Fiddle City

by Dan Kavanagh

  Fiddle City

  Dan Kavanagh

  To Craig and Li

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Preview: Putting the Boots In

  About the Author

  The day they crashed McKay, not much else happened on the M4. At least, not on the stretch between Heathrow and Chiswick; further west, that was somebody else’s patch, so who cared? Especially as it was one of those warm, hazy August mornings when the police cars bask like lizards on their special roadside ramps; when those few extra feet above the tarmac permit a careless, unobserved, cap-tilted snooze. And then, perhaps, towards 11.30, the quiet phut and crackle of the FM radio would be eased a bit lower, and finally drowned out by the tiny portable in the blue pocket, tuned to the ball-by-ball.

  And the cars weren’t giving any trouble either. By ten, the last commuters had vanished east in a swirl of nicotine and bad temper; they wouldn’t be back for at least six hours. The commercials, the heavies, the twenty-tonners were uncharacteristically well-behaved: something to do with the sun, no doubt. And the civvies: well, on the way to the airport they were too scared of wrecking their holiday to do more than forty; while on the way back, they were so baffled by driving on the left that they often stayed in third gear all the way to the Cromwell Road.

  So the blues weren’t too pleased when McKay got crashed, when a taxi driver who had seen – well, hadn’t really seen anything, just a wreck and a paint smear on the crash barrier – radioed in to his office, who called the local police, who called Heathrow, who transferred it to Uxbridge, who at the third time of asking (England 8 for 1, Boycott bowled Chappell 2: even that bit of the day was going well) managed to raise a drowsily laconic panda crew. Who weren’t too pleased with McKay for fucking up their morning. It was almost as if he’d done it deliberately.

  What was left on the crash barrier might have been paint, but it wasn’t. McKay’s car had bits of red on it, but not that much. It was a customised Cortina with a tiger motif. At the front, a trompe-l’oeil radiator grille whose vertical bars formed the tiger’s teeth; along the side, the massed lightning of gold and black jagged stripes; at the back, a tail painted across the bumper, and (McKay’s own suggestion, of which he was incontinently proud) a pair of tiger buttocks which met at the point where the special central exhaust protruded. At work, to his face, they called him, as he planned, ‘Tiger’; when he wasn’t there, they tended to refer to his as The Farting Cat. Sometimes they would watch him drive off, and laugh together at the first gust of blue-grey smoke from between the tiger’s buttocks.

  McKay left the Western International Cargo Market and headed east towards London. But he didn’t drive like a tiger. After a flash bit of foot-down and tyre-squeal as he left work (someone was usually watching, if only a cleaner and his broom), he settled back on the motorway to a steady forty-five. No point burning out the engine before its time. Besides, he liked being in his car – the longer it lasted, the better. Proper little maharajah’s palace in here, he used to say. The sound system; the row of miniatures in the ‘cocktail cabinet’, as he loftily described his glove compartment; the small, padded steering wheel, all black leather and studs; the full Cyril Lord underfoot; sheepskin seats (‘The wife makes ’em from the sheep Tiger runs over,’ he would explain); even a sheepskin rear-window shelf. On this shelf – another of McKay’s favourite touches – lolled a large soft toy. A tiger, of course. McKay was vaguely irritated that its colours didn’t match the bodywork, and he’d nearly punched the soft-toy salesman who tried to assure him that the colours were definitely authentic (as if the colours of his Cortina weren’t). Still, McKay was able to make a virtue of this whenever anyone mentioned it. ‘Tigers come in all colours,’ he’d quip, modestly referring to himself as well.

  McKay looked up past the too-pale toy and checked the traffic behind him. Just a coach, some twenty yards back. He moved his head a bit and studied his own reflection. The broad, slightly sweaty face, the cupid’s-bow mouth, the impassive eyes – they all pleased McKay as much as ever. Vroom, vroom, he thought to himself. Idly, he tugged on the chain around his neck until a thin silver swastika, about two inches square, appeared from beneath his shirt. The leading edges of the emblem had been filed to sharpness: for no particular reason at the time, except that it felt like a good idea. And later, it had proved useful now and then. When he was in the caff, for instance, and that Pakki had started looking at him. Not doing anything, of course – they never dared; they just looked. McKay had dug out a match, reeled in his swastika, and started sharpening the match to a point right in front of the Pakki’s face. Then he let the badge dangle and picked slowly at his teeth, all the time staring at this guy. That was one Pakki who didn’t bother to finish his sweet.

  McKay shifted the swastika in his right hand, selected one of the legs, and began to pick inquisitively at his left nostril with it. That was another reason for keeping to a steady forty-five; though of course, with a racing wheel like this you could drive at seventy with just one little pinkie if you felt like it. As he told people.

  He worked methodically at his nostril, occasionally flicking a bogy on to his jeans. A lorry began to overtake him. For a few seconds it was alongside, thumping and shuddering; then it fell back. McKay glanced in the mirror to see where it had gone, but all he saw was the same coach as before; it was a bit closer than last time, maybe ten yards behind.

  Typical of fucking lorries, McKay thought. They bang past you going down a hill, swerve in front as soon as they can see six inches of daylight, and then you have to overtake them all over again on the next uphill stretch. Ridiculous; they ought to be made to stay in the slow lane where they belong. Always half-overtaking you and then changing their minds just because there’s a one-in-fifty gradient.

  McKay didn’t check on whether it had been a one-in-fifty gradient that had made the lorry fall back. He just assumed it, as anyone else might; and he just happened to assume wrong. Instead, he shifted the swastika in his hand, selected a new leg – he wasn’t a dirty bugger, he knew about clean sheets – and began to pick up gently at his right nostril. As he did so, the thump and shudder repeated itself at his shoulder. If McKay hadn’t been otherwise occupied, he might have been tempted to have a little game with the lorry, accelerating just enough to keep ahead of it, slowing as the lorry slowed, really getting on its tits. He liked doing that to lorries. But it was a nice morning; McKay was feeling unusually good-humoured; he was on a routine delivery run; and besides, he was picking his nose. So instead, he merely looked ahead (there was a bridge coming up) and then in his mirror – that coach was still there; funny, it was right up his exhaust – and settled back to let the lorry pass.

  It was well planned; but then the men hadn’t been cheap: they only did one-offs, and they never took rubbish jobs. They were proud of their work; proud, that is, of the way they carried it out. They knew where to steal what they needed; they weren’t afraid of wasting a few days on research; and they didn’t keep telltale cuttings books on what they did – even though they had, in their own quiet way, made the papers a few times.

  The lorry, an articulated eighteen-wheeler, all swaddled in canvas and ropes, drew level with McKay about three hundred yards before the bridge. Gradually it began to inch past, until the back of the trailer was level with the rear offside door of the Cortina; then it seemed just to sit there, straining and burping, unable to get past. Fucking run out of puff again, thought McKay.

  The coach, meanwhile, took up even closer order. Anyone following the three v
ehicles would have concluded that there were only two – a lorry unwisely trying to overtake a coach; the Cortina was completely hidden. And from the front – well, the lorry would hide the car from those directly across from them; and the bridge, they assumed, would take care of the rest. That was what the men had planned; and they were men who weren’t cheap.

  As the cab of the lorry emerged into the sunlight on the other side of the bridge, the driver twisted the wheel and stamped on the brake at the same time, putting the vehicle into a controlled snake. The back part of the trailer slewed suddenly left and rammed the Cortina in the midriff. ‘Just a little boomps-a-daisy,’ was how the driver had described it when accepting the first half of the money; but then he was always prone to understatement.

  The first effect of just a little boomps-a-daisy was to make the sharpened edge of the swastika rip through the fleshy outside of McKay’s right nostril. McKay intended to swear at that point, but events rather got the better of him. Besides, if he had sworn, he might have used up all his best words before something much more unpleasant than a torn nose happened to him; and that would have been a waste.

  As the lorry struck the Cortina, the coach pulled out into the middle lane to get clear of whatever might happen. The car was batted diagonally across the hard shoulder. The nearside rear indicator light was the first thing to break against the crash barrier: but then that, compared to the final toll, was about as grave an injury to the Cortina as was McKay’s nose to the rest of his body.

  Crash barriers work in the way they are intended to, as long as the angle of approach is within a certain range. The Cortina’s wasn’t. It hit the barrier, stood up on its boot for a second – at which point the doors burst open and McKay was shrugged out – then skipped over the barrier and cartwheeled down an escarpment. McKay himself made a long red trail on the metal barrier in a way that no one could quite understand. It looked, to those who could first be bothered to stop, as if he had been exaggerating terribly: if you were thrown out of your car, why didn’t you just land on the barrier and stay there, canted over it like a carpet ready for spring beating? Why did it look as if someone or something had smeared the poor fellow all along the barrier? ‘Darling, no darling … don’t look.’ Of course he probably wasn’t wearing a seat belt, but even so, it did look a bit much. ‘Darling, I told you not to look. Darling, are you … well, quickly, use that patch of grass over there … Oh Christ.’ Why did one stop for accidents; why didn’t one do as all the other fellows did?

  No one had seen what had happened. Or rather, no one came forward to say that they had seen what had happened. There was a muted discussion, about an hour later, as an Alitalia DC-8 took off for Palermo, about what exactly had occurred, and those big lorries shouldn’t be allowed on the road, I always say, and do you think we should have stopped, and I hope no one took our number, and they couldn’t have, they couldn’t have known we were watching; but after ten days of a Thomson package, of sun and drink and not too many ruins, the whole incident was more or less forgotten. It was just a bump in the memory, no bigger than the bump in the crash barrier a few yards beyond the bridge.

  The police resigned themselves to not getting back to the cricket until it was 63 for 4; it was always 63 for 4 when England batted first against the Australians, so they supposed they could take the rest of the morning as read. The few motorists who had bothered to stop were routinely quizzed, but none of them had seen anything. The drivers of the lorry and the coach turned off at the next junction, and left their vehicles in a lorry park close to the Gunnersbury tube station: they both wanted the District Line, and didn’t see why they should have to change, especially after doing a job. They soon forgot the details of their morning’s work, and were never required to reflect any further on the crash.

  The only people who reflected on it – apart from McKay, of course, as he wheeled himself around in later years – were the two policemen in the panda car and the surgeons at Uxbridge Hospital. As the constables were driving back to their lizard’s ramp, one of them switched off the two-way radio and said,

  ‘You know, we could do some business.’

  ‘ …?’

  ‘Someone’s got to pick up that car, haven’t they? I mean, some garage. I mean, it’s business, isn’t it? It wouldn’t be far out of our way to pop round to a garage and tip them off when there’s a crash. They’d be bound to be grateful.’

  His colleague grunted.

  ‘Been done.’

  ‘Has it? What … locally?’

  ‘Not here. Up on the M1, couple of years ago. Big stink. Few early retirements. Didn’t work out.’

  ‘Hmm. Well, maybe they were too grabby or something; maybe they got too sure of themselves. I bet we could work it. Just pick the right garage. Not do it too often. Not ask them to be too grateful.’

  His colleague merely grunted again, and turned on the two-way radio. It might be worth a think.

  Meanwhile, at Uxbridge Hospital, the surgeons were having a more serious think. Should they start on the legs first, or the pelvis? One of the legs looked really messy; it might have to go altogether. On the other hand, with a pelvis you never knew what else you might find until you started digging around. It looked as if there were problems with the back as well. Oh God, that was the trouble with crashes – you never knew where to start. The chief surgeon looked up at McKay’s broad, tanned face. Why did they drive so fast, for Christ’s sake? Oh well, better get on with it. The anaesthetist caught his glance and eased the oxygen mask off McKay’s face. The side of the right nostril was slit open to a depth of about half an inch. The bleeding had stopped. Well, at least that could wait.

  1

  THREE MONTHS EARLIER DUFFY had been sitting over a drink at the bar in the Alligator, trying to decide which of two alarm systems to recommend to a customer: the one which worked better, but on which he got a smaller cut; or the one which worked less well (that electronic eye could be bypassed by a Scotty dog, let alone the fellows with A-levels who were joining the business nowadays), but on which he got a larger cut. Really, he supposed, there was no conflict: he’d disliked the customer so much – the way the fellow had automatically given him a beer while he had sherry (not that Duffy liked sherry), the hoity way he had put Duffy down about the most likely method a burglar would use to break in. Now what he’d do …

  ‘Mine’s a virgin on the rocks.’

  Duffy looked up. A chubby-faced man with pronounced five o’clock shadow was easing himself on to the next stool. He had a pasty complexion and didn’t look very fit. Duffy turned back to his whisky. What he’d do was draw up one of his specially complex-looking wiring plans for the old fart’s house, recommend the system on which he got a larger cut, shove in a slightly bigger bill than normal, and then hope for the best. It was all luck with burglary, really: if you landed a smart pair of gloved hands in the night, you couldn’t stop him; if you landed a trainee, or a shitter, or someone who was only really doing it to get away from the wife, then all you needed was a big white box with a few wires sticking out and they buggered off to the next house.

  ‘I said, mine’s a virgin on the rocks, old chum.’

  Duffy didn’t look back. He wasn’t in the mood to be picked up; he certainly wasn’t in the mood to spread the drink around. He’d got his bank statement that morning. So he merely raised his glass in the direction of the barman and said, when he came across,

  ‘I think the gentleman on my right wants to buy himself a drink.’

  He heard a chuckle, then:

  ‘Virgin on the rocks, same again for my friend here, whatever it is he’s got his fist wrapped around, the name’s Leonardo.’

  Duffy continued to gaze into his whisky. If chubby-chops wanted to buy him a drink, that was up to chubby-chops. He turned, and caught a look of scurrying anticipation from the next stool.

  ‘Leonardo … virgin … oh, forget it. Barman, put a vodka in that, will you. Large one.’ Then he turned back to Duffy. ‘Pity, that would
have been an easy round for you. I’m not a cheap date after the first.’

  ‘You’re not a date,’ said Duffy.

  ‘Eric Leonard,’ said the newcomer.

  ‘Duffy,’ said Duffy.

  ‘Anything else? Sir Duffy.’

  ‘There’s a Nick.’

  ‘There usually is. My dear Nick,’ Leonard repeated the name needlessly, in a mildly ingratiating way. Duffy almost didn’t recognise himself. At work he was Duffy; to his close friends he was Duffy; the only people who called him Nick were acquaintances who didn’t know – or weren’t allowed – better. So that was all right for the moment.

  ‘And you shall call me Eric.’

  ‘I’ll think it over.’ Duffy was always suspicious of people without proper surnames. Two Christian names: it wasn’t right; it wasn’t … neat.

  Duffy wondered what Leonard wanted. Apart from going to bed with him of course. Which was a long way from being a certainty. Mostly you went down to the Alligator so as not to go home alone – that stood to reason; but sometimes you just went for the atmosphere, a bit of drinking company, and then, with a ‘some other time, perhaps’, you were on your way. That was one of the things Duffy liked about the Alligator. It wasn’t a hard raunch club; it wasn’t a place where people came Concording out of the closet in a splatter of supersonic bangs; it wasn’t a place for clones – the lumberjack shirt, the little tache, the logger’s jeans; it wasn’t a place for leather and chains and ‘Hang on, I’ll just go to the toilet and grease my fist’. It was a quiet, neat place for quiet, neat people like Duffy. It was even, he supposed, a bit middle-class.

  Which was why Eric struck Duffy as a slice of rough. The pushy manner, the double entendres – that was so out of date, all that stuff; as out of date as bottom-pinching. You may be gay, Duffy thought to himself, but that’s where you start from, not where you end up. Duffy wasn’t a prude, but he might have been a bit of a puritan. He wondered what sort of job Eric did; but he didn’t wonder hard enough to ask.