Death Of A Devil

by Derek Farrell

  “Out,” he barked, and I obediently scooted across the back seat and out of the car.

  “Up,” he nodded at my arms, and I raised them as he patted me down, snatched the rucksack from me, peered into it, threw it back to me and pointed at the door.

  I walked into the club, the goon sticking to me like Lycra on a fat bloke, and noted, en passant, that the sign outside named the venue as ‘BARishnikov.’ Still, I thought, if I was going to be murdered, at least I’d be offed in a venue with a tacky pun in its name.

  Inside, I could hear the steady thud of dance music coming from somewhere under our feet. The entire lobby was lined with mirrors, the ceiling tiled in some reflective material, our reflections bouncing back so many times that it became difficult to see where anything – a cash desk, a men’s room, a torture chamber – might be located.

  But my goon knew exactly where he was going and directed me to a door on the far side of the room, which, in turn, lead to a steep and narrow flight of stairs upwards.

  At the top of the stairs, a small landing led to two doors and the suited heavy, still wearing his shades, knocked on the one on the left, and waited.

  A moment passed before the door was opened by Chopper himself, wearing what looked like tuxedo trousers, a white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a somewhat stressed look, his normally pristine hair spiking at odd angles.

  “Ah, Danny,” he smiled, though the smile didn’t reach his eyes. “Good of you to join us.”

  Us? I thought, wondering who else was in the room and scanning Chopper’s shirtfront for signs of blood spatters or other gore.

  “Cyril,” Chopper focussed over my shoulder, the smile dying, “you can lock up now, then pop back up here and wait outside.”

  The thug nodded, turned to go and was stopped by Chopper’s voice. “Oh, and Cyril – lose the fucking shades. You’re not Jason Statham, lad.”

  Cyril, blushing furiously, ripped the glasses from his face, mumbled his apologies and skittered down the stairs. Chopper, shaking his head like some bemused paterfamilias, opened the door wider and ushered me inside.

  “Like I say – thanks for coming, Danny.”

  “How did you know,” I asked and, before I could finish the question, he answered it.

  “Where you were? Danny,” he chuckled, “I like to know where people are. Especially when they’re hanging round with shitbags like Charlie Chatham. You want an espresso? Here,” he added, before I could say another word, “take this,” and he handed me a stack of papers – letters, magazines, bills, bank statements – and nodded at an industrial-scale shredder on the opposite side of the room.

  “Do me a favour,” he said, gesturing that I should start feeding the paperwork through the blades, “shred that. Every last fucking page. No espresso?”

  I shook my head.

  “Well I’m gonna have one. Want a latte? It can do them too.” He gestured at a Nespresso machine on the desk.

  “I’m alright,” I said, “but I still don’t understand. You’ve been following me?”

  “Go,” he said, smiling at me as though I were his favourite grandson and pointing at the shredder.

  I began, as though in a trance, to feed the paperwork through the machine and, between the noise of the blades and the gnashing of the coffee machine, it was a few minutes before I could actually hear what Chopper was saying.

  “Anyways, it’s not like I was the only one following you. Cyril had to deal with some other fucker who was trailing you last night. Any idea who that might be?”

  I shook my head. “Look, Chopper – I mean,” I caught myself, but too late, “Mr Falzone.”

  He chuckled. “Y’know, that nickname always makes me laugh. I think I’ve held a meat cleaver exactly once in my life. No,” he shook his head, sipped from his coffee, and his little ice blue eyes glittered like a cobra as he watched me feed a bank statement into the machine, “I’ve handled shooters, Bowie knives, one time a Black & Decker drill – cheap shit; buy Bosch if you want the job done without the fucking engine burning out – and a couple of chainsaws. If I was to get rid of someone these days, I’d use a wood chipper. Or a fucking shredder. And yet, has anyone ever called me ‘Shredder’? But you use one meat cleaver…”

  I gulped, tearing my eyes from his stare and looking down at the blades of the shredder.

  “So,” he said, “you gonna tell me what’s going on?”

  “It’s complicated,” I said. “Nick’s married, only—”

  “Not with the fucking rozzer,” he barked. “I can imagine what’s going on there and frankly it’s not a picture I want in my head. I mean what’s going on with Charlie fucking Chatham. That bastard’s no good and when people who know me start hanging round with people like him, Danny, my teeth start itching.”

  “I needed to talk to him,” I said.

  “Well I didn’t think you were measuring him up for fucking curtains. Talk to him about what?”

  I stopped pushing paper into the jaws of the shredder and the machine went quiet. “It’s complicated,” I said and he drained his espresso, neatly replacing the cup into a matching tiny saucer on the desk.

  “Yeah,” he growled, “you said that. How about you simplify it for me?”

  So I told him.

  About the body in the cellar and how it had turned out to be Billy the Brick, how Jimmy Carter had then crawled out of the woodwork and started menacing Ali and Carlton, only to be murdered himself. And finally, how the whole mess seemed to lead back to the Hatton Garden job.

  “Wallachs,” he said when I’d finished.

  “No,” I insisted, “it’s all true.”

  “No, you dappy fucker, I said Wallachs, not bollocks. It’s the name of the jeweller. They got away with over five mill in uncut stones. Rumour I heard was they was too traceable – laser markings, chemical analysis on file, all that shit – but even at a deep discount for cash, they’d still have been worth a couple of mill easy. So,” he said, the statement filled with menace, “you’re looking for the stones.”

  We were sat, now, by the desk, in two swivel chairs facing each other. All the better, I feared, for Chopper to plunge a Bowie knife squarely into my chest if I displeased him.

  “I’m looking,” I said, looking squarely into his face, “for whoever killed Jimmy Carter.”

  “And yet two people have already confessed.”

  “Cos they’re stupidly trying to cover for each other,” I said. “They didn’t do it.”

  He laughed. “Ah, Danny. You ain’t been around much, have you? You’d be surprised what people’ll do out of fear. Or for love. Look at you and your pretty policeman – creeping round in the dead of night to shitty hotels.”

  “Ali’s not a murderer,” I said definitively. “And nor is her son.”

  “So, you find the killer, the trail’ll lead you back to them stones,” he observed flatly.

  I wasn’t so sure about that fact or about where this conversation was going. “Maybe,” I said uncertainly.

  “It will,” he nodded, considered for a moment, then added, “so you’re looking for the remains of the Old Kent Road Massive, right?”

  I nodded. He stood up, crossed to the coffee machine and began making another espresso. “My missus would have kittens,” he said, nodding at the plume of coffee-scented steam issuing from the nozzle. “Says too much of this stuff is what’s fucking up my blood pressure. But I’m gonna need it tonight. Everything in this room has to be shredded before five thirty.”

  “Why?” I asked, regretting the question even as I asked it. “What happens at five thirty?”

  “A fire breaks out,” he said, lifting the cup from the machine and placing it gingerly onto the saucer. “Not long after downstairs kicks out. Don’t worry,” he chuckled at my face, “you’ll be long gone. So, Chatham sounds like he had a whole lot of nothing much for you.”

  I nodded, “I got one address – Billy’s wife. But she was never part of the gang by the sound of th
ings. Still, she might have some contact details for some of the others.”

  Chopper nodded. “Yeah, she was alright. Married some nob eventually, if I remember right. Minted but not through any hot stones. That it?”

  “For now,” I said.

  “Well I know where you’ll find Johnny Ho,” he said dryly, and I perked up. “Fertilizing the rose bushes at Enfield crematorium. He popped his clogs about ten years ago.”

  I slumped, but Chopper’s eyes suddenly regained the mongoose glint. “Funny thing, though. Johnny Ho had one restaurant in Dalston – The Silver Bowl, The Golden Shower, some shit like that – and then fifteen years ago he started expanding rapidly. Most assumed it was Mrs Ho’s doing but what if… Nah,” Chopper shook his head, “who’d take a fortune and invest it in a bunch of bloody noodle bars?”

  “But what if he did?” I asked. “Who’d be around to take offence at Jimmy’s questions?”

  “You ever met Lilly Ho?” Chopper asked with a smile. “Makes Myra Hindley look like Mother Hubbard. Nasty cow, and just the sort who’d deal firmly with anything she saw as an inconvenience.”

  I considered what he was telling me. “You think she’s worth seeing?”

  Chopper threw his hands in the air. “What do I know from seeing?” he asked in mock humility. “I’m a retired Maltese shopkeeper with three kids, two grandkids, a wife who’s thankfully in Fuengirola for the week and an apocalyptic conflagration to sort out in the next forty minutes. You’re the sleuth.”

  “I’m a barman,” I said flatly.

  He reached out and patted my cheek playfully, “You’re a barman with smarts, Danny.”

  “Not smart enough to spot your men following me around,” I answered, and he smiled.

  “Yeah, well, now that I know what you’re up to, they won’t be following you any more. Unless you need them to.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Fair enough. So, you gonna take a look at the widow Ho next?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But if you could get me contacts for any of the living members of the gang that’d be useful.”

  Chopper drained the cup and bowed to me. “I live to serve,” he murmured, placing the cup back in the saucer. “Now go. If you get a wiggle on, you might be able to get the night bus before this place goes up.”

  I stood to go, biting back the request to maybe have his goons run me home: I figured they’d be needed for whatever was afoot at the BARishnikov.

  “Oh, and Danny,” he called as I had my hand on the door knob.

  I stopped, turned back to face him.

  “You find them stones – or any suggestion where they are – let me know, yeah? A favour for a favour,” he said, the mongoose twinkle back in his eyes.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  “And you’re taking this straight to the police, of course,” Caz said.

  I remained silent, my hands busily slashing away with a kitchen knife as I peeled a sack-load of onions and ran each one through a food processor, turning them into billions of translucent slivers.

  “Daniel,” Caz crossed to me and stood in front of me, attempting to lock my gaze, “put down the knife, and tell me that you did not agree to play hunt-the-diamonds for the bloody mafia.”

  “Chopper’s not in the mafia,” I said, placing the knife on the side. “At least: I don’t think he is.”

  “Daniel, it makes little difference if he’s in the bloody Rotarians. He kills people. For profit, and possibly for fun. And,” she said as I opened my mouth to respond, “if you dare say he only kills his own kind, I swear I will pick that knife up and use it.”

  I closed my mouth. For a moment.

  “I need to find the murderer,” I said. “It’s the only way to get Ali free.”

  “And what about Carlton?” she asked.

  “Ah,” I wiped my hands on my apron, sniffing away the onion tears running down my face, “I’ve been thinking about that. Boys!” I shouted into the hallway, summoning the twins, who arrived in seconds. They were differentiated today by the fact that Dash was wearing a blue button-down while Ray had chosen a white version of the exact same shirt.

  “What’s up?” they chorused from the doorway.

  “I’ve been thinking about Carlton,” I said. “We’re in agreement that he didn’t do it,” I said, to nods from the other three, “so I’m guessing his original story – the pub crawl and pub brawl – is true.”

  Ray and Dash pulled up two chairs by the table. “Makes sense,” Dash said.

  “I mean, why would he lie about that?” Ray added.

  “Oh I don’t know,” Caz answered, “maybe because he was unsure how, ‘I spent the night drowning the man who murdered my father,’ would play.”

  “Are you with us or Reid?” I asked dryly.

  “Depends who ‘us’ is,” she said, referencing back to Chopper.

  “You’re right,” I said, “Reid is going to be focussing his attention on getting one of the two of them nailed for the murder, and my guess is that Ali went to bed alone after you left Dash, which means she has no alibi for half the night.

  “But if Carlton is telling the truth, he’ll have an alibi that we can serve up to Reid. It might not be watertight, but it’ll be a start.”

  “And how do we prove that alibi?” Ray asked.

  “The old-fashioned way, I said, and all three looked at each other. “You two,” I pointed at the twins, “start asking questions from pub to pub. Get a map. Draw a circle. Someone will have seen him. Certainly, the pub where he had this punch up will have seen and remembered him – and probably have it on CCTV.

  “From that one, work backwards or forwards. If we can prove he spent the night in a series of pubs, it reduces the opportunity for him to have drowned Jimmy.”

  “Okay,” Ray said, “so when do you want us to start this? Only, Danny, we’re a bit light on bar staff at the moment, so going house to house in every pub in the area is going to be difficult with only the part-time barmaid left here.”

  “I’ll give Maureen at The Walrus and Sealing Wax a call and see if she can lend us a couple of casuals. Would that work?”

  They nodded.

  “And any other thoughts on the – um – other situation?” I asked, casting a glance at Caz.

  Ray nodded. “Like we said, he’s got it in the cloud somewhere.”

  “I miss the good old days,” Caz groaned, “when the only things in clouds were silver linings and acid rain.”

  “Well if he’s got the stuff encrypted and stored in the cloud, there’ll be a key – or at least a trail starter – on whatever computer he used to play the recordings to you the day you were there.”

  “Right,” I said, “I know I’m really old, cos I’m hearing words, but they make no sense to me at all.”

  Dash nodded, pulled his chair forward and said, “It’s like this, Danny…” then stopped, looked at his brother and gestured for the smarter half of the partnership to take over.

  “If he’s got it encrypted in the cloud, it’s gonna be near impossible to find – let alone steal – the files. It’s like someone steals a book, fills it full of all your worst secrets, then takes it to the world’s biggest library and hides it on a shelf somewhere. There’s millions of other books in this library.”

  “Billions,” Dash chipped in, nodding vigorously.

  “Billions,” Ray said. “So even though you know it’s in the library, you’ve got no chance of finding it. But if you could find it, if you could get to the book, you would still have trouble pinching the book and getting it out of the library without being discovered.”

  “So we’re screwed,” I said, but was waved aside by Caz.

  “There’s something coming,” she said, smiling fondly at Ray. “I know there’s something coming, but I just don’t know what yet. Go on.”

  “Well,” Ray said, “what if you hid just inside the library door and waited for your blackmailer to come into the library? You know where he’s going – where all blackmailers
go. He’s going to gloat over the book. So you hide, and you follow him, and you see where the book is. And after he’s put it back on the shelf – remember, you still can’t pinch it, cos you’ll never get it out of the library, but – after he’s lead you to it, and gone home, you torch the book. Burn it to ashes. Now, neither of you has the book.”

  I sat in silence, mental pictures of Chopper shredding bank statements and discussing conflagrations running through my head.

  “Yes,” I said at last, “but what if you accidentally set fire to the whole shelf and burn the library down to the ground?”

  Dash grinned, rolling his eyes. “Dan, mate, the library doesn’t exist. Or, to be precise, the library is the whole internet. You can’t burn it down. But you can burn one of the books in it.”

  “You mean like deleting a file?” I asked, and his eyes lit up.

  “Exactly,” he smiled, the look of pride on his face matching, I imagined, the one that Cheryl Cole’s singing teacher might have had when her pupil first sang an entire chorus without the aid of auto tune.

  “Okay,” I said, “so the book is a file and the library is the internet. What’s the following all about?”

  “Well everything you do on a computer leaves a record of some sort. It’s there, even if you delete your history and your cookies. Most computer salesmen will deny it, but there are government bodies who have forced this tech in, so they say.”

  Caz slumped. “And would the ‘they’ who say this be the same ones who buy tin-foil hats and don’t use oyster cards in case the government spots them going to Wembley Park?” she asked.

  Ray laughed. “No, really, Caz, it’s kosher. A trace of everything you do on a computer is there forever. All you need to do is get on to the actual computer, find the trace and follow the trail through the library to the book.”

  “Okay,” I said, “can we stop now with the euphemisms? I get it. So we can really do this?”

  “Danny, we can set the Sky Box to record from Venezuela. Telling a server to delete some files isn’t that hard. Provided you can find the server. And crack the access controls. And find the files. And not trigger any alerts.”