The Damage (David Blake 2) (39 page)

‘There’s going to be a riot on that estate,’ Palmer said afterwards when we were all back at the Cauldron, as if I hadn’t known it already. Braddock’s lads would go berserk once they heard he was dead. They’d want to vent their anger at anyone who might be behind his murder and, when they couldn’t find the guys responsible for it, they would smash up everything, even the homes they lived in. Like it or not, the Police would have to go in to restore order and they’d take a pasting for a few hours, hiding behind riot shields as bottles rained down on them from the high-rises. Their commanding officers, mindful that the media was watching, would not want to be too heavy-handed to begin with, particularly if the riot had been triggered by the death of a ‘community leader’ like Braddock. Some would try and portray him as a cross between Ronnie Kray and Joan of Arc, defender of the oppressed masses of the Sunnydale estate. It would probably take serious injury to a Policeman before the top brass ordered their men to remove their kid gloves and go in with the batons. There is nothing that makes a copper angrier than standing impotently by while Molotov cocktails are hurled at him, and his mates are stretchered off to hospital. By the time they were finally allowed to use ‘reasonable force’ their anger would sweep across that estate like an avenging tide. Everyone would be caught up in it, innocent and guilty alike.

‘What do we do?’ asked Kinane.

‘Nothing,’ I told him, ‘we stay well clear of the place. Let them vent their anger. The Police will have to crack some heads to get them back in their cages. It’ll be a week before the place calms down.’

‘Then we go in?’ asked Kinane.

‘No,’ I told them, ‘
then
we turn off the tap. No drugs for the Sunnydale estate, which means no supply for the junkies, no cash to pay the dealers, the look-outs and the bully-boys who handle security. There’ll be no money for the loan sharks either. Braddock’s boys need to learn who pays for all the cars, the women and the nights out on the town. Give it a week and the junkies on that estate will be clucking, desperate to get their hands on anything that’ll get them high. Another week and you’ll get rival dealers coming in from the other estates. The guns will come out and they’ll be shooting each other every night. We won’t do anything to stop that. It’ll be Armageddon. We’ll just spread the word that Braddock tried to rip us off; that turning the tap off is punishment for the whole estate, and we won’t be coming back. Let’s see how long Braddock’s ‘Robin Hood’ image lasts when they are blaming him for the shit they are in.’

They listened intently while I continued to outline my plan for regaining control of the Sunnydale estate. ‘After a month, go down there with your sons and the boys from the gym and restore order. Speak to Braddock’s men, tell them you’ll turn the tap back on if they toe the line and stop dipping into our profits. Get the rival dealers out. It will be messy for a week or two but I suspect your boys will enjoy the work.’

‘I expect they will,’ agreed Kinane.

‘My guess is that everyone on that estate will be thrilled to see you by then. You’ll be the liberating army come to save them from themselves.’

‘I like the sound of that,’ he agreed.

‘I’ll get Sharp to talk to that journalist on the local paper. He can be a ‘highly-placed-police-source’ who reveals the authorities are acting on the theory that Braddock was killed for supplying them with information about rival dealers. The journalist will make that sound like a good thing, which would get Braddock a bit of sympathy from normal folk.’

Kinane interrupted, ‘but on the Sunnydale Estate…’

‘They’ll think he’s a Judas cunt,’ added Palmer.

‘Braddock a grass?’ laughed Kinane. ‘He’ll be spinning in his grave at that. He’ll probably come back and haunt you.’

‘He’s dead,’ I assured him, ‘you can’t harm the dead and they can’t harm you.’

‘You’ve got it all worked out, haven’t you?’ said Kinane wryly. ‘As usual.’

‘If you’re going to get rid of someone in our world, you’ve got to do it twice,’ I explained, ‘first you kill the man, then you kill his reputation. That way it ends.’

They knew I’d done it, when they hauled me in. Of course they did. They’re not stupid. The Police usually do know what’s going on. Proving it? That’s the difficult bit.

I was brought in for questioning and made to wait. I suspected they knew they would never be able to pin this one on me, not if they threw questions at me from now till the end of time, but they brought me in to make a point. They knew I had an alibi, several hundred in fact, and they would have been pissed off I chose the night of a high-profile charity do to put an end to Braddock. I suspect they would have been particularly annoyed to learn their own Chief Constable was in attendance as the guest of a children’s charity, while I entertained some of the great and the not-so-good a few feet from him on a different table.

‘Shall we dispense with the usual bullshit?’ Carlton asked, ‘and maybe just cut to the chase for once.’

‘Okay,’ I said, ‘it’s that parking fine isn’t it? I could have sworn I’d paid it but, if I didn’t, you’ve got me bang-to-rights.’

‘No,’ he said reasonably, doing his best keeping-calm-in-the-face-of-extreme-provocation act, ‘it’s the murder of Frank Braddock, but I think you know that.’

‘Frank Braddock?’ I asked, ‘no, the name doesn’t ring a bell.’

‘I thought we’d agreed to dispense with the bullshit, but no,’ he was trying to sound pained, ‘in a moment I’ll be forced to tell you that Frank Braddock was shot in his car last night by at least two unknown assailants and killed instantly. You will continue to deny you’ve ever heard of him, when in reality he was your top man on the Sunnydale Estate; has been for a year or more. I’m assuming you’ll then deny knowing where the Sunnydale estate is, even though we have film of you down there.’

So they’d been filming me. That proved nothing in itself and I was surprised he’d admitted it to me. ‘I was thinking of investing in some of the private properties on the outskirts of the place,’ I explained patiently, ‘I went down there to see if the stories about the estate had been exaggerated. I didn’t want to invest in an area with a reputation for petty crime and drug use. In the end I decided it probably wasn’t worth the risk.’

‘Really? Well that’s just fascinating,’ he was nodding to himself, ‘and I suppose, when I tell you Braddock was killed at around ten o’clock yesterday evening, you will helpfully point out that you were at your grand hotel opening, watching the boxing with a few hundred local dignitaries.’

‘And your Chief Constable,’ I reminded him.

He ignored that, ‘and I suppose you never left the building? And you can provide dozens of witnesses who’ll say as much? That’s all just fine and dandy,’ he told me, ‘except it isn’t – because we both know you killed Braddock or, more accurately, you had him killed. He’d been robbing from you and bad-mouthing you for months. The only thing that surprised us was how long it took you to get rid of him,’ he leaned in right close to my ear then, ‘we were beginning to think you’d gone soft, Davey boy, but we shouldn’t have worried about that. I mean, Bobby Mahoney’s protégé all these years? How could we ever have doubted you? You’re proper gangster, you are.’

‘Yeah, that’s right,’ I sighed, ‘I’m a wise guy, a made-man, I work for Don Corleone.’

‘What if I told you there was a woman in that car,’ said DI Carlton quietly. ‘Would you believe me?’

I’d been waiting for this and I was prepared. I still felt bad about that young girl, but to be brutal about it, little Suzy couldn’t have chosen worse company. I reckoned she’d sealed her fate as soon as she started sleeping with Braddock. Carlton probably thought I didn’t know she’d been killed too. He was hoping I’d be shocked into saying ‘no there wasn’t’ or ‘there can’t have been’ and he could then leap in with a flourish and shout something like ‘Ha! How do you know?’ like something out of a third-rate detective series.

‘Why would I believe anything you say to me?’

‘Oh yes,’ agreed Carlton. ‘She was beautiful, though you’d not know that now of course, with her face blown off and half her head missing. We had to identify her from the credit cards in her purse and the picture from an old ID card. One of our officers went round to her flat, came back with a picture in a frame from her university days. Looked to be a bit of class, she did. God knows what she saw in Frank Braddock, though I’m told he had a way with the ladies. I guess you’re going to tell me she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Did she just get in the way, or was it your intention to kill Simone Huntington for some reason we are not aware of? What did the poor bitch do to deserve that, eh?’

He paused while he waited for me to answer and frowned when I said nothing. ‘What’s the matter Blake? Feeling ashamed are we? I doubt that. You’ve got to have a heart to feel shame. I mean, come on, your lot don’t give a fuck who you kill.’ He turned back to look at me and frowned again. I was still trying to digest what he’d just told me. Then DI Carlton did a funny thing. He actually smiled.

‘He didn’t know,’ he sounded triumphant, ‘look at his fucking face. He didn’t know!’ and he shook his head in wonderment. ‘Well, how about that. You look like someone just punched you in the guts, Mr Blake. You look a bit sick.’

‘Should we bring you a bucket, Mr Blake?’ asked his Detective Sergeant, with a sneer. ‘Don’t want you to make a mess all over those expensive shoes of yours.’

Carlton wasn’t through yet. ‘What’s the matter? Was Frank Braddock’s old girlfriend not meant to be caught in the crossfire? You telling us your lads fucked up and shot a civilian when they were only supposed to take care of Braddock?’

‘You do look a bit rattled Mr Blake,’ added the DS. They were enjoying this. ‘Feeling a bit remorseful about causing the death of an entirely innocent girl?’

‘Is there something you want to tell us?’ prompted Carlton. ‘Well, is there?’

I steadied myself before I said, ‘I’ve nothing to say to any of you, nothing at all.’

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

F
or a few days after they told me Simone had been killed, I actually thought I was going a bit mad. I didn’t leave my hotel room. The more I thought about it all, the more I was convinced my head was going to explode. I even started blaming the God I don’t believe in for my bad luck. What the fuck had I ever done, I asked him and myself? All I ever tried to do was my best, for my family, for my friends, for the people who depended on me. Everything I did, I did for them. And this was what I got in return. I kept playing the last few seconds of Simone’s life over and over in my mind. Did she die instantly, or did she suffer? Had the rounds from the shotgun made a bloody mess of that pretty face of hers, like DI Carlton said? Was she frightened? Did she scream before she died?

There were a few dark days I can tell you but, in the end, I realised it really wasn’t my fault. I didn’t order Kinane to kill her. She just chose the wrong moment to step into Braddock’s car, that’s all. Call-me-Tanya’s story is as sad and simple as that. She never once told me he was the guy who got her so messed up, so how was I to know she’d be there that night? For fuck’s sake, I was the one who was trying to save her. Why would a woman like Simone fall in love with a man like Braddock? What the hell did she see in him, apart from the danger – the danger that cost her everything in the end?

There was a stage when I was thinking so much about Simone and poor Danny that it felt like my brain couldn’t cope with it all anymore, but I got through that low point and carried on. What choice did I have? There are still too many people who rely on me, who need me to make the right choice, for me to just switch off from the world. If I do, everything would come crashing down around me.

Simone’s picture appeared in all of the papers, unsurprisingly, because she was a young, beautiful and tragic victim. The newspapers all printed stories on her, but they couldn’t make up their minds how to describe her. Some ran pieces saying that she was a bright, educated young woman who had inexplicably befriended a man with a secret life she was wholly unaware of. To back this up, they printed accounts from a friend of hers who said she thought he was a property developer. But others ran much darker stories about the perils of drug addiction, safe in the knowledge that you cannot libel a dead person. They quoted anonymous sources who said Simone snorted cocaine in nightclub bathrooms and even at tables in bars, which was clearly a crock of shit. I mean, Simone did a bit of coke now and then but she was hardly likely to snort it in a crowded wine bar.

Her father was widely quoted on his desire to start up a charitable trust in her name. The Simone Huntington foundation would devote considerable resources, pledged by her dad and his city backers, to getting young men and women off drugs. There would be school visits to persuade children to refrain from using them altogether. ‘Perhaps then,’ her father was quoted as saying, ‘my daughter Simone will not have died in vain.’

Not long after I read that piece I got a call from Palmer, ‘it’s here,’ he said, and I could hear the relief in his voice, ‘the shipment’s finally arrived.’

‘Right,’ I said and hung up. It looked like I wouldn’t have to kill the Turk after all. The heroin drought was over.

The trial of Ron Haydon came and went with astonishing speed. He was an embarrassment to the region and his party, in particular those who’d backed him or worked for him for the past twenty-nine years, all of whom either abandoned him or turned on him. Everyone just wanted this case to be over and for Ron to go away.