Crusher

by Niall Leonard

  I swallowed, waiting for my turn. Maybe Terry would shoot me in the back of the head. I wondered if I’d even know what had happened before my face hit the carpet. I tried not to look round. I tried not to move.

  “I really liked this place,” McGovern was saying. “It was classy, you know. Proper classy, not just shitloads of velvet and gold leaf and poncey leather menus. And discreet as well, you could bring a girl here, or a contact, no one said a word. You didn’t need to threaten anyone or pay anyone off. The staff were professional. Best investment I ever made. Now look at it.” He gestured listlessly with Prendergast’s gun at the wrecked tables and the broken corpses, as if they were someone else’s fault. “Fucking blood and bodies everywhere. This joint is finished—it’ll be packed with reporters and tourists and fucking ghouls, and no celeb’s going to come within a mile of the place.” He bent down and shouted into James’s unhearing ear. “And Eccles is going to need a new fucking van, isn’t he? Since the last one got filled with shit.” He seemed pissed off that James didn’t react and didn’t cower. Straightening up, McGovern turned to me.

  “I don’t need lectures from pricks like Prendergast. I’ve got kids of my own. I’d never, ever get mixed up in that paedo crap. Get my name dragged in the mud, every dosser in the street calling me a nonce. But James here thought he knew better. Went behind my back. Used my fucking name, didn’t you?” This to James. “Cheeky sod.”

  Recalling something, McGovern smiled to himself and turned back to me. “Remember when I said we should send you to this place? And James tried to answer back? Should have known then he was up to something.” He thought for a minute. “I try not to mix personal stuff with business as a rule, but you saved my little boy’s life,” he said. He lifted Prendergast’s gun and pointed it at the centre of my forehead. The range was too far for me to jump him, even if Terry didn’t already have me covered. “What did you see here, Maguire?” he said.

  “James came here to kill me because I told the cops about the van,” I said. “Prendergast appeared. They shot each other. I called the cops.”

  “Naw,” said McGovern. “That’s not right.” And he cocked the hammer of the gun.

  “I didn’t see anything,” I said. “I was never here.”

  McGovern smiled that cold smile of his. “You know who you remind me of?” he said. “Me. When I was your age.” He released the hammer of the gun with his thumb and lowered it. “Big mouth, big balls, nose for trouble. But I learned fast and I could think on my feet.” He took out a handkerchief, rubbed the gun down and stooped to put it back in Prendergast’s limp hand.

  “You weren’t here, and neither was I,” he said. “In fact, I left the country a few days ago. I’ll be back when the fuss has died down. But I’ll be keeping tabs. And if I hear you’ve changed your mind, I’ll give you a reason to change it back again, all right?”

  “Got it,” I said.

  “Now we’re proper quits,” he said. “Piss off.” But I didn’t move.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. McGovern,” I said. When he looked at me again his cold smile had cracked, like ice over a deep, freezing black torrent. “I need to know,” I said. “Who sent that guy Hans to kill my dad, and me? You or James?”

  “Who the fuck was your dad?” said McGovern.

  “Noel Maguire,” I said.

  “Never fucking heard of him.”

  “He used to be an actor. He was writing a script for TV.”

  “Why would I give a fuck about TV?” said McGovern. “It’s all bullshit. And if I wanted you dead, you’d be dead.”

  “It was about a gangster’s deputy who tried to take over from his boss,” I persisted. “Christ—that was it. Dad must have found out about James’s plan to go into business for himself, and James had to shut him up.”

  “Sounds like your old man should have stuck to acting,” said McGovern. “Now piss off. I’m not going to ask you again.”

  * * *

  I pissed off, the way I came, and I was pretty sure nobody saw me go. An hour later Skinny Gordon turned up for the lunch-time shift, as I’d known he would, and he called the cops, and they let Eccles out of his fridge before he suffocated. He’d caught a stinker of a cold though, and the kitchen had to throw the fish away.

  I went home to bed and slept for twenty-four hours.

  sixteen

  “Records show an emergency call made on your mobile phone near Leytonstone, four fifty-five a.m.,” said Amobi. “About twenty minutes after you called me.”

  “I didn’t tell you where I was because I didn’t know where I was,” I said. “I had to ask the cab driver. Soon as he told me I told the local cops so they could find those two guys before someone disappeared them, the same way they tried to disappear me.”

  “These two men tried to crush you in a car?”

  “They caught me looking into that van full of kids. I don’t think they were pleased.”

  “They’re currently both in hospital. One fractured skull, one broken neck.”

  “I wasn’t very pleased either.” I saw Jenkins stifle a smile, but Amobi was too professional.

  “How exactly did you find the van with the kids in?” he said.

  “Well, I was out for a run, and I saw it go past, and I knew it was Eccles’s van, and I wondered what it was doing up in that neck of the woods, so I followed it and had a look.”

  “You were out for a run twenty miles away, along the North Circular?”

  “I run all over the place.”

  Amobi nodded. “The two men detained have previous convictions, and the children we found identified them as the traffickers.”

  “So you don’t really need my statement, do you?”

  “Were they the only two men you saw?” asked Amobi.

  Good liars stick close to the truth, Zoe said. She’d have known.

  “There was a third guy giving orders.”

  “Can you describe him?” Amobi clicked his pen and waited, poised to write. Short. Slim. Had my dad murdered. Oh, and last time I saw him he had an extra hole in his head.

  “I was in the boot of a car most of the time,” I said. “And I didn’t hear them use his name.”

  Amobi took a photo out of a folder in the desk between us and slid it over to me. It was a police mugshot of James, about ten years ago. His hair was longer and he was wearing little round glasses that made him look a bit like a chemistry teacher, but the sneer was unmistakable.

  “That’s him,” I said. “Have you caught him?”

  Amobi took the photo back and slipped it into the folder. He clicked his pen shut and slid it into the inner pocket of his jacket. No more notes? I thought. Amobi leaned forward with an intent expression and his fingers intertwined. Jenkins adopted a similar glower, though I doubted he had any idea what Amobi was going to say.

  “His name was James Gravett and he was killed yesterday in an exchange of fire with a police officer,” said Amobi. “At the restaurant where you’ve been working recently. The officer involved died of gunshot wounds at the scene.”

  “Shit, seriously?” I said. I was impressed by how sincere I sounded.

  “You haven’t heard about this?”

  “Eccles fired me a few days ago,” I said. “No notice or anything. Is he allowed to do that?”

  “You didn’t hear about the shooting on the news?”

  I shrugged. “Never listen to the news,” I said.

  “The officer involved was DI Prendergast,” said Amobi.

  “Prendergast? The guy I met, your boss? Jesus, that’s awful,” I said. “I mean, we didn’t exactly get on, but …”

  Amobi’s look made me shut up, and I realized my acting abilities were in fact on a par with my singing voice, and the less noise I made the better.

  “So you’re saying you know nothing about this incident, and you weren’t there that day?”

  “That’s pretty much it, yeah.”

  Amobi nodded, and again he didn’t push it. He wanted to let that particula
rly smelly sleeping dog lie. He’s just another copper after all, I thought—if they think the truth won’t suit them, they don’t go looking for it.

  “Thank you very much for your assistance, Mr. Maguire.” Amobi picked up the folder, and Jenkins sprang to his feet. Must have been his feeding time. “The CPS may be in touch if this goes to trial,” Amobi added.

  “You’re welcome,” I said. “In fact, I was wondering if you could do me a favour in return. You know, as a reward for saving those kids?”

  Amobi put the folder back down on the table. Jenkins hovered uncomfortably, unsure whether to sit down again. He looked at Amobi for a clue, but Amobi was looking hard at me, and waiting. I took out my mobile phone.

  “If I wanted to find out where a mobile phone number was based, how would I go about it?” I said.

  “You mean, find out where the phone is being used?”

  “I mean, find out where it is most of the time, even when it’s not being used. The handset has to be logged into the network to get calls, doesn’t it? And you can find out where it goes by what phone masts it’s nearest to.”

  “It’s called triangulation,” said Amobi, “and yes, under certain circumstances the police can request that information from the phone networks.”

  I scrolled through the mobile’s directory to one number and handed the phone over to him. He looked at the number coolly for a moment, as if admiring its mathematical qualities, then passed the handset back to me.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, standing up, “but as DC Jenkins will tell you, we cannot request that information unless it’s part of an active investigation. And if we did access it, we would not be able to share it with any member of the public.”

  “That’s right.” Jenkins nodded authoritatively.

  “Fine,” I said. “That’s what I thought. Guess I’ll just have to call the network myself, see how far I get.”

  Amobi opened the door of the interview room and stood back to let me go first.

  The text popped up on my phone a few hours later. The sender field was blank, and the time stamp was for an hour in the future, so I guessed Amobi had used some anonymizer system to cover his tracks. But now I had the information, I wasn’t sure I wanted it. I’d felt wary of trusting anything anybody told me, since Zoe had sold me out. My mum had already betrayed me once, when I was a kid, so why was I so surprised that she’d been lying to me again?

  Her phone was mostly operating from an address in Shepherd’s Bush. Nowhere near Covent Garden, where she’d said her hotel was. What the hell was that about? I could have just called her, or thrown her number away and tried to forget about her. But I couldn’t do either of those—I was too angry. It was only a small thing, but as I thought about it I filled up with so much rage I could barely think straight, like one of those kids you see in supermarkets sometimes, writhing on the floor and kicking their heels on the lino, screaming until they can’t breathe. All Mum owed me was the truth, that’s all. Just once.

  The address itself was in a back street ten minutes’ walk from Shepherd’s Bush Green, a shabby narrow townhouse four floors high. The ground floor was a kebab shop, and the building backed onto a tube line. Maybe it was the vibrations from passing trains that had shaken half the rendering off the facade and dislodged all those roof tiles. From outside the building looked as if it had been chopped up into bedsits with a hodgepodge of inhabitants. A few windows had neat white net curtains, and one even had a potted chrysanthemum on the sill, but in most windows the curtains looked like they hadn’t been opened in years. Some didn’t have any curtains at all, just blankets wedged into the top of the sash window frames.

  My mother was striding down the street in her black coat and long boots, looking too classy for this neighbourhood, where old men in greasy parkas squatted on benches clutching tins of strong lager, and drawn-looking women with peroxide blonde hair pushed buggies over-laden with supermarket bags and snot-stained kids. Just as at the funeral, my mother’s face was hidden behind big sunglasses, but I could see she looked pale, tense and preoccupied. She didn’t notice me standing at the bus stop across the road, or maybe she did, and after all this time didn’t recognize me. I watched her pause outside the kebab shop, pull a bunch of keys from her pocket and open the street door that led to the flats upstairs. I was about to dash across when a bus pulled up at the stop, and by the time I made it to the far side of the road the tenement door had already shut.

  Then it opened again, and a big pear-shaped woman in too much make-up emerged, wearing a short leather skirt and wedges way too tall and way too young for her. I smiled and tried to enter the hallway as she left, but she blocked my path.

  “Looking for someone, love?” she said. I fished for an alibi but my mind had gone blank. “Twenty quid for twenty minutes? Half strip and blowjob?” she went on. She hadn’t said “someone,” I realized—she’d said, “some fun.”

  “Another time, thanks,” I said, and smiled as though I’d been flattered by her offer. She forgot about me and walked on, wobbling on her heels, while I hurried in and up the stairs, taking them two at a time. The first landing had three doors leading off it, one to the rear, one to the front, one to the side. I paused, wondering if I should just pick a door and knock, when I heard footsteps ascending the stairs overhead—someone light on their feet, but tired after slogging all the way to the top. I took the next two flights stealthily, trying to walk on my toes and not make the floorboards creak under the threadbare nylon carpet. But as I ascended the last flight I heard drum’n’bass music thumping from somewhere on the top floor, and realized that racket would hide any noise I might make.

  Somehow I’d expected the top landing to be lighter than the landings below, but the lonely bare light bulb dangling from the ceiling had blown. The landlord must have been relying on the pane of glass set high into the roof above for illumination, but the skylight was so caked in bird shit and green slime it was like trying to swim under canal water, and the doors to each flat were pale oblongs in the gloom. The deafening drum’n’bass was coming from the door at the rear, so I knocked on the one in the middle. It opened almost immediately, and whoever was inside left it ajar and walked away.

  “I thought Mercedes would get their top saleswoman a better flat,” I said as I entered. My mother turned from the battered wooden wardrobe where she’d just been hanging up her coat and turned to me, amazed and afraid. “Who were you expecting?” I said. “Room service?”

  The small room had, impossibly, been divided into two even smaller rooms, and through a sagging concertina door in the thin partition I glimpsed a double bed in the room beyond. At the far end of this one, by the window, a stunted sofa faced an ancient TV, while the corner behind me had been converted to a kitchen—if you could call a tiny sink, a picnic table, two chairs and an oven-toaster on top of a cupboard a kitchen. The only sign of food was an empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s.

  “Finn,” my mother said at last, “how did you find me? What are you …?”

  “Why?” I said. “Why did you spin that stupid yarn about staying in a hotel in the West End?”

  “Oh God,” she said, and hid her face with her hand. “I didn’t want you to feel sorry for me.” When she looked up she seemed angry at herself. “I was worried you’d think you had to invite me to stay at our—your house, and—it would have meant taking everything too fast. I wanted to get to know you again, but that’s going to take time, and … it had to be your decision. And because you wanted to know me, not because you pitied me. I’m really sorry, I know how it must look.”

  “What about the rest of it?” I said. “All the things you told me, how much of that was true?”

  “All of it,” she said. “Except for the part about me being good at selling cars. They fired me after two days. I was really broke, and I was lonely, and I knew I’d been stupid. I told your dad I was sorry, and he said I should come home. Look—” She returned to the wardrobe and dug her coat out again. “There’s a cafe acr
oss the road, let’s go there and talk. This place is such a dump, and we can barely hear each other over that racket.” She nodded at the rear wall. The music from the back room wasn’t as loud in here as it had been on the landing, but the toaster-oven was rattling faintly in time to the thump of the bass.

  “What is there to talk about?” I said.

  “Well, we could talk about you,” she said. “Not all that horrible stuff you’ve been through, but where you’re going, what you really want to do with your life. Whether you’ve got a girlfriend. All that mother-son stuff. Besides, this cafe has got the most amazing muffins—we could split one.” She patted her pockets and checked for the jingle of keys.

  There was something so bright and cheery and fake about her tone that I held back.

  “Why are you in such a big hurry to leave?” I said.

  “Sorry, what?” she said. “This music drives me insane—the landlord does nothing about it, but it’s only on during the day, thank God—”

  Jesus, how could I have missed it? When I turned to check out the kitchen again I saw two glasses sat draining in the dish-rack. Looking again through the folding door into the poky bedroom, I noticed one suitcase sitting open on a chair, and another protruding from under the rumpled double bed.

  “Mum?” I asked at last. She smiled at me, feigning confusion, badly. “Who did you think I was when you opened the door?”

  I hadn’t heard him climbing the stairs under the pulsing din, and was only aware of his footsteps a moment before he appeared in the open doorway. He looked a few years younger than my mother, wiry and lean, with old blue tattoos bubbling up from under the neck of his T-shirt. He had dark skin, and a fine fuzz of black hair was appearing on his shaven skull under a woollen beanie. A silver ring glinted in his right ear. When his brown eyes lighted on me he grinned, revealing fine, even white teeth, though two of them were broken.