‘Would you say you’re still a young man, Aidan? Actually, don’t answer that. Youth’s a bit like beauty, isn’t it? In the eye of the beholder. I’d say you are, though. I’ve seen a girl or two giggle in your direction. You’ve got a job, a jawline. Even your hair. If I were talking to someone else in your position, I might even say they had their whole life ahead of them. Hold that thought for me, eh?
‘In January of this year, we had a visitor. Not really our tourist season so he turned a few heads, too. Older heads than yours, though. People with long memories who could put a name to a face. Blunt Trauma Billy, they called him.’ He smiled. ‘Blunt Trauma Billy’s one of those names you don’t really hear so much any more. Bit like Doris or Ethel. Of a time and a type. Yeah, sure enough, our tourist was well into his sixties. Retirement age for most. Unfortunately, old Billy’s chosen profession doesn’t provide much of a pension plan. A mechanic, these old heads called him.’
Parrs paused and smiled. ‘Not the kind that fixes cars, though. They remembered him as a sort of freelancer. Headhunted for certain jobs. A specialist who moved around the country to wherever the money took him. You have to be a bit nomadic for that kind of life. Rootless, with nothing to tie you down. Nothing to lose. That’s probably why he’s got no family, no friends. Bit like your smiling man. Bit like you. Do you know what Blunt Trauma Billy’s specialism is, Aidan?’
‘He fixes people,’ I guessed.
‘Correct. Dozens of them over the years, although only one that ever stuck. Anyway, back in January when we kicked his door in for a chat he had his mouth full. The funny thing was that he was tucking into a piece of paper. A couple of big lads held him down and, shall we say, obstructed the nasal passage, so he spat it out. It was just an address but I think you’d recognize it. You live there, after all. And there were three words scrawled below. Make it painful.’
He let that sink in for a minute. I realized I could hear myself breathing.
‘People keep asking me what you’re still doing here, son. You’re like a lucky charm that doesn’t fucking work. But I tell them someone’s gotta write Sutty’s reports for him. That you’re a gifted young detective with a bright future ahead. Obviously you and I know that’s a fairy tale. The truth is that it’s convenient to keep a compromised officer around the place. Someone I’ve got so much dirt on that I can use him for special jobs. See, I don’t believe in trust, Aidan. People you trust let you down every day. But when someone understands that you can flick off their life like a light … then you’ve got someone you can depend on. Make no mistake about it, son, my finger is hovering over the fucking switch.’
I didn’t say anything.
‘A hit’s slightly different, though. An imposition. In the game we’re playing, us versus them, there is one sacrosanct rule. Cops die of natural causes. I’m not talking about the madmen and the users, they’re a law unto themselves. I’m talking about the firms. The families. The ones who’ve got history and should know enough to know better …
‘Don’t get me wrong, I’ve wished ill on you at times, Aidan. There’ve even been occasions when it might’ve been convenient for you to go missing. Convenient for you to not turn up to work for a few weeks. Convenient to fish a headless torso out of the river, identifiable only by his thirty-inch waist and the word TWAT tattooed across his shoulders. But a hit represents a breakdown of the system. If I allow that, I’m opening the door to anarchy. Frogs raining from the sky, cats marrying dogs, etcetera, etcetera.
‘Course, our mechanic, Blunt Trauma Billy, is old school. That’s his USP. If he gets arrested he stands up, keeps his mouth shut and does his time. He wasn’t gonna talk to us, and he’d done nothing wrong except have a bad reputation and a copy of your address. So I let him go and told him to leave town. Far as I know, he’s never been back. Then I made a series of speculative arrests. I wanted to talk to the kinds of people who might’ve had him on speed-dial. I brought in what’s left of the old families. The Burnsiders, The Franchise. Even your old friend Zain Carver. And I explained to them the golden rule of the game: cops die of natural causes, and I told them what happens when they break it. You’re still alive, so it looks like they got the message. One hand went up at the end of class, though. Zain Carver. Teacher’s pet. He said he appreciated my time, the courtesy that I’d extended, but asked, out of curiosity, if the rule would still be applicable to people who became ex-police officers. People who got fired, for example. Are they still golden? Well now, I said, that’s in the jurisdiction of someone slightly less important than me. That’s between you and God.
‘When we first met, you were on your very last chance. Now you’re past it. Your life quite literally depends upon you keeping this job. This job quite literally depends upon keeping me happy. Do I look fucking happy?’
I realized he expected an answer. ‘No, sir.’
‘And why do you think that is?’
‘Oliver Cartwright, sir.’
‘Oliver Cartwright,’ he repeated. ‘I didn’t suggest that you stay away from him, did I? I didn’t say, “Stay away from him if you feel like it”, did I? I took you up the mountain with me and engraved it in stone tablets. Thou shalt not.’
He threw a rolled-up newspaper at me.
The main story was about a man who’d died in police custody. A whistle-blower had come forward, saying the stompers, the tactical response unit, had applied an illegal chokehold. There was a picture of Chief Superintendent Chase looking grave.
‘Surprise surprise, the news broke on Cartwright’s site. He’s been sitting on it for months in agreement with our mother superior, Chief Superintendent Chase, but since my men are harassing him, he decided to put it out there. You can imagine how upset she is with me, and in turn how apoplectic I am with you. You are labouring under the illusion that your continued existence in this world is related to skill or talent. You are wrong. Do something useful and focus on those fucking dustbin fires, because the day I can no longer depend on you will be the last day of your life, Aidan. And it’s getting closer.’
He turned to look at me but I kept staring straight ahead. After a minute or so he climbed out of the car, slammed the door behind him and walked away.
6
Sutty and I passed the rest of our shift sitting in deafening, heavy silence. The only sound was the wet click of his alcoholic hand-sanitizer, which he compulsively applied and reapplied as I drove. The fumes became so strong that the car felt like a hot box, and I started to see a trail on every light, a slipstream for every object. When I finally dropped him home in the early hours of the morning, he turned.
‘Anything you wanna tell me?’ he said. Sutty was a walking nightmare, but he’d also survived several career-ending catastrophes, constant controversy and his own rampant unprofessionalism. If I wanted to live through this, there were worse people to ask for advice.
‘Parrs thinks—’
‘Y’know what,’ he said, climbing out of the car. ‘I’m not interested.’ I watched him hustle up the path into his building like I was infective. I turned off his road and sat at a set of traffic lights for a minute.
A hit.
The engine was running, and the lights must have gone from red to green several times before I noticed. When another 5 a.m. driver, the first I’d seen for some time, angrily pulled around me I snapped out of it. I wound down all the windows, flicked on the sirens and tore through empty streets for an hour or so, blasting Sutty’s clinical stink out of the car, the cobwebs out of my head. The sudden exhilaration was something close to a high, and I ached for the days when I could have swallowed this feeling in a pill or snorted it off the back of my hand.
When I had these thoughts I sped up, attempted impossible manoeuvres and hairpin turns. I raced towards buildings with my eyes closed and didn’t stop until the last possible second. By the time I arrived back into the Northern Quarter I was shivering, and I could barely feel my arms and legs.
The night had passed and the morning commute had begun.