Free The Damage (David Blake 2) by Howard Linskey Page A

investment?’ I still didn’t get it.
    ‘According to Peter, this backer of his wants to buy us out.’
    ‘But the company is valueless.’
    ‘Peter has persuaded him otherwise. According to him, this mystery backer will pay one hundred thousand pounds for a controlling stake in Phoenix Films, so fifty grand is ours if we agree to walk away.’
    ‘Fifty grand? You’re joking. We’d walk away for nowt. We’ve walked away already. I didn’t even know we owned a stake in his so-called company.’
    ‘Then this will be the easiest fifty thousand we’ve ever made. All you have to do is meet Peter and sign his papers.’
    ‘That’s fine with me,’ I told him, ‘if someone wants to throw their money away then who am I to dissuade them, but I don’t want to go to that disgusting flat of his. Set something up elsewhere.’
    ‘He asked to meet you in Chi-Chi, on the terrace there.’
    That figured. I could imagine Peter Dean sitting on the terrace outside Chi-Chi, pronounced “she-she”, an establishment that, like him, had delusions of grandeur. He’d be wearing his sunglasses whatever the weather, dreaming he was really on La Croisette at the Cannes Film Festival instead of peddling smut on Tyneside.
    ‘Alright,’ I agreed, ‘but make it a drink, not lunch. I’m not eating at the same table as Peter. He makes my skin crawl. Fuck knows what he’s riddled with. Get Councillor Jennings to join me there for lunch after, no later than twelve-thirty. Half an hour with Peter is long enough, even for fifty grand.’

     
    On a good day I can imagine Bobby Mahoney is looking down on me and he understands. I can convince myself he knows I had no choice but to do what I did. He is pleased, in fact, that I am taking care of his daughter, while simultaneously preventing anarchy on the streets of his beloved city and, consequently, he is not likely to pay me a disapproving visit in the night, like the ghost of Hamlet’s dad. On a good day, I can calmly evaluate the facts behind his death and my involvement in it. I can coldly and clearly state that I had no choice and that Bobby Mahoney understood this, right up to the point when I pulled the trigger and killed him.
    Bobby had watched as Tommy Gladwell got a former officer of the Russian Spetsnaz, called Vitaly Litchenko, to press a gun against my head. He told me he would kill me if I made a wrong move. He then handed me a Makarov pistol with one bullet in it and ordered me to shoot Bobby. If I accepted he would let me live. If I refused he would kill me. I was given ten seconds to make up my mind and at the end of them I chose to live. I killed Bobby. I think about that moment every day. If I hadn’t done it, Tommy Gladwell’s Russians would have killed us both. That’s what I tell myself.
    No one was more amazed than I was when Tommy didn’t go back on the deal. He let me live, stuck me on a train to London and told me never to return. No one was more amazed than Tommy Gladwell when I came back and killed him and his Russian thugs. Well, no one perhaps, except me.
    ‘Do it,’ Bobby ordered me, right before I killed him, ‘you’ll be doing me a favour,’ and I believed that at the time, because I really wanted to believe it. ‘Get out of here, find Sarah and take care of her.’ That was the last order he ever gave me and I obeyed it. I found Sarah and I have been taking care of her ever since. I console myself with that fact. On a good day.
    But not all days are good. Some mornings I wake and recall, with awful clarity, a recurring dream I have, where I am back in that room down at the derelict factory with Tommy Gladwell and his Russians and, this time, the words coming out of Bobby’s mouth are very different. He’s asking me if I am really going to kill him just to save my own skin; if all the years I’ve known him mean nothing to me; if I am such a coward that I am actually going to go ahead and do this? Then I do it anyway, but this time it all happens