If only I could have left it at that.
There are times when you have to accept you’ve been fucked over, and that was one of them. But it pissed me off that he made so much money from scamming his own people, and something in me snapped.
I grabbed his right calf and started towards the door, dragging him and the wheelchair behind me. He screamed and shouted at me to stop, but I kept right on going. When we reached the door Crazy Dave couldn’t hold onto his chair any longer and fell out on his arse. I dragged him through the rain and only let go when we reached his Popemobile. He flailed around on the wet tarmac, trying to pull himself along on his elbows, back towards the house.
To this day, I didn’t know why I did it. It was immature, gratuitous and got me nowhere — but, fuck, it put a smile back on my face.
Unfortunately, I now needed his help again.
6
I turned right at the junction with Broad Street, passed the front of the hotel and headed towards the River Wye.
The only crazy thing about Crazy Dave was that he’d earned his nickname because he wasn’t: he was about as zany as a teacup. He was the kind of guy who analysed a joke before saying, ‘Oh, yeah, I get it. That’s funny.’ But then again, he wasn’t trying to find work for a bunch of stand-up comedians — even if we sometimes thought we were pretty fucking amusing.
There had always been a broker knocking around Hereford. He had to be ex-Regiment because he had to know the people — who was in, who was getting out — and if he didn’t, he had to know a man who did. When Crazy Dave left after his twenty-two years, he became an intermediary between ex-Regiment guys and the private military companies and individuals who wanted competent people. Dave got his cash by providing the right person for the right job. There’s an HR department in any civilian organization, so why not in a military one? After all, it would be a shame to waste all those skills the taxpayer had paid for us to learn.
Dave’s business was a perfect fit with Cameron’s Big Society. We get the guys into the army; we pay for them to be trained; we pay them to fight, and then we let them go and use their skills in the outside world. Some of them even filed tax returns.
I was heading for Bobblestock. It had been one of the first of the new breed of estate that had sprung up on the outskirts of town when Thatcher tried to turn us all into homeowners. The houses were all made from machined bricks and looked as if they were huddled together for warmth. They all had 2.4 children inside and a people-carrier on the drive.
Crazy Dave lived on the high ground. He’d told me proudly that he’d bought into phase three of the build. The window frames were painted brown instead of white to distinguish it. Apparently that gave the houses a more substantial look.
I drove into the estate. Nothing had changed in the five years since I’d last seen him. I stopped outside his brick rectangle and got another chance to admire the garage extension, which looked as if it had been assembled from a flat-pack.
The house to the right had been called Byways last time I was round. Dave must have new neighbours. Number 53 was now called Rose Cottage. There was fuck-all cottage-like about the place. A net curtain twitched inside. Maybe they’d bought it recently and were still coming to terms with the guy in the wheelchair next door having rough men arriving at his house at strange times of the day and night. They probably thought there was some sort of sex thing going on.
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.’