Jules was looking for something. ‘The Gents. You know where?’
‘Yes, mate.’ I pointed. ‘Let me have a look at that chart again, will you?’
He got it online and headed left of the counter.
4
The Green Dragon on Broad Street felt like it had been around as long as Hereford had been. It was the kind of ye olde tourist hotel where the Rotary Club met every Friday and Saga coach tours stopped for scones and tea.
The TV wasn’t tuned in to RT, so I sat on the big flowery eiderdown and tapped Anna’s number on the iPhone screen instead. It was a lot earlier than I normally called her, but I was going to have a pretty full day. I needed to catch up with Crazy Dave and then trawl the bars for Jan.
I’d already tried the last address I had for her, a flat in a three-storey pebble-dashed housing association joint on the Ross Road at the edge of town. She’d taken it over from her mum years ago. It was almost opposite where the old Regiment camp used to be. In her early husband-hunting years, she must have thought it gave her pole position. There’d been no one at home, and I wasn’t about to start knocking on doors to find out. Not yet, anyway. It was Friday. Unless she’d changed the habit of a lifetime, she’d be out on the town sooner or later.
The phone only rang a couple of times before she picked up.
‘How’s it going?’
‘Better than yesterday. Where are you?’ She was inside this time. I could hear Arabic TV in the background and no gunfire.
‘Back in the UK, in Hereford. You OK to talk?’
‘You took the job?’
‘Maybe.’ I explained. ‘I’m banking on BB keeping them alive long enough for me to find out where they are. Any luck with Frank?’
‘All I can tell you is that he was originally called Vepkhiat Avdgiridze. He’s not Ukrainian. He’s Georgian, from South Ossetia. It’s been fighting for independence for decades.’
‘I know. I was there a year or two before Putin went in.’
North Ossetia was part of Russia, but South Ossetia had always been disputed territory. Most South Ossetians carried Russian passports and wanted to break away from Tbilisi. They had declared it a republic in 1990 and the Georgian government had sent in tanks. A series of wars followed, until the Russians finally invaded ‘to protect their citizens’ in 2008. Well, that was one of the versions. Since then, it had been recognized as an independent republic by Venezuela and a handful of other countries that sucked up to Moscow, but the Georgian government still saw it as occupied territory.
‘Where does Frank fit in?’
‘He finances the South Ossetian independence movement. He helps them attack Tbilisi in any way they can. He’s not short of cash. It looks like he has fingers in every pie. Oil, gas, real estate. He backed Putin when he reorganized things. He’s no good guy, but he has class. He doesn’t own a football club or run for provincial governor. He keeps himself to himself. For him, it’s all about business, all about the deal.’
‘Are you sure he’s the one?’
‘I’ll send a picture.’
‘What about you, Anna? You OK?’
‘I’m fine. But, you know, I’ve been thinking … Maybe … Maybe I should stay a while longer. If Gaddafi retakes Benghazi, I should be here.’
‘And maybe Bahrain, maybe Syria?’
I kept it light, but we both went quiet for a while.
‘So when will you be coming home, Nicholas?’
‘If they’re alive, I’m going to have to go and get them.’
I heard an intake of breath. ‘Yes … Of course.’
There was a pause.
‘Nicholas, I have to go.’
‘I’ll call you tomorrow. But I won’t have a clue what you’ve been up to because pointy-head TV doesn’t show RT.’
She’d have no idea what pointy-head meant, but she started to laugh. I liked it when she did that.
‘Be safe, Anna.’
‘And you, Nicholas.’
The line went dead.
I sat on the bed, trying to make sense of our non-conversation.
My iPhone alerted me to the arrival of Anna’s MMS. I opened it up. The photo was slightly fuzzy and taken from a distance as he got into a limo, but it was Francis Timis all right.
I juggled tubes of instant coffee, fired up the small plastic kettle and worried about Anna. It was becoming a bit of a habit. It wasn’t just the danger she put herself in. I missed her. She was too busy saving the world for us to spend much time together. But I couldn’t blame her. Whoever said war is a drug was right on the money.
I called Crazy Dave on the room phone. I was pretty sure he’d ignore a withheld number or one he didn’t know, but pick up on a local call. I wasn’t wrong.
‘Dave …’
‘What?’
‘You about for a brew in, say, an hour?’
‘If you want work, you can shove it up your arse. As of sixteen hundred hours today I’m retired.’
‘Then get the kettle on for half three. You can still present yourself with a gold clock at four.’
‘Yeah, funny. What do you want?’
‘I’ll explain when I get there.’
I was glad I’d caught him in a good mood.
5
The Green Dragon’s car park was at the rear of the building. The garaging had probably once been filled with horse-drawn carriages. I checked out and drove my grime-covered 911 past Ascari’s café and onto Broad Street. The sky was dark and heavy with cloud.
I used to spend a lot of my time-off in Ascari’s, eating toast and drinking coffee. It was where I’d really got to know Crazy Dave. When I joined he was already a sergeant, something like three generations above me. He was in A Squadron, I was in B, so I didn’t get to see him that much. But over coffee and scrambled egg, we’re all the same. We both used to spend our Sunday mornings there, reading the supplements; him because he was trying to avoid his wife, me because I didn’t have one. Crazy Dave didn’t need to go there so much now. His wife had left soon after he’d got himself fucked up. His legs were useless, and as far as she was concerned, so was he. He was in and out of hospital like a yo-yo, and she didn’t fancy joining him for the ride.
There was a bit of bad blood between us too. I’d felt sorry for him when we met up again in 2005 — but it only took me a week or two to start thinking two fucked-up legs weren’t enough. A friend of mine from Regiment days tapped Crazy Dave for some work. He was in the early stages of motor neurone disease and wanted one last big pay-off so his wife would have a pension. So far so good, but Crazy Dave had found out and taken advantage of him. Charlie was so desperate he’d accepted only a fraction of what the job was worth, and Dave had trousered the rest.
I made him give Charlie’s widow the lot. In return, I’d hold off telling the guys who came to him for work how much of a markup he liked to take, or telling the companies that used him that he had a quality-control problem — he didn’t even check his workforce had fully functioning limbs.
The bit I’d enjoyed most was telling him that if he didn’t get his finger out and have the cash in her account within twenty-four hours, I’d be straight over to separate his bony arse from his wheelchair.
Next time I saw him, a year later, that was precisely what I did. I’d needed some int, but I’d fucked up. Instead of just asking him for a favour, which would have given him a bit of a kick, I’d tried to blackmail him. He gave me the int, and told me we were all square. Then he told me that if I made the mistake of thinking otherwise, he had three hundred guys on his Rolodex who’d happily take a shovel to my face.