Ли Чайлд - Belfast Noir

I reached into my jacket pocket and pulled out my tape recorder. But he waved his hand no. “Everything today is off the record.” He gestured to a door in the corner. “That’s the bathroom in there,” he said, still smiling. “Now, go in and take off the wire you’ve wrapped around your waist, or I’ll have four of my men come up here and do it for you.”

I toasted him with the glass, got to my feet, and headed for the corner.

“Your editor’s a coward with a big mouth,” he explained, answering my next question.

Ninety seconds later, I handed him over the wire and bowed respectfully.

“Only the one?” he asked.

I nodded.

“I do hope you’re a man of your word.”

“I’m too frightened not to be,” I answered.

He chuckled. “Good. So, to business. For a start, I imagine you’re wondering why the hell I’m talking to you at all.”

“Close enough,” I said, figuring it was better than my opener.

“Fact is, your people tell me you’re a bright man, Rex. And you and I could be useful to one another, not just today, but down the line.”

I’d been accused of many things in my time, but bright was a first, so I allowed myself a grin. “I’m flattered.”

“Don’t be,” he said. “You’re a natural. You have two great attributes, Rex. The first is that you hear everything, which is very useful for a man like myself in the business world, and the second is you say nothing, which is possibly more useful still. Oh, and you’re also exactly smart enough to know your limitations, which means you never try to be too clever. And if there’s one thing I have no time for, Rex, it is people who are too clever. Because you have to waste so much damn time watching them—and so much damn energy trying to out-think them—that it’s easier in the long run not to have them round you at all.”

“Would that include people like Billy Black?”

“Ah, the late lamented Billy Hairless.” He sighed, and his face seemed to sadden, though his eyes were still smiling.

“What do you mean late lamented ?”

He pulled a face like a man at his very first acting class pretending to be astonished. “You mean you haven’t heard? The police went to Billy’s flat this morning to question him about a horrific incident at the Oxfordian. It seems some poor court clerk was killed up there a few days back. But when the police burst in on Billy, he pulled a gun on them. And I’m afraid, after that, there was only going to be one winner.”

“Dead?”

“As an old joke, and it seems the malicious allegations which poor Billy had been making against many pillars of our society have died with him. Coincidentally, it was your chum Inspector Cotton who dispatched him.”

I was stunned. “ Jim Cotton?”

“Oh yes.” And all of a sudden Zucker’s dancing blue eyes turned cold and grey. “Split John’s big bald head open like a watermelon.” He paused and stared at me menacingly. “Best ten grand I ever spent.”

I had a sudden urge to vomit. Cotton was the nearest thing to straight you’d ever find in the cops. I quickly put my drink on the coffee table and half-staggered to my feet to go. Face flushed and heart pounding.

“Oh settle yourself,” said Zucker, the genial host again. “I don’t want to harm you. Not when I need you to do me such a big favour.”

The new shirt was sticking to my back with sweat. I looked again at the hall door and shook my head. “I’m not for sale.”

“I never thought you were,” he said. And he flapped his hand at me to sit again.

Slowly, I did as I was bid. Truth is, I didn’t know where else to go.

“I don’t want you to lie for me,” he went on. “I’ve enough people for that.”

“Well, what then?”

“I want you to tell the truth. Not about Cotton and Billy—no, you ever do that and you’ll go the same way yourself. But about Spotty John.”

“I don’t follow.”

“It’s simple. The cops are 100 percent sure Billy killed John. And there’s no one in the press who will doubt it either. Billy was an evil little sewer-dweller. He had the motive—and he had the form. Open and shut. Except . . .”

“Except what?”

“Well, it would be just perfect if Billy’s involvement could be, ah, corroborated by an outside source.”

“How do you mean?”

“If someone were to come forward and say that they knew how Billy had killed poor Mr. Norway. That would divert attention away from the cops’ accidental eradication of Mr. Black—and give the ombudsman enough to say Jim Cotton was damn right to go in with arms held high.”

“You mean you want me to frame Billy Hairless, posthumously?”

“Lord no. You won’t be framing anyone. Billy sent that man to a horrible end. Don’t doubt it. But it’ll look better if the story is coming from outside the camp. For example, Rex, you’ve spoken to Billy many times through your work. You could exclusively reveal that he had once suggested carrying out a carbon-copy murder on an informer he was trying to track down in his ranks.”

“And I suppose I alerted Jim Cotton to this just five minutes before he kicked down Billy’s door?”

“Precisely. Might even win yourself a press award out of it. Not to mention that news editor’s job. Plus, my own undying gratitude and a very decent wedding present. Very, very decent. Certainly as decent as the one Jim Cotton got.”

“Only problem is, I’ve no idea what happened.”

“Good point,” he said. And he was smiling, mouth and eyes, again. “So listen up carefully . . .”

* * *

Four hours later, I finished typing up my copy and e-mailed it through to Mike Mortimer, marked H.F.C. —our in-house code for Highly Confidential. In law, you can write what you want about a dead man. And I knew there’d be all manner of fanciful stories about Billy Hairless across the press the following morning, from girls to gambling to a string of gutted corpses.

But I didn’t want anyone else from the pack getting a look at what I’d got. Because, not to put too fine a point on it, I, Rex King, had struck gold.

The story began forty years earlier, when Billy was a child. A nasty-tempered brown rat took up residence in the family’s outside toilet and refused to leave, or indeed eat Billy’s mother’s poisoned cheese. Old Pa Hairless, however, was a very resourceful man and built a self-locking cage, which he laced with fresh chocolate. Sure enough, the rat got himself trapped—and it was eight-year-old Billy Junior who got the honour of disposing of the still-live pest. So he took the cage to a nearby ditch and attempted to submerge the rat in the water. The difficulty was that even when he took the cage to the deepest part of the ditch, the rat was just big enough to stand up on his hind legs and get his nose above the Plimsoll line. Then Billy had a brainwave. He went home and boiled up a kettle on the stove. Half an hour later, a drowned rat with a burnt snout was floating toes-up in the ditch.

Enticing Spotty John into the lap-dancing cage had proved just as easy. Billy Hairless knew his mark—all it took was an open door and a fifty-pound note. They’d then taken him from Lap It Up to the Oxfordian in a van, after hours, and used John’s key to let themselves into the pool area, before playing four rounds of Boil the Tea Urn. Security, it seems, had been off on the sick.

John, I speculated in my article, took at least forty-five minutes to die. Though off the record, Sami told me it was closer to an hour and a half. At least that’s how long it took Billy to ring him to tell him the job had been finished. Not that Sami was too concerned about the delay, mind. He’d had to give Billy two hundred grand of his private stash to pay off the shakedown. John, however, hadn’t managed to divulge where he’d stashed the rest of the loot—and took the secret with him to his boiling grave. That’s the damn problem with employing help who shoot first and ask questions later, Sami had told me.