Death Of A Devil

by Derek Farrell

  SIX

  The phone call came at 7:00 a.m. the next morning.

  Being that it was a Sunday and the police and forensics had only left about two hours previously, the place was quiet as the grave.

  This, as soon as I thought it, made me shiver.

  It had been a grave. But for how long? And why?

  The police were fairly sure that what we were looking at was not some Victorian cadaver. Mine own eyes – thanks to the presence, on said corpse, of an Oasis t-shirt – confirmed the fact.

  So, some time from the 90s onwards, then. But why?

  We’d been ushered out of the room as soon as the first rozzers had arrived and shone a torch at what was now half-in and half-out of the wall; but, in the few seconds I had before I was evicted, I saw a large dark mark on the back of the head.

  I was upstairs in the rapidly emptying bar by the time I realised it was a hole.

  Downstairs, bricked up behind one of the alcoves in the cellar of my pub, a man – I was assuming it was a man, though in truth I hadn’t had time to check – someone, who had been shot in the head some time after the early 90s had laid waiting for twenty years.

  First opinion was that a combination of water damage from the fire upstairs, vibrations over time (culminating, quite possibly, in the double-whammy of Dead or Alive and Michael Jackson) and a basically botched job on the bricking up, had resulted in the false wall weakening, the body dislodging and the unpleasant surprise that had put an end to Mr Tavistock and Co.’s spiritual safari.

  Why it had been put there seemed obvious: Someone had been forced to brick the body up because they had blown a sizeable hole in the back of its head. But that meant there were still a lot of unanswered questions: Who was the body? Who had put it there? When had it been hidden?

  But who – who the killer was, who the victim was – and why they had been shot and dumped here were still ringing around my head, even as the phone kept on ringing.

  I didn’t want to answer it; it would be journalists, or some thrill-seekers looking to pop round and, ‘See where it happened,’ but the ringing wouldn’t stop.

  Eventually, angry, I yanked the receiver up and, before I could say a word, a voice I knew – a gruff, gravelly voice with a slight accent and a barely suppressed fury – said: “The car is outside. Get in it. Now,” and hung up.

  Shit!

  I put the phone down, raced over to the window, twitched a curtain and looked down on a shiny black BMW idling outside the pub.

  I let the curtain drop and looked around the room like a hunted animal.

  Shit!

  The man who’d been on the end of the phone was the real owner of The Marq. He was a gangster who owned every chop shop, knocking shop, dodgy bookies, bar and racket between Borough and Peckham, and he did not sound happy.

  Chopper Falzone had never done time, despite being the recognised Top Man in Southwark, but the nearest he’d ever come was when the bodies of two of his business competitors had been discovered partially dismembered in a lockup he may – or may not – have been renting from a man with the charming sobriquet of Johnny ‘One Thumb’ Malone.

  On the day the jury had unanimously found in his favour, Chopper’s mugshot had appeared on the front of The Sun alongside the headline, ‘Innocent?’

  That question mark spoke volumes.

  If he could chop his opposition into little pieces, was it wrong to wonder whether he might, just possibly, have shot one of them in the head and buried them in the basement of The Marq?

  And if he’d done that, was it wrong to assume that he might be a bit pissed off with the moron who allowed a selection of municipal employees to go pouncing around in his gangster graveyard, disturbing the evidence he’d so obviously assumed was long concealed?

  I looked desperately around the room. I could make a run for it, obviously, but to where: Knowing Chopper, he had people waiting at the back door to prevent just such an eventuality.

  The phone rang again.

  I stared at it, my panic rising.

  It kept ringing. I picked it up.

  “You’re not in the car yet,” he said, managing to imbue those six words, that one statement, with a universe of menace.

  “I’m just on my way,” I lied, looking furiously around the room to see if there were any weapons I could smuggle in, then deciding that I had little that would be of much use against a man who could shoot another man in the face and brick him up alive in a basement.

  Okay, I had no evidence that the deceased had been shot in the face, or, indeed, that he’d been anything less than as dead as a Spice Girl’s solo career before he was walled up, but I was now at the point of panic, where it was a sure thing that Chopper had butchered the man, and I was next in line for the old bang-bang and brick send-off.

  “I was getting my coat,” I finally lied lamely.

  “Well now you’ve got it,” he answered, and hung up, the ending of the sentence unnecessary.

  I grabbed my jacket from the sofa, and, shoving my keys in my pocket (whilst hoping I’d be returning in a state to be able to use them) made my way downstairs, through the empty bar and let myself out, locking the door behind me.

  The car, from this angle, was a highly-polished black Bentley, the windows themselves tinted darkly so that there was no way to see who was inside.

  I opened the rear door, peered into the empty back seat and slipped into the car.

  “Sorry,” I explained to the impassive driver, who had neither acknowledged my presence, nor, in fact, shown the slightest evidence that he, himself, wasn’t actually stone dead, “I was looking for my jacket. I can never find it. Are you the same?”

  His eyes flicked to the rear-view mirror, caught mine and the car slowly and smoothly moved away from the kerb.

  “Oops,” I giggled nervously, “nearly forgot to put my safety-belt on.”

  Yeah, I thought, cos you really don’t wanna injure yourself in a road traffic accident before Chopper gets the chance to injure you in a real-life hatchet horror.

  Driver, again, did not respond, and I realised that – what with the racing heart and the nervous chatter – I was clearly on the edge of hysteria.

  It’ll be delayed shock, I reasoned. I mean, it’s not every day you find a dead body in your basement.

  Then I looked at the back of the man in front of me, his smart tailored black suit, the peaked cap perched solidly on his head, the neatly cut dark hair, the sharp freshly-pressed white shirt and, although it took me a few moments to realise it, the missing ear.

  My driver had one ear which was present, correct and visibly observable. It didn’t stick out like Cheryl’s had last night, but it was definitely there.

  However, where the left ear should have been was a mashed-up set of scaring suggesting he’d come a cropper with something – or someone – which had tried to ensure he’d never need to shell out for a surround-sound telly again, and I realised that it wasn’t, possibly, delayed shock, so much as very present and real shock, with just a soupçon of terror.

  The car continued on in silence.

  Eventually, we pulled up outside a business premises I knew well. One, in fact, that had struck fear in the hearts of anyone who’d grown up in this neck of the woods ever since Chopper had made it his headquarters.

  He’d had a new sign put up, which now actually allocated ownership to him – a fact which had to show an ego of an entirely different scale.

  CHOPPERS’ POUND SHOP, it said, and though I really wanted to mention to Van Gogh that the apostrophe was in the wrong place, I figured I was in enough shit without trying to correct a psycho’s grammar.

  He waited, and I waited, and at the very minute where I began to realise with mounting horror that he might be completely mute, he said, “Unless you want to fuck him off more than he already is, I’d get in there now.”

  SEVEN

  I pushed the shop door open, setting off a jangling bell, and stepped into the store. Chopper had done i
t up since I’d last been there: The overhead lighting no longer had the yellow tinge of a jaundiced alcoholic, the floor tiles didn’t seem to be as chipped as they had been on my previous visit, and the stock – though it was still a random collection of the shiny and the shitty – seemed to be arranged a little more carefully, the tat less haphazardly shoved on shelves.

  I glanced to my left. There was nobody behind the tills. A stack of remaindered James Patterson paperbacks and a pricing gun lay abandoned on the counter top.

  Behind me, there was a click and the door locked electronically.

  “Hello,” I called. “Anyone there?”

  Silence.

  I knew that there was an office at the back of the shop.

  And I knew that this was where Chopper had been known to take recalcitrants when they needed either softening up or chastising (hence the irony in the name of the shop: Many a victim had received a pounding in the pound shop), so I was somewhat reluctant to walk merrily in there.

  I called again, and waited. Nothing.

  Then, as if from heaven, there was a loud click, an ear-splitting scream of feedback, and Chopper’s voice came over the tannoy.

  “I’m in the back, fuckwit.”

  The tannoy clicked off again.

  There was nothing for it. I took a deep breath and wended my way down the household aisle, past rows of generic bleach, ‘Spring fresh’ scented candles (in autumn) and a full set of gardening implements including gloves, secateurs and shovels, and it wasn’t until I was at the end of the aisle that it dawned on me that I’d just passed enough product to allow Chopper to kill me, cut me up, clean the scene of the crime, bury me and have the whole place smelling like spring flowers without even needing to leave the shop.

  In front of me, the door to the office was ajar.

  I stepped into what looked like a security room, a small bank of screens displaying various views of the shop outside. An elderly man, his white hair creating a corona through which the light from some of the screens filtered, was scrutinising the images of the empty shop.

  “You took your time,” he said without looking up.

  “Sorry,” I began, then stopped as he held a hand up, swivelling in the chair to face me.

  “What is the world coming to, Danny?” he asked, gesturing beyond me to the shelves of cheap product outside. “This shop, which – let’s be honest – started off as a hobby; somewhere I could keep busy in my retirement,” he went on, smirking slightly at the word retirement, “has ended up very very profitable.

  “People like a bargain, you see, Danny.”

  I nodded, though I had no idea what this was all about, or where it was going.

  “And you know what follows the bargain hunters?” he asked and I panicked, thinking I was actually expected to know. “Fucking thieves,” the man who’d knocked off every warehouse between Luton and Gatwick snarled. “Light-fingered fucks who haven’t got the balls or the brains to pop up west and help themselves to something nice from Selfridges. Turn up here and pinch six-for-a-fiver stir-fry sauces off the fucking shelves.”

  “That’s a good price,” I said, making a mental note to check the stir-fry sauces on the way out. If I was still walking.

  He squinted at me. “You taking the piss, Danny?”

  “No,” I shook my head. “God, no, Ch—, Mr Falzone. I think I pay more at the cash and carry.”

  “Right.” Chopper nodded, still looking at me as though he were unsure of whether to believe me or not.

  “So here I sit,” he waved vaguely at the surveillance room, “in an office checking out the security cameras. In a fucking pound shop. What’s happening to the world?” he asked again. “There’s no class. No fucking loyalty. And then there’s no fucking brains. Who was he?”

  I realised that he’d segued from a general complaint about the state of the world and that the last question had been directed at me personally.

  “Who was he?” I asked, realising, as I did so, that Chopper was referring to the corpse.

  “Well I’m assuming it was a he,” he said. “Haven’t had confirmation of that yet. So: Who was he?”

  I flapped my gums, as the realisation that Chopper Falzone seemed to think I’d killed the body in the cellar sank in.

  “You mean you don’t know?”

  “Danny, if I knew, I wouldn’t be wasting my – or your – time asking you, now would I? Now: Who. Was. He?”

  My jaw dropped. “I—, I don’t know, Mr Falzone. I’ve no idea.”

  “Danny,” he said, flicking off the monitors and turning his full attention on me, “I’ve got used to you offing the punters. I know,” he held his hand up to silence my protest, “innocent as charged. Who isn’t? I mean, Danny, overseeing a fucking charnel house with gin is one thing, but now you’re disinterring the fucking corpses. It’s a pub, mate, not Rillington Place. So, what the actual fuck have you been doing in my pub?”

  “It was nothing to do with me,” I stammered. “I swear.”

  He paused. “So you didn’t off him?”

  I shook my head violently.

  Chopper harrumphed, paused a moment, considering, then smiled at me in much the same way that Mack the Knife might have smiled at Lotte Lenya, or Little Jenny or whoever the fuck was waiting for the blade to slip between their ribs.

  “I didn’t think you did. I said to my missus – he’s a good boy, that Danny. Y’know, for a pufta. No offence,” he added, knowing full well that what he’d just said was offensive.

  I chose not to take offence and told him as much.

  “C’mon,” he said, standing up, “walk with me.”

  He put his arm on my shoulder and guided me back out into the shop. I relaxed a little; figuring he was hardly likely to get out the brass knuckles by the plastic croquet kits and Jenga sets made of what I was fairly sure was protected wood.

  We strolled up the aisles in silence, until he let out a deep sigh.

  “So if you didn’t do him,” he said, “who did?”

  “I thought,” I said before I’d had a moment to think and then, realising what I was about to say, I froze.

  “You thought what?” He stopped, turning a gimlet eye on me.

  “I thought,” I scrabbled around for anything, “that you might have had an idea?”

  “Me?” he asked, startlingly believable incredulity settling over his face, “a simple shopkeeper? Why would I know who killed some poor bastard and shoved him in your cellar?”

  The ownership did not slip my attention. Chopper reminded me every month that I was running The Marq only through his good graces, and that the monthly ‘rent’ had to be paid. And suddenly, with the arrival of the desiccated bloke behind the wall, it was my cellar in, I assumed, my pub.

  “Well,” I vamped, hoping against hope to get away here without insulting Chopper too much, “you know so many people, and so many of them – I guess – die. Of natural causes,” I hastened to add.

  “Natural causes?”

  “Yes,” I began gabbling, “you know: Colds, flu, old age.”

  “Did this one look like he died of old age, Danny?”

  I shook my head in the negative.

  “No,” he said definitively. “And do you know how we know this Danny?” Chopper asked rhetorically, and, his voice rising alarmingly in volume, answered himself, “because he was buried in the basement of my fucking pub!”

  And now it’s his again, I thought, though – as usual – I said nothing.

  “You hear anything, Dan, you bring it to me.”

  “Hear anything?” I squawked.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, bringing his temper back under control, “the rozzers find anything, I’ll know it before their bosses do but you’ve got a knack, boy, for finding stuff out, and I want the motherfucker who had,” and again his temper snapped and he roared, “the audacity – the fucking audacity – to do someone and stash ‘em in my fucking pub without even having the courtesy to ask me. D’you like biscuits?” he
suddenly asked, the switch flipping back to genial old coot.

  “Biscuits?” I was puzzled.

  “Yeah,” he said, “biscuits? What? Is there a fucking echo in here? Y’know: Bourbon fingers, Jammy Dodgers, Garibaldis.”

  “Yes,” I gasped, my poor addled brain trying to figure out where this was going.

  “What’s your favourite?”

  “My favourite biscuit?” I closed my eyes, tried to calm the panic that was building and wondered why the fact that a human being had been murdered and secreted below my bedroom was worrying me less than the fact that I had to pick and declare a favourite baked good.

  “Gipsy creams,” he offered, twinkly-eyed and jovial. “Choc-chip flapjacks?”

  “Custard creams,” I finally shouted, more to make him stop reciting biscuit names than because there was any truth in the statement.

  He stopped, looked me up and down. “Yeah, I figured.”

  And then Chopper Falzone leaned towards me, right in to me, his eyes locking with mine, and the first thought that went through my mind was; shit, he’s going to kiss me, followed by; or head-butt me.

  But he did neither. Instead, he reached over my shoulder and snatched two packets of custard creams off the shelf behind me, proffering them to me like he was one of the Magi and I was a virgin mother.

  “They’re a few weeks past the sell-by,” he advised, “but they’ll still go nice with a cuppa. Now here’s the thing, Danny, you get wind of the motherfucker who did this, you let me know.”

  “And what will you do?” I asked, not wanting, really, to know the answer to the question.

  “Me?” he chuckled. “I’ll cut their fucking legs off and put them through a mincing machine. Here, take some Bourbon fingers with them. You got my number.”

  EIGHT

  “I think Caz suspects,” I said, leaning my head back on Nick’s chest.

  “Suspects?” Nick reached around me and lifted a slice of pizza from the box that lay open on the floral bedspread. The clash between the tomato and cheese topping and the almost fluorescent giant peonies was eye-watering.