The Damage E-Book

Howard Linskey

• Herausgeber: No Exit Press
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Serie: Newcastle Noir
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 517

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

'There's a thought that keeps me awake at night; I have to be lucky every time, they only have to get lucky once.' David Blake is a worried man. He should be enjoying the high life now he's Newcastle's 'Top Boy', the man who controls everything in the city that's worth controlling. The money keeps on rolling in and Blake is sharing his life with the girl that he loves, Sarah Mahoney. Shame he had to murder her father to save his own skin but at least she doesn't know anything about that. Blake never wanted to be boss but who else is savvy enough to deal with all of the firm's problems? Newly-crowned Glasgow crime lord, Alan Gladwell, wants to do business with the firm and the deal makes sense but can Blake really trust the man whose brother he brutally murdered? Then one of his men takes two bullets in the back and someone tries to take Blake out. As he struggles to stay in control, Blake is in a race against time to find his potential assassin and discover the truth in 'The Damage'.

Leseprobe

‘There’s a thought that keeps me awake at night; I have to be lucky every time, they only have to get lucky once.’

David Blake is a worried man. He should be enjoying the high life now he’s Newcastle’s ‘Top Boy’, the man who controls everything in the city that’s worth controlling. He lives in exiled luxury, while his brother Danny and trusted right-hand men, Palmer and Kinane, take care of business and make sure no one steps out of line. The money keeps on rolling in and Blake is sharing his life with the girl that he loves, Sarah Mahoney. Shame he had to murder her father to save his own skin, but at least she doesn’t know anything about that.

Blake never wanted to be boss, but who else is savvy enough to deal with all of the firm’s problems; like Braddock, the rogue drug dealer, who’s keeping too much of the take, and ‘The Turk’, Blake’s new source of ‘product’ who’s taken a million Euros down-payment on a shipment that never arrives. Newly-crowned Glasgow crime lord, Alan Gladwell, wants to do business with the firm, and the deal makes sense, but can Blake really trust the man whose brother he brutally murdered. Then there is his obsession with the beautiful but troubled Simone, who chooses to work in one of the firm’s massage parlours when she is so much better than that.

When one of his men takes two bullets in the back and someone tries to kill him, Blake struggles to stay in control.

From the heroin-laced high rises of Newcastle to the seedy back streets of Bangkok, in a world of contract killers, corrupt politicians, bent detectives, coke-snorting footballers, fixers, hookers and pimps, Blake is in a race against time to find his potential assassin and discover the truth in The Damage.

Howard Linskey has worked as a barman, journalist, catering manager and marketing manager for a celebrity chef, as well as in a variety of sales and account management jobs. He has written for newspapers, magazines and websites on a number of subjects. The Drop is Howard’s debut novel, published by No Exit in 2011.

Originally from Ferryhill in County Durham, he now lives in Hertfordshire with his wife Alison and daughter Erin.

Howard is a long-suffering Newcastle United fan and Mike Ashley is not on his Christmas card list.

Critical acclaim for The Drop

‘Linskey delivers a flawless feel for time and place, snappy down to earth dialect dialogue mixed in with unrelenting violence and pace. A Tyneside Dashiell Hammett to put Martina Cole firmly in her place.’

– Peter Millar, The Times (chosen in his Top 5 Crime Thrillers of 2011)

‘writing that leaps off the page in its lacerating forcefulness…a classic British gangster novel that evokes and matches some of the best writing in the genre’

– Vic Buckner, Crime Time

‘The Drop is overflowing with the grit that defines the very best of British gangster fiction’

– Mike Stafford, Bookgeeks

‘Howard Linskey does for Newcastle what Ian Rankin has done for Edinburgh’

– Sam Millar, New York Journal of Books

‘a brutal, hard-hitting debut which opens up Newcastle’s dark, violent underbelly like a freshly-sharpened stiletto’

– Simon Kernick

‘a razor-sharp debut and Linskey is sure to be at the forefront of Northern crime writing in 2011. A writer to keep an eye on.’

– Nick Quantrill, Harrogate Festival website

‘a very successful first novel’

– Chris Shepherd, newbooks magazine

‘Plainly put The Drop is a brilliant slice of modern Brit Grit’

– Brian Lindemuth, Spinetingler Magazine– Best Mystery/Crime Fiction 2011

‘A fast-paced, hard-boiled tale that zips along’

– The Crack

‘Linskey has a knack of expressing a mindset with clarity, humour and realism which along with the earthy vocabulary combines to create a marvellous tale.’

– Crimesquad

‘A cracker of a tale unrolled with great understatement but loaded with verve and pace. The backdrop is brutal, harsh and downright fatal for some, the characters jump right off the page, and I found the book difficult to put down. No Exit Press has found a real winner.’

– Adrian Magson, Shots

‘An absolutely cracking debut novel’

– bestcrimebooks.co.uk

‘A deftly written crime thriller, which really shows off Linskey’s skill at storytelling’

– Luca Veste, Guilty Conscience

‘Brilliant. Gangster writing at its best.’

– Paul Cleave – winner of the Ngaio Marsh Award

Also by Howard LinskeyThe Drop

For Erin & Alison, as it ought to be

CONTENTS

Title

About the Author

Acknowledgements

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Epilogue

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

...............................................

I would like to thank the following for their support and friendship during the writing of this book; Adam Pope, Andy Davis, Nikki Hurley, Gareth Chennells, Andrew Local and Stuart Britton. Thanks also to David Shapiro and Peter Day.

A very big thank you to Ion Mills at No Exit for publishing The Damage. Thanks to Alan Forster for the cover design and Claire Watts, Chris Burrows, Jem Cook and Alexandra Bolton at No Exit for their hard work on my behalf. A massive thank you to Keshini Naidoo for her intelligent and insightful editing.

I have huge respect for the team at Marjacq Literary Agency, particularly my agent Phil Patterson, whose time, help, advice and friendship are greatly appreciated by me. Thanks also to Isabella Floris for her efforts in foreign markets and to Luke Speed for his work on the TV option. A special thank you goes to David Barron and Stevie Lee at ‘Runaway Fridge’ Productions.

Finally, a massive thank you to my loving wife Alison and beautiful daughter Erin, for their love, faith and support, which means everything to me.

PROLOGUE

...............................................

Glasgow

The body was propped up in a sitting position on the park bench, head back, arms splayed wide, as if the victim had been trying to embrace someone right before the bullet struck. The entry wound was the soft tissue of the right eye, leaving the rest of the face completely intact. If it were not for the dark, bloody hole where the eyeball had been you might have thought the victim was merely dozing. From the back it was a different story. The high calibre round, meeting little resistance, had gone through the man’s skull, tearing off the back of the head and taking most of his brains with it. The exit wound was a gaping, ragged and bloody mess the size of a grapefruit.

Detective Constables Jason Narey and Eamon Walker had been the first officers on the scene and Narey had winced when he saw the damage. The only positive thing about dying like that, reasoned Narey, was that you wouldn’t know a bloody thing about it. You’d be here one second and gone the next, dead in less than the time it took someone to click their fingers.

It was a strange sight. Most victims of gunshot wounds ended up lying on the ground. This one was still seated on the wooden bench he’d been occupying when the bullet struck, causing everyone around him to scatter, screaming in panic as they ran from the park. Someone managed to retain the presence of mind to call Strathclyde Police to tell them the Sandyhills Sniper had struck again. As luck would have it, Walker and Narey were nearby, following up a lead in an unrelated case and, from what Narey could make out, there was nothing here to contradict the caller’s assessment. Everything about the crime scene indicated this killing was down to the sniper.

The municipal park was eerily empty now except for the two Police officers and the murdered man. The detectives proceeded cautiously at first, even though they both knew the killer would be long gone by now. That was the MO of the sniper. Set yourself up so you are well hidden, select a target somewhere off in the distance, preferably a face in a crowd, to cause maximum hysteria after the shot, then take them out. There’d been three previous attacks, on seemingly random and entirely innocent victims. As soon as the shot was taken, the sniper disappeared into thin air, leaving no clues for the Police to pick up on, not even a spent cartridge. The only real evidence they were left with was the bullet, which invariably passed through the body of the victim and was found nearby, embedded in the first solid object it met. Ballistics reckoned the ammunition in the earlier killings was .308 and Narey had no reason to doubt they’d find an exact match to that calibre in the undergrowth somewhere close to this poor sod.

Both men had taken a cursory look at the victim but you didn’t have to be a GP to know he was way beyond anyone’s help, so they retreated, to spots some distance away, standing either side of the body, their primary aim to secure the scene against any pain-in-the-arse-passers-by or make-a-name-for-themselves-journalists whilst they waited for the SOCOs to arrive.

Narey chose a spot by some trees, just in case. The sniper might be long gone but twelve years in the force had taught him to be cautious. Narey could still see the victim clearly enough from this vantage point. He looked like someone sleeping off a liquid lunch but the gelatinous brain matter plastered over the wall behind him told a different story.

‘Poor fucker,’ he said.

‘Wouldn’t want to be the one that’s got to clean this up,’ Walker called from his spot at the opposite end of the open ground between them, ‘he certainly picked the wrong day for a walk in the park.’

Narey couldn’t argue with that. If the victim had stayed in that afternoon or gone round the shops instead, he’d still be alive now, for this crime was about as indiscriminate as it gets.

The guy on the bench looked to be in his early forties, appeared respectable enough for this part of Glasgow and was dressed casually, in t-shirt and combats.

Narey wondered if the corpse had a wife somewhere. There’d be kids most likely and friends, colleagues from work, mates down the pub and all of them would be shocked rigid when they found out what happened to this guy. He was unlucky enough to have become the fourth, entirely random victim of the Sandyhills Sniper. These motiveless attacks, on unconnected victims from distances of hundreds of yards away, had shocked Glasgow into a kind of paralysis. People were afraid to be out on the streets, some were too scared to go to work and even pubs were reporting a downturn in business.

And the Press, as always, were sticking the knife in, ‘Baffled Police left clueless,’ being just one of the more helpful headlines that morning, followed by the strapline ‘Police can’t guarantee Sniper won’t kill again,’ as if anybody could guarantee that. Now there was a fourth victim, which meant the tabloids were going to have a field day. Fucking journalists, all they ever did was sneer. He’d love to get some of them to try and find the bloke responsible for this and see how they got on. They’d be bloody clueless, the lot of them.

Everyone was freaked out by this killer, because they knew they had just as much chance of being picked off by him as the next man. The Sniper didn’t care who he killed. So far there had been a van driver, filling up his vehicle on a busy petrol station forecourt in Sandyhills, which is why the Press had dubbed the killer the ‘Sandyhills Sniper’ even though he shot people from all corners of the city. Next, a middle-aged business woman in a trouser suit was gunned down walking home from work during the evening rush hour, closely followed by a young guy shot from his bike while he pedalled down the middle of the street on his way to get his exam results; straight As of course, the Press loved that bit and now this, a fourth victim in ten days; a poor, harmless bloke out for a stroll in the park on a Sunday afternoon.

Thank God they had McGregor on the case. Narey’s boss, legendary Detective Chief Inspector Robert McGregor already had a theory. He reckoned the perpetrator was copying the Beltway Sniper attacks of 2002, when thirteen luckless souls were gunned down randomly in Washington and Virginia by a nut job called John Allen Muhammad. ‘We’ve definitely got ourselves a copycat,’ DCI McGregor told a room packed with detectives, who were hanging on his every word, shortly after the second murder victim was positively identified.

At least the brass had been sensible enough to put their top man on it, temporarily commandeering McGregor from his duties looking into Glasgow’s gangland killings. Everyone knew McGregor would want this case. He may have been brought back to his native city to tackle the gangs, following a stint breaking up firms in London, but he would relish being reassigned until this one was cleared up, ‘And cleared up it shall be,’ he assured the officers in the briefing room.

Now here he was, striding purposefully down the hill towards them. Trust McGregor to get here before the SOCOs, his entourage of medium-ranking detectives trying and failing to keep up with him; tall, strong, powerful, his trade-mark, long, dark raincoat flapping behind him in the breeze. No wonder the tabloids called him ‘The Caped Crusader’.

As McGregor drew closer, Narey straightened until he was almost at attention. There was something the guvnor possessed that made you strive to do a good job for him, almost made you want to be a better man after you’d been in his vicinity. Narey supposed that was called leadership. McGregor wasn’t like other senior officers. All they worried about was managing their own careers but it was obvious McGregor cared passionately about the job and he had an incredible instinct. People said he could think like a gangster and was hard enough to take them down himself, being unafraid to get his hands dirty or his knuckles skinned. The stories about him were legendary. What man in the force wouldn’t respect that in a boss?

DCI McGregor drew alongside Narey, his burly frame almost blocking out the light. Some of the detectives were out of breath from the yomp across the park but McGregor looked like he’d just stepped from his car.

‘Jason,’ he said, ‘how’s the family?’ There was warmth in the question and it caught the younger man by surprise. After all, there were surely bigger priorities.

‘Good, thanks boss,’ a quadruple murder on his hands and McGregor still had time to ask after his well-being, amazing. Frankly he was astounded the guvnor could even remember his name, let alone the fact that he had a family.

‘How old’s your little girl? Eight?’

‘Yeah, she is,’ beamed Narey, ‘you’ve got a good memory boss.’ McGregor was probably able to recall the name and age of the kids of every man in CID.

‘My advice? Enjoy the next five or six years before she starts running you ragged. Now,’ he commanded, as if suddenly remembering they were all there for a reason, ‘lead the way.’

I’d be proud to, thought Narey but he managed to avoid saying it, instead he said ‘Mind how you go there, Sir. It’s a bit slippy,’ but DCI McGregor was already clambering down the grassy bank towards the victim.

‘Beat the SOCOs to it, did we?’ McGregor snorted. ‘Probably still struggling into their little white gimp outfits,’ and there were chuckles at that. ‘Let’s take a look at this body shall we? Don’t worry, I won’t touch anything,’ he added, his tone drippingly ironic, as if they thought he might start frisking the corpse. This attitude would never have been tolerated in any other officer but McGregor would get away with it, as he always did.

They stopped a few yards from the body and the whole party waited patiently for McGregor to take a look, then deliver his verdict. He didn’t disappoint. ‘A middle-aged bloke out on his own walking in the park,’ he began, speaking softly, as if to himself, ‘is he dodgy, I wonder? We should check that. Just because he’s unlucky enough to become the latest victim of the Sandyhills Sniper doesn’t mean he wasn’t out here looking for kiddies to fiddle with, leaving a trail of Werther’s Originals right up to the back seat of his Rover 75.’ They all laughed lightly at the chief’s gallows humour. ‘But I doubt it. I think we’ll find this poor fucker is probably divorced, not his idea either, and it wasn’t his weekend with the kids. He probably didn’t know what to do with himself until it was time to go to his local.’

Narey hadn’t thought of it like that but, all of a sudden, it seemed to fit. The boss had painted a vivid and believable picture of the victim, based on little more than a glance, and Narey found himself trusting in it unreservedly. Why else would a man be wandering in the park on his own, unless he was missing his kids?

DCI McGregor pointed at a scrunched up, brown paper bag at the victim’s feet that Narey hadn’t even noticed. ‘He dropped that when the bullet hit him. It’s empty, which shows he’s respectable, old fashioned, wouldn’t dream of littering the place with the bag that contained the bread he was using to feed the ducks.’

It was quite a forlorn image really, if the guvnor was right. Some poor sod whose life fell apart when his wife kicked him out, reduced to plodding through the park, making friends with the local bird life. ‘I wonder if he had a dog?’ mused the DCI, ‘might be worth checking the park to see if one ran off when the shot was fired, which brings me to the angle….’ He left the sentence unfinished, instead bending down to examine the bullet wound, peering closely at the obscene hole in the socket where the eyeball used to be. He looked like a golfer surveying a particularly tricky putt on the eighteenth green at St Andrews. McGregor rose and went round the back to check the exit wound and he took a long, hard look. He retraced his steps and went down low again, resuming the golfer’s stance as he looked once more into the bloodied eye socket, then he turned his head to look behind him.

‘So many possibilities; office blocks with flat roofs, those new apartments and the tenements,’ McGregor turned back to the corpse, as if checking something, then faced forwards once again, ‘but I don’t think so,’ he bit down on his lower lip while he was thinking, ‘beyond them, those tall high-rise blocks way back there. What do you think Peter?’

DI Peter Blaine at least had the balls to offer a half-hearted contradiction, ‘Not sure about that boss,’ he offered quietly, ‘looks a bloody long way from there to here.’

‘Could be out of range but I bet you a pint and a chaser that it isn’t.’ The disagreement was amiable enough. McGregor wasn’t the sort to make his officers look bad in public. ‘There are rifles these days that can take a man out from a thousand yards. I’d say it’s almost out of range, but not quite. Not for someone who’s had training, a veteran, Iraq or Afghanistan maybe.’ That was one of the theories they’d all been working to; that some unhinged former member of the armed forces, scarred by his war experience, had gone postal. Not that they were making that theory public, for fear of the backlash from the Press. ‘We should check those balconies,’ McGregor continued, ‘see if he left anything behind. You never know.’

‘Yes Guv,’ answered Blaine.

Narey stared at the three high-rise buildings McGregor had indicated. They were set back a long way from the crime scene, but they were still tall enough to tower over the park, affording a perfect vantage point of the bench. It would have been a simple enough matter to fire a shot, then disappear before anyone noticed. Narey didn’t know about rifles with a thousand-yard range but believed his boss knew what he was talking about. One thing he did know however; in those flats, the chances of anyone cooperating with the ‘Polis’ was next to zero, no matter what the crime.

McGregor glanced back at the victim, looked up again at each of the three high-rises in turn and squinted, then he rose slowly to his feet. ‘Gentlemen, I think you will find that the fatal shot came from there,’ he said, pointing at the block of flats to their left. Narey didn’t turn away from McGregor, which was just as well or he would have missed what happened next. There was a distant, muffled crack and Narey flinched as something zipped past his left ear.

Before anyone could move, the bullet caught DCI McGregor flush in the centre of his chest. He was catapulted backwards and a thick clot of blood expelled from his mouth as he gasped at the impact.

Narey looked down at his guvnor’s body. McGregor had landed on his backside, his body propped against the park bench, head slumped against the last victim’s knee, eyes wide open, a look of complete shock on his lifeless face, the trademark black raincoat puddling around him in the mud. ‘Jesus fucking Christ!’ someone shouted, and then all hell broke loose.

1

.......................

Newcastle – one year later

The legendary Peter Dean, appropriately enough for a porn baron, had gone down in the world. He looked up from the chipped basin he’d been spitting into, at the end of another spectacular coughing fit, and took in his tired, lined face in the old bathroom mirror. He stared at the unwashed greying-brown hair and squinted at the mercilessly receding hairline that was cutting a swathe over the top of his head. ‘Christ almighty,’ he murmured at the bald patches, wondering again if it was too late for a hair transplant at his age. He noticed his sallow complexion and sunken, watery eyes, ‘too many fags,’ he concluded gloomily, then immediately reached into his pocket for another one, struck a match several times with shaking hands and eventually lit it. Dean took a rejuvenating drag, then exhaled, deliberately blowing smoke at the mirror until his image was obscured.

He ambled back into the lounge of the one-bedroom-flat he called both home and office and sat down on the ancient battered armchair, attempting to ignore the cold by folding his arms across his chest. He was trying to avoid spending money on luxuries like heating, and he wondered whether he should put on a second pullover, while telling himself for the thousandth time that it would all work out somehow.

It hadn’t always been like this. There was a time when he and Bobby Mahoney had made good money from his little film production studio; a lot of money in fact. But that was when Bobby was still a wannabe gangster, making his way in the world with a little armed robbery there, some protection here, a bit of grass and a few whores on the side, before he went on to run the entire city. In Newcastle, back in the late seventies, Peter had been a player and, hard as it might be to imagine it now, was once on an almost equal footing with the man who went on to control Tyneside’s biggest criminal organisation. Back then, Peter was the go-to guy for all manner of adult material.

‘Angel Productions’ started out as a supplier of cine films. Those big, round loops of film that were spliced onto cumbersome, plastic wheels and ran on noisy projectors that could be beamed onto screens or, if your gathering was less discerning, plain white walls. Peter did well because his stuff was stronger than the material so beloved of the dirty mac brigade down in Soho. You could hardly show his stuff in cinemas. This was back in the days when, if you were really daring, you went to see, No Sex Please, We’re British or Confessions of a Window Cleaner, and Robin Asquith was considered the height of naughtiness. Of course, most respectable people didn’t watch anything that strong but, as Peter assured Bobby, ‘There are always some folk out there who want their sex dirty and real.’ For Peter, those people were manna from heaven.

Long before the advent of the internet, if you wanted to see actual sex performed in front of you by real people, it was sleazy, illicit and expensive, and Peter Dean was the man who could get it for you. He’d sell you his films under the counter at his studio or in the back room of one of Bobby’s pubs and they’d cost you. ‘When you take these home,’ he’d tell you, ‘you keep them hidden from your wife, your kids and the law. And you don’t know me. You’ve never met me, not once, do you hear?’

These days, you can watch stuff a hundred times more explicit than those old films on the internet, and all of it for free, which is why Peter Dean found himself living in reduced circumstances, renting a squalid flat above a branch of Blockbusters, an irony he seemed wholly unaware of.

Peter’s fall from grace had been a gradual one. Having ridden the crest of the cine film era, he initially adapted well to the VHS age, when the films got naughtier and nastier and he found he could sell more and more of them. He even ran some large shops at one point, partly funded by Bobby’s largesse. Bobby Mahoney ensured there was plenty of cash available for Peter to keep on paying the girls and making the films that were recorded onto those black, plastic cassettes that seemed so portable then and so bulky now, in the digital age. His stuff usually consisted of grainy footage of ‘Wives next door’ performing pathetic little stripteases before half-heartedly playing with themselves, until the window cleaner turned up, caught them at it and ‘punished’ them in the only way he knew how, with a good, hard shag. Bobby Mahoney continued to fund Peter because he knew a universal truth; where there’s sex there’s money.

In the eighties Peter was minted. He had the cars and the big house and he held legendary parties, with proper champagne and the finest quality drugs. ‘Pure Bolivian!’ he’d assure everybody.

Where there’s money and drugs and parties, there’s girls, and Peter had more than his fair share of them too. He had his pick in fact – and not all of them porn stars, though he did insist on ‘auditioning’ all of those as well. ‘You’ve got to show me what you’re capable of love, before I go to the time, the trouble and the expense of filming it,’ he’d tell them solemnly. Some walked, but most of them shrugged and let him get on with it. Not a single girl appeared in Peter’s films without first performing on his casting couch. ‘Not a bad way to earn a living is it?’ he confided to Bobby with a wink.

But the high life couldn’t last, and things got a lot harder for Peter with the advent of the DVD. The stuff he was churning out all of a sudden seemed old and a bit pathetic. He was loyal you see, perhaps a bit too loyal, keeping faith in the same lasses who’d paraded for him in skimpy schoolgirl uniforms in the eighties and ‘reinventing’ them for his ‘Bored Housewives’ series. By this stage, his housewives looked bored even while the window cleaner was giving them one on the kitchen table. Sales dwindled and ‘Bored Housewives 14’ actually lost money, which was unheard of in porn.

By the time the internet caught on, Peter was really struggling. How could he compete with his ‘Northern MILFS’ on DVD at £20 a pop when your discerning viewer could watch Pamela Anderson or Abi Titmuss doing stronger stuff? ‘You’ve got that Paris Hilton and Britney Spears showing their growlers for nothing these days,’ he told Joe Kinane in disgust, while explaining his latest business setback, ‘no one’s even paying them to do it!’

The sensible thing for Peter to have done was retire but he didn’t have quite enough put away for that. He regretted splashing so much cash around in his thirties; all those parties, all that champagne and all that coke didn’t come cheap but Peter hadn’t worried about any of it at the time. The money had been pouring in back then and he had thought it would all go on forever. Porn doesn’t come with a final salary pension and, like many of the ‘actors’ in his little films, Peter wondered what he could do afterwards, once the gloss had gone from his empire. So, near bankrupt and thrice divorced, he sold his house and, instead of buying a little bungalow in Barnard Castle, rented a tiny flat above the video store and ploughed what was left of his money into the reincarnation of ‘Angel Productions’.

‘Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Phoenix Films!’ Peter Dean was back.

Times may have changed but it wasn’t too late for Peter to change with them. He still thought of himself as an ideas-man, and now he was going to cater for the extreme end of the market. He would sell movies to ‘connoisseurs’ of the hard stuff. ‘We’ll cater for all tastes, no matter how weird they might appear to the so-called normal man in the street.’

There were little movies about barely-legal babysitters caught in the act of self-love by couples returning home early who were ‘punished’ in sadistic threesomes, fake ‘snuff’ movies in which the actresses appeared to have been brutally raped then ‘murdered’ for real afterwards, except the ‘actresses’ weren’t good enough to fake fear quite as well as they faked their orgasms, and the same faces tended to crop up again and again to be murdered over and over in front of Peter’s camera. ‘I will make films on demand on any subject you desire,’ he’d tell potential backers, ‘it’s all dependent on the price.’ There was rape, torture, masochism, sadism, onanism or bestiality. The sex was middle aged, old aged and under aged, with first timers, part timers and old timers. There were threesomes, foursomes and moresomes, and household items crammed into every orifice. Peter set up rooms full of girls and boys who swapped with each other, then forgot who they’d been shagging just moments earlier. The drugs helped with that. Nobody remembers anybody in the hard core porn world, except the name and number of their dealer.

Trouble was, whatever Peter Dean did, no matter how filthy, it was never quite enough. He just couldn’t compete with the internet. Every dirty thought Peter had in his sleazy life was already out there, magnified a thousand times and all just a mouse click away, most of it uploaded for free by Joe Public and his filthy ‘ex-girlfriend’, motivated by revenge on each other after they’d split up or, if they were still together, fuelled by the illicit thrill of knowing their most private, intimate moments were being watched every night by millions of strangers they’d never meet. How could Peter rival that?

He didn’t see it coming. Now, in his sixties, Peter Dean was a poster boy for failure. It took a couple of years but slowly, steadily, the money began to run out. That was when Peter decided on one last desperate throw of the dice. He went to see David Blake.

Bobby Mahoney hadn’t been seen around in a while, so there was no way Peter could speak to the man himself. Bobby was in semi-retirement somewhere hot, or so the story went, though there were other, more cynical voices than Peter’s who claimed he was really six feet under, killed by a rival gang or an ambitious lieutenant. Peter didn’t believe that but either way he realised he would have to deal with a new face in Bobby’s firm. The main man these days was David Blake; still a young guy, mid-thirties, clever enough by all accounts but not a hard man particularly, though it seemed that the real hard men in the Mahoney crew were more than happy to work for him. Blake gave the orders now, anybody who was anybody in the city knew that, and so Peter Dean had his receding hair cut neatly at a proper barbers in the town, then put on his best full-length dark brown leather coat, the one that made him feel like Humphrey Bogart playing Philip Marlowe, and set off to speak to Blake at the Cauldron, an old nightclub that doubled as an HQ for Bobby’s lads.

He was more than a bit put out on arrival to be told by a shaven-headed man in a leather jacket that, ‘a meeting with the boss is impossible. You didn’t make an appointment.’

‘Fuck that,’ he replied, because the bloke didn’t look particularly scary, ‘I know Blake’s here. I’ve known him for years and he’ll bloody well see me,’ then he’d tried to push by, an act that proved to be ill advised. Peter was stunned to be lifted off his feet, spun round and planted very firmly against the wall, his glasses falling to the ground and his cheek grazed by the brickwork until it drew blood. It said a lot for Peter’s parlous situation that he was more concerned about the condition of his spectacles than his own physical state. Bones could mend but he couldn’t afford a new pair of glasses.

At that point David Blake himself walked out into the corridor to see what was happening, spotted Peter being pressed against the wall and actually laughed at the sight.

‘Put him down, Palmer,’ he’d said, ‘you wouldn’t touch him if you knew where he’d been.’

It was an ominous start. He was however released from Palmer’s grip. ‘You’ve got five minutes, Peter,’ Blake told him as he was admitted to the great man’s office and they both sat down either side of an imposing wooden desk. Peter looked round the room. Half a dozen of Blake’s associates were there but he hardly recognised anyone. The guys he was used to dealing with were all gone. These fellas were all hard-looking bastards in their twenties and thirties, who looked like they had just stepped off a night club’s doors. Except for Kinane, the firm’s legendary enforcer, and Hunter, who was one of the few old guard remaining, a man who had virtually grown up in Bobby Mahoney’s crew, Peter couldn’t have put a name to any of them.

Blake was young to be running a firm, but then everybody looked young to Peter these days. Peter guessed he was in his mid-thirties, around six feet tall, dressed in a smart suit with no tie and in possession of a full head of dark hair Peter immediately envied.

‘What do you want to see me about?’ asked Blake without any preamble.

Peter launched into his practised spiel, including the jargon he’d learned from the business books he’d been reading lately. ‘I have a bit of a liquidity problem,’ he explained to Bobby’s young protégé, ‘but all I really need is some working capital. If you can provide the start-up cash then I can leverage an amazing new idea, one that promises a very high return on your investment.’ It was a fine speech, even if he did say so himself, and he was pretty certain Blake was interested, judging by the faint smile that played on the younger man’s lips as he listened.

‘Go on then,’ he urged Peter, ‘what’s the big idea?’

He knew Blake was hooked then. Peter leaned forward in his seat, but not too close because Palmer adjusted his position at the same time, as if to intercept him before he got too near to the boss. God these security types were jumpy.

Peter cleared his throat and pressed on, ‘What’s the most successful adult site on the world wide web?’ he asked.

Blake blinked like he had never given it much thought, ‘YouPorn?’

‘Correct!’ said Peter, wagging his finger at the younger man, as if Blake was a particularly bright student, ‘and why is it so successful?’

‘Because it’s free,’ answered Blake, ‘obviously,’ and Peter was unable to hide his disappointment.

‘Well no,’ he said, ‘I mean, yes it is free but that’s not the reason it’s so successful.’

‘Isn’t it?’ Blake gave him a questioning look and then raised an eyebrow at the guys in his entourage, who chuckled sycophantically. ‘Then what’s the reason Peter? You tell me.’

Peter spread his palms, ‘The name,’ and, when there was no acknowledgement of his powers of perception, he explained further, ‘that’s how everyone knew where to find them. There’s millions of porn sites out there on the internet but ‘You Porn’ took a name that was almost like one of the massively successful non-porn sites already out there,’ he paused, ‘You Tube, you know?’

‘Yeah, I know,’ admitted Blake, ‘that was a clever gimmick but I think the fact that they were the first to supply bucketloads of hard core porn for free, was their actual USP, don’t you?’

Peter didn’t know what a USP was so he just nodded, ‘Perhaps, but I still think it’s the name. It’s all in the name,’ he said grandly, holding a hand up and sweeping it across an imaginary billboard in front of him.

Blake sighed and said, ‘Peter, you have sixty seconds to get to the point. I have a flight to catch.’

‘Right, yes, of course, no problem,’ and Peter reached into the large, black document case he’d brought with him and fished out the A3-sized bit of card he’d had mocked up for the occasion, with what little remained of the cash from the sale of his house. He took off the cloth cover that obscured the art work and handed it to Blake reverentially. On it was a graphic artist’s rendition of the website Peter was going to create using David Blake’s money. Here was the idea that was going to put Peter right back where he belonged; at the very top of the pile.

Blake looked at the mock-up. He took his time and he peered at it intently. Peter held his breath. First Blake seemed to frown and Peter’s heart sank but then his face broke into a smile and it felt as if a great burden had been lifted from Peter’s shoulders. Thank God, he thought, the man with the money likes my idea. Everything was going to be alright after all. Peter’s troubles were over. He was so happy he could have leaned over and kissed Blake but, just then, something odd happened; Blake’s smile turned into a broad grin and then, horribly, unbelievably, it morphed into a chuckle. Blake looked at Peter and laughed, he looked back at the art work and laughed some more, then he started to really let rip. Blake showed the art work to Palmer and he laughed too, then they all leaned over, took a good look at it and joined in, all of them, everyone in Blake’s pathetic, arse-licking, little crew of tough guys started to laugh at Peter and his brilliant idea. What the fuck was wrong with these people?

Blake finally stopped laughing and said, ‘Thanks Peter, it’s been an absolute pleasure, no, it really has. Funniest thing I’ve seen in ages but I’ve got to go now. Like I said, I’ve a flight to catch. See you around eh?’

And with that Blake rose to his feet and was gone, the posse of bodyguards melting from the room after him, all of them still chuckling. Peter looked down at the art work that had caused so much hilarity and genuinely struggled to understand how such an intelligent man as Blake, a successful man, a so-called entrepreneur, could fail to see the sheer goldmine potential behind a porn site called ‘SitOnMyFacebook’.

Peter Dean went home and crawled; first into bed, then into a deep depression. He avoided meals, dressing and washing and failed to return calls from the very few acquaintances he had left. Bills and junk mail began to pile up on the mat. He contemplated suicide on a number of occasions and in increasingly imaginative and impactful ways.

Two weeks later, Peter finally emerged to take the phone call that would change his life forever. There would be money, a voice on the line explained, a lot of money and Peter would gain powerful new friends into the bargain. It seemed Peter Dean’s dreams would be realised after all and it was all so simple.

All he had to do was kill David Blake.

2

.......................

I have to be lucky all the time. They only have to get lucky once. That’s the thought that’s always with me these days, the one that gnaws away at my brain in the small hours until I finally give up on sleep and climb out of bed, leaving Sarah breathing softly behind me.

I woke early as usual, my rest fitful, interrupted by dreams so vivid they covered me in a sweat that pooled on my chest and chilled my body, despite the heat. There seemed no point in lying there reliving nightmares, so I put them from my mind and climbed quietly out of bed, being especially careful not to wake Sarah, because she needs her sleep more than most. I thought I’d woken her when she stirred and muttered ‘Davey’ but she rolled over immediately, still fast asleep, just calling out my name in her own dreams, as if I was the only one she knew who could save her from them.

I padded quietly down to the kitchen and made coffee, reminding myself, as I do every morning, that I really am a very lucky man in so many ways. I have my health, I have money, more than I could ever spend, and I have Sarah Mahoney.

And there’s our place in Hua Hin. Not many people get to make their coffee in a kitchen the size of most people’s flats. The sun was just coming up, turning the sky a grey-blue colour that you only ever see at the beginning of the morning. The scene outside my window looked like a watercolour. Soon the sun would be high in the sky and before long the heat would begin to cook the ground we walked on. Sarah likes it like that. She can sit out in the sun for hours in one of her bikinis that are little more than three tiny triangles tied together with string, her arms and legs covered in oil, her whole body turning a rich golden brown as she slowly bakes under the Thai sun, but I’m not too keen. I can’t sit outside for long before I get restless. I’m not comfortable out there basting like a turkey and I can’t relax with the bodyguards standing around us. Our ex-Gurkhas keep a discreet enough distance and it’s not as if they lech at Sarah – though I could hardly blame them if they did, she is a stunner after all – but I like a bit of privacy, and that’s one of the things I’ve had to sacrifice since I became the boss, so I prefer to swim in our indoor pool.

I spend a lot of time in the house while Sarah suns herself outside. I have a room set up with a bank of computers that help me keep a track on all of our legitimate investments. I am careful not to leave anything un-coded or incriminating on them that relates to the other side of our business though, the side that makes the real money. Most of our legitimate stuff is there for show; the restaurants, clubs and bars, the spa and fitness centre, even the two taxi companies we recently purchased and the bureau de change. They aren’t really businesses in their own right. They tick over okay and they make a bit of profit between them but they are only really there to serve one purpose; to do our laundry. They make us look respectable and we can plough the money that keeps on rolling in from everything else we are involved in through them and wash it all till it’s clean. My biggest headache is trying to find new ways to put the bent money through the system without anyone noticing it. Anybody who is involved in my world will tell you the same thing; the more money you earn, the bigger the problem, because you have to be able to explain every penny to the authorities if they come knocking on your door. It’s a problem as old as my profession. Just look at Al Capone. If he’d bothered to pay some taxes they’d never have got him.

The proceeds that flow in from the drug deals, the escorts and massage parlours, the protection we offer to local businesses and smaller firms who operate on our patch, along with the occasional armed robbery, all has to be cleaned and laundered. Having too much money isn’t easy. You might think this is a good problem to have but you’d be wrong. One mistake from me and I’ll be staring at four grey prison walls for the rest of my life. I live with that stress constantly.

That’s why I am about to make a change to the Gallowgate Leisure Group. Soon we will go global. We are about to become Gallowgate Offshore – then we really will have a licence to print money. But not yet, not until I can sort out a few issues closer to home; like the new luxury hotel we are building on the Quayside and the club we are about to open, which will be the largest nightspot in the north of England. More importantly, I have to sort out the heroin drought. My biggest wholesaler of coke and H has just left the market-place, suddenly and permanently. He thought it would be a good idea to import more than a tonne of cocaine into the UK in a single transaction, cutting the risks he endured with multiple trips from his base in Amsterdam. The stash was huge, and around ninety per cent pure, so it could be cut to make seven times the amount before it reached any users, which made that particular cargo worth more than two hundred and fifty million pounds on the street. It wasn’t all for us, of course, but we were going to take a sizeable amount and, as he had been supplying us with most of our heroin and cocaine for the best part of two years now, his arrest was a disaster for him and for us.

A shipment that size doesn’t just get stuffed into a cupboard, it was built into a hidden compartment behind the galley, but someone tipped someone else off and SOCA got on its trail. The Serious Organised Crime Agency used to be regarded as a bit of a joke in my world, but not any more. They’ve sharpened up their act. They impounded the yacht and dismantled it bit by bit until they found what they were looking for. It took SOCA three days to locate the drugs but eventually they were able to parade a haul on the TV news bulletins that amounted to around twenty per cent of the entire UK market and our wholesaler was facing a nailed-on life sentence. I wasn’t concerned about him talking, he was old school and knew the risks, but I was worried about a product drought on the horizon. If the drugs dry up my money dries up too – and there are a lot of people on my books who have to be paid on time.

That’s why the Turk and I are about to go into business together. Barely a month before, I was sitting in a little family restaurant in Istanbul, putting the finishing touches to the biggest deal of my life. It was the usual set-up. He and I shared a table while our bodyguards stood back and eyed each other suspiciously. I had brought Kinane and Palmer with me. No other customers were allowed in the place and the owner had made himself scarce. I’d forgotten what a smoke-filled room was like, all of the Turk’s guys smoked and it hung around us like a veil. The room was oppressively warm, no air con and I could feel damp patches of sweat under my arms. I was hoping to get out of that room quickly.

The Turk was, in point of fact, actually a Kurd. Because he was based in Istanbul, Remzi al Karayilan had become known as ‘The Turk’ and the name had stuck. He didn’t seem to care, but then he was doing pretty well by it so why should he? He was thriving because he had found a way to bridge two worlds; he knew people in Europe who wanted pure heroin and he had the contacts in the east to get it.

It takes guys like the Turk an eternity to come to the point. First you have to break bread with them, talk family, all that bollocks. He was a portly bloke who wore the fat round his belly like a badge of prosperity but you could tell he was a strong and powerful man underneath it. I’d had him checked out and I knew he had killed men with his bare hands. Now I was sitting opposite him, I could see how he’d managed to climb to the top of the heap in this city. He had the look of a man you definitely wouldn’t want to cross.

The Turk shovelled a couple of dates into his mouth and chewed them noisily. Before he’d finished them he asked me, ‘You have a wife, Mister Blake?’ I shook my head. The guy looked at me like I was a freak, but I wasn’t going to mention Sarah. I didn’t want him to know about her.

There were small plates laid out on the table, each with a different dish, Turkish meze; white cheese, hot peppers, dolma, kofte, squid and figs. I ate some to be polite before he finally got down to business.

‘I’m curious to know,’ he asked me, ‘what you think you can give to me, apart from your money?’

‘Isn’t that enough?’

‘Not now, maybe before when I did not have enough, but not now. I don’t want to be a rich man who dies in prison,’ he explained.

‘You know what I can bring. You wouldn’t have sat down with me if you didn’t. I can guarantee safe passage of your product from the Balkans to Amsterdam and beyond, right into the eastern ports of the UK. From there it goes straight to the estates and high rises of my city. I have a network of dealers working for me who can dispose of a dozen kilos at a time, with no interference from the police. That’s what I bring to this deal. Now convince me you are worth my investment.’

‘Me? I bring nothing Mister Blake,’ and he eyed me contemptuously, ‘just friends where you could not even step, without your throat it is cut,’ his accent might have been strong, and he jumbled his words, but his message was clear. ‘The Afghan tribes who grow the poppy trust me and the border officials in Iran live in my pocket. How many men do you own in those countries, Mister Blake?’ I was getting a bit bored of his faux-formality but he made a fair point. Most of the heroin used in Britain comes from Turkey these days, so his Afghan connections were critical to us.

‘And the Americans?’

‘Don’t give a fuck,’ he assured me, ‘as long as I am not Taliban, as long as I don’t talk about the prophet, they don’t worry what I do. All they care about is extremists. Years of Americans in Afghanistan and what has this achieved? Now the country produces ninety per cent of the world’s heroin,’ he shrugged, ‘the Americans tolerate this. They tolerate any one who is not Taliban. The only alternatives are the tribal warlords who make most of their money from the poppy.’

‘Most of the product comes out through Pakistan. Why don’t you use that route?’ I asked.

The question seemed to irritate him and he shrugged dismissively. ‘A country more corrupt than mine, even than yours,’ he told me with mock wonderment.

‘You’re saying Iran isn’t corrupt?’

‘I find it useful to work with governments that want to saturate western cities with heroin. Iran wishes for everyone in the west to become an addict. They won’t stop me helping them to achieve that. So long as I pay big money to the right people, my shipments will always go through Iran.’

‘Then on into eastern Turkey,’ I told him, ‘via the province of Agri where the product is collected by your men at Gurbulak and loaded onto oil tankers, before they smuggle it into the Balkans.’

He did not disguise his anger at my knowledge. ‘What are you,’ he slammed his hand down hard on the table, ‘a policeman?’

‘If I was, you would be in big trouble. I’m just a businessman who does his homework before he enters into a deal.’

‘It is not a good idea for you to know so much about my business,’ he said, wagging a finger at me, ‘maybe I don’t like that.’ Abruptly he drained his drink and stood up. ‘One million Euros in advance English, to show good faith, then we talk about your first consignment.’ He stood up. It was the signal that our brief meeting was over. He and his men left without a word. There was no handshake.

The Turk is convinced his process is impregnable. I hope so because I am about to trust him with a great deal of my money. Even for an organisation our size, one million Euros is a lot of loose change.

I can’t worry about that now though because today is the day that Pratin calls. I always pay Pratin on time, and the numbers are substantial. He comes down from Bangkok every month, regular as clockwork, and leaves carrying a nice big briefcase packed with currency – and none of your Thai Bahts either, this is strictly ‘US Dollar American’ as he calls it. Since Sarah and I relocated to Thailand I have got to know Pratin pretty well. He is Roi Tamruat Ek, which means he is a Captain in the Royal Thai Police, but his influence extends far further than his rank. Pratin knows people who matter. He is just another insurance policy I suppose, one more Drop that has to be paid, just like the monthly sum we still pay to Amrein, our high-level fixer back in the UK. Obviously I also have to shell out a considerable amount to my Gurkha bodyguards who patrol our compound night and day, making sure nobody can get in. They aren’t cheap either, but that’s one number on our balance-sheet that I never question because they are keeping me alive. That’s what it’s all about these days; insurance, protection, safety. I pay people to guard me, keep me out of jail, and tell me what my enemies are doing to get at me. It all costs big bucks, some of it in ‘US Dollar American’. I suppose you could call it the cost of living.

This is the bit no one tells you about when you are on the up. Before I started running Newcastle, I assumed my predecessor Bobby Mahoney was absolutely minted. I’d seen the figures; the amount of money coming in was vast and much of it was undeclared income. I knew what he paid out to employees of the firm and how much we spent on the Drop. There should have been plenty left over to live the high life but I’m telling you, lately, the cost of business has gone up and up. The more our empire has expanded in the little over two years since Bobby died, the more I have to pay out to avoid being killed or stuck inside a prison in the UK or Thailand for life, so I am always thinking. Am I paying the right guy the right amount? Should I be paying his boss or some other guy I’m not even aware of? If I fuck up it’s all over for everyone.

I try not to think about that as I surf the main news channels while I drink my coffee; Sky, BBC, CNN, though I don’t bother with Fox obviously. I can’t relax until I’ve surfed them all. Only then, when I am sure that the planet is still rotating safely on its axis, do I feel like I can properly start my day.

I was just about to change the channel when another news item claimed my attention. The trial of Leon Cassidy, aka the Sandyhills Sniper, was about to begin. The Sky News reporter told us earnestly that ‘Cassidy will stand trial on five counts of murder, including the killing of Detective Chief Inspector Robert McGregor.’ I was back in Newcastle when the sniper started picking off his victims and it had been a massive news story at the time. ‘Police are not looking for anyone else in connection with the killing,’ the reporter told us, in a poorly-concealed code that was designed to make everybody think ‘they’ve got the bastard.’ So much for innocent until proven guilty, I thought, but they did find the rifle in his flat, so it looked like Cassidy was going down.

I turned off the TV, then changed and went for a swim in the indoor pool. That alerted the stone calm figure of Jagrit to my presence, but he wasn’t the sort to overreact to my sudden arrival. He didn’t even flinch. I could see him standing there through the huge windows that overlooked our grounds. With his olive-skinned face and dark, watchful eyes he looked like he’d been carved out of jade. Jagrit is one of my Gurkhas chosen, like his comrades, because of their innate loyalty and legendary hardness. They were the perfect guys to look after me; honest, decent, honourable men but vicious bastards who could creep up on you and slice your throat open without you hearing a thing. Nobody could get into our compound with them watching out for me. These elite fighting men were probably the only reason Sarah and I got any sleep at all these days.

The water looked inviting enough so I did a few lengths, counting them off each time my hand touched the end of the pool. I did this most mornings to stay in shape, but I also liked the way it cleared my head at the start of the day. I can think in here and not in a way that makes me regret the past or feel anxious about the future. Who needs that? Deal with all of the shit you’ve seen and done and move on, that’s what I say. It’s the only way. Fretting is for old women and fools. Looking back on what might have been just drives you mad in the end.