‘When it’s over, take Baxter’s money and go abroad somewhere. Stay away for a while.’ He nodded like he understood but I knew he just wanted me to leave. I could tell he was eager to get started.
Baxter was swearing and pleading, almost frothing at the mouth now as he rocked from side to side, desperately trying to break free. ‘I think it’s time to shut you up, Baxter,’ I said and Bell reached for the gaffer tape. I watched as Baxter struggled but he couldn’t prevent it from being wrapped tightly round his mouth to stifle his screams. Not that anyone would have heard him out here in any case.
Kinane, Palmer and I watched as Bell slowly walked back to the table and selected the claw hammer. I got the impression he had given this day a great deal of thought. Baxter’s terrified eyes widened even further as Bell stepped towards him once more, raised the claw hammer and brought it down fast and hard, striking a sickening blow to Henry Baxter’s kneecap. His loud but muffled screams were almost too much, even for me.
‘You deserve this, Baxter,’ I told him, ‘remember that, all the while it’s happening to you and, by the way, the tool box was my idea, but castrating you before you die was his. Goodbye, Baxter.’
I turned away and walked through the door with Kinane and Palmer. We heard the muffled screams of the child killer all the way back across the warehouse floor. They grew more and more desperate and were only finally stifled when the huge outer door was pulled shut behind us.
‘Why didn’t you tell me you were going to let that little girl’s old man at Baxter?’ asked Kinane when we were back in the car on the road to the city.
‘Because I needed Baxter to see you angry and resentful,’ I told him, ‘otherwise he would have been deeply suspicious and would never have released the five million. This way everyone wins.’
‘Except Baxter,’ added Palmer, ‘and that’s the way it should be.’
Amrein had arranged for someone who looked remarkably like Henry Baxter to meet us in Newcastle and take the airline ticket and Baxter’s passport, which we had quietly lifted from his apartment. The next day he flew from Newcastle to Luton, then took a train into London and the Underground to Heathrow. From there he caught a flight to Bangkok. With Baxter’s passport, he sailed through Customs. When he touched down in the Thai capital he checked into a hotel for a few nights and ate in several restaurants, leaving a paper trail for anyone curious enough about him to enquire, then he checked out one morning and vanished. Henry Baxter disappeared forever. No one ever saw him again and nobody cared. He was just another dubious westerner lost in the fleshpots of Bangkok.
The death of Leanne Bell became another unsolved cold case, destined to lie on file for decades. It was the best solution for everyone and, with Baxter seemingly exiled abroad, no one could point the finger of suspicion at Leanne’s old man when he also went missing for a while. One of our lads cleaned up the mess and got rid of the body. He was a veteran of the firm and he didn’t say too much about it but he did confirm one thing; what he found there proved to him without doubt that every minute of the last five hours of Henry Baxter’s pathetic life was spent in unendurable agony.
36
We’d barely seen the back of one murder trial before we were embroiled in another, but this time I suspected the accused might not be guilty. I didn’t like Golden Boots, not many people did, but I didn’t have any great desire to see him banged up for life for a crime he hadn’t committed; having said that, I far preferred it to be him than me.
His barrister seemed to be struggling to combat the CPS case.
‘The prosecution is big on circumstantial evidence and the accused’s character, or lack of it,’ Susan Fitch had observed, ‘but they are weak on motive. He has to concentrate on that. As far as I can see they have yet to conclusively establish any kind of motive for the killing of Gemma Carlton and if they can show he had no reason to murder the girl then they are halfway there’.
She was right about one thing; when the trial started, the Prosecution tore straight into Golden Boots’ character.
‘Do you watch pornography on the internet?’ asked their barrister.
Golden Boots, wearing a suit and tie for possibly the first time in his life, shrugged, ‘Doesn’t everybody?’
‘But you watch a lot of it, don’t you?’
The footballer sniffed, ‘Not as much as you probably.’
That earned him a ticking off from the judge before the lawyer continued.
‘The police did a check on your internet history. They found a great deal of pornography. In fact I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that was pretty much all they found.’
‘I like to play Angry Birds too,’ he smirked, ‘unless they got confused and thought that was a porn site.’ He laughed at his own weak joke, but nobody else did. The lawyer ignored him.
‘I appreciate that in these more liberal times it is not entirely uncommon for young, adult males to view porn online.’
‘You’re telling me,’ answered the footballer.
‘But not many would view the sites you look at for recreational purposes.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Girls being punished, adolescent girls being punished, schoolgirls being punished,’ the lawyer recited.
‘Oh, well yeah, but that’s bollocks isn’t it, they aren’t real schoolgirls and it’s all an act isn’t it? It’s just a bit of caning and naughty stuff before they get down to the real thing but it’s all basically harmless, you know, fake and that.’
The lawyer continued unabated, dispassionately rhyming off a list of extremely hardcore porn sites, ‘MILFs being punished, ex-girlfriends degraded, embarrassed girls stripped in public, real women groped in the street. Are they all basically harmless too?’
Golden Balls took a while to stammer an answer to that one. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘you don’t always know what you are going to get when you land on those sites do you? And if you use porn, which I do, a lot, as you said, you get a bit desensitised to the vanilla stuff.’ I could see at least two members of the jury squinting their incomprehension at that phrase. ‘So, you know, you try a bit more specialist material.’
‘Yes, I see, and your specialist stuff all seems to revolve around the theme of women being tied up, punished and degraded doesn’t it? You don’t like women very much do you?’
‘Course I do. I’ve had loads of them.’ His joke was greeted with a stony silence in the courtroom.
‘Indeed,’ said the lawyer and something about the way he was taking his time made me realise he was saving the best bit till last. He didn’t disappoint. ‘And what about the rape videos?’
‘Eh?’ was all Golden Boots could respond with.
‘The rape videos,’ repeated the lawyer and you could have heard the proverbial pin drop at that point, ‘the ones you used a search engine to find — the nasty videos that aren’t on the more conventional pornographic sites. I have viewed one of those videos, one of the ones you downloaded for your personal pleasure and I have to say it was completely sickening. But I will allow you to answer me, so we can hear your side of things. You can tell us why you downloaded a video which contained fifteen minutes of a woman screaming and sobbing while she was stripped and raped by two men in her own home, while a third man videoed the whole thing.’
‘I saw that by accident,’ protested the Premiership’s finest.
‘You went on that site by accident?’
‘Yes!’
‘Seventeen times?’
‘Look, I don’t think it was real or anything. I reckon she was just acting. I reckon they was all acting in all of them videos.’
‘Really,’ the lawyer went on, ‘so you like to watch video footage of men pretending to rape women? Why ever would you do that?’
When Golden Boots finally answered he did so in a very small voice indeed, ‘It was just a laugh, that’s all. I never meant nothing by it.’