‘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
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.