The Devil's Home on Leave (Factory 2) by Derek Raymond Page A

plenty of people would have wanted to waste a geezer like that.’
    ‘Who, for instance?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘But you know, grasses, they usually don’t last long, do they? But what I still don’t get is, why pick on me?’
    ‘There’s no secret about that,’ I said. ‘This is a big city, but I can’t think of six villains in it that would have used a humane killer for a topping job. I’ll go further. Right now I can only think of one, and you may not believe this but fancy, you’re the one.’
    ‘I don’t even know yet,’ he said, ‘as a matter of interest, how you’re sure it was Hadrill; I saw on telly how he was all boiled away to a mess.’
    ‘Look,’ I said, ‘I keep telling people I come across, anybody that’ll listen, how stupid killers are. Particularly when they’re trying to be extra clever – that’s just what drops them in the shit.’
    ‘None of my business,’ said McGruder, ‘but I think it’d have to be a sight stronger than that.’
    ‘And it is,’ I said, ‘and it is your business. Because you were seen in the Nine Foot Drop that night. Also there was a man called Edwardes standing next to you for a while at the bar.’
    I wished I could find Edwardes; it wasn’t for want of looking.
    McGruder shrugged. ‘Look, I was there on the evening of the thirteenth, there’s no secret about it. Tony Williams the governor there put me up – six of us spent all night in his flat upstairs rabbiting and playing cards. So what about it?’
    ‘If it’s waterproof,’ I said, ‘that’s all about it, Billy. But I’m gnawing at it, and if it isn’t kosher I’ll find where the leak is and when I do, it’s you that’s going to leak, OK?’
    ‘I don’t believe anyone saw anything,’ said McGruder, ‘I reckon it’s just a blag.’
    ‘You can believe what you like,’ I said, ‘if I crack you you’ll have all the time in the world to work out where you went wrong. For the time being, I’m working on it, but I find it strange – same pub,same night, you a convicted killer, and Hadrill vanishes. I find the whole thing a great big coincidence, and I believe in them like I believe in Father Christmas, i.e., not at all, get it?’
    ‘What I get,’ said McGruder, ‘is that the counsel I can afford, he’d rip it all to pieces if you were daft enough to have a go, you’ve no proof.’
    ‘It’s early days,’ I said. ‘It isn’t proof yet, but it could easily be evidence, and you might find it will be by the time I’ve finished with it.’
    ‘You’re trying to fit me up for this, then,’ said McGruder in an easy voice. He kept smiling, even though the smile wasn’t really wanted just then; he had the look of a man, to me, who knew he was in trouble.
    ‘Yes, I’m going to have a go,’ I said. I stood up. ‘I’ll be in and out, Billy. Bye for now, and happy wanking.’

18
     
    Next morning, Saturday, I had proof that the body in the bags was Jack Hadrill’s. His boyfriend, who hadn’t been able to get into the Notting Hill pad that he shared with Jack, broke in (he was a tealeaf), and there was a letter on Jack’s bed which he finally brought into us after sweating a lot, hoping to do himself some sort of good. The letter was dated the thirteenth and in it Jack said that he was due to go out that evening – he didn’t say where – but he wondered if the meet wasn’t moody. He added that he’d been offered a deal with a lot of money in it by an anonymous punter. He’d left the flat key under the mat so that the friend could get in anyway, but the latter had been too stupid to look for it there. He was just, I thought when I had had a word with him, one of those people who preferred breaking into a place to using the key.
    I had Hadrill’s file in my drawer already – mind, I knew enough about him without it. Now there was a funny man. He’d hardly ever done bird – much too sharp – just three months for whizzing a motor when he was a lad.