Ли Чайлд - Belfast Noir

“No! No, I love it . . .”

“I thought it perfect for you, especially after reading its wee saying inside the box.”

Karl tilted the box, read the Timex motto engraved on the inside, grinned, and then read it out loud. “ Timex. Takes a Licking and Keeps on Ticking. ”

DIE LIKE A RAT

BY GARBHAN DOWNEY

Malone Road

For every story a newspaper publishes, there are nine more it will never print. This is one of them . . .

Spotty John Norway’s weirdly disfigured corpse was found nose-down in the pool of the Oxfordian, a private health club hidden away off one of the Malone Road’s leafy laneways. The burn marks were largely confined to Norway’s face and forehead, though there were also some patches on his neck and upper chest, presenting Inspector Jim Cotton with a problem.

“It’s strange enough, Rex, that he was a member of that club in the first place,” Cotton said. “A court clerk like him would earn what? Twenty grand a year? And I know he made a bit on the side—say another ten, tops. But a club like this would run you five, easy. Why would a man voluntarily hand over a sixth of his income, particularly when—and I mean no disrespect to the dead here—Spotty John would have needed every red cent he had to pull any colour of a girl?”

I looked down at the morgue tray and tried hard not to breathe in.

“Don’t think even John would have argued with you on that score.”

On his best day, Spotty John would have been too hideous to play the “before” guy in the Blitz Those Zits ad. But this evening, his head looked for all the world like it’d been parboiled then dipped in a deep-fat frier. Smelled like it too.

And people wonder why I won’t eat bacon.

Cotton, fair play to him, had called me in to do the identification and spare the Norway family the nightmares. He knew the chances of me getting a decent night’s sleep, after ten years on the crime beat with the Belfast Standard , were slimmer than my pay packet. Way too many carved-up bodies and scenes like this.

“The burns,” he said, “are probably from scalding water. Steam, maybe. But he’s clean as a whistle from the chest down, which means that whatever else, he wasn’t fried in the pool. Otherwise we’d be looking at the full lobster effect. Oh, and there’s no scalding in his throat or on the inside of his mouth.”

“Probably killed somewhere else and then dumped in the pool,” I nodded.

Cotton shook his head. “So you’d think, Rex,” he said, raising a finger knowingly. “But the strangest thing is that the burning didn’t kill him at all.”

“How then?”

He took a beat then grinned. “He drowned. And the forensic guys at the scene are pretty certain it happened at the pool. Preliminary water samples seem to match.”

“Tortured first, then held under?” I suggested.

“Possibly. Except there are no restraint marks on his body. And we scrubbed him for any other DNA but found nothing.”

I couldn’t resist: “Next thing you’ll be telling me is that you’ve no idea why it happened to him.”

Cotton laughed mordantly and at long last pulled the sheet back over the corpse. “No mystery there, I’m afraid. Little weasel had it coming.”

Spotty John was a small-time blackmailer and had become quite renowned for it. His job at the magistrates’ court, while undoubtedly menial, gave him licence to put the bite on all manner of petty criminals. For a small fee, he’d make sure a defendant’s name and address would be withheld from reporters, thus sparing the client considerable public embarrassment and community retribution. But should a chosen client decide not to divest himself of this small fee, you could guarantee that the juicier insides of the file would be leaked to a willing hack and distributed to tens of thousands of homes across the North before you could say punishment shooting .

John had given me dozens of stories in my years with the Standard— and held back hundreds more.

“He obviously put the squeeze on the wrong guy,” said Cotton.

“Either that, or this is the worst-thought-out suicide ever.”

* * *

Despite being a cop, Cotton sometimes found it difficult to suppress his inner decency, and the following evening he rang me at my flat, midgame, to give me a headstart on the pack.

“Kiddie-fiddlers,” he said, by way of hello.

“Excuse me?” I replied.

“Spotty John. He was trying to shake down a couple of child abusers. Their names were being withheld from the papers by order of the judge. Until the trial ends at least. And there’s a good chance they’re going to beat the rap. But you know yourself, when the names get out, the public assume the worst, and you’re ruined anyway. These particular gentlemen have a big amount to lose and that’s even before the concerned vigilantes come a-calling.”

“Off the record . . .” I said. But there was no need for wheedling. Cotton didn’t do foreplay. It was all duck or no dinner with him.

“Billy Black and Sami Zucker,” he went on.

“Not the Billy Black?”

He laughed. “Billy Hairless, one and the same, and yes, the Sami Zucker as well.”

Jesus. Sami Zucker was one of the five richest men in Cherry Valley. The current chairman of Belfast Chamber of Commerce, he’d risen from nowhere over the past decade to own hotels right across Europe. Billy Hairless, on the other hand, was a ten-bob hood, who ran tarts and protection at the roughest outreach of the Golden Mile.

“What the hell are those two doing together?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Cotton chuckled. “It’s like Cliff Richard in bed with the Pussycat Dolls. Apparently Mr. Zucker has been feeling a bit lonely since trophy wife number two left the nest, and Billy’s been finding him other chicks to keep him company. Except one of the chicks was under the bar.”

I whistled quietly. “Much under?”

“A month or so—not that it matters. Zucker said he was certain she was twenty-one, as Billy had told him. Billy says Zucker knew all along.”

“Charges gonna stick?”

“Fifty-fifty,” he sighed. “You know yourself, big money has a way of buying its way out of trouble.”

“But you have the girl and Billy Hairless’s statement.”

“Yeah. A teenage prostitute and an unconvicted serial killer, against a man who has four different judges on speed dial. Though in saying that . . .” He paused knowingly, to let me salivate a little.

“You have something else?” I ventured.

“You could say that,” he laughed, ending the tease. “According to his bank, Zucker withdrew two hundred thou, in cash, a week ago. And from what we can see, he hasn’t deposited it anywhere else. But you’ll never guess, coincidentally, who bought himself a new car, two days before he swallowed the bath.”

“No kidding.”

“Nope. We figure, though, that Spotty John had been a bit more discreet this time—and set up the whole scam anonymously. Insisted on the hush money being delivered to a PO box somewhere—maybe even got a third party to lift it. Zucker probably had his suspicions. He hears every blade of grass that bends. And when Spotty John drove past in his new Mercedes coupe, Sami added two and two together and made one thieving rat.”

* * *

My editor, Mike Mortimer, was, as per usual, caught halfway between ecstasy and a bad pill when I filled him in.

“Best ever,” he declared, and slapped his fake-wood desk with a vengeance. “We’ll nail sleazy Sami to the front page.” But within five seconds, Mike had his manager’s hat back on and was frowning like his numbers had come up a week too early. He looked at me slowly, picking his words. “Got to be very careful with this one, though, Rex. We print one wrong syllable and he’ll close us down. He’d love nothing better too. He took a quarter mil off one of our sister papers across the water, few years back, when they claimed he’d stolen the patent for the Asshole Chip. Last thing the bosses here want is to hand him another big payday. Before you write a single word, you’d want to make sure everything is tighter than a row of teeth.”