Duffy (6 page)

‘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.’

‘I didn’t know the police could do that.’

‘Not in theory they can’t. They’ve got a duty to investigate. But they’ve also got practical problems. They naturally spend most of the time going for the big stuff and only go for the little stuff when there’s a good chance of an arrest.’

‘So this is little? My wife has thirteen stitches and I’m paying out a hundred quid a fortnight?’

‘Well, Mr McKechnie, there’s big and big. And there are a couple of other possibilities.’

‘Which are?’

‘That the bloke at West Central is keeping tabs on what’s going on but thinks it’s too early to come in. He’s waiting for it all to blow up like a great boil full of pus, and then he’ll come in and burst it. Some people call this the romantic approach to police work. Some people call it the lazy approach. And then of course…’ Duffy paused.

‘Yes?’

‘There’s another possibility. This guy…’

‘Sullivan?’

‘Yes, Sullivan – he may be thinking that it’s all a private business anyway; that it’s just a little squabble about a patch. What about that, Mr McKechnie?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, I don’t know anything about you. As far as I know, you’re a perfectly normal trader who deals in funny hats or whatever. But, of course, if you had form, that might be different…’

‘Form?’

‘You haven’t got a criminal record, I hope, Mr McKechnie?’

‘I hope so too. No, of course I don’t.’

‘Good. Well, then, there’s only the last possibility, which wouldn’t be the easiest one for either of us. That this guy Sullivan is in direct collusion with whoever is using Salvatore’s name.’

‘And what would you do if that were the case?’

‘I’d advise you to sell up as fast as you can and get your tail out of the area, Mr McKechnie. An expanding operator and a sleeping policeman are a very unpleasant combination to come across.’

‘But we don’t by any means know that, do we, Mr Duffy?’

‘No, fortunately, we don’t.’

‘And in the meantime?’

‘In the meantime I can do some scouting about for you. I don’t think I – or you for that matter – want to get too near the second area of concern. If you’re dealing with a bent copper, the only rule I know is, stay away.’

‘And what about the first area?’

‘Well, we haven’t got much to start on. We’ve got a short man and a tall one at your home, one of them with a Stanley knife. No prints. One of them a bit sick by the sound of it. We’ve got a fat bloke with glasses and ginger hair just off Shaftesbury Avenue. And we’ve got a voice down the phone. What sort of a voice, Mr McKechnie?’

‘Quite deep. He started off a bit Italian; now he’s got more English, but possibly not quite English. Sometimes has what sounds like a slight accent, sometimes puts his words in a funny order. No, that’s not quite right, but he did start off saying lots of things like “As you say” or “How do you put it?”.’

‘Doesn’t tell us much. If he gets a kick out of pretending to be Salvatore, maybe he likes putting on a bit of an Italian accent as well. I’ll fix a tape on your phone as soon as lean.’

‘So what do we do next, Mr Duffy?’

‘We wait for you to get your next orders. And then we see what they are. And then we decide what to do. In the meanwhile I’ll mooch around and see what I can pick up. I’ll come back tomorrow and fix your phone; but after that we’d better not meet here again, just in case you’re being watched. We’ll keep in touch by phone.’

They bargained briefly about money. Duffy asked for thirty a day, and settled for twenty (however long the day was), or three quid an hour for part of a day, plus tube fares and any goods he bought for which he could produce a receipt. Then he asked for a silly hat and a mask.

‘I don’t think our sort of masks will make you a master of disguise, Mr Duffy.’

‘It’s just to have in my hand as I leave, in case you’re being watched. Makes me look more like a potential customer who’s been given some samples.’

‘Very true, Mr Duffy. Shall I invoice you for them?’

‘Yes, please.’

McKechnie wrote out an invoice. With a smile, Duffy handed it straight back to him. ‘Expenses receipt,’ he said, and left. He walked out into Rupert Street with a cone-shaped clown’s hat in one hand and a King Kong mask with plastic hair in the other. Two Cypriot youths were loitering at the entrance to the minicab office and an unhealthily pale man was taking down the wire shutters on the window of the dirty bookshop. It was beginning to cloud over.

McKechnie had lied to Duffy about his bit of trouble with the law. Duffy, on the other hand, had lied to McKechnie by pretending not to register Sullivan’s name. He knew Sullivan. He knew Sullivan from way back. And the memory of him tugged with it all those other memories which he normally kept locked away at the back of his skull, and which only escaped by chance, or when Carol said something to him like she’d said that morning.

Duffy knew more than just Sullivan. He knew West Central like the back of his hand. He’d been a detective-sergeant there for three years before the thing happened which finished his career. He’d done a year’s general there, and two years’ vice. He’d loved the work; he’d had a good giggle with the rest of the lads at the Xmas blue film shows; he’d got to know the patch and the whores, and made friends with a few of them; he’d known who handled smokes, who handled snort and who handled smack; he’d got an inkling of how the tight, impenetrable Chinese community ran itself – of when they ceremoniously deferred to white law, and when they didn’t give a wine waiter’s cork about it – and he’d learnt all about presh. He was on his way to becoming one of the best officers on the patch. Not just that, but one of the happiest too: when a pretty, round-faced, dark-haired, Irish-looking W.P.C. had joined them, there’d been the usual stampede from his colleagues. He’d hung back a bit, waited for the dust to die down, and then got talking to her. She got talking back, and they were away. Things couldn’t have been working out better.

What wrecked it all were two things: honesty and sex. Duffy, like most coppers, had a slightly flexible approach to the truth. You had to if you wanted to survive: not survive as a copper, but survive within yourself. The zealots who saw truth as indivisible ended up in either A10 or the cuckoo farm. Most of the time you stuck to the truth as closely as you could, but were prepared to bend with the breeze if necessary. Sometimes, for instance, it might be necessary to tell a little lie, fiddle your notebook just a bit, in order to make sure that a much bigger lie didn’t get to pass itself off as the truth. On those occasions you felt bad for a bit, though you knew you didn’t have any choice in the matter.

But Duffy, like most coppers, knew that you always drew a line somewhere. You might tidy up your verbals a bit, fiddle your evidence slightly, forget a little something, but you always knew why you were doing it: you were fixing the record in favour of justice. You weren’t doing it to get promotion, you weren’t doing it to get your own back on a villain for personal reasons, and you weren’t doing it because you were on the take.

That was the way it normally was, the way it was for most coppers. But not for all. Some coppers were bent as corkscrews, and they didn’t last long. The tricky ones were the half-and-halfers. Sullivan, for instance. You could never be quite sure about the Super. He always kept his own company, always seemed a bit lazy, a bit bored; he turned in a good enough arrest record, yet always seemed to be keeping some of himself in reserve. Partly it was that he’d been at the station longer than anyone else. He’d say things like ‘My experience tells me, lad…’ and ‘When you’ve been around West Central as long as I have…’ and ‘Listen, my boy, I was charging Jasmine when you still didn’t know what your middle leg was for…’ Most of the younger men tried to look on him as an avuncular figure, but none quite succeeded.

One summer a couple of new whores had started operating from a gaff on the corner of Bateman Street and Frith. One was a black kid, the other white, and they worked as a pair when they street-hustled. There wasn’t that much street-work going on – at least not in broad daylight; but these two were new to the patch, and they either had a brash approach to the market or else were run by a very grabby pimp, so they often hustled the street. One would keep a lookout and the other would proposition a prick. If he didn’t walk off at once, but couldn’t quite make up his mind, she’d point to her lookout and say, ‘Maybe you like my friend?’ The hesitating punter felt flattered at being given a choice, and thinking it almost impolite to refuse both of them, would make his selection. Duffy saw them work this trick lots of times.

They had looked like a couple of tough-faced twenty-year-olds who could take care of themselves. But they cut just as easily as anybody else. One evening in Bateman Street someone stuck a knife into the black girl, first into her shoulder and then, as she was falling, into her rump, as near to her cunt as he could. The girl lay in the gutter and bled a lot; and then she was taken to hospital where she was stitched up. She told Duffy she’d cut herself opening a tin of baked beans.

Stabbing at the cunt is the way pimps warn other pimps off their patch. You don’t cut the pimp, who might fight back, you cut one of his girls. Duffy wasn’t sentimental about whores, but he didn’t much like that sort of crime, and on this occasion he got a bit tough. He leaned on Polly, as the black girl called herself, for the name of her pimp. Then he went to the pimp and leaned a bit harder on him. Then he got a lead on someone called Savella who’d tried to warn off the pimp a few times in the weeks before the attack.

He started to lean on Savella, which was a lot harder than leaning on the pimp because Savella was a whole deal smarter and had a bright villain’s grounding in the law. Duffy went to see him a few times and made a nuisance of himself. He played it like one enthusiastic copper. He asked who Savella worked for. Savella wouldn’t tell him – ‘Amma self-ampaloyed’ he kept repeating – but Duffy went on asking around. Finally, he came up with a name: Big Eddy. No other name, no description. He carried on asking. He was keen on his case.

Eventually, Sullivan called him in.

‘Not getting very far with this stabbing, Duffy.’

Duffy begged to disagree. He’d got to the pimp, he’d got to Savella, he’d got to the name of Big Eddy. He’d made a few new contacts. The girls might talk more. He thought he’d got hold of someone who might have something he could use to put pressure on Savella.

‘My experience tells me the case is folding,’ said Sullivan.

Again, Duffy begged to differ. Anyway, he’d carried on in the past with much less to go on than he had now.

‘I repeat,’ said Sullivan, fixing Duffy with a couple of small toad-like eyes, the only live portions of his flabby, inanimate face, ‘that my experience tells me the case is folding.’

Duffy knew at the time that this was one occasion when he should bend with the breeze, one of those times when you shrug and say, ‘It’s only a whore’ – and, in this case, not a particularly nice one either. Foolishly, he didn’t. He went on with the case. He wasn’t exactly in breach of police regulations because Sullivan hadn’t officially closed the case, or taken it over, or handed it to someone else. It was just that in every other respect Sullivan had told him to lay off.