Crusher

by Niall Leonard

  “Of course I don’t.” She frowned, laughing. I found myself wishing I did have some cigarettes, and went to pull my jeans on—the corner shop would still be open. With a grunt of exasperation Zoe sat up, grabbed the T-shirt hanging over the foot of the bed and pulled it on. “Fuck’s sake, Finn, what’s the big deal?”

  “What are you going to tell him about me?”

  “What? Why are you being so paranoid? Nothing! I told you, he never listens to anything I say anyway.”

  I looked around for my T-shirt, and realized she was wearing it. She was leaning up against my headboard with her arms folded, looking at me through her fringe, and I felt the wave of anger break and recede, leaving nothing but froth and confusion.

  “When were you going to tell me?”

  “I just told you.”

  “He thinks I killed my dad.”

  “So what? You didn’t.”

  “Yeah, but thanks to him the cops aren’t looking for anyone else, and I’m having to do all their bloody work.”

  “What work?”

  “Finding out who did. Whether it really was some burglar, or that crazy girlfriend, or that fucking nutcase McGovern—”

  “McGovern?” she said.

  “Never mind,” I said.

  “McGovern the gangster?”

  “You’ve heard of him?”

  “I’ve seen his file.”

  “Holy shit. Could you get hold of it for me?”

  “No. Are you insane?”

  “No. Right. Sorry,” I said.

  She leaned forward, with a look of real concern. “Finn … why are you doing this? Asking about who killed your dad. What do you think you’ll achieve?”

  “I just have to know the truth,” I said. “He was my dad. I owe him that much.”

  Zoe shook her head. “You can’t go after McGovern,” she said. “The guy’s like a war criminal or something. If he had your dad murdered …”

  “What?”

  “You’ll never be able to prove it. He’s killed loads of people, it’s like his hobby. Finn—leave it, please. Let SOCA handle it.”

  “SOCA?”

  “Serious Organized Crime. My dad’s the local liaison.”

  “OK, if you can’t bring me McGovern’s file, could you just read it and tell me what’s in it?”

  She looked away. “I have to go.”

  Pulling the bedclothes back she clambered off the bed, pushed past me, pulled off my T-shirt, flung it at me and ran naked down the stairs. By the time I got to the living room she was already half-dressed and cursing the zip of her uniform skirt. Her blouse had ended up draped around Dad’s urn, somehow, and I apologized silently to him as I carefully pulled it free. To hell with that, he said. Don’t blow it now.

  I handed Zoe her blouse. She shrugged it on and quickly fastened the buttons I’d so carefully undone a few hours earlier.

  “Forget it,” I said. “Forget I asked, I’m sorry. Do you have to go?”

  “Of course I have to go, you pillock,” she said. But I could hear a laugh in her voice. Her brown cardigan crackled with static as she tugged it on and flipped her hair free of her collar. When I grabbed her hips and pulled her towards me she looked surprised and not displeased.

  “That was amazing,” I said. “You’re amazing.”

  I bent down to kiss her, and she kissed me back, and when she heard my breathing deepening she pushed me away again and turned and grabbed her coat and bag.

  “Yeah, that was fun,” she said. “We must do it again sometime.”

  “Sorry about the homework,” I said as I saw her to the door.

  She paused on the step outside. “Seriously, Finn … stay away from the Guvnor. He’s like a disease. Everything, everyone he touches …” Her voice tailed off to nothing. Without another word she turned and walked away, her head down, and with that little skip in her step girls use when they’re trying to hurry without actually running. I watched her till she vanished round the corner, then stepped back inside and shut the door.

  There was no answer at Elsa Kendrick’s flat. I knocked and rang for a few minutes, then stood back, looking up at the windows. It looked like she wasn’t in. I cursed at having come all that way for nothing. When I’d phoned Jonno Kendrick that morning to get her mobile number, he’d said, “Hold on a minute” and put the phone down. After five minutes of listening to 1970s cock-rock playing on what sounded like his cab radio, I got the message and rang off. In spite of the wasted effort, part of me was relieved. I hadn’t known what I was going to say to Elsa. The only thing I knew for sure about her was that she was an exceptional liar, which meant she was hardly going to burst into tears and blurt out a confession as soon as she saw me. I didn’t have any new evidence to confront her with, apart from my conversation with her ex-husband, or husband, or whatever he was. Though it would still have been interesting to watch her reaction when I told her what he had told me.

  There was no answer from the upstairs flat either. I could hardly wait around all day for Elsa to return. I didn’t have a car, so I couldn’t stake the house out, and like most suburban London streets there was nowhere to park anyway. I had a bicycle at home, but sitting on a bike was hardly a discreet way to stake out someone’s house. Short of breaking into the place opposite and twitching their net curtains, there was no way I could keep an eye on Elsa Kendrick’s flat, without some nervous neighbour taking me for a criminal and calling the cops to frogmarch me away. I glanced at my phone. It was nearly time to go to work anyway. I’d have to think of some other way to reach Elsa, maybe a message relayed through her old workplace, something designed to pique her curiosity. Of course I’d tried that before, when I claimed Dad had written about her, and she’d seen right through me that time. She was a slicker liar than I was. But I’d think of something.

  When I arrived at the Iron Bridge I was greeted like an old friend by the waiters and kitchen staff already on duty. I’d discovered there was a real camaraderie in the place, clearly born from a mutual terror of Chris Eccles. Working for him was meant to be a baptism of fire—or maybe a baptism of boiling goose fat—and a successful apprenticeship could get you a job skivvying in any restaurant in Europe. Maybe the trainees mistook me for a fellow dreamer starting at the bottom by scrubbing pans. I hadn’t tried to explain to any of them that my idea of haute cuisine was taking a sandwich up to my bedroom. But it was nice to be welcomed, and it was with a twinge of shame that I remembered I was only there to pick up information. If there was none to be found, I wasn’t going to stay … was I?

  But why shouldn’t I? I needed a job, and this was a job. Yeah, it was thanks to McGovern I’d got it, but maybe I could have got it for myself if I’d walked in and asked for it. Eccles didn’t scare me. In fact, I quite liked the guy.

  Like Zoe said, I hadn’t a hope in hell of proving anything against McGovern, even if he had ordered my dad killed. And if he hadn’t, what was wrong with staying here? Apart from anything else, the food was the best I’d ever tasted, and I was in serious danger of getting a belly. Maybe even I could learn to cook like that, if I set my mind to it. There wasn’t much reading involved—you didn’t see the chefs flicking through cookery books. I could run a kitchen. I might have my own restaurant someday. Zoe could do front of house, and when the last customer had left we’d fuck like bunnies, on a different table every night.

  All this was running through my head—and other places—as I went outside to empty the scrap bins from the lunch-time rush. Eccles was very keen on recycling, and all the food waste had to be set aside for composting, and the other garbage sorted into glass and cardboard and plastic. After carefully flattening some fruit boxes with my size ten trainers I piled them into the massive aluminium hopper under the window of Eccles’s office. As I dropped the lid and dusted my hands I heard a voice I couldn’t place at first, with a high-pitched laugh that sounded more like a sneer, from inside the office. It came to me at last: McGovern’s fixer, James. A hand reached out to shut t
he window, and when I saw the sleeve of a chef’s jacket and the chunky Rolex on his wrist I knew Eccles was in there too. It was a warm day but clearly he didn’t want his conversation with James to be overheard.

  Eccles’s office window was about two metres from the top of the steps that led from the back yard up to the rear doors, and its sill was about the same distance from the ground. But in the corner nearest the steps an extractor fan was mounted in the window, to vent the little kitchen fitted into this end of Eccles’ office. I skipped up the steps, clambered over the handrail, gripped the rail with my right hand and stretched my left foot out to rest on a waste pipe emerging from the wall just below, currently dribbling hot water into the drain. I grabbed the sill of the office window with my left hand, pressed my back against the brick and held my breath to listen to the voices coming through the extractor vent.

  “… mostly it stays up north, visiting the Normandy and Brittany markets for local produce and game. Twice a week in the summer.”

  “Is the van marked?” That was James’s voice again.

  “It has the logo of the restaurant on it, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Customs must give you a hard time about bringing in all that booze and dodgy meat.”

  “We don’t buy booze and the meat’s not dodgy. And we’re part of the European Community anyway, so …”

  “So your van doesn’t get stopped?”

  Eccles’s voice faded away. He seemed to have finally realized what James was getting at. Bit slow of him, I’d thought. “Not often, no.”

  “How often?”

  There was another pause. I could imagine Eccles tapping the arm of his specs on his perfectly straight white teeth.

  “Once a fortnight, maybe. I’d have to ask Christophe, my buyer.”

  “That’ll be fine,” said James. His words implied a shrug, as if he suspected Eccles of dragging his feet. The same van did the same run every week filled with smelly pâté and runny cheese, and Customs waved it through. I was beginning to see how investing in an upmarket restaurant might appeal to the Guvnor.

  The waste pipe under my foot started to bend. It was only plastic, and the hot water running through it had softened it. I clutched the window ledge harder and tried to take some of the weight off my left foot.

  “When’s the next trip?” said James.

  “Not for a fortnight. Christophe’s on holiday, and we have enough fresh produce laid up.” Now Eccles was obviously lying, and in danger of getting a slap. Or worse.

  “That’s perfect,” said James. “Let us have the keys and let us know where it’s parked, and you’ll have it back by the end of the week.”

  “What does Mr. McGovern want it for?” There was another brief pause.

  “You didn’t really just ask me that, did you?” The smirk was gone from James’s voice.

  The waste pipe under my foot snapped and my foot flailed, kicking the aluminium hopper so hard it rang like a gong. My left hand didn’t have enough grip on the windowsill and it slipped free. I nearly wrenched my right arm out of its socket hauling myself back to the handrail, but eventually I grabbed it with both hands and stilled and stood there, my heart racing, bent over the rail. I was trying to hear if my presence had been registered, if James had heard me kick the hopper or the loud hollow ponk when the waste pipe snapped off. Where it had broken, the steaming water now gushed and tinkled noisily, like an incontinent baby. But nobody came to the window, and the door to the kitchen didn’t open. I swung myself back under the handrail, tripped down the steps and retrieved the slops bin I had come out with. I was worried about Eccles; if he’d been dumb enough to invent any more reasons why James couldn’t do whatever he liked with Eccles’s van, James might decide to stop asking nicely. I could always blunder into Eccles’s office, like I’d got lost on my way to the toilets. It might put them off their stride … or James might decide it was one accidental appearance too many. Fuck it, I thought, and opened the door that led to the office corridor.

  Eccles was coming back down from the public area as if he’d just shown his visitors out. His face was empty and neutral, until he saw me standing there. He frowned. I donned my best gormless potwasher’s grin.

  “Everything all right, Chef?”

  “You can’t come through here in your overalls, Finn,” he said.

  “Right, Chef. Sorry.” I had to stop myself from tugging my forelock as I backed out.

  When I emerged James was standing in the yard. Shit, I thought, how did he get back here so quick? And what was he looking for?

  “All right?” he said. His wide toothy grin made my skin crawl. “How’s the job working out?”

  “Great,” I said.

  “Money OK?”

  “Great. Thanks.” I wished I could stop saying great, I sounded like a moron. Although maybe that wasn’t such a bad idea. “Tell the Guvnor I’m really grateful,” I added.

  James gave me a look. Either he didn’t like being asked to run errands or he didn’t like being reminded that he had a boss to answer to. He looked at the broken waste pipe, the down section leaning away from the wall, the water steaming and gurgling from the broken lip. “How long’s it been like that?”

  I shrugged.

  James nodded up at Eccles’s window. “He needs to watch out. Looks like a health and safety hazard to me.” He smiled, then turned and walked out of the yard, whistling.

  Back home that night I chucked my coat onto the sofa, took my phone out and checked it again. It looked like Zoe wasn’t the sort of girl to text every thought that went through her head, or a stream of smileys and LOLs. She knew how to play it cool. So did I—I hadn’t checked my phone more than a hundred times that evening. At about seven she’d sent: Cant cu tonite. Sorry. x

  Pity, I’d texted back. X

  Nothing since. Now I was worried that the capital X had been coming on too strong. Then I decided to stop worrying. I plugged the phone in to recharge, slogged up the stairs, scrubbed my teeth, checked for zits and collapsed into bed.

  I woke around two. I’d heard the front door softly close—Dad coming in from the pub, I’d thought sleepily.

  That’s what woke me up properly. I remembered that Dad was dead, and that whoever killed him had taken his keys … and I still hadn’t got round to changing the locks. So who had opened the door? Or had I dreamed it?

  I held my breath and lay there and listened. And heard nothing. A ticking from somewhere—probably the battery-powered clock on the wall by the front door—and a police siren distorting as it sped along the raised section of the motorway three streets away to the north. The deep rumble of a goods train, or a late-night landing at Heathrow.

  I pulled the sheets back, dropped my feet to the floor, lifting them at the last minute so they made no sound as they touched the rug. I stood, and the ancient floorboard under the rug creaked, as I should have known it would. I stood still. And heard nothing. It was bloody cold. Now I was up I wanted to piss.

  I headed for the bathroom and pulled the string. The clack of the ceiling switch resounded through the house like a pistol shot, and the light flickered on sullenly. I hated those economy bulbs Dad had fitted—they never seemed to get bright enough. I finished, shook, tucked it away and flushed the bog. The gushing echoed through the house, and mixed in with the echo down below was a sort of scuffle, as if someone had tripped on something. I reached for the string and pulled it, and the bathroom light flicked off, and I stood there motionless for thirty seconds while my eyes re-adjusted to the dark. Silence again. There was a cricket bat in the cupboard under the stairs, I remembered. Right now that seemed like a really stupid place to keep it.

  eleven

  I started down the stairs, this time placing my feet carefully, trying to remember where each step creaked and to avoid that part. I made it to the bottom almost without making a sound, and stood there by the front door, feeling the slight draught of cool night air on my bare feet. I was holding my breath and listening, and I c
ould still hear nothing, and I wondered if the sound of the front door closing had after all been part of a dream. Or maybe it was the reality, and all the rest had been a dream. Maybe Dad had come home and woken me up, and everything I thought had happened in the last week had never happened.

  But the living room was empty, and the table was bare, apart from the unread bills still scattered on it. No crappy old laptop, no pile of notes, no Dad. The movement behind me was so stealthy it might have been a spider’s scuttle but I heard it all the same and turned and registered the hand rising under my jaw and slapped it away, and whatever it was that hand had been holding flew across the pitch-black room and hit the wall, and at the same time a sledgehammer hit me in the solar plexus, driving all the breath from my body. Instinctively I raised my arms to block, just in time to catch a smashing blow to my curled fists, aimed at where my cheekbone would have been if I’d doubled over like I was meant to. The figure in front of me was slight and lithe and fast and he pressed forward while I retreated, desperately trying to catch my breath. He was whacking me above and below, trying everything to get me to drop my guard. A jolt of pain from my right kneecap nearly made my leg buckle—he’d stamped on my knee, but his aim had been off in the dark, or I’d have been on the floor screaming by now. I registered a bigger movement and realized he was aiming a roundhouse kick at my head.

  I stepped forward so the toe of his boot went behind my head and his shin cracked my ear. Lifting my arm, I grabbed his raised leg and held it, pushing him off balance while I drove my free fist into his balls. I heard him grunt through gritted teeth, and with a twisting wriggle wrench himself free. In that instant I knew I was really in trouble; anyone who could take a punch like that to the nuts and not go down puking had had serious training.

  He was a shadow in the dark now, both feet planted on the floor, in a slight crouch with one leg behind him, his knees bent and his arms loosely raised in a karate stance. His hands were black shapes, like he was wearing leather gloves. We were both in the dark, but it was my living room, not his, and when I stepped to the left and feinted he stepped to the right and collided with the corner of the table. In that instant I closed in, landed a jab to his solar plexus that made him gasp and followed through with a left to his jaw, but he pulled his head back just enough to stay clear, grabbed my arm as it went past and pulled it into a lock.