Duffy

by Dan Kavanagh

  ‘Of course.’ There was a long silence.

  ‘If we were in America,’ said McKechnie, ‘I suppose I would go to a private detective.’

  ‘You could do that here,’ said Shaw, ‘if you fancy hiring an active pensioner who once used to be good at catching couples on the job. They don’t exist any more, and if they do, you might as well give your money straight to Oxfam as use them.’

  ‘So what do I do if I don’t want to go on paying out a hundred quid a fortnight for the rest of my life?’

  That’s what I’m thinking about,’ said Shaw. He tilted his empty glass towards his companion.

  McKechnie got up and fetched them some more drinks. The pub was such a bastion of maleness that it didn’t even have barmaids. A fat man in a striped shirt with beer stains down it served him with a convincing display of surliness. A few commuters were resignedly gathering up their raincoats and briefcases before heading off dejectedly towards sun and light and domestic bliss. McKechnie thought how, in comparison, he was quite happy with Rosie. Despite his occasional mistress, he was really fond of her. Her wouldn’t want anything to happen to her. As he set down their drinks, Shaw said,

  ‘You could try Duffy.’

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Duffy. Nick Duffy. Used to be a sort of buddy of mine. Did a couple of years in vice. Left the force, oh, about four years ago.’

  ‘What does he do now?’

  ‘He set up as a security adviser. Tells companies how to vet their staff, how to put their money in the safe, that sort of thing. Does the odd bit of freelancing; and he certainly knows the patch. He might do a job if he was free.’

  ‘Why did he leave the police? Was he kicked out?’

  ‘Let’s say he left under a bit of a cloud.’

  ‘Is he a criminal?’

  Shaw looked up and smiled a wan, ironic smile.

  ‘Well, we all have our own definitions of criminality, don’t we? It’s rather a big subject. But if you’re asking me is he honest, then I’d say to you that Nick Duffy has got to be honest.’

  ‘How do I get in touch with him?’

  ‘He’s in the book.’

  ‘Well, thank you.’

  ‘No, don’t thank me. You don’t thank me because you haven’t seen me. O.K.? And two things. I didn’t put you on to Duffy: you’ve never heard of me, O.K.? And the other thing: it’s probably not a good idea to ask Duffy why he left the force. He’s a bit touchy on that score.’

  Shaw left quickly, before McKechnie even had time to finish his drink.

  3

  THE SUNLIGHT STREAMING IN through the high window of the Paddington mews flat twinkled on the gold stud in Duffy’s left ear. He’d sometimes dreamed of trying to invent a miniaturised alarm system, so that when the stud heated up a degree or two with the sun, a tiny bell went off in his ear. He’d given up the idea for two reasons: half the time he slept on his left side; and in any case, only a fool would rely on the sun.

  Duffy had toyed with the idea in the first place because he hated clocks. He couldn’t sleep if there were clocks in the place. He could hear a wrist watch from the other side of the room. An alarm clock always worked for him because its tick prevented him from getting to sleep in the first place. As he lived in a one-room flat (‘open plan’ was how the house agents dignified it), there was nowhere for clocks to go. The only timepieces allowed in had to be wrapped up. There was a Tupperware box in the bathroom marked ‘Watches’ for those who stayed the night. His kitchen clock was hung outside the kitchen window, in a polythene bag, its face pressing up against the glass. Sometimes, in the winters, birds would alight on it, thinking it was some sort of feeding apparatus, and peck inquisitively at the polythene. Then the bag would leak and Duffy would have to buy a new clock.

  Duffy hated alarm clocks even more because they made him sweat when they went off; their tone seemed panicky, and this always got through to him before he was properly awake, so that he came into consciousness feeling anxious. It was never the right way to start the day. For the same reason, he hated alarm calls in the morning, and tried instead to train himself to wake up at a predetermined time. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. It worked often enough to persuade him once to try leaving the telephone off the hook, so that he wouldn’t be made anxious by some early morning call. But when he did, he found that all night the dialling tone roared at him across the room like a cageful of lions. Then he thought of buying a big soundproof box to put the telephone in at nights, but decided that if he started doing that he would end up crazy, living in a flat where everything that made a noise – telephone, radio, refrigerator, front door bell – was neatly boxed in. You just had to live with a certain level of anxiety, he reckoned.

  So when the telephone went that morning he reacted normally – that is, he jumped as if the bailiffs had just booted in his front door. The girl beside him stirred and started shaking herself awake. Duffy was already across the room and standing naked at the telephone. He was a short, stockily built man with powerful forearms and haunches; he wore his hair in a longish brushcut which added perhaps an inch to his height. As he turned while talking on the phone, the girl ran her eyes over his slightly bowed legs, his cock, his pubic bush which was just catching the light, his chest with its concentration of dark hair round the nipples, his broad, strong face with a slightly small, tight mouth; she noticed a sudden flash from the stud in his left ear.

  The girl sat up in bed and listened to Duffy’s side of the conversation. It mainly consisted of pauses, grunts, ‘nos’ and ‘all rights’. Duffy never said Yes. If he was with you and meant Yes, he’d nod his head. If he was on the phone, he’d say ‘All right’. If you asked Duffy to marry you and he wanted to, he’d still only say ‘All right’. She couldn’t be completely sure, of course, but that was her guess. She’d once asked Duffy to marry her, and he’d said ‘No’.

  As Duffy put down the phone and walked back towards the bed, she slightly turned towards him. She had a pretty, circular Irish face, and cute, high breasts with small dark brown nipples. She looked at Duffy’s cock nostalgically.

  ‘Duffy,’ she said, ‘do you still remember what it was like to fuck me?’

  Duffy frowned.

  ‘We’ve been into that,’ he said, and walked away to the bathroom. There he opened the Tupperware box marked ‘Watches’, saw from Carol’s Timex that it was after ten, washed, and started to lather his chin. From behind he heard Carol’s voice from the bed,

  ‘I know we’ve been into it. I just wanted to know if you used to like it.’

  Duffy paused in his lathering, cleared his lips of soap with the back of the little finger of his right hand, and grunted back,

  ‘All right.’

  By the time he had finished in the bathroom, Carol had already laid the breakfast at the round table at the other end of the room. She sat wearing his blue towelling dressing gown. He had put on the light, short kimono which she always kept at the flat. It finished just below his rump. He wore it quite a lot.

  ‘Work?’ she asked.

  He nodded. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Telling me about it?’

  ‘No. Not until I’ve taken it or not taken it.’

  ‘You need the money, Duffy.’

  ‘I know.’

  Duffy Security had had a pretty up-and-down three years. Duffy had started up at a time when security was already a booming business. Prospective clients could look in the Yellow Pages and get a choice of any number of firms; even with a display box round your name, you were still competing with lots of better-known organisations offering every sort of service – mobile patrols, cash transit, dog patrols, keyholders, static guards, personnel screening. Duffy didn’t have a dog, though he did have a van; he also didn’t have any staff apart from an answer-phone and a friend who came in once a month to help with the accounts.

  What Duffy did have was lots of expert knowledge and a highly practical mind. But you can’t put that in an ad. People who want
security naturally assume that the bigger the firm is, the better its operation. In fact, as Duffy knew only too well from his days in the force, the large firms were always being infiltrated by ex-cons and stoolies; a hundred quid in the right place could buy you a lot of information if you were in the business of knocking off cash transfers.

  The only way to get successful in this field, Duffy knew, was to work at being really efficient and then hope for word-of-mouth to back you up. You couldn’t advertise in any effective way. Or rather, there might be ways, but they just weren’t feasible. One would be to have a variety of crooks who’d been nabbed as a result of one of your systems quoted saying things like, ‘I’d still be out there nicking if it hadn’t been for DUFFY SECURITY’. But even old lags have their pride. The other way would be to get firms you had advised to endorse you: ‘We’ve never had a break-in since we called in DUFFY SECURITY’. But anything like that would just seem an open challenge to every operator in town.

  So Duffy checked out his answerphone every day, took most of the jobs that were offered, and just about kept going. He wasn’t sure about the job this fellow McKechnie was offering; but he’d meet the guy at least. He said,

  ‘What time’s your shift?’

  ‘Three. Three to eleven.’ It was the shift Carol disliked the most. Nothing much happened all through the afternoon and early evening, and then, as soon as you were really tired, you were likely to get a bit of trouble on your hands.

  ‘Ah, the old shit shift.’

  Duffy got up from the table and walked to his fitted wardrobe at the other end of the room. A stranger would have thought his flat a bit empty. Duffy thought his flat a bit empty too. It had been like that since the second robbery.

  The first time he was robbed they only took the television set and his electric razor. It had been more of an embarrassment than anything else, especially the one-inch para in the Evening Standard headed ‘SECURITY MAN ROBBED’. He’d been wanting to get a new T.V. anyway; and, just to prove to the thieves that he didn’t really miss anything, he went back to wet shaving.

  The second time he was robbed they had come back for everything else: they arrived in a van marked Handimoves, took his furniture, his electric cooker, his fireside rug, his radio, his new television, his electric kettle, his pile of sixpences and even a pot plant. All they left were his fitted carpet, the ashtrays, and his bed. Why hadn’t they taken the bed?

  The first thing Duffy had done on this occasion was ring the news desk on the Standard and speak to an old mate of his. He bartered the story of the break-in – which was bound to reach them sooner or later – for a small case of drunken driving by a judge which he’d heard about a couple of days earlier and which was being quietly hushed. Only then did he call the police and get ready for their cracks when he told them what he did for a living.

  In fact, Duffy didn’t really mind the robberies. He quite liked buying new furniture, and the insurance company had paid up on both occasions without any quibbles. Moreover, Duffy always maintained that insurance was the best form of security. When he first started advising people about how to protect their homes and offices, he used to tell them that there were four systems to choose from. The best was total, comprehensive, wall-to-wall insurance. The second was a complex network of electronic beams and scanners so sensitive that it triggered when the night watchman farted. The third was your average burglar alarm, of the sort which thieves practise dismantling with their eyes closed just to keep in trim. And the fourth was a white plywood box; painted on it in red were the words DUFFY SECURITY, a miniature skull and a ragged flash of lightning. You attached a few fake wires to it and stuck it high up on the front of your house. In terms of cost-effectiveness Duffy used to recommend the fourth system: until, that is, the funny look in clients’ eyes began to make him realise that they didn’t want to hear the truth: they wanted to be told what they wanted to be told. From then on, that was what he told them.

  ‘Will I see you tonight?’ He asked the question in a deliberately casual way.

  ‘Oh, I don’t think so, Duffy. Not two nights on the trot. That would be just a bit too much like old times, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘All right. See you then.’

  ‘See you.’

  Duffy pulled on a green suede blouson with a big plastic zip up the front, and left Carol to finish breakfast by herself.

  He reached McKechnie’s Rupert Street office by half past eleven. Between a shuttered dirty bookshop and a twenty-four-hour minicab service he found a doorway; a couple of grubby plastic strips screwed to the side wall announced WORLDWIDE PRODUCTIONS (LONDON) INC. and MCKECHNIE IMPORTS. He walked up to the first floor, pushed open a door and saw a plain secretary wearing a long skirt and a big silver cross; she was reading a magazine. She did the full secretarial college number on him, but her face said that his arrival in the office was a high point in the day. Visitors were clearly as rare and fascinating as white men at the source of the Limpopo.

  ‘Mr McKechnie is just a little bit tied up at the moment, but I’ll see when he’ll be free,’ she said.

  ‘He said eleven thirty,’ said Duffy. ‘It’s eleven thirty. If he’s busy then I’m buggering off.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure he’ll be able to fit you in,’ she smiled, and buzzed the telephone. ‘Mr McKechnie, we have a Mr Duffy to see you in reception. Thank you, Mr McKechnie. Mr Duffy, would you go through, please, it’s that door there.’

  Duffy looked round the secretary’s office. It was about the size of a broom cupboard, filled with box files and steel cabinets. There were only two doors – the one he had come in through and another opposite. Maybe there were a few customers who thought McKechnie had his office out on the stairs or something. As he put his hand on the knob he looked round the secretary’s room again.

  ‘Is this reception?’

  She smiled and nodded.

  ‘Just checking.’

  McKechnie rose to shake hands with Duffy. He was a bit surprised how short the security man was, but he looked quite strong. He also looked a bit of a faggot to McKechnie’s eye. He wondered about that gold stud in his ear. Was it just fashion, or was it some sort of sexual signal? McKechnie didn’t know any more. In the old days, you knew precisely where you were: all the codes were worked out, you could tell who did and who didn’t, who was and who wasn’t. Even a few years ago you could still not go wildly wrong; but nowadays the only way of being quite sure who was what and who did what was when you asked your secretary to clean your glasses and she took off her knickers to do it with.

  Duffy reserved judgment on McKechnie. So far he was just another client – just another red-faced middle-aged man who might or might not be honest, might or might not be just after some free advice, might or might not be wasting his at the moment not very valuable time. He listened while McKechnie told him the first part of the story, the part to do with the break-in; McKechnie was relieved that Duffy didn’t smirk when he told him about the cat. Actually, Duffy thought it was quite funny – he’d seen so many nasty things happen to humans that he didn’t have much space left over for animals – but he refrained from laughing because at the moment he needed almost every customer he could get. Then McKechnie told him about Sullivan and West Central and the three hundred and fifty quid. He waited for comments.

  ‘So why did you come to me?’

  ‘I asked around.’

  At least he hadn’t said he’d picked Duffy’s name out of the Yellow Pages with a pin.

  ‘And what do you expect me to do?’

  ‘I don’t know yet. I want to hear what you say first.’

  ‘Well, I’d say you’ve got two problems, maybe separate, possibly connected. First, what happened at your house and the phone calls. I must say I hadn’t thought of doing the presh that way round before. It’s quite clever.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, normally what happens with presh is that they send a heavy man round who tells you the fee and the delivery date, and
then tells you what they’ll do to you if you don’t deliver – set fire to your house, kill your dog, kidnap your kid, or whatever. You think about it and then usually you do what they ask. And then maybe, after a while, after a few deliveries, you don’t pay, and they decide to sort you out, except that you’re expecting them to do that and so you might just have the blues there or something. But this way round, they do the rough stuff first, when no one can possibly be expecting it, let the customer stew, and then put in for the fee. It’s a different system, it’s not so predictable, and it throws in an extra element of craziness. The customer – you in this case – thinks, Christ, well, if they cut my wife before I hadn’t even not done something they asked, what the hell would they be like to mess with if I had done something they didn’t like; for instance, if I hadn’t paid up. So their first bit of heavy takes them coasting a long way, you see.’

  ‘I do. And who do you think this Salvatore is?’

  ‘No idea. I knew the old Salvatore a bit. You used to see him in Italian restaurants trying to look like a mafioso. Used to walk in, sit down, not say a word, eat his food, drink his wine, get up, walk out. Very dignified, slightly sinister, dressed in black, had a pepper-and-salt moustache. All the other diners thought he must be a big protection man. Well, he was a medium-sized protection man; did a few smokes and tarts as well, I think. Some of the restaurants he really did have the screw on; but the others, well, he just had a slate there and they used to send him the bill at the end of the month. And he always paid. He was a humorous old bugger, that’s for sure; quite a character. It sounds as if this bloke knew him, or maybe inherited a bit of his patch; or maybe he just liked his style. He sounds as if he’s got a bit of a sense of humour from what you say.’

  ‘Well, it’s the sort of humour which appeals to him more than me. So what about the second part of it?’

  ‘Hard to say. Could be anywhere on the scale from straight incompetence up to a lot of bent. I can’t imagine the blues losing three drops in a row. Not unless standards have fallen since I was there. But quite what it means is another matter. This guy at West Central might simply be telling you he doesn’t need the business: hasn’t got the time, hasn’t got the men, doesn’t care enough about your problems.’