Fiddle City

by Dan Kavanagh

  Look at it this way, Duffy told himself. The sooner you find out who’s nicking Hendrick’s stuff, the sooner you can stop worrying about a DC-10 turning into a Stuka, or about a cubic yard of frozen pee landing on your head from 20,000 feet. Fair enough. He turned off the M4 at Junction Three, ducked his head automatically as he cut across the flight path of the jumbos, and skirted the perimeter of the airport.

  Freight was handled on the south side of Heathrow. Inside the fence was the bonded area: there, the sheds belonged to individual airlines, who were responsible for cargo until it had cleared customs. Then they handed it either direct to the importer, or to one of the gaggle of freight agents just outside the fence.

  Hendrick Freight stood in one of the less fashionable areas of this subsidiary cargo market. Smarter forwarding agents were clustered under one roof in a modern shed close to the road. The security man on the gate let Duffy through after a brief phone call, and directed him to Hendrick Freight. It was a high, airy shed – Duffy hoped the job didn’t drag on until the winter – with side walls of yellow-painted breeze-block and an arching, corrugated tin roof. Bundles of goods lay on rust-coloured, triple-tiered racks. Large red numbers hung above each storage bay.

  As he stood there a yellow fork-lift truck suddenly whined past and nearly ankle-tapped him with one of its two flat metal prongs. Better watch out, thought Duffy. Collect one of those in the leg and you’ll be catching up on a lot of reading before you know where you are. He began to walk slowly up the length of the shed. Neolithic strip lighting lurked in the roof, and had to be helped out by the occasional bare, hanging bulb. Weighing machines, old from age rather than use, stood here and there. Though it was a warm, dry day, the shed felt damp.

  He passed the fork-lift truck, which was now fussing with some hessian-wrapped bundles, and reached a raised glass office at the far end of the shed. Mrs Boseley sat here. She didn’t really need the office to be raised: she seemed to be looking down on everyone already. She was about forty, with the sort of face people call handsome. This might have been expected to appeal to Duffy, but it very much didn’t: he liked women small and dark and friendly, like Carol, not high-boned and aloof and eight-ninths hidden beneath the surface. Her blonde hair was scraped back off her face and pinned at the nape of her neck with an ivory comb. She examined Duffy’s cards as if he had offered her an expired Libyan passport. Duffy determined to be as polite to her as he could possibly manage. He didn’t find it easy.

  ‘Worked for Mr Hendrick long, have you?’ she began.

  ‘A bit. Off and on.’

  ‘Enjoyed it, did you?’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Nice wife Mr Hendrick has.’

  Duffy didn’t know whether that was a question or a statement. He didn’t even know if Hendrick had a wife. He decided to treat it as a statement and let it go.

  ‘And he tells me you’ve done all sorts of odd jobs for him.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘What sort of things?’

  ‘This and that … Lifting things.’ Duffy vaguely thought this must be a qualification for working here. At the same time, he felt pissed off that he was being cross-examined: Hendrick had assured him the interview would be a formality. Maybe the woman was only keeping him in here so that the others wouldn’t get suspicious of him.

  ‘Mow the lawn?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘You’ve mowed the lawn for Mr Hendrick, for instance?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  Why, Mrs Boseley thought, didn’t the fellow ever say yes? But Duffy never said Yes; he either nodded, or went Uh-huh, or said All right. Carol thought that you could ask Duffy to marry you and he’d half look away, nod and say, All right. This was only a guess. She had asked once, and he’d half looked away, gone quiet, and then said, ‘No’.

  ‘Well, I can’t say we’ve exactly established your qualifications for the job, but we do want someone in a hurry, and if Mr Hendrick recommends you then I suppose that’s the end of the matter.’ She looked up and gazed at Duffy expressionlessly for a few seconds. He thought it was his turn to speak.

  ‘Thank you very much, Mrs Boseley.’

  ‘Hmm. I should say one thing to you though. The manner of your appointment is – how shall I put it – just a trifle irregular.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ (She didn’t know the half of it.)

  ‘Normally what happens in such circumstances is that the men who work here might be expected to suggest someone: one of their friends, for instance. These are hard times, you know, and everyone knows someone who’s out of a job.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I’m glad you do. Then you won’t be surprised if you encounter a little, how shall I put it, a little hostility at first?’

  ‘It doesn’t bother me.’

  ‘I hope it doesn’t.’ She put her head outside her glass cage and shouted at someone Duffy couldn’t see.

  ‘Tan. Tan, ask Gleeson to come up, will you?’

  They sat in silence until the door opened and a muscularly plump man in a dark blue boiler suit came in; he had dark hair and mutton-chop whiskers. He looked without acknowledgement at Duffy before turning to the desk.

  ‘Mrs Boseley?’

  ‘Gleeson, this is Duffy, who as I told you is joining us. Make him comfortable, show him around, tell him what to do, will you?’

  Gleeson nodded and left the room. Duffy glanced at Mrs Boseley but only met the top of her head as it bent over some invoices. He followed Gleeson out into the body of the cargo shed. As soon as he had caught up, Gleeson marched him across to a row of lockers and tapped the only one with a key in the door.

  ‘Yours. Overalls. In you get.’

  ‘I’m not that small,’ said Duffy, but Gleeson declined to smile. Duffy opened the locker and saw a pair of overalls. He also saw a Page Three girl pasted inside the door and a miniature tiger dangling on a string.

  ‘McKay’s,’ said Gleeson by way of explanation. The same name probably also explained why Duffy’s overalls were over-generously cut.

  ‘There’s room for another in here,’ he said. But Gleeson was already moving on.

  ‘You drive a forkie?’ he said suddenly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You drive a forkie?’ Ah, a fork-lift truck.

  ‘I’m sure I’ll pick it up.’

  ‘Well, you can start with a trolley, or a barrer. McKay could drive a forkie. Very neat. We reckoned he could pick an apple off your head with it, like whatsisname.’

  ‘Tell.’

  ‘I just told.’

  Gleeson walked him round the shed, pointing out various areas: Perishables, Dries, Refrigerated, and so on. Occasionally he’d introduce him: there was someone called Tan who appeared to be Chinese; someone called Casey, tall, long-haired and even surlier than Gleeson; a couple of drivers, and someone who’s name Duffy forgot. Then Gleeson told him to wait around in a corner of the shed until someone asked him to do something. Like being stood in the dunce’s corner, Duffy thought. Occasionally throughout the morning Gleeson gave him orders: he had to load and unload things; a couple of times he was asked to move a large packing case just a few yards, to a point which seemed no more sensible or useful than where it had started from. Duffy didn’t ask; he just did it. Maybe it was some sort of initiation; maybe they were just buggering him about.

  When the dinner whistle went he had just finished loading up a Transit van with Casey, who muttered what sounded like ‘Canteen’, and sloped off. Duffy followed and soon found himself hunched over pie and beans. Casey was eating double pie and double beans. Duffy stared at Casey’s hands. The first joint of each finger of his right hand had a letter tattooed on it: H A T E was what they spelt. Always on the right hand, of course, on the fist used for persuading people. Duffy knew what he’d see on the other hand – L O V E it read – but this time there was a slight variation. The ‘O’ on the second finger of the hand had a sophisticated addition, a cross on the top of it: O. Pretty high-clas
s tattooist, thought Duffy; wonder if he knows what it means. Casey did. As he tumbled his knife and fork on to his plate at the end of the pie and beans, he leaned across to Duffy and wiggled his second finger up and down in front of Duffy’s nose.

  ‘Courting finger,’ he said, laughed, and squeaked back his chair. Two minutes later he was back, with a double sago pudding and custard. Duffy watched in silence (he felt it tactful not to be too gabby with this one) as Casey slurped it down. When he had finished putting it away he exhaled loudly.

  ‘You courting?’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ replied Duffy straight away.

  ‘My mistake.’ But Casey’s tone was still closer to belligerence than apology. ‘Picked you for a wrong ’un.’

  ‘Sorry, can’t help you there,’ said Duffy. He sensed that it wouldn’t help him to wear a big pink star on his back around this place.

  It was comforting to see Carol. For one thing, she was always so keen that it was now. She insisted by her natural mood that it wasn’t the past any more, and that it wouldn’t be the future until at least tomorrow. And that you didn’t deserve the future until you’d made a reasonable job of the present. It was odd that she had this effect so forcefully on Duffy, because in many ways she did represent the past – the time when they were colleagues in the force, when they were going around together, when they were sleeping together successfully, before Duffy was framed out of his job and his girlfriend one nasty evening that he mostly tried to forget. And Carol helped him with this, refused to let him brood, insisted that he think about today, worried with him about his work. Sometimes she stayed the night, sometimes she didn’t; though since he’d moved further west, out to Acton, she stayed a bit more often than when he’d been in Paddington.

  They were sitting in his kitchen eating cheese on toast, and Carol was trying to stop Duffy leaping up every minute to tidy things away. Duffy was anal: there was no doubt at all about that. If he could, he’d do the washing up before the meal; Carol knew he’d secretly prefer her to hold the cheese on toast in her fingers so that he could wash up the plate. And then, when he’d done that, he’d probably hover near her with a damp J-cloth in his hand to catch any crumbs she might drop. And as for the refrigerator – it was just as bad as the last one, the one in which all the food was double-wrapped as if it were trying to escape and had to be straightjacketed; the fridge she’d called Colditz. This one, in his new flat, was no better: you opened it and saw nothing but plastic everywhere. No food, just plastic: Tupperware boxes, plastic bags, sometimes Tupperware boxes inside plastic bags, sometimes plastic bags inside Tupperware boxes.

  ‘What’s the distinction, Duffy,’ she’d once asked, ‘between the things that go in polythene bags and then into Tupperware boxes, and the things that go into Tupperware boxes and then into polythene bags?’

  ‘Ah,’ he’d said. ‘Ah. Now, I’m sure there’s a reason. I’m positive there’s a reason.’ He gazed at the ceiling, trying to remember.

  ‘Duffy,’ she bellowed at him after three seconds of his reverie, ‘you really think I want to know, don’t you? You really think I want to know.’

  ‘But you asked,’ he replied, puzzled and mildly offended.

  ‘Forget it. For-get. For-get. O.K.?’

  ‘O.K.’ He still couldn’t work it out.

  That evening he told her about Hendrick (though he didn’t mention how he’d been put on to him), and about his first two days at the shed.

  ‘Sounds like it could be a long job.’

  He grunted. She felt apprehensive when he grunted. It usually meant he was about to say something she might not like.

  ‘Can you do a couple of things?’

  ‘I might.’

  ‘Lend me your car in the evenings. I might need to follow someone and they’d know my van from work.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘I mean, swop. You can have mine.’

  There was a bit of a silence. Duffy had vaguely broken the rules. How would he know how to give it back at the end of the evening? Or where to give it back?

  ‘Maybe, Duffy. But it’d have to be day-to-day. You’d have to ask each time.’

  ‘O.K. And can you get me the traffic report on the accident this McKay had?’

  ‘I shouldn’t think so.’

  ‘You could, though, couldn’t you?’

  ‘I might be able to get someone to read it to me. But it’s not in our rules.’

  ‘I just thought,’ said Duffy quietly, ‘that someone might want to do the same to me.’ God he was unfair. She went and fetched her overnight bag. He knew what he’d done and felt shitty. Not about using her to get information, but about frightening her.

  ‘Please stay.’

  ‘No, sorry. Busy day tomorrow, beauty sleep and all that.’ She ruffled his hair as if to say, It’s all right really, it’s just that it’s not all right enough now. ‘And I hope they’re nicer to you at work tomorrow.’

  ‘Oh, yes, I forgot to say – they were quite nice to me today. I mean, they weren’t, as I told you, for almost all the day, and then they were.’

  ‘Explain.’

  ‘Well, I had to do most of the work, like yesterday, and nobody spoke to me much, and they made me do things I knew weren’t necessary, and they knew I knew weren’t necessary. And then at the end of the day, guess what? I looked in my locker and what did I find? Fifty quid. In very used notes.’

  3

  THE NEXT MORNING, THE jumbos weren’t using the M4. The whisper had got around and they were all following the North Circular. People said it was just the wind that made them land from a different direction, but Duffy knew better. Yesterday they’d obviously dug up so many divots in the runway that they were being forced to land on another one. And they wouldn’t tell the passengers. That was another reason why Duffy would never fly: you never got told the truth. He’d heard enough stories from his mates to know that the first rule of any airline was, Don’t scare the customers, they might yet live to come back and use us another time. So it was ‘Just a little turbulence’ when half the passengers could see that one of the engines was on fire; and it was ‘Sorry, the captain’s forgotten his Kleenex’ when the hydraulics collapsed and the plane panicked back to base, jettisoning all its fuel over the Thames Estuary as it did so.

  While he drove, he wondered idly about the Hendrick job. It looked like a money-earner, that was all it looked like: one of those jobs where you do your best until the client decides he’s poured enough money down your drain and he’ll try something else, or something better, or go to the police, or learn to live with his losses. He’d had this sort of job before. It would obviously take him some days more to work out exactly how the freight firm operated, how the terminal’s security worked and how it could be bypassed; and that was just basics. He didn’t know what was likely to be stolen (since in Hendrick’s description it changed every time), and he didn’t know who was best placed to rip it off.

  So what did you do in the slow cases, the nit-picking cases, the sit-on-your-bum-and-keep-your-eyes-open cases? Well, you went back to basics, and you got the little legs working. What did he have? He had a car crash. He had a – from what he heard – badly smashed-up freight worker, whom he couldn’t very well go and talk to in case he was a villain. He had a series of thefts at about monthly intervals. He had a shedful of people who weren’t particularly charmed by his company – though there was no reason why they should be, if he believed Mrs Boseley, and he had no reason (apart from not liking her) not to believe her. And he had fifty quid. That was what he had most.

  Cash in the locker was an old trick, of course. Everywhere in the world that there was a fiddle going – even in the place with the nice, comforting blue light outside – there was cash in the locker. For a very good reason: it sorted you out. It gave you an instant choice, and it instantly compromised you. If you handed it in, there were two problems: you might hand it in to the wrong person, someone who didn’t know what was going on, someone who’d create a
great stink as a consequence, and as a further consequence you might get your head rubbed up against the brickwork in some alley after work. Or you handed it in to the right person, the person who’d more or less given it to you, and then you were saying to him, ‘Nice to know you’re a villain; I’m not as it happens, but I do so hope we’ll still get on’, and then even if you were a bit bent, but just didn’t want to join in this particular package scheme, this Butlins of fraud, it made you look as if you were super-clean, nothing less than old Mister White the vicar’s son. And the consequence of that was that all the dirty jobs going somehow seemed to keep coming your way, and the sump oil just happened to get tipped down the trousers of your best suit, and the night shift fell into your lap just a bit more often than it did anyone else’s, and sometimes in the canteen your arm got just a little jog as it was ladling some beans into your mouth, until finally you thought, stuff it, and you couldn’t complain because you’d sound like a schoolgirl, and what had they really done to you anyway?

  So, often, simply because it was easier – or because the wife wanted some new curtains, or so that you could afford a double for a change while you watched the darts match – you took it. Duffy quite understood. He didn’t approve, but he didn’t have any difficulty in understanding.

  In the present case, he hadn’t wavered for a moment. As soon as he’d seen the green bundle with the rubber band round it, he’d tucked it into the top pocket of his denim jacket. There could be someone watching, you never knew. And if there was, it was a good idea to show them a picture of instant and willing corruption.

  Just to be on the safe side – there might, for all Duffy knew, have been something tiny but incriminating attached to one of the notes – he stuffed them into a brown envelope, put the date and place of finding on the outside, and gave it to Carol for safe-keeping. Now, as far as that side of things went, you just had to wait. You didn’t go poling up to Gleeson, or the Chinaman, or whoever you guessed it to be, and say, ‘Thanks very much for the money; what do I do now?’ Or you didn’t unless you were very stupid. You just hung around, and then after a bit, who knew how long, you’d be standing in the sun minding your own, when a voice behind you would say, ‘Nice to have you with us,’ and you’d turn and nod and keep your own counsel and think, so it was him.