The Devil's Home on Leave (Factory 2)

‘Les mois d’avril sont meurtriers.’

I knocked at a second-floor flat in a dreary house, one of two hundred in a dreary Catford street.

After a while I heard steps the other side of the door. ‘McGruder?’

‘Who’s that?’ said a man’s voice. ‘Who wants him?’

‘I do,’ I said. ‘Open up. Police.’

Later, I knew the following. At half past seven on the cold, sunny evening of Wednesday, April 13th, Billy McGruder went up to a passer-by in Hammersmith.

‘Excuse me, mate. You know a pub called the Nine Foot Drop?’

‘The Drop? Sure. You cross over the Broadway here, go up King Street, turn out of Ravenscourt Road into Tofton Avenue and it’s on the right. Ten-minute walk. You can’t miss it – great barracks of a place.’

‘Thanks.’

When McGruder got in there everything had gone fine – sweet as a nut. The solid man in his blue blazer was there all right, scanning newcomers through a mirror that covered the entrance. His back turned to Billy, he shifted on his stool at the bar to show that he had seen him and Billy, standing next to him for a moment to order, got a sweet cider and carried it over to the table that had been agreed on. Once Billy was settled, the man in the blazer – villain’s scar across his left ear – nodded across the bar at a man sitting alone at a table under a window with a raincoat over his shoulders.

This man was ageless and thin, with the bright, uneasy face of a stoat. His pale eyes blinked under colourless lashes, never still in his head which jerked on its thin neck, the prominent Adam’s apple throbbing nervously up at his chin. At times the man’s shoulders twitched under the mac with the quick gestures of a bird undecided whether to stay or fly with the fine-honed instinct of the weak, forever attuned to danger. He looked smart in a way to suit his thinness; he wore high, expensive boots, brown and polished bright – ninety quid’s worth easy – and a corduroy cap,
clipper style, at an angle half to the back, half to the side of his head, favouring his lifeless, gingery hair. A third of a pint of beer stood in front of him, a mess of foam trailing down the inside of the glass. Billy pushed his cider away; he hardly ever drank. He lit a cigarette, drew on it three times and put it out. He didn’t smoke; it was just the sign that he had understood all right who the target was.

Billy was very careful to be precise about the agreed signs. There was money in this job, fifteen hundred pounds; so naturally he didn’t want to make a mess of it.

He didn’t look near the target again. He knew who it was now, and that was enough. Indeed, Billy seldom looked directly at anyone; when he did, it meant that it was already too late for the person.

After a little while, the stout young man got up to go. In doing so, he left two keys on a ring behind him on the bar.

‘Night, Tony.’

‘
Night
, squire!
Night
, Merrill!’

If Tony Williams, the governor, who was standing behind his bar looking benevolent and polishing a glass, noticed that the keys had been left there he gave no sign of it – and when Billy, getting up to go to the gents, swept them casually into his pocket as he went by, the governor happened to have his back turned. No one else at the bar remarked on the incident, even if they noticed it. It didn’t pay to notice things in the Nine Foot Drop.

When Billy got to the gents, pungent with the smell of disinfectant, he went on past the splashback into the single cubicle and locked the door. He took the keys out of one pocket, a pair of thin gloves out of another, and put the gloves on. He rubbed the keys thoroughly and looked at the paper tag attached to the ring. He memorized the car registration number, tore the tag off, shredded it, dropped the pieces into the bowl and pulled the chain. He didn’t bother checking his other gear. He’d done all that before leaving for this rendezvous; he had everything he needed with him
in a briefcase which he never lost sight of. He had it with him now.

He went back to the bar, strolled to a window, and looked out to check that the car whose plates corresponded to the number he had memorized was parked outside. In the bar everything was as it had been, except that someone else had taken the solid man’s place at the Kronenbourg pump. The target was still sitting at his table all right, Billy saw, and that was going to be just too bad for the target. Women in the place looked at Billy admiringly, taking him for the spruce young businessman with the executive briefcase that he appeared to be. They couldn’t know that within less than an hour he would be stripped naked, carefully removing and preparing everything that he had in his case. They couldn’t know what he had in it.

Billy wondered if after all his man was waiting for somebody real; it could complicate matters if he were. Billy had been told definitely that he wouldn’t be – that a moody meet had been arranged for the target where the other man wouldn’t show. But you never knew. Using the mirrors, therefore, Billy watched while the target picked up his glass and turned it, as if undecided whether to have another. He went on watching until the target made up its mind, drained the glass suddenly and stood up.

Someone once asked me why I ever became a copper, never mind why I stayed on for fifteen years. I told him about the woman I found one night on the M1. It was early days. I was just a uniformed constable then, working out of Watford on patrol car duty. My place was next to the driver; the CID man was in the back. It was dreadful weather in late autumn. The rain was pissing down on a north wind, and we were cruising up to the Bedford turn-off, the end of our stretch, well below the legal limit because the motorway was flooded in places.

Then I saw what looked like a bundle of rags over on the hard shoulder. ‘Jam them on,’ I said to the driver. ‘Go on, hard.’

I realized it was a woman as we pulled over and stopped. I checked the time – it was midnight – got out into the rain and was immediately soaked. I knelt down by her and got my torch out of my back pocket; she looked about sixty. Her brown coat was sodden with rain and she was bleeding heavily from her stomach, though the blood was constantly being washed away by the rain. Her face was grey, and her legs and arms were sprawled out as she had fallen.