Duffy

by Dan Kavanagh

  All day Duffy sat with his body roaring hotly for revenge, and a cool, wise voice inside his head telling him that there was nothing he could do. Big Eddy had neutralised him, as Big Eddy had neutralised Sullivan and Ronnie and even that secretary of McKechnie’s who looked like a religious maniac but had a Peep Show body. Duffy wondered about Sullivan, about how they had ensnared him. A long, slow business, no doubt, a gradual putting-together of evidence, a deliberate recording of what would seem to the outside world like little favours but which to Sullivan may have seemed innocuous, and may even have been innocuous at the time. Take the photo of him eating with Eddy. Perhaps Sullivan had been invited to lunch by a third party: an informer, say, or someone with whom he dealt. They sit down to lunch – maybe they’re going Dutch, or maybe Sullivan’s paying – have a few drinks, and after a bit Eddy arrives and greets the stooge in a chummy way. What do you do if you are Sullivan? Get up and walk away? So Eddy sits down, you set a glass in front of him, perhaps he has a snack to keep you company, and suddenly the flashgun of a passing restaurant photographer goes off in your face. Do you get up and arrest him? Eddy seems as upset as you are, chases the man out, comes back saying how bad for his business the photo could be. And so you forget about it. Except that the photo ends up in Eddy’s file, and what does it show now? A West Central Super having a friendly lunch – all wine and camaraderie – with one of his patch’s top villains. Somehow, the stooge is obscured by Eddy’s body in the picture, and it looks as if Sullivan and Eddy are lunching tête-à-tête.

  And after that it gets easier. Easier for Eddy, and, in a way, easier for Sullivan. Soon you stop being certain where your world ends and the villains’ world begins. You even begin to meet Eddy socially: you think you might be able to get something out of him. He might get drunk and let something drop. Of course you have to get drunk in order to encourage him to do the same. And what does a cigarette lighter matter: you needed one anyway; it’s hardly a bribe, is it? Of course it’s not a bribe – it stands to reason. What copper would risk his job for a cigarette lighter – therefore, it cannot be a bribe. Even if it is inscribed. And then, maybe, you take a holiday with one or two fellows you’ve met drinking. A bit of abroad, shake the dust off your feet, look at the pretty girls on the beach, have a few jars, well, maybe we won’t take the wife, say it’s an Interpol conference or something. And Eddy turns up; had business in the area, thought he’d drop in. Joins in the fun, good company Eddy is, life and soul, have a few drinks, a few photos, and then maybe, well all the other chaps are doing it, Eddy’s doing it, it seems churlish not to, you have yourself a bit of local girl. The girl’s very nice to you, doesn’t seem to mind that you don’t parliamo the old italiano, doesn’t seem to mind that you’re a bit fat and a bit drunk and that you don’t do it all that well. And then Eddy bids you all goodbye, wouldn’t like to embarrass the Super by arriving at Heathrow with him, pop off now, byeee. And he goes. But it all ends up on Eddy’s file, and however it was, however Sullivan knew it really was, it can only look the way it looks on Eddy’s file.

  And after the meal, and the holiday, and the girl, and the cigarette lighter, it all gets easier and easier. The favours come: maybe Eddy feeds Sullivan the odd villain or two; after all it’s in his interest to see that Sullivan remains a successful local copper. Not too successful, of course, in case he gets transferred, so Eddy feeds him mainly minnows; but he helps keep him in business. And then, gradually, comes the payoff, or rather the beginning of the payoff, because it goes on and on and on, and will keep going on, until there’s no more paying to be done. It’s none of my business, Ernest (they’d be on Ernest and Eddy terms by now), but from what I hear I think you’ve got the wrong chap in that little case where the pimp got cut: I’ve been asking around and this is what I’ve come up with – and then evidence so good any copper would buy it, release his suspect, and arrest the man Eddy decided to fit up. And Eddy would keep your telephone calls on record as well.

  And so it goes on. Oh Ernest, I’m having a little local trouble with some new fellow called McKechnie. I don’t know what you’ve got on him, but I’ll send you round what I know; he’s a bit of a trouble-maker from what I hear. I shouldn’t think he’d be a good influence on the patch. And then a bit later, Ernest, funny thing happened, you know, I had a little chap come to see me today, quite a bright little fellow. Face from the past, I expect you’ll remember him, name of Duffy. Yes, that’s right, yes, queer. Bright fellow, but, well, I think he’s getting into the wrong company, Ernest. He seems to be doing some sort of job for McKechnie; no, I’m not sure exactly what, and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t really know what McKechnie’s up to. I mean, I don’t like to see a fellow like that get into any trouble, even if he is a queer copper we had to get rid of; I was just thinking maybe you might send someone round to have a word with him? Straight away? Oh, no need to hurry, Ernest, but, well, now you come to mention it, that would be quite useful. You’ve got his address, have you? Good.

  Duffy didn’t find corruption hard to understand, and it didn’t make him priggish either. Anyone could go the way of Sullivan, and then live for twenty, thirty years making little payoffs here and there, bending things just a bit, justifying it to yourself by keeping up your arrest record – and all the time there would be a sort of tapeworm inside you, feeding away in your guts. It wasn’t guilt, and it was too imprecise to be fear; it was a sort of hideous worry, a nagging certainty that one day you’d be called on to deliver too much, one day it would all be put in black-and-white terms instead of these comforting neutral greys, one day Eddy would be there flourishing all he knew about you and saying, ‘Fucking do this or I’ll break you.’ And you knew that if you didn’t do it, he’d break you; and if you did do it, you might get broken by someone else, but there was just a chance that you might get away with it and that it wouldn’t show, and it was always the better chance to do what Eddy suggested. So you did it, and this time it went wrong, and you were busted, broken, chewed up and spat out, sent down for a few years while your wife had to handle the shame and the loneliness and the sudden loss of your pension; what she’d married wasn’t after all a successful Soho gang-buster but a fat convict who’d never really been very nice to her, who’d lied and gone off on holidays with criminals and slept with foreign whores and now, at the end of his career, wasn’t even going to bring her home a pension. And how are you going to face the neighbours with that in the papers, Mrs Sullivan, without a trip to the doctor’s and talk of stress and the change and a bottleful of little pills and then, well, Ernest isn’t going to start seeing how fast the sherry’s going down now that he’s in the Scrubs, is he?

  That was one of the points about corruption: you never thought of the side-effects at the time. As you clinked glasses and climbed into your beach shorts, you didn’t really think about a Stanley knife tracing a three-inch cut down the right shoulder blade of Rosie McKechnie, who may have been married to a pretty shady fellow, but being married even to a murderer isn’t a crime yet, is it? That’s the sort of connection you don’t make, you don’t think cause-and-effect operates in that way; and yet it does, it’s exactly that sort of equation which in the end is presented to you, maybe in court or in your head, though usually by this time your head’s so muddled it can’t even follow simple equations like that. No, your head says, it wasn’t me that cut Rosie McKechnie, you can’t blame that on me, I was miles away, I was at my desk, no, I was even arresting someone at the time. You may have been, but that was only cover.

  Duffy understood Sullivan perfectly; and understanding him didn’t make him feel morally superior; but it did make him feel free to hate Sullivan with all the rage at his disposal. Because one of the little cause-and-effect links Sullivan might or might not understand any more was that it was he who had destroyed Duffy’s career. Sure, Eddy set it up, set the black kid up for Duffy; sure, it was because Duffy was after Eddy that Eddy did this; but without Sullivan as informant, as tip-off man, as maker perhaps of tha
t final phone call to the Paddington police – without Sullivan, all you had was a villain trying to frame a copper. Not much headway usually made there. Sullivan it was who made it work.

  And now Duffy had gone back to his old patch and got caught in Eddy’s net all over again. And Eddy, like a great big spider, had neatly trussed him up, injected him with something which made him quite harmless, and let him go. Eddy knew that the scraps of information Duffy had gathered were valueless compared to one corner of a single snap that Eddy had taken last night. As he was booted out into the night from the side door into Frith Street, Duffy, the tears welling in his eyes, had mumbled to Eddy that he’d come back and break his cock off. Eddy had chortled back at him,

  ‘Suck it and see, Mr Duffy, suck it and see.’

  And the three men had giggled, as they’d giggled when they’d watched the Polaroids gradually developing.

  Duffy wanted to ring Carol, but he wasn’t sure he dared. He wasn’t even sure she’d believe what he told her. He wasn’t sure he ought to sleep the night with her ever again after what had happened. The last time Eddy had fucked him up he’d been left unable to make it with Carol; he’d been left a compulsive one-night-stander, a user of whores and casual trade, bruised and wary when it came to emotional contact. What would be the result of Eddy fucking him up again this time? He didn’t like to think.

  He tried not to think of lots of other things during the rest of that day. He roamed around his flat, fed casually, walked the streets, dropped over to his office to see if there was anything on the answerphone, went home, watched five solid hours of television and collapsed into another dreamless sleep. Not surprisingly, since all the horrors came to the surface naturally enough during the daytime.

  The following morning he tried to kick himself into working. He pulled out some plans of offices and tried to give himself tests, asking how he would fit the cheapest and most efficient scanner network, or alarm system, given the particular area and its problems. The trouble was, he didn’t really care. All he cared about was what was going on underground in his mind.

  In the course of the day he got three phone calls, all of which helped him come to a decision. The first was the briefest.

  ‘Oh, Duffy, it’s Brian McKechnie here.’

  ‘Fuck off, McKechnie.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘I said, Fuck off McKechnie.’

  There was a vague, spluttering noise at the other end.

  ‘Oh, McKechnie, don’t ring off. There is one thing. Is your secretary in today, by any chance?’

  ‘My secretary? Why? No, she isn’t as a matter of fact. She’s got ’flu. Some sort of summer ’flu, I suppose.’

  ‘Thank you. Now fuck off, McKechnie.’

  Duffy put the phone down. The second call came in about lunchtime. Duffy had almost forgotten about it. As he picked up the phone, he heard a thick Russian accent.

  ‘Meester Daffy, ees yor controll. You weesh to yoin Keem in Moskva thees week orr nechst?’

  ‘Geoff, hi. What is it?’

  ‘What is it? Only the little job you gave me. Nixon’s secretary with her foot on the autowipe – remember?’

  ‘Sorry. Of course. No, I had a bad night’s sleep last night.’

  ‘Are you sitting comfortably?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then I’ll begin. I take it the tape you sent was recorded on a Sony portable SK 6500?’

  ‘I don’t know; well, I know it was a Sony.’

  ‘Well, it must have been an SK 6500 then. Fortunately they don’t rub out that well – the manufacturers often assume that on these little portables you’ll never just want to rub out so that you get absolute silence, you’ll only want to rub out when you re-record over the top. And the guy who wiped it – who I presume is the same guy who is speaking in the bit that’s erased…’

  ‘Can’t tell you, Geoff. You never know who might be listening.’ Duffy always liked teasing Bell about his paranoia. Bell never noticed.

  ‘Quite right. Anyway, the guy who wiped it used the same machine that he recorded it on, which wasn’t the thing to do if he was really keen to lose it. And it doesn’t look as if he knew about these machines because he only went over it once, I’d say.’

  Bell stopped. It was the techniques of finding things out that fascinated him much more than what could actually be found out by using such techniques. Duffy prodded.

  That’s terrific. And what did you find?’

  ‘Ah, that took a little while. The traces weren’t perfect, I had to re-record, blow it up, break it down – shall I tell you exactly what I did?’

  ‘I’d rather hear what was in the gap.’

  ‘Ah.’ He sounded disappointed. ‘Shall I tell you over the phone?’

  ‘Let’s risk it.’

  ‘I don’t like that word “risk”. Never use it myself. Well, the sentence, let me get my transcript, the sentence read, “I’m not having some GAP GAP GAP coming on to my patch and telling me how to run my shop.” That was before I filled it in.’

  ‘Yes, Geoff, and after you filled it in?’

  ‘Ah, let me get my other transcript…“I’m not having some grubby ex-fiddler from up north coming on to my patch and telling me how to run my shop.” I had a bit of difficulty getting “grubby” out of the tape, but I’m pretty sure that’s what it is.’

  ‘No doubt about the rest?’

  ‘None at all.’

  ‘Thanks very much, Geoff.’

  ‘What shall I do with the tape?’

  ‘Could you possibly deliver it with the transcripts to an address I’ll give you? Today.’

  ‘Well…’ Geoff sounded doubtful.

  ‘I can’t tell you why, I’m afraid.’ That clinched it.

  ‘Of course.’

  The third phone call came late in the afternoon, when Duffy was already rooting in his work cupboard for supplies. As he picked the phone up, he carried on checking the set of screwdrivers, the plastic-handled pliers, and the cutting knives he might need. He heard the pips panicking, then Carol’s voice came on. Like last time, she didn’t identify herself.

  ‘I’m not going to repeat it. Born Brian Kelly, 1929, Newcastle. ’49 London, ’52 back north, Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle, ’73 London. ’51 receiving London. ’53 receiving Leeds. ’54 receiving Leeds. ’61 indecent material through the post Manchester. ’65 Obscene Publications Act Manchester. ’70 receiving Newcastle. Probation, six months, six months, fine, three months, one year. Released ’71, clean since, and don’t ask me ever to do this again Duffy are you all right?’

  ‘I’ve got to see you tonight, Carol.’

  ‘Sorry, Duffy, I’ve got a date.’

  ‘No, I mean got to, Carol. Got to. Please cancel it.’

  There was a silence.

  ‘I’ve never asked you to cancel before. It’s always been part of the agreement, that I’d never ask you to cancel. I’m asking now. I’m serious, Carol.’

  ‘O.K.’

  ‘Your place, please. I’ll be late. Probably very late.’

  ‘I don’t want to hear why, Duffy. Just don’t tell me why.’

  ‘I won’t. And thanks.’

  Carol hung up. Duffy went on with his quiet, methodical preparations. He laid everything he might possibly need out on the table, and then selected in order of probability of need. There was no point setting off festooned with equipment like a fucking Sherpa. He might as well carry a large sack over his shoulder labelled Swag.

  He wondered about the best time. Everyone said two in the morning was the best time. Duffy thought it was a rubbish time. Two in the morning is when sounds travel for ever, when a sticky window makes a soft squeak and three Panda cars hear it from miles away. Two o’clock is when insomniacs look out of their windows and long for an excuse to phone the police, just to talk to somebody, anybody. ‘Oh, officer, there’s a rather suspicious cat on the roof next door. It’s got four legs, a ginger coat and is carrying a jemmy.’ Two o’clock is when the bu
rglars who get caught go burgling.

  Duffy settled for ten thirty. Lots of punters still on the streets, the pubs still going strong, lots of stray noises drifting about. The tarts getting into double figures for the day.

  He wore an anorak with pockets all over it, jeans and soft-soled shoes. He went in by tube as usual to Piccadilly Circus, strolled slowly along the Avenue and put on his punter’s walk as he turned up a side street. He worked his way across to Greek Street, crossed to the east side of the street to avoid walking past the front window of the Aladdin’s Lamp, crossed back, and went into the Duke of Hamilton. He bought a half of lager and went out into the tiny garden at the back. It was a cool night, and the only people there were a couple sitting at a table holding hands. They didn’t pay any attention as Duffy walked to the farthest table and sat down. They didn’t pay any attention as Duffy sipped his drink slowly and watched them out of the corner of his eye. When the barman called Time and they dragged themselves out of each other’s eyes, they didn’t even notice that there was no one else in the garden with them.

  As he sat in the shadows of the courtyard behind the Double Blue he realised that he had miscalculated. There were no lights at all in the upstairs windows; but downstairs the cinema was still going strong. Easing their way out of a back window and floating towards him came the noises of amplified pleasure: the sounds of wailing sheep, and of bats being bludgeoned to death.

  At eleven the noises stopped. At eleven ten the lights were turned out. At eleven thirty Duffy thought it was time to move. He pulled on a pair of very thin, transparent rubber gloves, got up out of the shadows and walked quickly to the cinema’s emergency exit. He listened for a moment with his ear to the door, found himself uttering not exactly a prayer but a profound wish, and pushed gently on the right-hand door. It opened an inch, two inches, then the retaining chain was pulled taut. Duffy paused, fished in a pocket, took out a pencil-thin piece of metal about three inches long, and tugged on the end. Three sections telescoped outwards, until he had an instrument about a foot long. He poked this through the gap in the doors, pulled the right-hand door almost shut on the metal rod, and moved it slowly upwards until it touched the chain.