Fiddle City

by Dan Kavanagh

  ‘All I can say is, Mr Hendrick, you’re a very fair-minded man.’ And a fucking fool.

  He supposed he believed Hendrick. He thought he was pretty wet and pretty naïve; but he supposed he believed him. In a funny way, too, Duffy almost agreed with him. The public always thought, once a criminal, always a criminal; they also thought that once you’ve committed one crime, then it’s as if you’re in a great supermarket – you just pick any crime you fancy off the shelf. Duffy knew it didn’t work like that. Some crimes go with other crimes, some don’t. White-collar criminals, for instance: they usually stuck with white-collar crime (who wouldn’t, it was so lucrative). And arsonists, they were really odd buggers. Just liked committing arson, all the time; nothing but arson. Have a house burnt out and it’s no good rounding up the cosh men and the bank robbers; you have to find a nut with a box of matches, someone who used to like watching the fire engines go by as a kid, someone who’s probably quite timid and entirely law-abiding – except that he likes burning people to death.

  So, theft and assault? Well, there was a much closer connection there. But not a necessary connection. Sometimes you hit people to steal from them; sometimes you stole and then had to hit people to get away. But an awful lot of people liked hitting other people just for itself. They liked it. It made them feel good. And it stopped the person they hit from carrying on irritating them. Duffy understood that. If you were a Malaysian brought up over here, didn’t feel particularly Malaysian, just bloody looked it all the time, you’d get fed up after a few years of school with all the kids pulling slit eyes at you and talking in sing-song voices and aiming kung-fu kicks at you which might just occasionally land, and most of all pointing out all the time that there were more of them than there were of you, and that’s how it was always going to be, and that’s a nice biro, Chinky-Winky, I fink I’ll have that. Wouldn’t you fancy carving a few stitches into someone after a bit of that? And if you did, and had, it wouldn’t necessarily make you want to start nicking Italian sunglasses ten years later, would it?

  Hmmm. Duffy could see the Hendrick view, but at the same time it was a bit wet-panted, a bit sentimental. You could just as well argue the line that, if Tan knifed someone at school, then afterwards the kids would probably have treated him differently. Don’t tangle with the crazy Chink killer: the eye-pulling and the kung-fu kicks would have fallen off. Kids respect violence and madness – not wet, introverted madness, of course, but crazy, outgoing, killer-madness. No doubt Tan got an easier ride at school after the knife episode. And no doubt he could have concluded that crime, in its funny way, does pay. That would be just as logical, wouldn’t it? And the logic would continue with the idea: it pays even more if you don’t get caught. Duffy knew from experience how to read a criminal record. He did it as policemen always do: reading any acquittals as convictions, doubling up the number of convictions, seeing the guilty pleas for what they probably were – a way of getting off a heavier charge – and filling in between the recorded convictions all manner of other, undetected crimes.

  Duffy was letting his mind freewheel because of an acute shortage of facts. All he could do was play about with the few he had. He wouldn’t have minded a bedside chat to McKay, but that was far too risky; too many possible connections. Instead, he rang Carol and asked her to run half a dozen names through the computer. He wanted to check the record against what Hendrick had given him. As an afterthought he added another name – Hendrick’s. You never can tell.

  Carol didn’t want to do it. She didn’t like the way Duffy just used her as part of the service he offered clients. It was also strictly against police regulations. She could be fired on the spot. Duffy exaggerated the importance of the check, and she finally agreed. It wouldn’t, after all, be that risky; and he did need it for his work; and he was, really, in the same line of business as her.

  He also asked if she would lend him her car that evening; but she refused. He could have it the following evening, but not tonight. Duffy agreed, rang off, and imagined her down at the roller-disco with John Travolta, who was excuse-me’d in mid-shuffle by Robert Redford, who squired her off to an operatically candlelit dinner (why was she still wearing her uniform in his fantasy?) and then, later, back at his place, made her weep and croon with joy and delight. Meanwhile, Carol was thinking: well, I could have put off Auntie this one time, but you’ve got to have some principles with men; especially with Duffy.

  At work, on the Monday, there was a tricky thing to be done. Gleeson. Duffy hoped he wouldn’t balls it up. It was a question of getting the right manner as much as anything. It was also a question of not bringing it up too soon, so that they had a little sweat about what might have happened; but also not leaving it too long, so that they thought nothing at all had happened. Duffy spent some of the day wondering whether Malaysians needed sunglasses in the English climate; and then, about mid-afternoon, he thought he’d better do it now before he’d thought about it too many times. He spotted Gleeson, clipboard in hand, checking some cases and wandered casually over to him.

  ‘Can you give me a hand with my car?’

  Gleeson didn’t look up, and went on checking his list.

  ‘It’s parked in the wrong place.’

  Gleeson ignored him.

  ‘It’s parked in the wrong place.’

  Still Gleeson ignored him. He pursed his lips over the clipboard and the mutton-chops shifted forwards.

  ‘It’s parked in the wrong place.’

  ‘Fuck off, Duffy,’ said Gleeson in a quiet, seemingly friendly tone.

  If you couldn’t get him to come outside, you’d have to say it here. Or you could try something different, to stop him telling you to fuck off. In almost an undertone Duffy said,

  ‘I take it you were wearing gloves, Gleeson, because I certainly was.’

  Then he wandered slowly away, out through the double doors and round to the car park. A minute later they were standing side by side peering into the engine of Duffy’s van. Gleeson’s mere presence told Duffy something extra: that he hadn’t been wearing gloves.

  ‘Now, what about Friday?’

  ‘What about Friday?’

  ‘The stuff in my car.’

  ‘What stuff?’

  ‘The calculators.’

  ‘What calculators?’ Christ, it was like an English lesson for foreign students; repeat everything I say but turn it into a question.

  ‘There were calculators in my car on Friday.’

  ‘You been nicking calculators, mate? Better watch I don’t report you.’

  ‘You put six calculators in my car on Friday.’

  ‘Now why would I do a thing like that? ’Snot your cowing birthday or anything is it?’

  ‘And quite by chance I was stopped by a random check at the gate.’

  ‘Very good, the security round here. Tight as oats.’

  ‘You borrowed my car keys on Friday.’

  ‘Did I, mate? Expect I wanted to move your car or something.’

  ‘You didn’t move my car.’

  ‘Then why would I want to borrow your keys? Be logical, mate.’

  Duffy felt he wasn’t quite on top of the argument. ‘Why did you come out here as soon as I mentioned wearing gloves?’

  ‘Is that what you were saying? I could hear you muttering something. I thought you wanted a hand with your car. That’s why I came out. Now you start telling me you’ve been nicking calculators. I think maybe this job’s getting too much for you, Duffy.’ Gleeson smiled in a friendly way; he knew how to look friendly as long as he didn’t mean it. The only thing to do was to change course.

  ‘O.K., let’s start the conversation again. Let’s pretend the car’s fixed. Let’s pretend you moved it on Friday. Let’s pretend I don’t somewhere have a package which might or might not have someone’s fingerprints on it.’ (Not that that would prove anything, Duffy realised.) ‘Let’s pretend I wasn’t given a shakedown at the gate on Friday, and that in any case if I was, it was completely random. O.
K.?’

  ‘I think this job’s getting too much for you.’ Duffy kept doggedly on.

  ‘So we’re starting now instead. I need this job, Gleeson. I don’t like it any more than any other job, but I need it. It’s not a good time not to have a job. Now, I don’t mind the fact that you give me shitty things to do, and make me move packing cases which you and I know fucking well don’t have to be moved. I don’t mind the fact that you give me a shitty corner of the shed to stand around in. I don’t want to join in your card games because I don’t play cards. I don’t even care why you don’t want me to work here; that’s your business. All I’m telling you is I’m working here, and I’m fucking going on working here, and you can bleeding well get used to it. And if you try and fuck me around, then I’ll fucking fuck you around, I can promise you that.’

  Duffy hoped the way he veered from pathos to aggression, and then to manic insistence, would have some effect. The trouble was, he didn’t really have any threats in his locker. ‘Or I’ll let your tyres down … ’ ‘Or I’ll stamp on your shoelaces … ’ – that was what it sounded like to him. He just hoped it sounded more convincing to Gleeson; he hoped the existence and current location of the calculators might give him just a little leverage. All he could do would be to hang on, keep his head down and watch out for people trying to fuck him up.

  At least Gleeson was looking serious as they walked back to the shed. His bushy eyebrows were pushing together in thought. As they came through the double doors he turned confidentially to Duffy.

  ‘By the way, I shouldn’t nick any more of them calculators, Duffy. I mean, you can’t work more than one at a time, can you?’

  As Duffy got on with his work he reflected that this conversation, necessary as it had been, would also have the unwanted effect of freezing things. Gleeson (assuming that it was just Gleeson, or ‘they’ if there were a ‘they’) would know that Duffy would be on the lookout for being fucked up, for having a dead cat stuffed up his exhaust pipe, or whatever. He’d be watching them (assuming ‘them’), and they’d be watching him. They might try and fuck him up; they’d most probably just leave him alone in his dunce’s corner; what they certainly wouldn’t do would be to follow up the fifty quid in the locker (assuming, of course, that this is what the money was about in the first place; on the other hand, maybe it was just a bit of preliminary bait so that he’d accept the calculators). Whichever way, Duffy realised that he was going to be hard pushed to get a break from this end of things. He’d just have to see if his out-of-hours legwork turned up anything.

  So began an extremely boring fortnight for Duffy. Every other day he phoned the third breakers’ yard, but they never replied. He borrowed Carol’s rusting Mini on the nights it was available, and each evening tailed one of four people; Gleeson, Tan, Casey and Mrs Boseley. That’s to say, he drove his van round to Carol’s, picked up the Mini, drove to one of the addresses he’d listed in his notebook, and sat around waiting for something to happen. It wasn’t much good as a technique for getting to know their routines; it was, in fact, only just marginally more useful than staying at home and pulling his wire; but at least he felt, as his bum grew more numb by the hour, as if he was more or less earning his money.

  The flaw in the schedule, of course, was that by the time he got into position outside where they lived, they’d often gone out for the evening already. Casey, for instance, seemed to turn round after work in just a few minutes – a quick rinse with Listerine was probably his idea of slipping into something loose. Two evenings were spent fruitlessly outside Casey’s squat in Heston before Duffy realised that he had already gone out and was probably exercising his specially tattooed courting finger in some cinema car park. The third evening Duffy took a risk and followed him straight from work in his van. That evening, of course, Casey decided to stay in. The next day he asked Duffy over double pie and beans,

  ‘Seeya figh’ last nigh’?’

  Duffy regretted that he hadn’t; Casey assured him it had been a figh’ inna million.

  With Gleeson he had to sit outside a large semi in Uxbridge; there was a Mrs Gleeson and, by the sound of it, a baby Gleeson. Maybe this explained why they didn’t go out much. At least, they didn’t go out on the nights Duffy chose. The only thing that slightly surprised him was the two cars shunted up against each other on the small concrete parking space: the Viva which Gleeson came to work in, and a big Granada, V-registration. Maybe Mrs Gleeson had private means.

  Tan was a bit more interesting. He lived with his family on the edge of Southall. He went out most evenings with his girlfriend – though, fortunately for Duffy, not before he’d had a good Malaysian meal with his parents first. Duffy imagined this meal while munching a pork pie and driving as fast as he could from Carol’s flat back to Southall. If he hurried he’d get there in time to follow Tan taking his girlfriend to a cinema, or to the pub, or once, for a walk in the park.

  Mrs Boseley lived in Rayners Lane, which was marginally more convenient for Duffy – out along the Western Avenue and then cut through. She seemed to like watering her front garden in the evenings, which meant that Duffy had to park some way off. The other thing she seemed to enjoy was having friendly chats with her neighbours. It didn’t seem very much to report back to Hendrick about.

  This routine was heavy on petrol. It was also heavy on Duffy’s patience. Nine nights of it on the trot and he couldn’t stand any more. He gave himself the evening off and went down the Gemini Club. This was where he trawled when the Alligator was feeling a bit stale, when he was tired of the same old faces sipping vermouth, when he wanted a bit more of the unexpected, a bit more of the chase. It wasn’t rough at the Gemini, but it was a bit more competitive. You had to work for your trade down there, spend a bit more; but the merchandise was a lot more varied. Duffy had a very nice Swede snaffled from under his nose (it was a members’ club, but foreigners were allowed in on presentation of their passports); he got home eventually with a shy publishing trainee who flirted quite hard, got Duffy to buy him too many drinks, told him in the van that he’d never done anything like this before (Duffy didn’t believe him, but assured him it wouldn’t hurt), and then got scratchy about leaving his watch in the Tupperware box. He walked around the flat, naked and drunk, with his watch still on, exclaiming, ‘But I want to time us, I want to time us.’ Eventually, when Duffy expressed impatience, the guy pulled a long face, trudged obediently to the bathroom, dropped his watch in the box and was promptly sick into it as well. As Duffy was rinsing the sick off the watch and listening to the snores from the settee, he vowed his loyalty to the Alligator once more.

  The next night but one something happened. Mrs Boseley went to town. At 8.30 she came out of her front door and gave Duffy a shock. She didn’t have a watering can in her hand; she didn’t look around for a neighbour to chat to; she walked straight to her car and drove off. What’s more, she had put her hair down.

  She was a confident driver, but he followed her without much difficulty into the West End. She clearly knew her way around; Duffy knew his even better. Three years as a detective-sergeant in Soho and he still remembered every alleyway, every one-way street, and most of the possible crimes. Mrs Boseley parked in Great Marlborough Street; he drove past her, stopped thirty yards on, and watched in his wing mirror as she got out and locked the car. He tailed her down Poland Street, along Broadwick Street, a left and a right, and then she suddenly disappeared into a club. He stood around some twenty yards short of the entrance for a few minutes, then crossed the street and strolled slowly along the pavement on the other side.

  Dude’s, it was called, and even from across the street it didn’t look the sort of place which Mrs Boseley would know about – not the Mrs Boseley he’d met anyway. There was a maroon awning over the entrance with ‘Dude’s’ written on it in three-foot-high copper-plate handwriting. There were velvet curtains in the windows, held back with lace ties; but though the curtains were drawn back, you couldn’t see through the window because
there were shutters as well on the inside, and these were closed. To work out what it might be like you had to consult the large display cases on either side of the entrance, which contained big colour transparencies lit from behind.

  Duffy crossed the road and quickly took them in. There was a picture of a curving bar with lots of stools, none of them occupied; there was a picture of what might have been a dining area, showing various booths with waist-high slatted swing doors. There were also two pictures of very pretty girls, one dark and one blonde, each with bare shoulders. At the top of the display box on the left Duffy read: ‘DUDE’S – WHERE GENTLEMEN RELAX’; at the top of the right-hand box he read: ‘DUDE’S – FOR THE BEST IN COMPANY’.

  He walked on, and took up a station some thirty yards beyond the club entrance. After about an hour Mrs Boseley emerged, and without a glance began to walk swiftly back towards her car. Duffy tailed her for long enough to guess with safety that she was going home; then he turned off, drove the Mini back to Carol’s place and swapped cars. He pushed the keys through the door; Carol had insisted on that. As he drove off, Duffy stared balefully at the cars parked nearby. Wasn’t that one Paul Newman’s?

  At work the next day he found himself occasionally looking down the shed to Mrs Boseley’s glass eyrie. Well, well, well, he thought. The regular, reliable job, the little house in Rayners Lane, the watering can, the husband in the iron lung – and suddenly, hair down and off to the tacky club. What did it mean; what did it mean? Was she turning the odd trick on the side to help with her husband’s medical expenses? If so, would it be worth it, driving all the way into town for just an hour? You’d have to do something incredibly filthy to make it worth your while, Duffy thought. And when she came out, she didn’t look as if she’d just done something incredibly filthy.

  Maybe there was an entirely innocent explanation. There never was, in Duffy’s experience; but try. Maybe her brother worked there; or something like an illegitimate daughter. Did you visit your illegitimate daughter at work? And why did she put her hair down? She looked, Duffy had to admit it, better with her hair down, less frosty. Almost like someone who wasn’t nasty.