein since the low point, when I left the severed head of a Glasgow gangster on the windowsill of his summer house, to warn him against ever trying to come up against me again. Neither he nor I ever forgot that at any point in our business relationship it might suit either one of us to have the other killed.

Amrein was a wiry little man in wire framed glasses who looked like a college professor — not the representative of one of the most lethal organisations on the planet. I’d given him a name and now I expected information.

‘You want the history lesson?’ he asked me.

‘Yes.’

‘Those Serbian brothers have been around for a long time. Their names are Dusan, Sreten and Marko Stevic. They started out in one of the hooligan gangs associated with a football team; Red Star in Belgrade. Little more than thugs, with a side-line in drug dealing; very minor but it drew them to the attention of the nationalists and they were recruited into one of the paramilitary units that sprang up during the Bosnian war; extreme right, ultra nationalist, largely uncontrollable. Their unit was linked to atrocities but the numbers involved weren’t large, so they were never pursued. It took the authorities years to bring charges against the big guys like Arkan and Milosevic. They gave up trying to catch everyone who’d slaughtered civilians. It was a very messy conflict.’

‘And when the war was over they turned to organised crime.’

‘What do men of violence always do when the cause they are supposedly fighting for is gone? They fight for money and power instead. The brothers weren’t part of a clan but if one of them wished to assassinate its rivals, without leaving a trail back to them, they would hire the Stevic brothers to do it. They worked for the Zemun and Surcin clans plus the Vozdovac, prospering precisely because they had no clear affiliation to any of them.’

‘They did other people’s dirty work?’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘and thrived on it.’ He stopped speaking until a woman with a baby in a pushchair coming the other way walked past us. When she had gone he continued, ‘Then everything changed. Ten years ago, the Serbian mafia assassinated the Prime Minister, Zoran Dindic, and the state finally clamped down on everyone. Operation Sablja resulted in ten thousand arrests, including the country’s own Deputy State Prosecutor. The leaders of the main clans were given long sentences, or were killed by police, or they murdered each other. The Serbian mafia has not been destroyed however. New leaders emerged and the Stevic brothers’ influence grew.’

‘What are they doing over here?’

Amrein hesitated as if he was trying to find the right words. ‘They target places for expansion.’

‘What’s their criteria?’

Amrein took a long time to answer, ‘They expand where they see weakness, either from the authorities or…’

‘Men like me?’ I prompted.

‘That would be their appraisal, not mine,’ he said, ‘but Serbian criminals are noted for the brutality of their methods. It is a legacy of the ethnic cleansing from the war, where torture and mutilation of captured soldiers or civilians was so commonplace as to be no longer noteworthy. Understandably, these methods deter business rivals. Fear is a powerful weapon,’ he reminded me.

Amrein was right. We both knew the power of fear. Was I scared of these Serbian brothers; the war criminals who would enjoy cutting me into pieces if they got the opportunity? Who wouldn’t be?

‘How are they getting away with this?’

‘It seems they are listed as high-level criminal sources.’

It was one of the oldest tricks in the book, but still one of the most effective and so hard to disprove. If I was a bent copper, being paid to turn a blind eye, I would do exactly the same thing. I’d list the criminal paying me as my grass. Whatever they were involved in, I’d argue, it was far less important than the information they provided. It’s often forgotten that a great deal of police intelligence on crooks is provided by other crooks, for a whole variety of reasons. Some are paid and some are looking to get their own crimes overlooked or sentences reduced by cooperating with the authorities. Others just do it to get their own back on former associates or to eliminate the competition. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; there is no code.

‘So who’s protecting them?’

‘It goes high. We think an Assistant Chief Constable.’

‘Bloody hell. That would explain it. Are you sure?’

‘Our people heard they’ve got something on him. They are most likely paying him as well.’

‘The classic combination of bribery and blackmail,’ I conceded, ‘which ACC is it?’

‘Brinklow.’

‘What can we do about this?’

‘It will be difficult,’ he told me, ‘with his support they are untouchable by anyone from inside Lothian and Borders Police and there’s a lot of politics. They don’t like outside interference.’

‘What about SOCA?’

‘Won’t be interested, unless we can provide conclusive proof Brinklow is on the take.’

‘And you don’t have that proof?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Amrein, we pay you a lot of money to fix things like this.’

‘I feel sure we can come up with it,’ he told me, ‘in time. Leave the Serbian brothers to us,’ he urged me.

We’d reached the stone footbridge over the River Wear. ‘There is one other thing,’ he told me, when we crossed to the other side, ‘and I suspect you will not like to hear it.’

At this point it was hard to imagine how my day could get any worse, but it did. ‘Yaroslav Vasnetsov insists upon a meeting.’