The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 7

by Maxim Jakubowski

  I nodded.

  “The defendant will answer the question,” the judge ordered.

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s just coincidence.”

  “And when was the last occasion you had a memory wipe before this?” Miles Dawson demanded. He was smiling.

  “Three weeks earlier.”

  That was true and the police had already checked. In the last five years I’d had seventy-three memory wipes. Jack Cogan made the bank double-check the figure, and when they told him it was correct, he went to the clinic himself to check it was true.

  “But why?” He’d asked me.

  “Because I get bored.”

  “And memory wipes stop you getting bored?”

  “No,” I said. “They stop me remembering what’s bored me.”

  He’d sighed, offered me a coffee and muttered that he was sorry. We both knew what he meant. Jack Cogan was sorry he had to hand me over to the enforcers. He was sorry he couldn’t fix the jury. He was sorry he couldn’t have the machine-guns that would kill me loaded with blanks and give me an exploding vest.

  It wouldn’t be the first time that happened.

  When Mr Dalkin kept pushing the memory wipe angle, I told him how many I’d had in the last five years and suggested he confirm this with the police. He decided to move on to other matters after that.

  “What you’re going to see,” he told the jury, “is horrific. If I could spare you this, I would. If the man in the dock had any decency . . .” The little man paused to glare at me. “He would spare you having to see this by pleading guilty. But then, if he had any decency he wouldn’t have done what you’re about to see.”

  The lights went down, the shutters were closed, and a screen on a side wall began to flicker and then clear as the clerk of the court played back the house security tape from that night. At first none of us could see anything. We were looking at the wrought-iron gates to a mansion and we were looking at them from inside. From a camera just above the front door to judge from the angle of the picture onscreen.

  I hadn’t seen this section of tape before. I’d seen shots of the body, close-ups of the bullet wound meant to make me confess out of horror for what I had done. But everything I’d seen began with the corridor outside the boss’s study. This was outside the house itself, and at the moment the killer was a shadow outside the gate.

  He limped up to the gate, slapped his hand on the lock and blinked as a flash of light read his palm and lit up his face. A hundred people, maybe 150 filled the court, and all of them turned to stare at me.

  A click announced the gate had unlocked and a shuffle of gravel could be heard as the killer made his way towards the front steps. An automated machine-gun bolted to a gatepost followed him and a tiny gun satellite dropped into view, skimmed once around his head and then slipped away.

  As the killer approached the front door, it clicked open for him. “Welcome,” said the house AI.

  The killer nodded absent-mindedly.

  In the light from the hallway, his face could be seen more clearly than ever. It was my face. His hair was dirty and his face unshaven. A tatty overcoat hid a shoulder holster that became visible as he turned towards the stairs and his coat swung open slightly.

  He checked his watch.

  And the entire court glanced at my wrist. I wondered why the guards had given me back my Omega before letting me into court, and now I knew. The heavy black ring around the dial and the fat metal links of its strap were unmistakable.

  He took the steps clumsily, obviously troubled by his bad leg. All the same, he knew where he was going and that, in itself, was significant. On the landing, he looked once into a mirror to adjust his hair slightly, brushing it out of his eyes. Then he pulled a Colt from its holster and dropped out the clip, skimmed his eye down the clip to check it was fully loaded and slipped it back into the gun, flicking the safety catch and jacking the slide.

  After which, he extracted a silencer from his side pocket and began to screw it on to the muzzle of the gun. Something made him change his mind, because he shrugged, in exactly the way I shrug, unscrewed the silencer and dropped it back into his pocket. A few seconds later he was in the corridor and approaching the door.

  As we watched the screen froze.

  “What did you say to him?” demanded the defence attorney. “In those three minutes when he was staring death in the face. Did you mock him? Tell him he had it coming?”

  “It wasn’t me.”

  But I knew all the things I would have wanted to say.

  In the old days when you talked to yourself it was inside your own head. These days . . .? One of me was dead, the other stood here. I had no idea who the third man was because I’d only ever had myself cloned once and look at the trouble that got me into.

  At a nod from Mr Dalkin, the screen came back to life and I watched myself step out of the door and shut it behind me. I was smiling. It was a self-satisfied smile.

  “Notice the complete lack of remorse,” Mr Dalkin demanded, turning to the jury. Obediently, they did exactly as told. A bunch of sheep the lot of them, although I was the lamb to their slaughter.

  Whatever glamour my defence attorney once had was reduced to a tired-looking flower in her buttonhole. The rest of her was a washed-out ghost in a cheap black dress. She was court appointed, which tells you all you need to know. And the entire court – including the judge – had decided that I was guilty as sin long before she even stood up to defend the indefensible.

  When I smiled at her, she looked away.

  I’d been wondering what defence she’d been planning to use. Insanity, drunkenness, unhappy childhood. We could have used any of those. But someone would have had to talk to me first to extract some facts and no one had bothered.

  She fell back on dramatics.

  “Tell me,” she said, flinging out one arm. “Can a man really stand trial for murdering himself?”

  The prosecutor was out of his seat and hopping up and down before my counsel had drawn breath to begin her next sentence. He needn’t have bothered. The judge announced that yes, a man could.

  Mr Dalkin sat down.

  My counsel looked around her, noticed the number of cameras and the size of the crowd and decided she had to do more than just stand there opening and shutting her mouth. “This man,” she said, pointing at me. “Used to be a gang boss. Until he was sued by his own clone. For reckless endangerment. Sued successfully.”

  I was sure the jury got that bit.

  Because I was the man standing in the dock wearing a tatty jacket and being defended by her. And they’d buried the other me in a new silk suit and smothered his grave in enough orchids to fill a rainforest.

  She made half a dozen mistakes in my life story but no one bothered to correct her, including me. The basics were there. Gang boss discovers he’s due to be hit and grows clone to take the bullet instead. Clone stops off on his way to the hit, calls the police, the media and a lawyer he gets from a small ad in the back of that day’s paper. The police and the lawyer could have been handled. The police, the lawyer and the media was one problem too many. Particularly as it was the out-of-state media my clone called.

  The assassin was arrested.

  I was sued by my clone. As my defence counsel said, successfully.

  He took everything. The house, control of the gang, my bank accounts, my contacts book and a web of connections I’d spent most of my life building up. A dozen gangs had rolled over in the time I was boss; moving me up the ranks towards being boss of bosses. All the gangs got their autonomy back. Mostly it was the previous boss who simply stepped back into his old shoes. Sometimes his son, where an old boss had died in mysterious circumstances. Once it was the grandson; but that was the Lucianos and they were notoriously unlucky.

  The map of the city went back to where it was before I came in. Jack Cogan kept me alive. That is, he let it be known he’d not been bought off or intimidated if anything happened to me and the best way to make sure nothing b
ad happened was keep me alive. I don’t doubt I owe him. Equally, I don’t doubt that at some point, he’d intended to collect.

  Sighing deeply, my counsel retook her seat.

  Whatever she’d been saying, it didn’t look like the jury were convinced. A couple were even shaking their heads, as if they didn’t know why she’d wasted her time trying to defend me in the first place. Only Jack Cogan was looking at me.

  He nodded at the screen.

  Then he glanced at his watch. When I shrugged, he did it again.

  Maybe he had an appointment? A whore and a bottle of whisky waiting for him in some police apartment somewhere? I hoped so, one of us deserved to enjoy his afternoon and it didn’t look like it was going to be me. Although there was probably someone out there sick enough to look forward to a couple of dozen machine-gun slugs to the chest. There are some sick people in this city.

  And then, and this was weird, Jack Cogan stood up from his table and limped towards the restroom. Now Jack doesn’t have a limp. I do, courtesy of whatever happened in those lost three days.

  His leg was fine when he walked back to his seat.

  It was my turn to speak. At least I assumed it was, from the way everyone was staring at me when I looked up from the dock.

  “Well,” said the judge. “Do you have anything to say before I pass sentence?”

  By this point Jack Cogan was almost purple with . . . It was hard to tell with what. I’ve only ever seen Jack with three expressions; angry, more angry, and angrier still, and all of these involved scowling. Now he looked almost anxious.

  “Well?” the judge demanded.

  “Yes,” I said. “Can I see that tape again?”

  You could tell from the judge’s expression that he just thought I was digging myself into a deeper hole. The sneer on his face said he had no problems with me doing just that. As for Mr Dalkin, he was nodding like a toy dog before the judge even turned to him.

  “No objections,” he said.

  As for Jack Cogan, he was looking relieved. Which told me what I needed to know. At least, it told me I was meant to know something, and that something was on this tape. So I watched the killer walk to the gate, slap his hand on the palm reader and listen to the gate click open.

  “Sir,” I said. “Can I see that again. . .?”

  The judge sighed, but he let the clerk of the court rerun the sequence. As the killer tapped his hand to the plate, I tapped mine to the bulletproof glass in front of me, trying to mimic his movements.

  He limped across the gravel, and he’d almost reached the front door before I realized the obvious. A glance round the court told me no one else had noticed it. So I kept silent as the front door opened itself and the killer made his way upstairs and along the corridor. I watched him drop his clip from the gun, check his watch, and decide against using a silencer.

  We heard the shot and watched the man make his way back to the front door, shut it behind him and let himself through the gates, vanishing into the darkness beyond.

  “And the tape stops after that?”

  The prosecution lawyer looked up sharply, and the judge looked at the chief of police, who nodded reluctantly. My defence looked blank. No one had bothered to tell her. Why would they? And for the amount she was being paid, she hadn’t bothered to ask. “How long for?”

  “Mr O’Brian?” The judge was staring at the police chief.

  “An hour, your honour.”

  “And when the tape comes back on?”

  Judges are not meant to ask questions like that. They’re meant to leave it to the lawyers. But this was Judge Mallory’s court and he’d obviously decided he was going to do what he wanted.

  “Nothing, sir. It’s all silent.”

  “How did you know?” Judge Mallory demanded. He was talking to me this time. “And what relevance does it have?”

  “That’s not me on film,” I told him. “That’s the clone.”

  Uproar filled the court. It was a big room and its ceiling was high and its walls were panelled in oak that muffled speech so effectively the main players were mic’d for sound. All the same, the noise of the crowd echoed off those oak walls and I watched at least a dozen sound men wince before turning down their dials.

  “He’s wearing his watch on the wrong wrist.”

  “You could have done that,” shouted the prosecution lawyer. “You did do it. A cheap attempt to establish an alibi.”

  “And his hair’s parted on the wrong side.”

  “Once again . . .”

  The judge waved the prosecution into silence. “Anything else?” he demanded, smiling sourly.

  “He’s limping on the wrong side.”

  “Run the bloody tape again,” the judge told his clerk.

  So the clerk did, and then the judge made me limp across the courtroom while everyone watched. He checked that my hair did indeed part on the other side, that I habitually wore my watch on a different wrist. He asked who could confirm this and Jack Cogan put up his hand.

  “And the limp?”

  “Recent,” said the captain. “We had it examined. A cracked kneecap. It looks like a fall downstairs.”

  “In your opinion,” the judge said. “How do you read what we’ve got here?”

  Jack glanced towards the chief of police.

  “I’m over here,” the judge told Jack.

  “Sorry, sir.”

  The judge grunted. “So,” he said. “Talk me through what you think we’ve got. That is if your chief has no objections.”

  Chief O’Brian scowled.

  “The clone used a photograph of the defendant to perfect his disguise. Only he dressed himself in the mirror and forgot to allow for things like the watch being on the opposite side. So when he came to faking the limp . . .”

  “He dragged the wrong foot.”

  Jack Cogan nodded. “Yes, sir. That’s my reading.”

  “But he got through the gate and the front door and none of the weapons targeted him. That means . . .”

  “He shared DNA with the man in the dock.”

  “I know what it means,” the judge said sharply. “You need to find out if there’s a second clone.”

  There wasn’t, and no one could come up with a reason why the first clone should want to commit suicide or decide to take me with him when he did. The next time I saw Jack Cogan he had gold braid on his uniform and arrived at the restaurant in a bulletproof sedan with police stencilled discreetly on the side. A driver so young he was barely out of diapers rushed to open the door.

  “Chief,” I said.

  “Mr Capone . . .”

  We shook hands while his driver took up position beside the restaurant’s front door and my bodyguards went round to protect the back. I owned the place and had chosen its staff myself. That was a while ago. All of them had since assured me, hand on heart, that they were delighted to see me back.

  “The usual?” I asked Chief Cogan.

  He nodded, unfolding his napkin and tucking one corner into his collar. In the three weeks since the court case his chest had lost its epic battle with his girth and resigned itself to losing. We ate squid, the little ones dropped into batter and dusted with paprika. Then we ate linguine and clams and washed it down with a bottle from my own vineyard in California. And then we ate whatever those little cakes are that are doused in rum and rolled in sugar.

  “You had me scared,” he said, when coffee finally arrived.

  I waited for him to explain.

  “Al . . .” he said. “You had me scared. I thought you’d forgotten the plan and the man was about to send you down.” He sat back and huffed like a horse. “Guess that’s why I’m me and you’re you. I don’t have that kind of nerves.”

  He ate the sweet biscuit I passed him and reached into his pocket for a folded piece of paper. I let him reach. The chief had been searched long before he came into my presence.

  “Thought you’d like to see this,” he said.

  It was a note from the city co
roner. Three mob bosses had died by falling to their deaths from three different windows. The two goons who beat me up on arrest had saved everyone the trouble and shot themselves the afternoon the trial ended. The old chief of police was still alive, but he’d decided to leave town.

  “You know where he’s gone?” I asked.

  Chief Cogan nodded.

  “Good, then let it be known it wouldn’t be good for his health to come back. Anything else?”

  “Usual stuff,” he said. “Clubs wanting licences, drive-bys in the ghetto and an unlicensed pimp trying to take over three blocks in the east city.” He dumped his notes in front of me and listened intently as I told him what I wanted done in each case.

  “You clear on that?”

  “Sure thing,” he said. “Completely clear.”

  So I glanced at my famous watch to show it was okay if he wanted to take his stomach somewhere else now. In fact, it would be good, because I had stuff to oversee. And Jack Cogan took the hint and pushed back his chair, dipping forward at the last minute to grab a chunk of bread that had been hiding in a basket under a napkin. After stopping to butter it, he nodded apologetically and headed for the exit.

  At the door, he turned back. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Who knows? I might even answer.”

  “That night you came by my house and told me to smash your right knee. I thought you’d lost it.” Chief Cogan shook his head at the memory. “But you had it planned, didn’t you? Right from the start. All that getting drunk and being thrown out of bars. All those memory wipes. You were setting it up, so no one could say you’d had your memory wiped only the one time it mattered. After . . . after . . .”

  “The other Mr Capone shot himself?”

  “Yeah,” said the Chief, wiping sweat from his forehead. “After that.”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  Jack Cogan grinned. He knew that was all he was going to get. The Chief let himself out and left me wondering. Maybe I had set it all up that carefully. Left myself little notes on the earlier occasions. Worked it all out down to the last memory wipe, wrong parting, misworn watch and shuffle of the wrong foot.