Duffy

by Dan Kavanagh

  By closing the door Duffy had relaxed the chain as much as it was possible. He pressed upwards on the chain, his eye squashed against the eighth-of-an-inch gap between the doors. Nothing happened. He pressed again, then started jiggling the chain up and down with his rod. Suddenly the cut link freed itself, and the two ends of the chain swung down, the one on the left striking the metal door with a clang.

  Duffy listened, then pushed very gently on the door. He squinted through again. The padlock was clearly attached to the right-hand bit of chain, the bit he couldn’t see; but its weight meant that as he pushed, the section of the chain that was gradually freeing itself, clinking slightly as each link ran over the rail of the push-bar, was the part he could see, the left-hand end. What he wanted to avoid was the whole end of the chain swinging free and falling away to hit the other door. Duffy pushed until the door was about six inches open, then decided on another course of action. He pushed his rod through one of the links of the left-hand chain, and simply began to lift. This freed the chain and at the same time eliminated the danger of part or all of it falling loose.

  When the chain came free of the push-bar on the left-hand door, Duffy pressed on the door until it was wide enough open to let him through, then slipped inside. Quietly he replaced the chain as it had been before, fitting the cut link back into place. Then, being doubly – maybe unnecessarily – careful, he slipped the bolts on the open door back into their slots.

  After the lager and the nervous wait until the Double Blue closed, what Duffy needed most was a piss. He knew it would only be on his mind if he didn’t have one, so he walked down the corridor towards the cinema and found the toilet. He debated whether to leave the door open for more light, or close it for better sound-proofing. Eventually he pushed the door to, lit his tiny pen-torch and pissed carefully against the side of the bowl. Then he climbed up on to the bowl, fished in the cistern, and collected his heavy, snub-nosed metal-clippers. No point in leaving more evidence on the scene that you had to.

  He dabbed the cutters dry on the thigh of his jeans and walked quietly up the stairs. He got to the landing and was about to open the middle of the three doors when he suddenly noticed a light coming from beneath the door of the room on the right. Then he heard a slight banging and shuffling noise, followed by a distinct cough. Fuck it. Damn. He wondered if someone was sleeping the night there. Or perhaps they were just locking away the takings from the Double Blue. All the doors opened into the rooms from the landing, which didn’t help Duffy. Eventually he decided to wait pressed against the wall by the side of the right-hand door. He waited there for five minutes or so, then heard footsteps approaching.

  As Jeggo put his head out to look for the light switch on the landing, Duffy hit him as hard as he could on the side of the head with the metal-clippers. Even the shortest fights are noisy. Jeggo roared with pain, and Duffy hit him again nearer the temple with the cutters, grunting loudly with the effort as he did so. Jeggo fell to the floor about as quietly as an entire sack of coal being emptied down a metal chute into a coal cellar.

  Duffy had knocked enough people unconscious to know that they didn’t necessarily stay that way for as long as you wanted them to. He took Jeggo by the back of the collar, and carefully avoiding the blood which was staining the right side of his face, dragged him through the middle door and along the carpeted passage. He flicked a light switch, climbed on a chair, and examined all the surrounds of the door-frame at the end of the passage. It was clean. He turned the handle and found it was locked.

  First he squinted through the keyhole to find out whether there was a key left in the lock. There was. Then he extracted a little probe with a magnet on the end which snapped on to the snub end of the key and allowed him to manipulate it. The magnet wasn’t strong enough to unlock the door with the key; but strong enough to turn the key itself to a vertical position, so that he could push it gently backwards until it fell out on to the carpet on the other side. Duffy then took out his set of skeleton keys and had the door open in a minute.

  He dragged Jeggo through into the green room and dumped him on the floor. He bled quietly on to the carpet. The curtains were closed, so Duffy turned on one of the lights, the brass standard lamp nearest to the side room. Then he pulled a chair over to the door and climbed up on it. With his pen-torch pressed close to the cream-painted box, he examined every edge of it, found some screws which had been crudely painted over, and with a short screwdriver chipped away at the hardened paint. Then he slowly undid the screws. As they loosened, he pressed against the cover of the box. The screws fell to the floor, and the lid was held in place simply by his hand. He laid his face close to the left-hand side of it and very slightly pulled the cover away on that side. Then he did the same on the right-hand side. He couldn’t get at the top, so he ran a thin blade between the top edge and the wall. Again, nothing. He couldn’t get at the bottom edge because it was tight against the top of the door-frame. This was the big one you simply had to risk. Duffy looked round to make sure he’d worked out the quickest way to the door in case there was a trigger on the bottom edge. Then he gently began to lift the cover away.

  Nothing happened. Nothing happened except that, when Duffy looked at the alarm he nearly giggled. Then he did giggle. Jackson and Horwill had started making these in 1952, and for some reason had kept them in production until the mid-1960s. They weren’t bad – that’s to say, they went off reliably, they made a loud noise, they didn’t need servicing – it was just that, well, burglars practised on these when they were still at primary school. They were the sort of alarms which villains taught their wives how to defuse, just so they could get a feeling of what hubby’s job was like. There were hoary burglar’s stories which turned on getting to a job with the very latest equipment and finding yourself faced with a Jackson and Horwill ’52.

  Two minutes and a few keys later, Duffy had opened the door to the side room. As he did so, he heard a sound from the floor. Jeggo was moving a bit, making a little noise. Duffy walked quickly across and kicked him on the side of the head that was nearest him – the side that didn’t have blood on it. If that fucked up the inside of Jeggo’s head, he thought, it could only be an improvement.

  The room was very neatly arranged. On the far wall were the manila files, covering about three shelves. A to Z. He reached up to the top shelf and pulled out ‘Duffy’. In a pocket on the inside of the left-hand cover were the Polaroids from the night before last. He put the file on one side. Then he looked for one or two names in particular. Then, on an impulse, a sudden, slightly sick impulse, he looked for Carol. Thank God, she wasn’t there. He looked for Shaw. There was a very thin file, a photo or two, nothing much, a few notes, as if either they hadn’t tried to get anything on him, or else he was one dourly honest copper.

  Duffy pulled out the rest of the files and tipped them on to the floor. Tightly packed papers burn poorly, so he scattered them loosely. Then he looked around the room and noticed two metal filing cabinets. Locked, but Duffy could open them blindfold. One was full of cassette tapes, again filed in alphabetical order. He went through them slowly. The other had a number of 8 mm. cine-films in it. He broke one open, went back into the green room, and held a strip up to the light. Then he piled the films and the tapes on top of the manila files.

  He took his own file, opened it up and placed it flat on the carpet. He took out the Polaroids and built them into a house of cards. Then he took a box of matches and lit the edge of one of them. It caught, the edge burned, and then with a sudden flare the chemicals on the print surface lit. Soon all the prints were alight, and papers round the edge were beginning to catch as well. He watched unblinkingly while the Polaroids bubbled and flamed, and started giving off smoke and the smell of burning oil. He watched them curl and bend, and then the house of cards he had made collapsed. More papers caught, the fire was well alight; Duffy fed on some tapes and films, then some folders, and decided it was time to leave.

  He propped open the door into
the side room to help ventilate the fire. Then, as he left, dragging Jeggo with him, he propped open each door in turn. Already as he left the green room he could feel the heat of the fire. He dragged Jeggo bumping down the stairs, pulled the chain out of the emergency exit door, slipped the catches, and propped both the doors open. That should help the draught.

  Still careful not to collect a dab of blood, he dragged Jeggo to the end of the courtyard and left him there. If he wanted to rush in and try to put out the fire when he came round, he was welcome to. Duffy hopped over a few fences until he came to an alley leading back out into Greek Street. There were still a few cruising taxis, looking for drunken foreign punters whom they could drive to hotels a mile away and charge them ten quid. They’re a greedy bunch, cabmen, that late at night, but Duffy didn’t care. When the first taxi didn’t stop, he simply waved a five-pound note at the driver of the second and told him to take him to Carol’s.

  Eddy certainly wouldn’t think that it was Duffy who had done him. Not straight away, at least. Duffy was sure Jeggo hadn’t had time to see him. But Eddy might work it out by process of elimination. He might connect Duffy’s security business with the fact that someone had bypassed the burglar alarm on his side room. And he might come up with a name at the same time as he realised what he had lost. What had he said that time? Great men have their libraries. Eddy had his files and tapes and films and Polaroids. Only Eddy didn’t have them any more. Knowledge is Power; and without that room Big Eddy Martoff was going to be no more than just another pushy Soho villain.

  Duffy didn’t want to be around when Martoff realised that. He didn’t like to think of Martoff running his finger down the telephone directory for Duffy’s home address. So Duffy wouldn’t go back to his Paddington flat, not for anything. In any case, after two burglaries there wasn’t much left there that he valued. Everything was replaceable: clothes, tools, television set.

  There were a few last things to do, of course, before Duffy disappeared into another part of London. As he sat in the taxi he felt the front of his anorak. The files made him look pregnant. He’d taken two: Sullivan’s and McKechnie’s. In the morning, after he’d slept with them under his pillow, he’d pop round the corner and have Sullivan’s Xeroxed. Five copies. He didn’t worry so much about McKechnie; but Sullivan wasn’t getting away.

  Then he’d pack the files up, enclose the tape and transcripts Bell would have delivered to Carol’s by now, and send them off to AIO. He didn’t know what AIO would do about McKechnie – probably pass the file on – but he knew what they’d do about Sullivan. And just to make sure that they knew what they were going to do about Sullivan, he’d send off four of the Xerox copies to crime desks in Fleet Street. The fifth he’d keep for himself. It should see Sullivan good for five years at least, depending on which judge he drew.

  When Duffy got to Carol’s, she was still up. The package from Bell was on the kitchen table. She hadn’t seen Duffy so cheerful for months. He grinned at her, pressed his file-stuffed anorak against her and gave her a kiss. Then he looked at her oddly, shook his head an inch or two, and said, ‘Sorry’. Sorry, she supposed he meant, in case you misinterpreted that. But she didn’t ask. She didn’t ask either what he had been doing, or why he wanted to stay the night tonight, or why she had had to put off her date. She didn’t ask, because she really didn’t want to know. All she said to him was,

  ‘Duffy, I thought you might be hungry, so I’ve got us some bread and cheese.’

  He looked up, then suddenly seemed lost in memory. He was thinking about the last few days, about the fears and the anger; he was thinking about the cubicle at the Aladdin’s Lamp, and the thin copper wire wrapped threateningly around him. But all that he said to Carol by way of explanation about Martoff and Jeggo and Georgiou, about Sullivan and Shaw, about McKechnie and Bell – all he said about what had happened to him in the past weeks, and what he had done, was,

  ‘I really don’t think I could face cheese, love.’

  And then he gave her an enigmatic smile.

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Duffy series

  The day they crashed McKay, not much else happened on the M4. At least, not on the stretch between Heathrow and Chiswick; further west, that was somebody else’s patch, so who cared? Especially as it was one of those warm, hazy August mornings when the police cars bask like lizards on their special roadside ramps; when those few extra feet above the tarmac permit a careless, unobserved, cap-tilted snooze. And then, perhaps, towards 11.30, the quiet phut and crackle of the FM radio would be eased a bit lower, and finally drowned out by the tiny portable in the blue pocket, tuned to the ball-by-ball.

  And the cars weren’t giving any trouble either. By ten, the last commuters had vanished east in a swirl of nicotine and bad temper; they wouldn’t be back for at least six hours. The commercials, the heavies, the twenty-tonners were uncharacteristically well-behaved: something to do with the sun, no doubt. And the civvies: well, on the way to the airport they were too scared of wrecking their holiday to do more than forty; while on the way back, they were so baffled by driving on the left that they often stayed in third gear all the way to the Cromwell Road.

  So the blues weren’t too pleased when McKay got crashed, when a taxi driver who had seen – well, hadn’t really seen anything, just a wreck and a paint smear on the crash barrier – radioed in to his office, who called the local police, who called Heathrow, who transferred it to Uxbridge, who at the third time of asking (England 8 for 1, Boycott bowled Chappell 2: even that bit of the day was going well) managed to raise a drowsily laconic panda crew. Who weren’t too pleased with McKay for fucking up their morning. It was almost as if he’d done it deliberately.

  What was left on the crash barrier might have been paint, but it wasn’t. McKay’s car had bits of red on it, but not that much. It was a customised Cortina with a tiger motif. At the front, a trompe-l’oeil radiator grille whose vertical bars formed the tiger’s teeth; along the side, the massed lightning of gold and black jagged stripes; at the back, a tail painted across the bumper, and (McKay’s own suggestion, of which he was incontinently proud) a pair of tiger buttocks which met at the point where the special central exhaust protruded. At work, to his face, they called him, as he planned, ‘Tiger’; when he wasn’t there, they tended to refer to his as The Farting Cat. Sometimes they would watch him drive off, and laugh together at the first gust of blue-grey smoke from between the tiger’s buttocks.

  McKay left the Western International Cargo Market and headed east towards London. But he didn’t drive like a tiger. After a flash bit of foot-down and tyre-squeal as he left work (someone was usually watching, if only a cleaner and his broom), he settled back on the motorway to a steady forty-five. No point burning out the engine before its time. Besides, he liked being in his car – the longer it lasted, the better. Proper little maharajah’s palace in here, he used to say. The sound system; the row of miniatures in the ‘cocktail cabinet’, as he loftily described his glove compartment; the small, padded steering wheel, all black leather and studs; the full Cyril Lord underfoot; sheepskin seats (‘The wife makes ’em from the sheep Tiger runs over,’ he would explain); even a sheepskin rear-window shelf. On this shelf – another of McKay’s favourite touches – lolled a large soft toy. A tiger, of course. McKay was vaguely irritated that its colours didn’t match the bodywork, and he’d nearly punched the soft-toy salesman who tried to assure him that the colours were definitely authentic (as if the colours of his Cortina weren’t). Still, McKay was able to make a virtue of this whenever anyone mentioned it. ‘Tigers come in all colours,’ he’d quip, modestly referring to himself as well.

  McKay looked up past the too-pale toy and checked the traffic behind him. Just a coach, some twenty yards back. He moved his head a bit and studied his own reflection. The broad, slightly sweaty face, the cupid’s-bow mouth, the impassive eyes – they all pleased McKay as much as ever. Vroom, vroom, he thought to himself. Idly, he tugged on the chain around
his neck until a thin silver swastika, about two inches square, appeared from beneath his shirt. The leading edges of the emblem had been filed to sharpness: for no particular reason at the time, except that it felt like a good idea. And later, it had proved useful now and then. When he was in the caff, for instance, and that Pakki had started looking at him. Not doing anything, of course – they never dared; they just looked. McKay had dug out a match, reeled in his swastika, and started sharpening the match to a point right in front of the Pakki’s face. Then he let the badge dangle and picked slowly at his teeth, all the time staring at this guy. That was one Pakki who didn’t bother to finish his sweet.

  McKay shifted the swastika in his right hand, selected one of the legs, and began to pick inquisitively at his left nostril with it. That was another reason for keeping to a steady forty-five; though of course, with a racing wheel like this you could drive at seventy with just one little pinkie if you felt like it. As he told people.

  He worked methodically at his nostril, occasionally flicking a bogy on to his jeans. A lorry began to overtake him. For a few seconds it was alongside, thumping and shuddering; then it fell back. McKay glanced in the mirror to see where it had gone, but all he saw was the same coach as before; it was a bit closer than last time, maybe ten yards behind.