Dad, why are these women chucking themselves at me? I could imagine him snorting. Well then, why do I think they’re chucking themselves at me? They’re like buses, Dad would have said. Nothing for ages and then three come along at once. Typical of him, stupid gags and no answers. I thought about it some more, without referring it to my dad. Maybe they wanted something. Maybe just a shoulder to cry on, or someone to listen to them. That’s what your mother used to say, a voice that might have been Dad’s piped up. All any woman wants is for you to listen. Maybe, I thought. But why do they want me to listen to them?
I didn’t hear her leave; in the morning the quilt was neatly rolled—or as neatly as it could be rolled—and left on the sofa. She’d scribbled something on the back of one of the unopened bills with a red pen. Her handwriting was so bad the letters wriggled and swapped places without my messed-up brain having anything to do with it. Eventually I worked the message out, though.
Thanx
C Ya
Z
x
eight
According to the movie Raging Bull—a favourite at Delroy’s gym—Jake La Motta the boxer used to get his wife to work him up into a sexual frenzy before a fight and then pour ice down his shorts. The theory was that he’d work out his frustration in the ring. I finished my run so fast that morning I was back shortly before I left. I went into my press-ups and curls, trying to think about anything except Zoe wearing not much but a T-shirt, even if that meant worrying about money instead.
If this new job lasted I wouldn’t have to worry, I thought. I’d never worked evenings before, apart from the few times I’d done a double shift at Max Snax and come home too wrecked and smelly to train properly. Evening shifts—especially ones that paid as well as last night—would suit me a lot better. After the boxing club had closed down I’d never known what to do with myself in the evenings anyway. Telly was mostly crap, going to the cinema cost money, and reading had never been my favourite pastime.
Then it occurred to me that the job couldn’t last. If it didn’t take me closer to the truth about who killed my dad, I’d just have been taking favours from McGovern. And although I’d saved his kid’s life and all, it probably wasn’t a good long-term strategy to be in any sort of relationship with McGovern, or even appear on his radar.
I was on my sixth set of curls, the burn blazing hard in my abs, when the doorbell buzzed. A brief hope flared it might be Zoe, but I smothered it immediately—I’d probably never see her again—and deliberately took my time opening the door.
DS Amobi stood there modelling the latest smart-casual look for the ambitious urban police officer. Another man stood at his shoulder in the standard-issue blue suit and beige mac TV detectives always wear and hardly anyone ever does in real life. His bland face was hard to place … Of course, it was Jenkins, the DC who’d attended the inquest.
“Mr. Maguire,” said Amobi, “we wondered if you could spare a few moments?”
“Here, or down the nick?” I said.
“Here is fine,” said Amobi. “It’s just a routine call, a progress report on the course of our investigation.” Jenkins stood there like a shop-window mannequin sent to make up the numbers.
I looked down the path. “Where’s Prendergast?”
“DI Prendergast has several other cases to supervise,” said Amobi smoothly.
“Do you have any progress to report?” I said.
“Would it be possible for us to come in?” If he’d bowed Amobi couldn’t have appeared more eager-to-please and amenable. He seemed to be the new breed of copper, well-versed in PR, devoid of the second-hand swagger younger cops unconsciously learn off the older hands. It made him that much more dangerous and hard to read.
I stood back and held the door open. They entered, Jenkins nearly colliding with Amobi’s back when the senior officer stopped to wipe his feet. From the look of Amobi’s shoes my mat probably left his soles dirtier than they were to begin with. Amobi moved inside and Jenkins wiped his feet in turn, but without much enthusiasm.
I grabbed the towel hanging over the bottom of the banister and gave it a sniff. It would do. I wiped the sweat from my face while Amobi glanced at the quilt still rolled up on the sofa and cautiously planted himself on the free cushion beside it. Jenkins perched in the armchair, looking uncomfortable, as though he’d rather be sitting beside his boss, or wandering round the room peering at the family photographs for clues the way plain-clothes cops did on TV shows.
“We’ve made extensive enquiries locally,” said Amobi. “Door to door in this street and the neighbouring streets, over the course of several days and evenings, to try and make sure we spoke to everyone. We thought perhaps the intruder might have escaped from the rear of the property, but no one in the houses backing onto yours witnessed anything suspicious.”
I nodded. This sounded worryingly like a prologue to getting my rights read.
But Amobi sounded sincere when he went on, “I’m sorry not to be able to offer you better news. We have spoken to many of your father’s acquaintances locally, and tried to piece together his last known movements as best we can. So far we’ve found nothing that could be considered out of the ordinary. We wondered if perhaps you might have recalled some details that weren’t in your original statement.” Here we go, I thought. “You were in a state of shock at the time,” Amobi explained, “and witnesses often find vital information pops into their mind some days after the incident.”
“What about Hans?” I said. My nose was running. I wiped it on the towel, and noticing Jenkins’ distaste, I did it again, properly. Amobi didn’t react either to what I did or what I’d said.
“Hans?” he asked.
“The guy in the pub the night before my dad was murdered. The night Dad’s keys went missing. He said he was a reporter for a German newspaper, the Suddeutsche something … Surely you know all this.” Amobi’s dumb-acting had irritated me into shooting my mouth off, and I saw too late that this had been his precise intention. Must remember never to play poker with this guy, I thought.
“We are pursuing that lead, but the witness descriptions weren’t very helpful,” said Amobi. “There was rather a lot of alcohol consumed on the night in question.”
Not by Hans, I thought. “But you’ve been in touch with the Suddeutsche Wotsit,” I said. “I mean, you have people who speak German. Don’t you?” Perhaps that was too much to ask. From what I’d seen at the inquest, DC Jenkins barely spoke English.
“Like I said, we are pursuing that lead. But I’m interested to know how you got to hear about this fellow Hans.”
“Same way you did. I asked.”
“Have you made any contacts that you think might be useful, or found any leads you’d like to share with us?” He was doing that father-confessor thing, where they try to get you to blurt out your sins, as if the point was to make yourself feel better.
“Not really.”
“You mean you haven’t learned anything, or you don’t wish to share it?”
“Yes,” I said. Amobi let that one pass. The silence curdled.
Jenkins nonchalantly dug his big-screen phone out of an inner pocket and checked his email. After a moment he sensed Amobi watching him, looked up into a hard, cold stare, flicked the phone off and put it away.
Did you know my dad had a girlfriend? I thought about asking Amobi. Did you hear how her jealous husband came to the pub looking for him? But I wanted to talk to Jonno Kendrick myself, before the cops got to him. Afterwards I’d leave him somewhere they could scrape him up easily.
“Mr. Maguire”—Amobi opened his hands, all innocence—“we want to find out who murdered your father. We know you do too, but there are risks involved. As policemen we are paid to take risks.”
“Right,” I said. Two could play dumb, I thought, although I wasn’t acting. I really wasn’t sure what Amobi was getting at.
He sighed. “You were seen a few days ago at an address in Maida Vale. Posing as a gardener, you entered the resi
dence of a known criminal.”
Shit. The Guvnor’s house was under surveillance. I should have known that—for years the Met police had dedicated a whole branch of the force to convicting big-time gangsters like McGovern, and it had got them precisely nowhere. Of course they were watching his house. The question was, how long had they been watching me?
“Can I ask what you were doing there?” said Amobi.
“You lot suspect me of killing my dad,” I said. “I know I didn’t, but I don’t have fifteen thousand coppers to go knocking on doors for me, asking who did. So I thought I’d go right to the top.”
“You walked into McGovern’s house to ask him who killed your stepfather?”
“Yeah.”
“What did he tell you?”
“Ask him yourself. You’re the ones paid to take risks.” That shot caught Amobi under the ribs, I noted smugly. His eyes widened and he was going to say something hasty, but stopped and looked at the floor briefly.
“Mr. Maguire …” He looked up at me. “Joseph McGovern is a very dangerous man. He is utterly ruthless. He has people maimed and blinded and killed, without compunction. Not just enemies—friends he has fallen out with. Employees he has no further use for. Children and loved ones of people who own an asset or control a business he wants. I think you are a brave man, and you think you have nothing to lose. But believe me, if you get mixed up with McGovern, you will regret it. He will find a way to make you suffer. He always finds a way.”
I could have sworn the temperature in the room had dropped a degree or two. Amobi reminded me of a hellfire preacher, only more scary, because of his quiet, measured, matter-of-fact delivery and his perfect diction with its faint echo of Nigeria.
“I know all that,” I said. “I looked him up. I know the Serious Crimes squad have been after him for years. And they haven’t caught him, because he knows everything they do before they’ve even decided to do it. Maybe he’s psychic.” It was a lot more likely that McGovern had senior coppers on his payroll, but Amobi knew that just as well as I did. “If I had any dirt on McGovern, you’d be the first to hear about it. And McGovern would be the second. Well, maybe the fourth or fifth.” The afterthought kind of spoiled my little speech, but I didn’t want to sound like I was accusing Amobi of being bent. Then I wondered why I even gave a shit about how DS Amobi felt.
“We can help each other,” said Amobi.
“Fine. You let me know who this guy Hans really was and bring him in for questioning, and I’ll tell you what McGovern’s garden looks like.”
Amobi smiled. “Thank you for your help, Mr. Maguire,” he said, as warmly as if I’d written out a full confession and drawn him diagrams. He rose to his feet, and Jenkins did the same. I wondered if Amobi tripped on the step going out whether Jenkins would stumble too.
“Thanks for coming by,” I said.
Amobi flicked a card out of his breast pocket as smoothly as a conjuror. “If you change your mind, this is my personal number,” he said.
I looked at the card, and took it, and thought about doing something rude with it. But it would have looked childish and Amobi was too cool, so I just slipped it into the back pocket of my tracksuit. McGovern’s tracksuit, I remembered with a guilty twinge.
Amobi opened the door for himself, stepped out—without tripping—and gave me a wave. “Thanks again,” he smiled. Damn, I wished I had teeth that good.
Jenkins smirked wanly as he pulled the door shut. “Thanks,” he said.
I paid my dad a visit that afternoon, and sat there staring at the body in the coffin. I wanted to sit there until I felt something, but my head was full of the upcoming funeral and what I was going to say and the arrangements I’d made with the priest and whether anyone would turn up. And what I would tell people when they asked me what had happened. Or what I would tell myself. Was McGovern so paranoid and vicious he had some wannabe amateur screenwriter whacked? Did my dad offend the Guvnor’s ego, or did he actually find out something important? If he had, what was it? Was it in those notes that went missing?
Or was it anything to do with McGovern at all? If the cops had talked to the old guys in the pub, they might well have heard that story too, about the jealous husband who came looking for my dad. Amobi wouldn’t have missed that, like I did at first. But then, I knew that man was Jonno Kendrick, and chances were the cops didn’t, not yet anyway. Which meant I still had a chance to get to him before they did.
It was no good. I was sitting there staring at a bad waxwork someone had swapped for my living, grumbling, snoring Dad. He wasn’t here, and there was nothing for me to feel, so I left.
At the Iron Bridge that evening, the staff special was some minty-lamby-nutty concoction that melted in the mouth. It tasted so amazing I paused to savour it, which was a mistake, because in those few seconds Gordon added two greasy pans to the stack and nearly toppled the whole lot onto the floor. I caught them with my elbows, wrestled them in the direction of the sink and fought on. Eventually the tide of scummy steel receded and Eccles reappeared, taking out his wallet.
“I’ve spoken to Josie,” he said. “Next week we’ll start putting you through the books, so you need to pass her your bank details.”
“I’d rather have cash,” I said.
“You take home the same after tax and insurance,” said Eccles. He clearly considered the conversation over and was moving away when I piped up.
“I need Monday night off, Chef.”
“Is that what you’re down for?”
“Not exactly,” I said.
If I’d smacked him on the back of the head with a skillet he could not have looked at me with as much disgust at my betrayal.
“I know it’s short notice, I’m sorry.”
“Please don’t mess me around, Finn. I really thought we understood each other.”
He could have faced off against Prendergast, I thought. They were both scary enough. I wouldn’t put either of them up against McGovern, a little voice added.
“My father died a few days ago. The funeral’s on Monday.”
Eccles stared at me. “You have got to be fucking kidding,” he said.
“That’s why I needed this job. But I’ve got to have Monday night off. In fact, I’m not really asking.”
Eccles tapped the arm of his glasses on his teeth. “Fine,” he said. “But if you don’t turn up Tuesday, don’t bother coming back.”
“Thanks, Chef,” I said.
Halfway to the swing doors he stopped and turned and walked back. “And Finn … I’m sorry about your dad,” he said.
“Yeah, thanks, Chef.” You prick, I added mentally as I wiped down the sink. As it happened, I could have come to work Monday evening. The funeral and the reception, or whatever it was called, would be over by six, and I wasn’t planning to spend the evening shitfaced and wallowing in nostalgia.
nine
My soul was an old horse
Offered for sale in twenty fairs.
I’d memorized the poem so I wouldn’t have to read it off a page. I hadn’t known what it was called, only that my dad used to declaim it whenever he’d had too much to drink, which wasn’t often enough for me to remember much of it. I’d managed to piece together a few phrases in my head, and went searching for them on the Net. Turned out it was called “Pegasus,” by an Irish poet called Kavanagh, and it took some finding because there was an English poet with the same name and initials, and by the time I’d worked that out I was nearly cross-eyed with the effort of ploughing through endless verses online. I’d never really cared about poetry—why can’t writers just say what they mean?—but when I finally managed to read it I knew it was what Dad would have wanted, and this would be my last chance to indulge him.
The poem was about an artist trying to find a proper job and being endlessly rejected. The symbolism was so obvious even a thicko like me could understand it.
… the buyers
Were little men who feared his unusual airs.
Yeah,
Dad, that’s why they stopped hiring you; you scared the bastards.
I’d been worried that the chapel was too big, and that on the day it would look pathetic and empty. But by a quarter to ten a few people had turned up, and then a few more, and then even more, and they had spread themselves along the pews in loose little knots, and by the time the service had started the place was respectably full. On my right, about halfway up, a few close neighbours sat politely listening. Dad used to stop at their gates occasionally to exchange local gossip and grumbles about over-development and muggings and house prices, and even the endless parking problems, though we’d never owned a car. Me, the neighbours would only nod at. More often I caught them looking at me sideways, clearly thinking I was bad news. The nods were their way of placating me so I wouldn’t burgle their houses and pee in their tropical fish tanks.
On the left of the chapel, up near the front, were the luvvies—dad’s old actor mates. You could tell them as soon as they arrived by the way even the blokes hugged and kissed each other, and by the loud hoots of laughter they theatrically stifled. Now they sat there solemnly, listening to my delivery, no doubt thinking my dad would have done it better, wondering whether there’d be anything to eat afterwards or just booze, and please God please let it be a free bar.
“No more haggling with the world …”
As I said these words he grew
Wings upon his back.
Still on the left but further towards the back sat Jack and Phil and Sunil the newsagent, from the Weaver’s Arms. To the right, in the furthest pew at the back, sat DS Amobi. He hadn’t brought Jenkins along, and I was grateful—that twat would have spent half the service playing with his phone. In the pew in front of Amobi was a tall guy with a bent spine and a lumpy woman in glasses, sitting quietly with their hands in their laps. I suddenly realized they were Jerry and Trudy from Max Snax, and an unexpected lump filled my throat when I only had two lines to go.
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