by Dan Kavanagh
Through another door and they reached the Georgian double-cube room. Duffy was led, still handcuffed, to the sofa. As he was about to sit down, Eddy suddenly stopped him.
‘No, no, that must be very uncomfortable, sitting like that. We’ll put them on you again from the front. You won’t, of course, struggle, or do anything silly.’
‘Can I rub my wrists a bit?’
‘Of course. But I think we’ll sit you on the sofa first. It’s very hard to surprise people when you’re sitting on a sofa.’
They sat turn down and crowded round him while they undid the cuffs. He rubbed his wrists for a couple of minutes, then held them out forwards.
‘Perhaps not quite so tight, this time,’ Eddy instructed. Jeggo looked disappointed. ‘After all, we’re not dealing with Houdini.’
Then he dismissed Jeggo and told Georgiou to stay. Duffy looked round the room again, ostensibly to admire, really to check the doors and windows. The latter were hidden by full-length chintz curtains which matched the sofa and chairs. Brass standard lamps supplied the sort of light Eddy was presumably hoping to install in his other rooms. Duffy wondered, not for the first time, at the way in which this graceful, genteel room, the prints, and Eddy’s elegant clothes were subsidised and maintained by punters peering through glass letter boxes, by the amplified wailings of sheepdogs and Hoovers, by thousands of copies of Hogtie and 42-Plus. He kept such thoughts to himself.
‘Very pretty,’ he simply murmured.
‘Yes, indeed. Now, Mr Duffy, it’s already midnight, but I’m afraid we’re going to have to detain you for quite a bit longer. An hour or two, probably. I hope no one is expecting you back?’
Duffy didn’t reply. Eddy watched him from across the top of his desk.
‘Of course, your private life is no business of mine. Still, I should think that most of the late-evening customers of the Aladdin’s Lamp would, on balance, probably not be going home to bed-partners, if I can use as neutral an expression as possible. Georgiou and I occasionally have to work as late as this, though we always try and let our wives know in advance. We certainly let them know we would be working late tonight, though of course until you turned up we didn’t know quite how late we might have to stay. But then, that’s business. By the way, Mr Duffy, did you register the appropriateness of the name I chose for the Aladdin’s Lamp? I hope you found it as witty as I do.’
Duffy hadn’t actually thought about it. He doubted if many of its other patrons had either.
‘Now, Mr Duffy, I propose to be fairly frank with you. I trust that you will be equally frank in return. I am, of course, more than a little displeased that you took my instruction to stay away from my pavements so cavalierly. But now that I have you here I would like to take the opportunity for a little exchange of information. We like to keep our files up to date. Now, you left the force some four years ago, as we have already discussed. What have you been doing since?’
Duffy didn’t know how much Eddy might have on his file that he hadn’t revealed in their previous meeting, so he played it reasonably straight.
‘I set up a security firm. Advising businesses about how to vet personnel, that sort of thing.’
‘Oh, I see. Quite an appropriate profession. What other sort of things?’
‘Well, I tell them how to set up scanning equipment to stop pilfering, that sort of thing.’
‘Ah, we may have to come to you for advice one day. At the moment the punters in the shops are much too timid to try running off without paying. That is one advantage we have over other businesses. And how is your firm doing?’
‘So-so. It’s a bit seasonal. A big rush of crime always helps.’
‘How ironic. You depend on crime for your job. I depend on silly laws and public prudery to keep my business ticking over. But Mr McKechnie, when he came to you, didn’t come for a scanning system.’
‘No. He wanted me to find out who was preshing him.’
‘And why did he come to you?’
‘He knew I did a bit of freelance work on the side when trade was slack. I was recommended to him.’
‘And you found out who was preshing him?’
‘Yes. You.’
‘And you told him who it was?’
‘Of course.’
‘And what did you tell him he should do?
‘I said he had three choices: give you what you want, have another go to see if there was a straight cop at West Central, or look for some powerful friends.’
‘Perfectly sound piece of thinking. And what did he say in reply?’
‘He said he’d ring me back.’
‘And did he?’
‘No.’
‘And did you suggest any other alternatives to him?’
Duffy considered. A sudden suspicion came to him. Maybe their conversations hadn’t been entirely private. He said lightly,
‘I told him he could always try and kill you. But I warned him it was against the law.’
‘So it is, Mr Duffy. I’m glad you pointed that out to him. I wouldn’t want him running away with any wrong ideas. You didn’t suggest yourself for this project?’
‘No, I didn’t suggest it seriously.’
‘And did McKechnie indicate to you whether or not he might go looking for some powerful friends?’
‘No.’
‘Do you think he has any?’
‘I wouldn’t know. I shouldn’t think powerful people would be interested in the friendship of a bankrupt importer of King Kong masks.’
‘Well put, Mr Duffy. So, in short, would you say that the task for which McKechnie hired you is complete?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘No lingering reservations? No pricking conscience?’
‘No.’
‘Good, Mr Duffy. I think you’ve been very frank with me. Franker, if anything, than I expected. Now I’ll tell you a thing or two. You have, if I may say so without sounding patronising, done very well in your investigation. You seem to me to have worked diligently and efficiently. Since we first became aware of your presence you haven’t done anything to draw attention to yourself unnecessarily. Indeed, the first time you were pointed out to me in the street by Georgiou, I said that you looked just like an ordinary punter. As a businessman, I admire that professionalism.
‘You’ve found out various things, and you’ve reported back the knowledge you have obtained. You understand in a small way what I practise in a big way. I think I explained the previous time we met my philosophy that knowledge is the basis for power. And the corollary of that is that your small piece of knowledge can be easily neutralised by my much larger amount of knowledge. Your small piece of power obtained through your investigations can be rendered entirely harmless by the considerably greater power I obtain from my considerably more thorough researches. Why do you think great men have always established great libraries? Because they understand the secret of power.
‘Don’t look at me like that, Mr Duffy. Just because I talk of great men it doesn’t mean that I have delusions of grandeur. You’d like that, of course, it would make it all much neater for your copper’s mind, wouldn’t it? On the contrary, I have no claims or ambitions to be a great man of any sort. I am a successful businessman with very precise business aims. I obtain the knowledge I need for the implementation of those aims.’
It all sounded so reasonable in this easy, sanitised language. Duffy had difficulty reminding himself that the ‘business aims’ involved things like paraffin heaters through Ronnie’s windows and a Stanley knife on Rosie McKechnie. He also couldn’t work out whether or not Eddy was telling him any secrets: whether he was giving away a lot, or giving away nothing.
‘You see, let’s take the present case. Yourself. Now, many businessmen in my position would react extremely unfavourably to your presence, even to your existence. I should think your average local businessman, put in my position, might react rather sharply. Wouldn’t you agree?’
‘Depends how smart they were,’ said
Duffy.
‘Oh, come come, there’s no need to try and flatter me. What I am going to do with you has been entirely decided, anyway, and you couldn’t possibly change my mind about it. No, we are talking in general practical terms. Now, the average local businessman, having already warned you off his patch as I did only the other day, would undoubtedly take it as a severe affront to his sense of machismo that you returned. He would also – rightly or wrongly – feel that what you had found out was a threat to him. So he would naturally be extremely unpleasant towards you. This unpleasantness would doubtless express itself in violence. In some cases, the scale of the violence might be such as would result in your death.
‘Now, I am not necessarily against such drastic measures in business terms. And if I made such a business decision about you, there wouldn’t be much trouble implementing it; I’m sure you’ll agree, if you think of Jeggo’s quite severe hostility towards you, that there wouldn’t be any problem of implementation. Well, this particular course has been urged in your own case, but I have been inclined to take a different line. Why eliminate, I always say, when you can neutralise? Why be so proud of your knowledge and not use it to the full?’
Eddy suddenly got up from behind his desk and disappeared into his side room, the one with the tiny cream-coloured box perched just above the door. He came back with several manila files under his arm and sat down next to Duffy on the sofa. He tapped the first file.
‘Now, this one will be familiar to you already.’ He opened it and Duffy saw it was his own file. ‘Updated, you see,’ said Eddy, and pointed to the latest Polaroid of Duffy. It showed him sitting exactly where he sat now, holding in his hand the earlier photograph from the file. ‘Quite an ironic picture, don’t you think? I suppose we could take another now of you sitting looking at a photo of yourself looking at a photo of yourself. Like those mirrors set in parallel where your image recedes for ever.’
He put Duffy’s file down and tapped the others. ‘It wouldn’t be a good idea to let you see all of these, but I’ll show you enough to tantalise you.’ He nipped open the first and Duffy saw a bundle of photos of Ronnie; Eddy quickly flipped through the papers beneath: reports, transcripts of telephone conversations, Xerox copies of Ronnie’s letters, a sketch map, photos of Renée and several other tarts. It looked at least as full as the sort of dossier West Central would have on Ronnie.
Eddy opened the second file and chuckled. Duffy looked at the first photo; after a while he said, ‘My God,’ and Eddy chuckled again. It was McKechnie’s secretary. She wasn’t wearing her silver cross and she wasn’t wearing her long skirt. She wasn’t wearing any skirt. Or knickers. Or anything. She had her hair done in a different style and looked as if she was about to bounce on stage at the Peep Show.
‘One of yours?’ asked Duffy.
‘Trade secret,’ said Eddy. ‘Not that it matters. I think she might well have a bad case of ’flu by the time it comes for work tomorrow.’ He opened the third, thickest file, and said, ‘I think it might be a mistake to let you see more than the photos in this one.’
Duffy looked.
Sullivan! Sullivan blurred, walking down a street. Sullivan in beach shorts on some possibly foreign beach, surrounded by businessmen, also in beach shorts, none of whom Duffy recognised from his days at West Central; they were all raising their glasses to the camera. Sullivan in a restaurant with Eddy, and looking round very crossly at a candid cameraman’s sudden flashgun. Sullivan looking much younger – maybe twenty years younger; that was interesting. Sullivan with someone who just possibly might not be a tart on his arm. Eddy closed the file, and moved on to the next.
‘And the next I probably shouldn’t show you at all.’ He merely turned the file sideways and showed Duffy the name down the spine: McKechnie.
Eddy gathered up the files and took them back into the side room. Then he walked to his desk, picked up one of the phones and pressed a button.
‘You ready?…Yes…Good…Two minutes.’ He looked up at Duffy. ‘And now, Mr Duffy, while you think over the implications of what you have just seen, you’re going to find out the difference between being eliminated and being neutralised.’
This time they blindfolded him, took him along the corridor they had come in by, and down some steps; they turned him round on the spot so many times he was giddy, then walked him a bit, took him up some steps, out into the open, back indoors, along a corridor, past somewhere hot, and eventually got him to lie down on what felt like a high bed. Then they pulled his manacled hands up over his head and tucked them behind his neck. (Was that why they had handcuffed him more comfortably in the green room?) He heard a faint clink and discovered he couldn’t move his hands. Then his shoes and socks were removed, his trousers and pants taken down. He lay quietly; there was little point in kicking out if you were blindfolded and had your hands manacled behind your head. Two people took him one by each foot, pulled his legs apart a little, and tied some sort of straps round his ankles. He felt helpless, exposed, felt that he was going to be castrated.
Then they simply cut the clothes off the top half of his body. He felt a large pair of shears snipping up the arms of his blouson, then up to the neck, and the garment fell of him in three pieces. His shirt was sheared away from him. Now he was completely naked and strapped down. Someone laid a couple of cloths – perhaps towels – over the straps restraining his ankles. His thoughts chased their own tails round his head. And all this time no one had uttered a word. It made the isolation worse.
And it made what happened next feel odder. He smelt something sweet quite close at hand. Then he felt something damp being poured on to his stomach. Then a hand began to massage oil gently into his stomach. Then another hand joined it and began to spread the oil up to his chest. Shortly afterwards another pair of hands began to work on his legs. Every so often he felt tits brush gently against him. Then something different from the previous time in the Aladdin’s Lamp happened: a mouth lowered itself softly on to his cock and began to lick.
If the body could obey orders of the mind, his cock would have stayed the shrunken, tiny, timorous object it had been all the way up to this point. But the body is fractious, temperamental, disobedient. Duffy knew this from his night with Carol: how many times had he sworn at his recalcitrant flesh? And this time, though his mind was tense with fear, his body relaxed. As oil was rubbed smoothly into his cock, it grew and prospered. Tits grazed softly over his chest, then went away. His cock was being wanked with the gentle firmness of a professional. He felt flesh ease itself between his knees – perhaps the girl who had been at his chest was now kneeling between his legs. The silence continued, broken only by the soft swish of oiled flesh. He felt a fresh touch on his cock, and then, from darkness and silence, the world suddenly, horribly roared into light and sound.
It took Duffy perhaps five seconds from the blindfold being withdrawn for his eyes to get used to the light, and to see what they had done to him. And in five seconds a Polaroid fitted with a Powerwind can take maybe half a dozen pictures. The ones which Eddy took after the first six were probably not of much value to him, for Duffy let out a roar of pain and anger, his face contorted, and Jeggo had to punch him very hard in the ear to shut him up. But the first half dozen, with the angelic, flaxen-haired, seven-year-old boy grasping Duffy’s erection, and Duffy himself, his arms crossed behind his head in the posture of a sybarite, looking up with a puzzled stare of pleasure – those six would do for Eddy’s purposes.
They untied Duffy and told him to collect his clothes. He put on his trousers, shoes and ripped shirt, and folded up the three bits of his blouson. They kicked him out of a side door and he stood on the pavement in Frith Street with tears trickling down his face. A cruising taxi passed but refused to stop for this weeping scarecrow who was probably just another Soho drunk. Sick to his stomach, Duffy set off to walk home.
9
DUFFY GOT HOME AS light was breaking and the first milkmen were clinking their way on their rounds. He looked
through his kitchen window at the clock wrapped in polythene. It said two minutes past six. He fell on his bed and slept without a murmur, without a dream. It was when he woke that he had the dreams, and found his present flicker-lit with jagged flashes of the night before. Of the whirr and splut of the Powerwind Polaroid disgorging its prints. Of Eddy, Georgiou and Jeggo hanging over them while they developed, giggling like schoolboys at their first X-film. Of Eddy turning and saying to him, ‘Don’t go away, we may need another set.’ Of the child between his legs, looking as if he had just been set down in a grand sort of playpen. Of the two girls who had wanked him suddenly coming over all maternal with the child, who had started crying when Duffy began roaring. Of Eddy’s smile of triumph, knowing that he didn’t even need to explain the angles to Duffy. And of Eddy’s final gesture before they booted him into the street – reaching across and tucking into Duffy’s shirt pocket the least useful of the prints.
Duffy suddenly had a thought. Maybe the picture showed him being hit by Jeggo. Maybe it showed handcuffs. Maybe he could take it to the police, to some police somewhere, and show that it had all been a put-up job? He dug out the photo, looked at it, choked, and despaired. There was no ambiguity about what the picture showed: a masochist paedophile who liked being chained up and beaten while a young boy held his cock. Given the context, Duffy’s open-mouthed roar of pain translated as the expression of a deviant reaching climax.
Duffy screwed up the photo and threw it in the waste-paper basket. Then he dug it out, took it over to the stainless steel draining board and put a match to the edge. The white cardboard caught slowly, then burned towards the edge of the print. Duffy half expected it to go out when it reached the chemicals, but it caught more fiercely, with enthusiastic flame and gouts of black smoke. Bubbles ran across the surface of the print ahead of the flames; the photograph curled and bent as they started to die. Duffy sniffed the deep black smoke; the fumes smelt of burning oil refineries in a distant land.