A Fistful of Knuckles (11 page)

Suddenly, Sam caught a familiar face amid the crush of onlookers. It was Chris. He had managed to worm his way right up to the side of the ring and was trying to gauge the width of Patsy’s knuckles from a distance. He kept holding out his finger, trying to estimate how it compared to Patsy’s fists. He looked frankly ridiculous.

‘Chris, don’t be a bloody idiot …’ Sam muttered.

But in the next moment, there was a sudden shift in the ring. Stu was rushing forward, throwing fast, blind punches, but this time Patsy sprang into life. With breathtaking speed he fired out his left fist, then his right, in quick succession, like pistons.
Bash-bash!
The first blow flung the boy’s head sharply to the side, the second lifted him clear off his feet. He landed flat on his back and lay motionless. A single tooth bounced to a stop on the canvas a few feet from him.

Patsy turned away and rolled his shoulders. It wasn’t a victory – it had been a warm-up session, nothing more – a little light sparring to wake up his muscles. He glowered about at the yelling crowd, searching for a more worthy opponent.

Stu’s mates clambered into the ring, but not to fight. They grabbed Stu’s senseless body and started dragging it away. As they did, Chris dived into the ring and pawed at Stu’s face, trying to measure his finger against the swelling bruises on the boy’s cheek and jaw.

For God’s sake, Chris, don’t draw attention to yourself!
Sam willed him silently.

But it was too late.

Patsy had spotted Chris and was striding towards him. As Stu’s mates hauled their fallen friend out of the ring, Chris tried to crawl away with them, but all at once he found his way blocked by a massive, tattooed leg. Chris’s nose bumped against Patsy’s kneecap; he slowly raised his eyes, looked up at Patsy’s thigh, his boxing shorts, the decorated bullet holes across his stomach, the devil face leering from his chest, until finally he made eye contact with Patsy himself.

Very meekly, Chris said: ‘We could be friends.’

Sam felt Annie tug at his arm.

‘Let’s get him out of there,’ she urged.

‘We mustn’t draw attention to ourselves,’ Sam replied, stopping her from rushing forward. ‘We’re supposed to be undercover.’

‘Sam, that monster’ll
kill
him!’

‘Chris isn’t up there to fight. He’ll jump out of the ring and run a mile, you’ll see.’

Sam watched as Patsy grasped Chris by the shoulders and lifted him to his feet.

‘My next opponent, is it?’ Patsy growled.

‘Who?
Me
?’ said Chris. And with exaggerated nonchalance he said: ‘Nah, I’m just some little fella.’

‘Ain’tcha man enough?’

‘For what?’

‘To face Hammer Hands O’Riordan.’

An encouraging cheer went up from the crowd. Chris looked anxiously about, then seemed to take courage from the onlookers’ support. He shrugged Patsy’s hands away from his shoulder, straightened his knitted tank top, and said: ‘I can look after meself.’

‘Oh, Christ …’ muttered Sam.

‘Last one round, win ten pound,’ said Patsy. ‘Fink you can manage that?’

‘I wouldn’t say no to ten quid,’ said Chris, cockily. ‘But … you know, I’m doing okay. I don’t need a tenner. And I’d hate to cause you an injury.’

Sam covered his face with his hands. Was Chris fearless? Was he suicidal? Or was he just a berk?

Patsy brought his ugly, tattooed face close to Chris’s and sniffed him, first one side, then the other, like a lion. Chris took a nervous step back. Patsy turned to the crowd, raised his voice and cried out: ‘He’s agreed to fight!’

A roar went up. Chris’s face went white.

‘I never agreed to nuffing,’ he whined, and he appealed to the baying mob for support. ‘I’m good for a tenner, I don’t need the money!’

But the crowd had taken up the chant now.
Fight – fight – fight – fight!

‘We’ve got to stop this!’ said Sam, and he pushed forward, but the press of bodies was so tight now that he couldn’t get through.

‘Chris! Chris!’ called Annie, but her voice was swallowed up by the noise.

Fight – fight – fight – fight!

‘Get ya stuff off, boy,’ Patsy said, looming over Chris. ‘Strip down, to the waist.’

‘I can’t, I got a wheezy cough,’ pleaded Chris.

Patsy began to pose and posture again, displaying his battered, scarred, tattooed physique from every angle. Chris swallowed in a dry throat.

Fight – fight – fight – fight!

‘I tell you what,’ stammered Chris. ‘No need for fisticuffs. Give us an Indian burn and we’ll call it quits.’

Patsy raised his fists and adopted the stance of a boxer. Chris looked frantically about like a cornered animal.

‘Can’t we talk about this?’

Fight – fight – fight – fight!

‘We can do a deal, how’s that? You can’t say no to a deal!’

Fight – fight – fight – fight!

Chris leant forward to whisper something in Patsy’s ear, but found himself confronted by a gaping, fleshy hole. He pulled a horrified face and moved round to Patsy’s
other
ear; cupping his mouth, he whispered into it.

Patsy listened, paused, then turned to the crowd.

‘Thirty quid!’ Patsy declared. ‘Thirty quid he’s just offered me!’

The crowd went mental, booing and whistling and hurling abuse.

Patsy turned his terrible, fiery eyes back towards Chris and said: ‘Is that all your life’s worth to ya, young ‘un?’

Chris seemed on the verge of tears. He whispered again.

‘We’re up to fifty!’ Patsy relayed to the crowd.

Coward! Wanker! Fight – fight – fight, you spasmo –fight!

Chris fell to his knees.

‘I’ll pay you a thousand!’

He flapped at Patsy with his hands, a wretched supplicant before a barbarous, pitiless god.

‘A million!
Two
million! You can have me fags an’ all!’

Sam could see Chris’s mouth working away, but now his words were drowned by the furious mob. Even so, it was obvious that Chris was pleading. He grabbed one of Patsy’s hands and kissed it pathetically, like he was meeting the pope.

Degraded by this miserable creature’s presence, Patsy pushed him away, and Chris tumbled backwards out of the ring. The crowd jostled him, drubbed him, insulted him, shoved him, until at last he broke free and went stumbling off, disappearing from view behind a noisy generator that was feeding power to the rides. Sam and Annie caught up with him and found him shakily trying to light a cigarette.

‘Chris, what the hell did you think you were doing?’ Sam yelled at him. ‘You could have blown our cover back there, do you realize that?’

Chris gripped his lighter with both hands to keep it steady.

‘Sorry, Boss.’

A fart of terror escaped from his arse.

‘Sorry, Boss.’

He belched like a walrus, seemed about to be sick, managed to swallow down his rising gorge.

‘Sorry, Boss.’

Despite his anger, Sam had to feel sorry for him. His mood softened.

‘Well, at least you got out of there in one piece,’ he said.

Annie rubbed his arm – then pulled her hand away from his soggy clothing.

‘I was sweating cobs!’ Chris said.

‘Feels like it,’ grimaced Annie, wiping her hand with a Kleenex. ‘What did you think you were playing at, Chris?’

‘I was trying to measure the size of his hands.’

‘Well, full marks for the Dunkirk spirit, Chris,’ said Sam, ‘but next time, try not go about your policework like such a tit, okay? You risked the whole operation.’

‘
And
your own neck!’ put in Annie.

‘Yeah, but I got a result,’ said Chris. ‘Didn’t you see what I did?’

‘Yes, we saw. You laid eggs like a chicken and begged for your life.’

‘Ah! That’s how I
wanted
it to look! But that was all part of my cunning plan, Boss.’

‘Chris – that weren’t a plan – that was sheer screaming panic.’

But Chris shook his head knowingly and said: ‘You thought I was kissing his hands to ask for mercy. But I weren’t.
I was measuring them.
That’s what we came here for, weren’t it, boss? I felt his hands to see the size of ‘em. And you know how wide they were across the knuckles? From here to here.’

He pointed to one side of his mouth then the other. And to demonstrate further, he laid his finger across his lips longways.

‘Three inches, near as dammit,’ he said. ‘Patsy O’Riordan’s knuckles are three inches across.’

‘Three inches?’ said Sam. ‘Are you absolutely certain?’

‘I’d swear to it, boss. In court. Patsy O’Riordan – he’s your man. And
I
just proved it.’

Sam and Annie exchanged a look – then Sam patted Chris’s shoulder.

‘You’re a bullshitter, Chris – but it looks like you’ve confirmed our killer.’

But Chris shrugged Sam’s hand away, looked down his nose at him, and said with pride: ‘Careful who you’re calling a bullshitter, boss. You’re talking to the bloke who’s gone a whole round with Patsy ‘Hammer Hands’ O’Riordan.’

The demonic face inked onto Patsy O’Riordan’s chest once again haunted Sam’s dreams that night. He awoke early, bathed in sweat, his blankets balled at the end of the bed. Padding to the bathroom, he splashed cold water onto his face and tried to recall the details of his dream, but all he could now remember were muddled, hazy images – the demon face looming out of the darkness; pounding fists; Annie being struck and falling into a deep, dark void; Sam blundering, lost and alone, through a nightmare labyrinth that went on forever.

‘Forget it!’ Sam whispered to himself. ‘These dreams don’t mean anything. They don’t. They
don’t!
’

His heart told him otherwise, but he forced himself to ignore it.

Arriving early at CID, Sam found Gene was the only one to beat him in.

‘Up with the lark, Guv?’ he said, stepping into Gene’s office.

‘Didn’t sleep, Tyler. Things on my mind.’

‘I thought you might have worn yourself out on the dodgems last night. You were certainly going for it.’

‘Merely demonstrating the art of good driving,’ Gene growled back. ‘The Nureyev of the highway. They should have looked and learned, not had me banned.’

‘They banned you from the dodgems?!’

‘Wipe that smirk off your gormless face, Tyler. Them fairground pikeys besmirched my honour.’

‘You can’t blame ‘em, Guv, you
were
getting a bit leery.’

‘
I was bumping! That’s why they’re called bloody bumper cars
!’ yelled Gene.

‘They’re
dodgems,
Guv. You’re supposed to
dodge.
’

Gene glared at Sam for a few seconds, then settled himself again. ‘Anyway. Forget it. We’re not here for that. What matters is the Denzil Obi case.’

‘Well, thanks to Chris we’ve got a possible match between Patsy O’Riordan’s fists and the wounds on Obi’s body.’

‘Which is good enough for
me,
Sam, but you know as well as I do that standing Chris up in court to say that he reckons O’Riordan’s the killer because he
kissed his hands and thinks they might be the right size
isn’t exactly going to secure us a conviction.’

‘Spider was at the fair last night, guv. I managed to catch up with him.’

‘And what did he say?’

‘Not a lot. He was very threatening. I thought he was going to smash my face in.’

‘Frit you, did he?’

‘No, Guv, he didn’t ‘frit’ me.’

‘Bet he did. Bet you pooped some.’

‘Guv, I attempted to engage to elicit information in the pursuance of this homicide enquiry,’ Sam said, ignoring the pouting, eyelid fluttering, limp-wristed posture Gene adopted to mock him. ‘He was in a bad way, emotionally. Very highly strung, on the verge of some sort of breakdown I’d reckon. Denzil’s death has really hit him hard.’

Gene shrugged: ‘Either that or he’s play-acting.’

‘He wasn’t play-acting, Guv. I think Denzil was all he’s ever had in life. And when he lost Denzil, he lost
everything.
’

Leaning back in his chair, Gene thought for a moment, then asked: ‘Faggots, you reckon?’

‘What does it matter? God, Gene, two men
can
be close, you know!’

‘Well, depends what you mean by “close”, don’t it, Tyler. There’s close and there’s close. I mean, there’s mates, right – and there’s
‘best’
mates – and then there’s
‘arseholes in the bogs’
mates, which ain’t right.’

Sam massaged his temples for a moment, told his temper not to rise, and said: ‘Let’s just keep our minds on what’s important here. Spider was at the fair last night –the same fair that Patsy O’Riordan works at. Both men are connected to Denzil, and Patsy is now our chief suspect. So, if we’re right, and Patsy killed Denzil, then it’s a fair guess to say that he might very well be after Spider too.’

Gene nodded thoughtfully. ‘I’ve been thinking about that. You remember there were three locks on Denzil Obi’s door.’

‘Yes. And a spyhole too.’

‘And a spyhole …’

Gene trailed off, lost in thought. After a few moments, he said: ‘Denzil was a frightened man. Three locks and a spyhole –
that’s
frightened. And yet he opened the door for the man who killed him.’

‘Looks that way, guv.’

‘If it was Patsy O’Riordan standing there, why the hell would he let him in? There was bad blood between them. He
knew
that Patsy had a grudge against him – a deadly grudge – a
killer
grudge – and still he opened the door and let him in. Why?
Why
?’

Sam shrugged: ‘Maybe Spider can answer that.’

‘I’ll
bet
he can.’

‘What do you mean, guv?’

‘You’re a copper, Tyler – figure it out.’

Sam frowned, not following Gene’s thinking. He imagined the scene moments before Denzil was attacked: there was Denzil, in his flat – a knock at the door – Denzil instantly wary and suspicious – he goes to the door and checks the spyhole – he sees a face he knows – a face he trusts – a face he is willing to open the door to …

‘
Spider!
’ said Sam.