Death Of A Devil

by Derek Farrell

  “There had to be a snag,” Caz moaned.

  “But you can do that, right?” I asked.

  “No,” Ray shook his head. “There is a slight difference between setting the Sky Box and hacking a commercial-grade server.” He brightened up, “But I might know a man who can…”

  TWENTY-SIX

  Lilly Ho had, from what we could gather, over twenty Chinese restaurants in her empire, ranging from corner takeaways to glittering haute cuisine places like Jade Palace, which was located on a side street in Knightsbridge, not far from Harrods and Harvey Nicks.

  As we walked through the restaurant door, it closed silently and firmly behind us, the tightness of the fit sealing the outside world where it belonged and replacing the traffic noises and diesel fumes with a low buzz of chatter and a scent, in the lobby at least, of jasmine and magnolia, issuing forth from candles the size of my head, which burned either side of a life-sized terracotta warrior.

  The young woman behind the reception desk – more of a reception plinth, really – smiled openly at us, her perfectly-tailored Armani trouser suit and immaculate make-up making it seem that we had walked into an exclusive boutique rather than a restaurant.

  “Good afternoon,” she said, her accent more Beaulieu than Beijing, “welcome to Jade Palace. My name is Aileen. How may I help?”

  Caz stepped forward and, in matching cut-glass tones, informed the receptionist that we were here to see Mrs Ho.

  Aileen frowned.

  Aileen fiddled with an iPad on the plinth in front of her, tapping it and swiping, and for a moment I considered whether she was maybe playing Candy Crush and hoping we’d get the message and absent ourselves but, at length she looked up, the frown deepening.

  “I have no appointments booked in for Mrs Ho today,” she announced. “Perhaps you’re a day early?”

  “Oh we don’t have an appointment,” Caz smiled sweetly. “But it’s rather important we meet with Mrs Ho. It’s, you could say, a matter of life and death. In that someone is dead and someone else is facing life for their murder.”

  Aileen did not like that. She re-tapped the screen, began typing something into it, frowned again and looked back up at us.

  “I’m really very sorry,” she said, banishing the frown and replacing it with the happy-to-help rictus grin she’d clearly been trained to default to, “but Mrs Ho is a very busy woman. I’m afraid she couldn’t possibly see you without an appointment. Perhaps if you could email her with your concerns?”

  Behind us, the door opened and another couple arrived. Aileen glanced over our shoulders, dismissing us already, boosted the smile back up to eleven and went into her script.

  “Welcome to Jade Palace. My name is Aileen. How may I help you?”

  The male half of the newly-arrived couple looked uncertainly at us, as though unsure whether he would be offending us by shoving us to one side and announcing his name and the fact that he had a reservation.

  “Oh don’t mind us.” Caz waved him on, “We’re just waiting for the owner to come out.” She tapped the side of her ever-present handbag. “We’ve brought the results of some stool samples. Turns out the whole party wasn’t suffering from gastroenteritis. It was Norovirus after all.”

  Aileen blanched, pressed a button, waved on the new arrivals – each now looking somewhat uncertain about their upcoming gastronomic adventure – and turned to us, the smile completely banished, the accent becoming more council estate than country estate, a fury blazing in her eyes.

  “Fuck off,” she hissed, “or I’ll call the law on you both.”

  “Go ahead,” I said.

  “Don’t think I won’t,” she answered, fishing in a drawer in the plinth and extracting an iPhone which she brandished as though it were a Colt 45.

  “Look,” I said, “all we need is a few minutes with Mrs Ho.”

  “And I’ve told you,” she snapped back, “you’ve got more chance of getting a few minutes with Princess Di and Marilyn Monroe. Now fuck. Off.”

  “Tell her,” I said, “it’s about her late husband, the Old Kent Road Massive and the somewhat sensitive issue of murder.”

  “Look,” Aileen acquired the air of someone whose job was on the line, leaning in to us so that we had to lean in to her and thus drop our voices, “she won’t see you. She never sees anyone.”

  “Thank you, Aileen,” said a voice behind us. “I’ll take it from here.”

  We turned.

  Behind us, having come through a hidden door behind the terracotta warrior, was a small woman, her chubby figure encased in a shiny black tracksuit, a silver dragon embroidered across her left shoulder and down her front across her right breast, the forked tongue pointing towards the silver Nike high-tops on her feet.

  Her round, inquisitive face was topped by a sleek black bob, and her eyes peered out from behind a wire-framed pair of spectacles, the lenses of which were at least two inches thick.

  Mrs Ho jerked her head at the door she’d come through and once we’d all walked through, left the lobby and she’d closed the door behind us, she turned to us.

  “What’s this all about?” she demanded. “And who the hell are you two gau fahn?”

  I held out my hand. “I’m Danny Bird, Mrs Ho and this,” I gestured at Caz, “is Lady Caroline Holloway.” I stuck my hand back out and Lilly Ho regarded it with the same level of disdain I suspect she’d display if someone held a still steaming turd out in offering.

  “That supposed to impress me?” she demanded, nodding at Caz. “Lady Holloway. Only we’ve had our share of the gentry in here and let me tell you, they’re mostly a bunch of fuckwit inbreds.”

  I glanced at Caz, who had plastered her Princess Alexandra face on – the one I liked to imagine she’d do if she was on a royal visit to open a home for the dangerously insane and had just come face to face with one of the inmates.

  Lilly, having waited three or four beats for a response, turned back to me. “See what I mean. Right – I know who you are, but you still haven’t said what you want.”

  “We wanted to talk to you about the Old Kent Road Massive,” I said, and she sighed theatrically.

  “Yeah,” she said, “I gathered that from your little performance out there. Fuck it, I ain’t got time for this. Come on.” She waved us down the poorly-lit, narrow corridor we were standing in and, displaying a huge and glitzy Rolex on her wrist, shoved aside a swing door at the end of the hallway and lead us into a nightmarish scene.

  We were standing in the kitchen of Jade Palace, and if outside had been all tranquillity and jasmine scented luxury, here was chaos, heat and the smell of overused fat.

  The kitchen was state of the art, if the art you were looking to be state of was the recreation of a battle kitchen during the Crimean War.

  “Willy,” she barked at one cowering functionary, “get them fucking lobsters out to table six and go easy with the garnish, alright. Where’s my fucking shark’s fin soups?”

  “Here, Madame Ho,” one of the cooks answered, plating up four bowls of steaming broth.

  She turned to us. “You couldn’t come after the lunch service?”

  “We couldn’t be certain of finding you here outside of the lunch service,” I answered, and she inclined her head as though acknowledging a simple fact.

  “So, the Old Kent Road Massive. Why you asking questions about that lot? I haven’t heard them mentioned for years.”

  “But your husband was one of the gang?” I prompted.

  “Gang?” She cackled. “It was more a bunch of silly boys playing games, drinking, waving their willies around, that sort of thing.”

  “That sort of thing?” I eyeballed her, and she eyeballed me back.

  “Spot of mah-jong, game of darts, the odd armed robbery,” she shrugged at length. “Everyone’s got to have a hobby. Anyway, it’s irrelevant now. Johnny’s dead.”

  “I’m sorry,” I bowed my head. “How did he die?”

  “Battered prawn,” she said, tears spring
ing to her eyes.

  I blinked. She poked a finger behind the lenses and wiped the tears clear of her eyes.

  “Silly bastard choked cos he put two deep fried prawns in his gob at once without takin’ the head off one of them. Choked to death on a prawn head. It’s hardly a heroic end, is it? I mean, why can’t people just be happy with what they’ve got?” She rattled her Rolex and shook her head despondently before turning to bark in loud and threatening-sounding Cantonese at the young man standing at a six-ring hob, all rings blazing as he played the pans like a virtuoso. The only English phrases I recognised in her diatribe were “More rice,” “less chicken,” and, “you fucking halfwit.”

  At length, she returned her attention to me and, shaking her head sadly, said, “Greed is a terrible thing, isn’t it?”

  “Quite. So, do you know where any of the members of your husband’s, um, mah-jong circle might be these days?”

  She repeated the question as though translating it in her head, blew out her cheeks so that her head resembled, even more, a beach ball with glasses on and shook a negative reply. “No idea, love. Sorry. I haven’t had dealings with any of that lot in an age. But why would you be looking for them?”

  I hesitated a moment and, before I could decide what to say, Caz had jumped in.

  “Because,” she said, “it looks like someone in your husband’s old circle has decided to reduce the diameter somewhat.”

  Lilly cast a disdainful eye on Caz before turning to me. “Does she always talk like a fucking fortune cookie?”

  “Someone’s murdered at least two of the old gang,” I announced, choosing to leave out the fact that there’d been a twenty-year gap between the two killings, “and we’d like to find the remaining members so we can – hopefully – prevent any more deaths, and find out who did the first two killings.”

  “Well why didn’t you say that?” she asked, shooting more evils at Caz. “So, who’s dead?”

  I told her – the mention of Billy Bryant raising little more than an eyebrow but the name Jimmy Carter causing both eyebrows to shoot skywards. “Interesting,” she said, “and you say that the filth have Carter’s missus for the job?”

  “She didn’t do it,” I said.

  “Course she didn’t,” Lilly stated absent-mindedly, “but it’s interesting that you turn up asking me if I know the whereabouts of the rest of The Massive. Cos you’re the second person in as many weeks to come round asking.”

  “And the first was?”

  “Jimmy, of course,” she said. “Oh yes, he came sniffing round here like some cut-price Goodfella. Making out he had something important to discuss with Johnny. Acted all sorry to hear the news when I told him Johnny’d been dead for years. I told him to sling his hook.”

  A thought occurred to me: “Did he tell you where he was going next?”

  “Nah,” she shook her head, “but I’ll tell you where he should have been going – a decent barber.”

  “Any idea where he was living?” I asked. “I mean, if he’d been away for years then Jimmy had to have somewhere he was staying.”

  She shook her head again. “To be honest, I had no time for that bleached-blond fuckwit when Ho was alive, so I’d even less time for him when he came back from whatever rock he’d been under. The whole lot of ‘em were a bunch of useless alley cats but woe betide any of their women who even looked at a bloke. I made it clear to Ho that if he ever so much as raised an eyebrow at me I’d have his knackers off with a cleaver. Unlike that silly cow who was married to Jimmy. She couldn’t stand up to a butterfly.”

  I glanced at Caz. This was not the Ali we’d come to know.

  “Christ knows why. That fucking ludicrous barnet. He thought it looked all Club Tropicana, only it was more Saga Holidays. I know men like him, and they tend to be more familiar with a knuckleduster than an iron. They need a woman who’ll not take their shit. Anything else,” she shook her head in disgust, “is weak.

  “Weak,” she repeated, definitively.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  “This,” Ray announced proudly, “is Phoenix.”

  In front of me stood a short, overweight teenager, his unbuttoned plaid shirt and dirty-looking jeans too big for him but the Buffy t-shirt visible under the shirt, contrastingly, stretching tight over a nascent pot belly.

  “Alright,” he said, nodding at me and running a hand – the nails grubby and badly bitten – through greasy hair. A stripe of dark fluff ran down each cheek, gathering under his chin in something resembling a beard, only one constructed of duckling down.

  I smiled, holding a hand out to the wunderkind. “Well, Mr – um – Phoenix, it’s a pleasure to meet you.”

  “No.” Phoenix shook his head, recoiled from my extended hand. “You haven’t met me. I haven’t met you. Have you told him?” he asked, pointing at me and addressing Ray.

  “Well,” Ray smiled the smile that I knew always prefaced a ‘difficult’ conversation, “you see, Danny—”

  “Oh, man,” Phoenix threw his hands in the air. “I thought you told him.”

  “I’m telling him now, Walter.”

  “Jesus, dude. No names.”

  “Sorry. Phoenix. I’m telling him now, okay?”

  Ray turned to me. “The thing is, Danny, Phoenix here is a wanted man.”

  “Well, as I always say,” murmured Caz, simultaneously fluttering her lashes at Phoenix and downing her second martini of the night, “it’s nice to be wanted.”

  “No, Caz,” Ray insisted. “Really wanted. Interpol, the Feds, MI5, they’re all after him.”

  “And he’s sitting in my kitchen,” I said.

  “So what have you done?” Caz enquired.

  “I hacked Tesco,” the young man said, looking somewhat downcast, “and gave myself a billion Clubcard points.”

  “But in order to get into Tesco,” Ray expanded, “he accidentally went via a Black Ops NSA server and may have accidentally deleted a raft of top-secret surveillance files.”

  “I’m good at deleting,” he admitted, somewhat shamefacedly.

  “Well,” I nodded at the kitchen table, “we’re ready to get deleting any time you are.”

  Phoenix looked back at Dash. “He knows about the, er, arrangement?” he asked.

  “Arrangement?” I frowned at Dash. “What arrangement?”

  “It’s five hundred up front,” Dash said, nodding at Caz. “We’ve already discussed it.”

  “And I take no responsibility for the results – or lack of results – of what follows. It’s not an exact science.”

  “Wait,” I stayed Caz, who had already dived into her handbag. “What d’you mean, ‘It’s not an exact science’? Even baking a cake is an exact science today. What’s this if not scientific?”

  “I mean,” Phoenix said, pocketing a fat envelope which Caz handed to him, “once we’re in there, there’s no knowing what security they’ve got in place.”

  This, I did not like the look of. “Security?”

  Phoenix slipped a messenger bag off his shoulder and dropped into a kitchen chair. “They sometimes put watchdogs that cut off the connection. Or blast code that exterminates your router. Speaking of which,” he added as he pulled a battered laptop from his bag, followed by a length of cable, “what’s your Wi-Fi password?”

  “Wi-Fi?” I glanced at Dash and Caz.

  “Yeah,” Phoenix placed the laptop on the table, handed one end of the cable to Dash and plugged the other end of it into the computer, “you know, the thing that sends the internet through the air to your laptop – Wi-Fi.”

  “I know,” I said in my best Johnny Gielgud, “what Wi-Fi is. I just don’t know what the password is.”

  Phoenix rolled his eyes and issued the most exasperated sigh I’d ever heard. “Dude,” he gestured at Dash, “I thought you said this was all cool.”

  “It’s knobber. Only the ‘o’ is a zero,” Ray announced, plugging the cable straight into the mains as I sputtered and demanded to know who had set up m
y Wi-Fi password.

  Phoenix dived back into this bag and extracted a can of Red Bull, then another and, unzipping a pocket on the front of the bag, two more cans of the high-caffeine, sugary drink, followed by two Mars Bars.

  “So I suppose a cocktail is unnecessary,” Caz breezed.

  “Missus,” Phoenix said, a look of shock on his face.

  “Miss,” Caz corrected him.

  “I’m sixteen. I can’t legally drink. And I wouldn’t want you to lose your licence.”

  “Oh it’s not my licence,” Caz replied, then frowned. “Do I look like a pub landlady? Danny?”

  I waved her aside. “Sixteen?” I asked.

  “Next birthday,” Phoenix clarified, his eyes never leaving the screen as he hammered away at the keyboard.

  “Jesus,” I looked at Ray, who shrugged.

  Caz, meanwhile, was grumbling away about how someone could raise the legality of a cosmopolitan, yet be happily hacking the CIA from their back bedroom.

  “Problem?” Phoenix asked, raising his eyes briefly from the screen.

  “Only that I guess your mum will want you home at a decent time,” I said. “I mean, it is a school night.”

  “Dude,” he stared at me, blinked slowly and cracked open a can of Red Bull, downing at least half the contents in one huge gulp, “chill. This’ll be a piece of cake. Be home before News at Ten is over. You got any crisps handy?”

  I shuffled off to get some crisps, indicating, by a twitch of my head, that Ray should follow me.

  “Where the hell did you find him?” I whispered when we were out of sight.

  “Walter’s a legend,” Ray said.

  “And what’s with the Phoenix shit?”

  Ray rifled through a box of crisps, extracting two packets of salt & vinegar, one cheese & onion and a ready salted. “He’s an internationally-renowned hacker and activist. Phoenix is all about rising from the ashes of the past, reforming yourself and the society around you through destruction and rebirth. Walter’s, well,” he handed me the two bags of salt & vinegar, “not. Is it?”