The Killing Club by Paul Finch

worrying. ‘Maybe we could just get on with what we’re supposed to be doing,’ she hissed. ‘Like you said, Frank, we’ve got a bloody catastrophe on our hands … if we ignore it much longer, it’s going to burn both our departments to the ground!’

Chapter 8
    The landlord of The Maypole Tavern was a pain-in-the-arse wanker.
    At least, that was Detective Inspector Jim Laycock’s view. To start with, his first name was Hubert – who the fuck was called ‘Hubert’ in the twenty-first century? – and though he possessed the sort of build that might have been designed for innkeepers in North London – broad, sloping shoulders, brawny, apelike arms and a big square head – this was offset by the immensity of his beer belly, which was so grotesque that it wobbled over the front of his waistband as he walked, and meant he had to lean backwards to effect any measure of decorum. He had a receding hairline, but there was still sufficient left of his greasy, greying mane at the back for him to tie it in a pretentious pigtail. Laycock didn’t know which he found the more revolting, this, or the round, soft, permanently sweat-shiny ‘baby’s arse’ that Hubert had for a face.
    Of course, appearances weren’t everything.
    If they were, Laycock himself – with his handsome looks and impressive physique (though it might be a little flabbier now than it used to be) – wouldn’t be in such a rut as this: disliked by his juniors, mistrusted by his seniors, despised by the villains to a degree where they’d probably kill him if they got half a chance, and more than happy to drown these sorrows each night with as much beer as he could get down himself.
    ‘Kill me, eh?’ he muttered, propping up the Maypole bar. ‘Yeah … let them try!’
    They’d get what was coming. And so would that scrote of a landlord, Hubert Mollop – or whatever his full fucking name was. The bastard thought Laycock didn’t know he allowed rent-boys on the premises. This wasn’t a gay pub, not officially, but Mollop was a shirt-lifter of the first order – Laycock felt certain. He’d had it on good authority there was a private room here, a place unknown to regular patrons, where underage male prostitutes came to entertain their clients, paying the sympathetic landlord a generous cut of their earnings.
    As usual, the problem was proving it.
    The bastard was too clever to leave anything lying around that might incriminate him, or to trust his dirty little secrets to anyone he didn’t know intimately. The local catamites might be able to help – the trouble was that Laycock, though he was now running day-to-day divisional CID operations at Wembley nick, hadn’t been there long enough yet to develop contacts with that particular crowd, which meant he had to rely on the two informers who’d first tipped him off about Mollop, neither of whom was totally reliable due to their both having been banned from The Maypole in the recent past. That was one reason the rest of Laycock’s CID team didn’t feel the info was kosher, and the main reason he hadn’t tried to share what he’d learned with the local vice squad.
    But there was no rush. Laycock wasn’t going anywhere – so he could afford to watch and wait. In any case, this was only one of several pubs on his patch that he increasingly found he had a problem with as he made his nightly rounds of them. There was low-level dealing going on in some of them, not to mention regular underage drinking. In all cases, it stemmed from the uncouth bastards who ran these establishments. They were all either slobs or nonces or druggies themselves. At least, this was the impression Laycock got, and his grasses tended to support this view, even if his team didn’t.
    Not that he cared what those tossers thought.
    It amazed Laycock how the rest of Wembley CID thought he didn’t know about the dissent-filled discussions they held behind his back, how they’d tell any senior guv’nor who’d listen how