A Fistful of Knuckles

by Tom Graham

  ‘We’re always getting coppers hanging round backstreets fights,’ Patsy muttered, his voice low and dangerous. His breath reeked of sewage and rancid milk. ‘They love a flutter on the ol’ fisticuffs. For some reason, though, they always seem to bet on the wrong bloke. Is that what happened tonight, is it? Did you bet on the wrong bloke?’

  ‘I don’t know about my guv’nor, but I didn’t bet a penny,’ said Sam. ‘I’m not a gambling man. Also, I wash behind my ears and I’m always in bed by eight.’

  Patsy grinned, running his fat, pink tongue over his uneven yellow teeth: ‘So what were you after, then? Eh? Or shall I guess? Did it have anything to do with that blackie Denzil Obi?’

  ‘If you mean Mr Denzil Obi, the mixed race gentleman whose murder we’re investigating, then yes it did.’

  ‘Reckon it was me what done it?’

  ‘Yes. I think it was you.’

  ‘And why would I go and do a fing like that?’

  ‘Revenge. He tried to kill you nearly ten years ago. He put three bullets in you.’

  ‘And then blew my ear off,’ said Patsy, nodding. He shrugged. ‘Water under the bridge.’

  ‘I don’t believe that.’

  ‘Listen, sonny – if I went after every bloke I had a grudge against, there’d be a heap of bodies higher than that Ferris wheel, you getting me? I’m a boxer, not a murderer. Denzil Obi, he’s your murderer … leastways, he would have been if he’d had half a clue in his dopey black head. And that slag Spider, he’s no better. Ask yourself – who shot who? Eh? It was them two who came after me with a shooter, right? And who did I shoot? No one.’

  Sam opened his mouth to speak, then shut it again. His brain was still reeling from all the blows and the screaming pain coursing through his battered jaw, but he couldn’t afford to be woolly headed. He had to think. He had to play the next few moments very, very carefully.

  Gene’s out of the game, at least for the time being. How this situation plays out is entirely down to me, and there’s nothing the guv can do. My plan was to draw Patsy into a trap, win his confidence, and somewhere along the way get him to admit that he killed Obi. Gene pissed on that plan – but now’s my chance to put it into action! He’ll kill me for it later – but let him. It’ll be too late by then.

  ‘Listen up, Patsy,’ said Sam, and he shot a sideways glance at the menacing figure of Moustache-man looming over him. ‘I want a word with you, in private. You can help us – and, in return, we can help you.’

  Patsy ran his small, bony, breezeblock-breaking hand over Princess’s back, smacked her meaty arse, then turned to Sam and said: ‘You can talk in front of any one of my lads. They’re sound.’

  ‘I’m sure they are. But this is … a little delicate.’

  Patsy chewed this over, then told Moustache-man to bugger off. Moustache-man glowered fearsomely at Sam for a moment, as if warning him not to try any funny business, then loped off in the direction Ponytail had carried Gene.

  ‘Well then,’ said Patsy, drawing closer to Sam and looming over him. His nightmarish, tattooed face was drawn into an unreadable expression. ‘You got what you wanted. It’s just me now.’

  ‘Get your goons to bring my DCI back here and then we can start talking.’

  Princess growled.

  ‘She don’t like hearin’ you givin’ me so many orders, son,’ said Patsy. ‘And neeva do I. Spit out what you want to say, or clear off.’

  It was hopeless trying to argue. Sam had no choice but to leave Gene in the hands of fate.

  ‘That dog’s making me jumpy,’ said Sam. ‘Let’s go inside.’

  ‘Inside then.’

  Sam turned towards the caravan, but Patsy stopped him with a hand on his shoulder. His touch, surprisingly, was light, his hand barely resting on Sam’s jacket. But even so, Sam could sense the implacable strength that resided within it, like the silent, terrible potential poised within the heart of a primed warhead.

  ‘You don’t want to nick me for what happened to Obi,’ he said, his voice low, his eyes glaring. ‘You really don’t, son.’

  ‘We know you did it,’ Sam replied, almost in a whisper.

  ‘Can you prove it?’

  ‘No. We can’t get enough evidence together.’

  ‘So what you gonna do then?’

  ‘What we always do. Pin it on somebody else.’

  ‘Wiv my help?’

  ‘Yeah. With your help, Patsy.’

  Sam paused. He thought, in his own opinion, that he sounded pretty convincing. But would Patsy buy it?

  For several moments, Patsy did nothing. Then he frowned. Or at least, Sam assumed it was a frown; the man’s face was so disfigured by ink that his expressions were hard to read. He watched Patsy’s troll-like face, watched the eyes narrow, watched the tongue dart back and forth across the tombstone teeth.

  ‘Bent coppers,’ Patsy said at last. And then he grinned: ‘You gotta luv ‘em! You always know where you stand with a bent copper. They’re the only sort you can trust. I tell you, boy, you should have been up front about this from the off and we’d never had clobbered ya! C’mon, son, we’ll have a drink and hammer all this out.’

  He turned and squeezed himself through the door of the caravan.

  Alone for a moment, Sam exhaled, letting out the nervous tension that had been building in him until he thought he’d burst. He looked down at his hand and forced it to stop shaking. Princess snarled at him, and he backed away from the tethered beast to join the untethered one inside the caravan.

  CHAPTER TWELVE: CHEZ PATSY

  Lavender. The inside of the caravan smelt of lavender. Sam glanced around at immaculate net curtains bunched with white ribbons at the windows, a row of dusted and precisely arrayed china ornaments, a coloured vase of fresh flowers on a spotless Formica table. Patsy’s caravan was a masterpiece of hygiene and domestic order.

  ‘Very nice,’ Sam said. ‘If only my colleagues at CID were half as housetrained as you.’

  ‘I don’t like mess and I don’t like filth,’ Patsy grunted. ‘Gets me in a temper. I like all me stuff to be just so.’

  Sam had a glimpse of Patsy industriously pottering about the place in his pinny, flicking a feather duster over the black-and-white portable TV with its circular indoor aerial, neatly arranging the rows of C-45 music cassettes, beavering away with the dustpan and brush on the wood-effect floor.

  No – not Patsy. Tracy Porter, she’s the domestic drudge round here.

  Sam recalled Tracy’s battered, brutalized face, her refusal to speak up and name Patsy as that bastard who assaulted her.

  Glancing around the caravan, Sam thought: So – these are the high standards of housework she must maintain. What did she do to earn herself a beating? Forget to dust the back of the TV? Miss a speck of dirt on the floor?

  Where was Tracy now? She didn’t seem to be at home – the caravan was hardly big enough to give her a room to hide herself in. Perhaps she was manning one of the concessions at the fair, selling candyfloss or taking the money for the ghost train.

  And what happens if she suddenly turns up? Will she react when she sees me? Will she warn Patsy I’m after him? Will she betray me?

  Patsy took down something box-like and stashed it under the table in the middle of the caravan. Then he fitted his massive, muscle-bound body into a plastic armchair, produced a bottle of scotch and poured a couple of shot glasses.

  ‘Before we talk, I need to know what’s happened to my guv’nor,’ said Sam. ‘What have you done with him?’

  ‘He’ll live,’ intoned Patsy.

  ‘That’s not what I asked.’

  ‘It’s the only answer you’re gonna get, son.’ Patsy passed Sam a shot glass of whisky. ‘You wanted to talk to me. So start talking.’

  Act tough. This bastard won’t respect weakness. Put up a front that’ll impress him.

  In the way he imagined bent coppers would do it, Sam knocked his scotch back in a single go. It was a rough brew, like drinking paint strippe
r, and the burn of the stuff brought tears to his eyes.

  ‘You killed Denzil Obi,’ Sam said. ‘Didn’t you.’

  ‘Never touched him.’

  ‘Fine by me,’ shrugged Sam. ‘I couldn’t care less, and neither could my department. But we’re getting squeezed by the Home Office to finger somebody for the Obi case, so we’ve set our sights on Spider. We’re going to fit him up. That should please you, Patsy.’

  Patsy shrugged, said: ‘Why Spider?’

  ‘He’s an easy target. The man’s an idiot, and now Denzil’s dead he doesn’t have a friend in the world. He’s just the sort of loser who’s perfect for fitting up like this. We’ll pin Obi’s murder on him, plus a whole backlog of cases that need clearing. The Home Office will give us all gold stars and everyone in CID will be very happy.’

  Patsy refilled their glasses but said nothing.

  Sam went on, thinking fast: ‘The trouble is, Spider’s disappeared. Gone to ground. He’s frightened of you, Patsy. He thinks he’s in line for the same treatment Denzil got.’

  ‘Which was nuffing to do with me, like I said.’

  ‘Whatever. The point is, he’s vanished. So, we need to draw him out. You can do that for us.’

  ‘How? I don’t know where Spider is. I haven’t seen him for ten years – since him and Denzil tried to murder me.’

  He patted his belly and lifted the hem of his tee-shirt, revealing the tattooed bullet-holes that bore witness to those violent events from the past. Grotesquely, he insinuated a finger into one of the holes and picked out a tufty ball of lint.

  ‘Spider used to train at the same gym as Denzil,’ said Sam. ‘There’s boxers there who know where he is, but they’re not talking. They won’t tell us where he’s hiding, but what they will do is take messages to him.’

  Patsy waited for Sam to keep talking. Sam paused for a moment, hoped that whatever came out of his mouth next would sound convincing, and said:

  ‘Offer to fight him. Just you and Spider. We’ll see that word reaches him. And I tell you now, he’ll accept the offer. He’ll break cover to face you – and when he does, we’ll nick him.’

  ‘He won’t face me,’ said Patsy. ‘He’s not man enough.’

  ‘We’ll tell him it’s a trap, that it’s a police set-up to lure you out of hiding. We’ll tell him it’s you we’re going to nick, Patsy – and instead, we’ll nick him.’

  Sam accepted another refill and knocked it back. Had his convoluted plan sounded remotely convincing? Did Patsy even understand it? And if he did, would he swallow it?

  It’s vital that he starts to trust me. The more he trusts me, the more likely he is to let something slip – something important – something that betrays his guilt beyond question. But he’s got to trust me first. He’s got to let his guard down.

  ‘So …’ said Patsy in a slow, thoughtful voice. ‘You want to use me as bait to lure him out of hiding.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But he’ll think you’re using him as bait to lure out me.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And then – although you reckon, for some reason, that it’s me what killed Obi, you’re gonna nick Spider and fit him up for it.’

  ‘You got it.’

  Silence fell between them, broken only by the muffled racket of the fair outside. Patsy said nothing.

  Has he smelt a rat? Have I over-reached myself here? Have I failed to win his confidence?

  ‘Come on, Patsy, it’ll be a cakewalk,’ Sam said. ‘All you have to do is stand there, let him see you. He won’t be able to resist. And the moment he shows his face – blam! Me and my boys swoop in.’

  ‘I understand all that, son. I’m pretty smart for a pikey.’

  Patsy knocked back his drink, and Sam did likewise, forcing himself not to grimace at the hard bite of the scotch as it went down.

  ‘Let’s say I go along with this,’ he said, fixing Sam with a piercing look. ‘What’s in it for me?’

  ‘I thought that was obvious.’

  ‘Spell it out.’

  ‘Well, for starters, you’ll be clear of Denzil Obi’s murder.’

  ‘Which was nothing to do with me anyway, son.’

  ‘Patsy, we don’t care if it was you, Cassius Clay or Ken bloody Dodd who killed Denzil Obi. We can’t prove it was you, but we’ve got what we need to pin it on Spider, and that’s all we give a damn about.’

  ‘Speak up, old son,’ said Patsy, and he indicated the tattered remains of his ear. ‘I’m a bit mutton on this side.’

  ‘I said we don’t care who killed Denzil Obi,’ said Sam, raising his voice. ‘It’s not in our interests for you to go down for this. It’s Spider we want. He’s nothing. Worthless. But you, Patsy – you’ve got connections.’

  ‘Wiv what?’

  ‘Come on, Patsy, don’t play Snow White with me. There’s a lot of villains you can get access to … and help us get access to.’

  ‘I don’t have no criminal contacts,’ said Patsy. ‘I’m clean.’

  Sam laughed, hopefully in a macho way, and said: ‘Clean as a whistle, I’m sure. But just think about this, Patsy: we can make it worth your while to play along with us. Very worth your while. You can settle a few old scores, get rid of a few old enemies, and make your new buddies in CID a bunch of very happy bunnies.’

  Sam held out his glass for another refill, downed it in one, forced himself not to choke on the vile acid, and said: ‘So there you go, Patsy. You’re more use to us on the outside than banged up. And Spider’s more use to us as a fall guy than anything else. The whole situation’s perfect.’

  Patsy looked thoughtfully into his whisky glass, and still he did not speak.

  ‘Well, Patsy? What do you say?’

  ‘I say you’re asking a lot,’ Patsy growled in a low voice. ‘I say you’re asking me to be a nark.’

  ‘Yes. That’s exactly what we’re asking. Or would you rather I went back to the Home Office, got them to lay off the pressure, and continued compiling a case against you, Patsy? Would you rather we set about putting you away for life for the murder of Denzil Obi?’

  ‘But I didn’t kill Obi.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Patsy, I haven’t got all night. Make up your mind. This could be a sweet little deal for both of us … the start of a very productive working relationship … perhaps even a beautiful friendship.’

  ‘I didn’t do Denzil Obi,’ Patsy said.

  ‘No. Spider did.’

  ‘I mean it, son.’

  ‘So do I, Patsy. All you have to do is help us make that a reality.’

  Sam thought of Spider, depressed and forlorn, sitting in one of the holding cells back at the station. Was it right to use him as a pawn in this violent and high-risk game? Sam was playing all sides off against each other, using both Spider and Patsy as a bait for one another. Was he overplaying his hand? Could he really control the outcome of the situation he was creating?

  After a few moments of silent thought, Patsy turned and looked at a little clock on one of the immaculately dusted shelves. The second hand ticked round, counting away the last few seconds until it was seven-thirty.

  ‘Five,’ said Patsy. ‘Four. Three. Two.’

  He pointed a tattooed finger at the door of the caravan, and bang on cue it opened.

  ‘One. Hiya, Trace.’

  A nervous, mouse-like voice replied: ‘Hiya, babes.’

  Dressed in nylon tracksuit bottoms and a faded Steve McQueen tee-shirt, Tracy stepped gingerly into the caravan, laden down with carrier bags from the Co-op. Her face was still bruised and swollen, even worse than Gene’s.

  Sam’s heart leapt into his mouth. He forced himself not to betray any outer reaction, but inwardly his nerve endings were jangling. What would Tracy say when she saw him? How would she react?

  ‘Nice to see you bang on time,’ Patsy said.

  ‘Yes, babes,’ said Tracy. She looked across at Sam, and her battered face registered not so much as a flicker of response. Then she tur
ned back to Patsy: ‘I got a move on. Didn’t want to muck you about or nuffing.’

  ‘Got everyfing?’

  ‘Yes, babes, I got everyfing.’ She carried the bags through to the tiny kitchen area and began putting things away – cornflakes, gold top milk, lime cordial, a plastic tub of Wall’s ice cream. As she opened cupboards, Sam glimpsed perfectly arrayed tins and jars inside.

  She’s not going to give me away, he thought. She’s been smacked too many times for speaking out of line to say anything now. She knows how to keep quiet.

  ‘It’s only right for a fella to know where his bird is,’ Patsy said to Sam. ‘Can’t let ‘em go wandering off at all hours, can you.’ Then to Tracy: ‘Ain’t you gonna ask me how I got on?’

  ‘Sure. How’d you get on, babes?’

  ‘How’d you think, you dopey mare? His brains were ‘anging out his arsehole by the time I walked away.’

  ‘Nice one, babes.’

  Tracy folded the Co-op bags and tucked them neatly in a drawer, then picked her way over to Patsy to kiss him. It struck Sam that barely half an hour before, Patsy had been in the thick of the nastiest, filthiest, most ferocious hand-to-hand fighting he had ever witnessed. And now here he was, taking his ease in his favourite chair, knocking back the whisky, and casually cutting a deal with what he took to be a thoroughly bent copper. The amount of physical punishment this monstrous man had absorbed this evening was staggering. And somewhere out there lay Gene Hunt, unconscious, downed by a single shattering blow to the skull, while Patsy snogged and slobbered over Tracy after taking enough of a pounding to sink a battleship. Where did such an appetite for violence come from? Were creatures like Patsy O’Riordan born that way? Did he emerge from a hard-as-nails gene pool, inheriting this staggering capacity for physical punishment from his father and grandfather and so and so on, all the way back to the primeval caves? Perhaps he wasn’t so far removed from the Neanderthals as all that.