Bleeding Hearts (13 page)

Hoffer had got into drugs the same way. He spent his days busting pushers and users, living so close to drugs that it was like the fucking things were whispering to him, even in his sleep. One day he’d confiscated some bottles of rock cocaine, only he’d handed them in one short. He soon found that there was an underclass of police officer that used a lot of drugs. Some of them just took drugs off one pusher and resold to another, keeping a little back along the way. Others had deep habits and pinhole eyes, real smack heads. You were in a privileged position, being a cop. You didn’t have to look far or try hard to score a haggle of white shit, and you so seldom had to pay. But free-basing, that was a nightmare. Someone had tried to introduce him to it, recycling their smoke into a balloon and offering him the used smoke. Hoffer had never enjoyed the more social aspects of drug use, and drew the damned line at breathing somebody else’s high.

So here he was in London, doing what he did.

He added a couple of hundred milligrams of speed to his purchase, and to offset the speed asked about quaaludes or ‘bennies’, but ended up with Librium and a bit more boo.

‘Packing heat,’ he said to himself afterwards. Soho had still failed to provide a night’s fun, so he’d prowled the West End, sitting in a fag bar for quarter of an hour before realising his mistake, and finally locating a hooker who wouldn’t accompany him to his hotel, but could provide relief in her own quarters. Hoffer couldn’t agree to this; he’d gone to a hooker’s greasy bedroom before, only to have her pimp try to roll him. So they made do with a back-alley blow job, for which she charged a twenty. That put her on £240 an hour, which was decent money. It was even more than Robert Walkins was paying.

In the morning he had a shower, the bath being too narrow for anything like a soak, put on a sober blue suit, and went to see his bank manager.

Mr Arthur looked like he was the one begging a loan for his daughter’s life-saving surgery.

‘Events will take their course, Mr Hopper.’

‘That’s Hoffer.’

‘Of course, Hoffer.’ Arthur gave a smile like a toad at mating time. ‘But it’s a bit early yet to expect any results, as I say.’

‘Say whatever you like, shithead, but listen to this.’ Hoffer leaned forward in his cramped chair. ‘I don’t have to play by any rules, so if you want to be able to leave your office every lunchtime and evening without having to check both ways for baseball bats, I suggest you give events a kick along the course they’re taking.’

‘Now look here — ’

‘I
am
looking, and all I see is something I try not to tread in on the sidewalk. And I don’t mean manholes. Now get hassling head office for all you’re worth, and meantime let me see what you’ve got here behind the scenes.’

Arthur’s top lip was glistening with sudden perspiration. He looked like he’d lost about twenty pounds in stature.

‘I’ve got an appointment at eleven.’

‘Cancel it.’

‘Look, you can’t just — ’

‘I thought I already was.’ Hoffer stood up, keeping his hands in his pockets. With his elbows jutting from his sides, he knew he looked like something from the jungle. Arthur would have clambered up the cheese-plant in the corner if he’d had any motive power. ‘Now go fetch me the files.’

He sat down again, trying to look comfortable. The bank manager sat there for a few moments, just to show he wasn’t intimidated. Hoffer allowed this with a shrug. They both knew the truth. Mr Arthur got up slowly, his hands gripping the edge of the desk. Then he walked out of the office.

He came back with a couple of files and some sheets of photocopier paper. ‘This is all I can find just now. Most of our records get sent to head office eventually.’

‘Tell them you want them back here pronto. What about the check on Wesley’s current account transactions?’

‘It’s being carried out. We have to go through all the old cheques. They’re not kept in neat little piles.’

Hoffer reached out a hand for the files. There was a knock at the manager’s door.

‘Ignore it,’ said Hoffer.

‘I certainly shan’t.’ Arthur walked briskly to the door and pulled it open. ‘This is the man, officers.’

Hoffer turned his head lazily. At the door stood two uniformed policemen. So Arthur hadn’t just been seeking out the files. Hoffer peeked at them anyway. They contained only blank sheets of typing paper.

‘You sonofabitch,’ he said. The policemen then asked him to accompany them, and he rose from his chair. ‘Certainly,’ he said. ‘No problem here,’ he assured them.

But all the time he had eyes only for Mr Arthur.

‘Never again! Do you hear?’

Hoffer heard. He was bored of hearing it. Bob Broome didn’t seem to have any other words in his vocabulary.

‘Can we turn the record over, Bob?’

Broome slapped his desk. ‘It’s not funny, Hoffer. It’s not a game. You can’t go around threatening bank managers. Jesus Christ, they run the country.’

‘That’s your problem then. Still, it could be worse.’ Broome waited for an explanation. ‘At least Arthur didn’t look Jewish.’

Broome collapsed on to his chair. ‘You’re slime, Hoffer.’

Hoffer didn’t need that. ‘Yeah, I’m slime, but I’m slime that
pays.
So what does that make you?’

‘Hold on a second.’

‘No, shut up and listen. Remember, I’ve been a cop, I know what it’s like. You try to look busy, but most of the time you’re treading water waiting for somebody to come tell you who it is you’re looking for. I can’t do that any more. I don’t have that luxury. What I’ve got is a head and a pair of fists, and if you don’t like that, then just keep out of my way.’

‘I just saved you from a barrow-load of manure.’

‘And I thank you for that, but I’ve walked away from shit before without needing a pitchfork up my ass.’

Broome shook his head sadly. ‘I don’t want you around, Hoffer.’

‘Tough titty.’

‘I mean it. I don’t want you anywhere near.’

‘I can handle that, Chief Inspector.’ Hoffer stood up. ‘But remember,
you’re
the one who called me,
you’re
the one who took my money.’ Hoffer walked out of the office. He didn’t bother closing the door.

On his way out of Vine Street, he saw DI Dave Edmond going in. They knew one another through Broome.

‘Hey ... Dave, right?’ said Hoffer, the bright smiling American.

‘That’s right,’ said Edmond.

‘Are you busy?’

‘Well, I was just ...’

‘I thought maybe I could buy you a drink?’

Edmond licked his lips. It had been a whole eleven hours since he’d last touched a drop. ‘Well, that’s very kind.’

Hoffer put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Ulterior motive, Dave. I’ve got a couple of questions, and Bob thought maybe you wouldn’t mind ...’

‘What sort of questions?’ Edmond was already being steered back the way he’d come.

‘Oh, just background stuff. You know, ballistics, scene of crime, that sort of thing. And anything you have on the deceased.’

Edmond had said that if they were going to talk about guns, maybe he should invite Barney along. Sergeant Barney Wills was the station’s arms aficionado. So they took Barney with them to the pub.

It was another of those ‘olde worlde’ interiors which bored Hoffer stupid. In America, a bar looked like a bar, a place where you went to drink. He couldn’t see the point of horse brasses and framed prints of clipper ships and shelves of books. Yes,
books,
like people might suddenly mistake the place for a library and decide to have a drink anyway while they were there.

It was all a joke too, hardly any of it authentic. The prints were fresh and framed in plastic, the books bought by the yard. Often he despaired of the English. They were too easy to con. Edmond and Barney were perfect material for a
real
con artist, perfect because they thought they were putting one over on
him.
He was just a loud Yank with money to spend and a lot of daft notions. They’d play him along, laughing at him, taking his drinks, and they’d tell him a few stories along the way.

Hoffer didn’t mind this game. He knew who was screwing who. If the scene had been a porn movie, the two policemen would have had their cheeks bared in submission.

Barney told him what the lab had discovered about the sniper rifle. Namely that it had indeed fired the fatal shot, and that it was a specialist weapon, in use in the armed forces but not in general circulation. Arms weren’t easy to come by in Britain anyway, though recently the crack dealers hadn’t been having any problems. The Army and the Royal Marines used the L96A1, but civilian target shooters wouldn’t use one.

‘It was a Super Magnum,’ Barney said, between gulps of Scotch. ‘.338 Lapua Magnum ammunition. Christ knows where he got it.’

‘There must be a few bent gun dealers around,’ Hoffer suggested.

‘Yes, but even they wouldn’t deal in an L96. I mean, half of them wouldn’t even know how to begin getting hold of one. This thing fires a thousand yards, who needs that? And the sight he had on it, this was quality gear, must’ve cost a fortune.’

‘Someone must’ve been paying a fortune,’ Edmond added.

‘Question is, who?’ Hoffer got in another round. ‘I’ve looked into assassins, guys, I mean the whole tribe of them. Leaving out the one-off crazies who go blast their local burger joint with an Uzi, they tend to come from a military background. Makes sense, right? I mean, that’s where they get the training, that’s where they first taste what a gun can do.’

Both men nodded, too busy drinking to interrupt.

‘But this guy is a haemophiliac, or at least we think he is, and the doctors assure me the military won’t accept haemophiliacs.’ Hoffer’s own words hit him:
military background.
Maybe he was on to something. He thought about it for a minute. Edmond and Barney didn’t seem to notice. They started up a conversation about some cricket match. Eventually Hoffer drifted back to the real world. It was the tap of empty glass on wooden table that did it. Not that his companions were hinting or anything.

‘This’ll have to be the last round, guys. We’re all busy people.’ So he got them in again, and decided the balance was all wrong. He was shelling out, and not getting back much of a dividend.

‘So, Barney, what about these gun dealers? The bent ones, I mean. Are they on a list or anything? I’d appreciate a look-see.’ What else could Barney do but nod and say he’d see what he could do? Hoffer turned to Edmond.

‘Now, Dave, you were going to tell me about Eleanor Ricks ...’

The Army camp wasn’t such a bitch to find after all.

Hoffer had been expecting a hellhole in the middle of nowhere, but this was just north of London, on the edge of a commuter town and slap next-door to a housing estate.

When he’d spoken to the camp by telephone, they’d said he could take a mainline train up there, it only took half an hour. So that’s what he did. The people were kidding themselves if they thought they lived in the ‘country’. They weren’t living
in
anything, they were living on something, and that something was borrowed time. London was snapping at their shoelaces. They worked there, earned their living there, and London wanted something back in return. It wanted
them.

They tried to look prosperous and talk differently, but they were pale, almost ill-looking, and their cars only made traffic jams. Hoffer, who had considered taking a cab all the way, was relieved he’d gone by train. The roads he saw were crammed. Someone mentioned a nineteen-mile tailback on the M25. They called the road an ‘orbital’. You could orbit the globe in less time. The train wasn’t quite perfect though. It had been late leaving London, and it hadn’t been cleaned or aired since depositing its rush-hour cattle in London. It smelt bad and there was trash on the floor.

The cab Hoffer took from the station didn’t smell much better, and there was only slightly more room in the back than in a British Rail seat. He stuffed his legs in a diagonal and made do like that. He got the cab to drop him at the camp entrance. He was surprised to see armed guards on the gate. One nodded him in the direction of the gatehouse.

‘What’s the problem, chief?’ Hoffer asked, as the guard on the gatehouse phoned him in.

‘Terrorists,’ the guard said. ‘We’re on constant alert.’

‘I thought they’d stopped bothering you guys, started bothering the rest of us instead?’

‘You never know.’

Armed with this philosophical nugget, Hoffer was pointed in the direction of the office he wanted.

He was met halfway by a young soldier whose face looked to have been pressed the same time as his shirt and pants.

‘Mr Hoffer? The Major’s expecting you.’

‘It’s good of him to see me at short notice.’ Hoffer almost had to jog to keep up with the man. Somewhere along the route, Hoffer was supposed to catch the guy’s name, but he was too busy catching his own breath. He was led into a building and told to take a seat. He was glad to. He tried focusing his eyes on the recruiting posters and glossy brochures. You’d think you were booking a holiday for yourself rather than a bruising career. The soldiers in the brochures looked tough and honest and Christian. You just knew democracy and the free world would be safe in their hands, even if you were dropping them into a country where they couldn’t speak the language and the distant hills were full of mortar and Mullahs.