Duffy (22 page)

Eddy certainly wouldn’t think that it was Duffy who had done him. Not straight away, at least. Duffy was sure Jeggo hadn’t had time to see him. But Eddy might work it out by process of elimination. He might connect Duffy’s security business with the fact that someone had bypassed the burglar alarm on his side room. And he might come up with a name at the same time as he realised what he had lost. What had he said that time? Great men have their libraries. Eddy had his files and tapes and films and Polaroids. Only Eddy didn’t have them any more. Knowledge is Power; and without that room Big Eddy Martoff was going to be no more than just another pushy Soho villain.

Duffy didn’t want to be around when Martoff realised that. He didn’t like to think of Martoff running his finger down the telephone directory for Duffy’s home address. So Duffy wouldn’t go back to his Paddington flat, not for anything. In any case, after two burglaries there wasn’t much left there that he valued. Everything was replaceable: clothes, tools, television set.

There were a few last things to do, of course, before Duffy disappeared into another part of London. As he sat in the taxi he felt the front of his anorak. The files made him look pregnant. He’d taken two: Sullivan’s and McKechnie’s. In the morning, after he’d slept with them under his pillow, he’d pop round the corner and have Sullivan’s Xeroxed. Five copies. He didn’t worry so much about McKechnie; but Sullivan wasn’t getting away.

Then he’d pack the files up, enclose the tape and transcripts Bell would have delivered to Carol’s by now, and send them off to A
IO
. He didn’t know what A
IO
would do about McKechnie – probably pass the file on – but he knew what they’d do about Sullivan. And just to make sure that they knew what they were going to do about Sullivan, he’d send off four of the Xerox copies to crime desks in Fleet Street. The fifth he’d keep for himself. It should see Sullivan good for five years at least, depending on which judge he drew.

When Duffy got to Carol’s, she was still up. The package from Bell was on the kitchen table. She hadn’t seen Duffy so cheerful for months. He grinned at her, pressed his file-stuffed anorak against her and gave her a kiss. Then he looked at her oddly, shook his head an inch or two, and said, ‘Sorry’. Sorry, she supposed he meant, in case you misinterpreted that. But she didn’t ask. She didn’t ask either what he had been doing, or why he wanted to stay the night tonight, or why she had had to put off her date. She didn’t ask, because she really didn’t want to know. All she said to him was,

‘Duffy, I thought you might be hungry, so I’ve got us some bread and cheese.’

He looked up, then suddenly seemed lost in memory. He was thinking about the last few days, about the fears and the anger; he was thinking about the cubicle at the Aladdin’s Lamp, and the thin copper wire wrapped threateningly around him. But all that he said to Carol by way of explanation about Martoff and Jeggo and Georgiou, about Sullivan and Shaw, about McKechnie and Bell – all he said about what had happened to him in the past weeks, and what he had done, was,

‘I really don’t think I could face cheese, love.’

And then he gave her an enigmatic smile.

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The day they crashed McKay, not much else happened on the M4. At least, not on the stretch between Heathrow and Chiswick; further west, that was somebody else’s patch, so who cared? Especially as it was one of those warm, hazy August mornings when the police cars bask like lizards on their special roadside ramps; when those few extra feet above the tarmac permit a careless, unobserved, cap-tilted snooze. And then, perhaps, towards 11.30, the quiet phut and crackle of the FM radio would be eased a bit lower, and finally drowned out by the tiny portable in the blue pocket, tuned to the ball-by-ball.

And the cars weren’t giving any trouble either. By ten, the last commuters had vanished east in a swirl of nicotine and bad temper; they wouldn’t be back for at least six hours. The commercials, the heavies, the twenty-tonners were uncharacteristically well-behaved: something to do with the sun, no doubt. And the civvies: well, on the way to the airport they were too scared of wrecking their holiday to do more than forty; while on the way back, they were so baffled by driving on the left that they often stayed in third gear all the way to the Cromwell Road.

So the blues weren’t too pleased when McKay got crashed, when a taxi driver who had seen – well, hadn’t really seen anything, just a wreck and a paint smear on the crash barrier – radioed in to his office, who called the local police, who called Heathrow, who transferred it to Uxbridge, who at the third time of asking (England 8 for 1, Boycott bowled Chappell 2: even that bit of the day was going well) managed to raise a drowsily laconic panda crew. Who weren’t too pleased with McKay for fucking up their morning. It was almost as if he’d done it deliberately.

What was left on the crash barrier might have been paint, but it wasn’t. McKay’s car had bits of red on it, but not that much. It was a customised Cortina with a tiger motif. At the front, a trompe-l’oeil radiator grille whose vertical bars formed the tiger’s teeth; along the side, the massed lightning of gold and black jagged stripes; at the back, a tail painted across the bumper, and (McKay’s own suggestion, of which he was incontinently proud) a pair of tiger buttocks which met at the point where the special central exhaust protruded. At work, to his face, they called him, as he planned, ‘Tiger’; when he wasn’t there, they tended to refer to his as The Farting Cat. Sometimes they would watch him drive off, and laugh together at the first gust of blue-grey smoke from between the tiger’s buttocks.

McKay left the Western International Cargo Market and headed east towards London. But he didn’t drive like a tiger. After a flash bit of foot-down and tyre-squeal as he left work (someone was usually watching, if only a cleaner and his broom), he settled back on the motorway to a steady forty-five. No point burning out the engine before its time. Besides, he liked being in his car – the longer it lasted, the better. Proper little maharajah’s palace in here, he used to say. The sound system; the row of miniatures in the ‘cocktail cabinet’, as he loftily described his glove compartment; the small, padded steering wheel, all black leather and studs; the full Cyril Lord underfoot; sheepskin seats (‘The wife makes ’em from the sheep Tiger runs over,’ he would explain); even a sheepskin rear-window shelf. On this shelf – another of McKay’s favourite touches – lolled a large soft toy. A tiger, of course. McKay was vaguely irritated that its colours didn’t match the bodywork, and he’d nearly punched the soft-toy salesman who tried to assure him that the colours were definitely authentic (as if the colours of his Cortina weren’t). Still, McKay was able to make a virtue of this whenever anyone mentioned it. ‘Tigers come in all colours,’ he’d quip, modestly referring to himself as well.

McKay looked up past the too-pale toy and checked the traffic behind him. Just a coach, some twenty yards back. He moved his head a bit and studied his own reflection. The broad, slightly sweaty face, the cupid’s-bow mouth, the impassive eyes – they all pleased McKay as much as ever. Vroom, vroom, he thought to himself. Idly, he tugged on the chain around his neck until a thin silver swastika, about two inches square, appeared from beneath his shirt. The leading edges of the emblem had been filed to sharpness: for no particular reason at the time, except that it felt like a good idea. And later, it had proved useful now and then. When he was in the caff, for instance, and that Pakki had started looking at him. Not doing anything, of course – they never dared; they just looked. McKay had dug out a match, reeled in his swastika, and started sharpening the match to a point right in front of the Pakki’s face. Then he let the badge dangle and picked slowly at his teeth, all the time staring at this guy. That was one Pakki who didn’t bother to finish his sweet.

McKay shifted the swastika in his right hand, selected one of the legs, and began to pick inquisitively at his left nostril with it. That was another reason for keeping to a steady forty-five; though of course, with a racing wheel like this you could drive at seventy with just one little pinkie if you felt like it. As he told people.

He worked methodically at his nostril, occasionally flicking a bogy on to his jeans. A lorry began to overtake him. For a few seconds it was alongside, thumping and shuddering; then it fell back. McKay glanced in the mirror to see where it had gone, but all he saw was the same coach as before; it was a bit closer than last time, maybe ten yards behind.

Typical of fucking lorries, McKay thought. They bang past you going down a hill, swerve in front as soon as they can see six inches of daylight, and then you have to overtake them all over again on the next uphill stretch. Ridiculous; they ought to be made to stay in the slow lane where they belong. Always half-overtaking you and then changing their minds just because there’s a one-in-fifty gradient.

McKay didn’t check on whether it had been a one-in-fifty gradient that had made the lorry fall back. He just assumed it, as anyone else might; and he just happened to assume wrong. Instead, he shifted the swastika in his hand, selected a new leg – he wasn’t a dirty bugger, he knew about clean sheets – and began to pick up gently at his right nostril. As he did so, the thump and shudder repeated itself at his shoulder. If McKay hadn’t been otherwise occupied, he might have been tempted to have a little game with the lorry, accelerating just enough to keep ahead of it, slowing as the lorry slowed, really getting on its tits. He liked doing that to lorries. But it was a nice morning; McKay was feeling unusually good-humoured; he was on a routine delivery run; and besides, he was picking his nose. So instead, he merely looked ahead (there was a bridge coming up) and then in his mirror – that coach was still there; funny, it was right up his exhaust – and settled back to let the lorry pass.

It was well planned; but then the men hadn’t been cheap: they only did one-offs, and they never took rubbish jobs. They were proud of their work; proud, that is, of the way they carried it out. They knew where to steal what they needed; they weren’t afraid of wasting a few days on research; and they didn’t keep telltale cuttings books on what they did – even though they had, in their own quiet way, made the papers a few times.

The lorry, an articulated eighteen-wheeler, all swaddled in canvas and ropes, drew level with McKay about three hundred yards before the bridge. Gradually it began to inch past, until the back of the trailer was level with the rear offside door of the Cortina; then it seemed just to sit there, straining and burping, unable to get past. Fucking run out of puff again, thought McKay.

The coach, meanwhile, took up even closer order. Anyone following the three vehicles would have concluded that there were only two – a lorry unwisely trying to overtake a coach; the Cortina was completely hidden. And from the front – well, the lorry would hide the car from those directly across from them; and the bridge, they assumed, would take care of the rest. That was what the men had planned; and they were men who weren’t cheap.

As the cab of the lorry emerged into the sunlight on the other side of the bridge, the driver twisted the wheel and stamped on the brake at the same time, putting the vehicle into a controlled snake. The back part of the trailer slewed suddenly left and rammed the Cortina in the midriff. ‘Just a little boomps-a-daisy,’ was how the driver had described it when accepting the first half of the money; but then he was always prone to understatement.

The first effect of just a little boomps-a-daisy was to make the sharpened edge of the swastika rip through the fleshy outside of McKay’s right nostril. McKay intended to swear at that point, but events rather got the better of him. Besides, if he had sworn, he might have used up all his best words before something much more unpleasant than a torn nose happened to him; and that would have been a waste.

As the lorry struck the Cortina, the coach pulled out into the middle lane to get clear of whatever might happen. The car was batted diagonally across the hard shoulder. The nearside rear indicator light was the first thing to break against the crash barrier: but then that, compared to the final toll, was about as grave an injury to the Cortina as was McKay’s nose to the rest of his body.

Crash barriers work in the way they are intended to, as long as the angle of approach is within a certain range. The Cortina’s wasn’t. It hit the barrier, stood up on its boot for a second – at which point the doors burst open and McKay was shrugged out – then skipped over the barrier and cartwheeled down an escarpment. McKay himself made a long red trail on the metal barrier in a way that no one could quite understand. It looked, to those who could first be bothered to stop, as if he had been exaggerating terribly: if you were thrown out of your car, why didn’t you just land on the barrier and stay there, canted over it like a carpet ready for spring beating? Why did it look as if someone or something had
smeared
the poor fellow all along the barrier? ‘Darling,
no
darling …
don’t
look.’ Of course he probably wasn’t wearing a seat belt, but even so, it did look a bit much. ‘Darling, I
told
you not to look. Darling, are you … well, quickly, use that patch of grass over there … Oh
Christ
.’ Why did one stop for accidents; why didn’t one do as all the other fellows did?