by J. S. Mahon
Two Crime Novelettes
The Revenge of Darian Devlin
A Singular Murder
- My Grandfather’s Secret Crime
J.S. Mahon
Text copyright ©2015 J.S.Mahon
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
The Revenge of Darian Devlin
1
Since the end of winter I’d been parking on a quiet street at the edge of town and strolling in to the office. It was the ten minute walk back after work that I enjoyed most – just long enough to clear my head of the bullshit and lies that I’d been listening to all day long. One fine Tuesday afternoon in late April I got back to find a flat tyre and it was lucky that I’d bought one of those electric inflators or I’d have had to root around for the jack. That’s typical of the useless rabble who I deal with, I thought after pumping it up and listening for any hissing, that the bastard who did it hadn’t the nerve to do the job properly.
I was sure, you see, that it was one of them; one of what we call our ‘customers’ (what a laugh) who was upset about me stopping his money. Some of my soft colleagues say that’s the worst thing about the job, having to sanction so many people’s benefits every month, but for me it’s one of the main perks. I love seeing their stupid faces when I tell them that for one reason or another they’ll not be getting paid for a fortnight, a month, or, best of all, three months and waiting to see their reaction. Most of them just go pale and walk off, but others burst into tears or start shouting at me. Either way I get security to see them out and, if they’re a shouter, I normally report them for threatening behaviour so that they’ll get their money stopped for even longer.
The wife thinks I’m a bit of a sadist when I tell her about my day’s victims over dinner, but she knows that it’s my job that’s been bringing in the steady money for over twenty years so she tends to humour me. She says that perhaps if I were a bit more diplomatic I might get promoted, but being the most feared adviser in town – for miles around, in fact – is worth more than money to me. She once pointed out that if I ever got made supervisor I’d be able to boss my colleagues around too, which was food for thought, but with the number of complaints that I’ve had – probably hundreds over the years – I’m not exactly my manager’s pet. She can’t touch me though, the frigid old bag, because I always play it by the book, just about.
Anyway, the flat tyre got me thinking about which of my customers it might’ve been. They’d had their fun and let off a bit of steam, or air, and now I was going to have mine. The next day I parked in the same place – no dole dosser was going to intimidate me – and as soon as I got to my desk I started thinking about possible suspects. That morning I just made everyone sign on and sod off double quick so that I’d have time to compile my list and by lunchtime I’d jotted down six suspects; five blokes and one mad cow who might just have done it, though I doubted she had the brains to find out where I parked.
Brains, though not many, and patience is what they would’ve needed to have trailed me back to the car at some point, and by home time I’d whittled my list down to just three: Peter B., Malcolm D. and Afzal K. They’d all yelled at me in the past and I even thought that Peter B. was going to take a swipe at me once, which would’ve been fine by me as with my judo skills, though now a bit rusty, I’d have had him pinned to the floor with his arm straining at the socket before he’d known what’d hit him, the skinny old git. There have been plenty more shouters over the years, and quite a few repeat performers, but those three stuck in my mind because their little tantrums were all quite recent and I’d been able to feel their hatred and frustration ever since, something that made me look forward to seeing them every fortnight.
When I got home I told my wife about the flat tyre and she said I should start parking in the job centre car park, where there are cameras.
“What, and give them the satisfaction of doing me out of my little stroll? Not likely, and this doesn’t end here, oh no, because I’m going to find out who did it and make their life a bloody misery,” I said. I know I said that because she’s reminded me of it often enough since then.
I’ve always tried to switch off from work after dinner, but that evening I kept thinking about my list and what I was going to do about it. I’d be seeing all three of them before the end of the week and I thought about how best to mention the incident and look for signs of guilt. Not being one to beat about the bush I decided to take a direct approach.
“Let’s have a look at your job book then, Afzal,” I said the next morning.
“I’ve found quite a few this week, Darian,” said the big oaf, his muscles rippling under his shiny t-shirt as he fished about in his bag for the booklet; muscles, I might add, that he’d built up in the gym during his endless hours of leisure. At least he’s learnt to be nice to me now, I thought, while I looked through the jobs that he’d applied for.
“This warehouse job here starts at six,” I said. “There are no buses at that time. Do you drive?”
“Yea, but my car’s off the road just now. Can’t afford the insurance.”
“Hmm, never mind. Cars can be a pain, anyway. I got back to find a flat tyre after work yesterday,” I said, looking at him far more intently than the comment warranted.
“Oh, bad luck, boss. You get the spare on OK?”
“Didn’t need it. Someone had let it down.”
“What? In the car park?”
“No, I parked on a street and walked in,” I said, casually, but still looking straight into his eyes.
“You’re better off in the car park, with all the scumbags in this town,” he said, apparently excluding himself from a category to which I thought he firmly belonged.
“No, I like my little walks,” I said. “See you in a fortnight.”
Although he’d said the right things and kept his cool, I didn’t eliminate him from my list because anyone so young and fit who can stay out of work for so long has to have a bit of cunning. You have to remember that these days with their dole money, housing benefit and not having to pay council tax, if they can earn fifty or sixty quid on the side every week they’re as well off as someone working full-time in an unskilled job. That one probably helped out in the gym or sold steroids to top up his money and it was people like him that I was really out to get.
Though, as I said, I’ve never applied for promotion, I have tried to get myself moved onto the benefit fraud team a few times, but without any luck. That really would be my dream job; lying in wait for the robbing bastards to catch them working and then having a nice day in court watching them get sent down. I got to the interview stage once, but I was told afterwards that I seemed just a little bit too keen about the whole thing for the panel’s liking – a set of gutless pen pushers if ever I saw one.
I saw Malcolm D. on the Thursday afternoon and although I knew the big fat drunk didn’t drive, I asked him all the same.
“No, never got me licence,” he said.
I looked into his bloodshot eyes and gave him the puncture spiel just the same. He didn’t react half as calmly as Afzal K., but he might have been genuinely surprised by my story and accusing looks, and the fact that his hands were a bit shaky was nothing new. He knew only too well that if I caught so much as a whiff of booze on him he’d be out of pocket for a month, so the days he came to see me he had to put off his first can of gut-rot cider or whatever he drank until afterwards. That’s why I al
ways scheduled his appointment in the afternoon, the later the better, to make him suffer. In that condition he was hardly capable of tying his shoelaces, but when he was tanked up – which he was when he yelled at me for stopping his money for a month (three after the yelling) he looked like he’d murder his mother for a bottle of whisky. After umming and ahhing about his job search booklet for a while just to torment him, I sent him on his way to the off licence and thought him neither more or less a suspect than before.
By the time I saw Peter B. on Friday morning he’d risen to number one spot on my list and I greeted him more cheerfully than I’d ever done before.
“Hi, Peter. How’s it going? I’ll just have a quick look at your booklet and you can be off.”
He slid it across the desk towards me and eyed me warily. Of my three suspects Peter was the one who had worked the most, as a welder, but now in his late fifties and with eyesight problems the most he got was a few weeks’ temporary work now and then. I knew that he still ran a car but I thought he managed it through thriftiness rather than foul play. He’s a very upright type, this Peter, and embittered by the fact that no-one will give him a decent job. The first time I stopped his money, just for a week, was because I’d had a fruitless day and wanted to keep up my figures, so I picked up on the fact that he’d applied for a job that he couldn’t do – a maintenance engineer I think it was – and sanctioned him.
Rather than the white face and muttering that I’d expected he turned bright red and looked as though he was going to explode. He was so angry that he couldn’t speak and when he did finally manage to get something out it was just, ‘But why?’ in a seething voice. Then I put on my best poker face to hide the delight I felt as I explained the seriousness of his offence, as if applying for a maintenance engineer’s job was tantamount to impersonating a police officer. I had to try very hard not to laugh that day and when he finally trudged out he looked ten years older than when he’d come in.
Anyhow, I opened his booklet and went through the jobs one by one, nodding and smiling as I did so, until I came to one that provoked my sternest frown – ‘The frown that launched a thousand sanctions,’ I’d said to Helen, my wife, one evening, although I found it funnier than she did.
“Hmm, this job here is a long way away,” I said, tapping the offending words with my pen. “Will you be able to get there?”
“Yes, it’s only about an hour in the car,” he said, the blood already rising to his craggy face.
“It’ll cost a lot in petrol.”
“A job’s a job,” he said with a shrug and an attempt at a smile.
“It’s about seventy miles a day, though. Is your car reliable?” I asked, getting into my Spanish Inquisition mode.
“It’s old, but I service it properly.”
“Tyres all right?” I asked, looking through his thick glasses into his watery eyes.
“They’re good for a few thousand miles yet,” he said without a flicker.
“Mine are almost new but I still got a flat the other day.”
“Bad luck,” he said, looking at my pen and willing me to offer it to him.
“All right then. Sign here.”
His fortnightly ordeal over, he gave me a curt nod and stood up. “I’m trying my best to get a job you know, Darian,” he said, his sincerity warming my generous heart.
“I know, Peter, I know. See you later,” I said with a benign smile. The poor sap’s relief showed in his walk as he strode across the carpet to the doors and he’d probably be happy for a week or so until he started counting down the days to his next signing. He thought he was in my good books now, so the next time I stopped his money the blow would come all the harder. My job makes me feel like God sometimes but as I don’t believe in religion I’ve no fear of ending up in the other place when I snuff it.
The next person I saw, a complete waster in a hooded jacket, couldn’t believe his luck when I gave him the pen before he’d even sat down and shooed him away so I could have ten minutes to myself. I’m a bit perverse that way, you see, as I please myself how I treat them. I let some of them get away with murder just for the hell of it and then come down like a ton of bricks on the most unsuspecting people.
A couple of years ago, after an especially productive month spent saving taxpayers’ money, I was hauled up before the senior manager and told that I’d been accused of picking on the most vulnerable people. I strongly denied it and asked him who on earth could have suggested such a thing, because I knew that only the intervention of a so-called colleague could have landed me in the hot seat. He wouldn’t say, of course, and after I’d pointed out to him all the ex-cons and general nutcases who I’d also sanctioned he had to admit that my playing field was a fairly level one. He also knew that I was a staunch union man and not averse to kicking up a fuss to defend my good self.
“Just ease off a bit, Darian,” he’d said when he was seeing me out, so I did, for a while.
So, after my meeting with Peter B. he was back in third place on my list, though he was still very much on it because after making his life hell for over a year I couldn’t rule him out on the strength of his good reaction to my tyre talk. On reflection I realised that all three of them were clever enough to have steeled themselves for some kind of interrogation and I spent my lunch break thinking about possible additions to my list. I decided to add Sandra C., the loopy woman I mentioned earlier, because although she’s as thick as they come, I’d certainly given her reason enough to hate me. When I got back to my car that afternoon and found ‘JOB CENTRE TYRANT’ scratched deeply into the bonnet I ruled her out again. I knew that her writing skills just weren’t up to it.
2
Letting Darian Devlin’s tyre down was just a whim. I knew where he normally parked and as I was passing nearby one afternoon, on my way to the doctor’s, I nipped up the narrow street and saw his car in the usual spot. I was going to scratch it with my key, but I thought that was a bit much so, seeing there was nobody around, I decided just to let a tyre down instead. I enjoyed watching the wheel rim sink to the ground as the tyre splayed out and I thought it was the very least he deserved. I’d never liked him, but just lately that dislike had turned into an intense loathing that had to find some means of escape. The great bully needed teaching a lesson and I hoped that my gesture, because it was little more than that, might just shake the aura of invincibility that the rotten bugger carried around with him.
It’s funny, but after seeing him that week and finding him just as hateful as ever, rather than feeling pleased about the inconvenience I’d caused him, I felt an urge to take things a step further. I mean, what’s a flat tyre? A big bloke like that would have had no problem changing the wheel and when he found that it had just been let down he probably thought that whoever did it was a complete coward.
When I saw that it hadn’t stopped him parking on that street, I plucked up the courage to scratch something nasty on his car bonnet. That took more guts, I can tell you, because if I had been caught I would have been in deep water. It was at about lunchtime on Friday when I did it and I had a great weekend thinking about what a lousy one he would be having. I hadn’t done anything like that since I was a kid and I was surprised how liberating it felt – quite a thrill, really – and that I didn’t feel the least bit remorseful. My life hadn’t exactly been a bundle of fun for a while and a bit of mischief was just what I needed to perk me up a bit.
3
When I saw what someone had done to my car bonnet to say that I was furious would be an understatement. I wasn’t good company that weekend and I tried to stay out of Helen and Jenny’s way as much as I could. Jenny’s my twelve year old daughter, by the way, and she’s doing very well at school. It was fine at least, so I took my dog Felix out for long walks on both days and even he could see that I was out of sorts. He’s a faithful little Yorkshire terrier and he kept looking up at me even more than he usually does, especially when I was thinking, or cursing, aloud up on the hills.
; Obviously my main train of thought was trying to decide which of the three of them did it, Afzal K., Malcolm D. or Peter B., and if there might be someone else that I hadn’t thought of. I wouldn’t be seeing any of those three that week, unless I called them in especially, so I’d be able to concentrate on the rest of my caseload and mention what had happened to my car if I saw fit. I could have gone to the police, of course, and told them who I suspected, but I preferred to do things my own way. Besides, if the police got one of them to confess they’d probably only get a fine that they’d be allowed to pay off very gradually and I was sure I could punish them much more severely myself over just as long a period.
As my car was in the garage for most of the week I had to catch the bus to and from work a total of six times and that did nothing at all to restore my good humour. Let’s face it, you have to be pretty poor, or useless, or both to catch buses if you’re an adult and my fellow passengers were a seedy lot; drab failures most of them. I was also surprised by how expensive it was and I worked out that if I had to use the bus all year round it would cost me almost as much as running a car. It made me realise why my customers complained so much when I told them to apply for jobs in other towns and I resolved to do it much more often. The daft slogans on the backs of the buses made me laugh too, but I thought of a better one: ‘Your Local Buses, Making the Poor even Poorer’ which I thought both funny and true.
That was the only fun I had on the rattly great thing, though, and I was relieved to pick up my car and drive home on Thursday. I was all for continuing to park on my usual street, but Helen begged me not to. She said that if someone hated me so much they might do something even worse to the car, or to me, and I said I’d like to see any of those scroungers stand up to me, pumped up muscles or not. I’m a few years off fifty yet and with my size and my martial arts it’ll be a good few years before I have to worry about losing a fight to anyone not man enough to hold down a job.