Fiddle City

by Dan Kavanagh

  Duffy swabbed the plastic package dry. It was fastened tightly at the top with thin wire. He removed the wire, and opened the top of the package. Another one was inside, upside down. He pulled it out; tied as tightly as the other, this time with string. Inside it, yet another bag, this time with a wire tie. Duffy imagined Carol’s voice: Hey, Duffy, is that smack trying to escape? He smiled to himself. He looked inside the third bag, and there it was: lying contentedly, feeling safe. He licked a finger and tasted the fine white powder; it was bitter and salty. He closed the top. He weighed it in his hand; allowing for the three lychees put in as padding, and the juice, there were maybe six ounces here.

  Then he went back to the cans. It was hard on the fingers. Maybe he should buy himself an electric can opener. No, maybe not: there can’t be too many jobs like this. In can 117 he found another bag. He dug it out and put it on the kitchen roll beside the first one. Then he ploughed on. The rest of the cans proved, if only in one sense, fruitless. Finally, he stared at his kitchen table. One hundred and forty-four opened, dripping cans of lychees yawned back at him. It looked like one of those fairground games where you have to throw a ping-pong ball at a cluster of goldfish bowls: the ball bounces around the rims for a while, and if it falls into a bowl you win a prize. Duffy had won two.

  He fetched two big black plastic refuse bags and poured all the lychees into one of them; then he threw all the tins (after carefully closing the lids) into the other. Then he mopped up the kitchen table, and changed the kitchen towel under the bags of heroin, as if it were a nappy. Then he sat down and stared at them for a while.

  He was going to leave each portion in its own bag, until he remembered what Willett had told him. If by any chance the two bags had come from different factories, then that would screw things. Carefully, Duffy emptied their contents into a jam-jar. He shook it vigorously for a couple of minutes. Then he redistributed the heroin: he had six little plastic bags to share it among. Half he put back into one bag, which he tied with wire. The other half he distributed between the other five bags, and tied their tops. Shared out that way, they were only about half a centimetre deep when pressed down. That should do it.

  He thoroughly washed the jam-jar and scrubbed the kitchen table. Then he had a thought. He reopened the black refuse bag which had the tins in it and took out a couple. He untied the wire from the top of Dalby’s little package and dripped some of the lychee syrup into the heroin. That would ease things along a bit. Short of typing out arrest warrants, this was as helpful as Duffy thought he could be. If the Government Chemist was as shit-hot as Willett had said, he’d soon identify the liquid that had leaked into Dalby’s smack. Oh yes, Mr Dalby, and did you on such-and-such a date take delivery of one gross of lychees? Duffy imagined Dalby’s reply: Yes I did, and I opened every single one of them myself and none of them had my heroin in it. Thank you, Mr Dalby. The Crown rests its case.

  Duffy put down his black bags on the way out to the van. He hoped the one with the fruit in it didn’t burst. Seventy-odd pounds of sweet eyeballs rolling down the street, tasting of the smell of roses: that was all he needed. With relief he humped them into the back of his van. Then the tins. Then he pulled on his driving gloves and went back into the flat. He wiped the plastic packages very carefully and slipped the five slim packets into his right-hand blouson pocket. He could take Dalby’s with him as well; but decided against it and put it in the fridge instead.

  Last van to Fiddle City, he thought, as he idled along the M4. It was 9.30. The jumbos were back to being just coloured lights in the sky; as they hung there, scarcely moving, Duffy kept expecting them suddenly to go out, like the last trailing sparkles of a rocket. But they didn’t. No, they wouldn’t, would they, not as long as they had Duffy to annoy: that gave them a reason for living. And of course, all the pilots had decided to use the M4 route tonight. ‘Well, I had thought about the North Circ, but I decided to waggle my wings at Duffy one last time – you know, suddenly lose a few hundred feet, cut the jets, and steer in his direction. He didn’t like it much, you know. Swerved straight on to the hard shoulder and dived in a ditch. Funny fellow.’

  At the shed it was quickly done. Third drawer down on the right, that was all he was interested in this visit. He unclipped the photo frame, and tucked the five thin bags in between the backboard and the photo of Dalby; then he did it up again. It was a bit tighter than before, but he doubted Mrs Boseley would notice. She would have eyes only for that plump English face, that sweet bald head, those cute little round gold glasses. When did she look at it, Duffy wondered: when the day was going well, or when the day was going badly? Why did people have photos on their desks? Duffy didn’t know. Duffy didn’t even have a desk.

  Back at the flat he had a few more hours to kill. He rescrubbed the kitchen table, rewashed the jam-jar, ate a pork pie and sat watching television. The trouble was, he had to keep switching channels. He was enjoying a rerun of North By Northwest until it struck him that Eva Marie Saint was perfect for the part of Mrs Boseley. He button-punched away from a comedy duo because the fat one kept waggling his face around and Duffy only had to paint on a pair of mutton-chops to be with Gleeson. And then a forty-five minute BBC-2 film about a social worker, which Duffy was intensely bored by, but thought was entirely safe, suddenly blew up in his face during a case conference; one of the other social workers looked just like Lesley. He stopped watching television, rechecked Willett’s and Carol’s schedules, and tuned in to a late-night radio phone-in. It was all about the distribution of Britain’s North Sea oil revenue, and proved harmless.

  At one in the morning he stuffed the single bag of heroin into his blouson and set off. He’d had a long stare at the lock on the door of Number 61 and had marked off half a dozen keys to try first. He was fairly confident one of them would do the trick. He didn’t fancy standing on the doorstep too long and hearing the distant tread of some keen young copper: some updated version of the younger Duffy. Attempted burglary while in possession of heroin didn’t sound the sort of offence for which he’d get an unconditional discharge.

  But the door yielded at the third key. Now all he had to hope was that Dalby wasn’t romancing one of his employees, wasn’t taking a post-coital header into the tub at this very moment. The office was empty; the bedroom behind was empty; out of curiosity Duffy looked at the bath. Hmm, looked just like a normal bath; disappointing. He took the bag of heroin out of his blouson pocket and had a think. Then it came to him. Where might plump little Englishmen put their treasures? Where childhood’s magic used to unfold. Duffy tucked the bag of heroin underneath Dalby’s pillow. The tooth that once fell out could turn into a sixpence. The heroin could turn into thousands of dreams, thousands of sensations, millions of sixpences. It could also turn into some dead people. Or, in this case, it could turn into a long prison sentence.

  He left Dalby’s office and looked down the few steps at the wankpit. The candles and the joss-sticks were dead, the champagne and the spunk in the carpet were slowly drying out. The smell of it was pretty bad, even from here. You probably would want to take a lot of baths if you ran a place like this. He thought of his hand, wet from the champagne bottle, being politely reapplied to the girl’s nearer breast. ‘You can hold them,’ she’d said. ‘You’ve paid for them. They’re not for looking at.’ Duffy turned and left.

  At eight o’clock the next morning he made the first of two phone calls.

  ‘W.P.C. Lucas, please,’ he said in a strong Welsh accent.

  ‘Carol, some Taff for you,’ he heard a voice shout, while a hand was inefficiently cupped over the mouthpiece.

  ‘Hallo?’

  ‘Don’t say my name, it’s Duffy. Or rather, it’s your anonymous Welsh informer. That place I made you sit outside the other night – Dude’s. I’d say there might be some heroin in there somewhere. The fellow probably uses it just before he goes to bed, or maybe when he’s in bed.’ He told her where Dalby’s private door was, so that the ferrets could start at both end
s. ‘Oh, and your anonymous Welsh informer will be ringing you next week about a celebratory meal.’

  ‘Oh, D … ’

  ‘Don’t say my name.’ Christ, she’d nearly blown it then. ‘I mean, we’re not necessarily going out’ (after all, he’d taken her out only recently) ‘but we could stay home. I could cook you something. I’ll learn a new takeaway.’

  ‘Thank you for your information,’ replied Carol correctly.

  Then he rang Willett and directed him, without being too specific, towards the task of ripping Mrs Boseley’s desk apart, and preferably her with it. After he’d rung off, he regretted he hadn’t just said, ‘There’s half of it in the photograph frame, and half of it up Mrs Boseley’s bum.’ That would have made her eyes swivel.

  He hung around the flat for a bit, not knowing what to do. He didn’t want to be around when the raids took place. Certainly not there, and not even here, at the end of a telephone. One of the troubles was, he could never leave a ringing telephone unanswered. If only he could train himself to do that, he could sit around the flat all the time.

  What did other people do when they had nothing to do, Duffy wondered. Visited their old mums or something, he supposed. Duffy didn’t have an old mum. But he had one small thing to do, at least. He drove round the North Circular for a few miles, turned off into a stretch of London which was being slowly gentrified, and found himself a skip. He dumped the lychees and the tins. Then he bought himself a pub lunch.

  He drove slowly home and called at a couple of kitchen shops on the way. He bought some plastic bags in the one size he was getting a bit low on. There didn’t seem to be anything else he wanted to buy. Carol had this picture of him as someone who kept squirrelling away kitchen equipment. Duffy thought this was unfair; he just wanted to have enough of everything. He hated the idea of running out.

  Why didn’t he feel excited, he wondered, at the end of this job? It was the end, after all: Carol and Willett would struggle briefly with their consciences, would worry a bit over whether Duffy had just been very smart or whether he’d been fiddling things, but would accept what they’d been given; hell, they might even get commended for their smart cultivation of contacts – so why should he worry? And as for his methods: well, Duffy thought, when in Fiddle City …

  Even so, the job did leave him feeling depressed. Depressed at the thought of a world which had dead babies at one end of it, dead girl fixers at the other, and in the middle a swarm of tireless operators who just sat around for a few months, and then, with a pinprick in a tin label, did what they wanted to and got away with it. He was depressed, too, at parts of his own reaction to it all: for instance, at the way he’d wanted to kill Gleeson. He realised soberly that he might very well have done so if he’d had the real thing in his syringe.

  Well, there weren’t any new methods of stopping feeling depressed; there were only the old methods. He spruced himself up and headed off to the Alligator. He got there right on opening time, six o’clock. He drank double whiskys, not very fast, but fast enough. It wasn’t so much that after a while he began to stop feeling depressed; it was more that he started to feel very drunk. At nine o’clock there was a shuffle at the next barstool and a cough.

  ‘My dear Sir Duffy.’

  He turned. Slowly, don’t overshoot the stool. Uh-HUH:

  ‘Eric.’ It was that Eric fellow. Why had Duffy thought of him as unhealthy-looking? He’d never seen a fitter man in his life. He looked very healthy. He looked very neat. He looked very nice too.

  ‘Drink for my friend,’ Duffy shouted in what he judged to be more or less the direction of the barman.

  ‘I knew I’d win one day,’ said Eric, and ordered a triple vodka and tonic. ‘These bar measures,’ he said to Duffy by way of explanation. Christ, Duffy did look drunk. He should have ordered a quadruple.

  ‘Well, Sir Duffy, what have you been up to today?’

  ‘Ah,’ replied Duffy, and turned back towards the bar, partly out of modesty at his exploit and partly so as to hold on better. ‘I caught Lord Lucan today.’

  Eric winked at the barman as his drink arrived.

  ‘Another triumph for Duffy Security. How did you manage that?’

  ‘Well, you see … ’ (Christ he really was pissed) ‘he was flying this jumbo belonging to Crock … to Cook … to Cruc … to Cockr … ’

  ‘To who?’

  But Eric never found out. Duffy suddenly keeled over into his arms, knocking Eric’s triple vodka to the floor as he did so. With the help of the barman, Eric hauled him back on to his stool. Duffy was very heavy, pulling his full drunk’s weight. Briefly, he opened an eye, and smiled seraphically across at Eric. His lips fumbled their way into action.

  ‘Your round, I think.’

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Duffy series

  Warm-up

  THERE ARE TOO MANY ways of breaking a footballer’s leg. Too many, that is, from the footballer’s point of view. Others may find the freedom of choice encouraging.

  Duffy patrolled the edge of his penalty area and wondered what had happened to Danny Matson. That was where it had started. Danny Matson in the underground car-park. The first sign of the whole business going public. And after it had gone public, and really threatened to become a bit serious, there had been more things to worry about than poor little washed-up Third Division Danny. Who remembers yesterday’s footballers? Who remembers even the famous ones—the ones with the hacienda-style house, the Merc and the wife that’s a genuine blonde, the ones who get to partner fat comedians on the TV golf? They slip the mind as soon as they stop playing. Pampered swaggerers, they strut the floodlit pitch for the last time, salute the fans, and disappear down the tunnel. Suddenly, they find it’s colder there, and they don’t feel so tall, and no one applauds; there’s a faint smell of piss and Ajax, a 40 watt bulb overhead, and a concrete floor underneath. No grass any more: if you fall, this time it will really hurt. And that tunnel is the rest of your life. So if it feels like this to the players at the top, what chance was there for the Danny Matsons?

  Time to stop worrying; or to start worrying about something different. That speedy little ginge had got the ball again. Duffy retreated towards his goal. Close him down, for Christ’s sake close him down. Bell was too slow, as usual, but Maggot got near enough to threaten a little GBH, so the ginge whipped the ball out to the left instead. Duffy checked his angles, got up on his toes, banged his gloves together and started inching out for when the winger beat the right back. He would beat the back, of course: he’d done him three times already, no trouble. Once going inside, once outside, once nutmegging him in a show of public contempt. Which would he go for this time?

  He went for simple pace—the cruellest method there is. Show the full back every inch of the ball, give him a couple of yards, then just hare past him as if to say, Give it up, this game, don’t bother, you’re too fat, you’re too slow, you’re not smart enough. And that left it up to Duffy. Come out fast, narrow the angle, cut down the winger’s options, make him pick one way or the other, don’t go down too soon, but when you do go down, really spread yourself. Duffy was muttering the coaching manual to himself for company; there wasn’t much other help around. The winger was closing fast. Now, thought Duffy, and started to spread himself. Just as he did so, the winger gave a little jink to the right, and took off at speed to the left. He beat Duffy, who couldn’t lay a finger on him, legal or illegal; but in doing so ran himself out of space. Too close to the line, and with a red-faced defender thundering back, the winger tried a finely-angled cross-shot which missed even the side-netting. He spat angrily and interrogated the turf, as if the ball had bobbled unexpectedly at the last minute. Duffy got up calmly, trying to look as if he had masterminded the whole thing. Honour seemed even, except that Duffy knew there would be a next time, quite soon, and that this fellow had more tricks than the Magic Circle.

  Duffy was a worrier. They say goalkeepers tend to be worriers. Some start off like that, and choos
e to play in goal because it fits their temperament. Others start off calm, capable fellows and then get frazzled up by their own leaky back four, or by a sudden loss of form when their handling goes and they sweat at the thought of a high cross, or by some psychotic striker with Aberdeen Angus thighs who doesn’t seem to know whether it’s the keeper or the ball that he’s meant to be putting into the net. Further up the park and you can hide; you can even blame others. But a goalkeeper is exposed. Everything he does wrong is vital. Ten men can win you the game and one berk can lose you it; that’s what they say. You can get your own back a bit by shouting at the other ten: keepers are allowed to shout, and can sometimes shift the blame after a goal by picking out the least forceful member of the defence and giving him a rollocking. But mostly you’re on your own, shuttling between boredom and fear.

  Duffy had been a worrier long before he started playing for the Western Sunday Reliables. He’d been a worrier since—oh, he couldn’t remember. He worried about that too: was his memory going? When other keepers went about their business, they worried about playing badly, and losing, and letting the side down, and getting kicked, and facing penalties, and getting called a wally. Duffy worried about all this too, and then some; he even worried about why he’d become a goalkeeper in the first place. Perhaps he wasn’t really a worrier; perhaps he was a fully-fledged neurotic.

  One of the reasons he liked goalkeeping—and one of the reasons he worried—was that he liked things neat. He liked the neat box of the penalty area; he liked the way it marked out his territory, his manor. Everything that happens inside this box is your responsibility, Duffy; he felt like some young copper being given his first beat. He also liked the way everything in his manor had corners: the penalty area, the goal area, the woodwork; even the netting was made in squares. He liked these right-angles: they reassured him. The only thing on his patch that didn’t have corners was the penalty spot. A great big round chalky mess, as if some bloody enormous pigeon up above had decided to unload right into the middle of Duffy’s manor: splat. Somebody ought to clear that mess up, Duffy thought. It bothers me. He didn’t like the penalty spot. For a start, it was much too near the goal.