Dead Centre ns-14 Read online

  Number 49, to the left, was still called The Nook. Crazy Dave, of course, just had a number. How crazy was that? A ‘60’-plate Peugeot Popemobile was parked outside, the correct nine inches or whatever it’s supposed to be from the kerb. The road was a dead end, so he’d even gone to the trouble of finishing his last trip with a three-point turn and aiming it in the right direction for a quick getaway.

  The whole thing was rigged and ramped, even down to levers and stuff instead of pedals. I could see bags on the passenger seat and down the sides of the pope’s throne in the back.

  7

  I walked up the driveway towards the concrete ramp that had replaced the front steps. I waved at the small CCTV camera covering the front of the house. The door buzzed. I pushed it open and let myself in.

  The house was exactly as I remembered it. It still smelt like it’d been given the once-over with a couple of cans of Pledge. There was still a Stannah parked at the bottom of the stairs, and at the top, enough climbing frames to keep a whole troop of baboons happy. Down in the hallway, some shiny chrome bars had been stuck to the walls. A couple of dangle bars hung on nylon webbing. It looked like a gymnast’s idea of heaven.

  My Timberlands squeaked on the laminate flooring as I walked into the no-frills living room. There was a big fuck-off TV, and that was about it. The rest was open space. It wasn’t as if Crazy Dave needed an armchair.

  French windows opened onto the garden, accessed via another ramp. I followed a narrow path of B&Q’s best fake Cotswold stone up to a pair of doors set into the garage wall. The garage had been converted into an office.

  Crazy Dave was sitting behind his desk, within easy reach of the two most important assets his business possessed: a pair of small plastic boxes stuffed with index cards containing the names and details of more than a hundred former members of Special Forces. No wonder the garage had drop-down steel shutters and weapons-grade security. To people wanting to know which companies were doing which jobs, those cards would have been worth more than a container ship full of RPGs.

  I closed the door behind me. ‘Better late than never.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘About time you got that thing paved. It was like walking through the Somme with that wheelchair of yours fucking up the grass.’

  He wasn’t smiling.

  ‘Don’t get up, mate.’

  Still no smile.

  I held up my hands. ‘Dave, I want to call a truce. End-Ex. I’m sorry about what I did. I fucked up. Simple as that.’

  ‘Yes, you did.’ He hesitated for a moment. ‘But you know what? Fuck it.’ He slapped the arms of his chair. ‘When you’re in one of these fucking things you realize life’s too short to get pissed off about stuff like that. So fuck you, and fuck the problem. What do I care? I’m living in a soap, am I?’

  That was good enough for me.

  Where the up-and-over door had once been there was now a stud wall. There were no windows in here — just three sets of fluorescent lights. The brew kit still sat on a table against the opposite wall. The Smarties and Thunderbirds mugs were still going strong. I wondered if he’d saved the Easter eggs they’d come with.

  He nodded at the CCTV monitor. ‘Nice motor. You kill someone for that?’

  ‘Yeah, I did.’ I made my way to the desk. ‘So, how’ve you been?’

  The last time I saw Crazy Dave he was balding, with a moustache, like Friar Tuck in a 1970s porno. Now all the hair had gone, but the moustache was still hanging on.

  ‘Fucked.’

  ‘So I can see, mate. The Charles Bronson look ain’t doing you any favours.’

  He gripped the arms of his wheelchair, lifted himself a couple of inches out of the seat and held himself there, perhaps something to do with his circulation, or to stop pressure sores developing on his arse. ‘Yeah, well, we’ve both got life sentences, haven’t we?’

  He careered round the desk in a maroon space-age chair. It looked as though it could use some go-faster stripes. ‘But at least I can get out on the piss when I want to.’

  ‘Can you do a wheelie in that thing yet?’

  He reversed, jerked, and the front wheels came up. He grinned like Evel Knievel. But we both knew that was as good as it was going to get. Crazy Dave had been invalided out of the Regiment after a truck driver from Estonia bounced him off a motorbike on the M4 and forced him to take the scenic route. As if that wasn’t bad enough, he’d borrowed my Suzuki 650. Six months in Stoke Mandeville hadn’t sorted him out. His legs were still useless.

  8

  His next party trick was to get us both a brew.

  ‘So — you come here with something you know, or something you want to know?’

  ‘BB.’

  ‘The principal’s wife getting a seeing-to again, is she?’

  ‘That’s the least of my worries. Do you know who the wife is?’

  He spun round to face me with a bag of sugar in his lap. ‘I don’t get involved at that level. The job’s gone through about three or four middlemen before it gets to me. They wanted a BG for a mother and a child. I pick — I used to pick — the best available at the time.’

  I shook my head. ‘Mate, how come you were the only one—’

  ‘To give him work?’

  I nodded. ‘He was even a nightmare on the tsunami job, when there wasn’t anybody to shag. What’s he got on you? Is he giving you one as well?’

  He spun back round to the kettle and put the sugar down. ‘Shit!’

  ‘Touched a nerve, have I?’

  The wheelchair raced towards the door. ‘No — a shit, I need a shit.’

  I followed him into the garden.

  ‘Look, Nick. He finished that anti-piracy job after about six months. That was fuck-all to do with me. I gave him a job with the oil companies looking after the pipeline in Georgia. It was a good little number in Tbilisi. But he fucked up by falling out with the company over expenses.

  ‘Then I gave him a job working for an American family in London, which he fucked up big-time. I think the husband was a computer mogul, downloads, some shit like that. While the husband was away, BB started thinking with his cock again. He reckoned that if he got in with the wife, she’d divorce the guy and give Wonderboy access to a big wad of cash.

  ‘The problem was, he pissed off a lot of other people along the way. He was going round acting as if he was running the job. It was a big one. There were nearly thirty of them on the team, looking after the family in the UK, and the husband as he bounced around the planet selling his downloads or whatever the fuck it was.

  ‘Anyone who got pissed off with him, BB would get her indoors to sack them. He didn’t give a fuck about those lads, just had his eye on the money. Silly bastard, he thought all he had to do was keep his shagging quiet until the divorce, and then everything was going to come up roses.’

  We got to the Stannah lift. Refusing my help, Crazy Dave swung out of the wheelchair onto the hanging frame, then manoeuvred his arse into position.

  ‘BB’s problem is, he doesn’t understand that the main reason these guys have got so much of the stuff he’d like to dip into is that they’re smart.’

  Crazy Dave pressed a button. The motor took him upstairs with a gentle whine. I followed.

  ‘So then what happened?’

  ‘He found himself out in the cold. He had no money, and he had no mates because he’d been such a cunt to everyone. That lad can’t seem to keep any distance between his cock and his head.’

  We reached the landing. The stair-lift stopped and he grabbed another climbing frame. Bars hung at intervals from the ceiling all the way to the bathroom. He started swinging arm over arm, legs dangling, towards the far end of the landing. From time to time his feet scuffed along the carpet.

  Crazy Dave didn’t need to know the whole story. ‘Mate, I have to know if he’s still effective. When the shit hits the fan, has he got a brain? The principal has asked me to check him out. He’s very concerned about the boy’s protection. He wants
the best available — and if that’s BB, so be it. What do you reckon?’

  The last of the hanging bars was his turning point above the toilet itself. He lowered himself onto his throne, complete with arm supports and a nice padded PVC seat.

  ‘That’s not a problem. He’s good — he’s a twat, but he’s good. If he wasn’t, I’d have gone out of business long ago.’

  Crazy Dave was pulling down his grey tracksuit bottoms a lot quicker than should normally be required. He tried to rip off the Velcro fastening on his big boy’s nappy with the other hand. ‘Fucking things. Why don’t they make the tabs bigger, for fuck’s sake?’

  The nappy finally came off, and he gave a sigh of relief.

  ‘You know, everyone gives him a hard time because he was TA. Nothing to do with the shagging. I was TA, for fuck’s sake, and I didn’t do too bad, did I? Because he’s a dickhead, no one takes him seriously as a player. But they’re wrong. If the shit ever hits the fan, he’ll look after the wife and kid big-time. He’s more than capable.’

  He looked up before letting rip. ‘Now fuck off out of here.’

  I closed the door but stayed close enough to know that his arse still worked, even if his feet and legs didn’t. ‘Hey, Dave, why’s the council still saying no to a bog downstairs?’

  He’d spent two years making application after application. He’d even shown up at the council offices in his wheelchair, but the same twat kept knocking him back. It looked like he still was.

  He laughed. ‘I got consent about three years ago, but fuck them. I’ve got used to coming upstairs. Besides, it’s the only exercise I get.’

  ‘You really binning it?’

  ‘Yep, fuck it. You know what? I go for a drive every afternoon these days. And sometimes late at night. I just want a little freedom, like I used to have on the bike. I always wanted to do Europe on one, you know. Go banzai on them autobahns. So about a month ago I thought, Fuck it, that wagon out there is going to take me all over, from this evening, and then I’m getting a fucked-legs wagon in Canada. Not exactly a bike, but so what? I’ve got to get it done before I die in that fucking chair. It’s sixteen hundred hours and I’m off to Dover, so now you can really fuck off.’

  I had to hand it to him. ‘Good luck, Monkey Boy.’ I headed downstairs.

  9

  20.30 hrs

  I’d been hitting the bars in town, doing my best not to bump into anybody I knew apart from Jan. I didn’t need the ‘Oi, what’re you doing here?’ and ‘What you been up to?’ and all that sort of shit. I needed to keep moving. Only if push came to shove would I actively seek out familiar faces to try and track her down. Failing that I’d go back to her flat and sit and wait — and hope that she still lived there.

  I’d already done most of the pre-gaming bars. The last hits had been the Barrels, the West Bank and the Hop Pole, and now I was heading to Saxtys. The wine bar had been in the city centre for decades in different incarnations. It also had a nightclub that was Jan’s idea of a perfect Friday night out.

  I walked through the glass doors into a wall of noise. The blow-heater blasted downwards across the threshold to keep it warm inside. The place was packed with pressed shirts, clean jeans, night-out dresses. Colognes and perfumes filled the air. I eased my way through the wall-to-wall crowd. The club hadn’t opened yet, but it was time enough for Jan to have booked herself a spot. Women like her who thought they were still sixteen were as much a fixture in this town as the cathedral.

  And there she was. Right at the back of the crowd, at the bar, just before it opened up into the seating areas. She and two other mutton-dressed-as-lambs were standing around a small table, waffling away.

  Time hadn’t been as kind to Jan as it had to Tracy. Her sleeveless blue dress stretched just that bit too tight. Her bra straps showed, and the flesh overflowed each side of them. The hair was still the same, far-too-dark-to-be-natural brown and straightened beyond belief. Her mascara was laid on with a trowel, and she hadn’t held back with the bronzer and eyeliner.

  I moved towards the bar and into her line of sight, but she was too busy chatting to her mates. If they ever started shooting The Only Way Is Hereford, these three would be first in the audition queue.

  ‘Jan!’ I did my best to look surprised to see her. ‘Jan!’ I had to raise my voice. ‘How are you?’

  She gave me a fuck-off-whoever-you-are look. I wasn’t in Friday-night clothes and I wasn’t twenty-five.

  ‘It’s me — Nick.’ I kept the smile in place, still bending, tilting my head down to her level.

  Recognition finally dawned.

  ‘All right, Nick?’ Her expression brightened. ‘How are you? It’s been ages!’

  The Hereford accent always sounded like soft Welsh to me. Her arms came up for a bear hug and I got a noseful of Boots Special. She took a step back but kept a hand on my arm as she checked me out.

  ‘Too long, Jan. Mong’s funeral, I guess. You look … really … good …’

  She liked that. She probably wasn’t used to flattery from someone who wasn’t after a shag. ‘Oh, thanks, Nick. I’ve got to put a bit more slap on these days to cover the wrinkles, but I get by.’

  Her mates melted away and started talking to a group of men with sharp creases down the sleeves of their Friday-night shirts. She hadn’t introduced me to them. Code, probably, for ‘fuck off’.

  We had to keep close to make ourselves heard over the music. The Boots Special was starting to make my eyes water.

  ‘So, you married again yet?’

  She lifted up her left hand. ‘Not right now. But I’m a four by four.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘Four kids by four husbands. They’re all grown-up now. Flown the nest. Gives me some me-time at last.’ She gave me a sad smile. It told me that me-time was not quite as much fun as she was trying to make it sound.

  ‘You still living on the Ross Road? In the flats?’

  She reached down for a glass of what looked like spritzer and sipped from it until the ice slid down and hit her lips. ‘What about you? You found a nice girl?’

  ‘Why? You offering?’

  A faraway look came into her eyes. ‘Well, there’s a thing …’

  She started the general catch-up stuff. Have you seen this guy, that woman? All that shit. I didn’t have a clue who she was on about half the time. This was no longer my world. When I’d left Hereford to go and work for the Firm, that was it. I wasn’t coming back for weekend trips. Hereford was done. And after London, there was somewhere else, and somewhere else again. I’d moved out. I might even have moved on. The only thing I’d left behind was my account at the Halifax. I wondered how the recession had hit my £1.52.

  ‘Seen anything of BB?’

  Her expression clouded. ‘No — fucking arsehole. He stayed at my place the night before the funeral, then didn’t even bother coming to the service. What a wanker.’

  I shuffled her towards the bar for another drink. There were still a few things this girl wouldn’t take lying down.

  ‘What about Tracy? Last time I heard, she was in France. She met somebody?’

  There was no hint in her face of a drama. ‘Yeah, she’s OK. Some Russian or other. Lucky bitch. I wanted to go over as well, see if I could get one. She’s in love. They’ve got a little boy. Stevie … something like that. I think he’s about four … five … six, maybe. Don’t really hear much from them.’

  She didn’t look too impressed with it all.

  ‘That’s great news, isn’t it? That she’s happy?’

  The barman came over to Jan far earlier than our place in the queue deserved. She didn’t even need to tell him what she wanted. ‘What about you, Nick?’

  ‘I’ll just have an orange juice.’

  Her eyes narrowed. ‘You still looking to live to a hundred?’

  ‘Nah. I just know a whole lot of other ways of killing myself.’ I moved the smile back into place. ‘You haven’t heard from Tracy, then?’

  ‘Not sin
ce she’s been in the money.’ She leant in a bit closer. ‘You kept on telling her to leave, didn’t you? Well, hasn’t she done well for herself?’

  Her nose wrinkled. It wasn’t a pretty sight.

  ‘You could go, try somewhere else. You said your kids have left home …’

  The drinks turned up, and a brighter future was no competition for a long swig of spritzer. ‘You were always good to her, weren’t you, Nick? She used to give me some of the money you sent, just sometimes, when I was a bit hard up.’

  ‘Oh, right. And I bet she still sends you a few quid, eh?’

  I got a nod, but a disapproving one. ‘Yeah, but not that much. And it’s not like she couldn’t spare it. I thought maybe she’d buy me a house, but no. It’d be pennies for her. But what do I get? Nothing. And I’m her sister, for fuck’s sake.’

  Jan took another slug. She’d made the mistake of thinking that just because people had money it was their duty to piss it away. She was jealous that Tracy had it, and angry that she didn’t hand enough of it over. It wasn’t Tracy’s to give away in the first place, but that didn’t seem to occur to her. All she wanted to do was grab.

  ‘Listen, Jan. I’ve got to meet someone at the Market Tavern. I’ll try and get back later. But if I don’t make it, what’s your number?’

  I pulled out my phone, still smiling so much my face was beginning to hurt. She opened her bag. I didn’t expect to see house keys. She got so pissed she’d lose them, so she used to hide a spare set. But there they were. And I also clocked three mobiles.

  ‘Jesus, Jan. You a dealer or what?’

  She selected one and powered it up. ‘Just a complicated life, Nick. Two men to manage, and you’ve got to keep them apart. I’m a bit old-fashioned like that.’