Free Duffy by Dan Kavanagh

breath, headed up to Shaftesbury Avenue, crossed it, and found himself back on the patch he’d worked for three years. He’d been back a few times, to a restaurant or something, but always in the evening, under cover of dark. Now he felt more unprotected, more recognisable. He dived into a coffee bar. Sitting over a cappuccino, he gave himself bottle. Four years was a long time: whores change, villains change, the blues change. If that was bad in terms of finding things out, it was good in terms of not being recognised. Besides, he looked different now. Before, it had been two-piece suits from Burton’s and Hepworth’s, with a sports jacket for when he was trying to look casual. Now it was Jean Junction, street markets, suede and leather, faded denim; his hair was quite a bit longer at the sides, and brush-cut on top; sometimes he wore shades with pale yellow glass in them.
    And on top of that, the answer was to walk like a punter. Punters had two ways of walking – very fast, as if they had a couple of minutes to catch a train and couldn’t get out of the Golden Mile quick enough, and very slow, as if they were killing time before an appointment, and that was the only reason they were loitering through the place. And whichever method they adopted, they always walked with their heads a bit down; they didn’t look people in the face, and they believed, if they kept their eyes lowered, that no one could see if they were squinting sideways into the windows of dirty bookshops. The people who walked at a normal pace with their heads up, and who looked other people in the eye as they passed them, were the people who owned the place: the shopkeepers, the whores, the pimps, the restaurateurs, the villains, and the blues.
    As a copper, Duffy had been street-wise. He knew the way the place worked, how to get around in it, where the skeins of power ran. You picked it up slowly, partly from other coppers, but just as importantly by finding out for yourself; by getting to know the patch not just physically, but somehow emotionally as well. You sensed it pulsing away. This wasn’t the main part of being a copper: you didn’t stand in the middle of Soho, mystically sniffing the air like Maigret, and then head off and run a villain to ground. It was just background; it was knowing where you were. But to Duffy it was a vital preliminary to the job.
    He finished his coffee and went out to get the feel again of his old patch. He walked along Old Compton Street, up Greek, down Frith, up Dean, across little courts and alleys into D’Arblay, down into Broadwick (past West Central on the other side of the street), down into Brewer, along to where it nearly joins up with Berwick in a fetid knot of street markets and escort agencies and cinemas, past Raymond’s Revuebar and back across into Dean. He ate a lasagne and green salad in a corner café, and reflected that he still had almost eighteen quid left for the day (McKechnie, after some protest, had paid him seventy-five pounds in advance).
    In four years it had changed a bit to his eyes. There were more bookshops than before, and more sex shops with rubber cucumbers in the window. Massage parlours seemed to be holding steady. Strip clubs were a bit on the decline, and had largely given way to porno cinemas. A few years ago Soho simply had normal cinemas, but showing naughtier films from the regular distributors: Danish Dentist on the Job, Nurse Call, Catch 69, Vixens Behind Barbed Wire, those sort of films. If you wanted something a couple of degrees hotter, the only place to go was the Compton Cinema Club in Old Compton Street; and if after that you were still unsatisfied, as you came out there might, if you were lucky, be a tout or two on the pavement offering you a really blue film. Now, though, there were whole series of cinema clubs, called Triple-X and X-Citing and Double Blue and Eros Eyrie and Taboo, with gaudy signs outside offering XXX-rated movies to those over eighteen.
    The