Wind Up Dead

Book 0: Manchester Underworld series

by Sam Tobin

Genres: Crime Fiction

Synopsis

The next gripping instalment in the bestselling Manchester underworld series from Sam Tobin, the master of gritty gangland.

Malton returns in the next gritty and gripping instalment in the bestselling Manchester underworld series.

If you put one step wrong on these streets, you might... WIND UP DEAD.

ONE BOY DEAD

Craig Malton rules Manchester, solving crimes for criminals and flying under the police's radar. When he's called to a murder scene before the cops can get their hands on it, he senses something is wrong. Someone is trying to make Zak Alquist's murder look like something it's not.

ONE BOY MISSING

Lesha's son was murdered years ago, so when a local boy goes missing, she feels the sting only a bereaved mother can. But this is more than just a teenage runaway. On the missing boy's phone is a photo of him - and murder victim Zak Alquist.

A DARK CONSPIRACY

Can Lesha and Malton uncover the rot at the heart of the city and cut it out before another life is taken?

(P)2023 Hodder & Stoughton Limited

Release date: September 28, 2023

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 368

Sample

Prologue

The lights were on in the small, ground-floor flat on the edge of Moss Side. Standing outside in the darkness, the man looking in through the window was as good as invisible. He was free to take in the scene. Bide his time. Wait for just the right moment to make his move.

What he saw disgusted him.

The sofa was missing all the cushions. A filthy duvet had been thrown over the bare base to try to give some impression of domesticity. All it achieved was to make the room look even more squalid.

The floor was covered in burn marks and debris. Takeaway wrappers, cigarette butts and drugs paraphernalia.

People had defaced the magnolia walls with marker pens, blood and what looked like faeces.

In the quiet outside the window the man turned and silently spat on the ground. He hated junkies.

When he looked back up, for just a moment before his eyes adjusted to the light levels, he caught a glimpse of his own reflection in the glass. A broad, white face, hair shaved to reveal the ridges of his skull at the sides and swept back on top. There was an unrelenting motion to his eyes, never at rest, always alert. His nostrils wide and flared, sucking in the night air.

As his eyes refocused, in one corner of the room he saw a mattress that looked recently slept on. The door to the living room hung open. Through the crack in the open window he could hear movement. The person he was waiting for.

A young, black teenager walked into the living room, his face glued to his phone. He had the height of an older man but his soft features betrayed every one of his sixteen years. Even if he had looked up he wouldn’t have seen the man outside standing in the dark. But the man saw him and smiled. It was nearly time.

He felt his heart begin to race. Not with fear but with excitement. This is what he lived for. Savouring the moments of quiet before the storm. His dry mouth tasted metallic with the anticipation of what he was about to do. His heavy fists clenched and unclenched; he jogged from foot to foot as the adrenaline built up inside him. He looked like a professional athlete gearing up to play.

In a way he was. He’d made his living turning his innate love of extreme violence into a profitable career.

In the flat the oblivious teenager turned and walked back out of the room.

The man outside ran his tongue around his lips, licking the empty gap in his gums where his front teeth once were. Then he slowly pushed open the ground-floor window and hauled his short, squat body into the flat.

It smelt worse than it looked. Stale body odour and smoke. The marks on the wall definitely were shit. Human shit by the looks of it. The man felt not a glimmer of doubt about what he was about to do as he walked through the living room and into the hallway where the teenager was still on his phone.

The man was breathing heavily now, ready for action. The sound of his breath whistled through the gap in his teeth. It was the first indication the teenager had that he was not alone in the hallway.

The boy turned and had just enough time to register the appropriate reaction of fear before the man was on him.

The first blow knocked the teenager clean out, his body falling awkwardly against the wall and down to the floor.

But one punch wouldn’t be enough. Not by a long shot.

It was only a matter of seconds but what followed was a blur of fists and feet. Blows struck without any regard for their target.

All the while the man hissed softly to himself, ‘Fuckin’ . . . fuckin’ . . . fuckin’ . . .’ His own private hymn to his frenzied brutality.

Then as soon as it had started it was over. The man stood upright, sucking in a lungful of air. He felt his head clear and the painfully tight knot in his guts eased just a little.

On the floor the teenager was making wet groaning sounds.

The man was about to pick up the body when the door to the bathroom opened and he found himself face to face with a wretched-looking man in his thirties: lank hair, blotchy, ulcerated skin and the rheumy red eyes of a junkie.

Once more the knot in the man’s guts pulled itself tight and he pounced.

1

Malton was late for a murder. It was a warm Saturday night in early August and thousands of bodies filled Manchester city centre, blocking his way as Mancunians and visitors alike spilled out of bars, restaurants and clubs over the pavement and into the road.

Sat behind the wheel of his vintage, green Volvo estate, Malton watched packs of middle-aged men from out of town, their bellies hanging over skinny jeans, their sunburned arms dangling from shirtsleeves as they shouted and swaggered their way across the city centre. He saw endless groups of hens; from the women all dressed as superheroes to the party wearing T-shirts with the mortified hen’s face printed on them. They all moved with purpose. Determined to squeeze as much fun as possible out of their big night out in Manchester.

He had got the call ten minutes ago. A boy called Zak Alquist had turned up dead. Slaughtered in his own home. Because of who his father was, soon enough the whole of the Greater Manchester Police would be mobilised to find the killer.

Malton’s job was to beat them to it.

A drunk banged his hands on the roof of Malton’s car. A red-faced man, his shirt untucked, sweat pouring off him. As he came level with Malton’s side window the smile left his face. Looking back at him from inside the car was an eighteen-stone, shaven-headed, mixed-race man with a deep scar running down one side of his face. His expression was unmistakably hostile.

The drunk held his hands up in surrender and stammered something that Malton didn’t have time to hear. He was already in motion. He needed to get to Zak’s apartment.

Malton wasn’t police. Not even close. He owned Malton Security, a firm that ran doors, protected property and provided security to high-net-worth individuals. But that was just the tip of the iceberg.

Craig Malton was the man who Manchester’s criminal fraternity turned to when they needed to get to the bottom of something and would rather not get the law involved. He solved crimes for criminals.

After finally managing to weave his car through the crowd of bodies, he turned off the inner ring road into the newly minted neighbourhood of Ancoats. Towering mills had been filled with apartments, their ground floors a carefully curated selection of international cuisine, themed bars and artisanal eateries. What had been a neglected backwater just a decade ago, was now teeming with life.

One of the men responsible for this miraculous change was Nate Alquist. Nate was as close as it came to Mancunian royalty. A property developer with the council’s ear. Through his company, Upland Living, Nate owned half of Moss Side as well as several tower blocks in the city centre. He had spent the last decade remaking Manchester in his image, cheered on all the way with generous government grants and glowing press coverage.

But now his son was lying dead in one of the apartments he himself had built. And it wasn’t the police who Nate turned to. It was Malton.

Manchester had long since shed its image of post-industrial deprivation. But just under the surface, the grime and filth were still there. Nate Alquist knew that as well as anyone. You didn’t get to be as rich as Nate without brushing up against the dark underbelly of the city. Greater Manchester Police would get their turn but Nate had the money and connections to reach out to someone like Malton. Someone who saw how Manchester really worked.

Malton knew every criminal in the city. The families out east involved in the wholesale importation of drugs. The gangs that clustered around the deprived northern edge of the city centre selling those drugs. The various criminal firms around Salford and Chorlton whose exploits ebbed and flowed across multiple generations. Malton could talk to people who would never speak to the police on pain of death. He could go places the police would be scared to even think about treading. And he could do things the police would never dream of doing. Whatever it took to get answers.

Malton parked his car down a cobbled backstreet and walked through the shadows cast by the towering Ancoats mills. His footsteps echoed on the same streets that hundreds of years ago workers trod as they poured out of their slums ready to break their bodies on the wheels of industry. Manchester used to sell cotton. Now it sold apartment living and men like Nate Alquist had made their fortune doing it.

It had been twenty minutes since Nate made the frantic phone call to his lawyer Bea Wallace begging for help. Malton was that help.

He emerged from the canyons of converted mills and out into what was left of the evening sun. Ahead of him lay the last remaining patch of green space in Ancoats. An empty field threatened on all sides by development. The tramline ran across the far end of the field and beyond the tram stop loomed dozens of newly constructed apartment complexes. Nate Alquist had told Bea that in one of those flats Malton would find the body of his son Zak Alquist.

Malton picked his way between the groups of people sat on the grass, drinking in the evening light. A tram pulled in from East Manchester disgorging dozens of clubbers all too excited by the night ahead to pay much attention to him as he stalked towards Zak Alquist’s canal-side apartment block.

Malton noted with satisfaction an absence of police. He could hear only the distant, ambient sirens of a Saturday night in Manchester. He had made it clear that if Nate wanted his services he needed to be the first one to see Zak’s body. The crime scene would be his and his alone.

He didn’t have to wait long before someone emerged from the front entrance and he slipped past them before they even had a chance to decide whether or not they wanted to challenge the grimly determined man striding away through the lobby and slipping into the stairwell. By the time Malton reached Zak’s floor he was jogging. He didn’t want to spend any longer than he had to in the building. Bea had instructed Nate to wait half an hour and then call the police. With Malton on the job he would need the plausible deniability of police involvement.

The door to flat 304 was ajar. Malton paused briefly to slip on a pair of blue latex gloves and a facemask. He was walking into a crime scene; he didn’t want to leave anything of himself behind. Looking left and right to make sure the coast was clear, he took a breath and stepped into the apartment.

He was greeted by an abattoir.

The lights were off but in the glow thrown from the flats across the canal he saw a body sprawled on the floor of the small, open-plan apartment. But only the body. The neck ended in a ragged gash of flesh. Where the head used to be was little more than nauseating, wet pulp. Meat and jelly and bone. Malton recognised the round indentations of a hammer beaten into the bloody floorboards. Whoever had been wielding the weapon hadn’t stopped until there was nothing left. Extreme overkill. Looking up at the ceiling confirmed it – the wild blood splatter of a frenzied attack.

The unmistakable smell of viscera filled the flat. An earthy, salty stench.

A large pool of blood was spreading out from the body, across the wooden flooring and soaking into the nearby rug. Zak Alquist hadn’t stood a chance.

Malton took a step back and looked around. Aside from the gore the flat was immaculate. High-end appliances, hardwood floors, elegant Scandinavian furniture and brash modern art hanging on softly pastel walls. A flat like this would easily cost a couple of thousand a month. Not for Zak though – his father owned half the block.

Scattered all around the flat were piles of money. Paper money. Tens of thousands of pounds. Some in bundles, some loose notes. All of it covered in blood.

In the distance Malton heard a single, determined siren. He froze. It was getting closer.

Malton bent down over the human remains. Something caught his eye, the start of a tattoo beneath the scoop neck of Zak’s T-shirt. Malton gently lifted the T-shirt. There on the right breast a tattoo that read: CARRIE 4EVA. The stylishly modern font contrasted with the ironically old-school text.

He was getting up when he saw something he’d missed. Leaning in closer, amongst the cash he instantly recognised what he was looking at. Bright and white in the half-glow. A kilo brick of cocaine. A dealer’s amount. And something else, a mark on top of the brick.

The siren was definitely getting louder now. Other sirens joined it. A murder would be a top priority. Police all over the city centre racing to get a piece of the action. It was time to get out.

Through the gloom, Malton squinted at the brick of cocaine. There on the top was an imprint. A signature. Whoever had pressed the cocaine into a brick had also branded their logo onto the top of it. In drugs as in most things nowadays, branding was everything.

As his eyes acclimatised further he made out the marking. It was a circle inside of which was the outline of a hand grenade.

By the time the police stormed Zak Alquist’s apartment Malton was already walking out the underground car park and taking the long way round to his car.

Whoever had killed Zak Alquist had done so with such a high level of violence that there was only one thing Malton could say for sure. It wasn’t the first time they’d killed a man and it wouldn’t be the last.

2

The whole of Moss Side rang to the sound of bass. The fat sound ricocheted off the terraces and echoed through the parks. It filled backyards and crept in open windows. The Moss Side Caribbean Carnival after-party had been going for several hours now and was showing no signs of slowing down.

Far from it. Now the parade was done with and the events in Alexandra Park were starting to wind down, the real party was only just beginning. Half a dozen unofficial sound systems were set on street corners, and throughout the narrow streets of Moss Side impromptu barbecue stalls had sprung up, serving jerk chicken and brutally spicy homemade sauce.

Dean was looking forward to the party stretching on into the early hours.

Officially he was here on work. Unofficially this was just the latest encounter in his growing love affair with Moss Side. Next to him, his girlfriend Vikki seemed equally thrilled, their white faces standing out among the crowds of revellers.

Dean was tall and thin. A boyish face made younger still with a look of constant curiosity. Vikki was not quite as tall as Dean but she was far more powerfully built. Solid and athletic she had the natural beauty of someone confident in their own skin. While Dean wore jeans and a T-shirt, Vikki was in baggy combat trousers, platform trainers and a crop top. Dean loved watching Vikki dance; seeing her lost to the dense, throbbing music.

Suddenly a new sound system erupted from further down the road. A cheer went up as competing bass lines smothered each other, flooding the road with joyous noise. Vikki turned to the sound and started swinging her hips appreciatively, her arms in the air, one hand clutching a can of beer.

Dean worked for Malton Security. More accurately he worked with Craig Malton. When an old friend had asked Malton to provide unofficial security for the after-party, Dean had been tasked with organising a crew. Amongst the police and official marshals, Dean had made sure that a dozen of Malton Security’s best guys were spread over Moss Side. Watching for known faces. Stopping trouble before it had a chance to get started. Like Malton himself, the men Dean had chosen were all Moss Side, guys who had grown up in the area and knew what made it tick.

Dean was there to make sure everything went smoothly. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t enjoy himself while he did so. After all he was now a Moss Sider too.

He’d been living with Vikki in her flat in Salford but last month, fearing another Grenfell, the council had stripped the entire block of all its cladding. Without external insulation, every flat in the block was now either unbearably hot or impossibly cold.

It was Craig Malton who had stepped in with a solution in the form of a terraced house he owned in Moss Side.

Dean and Vikki had only been going out for a few months but now they found themselves living together. A few miles from the city centre, Chorlton and Hulme, Moss Side was ideally placed to enjoy the best of Manchester. They had laughed about how they’d suddenly ended up like an old married couple but deep down, the longer it went on, the more Dean found himself enjoying the arrangement. The times when Vikki was late back from the fashion course she was doing at Salford Uni and he got to tie on an apron and bash together their evening meal. Or when he’d come home and she’d surprise him with tickets to a gig or a trip to a brand-new bar.

Domesticity had been sprung on him but now Dean couldn’t be happier.

It was very different from his previous living arrangements, back in the flat he had shared with his mum. Dean had dreaded telling his mum that he was moving out. But far from being inconsolable, she had already cleared out his old room and was in the process of turning it into a small yoga studio.

From working with Malton Dean knew all too well about the reputation of Moss Side. The random violence. The gangs and the guns and knives. As if a curse hung over the place, dragging generation after generation through the same pointless suffering.

But living in the area Dean had discovered the real Moss Side. The families. The communal pride. The history that despite being an integral part of Manchester, went largely unknown, with the world preferring to dwell on all the worst aspects of the M14 postcode. Dean already knew half the people in the street they were living on. He was on first-name terms with the couple who ran the chippy, the family who owned the corner shop and the Halal butcher across the road.

For everything it had endured, Moss Side had never given up.

Looking at the girl he loved, dancing in the street alongside the hundreds of revellers, Dean couldn’t think of any better place to be.

It was then he saw the gun. Almost hidden, sticking out the back of the trousers of a young man stood a few feet away from another group of youths. Dean instantly recognised his body language: hopping from foot to foot, walking back and forth. He even seemed to be talking to himself. Psyching himself up.

Vikki was busy dancing with an elderly Rastafarian. Dean looked up the road. He saw one of the Malton Security guys defusing a drunken argument with laughter and good humour. A quick scan of the surroundings told him that no other backup was nearby.

Dean had to act and he had to act now. A gun being pulled wasn’t just a lethal threat in that moment. What would follow would be worse: the retaliation in the hours and days that followed. The spark that could set off a beef that could run for years and ruin countless lives. Dean had only lived there a few months but already Moss Side felt like home. He’d do whatever it took to defend his home.

Thinking quickly, Dean grabbed a box of jerk chicken that was being prepared at a nearby barbecue. Before the waiting customer had a chance to complain Dean handed him two twenty-pound notes, smothered the chicken in hot sauce and was on the move.

As he passed Vikki he whispered in her ear: ‘Be careful.’ There was no time for anything more.

Dean sped up and crossed the road. Holding his box of chicken out in front of him, he could smell the sweet and spicy sauce. Thick and sticky.

A thick, sticky sauce that went all over the tracksuit top of the boy with the gun as Dean walked right into him, dropping his chicken over the pavement.

The young man spun round. He was about Dean’s age with a scruffy moustache and braids. Whatever he had been trying to talk himself into doing was forgotten as he turned all his anger on Dean.

‘You fucking div,’ he screamed in Dean’s face.

Dean noticed both the boy’s hands were raised, gesticulating. As long as they were nowhere near the gun everything would be fine.

‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ said Dean as loudly and as whitely as he could. A few faces turned to look. He heard a laugh.

‘I’ll fucking end you, you lanky dickhead,’ spat the guy, all his anxiety and indecision suddenly forgotten.

Dean leaned over and made to brush the sticky mess off the tracksuit top.

‘Don’t fucking touch me, bro,’ shouted the young man, springing backwards from Dean’s touch, his hands still up. A small crowd was gathering. Voices joining in. Phones coming out.

‘I didn’t see you,’ said Dean apologetically. Over the lad’s shoulder he saw that one of the Malton Security guards was already coming over.

‘Nah, no way you leaving me like this.’

Just as the guy’s hands went down and towards his trousers the Malton Security guard was there. He was a large, first-generation Somalian Manc called Djama. He’d joined around the same time as Dean. The two of them sometimes had lunch together when their shifts overlapped, Dean pumping Djama for titbits of information that could prove useful down the line.

‘What is this? What is this? What is this?’ said Djama, a huge smile on his face.

‘I’ll pay for the dry cleaning?’ offered Dean.

‘Fucking dry cleaning?’ spat the young man. He took a step towards Dean again but then, taking a look at the six-foot-two Djama, turned and stormed off into the crowd.

‘White guy at the Moss Side Carnival,’ said Djama loudly, playing to his captive audience. The crowd burst into laughter. Dean mugged for their benefit before finally slipping back to Vikki, the flashpoint defused with humour.

Vikki had been standing watching the exchange. She looked like she’d seen a ghost.

‘You OK?’ asked Dean.

‘That guy, the one you bumped into. He walked past me. He had a gun in his trousers.’

‘Did he?’ said Dean innocently.

3

DI Benton looked around and tried for a moment to think more like a teenage boy and less like a middle-aged, female detective still furious at being sent out on a random ­missing persons case despite her recent promotion to the rank of Detective Inspector.

She was stood in the cramped bedroom of a boy who had been missing for the past forty-eight hours. The window had been hauled open a crack but the air was still thick with undertones of sweat, masturbation and top notes of Lynx body spray.

Crammed into the space was a single bed with a plain blue duvet, a wardrobe and small desk. The desk was piled with schoolbooks, and a large TV balanced on a nearby chest of drawers with wires leading out to a PS4. The wardrobe didn’t quite fit. It covered half the window making the room feel even more claustrophobic.

Several shoeboxes were stacked on top of the wardrobe and the clothes basket bulged with dirty washing. Benton suspected the mother had cleaned the room before she came over. Something that was both unnecessary and unhelpful for Benton’s purposes.

More than anything the room felt small. The kind of place that made a teenage boy restless to find his place in the world.

Benton thought back to her own teenage daughter’s room. Even before they’d moved in Jenni had demanded the largest room in the house. And got it. She slept in the master bedroom along with all the best furniture. Benton was home so little it didn’t seem worth putting up a fight.

‘Can I help you?’ came a voice from downstairs. The mother of the boy who had walked out of this very house forty-eight hours ago and had yet to return.

‘I’m nearly done,’ Benton called back.

Her eyes went around the room. She’d checked under the mattress, gone through the drawers and the wardrobe. She was running out of places to look.

She caught herself in the mirror on the back of the door. She had a police metabolism. Always on the go, always eating, never stopping. It meant that she was solid but she was surprisingly fit. With no time for anything more than moisturiser, her skin had a healthy pink glow. A stern face framed with choppy, brown hair. Benton cut her own hair; it was quicker that way. She had more than enough to do without wasting half a day on a haircut. Years of this habit had given her a very distinctive look. One she confidently owned.

After shutting the bedroom door, Benton climbed onto the bed and took down the first of the shoeboxes. She was dismayed to find some shoes inside.

She replaced the box and tried the next one.

Shoes again.

The next one wasn’t shoes. It was filled with old Pokémon cards.

She replaced it and as she took a step back she suddenly lost her balance. Benton grabbed at the top of the wardrobe knocking the shoebox full of Pokémon cards down and scattering them all over the floor.

Her arms shot out and she braced herself against the bedroom walls. Her heart racing, she quickly checked she wasn’t in any immediate danger of falling on her arse before turning to see what had happened.

One foot had sunken down into the mattress.

Benton very carefully lifted her foot out of the mattress and made sure it was firmly planted on the floor before she let herself down and knelt in front of the bed. Lifting the mattress, she saw that someone had cut a hole in the top of the divan base. When she’d looked before she’d not seen it but now that her foot had gone through it, it was unmissable.

She leaned forward, holding the mattress up on her shoulder as she stuck a hand into the base and rummaged around. As she fumbled in the divan she suddenly remembered a flash of her police training. A warning about sticking hands in suspicious places. Knives and syringes and worse. It was the sort of advice Benton relished ignoring.

Her fingers came across something hard with a taut elastic band around it.

She pulled out what looked like a stack of bank cards and IDs. The top one was a white man in his thirties who from the look of him Benton would say was more than a little fond of drugs. Definitely not the teenage boy whose room she was currently searching.

Benton pocketed the stack of ID cards and reached back into the hole. Just from the feel of it, she knew exactly what the next thing she found was before she’d even pulled it out.

Her heart sank as she pulled out a quarter kilo brick of cocaine, wrapped in cellophane and tape. It had suddenly become a very different sort of missing persons case.

***

‘Did you find anything helpful?’ asked Tejumola, the mother of Femi Musa, the boy in whose bedroom Benton had just found enough drugs to send him away for a double-figure stretch.

Benton gazed at all the photographs covering the walls of the front room. Femi with his mum and dad dressed for church. A young boy in a bow tie stood between two beaming, proud parents. Here was Femi getting an award for spelling. Here he was. . .