Duffy (13 page)

‘Will you tell me what it’s like at the station nowadays?’

‘No.’

‘Is anyone preparing a move?’

‘No. Duffy.’

‘Will you tell me how Sullivan’s behaving?’

‘No.’

‘Will you look out the file on Big Eddy for me?’

‘No.’

‘Then will you do this? Will you – wait for it – will you look out the file on McKechnie for me, because if it turns out you’ve got reason to know him at West Central then I might just have to pull out of this job, mightn’t I?’

‘Don’t take it as a promise, Duffy, in case it gets broken. All I’ll say is if I’m near his file anyway, and there’s no one about, and there’s no chance of it ever,
ever
getting out that I looked at it, then I might.’

‘One last question.’

Carol looked weary.

‘Will you stay the night, please?’

Carol nodded, smiled, went off into the bathroom and unsnapped the plastic box labelled ‘Watches’.

6

T
HE NEXT MORNING DUFFY
made a phone call to an old friend, a specialist at the sharper, technological end of surveillance. Geoff Bell could bug a phone just by scowling at it; could lift a voice-print out of thin air; could lay down a surveillance system which would tell him three miles away if a police dog was taking a leak. He wasn’t entirely honest – his moral sophistication lagged a little behind his technological sophistication; though the only time the coppers had tried it on and raided him they got a nasty shock: Bell had so completely bugged and monitored his own flat that three days later he sent them a one-hundred-page dossier detailing what each of the three coppers had done for every second they were in his flat. He even knew that the big, burly copper with the black moustache had approved of the girl’s photo that was pinned above the desk. And the day after the dossier arrived, Bell filed suits for trespass, criminal damage and wrongful seizure of property. Somehow the police seemed to lose interest in his case after that.

‘Geoff, it’s Duffy. I’ve been in touch with Control and he says could you drop the package behind the cistern in the middle bog as you’re leaving Lenin’s tomb. The plane tickets will be arriving in the morning.’

‘All right, Duffy, I won’t record you for once.’

‘But you were recording that bit?’

‘Of course.’ With Bell, documentation was as much a mania as a job.

‘And you’ll wipe that first sentence of mine?’

‘Yes.’

‘And then it won’t be there?’

‘No. Because I’ll have wiped it. You slowing down, Duffy?’

‘It really won’t be there?’

‘What’s on your mind, Duffy?’

‘I’ve got a tape with a gap on it. Two and a half, maybe three seconds.’

‘Nixon’s secretary put her foot on the autowipe again?’

‘That sort of thing. What I wondered was, do you think you could get anything out of it?’

‘Depends. Depends on quite a lot of things. How loud the original recording was. How determined the guy was to wipe it: if he went over it lots of times there probably wouldn’t be anything left. Depends if he wiped it on the same machine he recorded it on. Depends how good the tape and the machine were in the first place. Depends how much of a hurry you’re in for it as well.’

‘Couple of days, would that be enough?’

‘I’ll do what I can. Most of the time, wipe means wipe, though.’

‘Sure.’

Duffy rang off and went and rooted in his tool chest. He found a pair of powerful, short-handled, snub-nosed metal-clippers, and slipped them into his pocket. Then he collected McKechnie’s tape, scribbled a note, and put the tape in an envelope to drop through Bell’s door. As he ruffled Carol’s hair by way of goodbye, she said,

‘I haven’t seen a thing, Duffy, and I’m sure I wouldn’t have liked it if I had.’

‘Just a new tin opener, darlin’. Made in Switzerland.’

‘Where the nuts come from,’ was all she said.

Duffy dropped the tape off at Bell’s and took the tube in to Piccadilly Circus. It was beginning to feel like going to work.

He walked up the Avenue, turned left, and approached the Peep Show with his punter’s gait. He changed a couple of quid with the cashier, and settled in to a cubicle. It was early in the day: the Kleenex on the floor was quite dry. He reckoned that the Peep Show probably ran on eight or ten girls. Each girl had about a ten-minute turn, so that they’d have to wait maybe an hour and a half before their next routine. They wouldn’t be sitting around in a dressing room with their feet up talking about skin conditioner, that was for sure. Soho was one of those places where time translated directly into money. The old-style whores used to operate like taxi-cabs. You’d have to finish in ten minutes, otherwise they’d start an ‘I can’t hang about all day’ routine; if you wanted another go after you’d finished the first time, the same rate applied, only they gave a discount if you could finish in five minutes.

At a guess, the girls in the Peep Show did a circuit to other such places, or maybe to strip clubs – Duffy wondered if the skin clubs would cease to exist in a year or two – or maybe they popped home and did an hour’s trade. Duffy inserted his first 50p piece and the metal shutter slid up. A skinny, underfed girl with tiny tits was dancing as hard as she could, except that it didn’t seem like dancing, not compared to some of the others, it seemed more like running on the spot. Round her neck she wore a velvet choker in what seemed a pathetic attempt to distract attention from her waif-like body. Even her pubic hair, Duffy noted dispassionately, seemed lacking in vigour, and grew patchily, with no enthusiasm. When it came to straddling the glass letter boxes, she did it in a wooden, automatic routine, glancing round anxiously to see if she was missing anyone out. Duffy wondered if any of the anonymous circle of eyes found it exciting. He just wanted to throw a Red Cross blanket round the girl’s shoulders and feed her some hot soup.

He left his letter box closed for the rest of her act, then dropped in another 50p. Two minutes with his slot open, watching and partly watching; then five minutes or so with it shut. He wondered if punters had to keep up a certain percentage of time with their windows open before they got their doors kicked by the management. Maybe no one minded any more, they made so much money. It was like in the dirty bookshops. In the old days there would be cardboard signs up above the racks of mags saying
NO BROWSING
. Large men came up to you and said things like ‘Two minutes more’ and then, with a heavy parody of civility, ‘Can I help you?’. Now nobody seemed to care that punters stood in shops for hours on end and then left without buying; the turnover was obviously quite lucrative enough and harassing the customer didn’t particularly improve your trade.

Duffy changed some more money, and after he’d got through three quid his slot clanged up to reveal the black girl, Polly. He watched her more closely than the previous girls, checked out the white scar on her shoulder, and then, when she bent right forwards to give the punters a double-barrelled shot, he looked at the top of her thigh: there, right where the thigh joined the buttock, was the pimp’s cut: a white scar running down into her groin.

Duffy left at the end of that 50p’s worth and waited across the street for the black girl to emerge. When she did, he crossed quickly and caught up with her before she had the chance to disappear like the last time.

‘Excuse me,’ he said as he came level with her.

‘Yeah?’

Duffy didn’t know quite how to begin.

‘Er, excuse me,’ he said again. He felt almost embarrassed; he certainly must have looked embarrassed, because she suddenly gave a hard, professional smile.

‘Okay, love, I was going to do some shopping, but I’ll fit you in.’ She turned round and started walking back in the direction she’d come. Duffy followed, having to catch her up again. She was already rattling off her price list.

‘Ten for straight. You wan’ it straight? Do you Greek if you like. Greek’s twenty. Blow’s fifteen. Hands? Well, hands is ten too, I know it sounds a lot love, but honestly, it’s as much trouble as the other. Made up your mind?’

It was only half past twelve. He didn’t feel particularly randy. But having got this far he didn’t think stopping, explaining who he was, and asking a few questions would produce a helpful response. At her gaff he dropped ten pounds into a little woven basket on a dresser and got on with it. She made a great show of being excited to hurry him along. He made a similar show to fool himself and hurry himself along. Their thoughts were miles away from their bodies.

‘There, that’s better now, love, isn’t it?’ For a tan, she was chatty.

‘You’re Polly, aren’t you?’

‘If you like.’

‘I brought you flowers once.’

She looked at him strangely.

‘Listen, love, none of my punters bring
me
flowers. Not even my regulars.’

‘No, I brought you flowers in hospital. Four years ago.’

She stopped pulling up her skirt and looked at him again. Then she said,

‘Fucking copper, aren’t you?’

‘Not any more.’ He finished dressing and zipped up his blouson.

‘I don’t take coppers. I never take coppers.’

‘I’m not a copper. I’m private now. Can I talk to you?’

‘No you fucking can’t.’ She seemed frightened, even though she was acting angry.

‘It wouldn’t take very long. I just want to ask you about four years ago.’

‘No way. Fucking get out. Get out, copper.
FUCKING GET OUT.’
She ran to the side of her bed and pressed a bell.

Duffy got out. He got out very fast indeed.

He bought himself lunch at the Casa Alpina, a little Italian café where he sat next to the hatch and listened to the waiters bawling down the intercom. As he sat over the menu a youngish waiter with a bald head and a black moustache rushed at the hatch and deposited a pile of sticky-pudding plates in the pulley lift, at the same time bending his head to the intercom and shouting, ‘Piccolo hors-d’oeuvre twice!’ Duffy liked places like this: the noise, the friendliness, the cheapness. He ordered himself bacon, sausage, eggs, tomato, baked beans, double chips and a half carafe of wine.

He hadn’t been counting on Polly, so it wasn’t too much of a blow that she wouldn’t talk. You just have to try every avenue and hope that some of them lead somewhere. Most of them don’t, of course. In any case, he reflected, Polly didn’t exactly owe him anything. The flowers had come off police expenses; and he had leaned on her more than a little at the time.

After lunch it was back to the Double Blue. He hoped this bit of the day would go better. He dug out his membership card in the name of Daniel Drough and presented it to the soiled hippy in the box office, who shook his head.

‘Sorry, mate, your membership’s expired.’

‘Don’t be stupid, I only joined a few days ago.’

‘Sorry, mate, that’s not what your card says.’ He handed him back the card: Membership for one year from…’ it said at the bottom, and on his previous visit the hippy had filled in ‘10 June 1978’. He’d written ‘1978’ instead of ‘1979’ so that the card appeared to expire the day he had sold it. One of the oldest tricks in the book. Duffy kicked himself.

‘Look, you sold me that card a couple of days ago.’

‘Me? Not me, mate. I only came back from holiday today.’

‘Where did you go?’ Duffy was pissed off, especially with himself. The hippy looked mystified. What was this punter doing getting all uppity?

‘And besides,’ the hippy went on triumphantly, ‘this isn’t my writing.’

Duffy handed over another fiver.

‘Same name again this time is it, guv? Or do you fancy a change?’

‘Heath,’ said Duffy, ‘E. Heath.’

Inside, there were about the same number of punters as before. Twenty or so diligent E. Heaths who might never have moved since Duffy had left the last time. On the screen the beach movie was showing again. Now a fat man had joined the two oily girls, who were toying with a beachball. For some obscure reason – perhaps as a punishment for their lesbian activities on a public strand – he kicked away their beachball, turned them over on their fronts, and began slapping their bottoms. With the amplifying system at the Double Blue, it sounded as if someone were beating carpets: a loud, extended, reverberating crump.

After ten minutes or so of this, Duffy decided to move. He got up from his seat and made his way to the toilet. He walked slowly past it and stopped by the emergency exit opposite the foot of the stairs. He looked up the stairs, listened for a bit, then took out his metal-clippers. He could go for the padlock or he could go for the chain. Both of them were a bit rusty, and almost certainly never used, but Duffy thought it possible that the padlock got a few glances occasionally. He started work on one of the links in the chain. Then he stopped, looked for a rustier one, and started again. After several silent heaving bursts on the clippers, he severed the link at a point where one of its straight sides began to go into a curve. Then he moved the clippers along about an inch and started work again close to the other curve. Soon a short, straight piece of link just under an inch long tinkled on to the stone floor. He picked it up and put it in his pocket.

Next he slowly slid the bolts at the top and bottom of the left-hand door. The door could now be pushed open from the outside until it came up against the chain, which would still hold tight despite the missing piece of link. The exit was in a dark part of the corridor, getting a little faint light from the top of the stairs, and Duffy hoped that no one would take a look at it. It would be just his luck if the G.L.C. decided to send round someone from their licensing department for a spot check.

Duffy walked softly back to the toilet, went inside and shut the door. The cistern had lost its lid at some stage, and Duffy climbed on the seat and peered in. He took the metal-clippers out of his pocket and gently lowered them into the water. The inch-long piece of chain followed. Then he climbed down, satisfied. That was the mechanical side done. The human side was always much more likely to go wrong.

He went back to the stairs and started to climb them. When he got to the top he saw three closed doors. He walked quickly across to the one on his right, the one from which the voices had come before, and knocked. Nothing happened. Instead, there was a voice from behind him.