‘None taken,’ I told him, ‘just don’t go round my house while I’m out or my lads will have to have a word.’
He started laughing heartily at that and the laugh became a spectacular coughing fit. I realised that poor old Jinky had become the victim of his own success. He’d been so adept at charming neglected lasses into his bed that he was left with an inbuilt distrust of all women. But look where that had got him, a loveless existence, in a squalid little flat. There was a certain cruel irony in that.
‘Do you want us to ask around, quiet like, to see if anyone knows anything about your dad? I see a lot of the old guys in the club.’
‘Cheers Jinky, I’d appreciate that. I figure someone might know what happened to him. Tell them there’s a few quid in it for them if they have information I can use,’ and I reached inside my wallet and took out a ton. He made a half-hearted attempt to wave it away. ‘You’ll need to buy a few pints if you’re asking around on my behalf,’ I said and I left the hundred quid on the little table next to his half-filled whisky glass. Then I wrote my mobile number on the top of his Racing Post.
‘It’s been canny craic,’ I told him, as I picked up the bottle and poured him a larger measure.
‘Thanks bonny lad,’ he said as I left him with the bottle and his memories.
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.