by Dan Kavanagh
‘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 coupl
e 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.
He’d just got a fresh line on Big Eddy when the rug was pulled. Quite how it happened and who was the stool he never knew, but there must have been a tip from someone inside the station. Everyone there knew he’d been going through a sticky time with Carol. They’d had one of those spells everyone gets after a year or so of knowing each other, when the freshness has worn off a bit and everyone starts treating you as an established couple and whistling the Wedding March at you and doing cradling gestures and you suddenly wonder whether you’re doing the right thing after all. You want to stand back, think about it a bit, make sure you’re on the right path. Duffy had tried to explain this to Carol, who’d assumed he was trying to drop her in as painless a way as possible. She wasn’t going to be dropped like that by anyone. She yelled and she cried and he told her she was jumping to the wrong conclusions but that her acting like this was anyway proving that she was assuming things which they hadn’t ever discussed, and that of course he still loved her, but she really ought to try and see the relationship from another angle. Like his, for instance, she said.
Eventually they agreed on a couple of months apart, no strings, no bed, no conditions; then they’d see how they felt.
After about three weeks Duffy started getting pretty itchy. They’d agreed not to impose anything on each other for the two months: they could be as free as they liked. Duffy debated with himself about what to do, and then gave in.
The point about Duffy was, as McKechnie surmised, that he plugged in both ways. He didn’t need a transformer. He’d had a very gay phase when he was eighteen, then sobered up a lot when he joined the force, and since then pretty well divided his favours equally between the two sexes. His mates at work saw he was keen enough on women for them not to suspect him; the other half of his preference he kept more or less to himself. He told Carol, who merely said she’d always thought that she had a rather boyish body, and asked if he’d like her to dress up as a bloke from time to time. He said it wasn’t exactly like that; but he was pleased at the way she reacted.
When they took their two months’ separation from each other and Duffy got itchy, he thought a lot about which way to go. If he went for a girl, Carol would be bound to be jealous, despite the agreement. If he went for a guy, then maybe she’d feel he was – what would she say? – slipping backwards; but maybe she wouldn’t feel so threatened when he told her. In terms of sexual pleasure, it didn’t make much difference to him; he wasn’t picky when it came to orgasm.
The first time he went trawling at the Caramel Club and took a chubby journalist back to the flat he was then living in off Westbourne Grove. A couple of nights later he went to the Alligator and landed himself a polite undergraduate hot off the Oxford train. The third time he went back to the Caramel again, drank a bit more than usual, and was half-helped home by a nice black kid of about his own age.
Ten minutes after that his flat door was kicked in by two full-sized policemen, the black kid started yelling, ‘He bought me drinks, he bought me drinks,’ and the larger of the two policemen seized him by the bare shoulder, twisted him round on the bed and said, with heavy irony, ‘Excuse me, sir, but how old is your friend?’ The whisky fumes were clearing from his head as if someone had switched on an Xpelair, and he knew he’d been set up.
The kid was a plant; he said he was nineteen. The police took an address and told him to scram. They took Duffy down to the station and charged him. When he told them his profession, one of the two policemen turned his back while the other punched Duffy in the kidneys. ‘Fucking bent queer copper,’ he said; then ‘Fucking queer,’ and punched him again.
Duffy knew it was curtains. He was suspended from duty and sat around gloomily at home. Eventually he was called to West Central. And who should give him the good news but Sullivan?
‘When you’ve been around as long as I have, nothing much surprises you, Duffy. But this does. This does. I’ve argued for you, though personally my instinct would be to throw everything at you. I’ve talked to the investigating officer in the case and I’ve got you the best deal I can; a sight better than you deserve. And I’ve done it not for your sake but for the sake of the station, I don’t mind telling you. Westbourne Grove have agreed not to prosecute; they’ll say it might cause the kid too much psychological harm to give evidence and they’re writing the case off. Now go away and come back in five minutes with your resignation.’
It was a perfect fit-up. It destroyed his career, and it wrecked his relationship with Carol. Moreover, Duffy failed to appreciate Sullivan’s avuncular touch when he called Carol into his office to explain what had happened. She
had stayed away from Duffy for two months, trying to understand what had happened. When she came to see him, he did his best to explain, but there were too many scars. They tried going to bed together to see what that would do, but she was tense and nervy and he couldn’t get a hard-on. Sleeping was all right, though, and waking up together was usually nice. Gradually they got back together a bit, but only as wary friends. Sometimes Carol stayed the night, but they never made advances to each other in bed. He never got a hard-on when she was in bed with him, not even a sleepy, unintended one.
‘Brother and sister?’ she’d once said to him as they were falling asleep. Brother and sister, but with a suspicious loitering past. Brother and sister with a lot of previous.
Duffy had good reason to remember Sullivan.
4
DUFFY WOKE UP OUT of a bad dream. It was a bad dream because for Duffy life within it was all fivers and éclairs. In his dream he was a Chief Super in whose presence villains shrank to the size of earwigs; he snapped his fingers and cases on which the brightest blues had broken their teeth simply fell open in his hands. After a triumphant day at the office like this he was driven home to a large detached house deep in some beech woods where Carol and the kids were waiting for him. As he drove through the gates his eldest son, a flaxen-haired rascal, fired his bow and arrow at the car; the rubber sucker on the end of the arrow glued itself to the hub-cap and the car rolled along like Boadicea’s chariot, slicing the heads off bluebells all the way up the drive. No matter, Duffy thought in his dream, the bluebells will never run out. Then they got to the house and Carol was waiting on the steps. As they stepped inside the door, she gently tugged on his sleeve and took him upstairs. She slipped off her dress and was wearing nothing underneath. Duffy threw his suit over a chair, climbed out of the rest of his clothes, and as he approached the bed where she lay on top of the candlewick cover she exclaimed, as if surprised by joy, ‘Duffy, you’re so big, you’re so big.’
