by Dan Kavanagh
‘Anything happened so far?’
‘Well, bits you can’t connect. The thing with Ronnie.’
‘How did Ronnie know who it was?’
‘Process of elimination. Couldn’t have been anyone else. Then there’ve been one or two bits of nasty lately. A tart got cut up a bit.’
‘Sorry,’ said Duffy automatically.
‘No, no one I knew, but it makes you edgy. And a club got burnt out – you know, accident, the usual thing. Just happened Big Eddy was interested in the property. Just happened he bought what was left of the building for a little nothing. You see, it’s all a bit like that; but you know that if you’ve heard one or two little things, then you can be bloody sure that other people have heard others, and that they’re likely to add up to a move.’
‘Who works for Eddy?’
‘Lots of people.’
‘Anyone in particular?’
‘There’s Georgiou – remember him? Nick Georgiou?’
‘No.’
‘Fat guy – ginger hair, glasses, a bit crazy; everyone says don’t cross Georgiou. He’s a bit sick, they say; likes to make you think he’s friendly, then you’ve got a billiard cue across the kneecaps before you know where you are.’
‘Who else? Who does Eddy’s dirty?’
‘Well, Georgiou likes doing some. Puts in for it. Then there’s Kyle. Thin guy, full of mouth. About six feet or so. Very bad teeth. Talks out of the side of his mouth. Very gabby.’
‘Anyone else?’
‘One or two. Paddick – he’s a sort of tough, blond guy. They say he’s bent, but everyone’s bent nowadays I reckon. Pardon, love. Oh, and Hogan – little Irish guy. Nasty fellow. Grew up throwing paraffin heaters at old ladies.’
‘Charming. Where does Eddy hang out?’
‘People like that don’t hang out, Duffy, you know that. You don’t stand around in billiard halls waiting for the Eddies of this world to turn up. He doesn’t sit in bars and wait for his runners to deliver. The bars go to him. People like him don’t hang out, Duffy, they don’t hang out.’
Duffy smiled.
‘Well, it’s been a good twenty-five quid’s worth, Renée.’
‘Sixty, love, or I’ll be after you with a parry heater.’
‘Thanks, Renée, you’ve been very useful. And to think, I haven’t even been here.’
‘O.K., Duffy. Just make sure you leave like a punter.’
He left the flat as if in a flurry of guilt, and walked down the alley trying to look like a man who had been tied to a bed for an hour while three tarts in school uniform poured golden syrup all over him and then licked it off. He kept his chin tucked into his neck and didn’t look round. If anybody had seen him leaving Renée’s flat, he wouldn’t have known.
At home that evening, he brought all his artistry and ingenuity to bear on Carol’s Cheddar on toast.
‘Not bad, Duffy, you’re really coming along with your cooking. I don’t think I could have bettered this Cheddar.’
Duffy looked pleased. He’d decided to learn to cook after he’d stopped being able to eat cheap copper grub; after he’d got impotent with Carol; after she’d suggested they might still get married and he’d turned away and said ‘No’. But cooking didn’t come easily to Duffy. Carol kept telling him he ought to develop the right instincts – ‘How do you develop instincts?’ he asked, puzzled – and his approach was methodical and painstaking. He reweighed flour time and time again to get exactly the specified amount; he scrubbed vegetables as if they had to be clean enough to take part in a moon shot; he regarded every egg and every tin of luncheon meat as if they were explosive devices which had to be defused with the tenderest care.
‘It’s the mess I don’t like,’ he had said.
‘There isn’t any mess,’ Carol had answered, looking around.
‘That’s because I made sure there wasn’t.’
Duffy devoted as much time to getting rid of wrappers and packaging the leftover food as he did to cooking. If you opened his refrigerator door, you wouldn’t see anything to eat: you’d see shelvesful of opaque Tupperware boxes; polythene bags with neurotically doubled knots in their necks; even, occasionally, Tupperware boxes inside polythene bags. The first time Carol took a look, she called out,
‘Hey, Duffy, is the food trying to escape or something?’ and ever afterwards referred to his fridge as Colditz.
When they had finished supper Duffy washed up at once, in case any germs escaped from the decomposing food and started tunnelling their way into Colditz. Over coffee he asked casually,
‘What’s going on down at the patch, Carol?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, you know, what’s it like down the station? They jumpy or anything? Anyone getting ready for a move in the patch or anything?’
‘Duffy,’ she said sternly, ‘you don’t want to know about that. You’re not a copper any more.’ Her dark eyes looked at him severely from out of her pretty Irish face.
‘I’m interested.’
‘Duffy, it’s four years. You haven’t asked me in four years. We agreed you shouldn’t ask. We agreed it wouldn’t be good for you.’
‘What’s going on, Carol?’
‘No.’
‘I need to know now.’
‘No unless you tell me why. And even then probably no.’
‘If I tell you some things it might make it harder for you at work.’
‘If it looks like getting that way I’ll stop you.’
Duffy told her everything he’d learned since that first phone call of McKechnie’s which had got him leaping out of bed away from her. He told her the lines along which he was guessing, told her his flickering doubts about McKechnie, told her everything he’d been told by Renée. He didn’t disguise the fact that he was as much fired by his interest in Sullivan as he was by earning his money helping McKechnie. At the end, Carol said,
‘I don’t think I should, Duffy, I don’t think I should.’
‘Why not?’
‘I’ve lost a lot because of you, Duffy. I’ve lost four years of maybe being happy.’
‘That wasn’t because of me, that was because of whoever fitted me up.’
‘Same four years, Duffy, same four years. And the black kid may have been a plant, but’ – she looked at him reproachfully, for the first time in years – ‘you chose him, didn’t you?’
‘But that was all part of our deal.’
‘Well, there’s deals you hope will go one way, and deals you hope will go another, aren’t there?’ Carol sounded almost bitter; she had every right to. She didn’t look at him as she continued. ‘So now what you’re asking me to do is spy on the people I work with, all so that you can earn twenty quid a day from someone who for all you know is a crook. And so that you can get your revenge on Sullivan or whoever it was at the station who helped fit you up. Revenge isn’t a good idea, Duffy.’
‘They say revenge gets better the longer you leave it.’
‘Bollocks,’ said Carol fiercely. ‘Revenge screws you up. You’ve got to go on living if you don’t want to be screwed up. And I’ve got to go on living,’ she said with sudden emphasis. ‘I haven’t had all that much fun for the last four years. There’ve been some good bits, but I’ve mainly just been ticking over. And why I keep ticking over is because of my work. I like my work, Duffy, you must remember that, even if we don’t talk about it. I may not be keen on everyone at West Central, and I may even have my private sus about some of them, but I’m going to go on working there, Duffy. You screwed up some of my life four years ago, but you’re not having another bite at what’s left of the cherry.’
‘Will you tell me what it’s like at the station nowadays?’
‘No.’
‘Is anyone preparing a move?’
‘No. Duffy.’
‘Will you tell me how Sullivan’s behaving?’
‘No.’
‘Will you look out the file on Big Eddy for me?’
‘No.’
‘Then will you do this? Will you – wait for it – will you look out the file on McKechnie for me, because if it turns out you’ve got reason to know him at West Central then I might just have to pull out of this job, mightn’t I?’
‘Don’t take it as a promise, Duffy, in case it gets broken. All I’ll say is if I’m near his file anyway, and there’s no one about, and there’s no chance of it ever, ever getting out that I looked at it, then I might.’
‘One last question.’
Carol looked weary.
‘Will you stay the night, please?’
Carol nodded, smiled, went off into the bathroom and unsnapped the plastic box labelled ‘Watches’.
6
THE NEXT MORNING DUFFY made a phone call to an old friend, a specialist at the sharper, technological end of surveillance. Geoff Bell could bug a phone just by scowling at it; could lift a voice-print out of thin air; could lay down a surveillance system which would tell him three miles away if a police dog was taking a leak. He wasn’t entirely honest – his moral sophistication lagged a little behind his technological sophistication; though the only time the coppers had tried it on and raided him they got a nasty shock: Bell had so completely bugged and monitored his own flat that three days later he sent them a one-hundred-page dossier detailing what each of the three coppers had done for every second they were in his flat. He even knew that the big, burly copper with the black moustache had approved of the girl’s photo that was pinned above the desk. And the day after the dossier arrived, Bell filed suits for trespass, criminal damage and wrongful seizure of property. Somehow the police seemed to lose interest in his case after that.
‘Geoff, it’s Duffy. I’ve been in touch with Control and he says could you drop the package behind the cistern in the middle bog as you’re leaving Lenin’s tomb. The plane tickets will be arriving in the morning.’
‘All right, Duffy, I won’t record you for once.’
‘But you were recording that bit?’
‘Of course.’ With Bell, documentation was as much a mania as a job.
‘And you’ll wipe that first sentence of mine?’
‘Yes.’
‘And then it won’t be there?’
‘No. Because I’ll have wiped it. You slowing down, Duffy?’
‘It really won’t be there?’
‘What’s on your mind, Duffy?’
‘I’ve got a tape with a gap on it. Two and a half, maybe three seconds.’
‘Nixon’s secretary put her foot on the autowipe again?’
‘That sort of thing. What I wondered was, do you think you could get anything out of it?’
‘Depends. Depends on quite a lot of things. How loud the original recording was. How determined the guy was to wipe it: if he went over it lots of times there probably wouldn’t be anything left. Depends if he wiped it on the same machine he recorded it on. Depends how good the tape and the machine were in the first place. Depends how much of a hurry you’re in for it as well.’
‘Couple of days, would that be enough?’
‘I’ll do what I can. Most of the time, wipe means wipe, though.’
‘Sure.’
Duffy rang off and went and rooted in his tool chest. He found a pair of powerful, short-handled, snub-nosed metal-clippers, and slipped them into his pocket. Then he collected McKechnie’s tape, scribbled a note, and put the tape in an envelope to drop through Bell’s door. As he ruffled Carol’s hair by way of goodbye, she said,
‘I haven’t seen a thing, Duffy, and I’m sure I wouldn’t have liked it if I had.’
‘Just a new tin opener, darlin’. Made in Switzerland.’
‘Where the nuts come from,’ was all she said.
Duffy dropped the tape off at Bell’s and took the tube in to Piccadilly Circus. It was beginning to feel like going to work.
He walked up the Avenue, turned left, and approached the Peep Show with his punter’s gait. He changed a couple of quid with the cashier, and settled in to a cubicle. It was early in the day: the Kleenex on the floor was quite dry. He reckoned that the Peep Show probably ran on eight or ten girls. Each girl had about a ten-minute turn, so that they’d have to wait maybe an hour and a half before their next routine. They wouldn’t be sitting around in a dressing room with their feet up talking about skin conditioner, that was for sure. Soho was one of those places where time translated directly into money. The old-style whores used to operate like taxi-cabs. You’d have to finish in ten minutes, otherwise they’d start an ‘I can’t hang about all day’ routine; if you wanted another go after you’d finished the first time, the same rate applied, only they gave a discount if you could finish in five minutes.
At a guess, the girls in the Peep Show did a circuit to other such places, or maybe to strip clubs – Duffy wondered if the skin clubs would cease to exist in a year or two – or maybe they popped home and did an hour’s trade. Duffy inserted his first 50p piece and the metal shutter slid up. A skinny, underfed girl with tiny tits was dancing as hard as she could, except that it didn’t seem like dancing, not compared to some of the others, it seemed more like running on the spot. Round her neck she wore a velvet choker in what seemed a pathetic attempt to distract attention from her waif-like body. Even her pubic hair, Duffy noted dispassionately, seemed lacking in vigour, and grew patchily, with no enthusiasm. When it came to straddling the glass letter boxes, she did it in a wooden, automatic routine, glancing round anxiously to see if she was missing anyone out. Duffy wondered if any of the anonymous circle of eyes found it exciting. He just wanted to throw a Red Cross blanket round the girl’s shoulders and feed her some hot soup.
He left his letter box closed for the rest of her act, then dropped in another 50p. Two minutes with his slot open, watching and partly watching; then five minutes or so with it shut. He wondered if punters had to keep up a certain percentage of time with their windows open before they got their doors kicked by the management. Maybe no one minded any more, they made so much money. It was like in the dirty bookshops. In the old days there would be cardboard signs up above the racks of mags saying NO BROWSING. Large men came up to you and said things like ‘Two minutes more’ and then, with a heavy parody of civility, ‘Can I help you?’. Now nobody seemed to care that punters stood in shops for hours on end and then left without buying; the turnover was obviously quite lucrative enough and harassing the customer didn’t particularly improve your trade.
Duffy changed some more money, and after he’d got through three quid his slot clanged up to reveal the black girl, Polly. He watched her more closely than the previous girls, checked out the white scar on her shoulder, and then, when she bent right forwards to give the punters a double-barrelled shot, he looked at the top of her thigh: there, right where the thigh joined the buttock, was the pimp’s cut: a white scar running down into her groin.
Duffy left at the end of that 50p’s worth and waited across the street for the black girl to emerge. When she did, he crossed quickly and caught up with her before she had the chance to disappear like the last time.
‘Excuse me,’ he said as he came level with her.
‘Yeah?’
Duffy didn’t know quite how to begin.
‘Er, excuse me,’ he said again. He felt almost embarrassed; he certainly must have looked embarrassed, because she suddenly gave a hard, professional smile.
‘Okay, love, I was going to do some shopping, but I’ll fit you in.’ She turned round and started walking back in the direction she’d come. Duffy followed, having to catch her up again. She was already rattling off her price list.
‘Ten for straight. You wan’ it straight? Do you Greek if you like. Greek’s twenty. Blow’s fifteen. Hands? Well, hands is ten too, I know it sounds a lot love, but honestly, it’s as much trouble as the other. Made up your mind?’
It was only half past twelve. He didn’t feel particularly randy. But having got this far he didn’t think stopping, explaining who he was, and asking a few questions woul
d produce a helpful response. At her gaff he dropped ten pounds into a little woven basket on a dresser and got on with it. She made a great show of being excited to hurry him along. He made a similar show to fool himself and hurry himself along. Their thoughts were miles away from their bodies.
‘There, that’s better now, love, isn’t it?’ For a tan, she was chatty.
‘You’re Polly, aren’t you?’
‘If you like.’
‘I brought you flowers once.’
She looked at him strangely.
‘Listen, love, none of my punters bring me flowers. Not even my regulars.’
‘No, I brought you flowers in hospital. Four years ago.’
She stopped pulling up her skirt and looked at him again. Then she said,
‘Fucking copper, aren’t you?’
‘Not any more.’ He finished dressing and zipped up his blouson.
‘I don’t take coppers. I never take coppers.’
‘I’m not a copper. I’m private now. Can I talk to you?’
‘No you fucking can’t.’ She seemed frightened, even though she was acting angry.
‘It wouldn’t take very long. I just want to ask you about four years ago.’
‘No way. Fucking get out. Get out, copper. FUCKING GET OUT.’ She ran to the side of her bed and pressed a bell.
Duffy got out. He got out very fast indeed.
He bought himself lunch at the Casa Alpina, a little Italian café where he sat next to the hatch and listened to the waiters bawling down the intercom. As he sat over the menu a youngish waiter with a bald head and a black moustache rushed at the hatch and deposited a pile of sticky-pudding plates in the pulley lift, at the same time bending his head to the intercom and shouting, ‘Piccolo hors-d’oeuvre twice!’ Duffy liked places like this: the noise, the friendliness, the cheapness. He ordered himself bacon, sausage, eggs, tomato, baked beans, double chips and a half carafe of wine.
He hadn’t been counting on Polly, so it wasn’t too much of a blow that she wouldn’t talk. You just have to try every avenue and hope that some of them lead somewhere. Most of them don’t, of course. In any case, he reflected, Polly didn’t exactly owe him anything. The flowers had come off police expenses; and he had leaned on her more than a little at the time.