Peter Robinson: Bad Boy

“This is rubbish.”

“But you had another weapon waiting in the wings, didn’t you? A young lad called Jaffar McCready who was fast proving himself indispensable. And dangerous. He needed to prove himself, and you needed him to do it. That one final act of outrageous loyalty that binds forever. You gave him a gun. You loaded it for him. Perhaps you even showed him how to fire it. And Jaffar McCready shot Marlon Kincaid. What he didn’t know was that he’d been seen. A most unreliable witness, for sure, especially at the time, but he’s scrubbed up quite nicely since then, soon to be a member of the ministry, actually, and his memory seems a lot clearer now, especially given everything we’ve found out since.”

“What does any of this have to do with me?”

“What you didn’t know was that, for reasons of his own, McCready kept the gun. A trophy. A souvenir. Call it what you will. You no doubt told him to get rid of it at the time, and you probably thought he had. After all, why would he want to keep an incriminating gun around? Maybe he was just sentimental. His first kill. Or perhaps he liked the idea of having something on you? Whatever the reason, he kept the gun. Then one night he had a row with his girlfriend. To spite him, to piss him off, she took the gun and ran off, went to stay with her parents in Eastvale. Her mother found it. Maybe she just was cleaning up her daughter’s room, the way mothers do, or maybe she was curious, wanted to see if she could find anything that would explain her daughter’s unusual silences, her odd behavior, her strange cast of mind since she’d come home. Either way, she found the gun. And that’s when things started to go wrong. But that doesn’t really matter here and now. What matters is that we found a clear set of fingerprints on the magazine inside the gun. Those fingerprints are yours. Can you explain how they got there?”

Fanthorpe frowned and sipped his whiskey. “I don’t have to. You can talk to my solicitor about it.”

“I will. But there’s really only one way they could have got there, isn’t there? You handled the magazine at some time.”

“So what? You didn’t find any of my prints on the outside of the gun, did you? On the trigger guard?”

“How do you know that?”

“Oh, very clever, Banks. Is this where I say, ‘Because I wiped them off,’ then put my hand to my mouth and admonish myself for making such a gaffe? It’s not going to happen. The fact that you found my fingerprints on the magazine inside a gun proves nothing except that at one time I touched that magazine. It certainly doesn’t prove that I ever fired the gun. I don’t need a solicitor to prove that. You’re fishing.”

“Do you often go around handling magazines for prohibited weapons?”

“I can’t say as I ever remember doing such a thing. There are any number of ways it could have happened. Perhaps a vet used it to put down a sick animal.”

“A nine-millimeter Smith and Wesson automatic?”

“Maybe a copper passed it over to me once and asked me what I thought?”

“Pull the other one,” said Banks.

“And just how did you get my fingerprints for comparison in the first place? I’ve never been fingerprinted in my life. There’s no way I’m in your system.”

“That’s a terrible oversight, and I promise we’ll put the record straight as soon as possible. You did, however, handle a photograph of Jaff McCready that DS Jackman passed you the last time we were here. That glossy photographic paper has a wonderful sticky surface for fingerprints.”

“That’s entrapment! You’ve fitted me up.”

“Don’t be silly. It might conceivably be entrapment if they were forged documents, or a murder weapon. But it was only a photograph. It means nothing in itself.”

“I guarantee they’ll laugh you out of court.”

“Do you, really? Because I don’t think so. And I’m very glad to hear that you agree with me that it will get to court. These days the Crown Prosecution Service is very picky about the cases it allows to go to trial. They don’t like losing. They tend to choose dead certs.”

“Well, on the evidence you’ve got, there’s always a first time.”

“Then there’s the little matter of Darren Brody.”

“Darren Brody?”

“Yes. Come on. You know Darren. Your farm-hand-cum-enforcer. For some reason neither Darren nor Ciaran was involved with the Marlon Kincaid killing. Perhaps they were on another job, mucking out the stables or something. Or perhaps you just needed McCready to get his hands dirty, a blooding, like the kid’s first foxhunt. But Ciaran and Darren have been doing quite a lot of overtime for you lately, haven’t they?”

“What do you mean?”

Banks shook his head. “Ciaran’s seriously deranged. You should know what a liability it is to have someone like him on your payroll.”

“Ciaran would never say a thing against me.”

“You’re right about that. Ciaran’s a vicious psychopath who enjoys hurting people. But he’s loyal. He probably thanks you for the opportunity. He hurt Justin Peverell’s girlfriend, Martina Varakova. Killed her, in fact, very slowly and very painfully, while Justin was tied up and made to watch. Justin is catatonic now. The doctors aren’t holding out a lot of hope of his making a full recovery. Well, you wouldn’t after something like that, would you? Imagine someone doing that to your lovely wife.”

“Why are you telling me all this? What’s it all got to do with me?”

“Jaffar McCready had something of yours-two kilos of cocaine, fifty thousand pounds and a hot gun, to be exact. We have it all now, locked up safely in our evidence room.”

Fanthorpe sneered. “Safely? I’ll bet.”

“You wanted it all back. Naturally. You even told me you wanted it back. DS Jackman here is a witness to that.”

Winsome looked up from her notebook and smiled at Fanthorpe.

“You just never told me what it was,” Banks said.

“But you think you’ve worked it out for yourself?”

“It wasn’t that difficult.”

“I’m afraid you’ve come to the wrong conclusion. If that’s what you found, then I was obviously mistaken, and Jaffar didn’t have what I thought he had. None of that belonged to me.”

“Darren Brody has been working with Ciaran French for a few years now. He knows what Ciaran’s like, has seen him getting progressively more violent and cruel. It’s all right with him when it’s worked as a threat and people talk, then usually go away with only a few cuts and bruises. But this time it got out of hand. Way out of hand. My guess is that Ciaran had built up such a lust for bloodletting that he couldn’t hold it back any longer. Victor Mallory. Rose Preston. Teasers. However it happened, Darren was with him, and Darren couldn’t stop him, but he didn’t like what he saw.”

“Darren’s just trying to save his own skin. They’re both psychos.”

“We’ll leave the question of why you would employ a couple of psychos aside for the moment. Jaffar McCready certainly wasn’t one. He was a greedy, cocksure, ambitious, intelligent young man with a tendency to violence when necessary. He wanted to be a player. He didn’t especially like killing. He wasn’t even particularly good at it. He had so many chips on his shoulder he could have given Harry Ramsden a run for his money. Anyway, the point is that Darren has had enough. He had to watch Justin’s face while Ciaran sliced up Martina Varakova in front of his eyes. I doubt it was a pretty sight. Darren’s a bit tougher than Justin, and he still has his faculties, but a strange thing happened to him that night. They’d found out what they wanted to know, that Justin was meeting Jaffar and Tracy on Hampstead Heath, near the Highgate Ponds, but Ciaran had already gone too far to stop. He couldn’t. Because of that, while Darren was watching him, he was suddenly struck, like Saul on the road to Damascus, with a revelation. He asked himself, Why? Why was he watching this? Why was he participating in this? True, the people Ciaran was hurting were a couple of toerags who didn’t give a damn about people’s lives themselves. But this was too much. How on earth could Darren ever extricate himself from his complicity in Ciaran’s actions, though those actions horrified and disgusted him? And do you know what? He found a way. It’s called cooperating with the police fully in their inquiries. Darren talked, Farmer. In fact he sang like the three tenors all rolled into one. The complete performances. Box set.”